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 Jul 2014 Redshift
jdmaraccini
Forget poetry I am screaming
Am I alive or am I dead?

Do I need to include typos
14fe8heqi2regretthedayiwed...

Seriously
there is an unseen gravity that pulls inside my head
stealing my energy can you help me

Enough said
so say the voices inside my head

I am nobody until I die
or am I gravely mistaken

I send this S.O.S.
these words of my distress

Am I alive or am I dead?

does it matter?
© JDMaraccini 2015
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Steele
Eyes (10W)
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Steele
They                                                             ­                     They
   say  that  the  eyes                                  say  that  the  eyes
    are                the soul                         are                the soul
        windows to                                          windows to
I dunno if this qualifies, but I'll play along as best I can.
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Bamboo Bean
Something good
a night of terror-less sleep
a friend who's there
a pain pill
a memory without the inevitable crash
tears wetting the clay
a *** that doesn't crack
art that's honest
losing one of many addictions
peace pipe
a starry-flourescentless night
lose my mind
for something good
1,500 pills
2 manic episodes
1 hospitalization
loads of shame
prison of Blah
depression
more depression
all I'm looking for-
the one thing I need tonight
something good.
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Bamboo Bean
Bipolar, if you had asked me what I knew about it six months ago I would have said it means that a person goes from being really happy to really sad sometimes or, if I would be honest I would have said I hadn't a clue about it.
Bipolar means to touch heaven and hell.
This year began with me being in a severe depression, often holding a loaded gun to my head with a finger lightly depressing the trigger. Bipolar, after all, is the highest killer of all psychiatric illnesses with 1 out of 5 committing suicide and 1/2 attempting it. I felt completely alienated from anyone- severely out of place in the world, as if my birth was some sort of horrible mistake.
But I'm holding onto hope, hope that all these meds(Lamictal, Saphris, Abilify) may eventually enable me to have a life again. This year I lost my sister to suicide(she was 27 and also bipolar), I cannot put anyone through the pain that I've felt due to her leaving like she did. I must "carry that weight" as the Beatles would put it.
If you too are Bipolar I would love to chat, please message me. I'm looking for a friend who can relate, hell, I'm just looking for a friend.
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Bamboo Bean
Waking up in the morning feels like a mistake
what the hell am i?
I drag through these miserable days like a two-legged dog.
My value feels like dirt.
I am *****
I am lonely and lost.
 Jul 2014 Redshift
Carsyn Smith
There’s a third space
That’s not quite here
Yet not quite there.
It’s a dark place
With no clear light
Other than the fireflies
That hover close listening,
To our quiet whispers
To our quick mumbling
And to the declarations.
There’s a slight drizzle,
But I don’t mind,
Because your voice is
      My umbrella
      My blanket
      My everything.
Close my eyes, listening
To the muffled backg­round,
It makes me think
I’m there with you.
But not quite there –
In a third         space,
With you beside me.
I don’t hangup first
Because I want to
Listen for your guard
As it falls         away
Some where in         that

                 Third space.
Why won't Hello Poetry add my tabs :-/??
 May 2014 Redshift
AuntieBelle
Fill your heart, fill it as full as you can.
Fill it with memories most warmly hued
and remember them well
in all their glorious, sweaty,
kindly brutal
minutiae.

Remember each drop,
each bite,
each individual dust
mote dancing
the still, hot, sunlit
February
Thursday.
Remember how different
places all have their own
unique elusive
smell and how
it is impossible to describe this to anyone
who has never lived
anywhere else.

Fill your heart with all those memories
of the best kind
of home grown hell.

Fill it until its tears are forced out.
Fill it against the long, cold dark of parking lost.
Fill it against mysterious hate.
Fill it against misery and mud and hard
frozen
bottle
glass
lies.

Fill it so full it can't ever sink far down.
Burden it with buoyant stories
and weigh it with
hypnotic winter flame.
These are the things of which
the cold terror to
victory apocalyptic will be born.
There are no second prizes here.

Fill it with the certainty of the worn places
where the chairs met
the table
each night.

Fill it with the truth of
the gnarled and sun-warm roots and
the indisputability of a Beetle motor accelerating and
the violent pirouette of each spring
and the ozone smell and
the way wet wood screams at the sky and
the way the sound
hits all ears the same
regardless of
their color or
what side of Line Avenue they’re from.

Remember what line you’re from
and to hell with the rest.
You must mind your own.
There’ll be water
if God wills it.

You are never too far lost if you still know
your father’s face and can still remember
getting milk from the tubes
in the
silver metal cooler
and the red cookie jar
lid as the
adults smoked at the green kids’ table
and everyone mostly had blue eyes
and red hair and there was always a phantom killer
lurking  
right beyond the only hope door
before you were ****** into the mirror
world and
*******, but
kids sure do have to make some
rough choices
before nine o’clock.

Keep remembering and when you remember,
remember even deeper
remember in yet greater detail and
practice that remembering until
you
ARE
the dust motes
the milk tube
Thursday
roots
sun
until you ARE each drop of sweat
until you ARE the phantom killer
and the red cookie jar lid
the straight line of smoke rising out
of the ashtray and
the motor and the
scream and the
ears and
you ARE all these things
and you ARE
and you can’t really say where these things begin or where
you end because you’re not sure that
anything really does end or
begin
anymore.

Beginnings and endings
haven’t much meaning after
everyone has
shown their cards and the worn places on the chairs have
met the table
one
last
time.
May 17th, 2014
Tacoma, WA
 May 2014 Redshift
AuntieBelle
Quote
 May 2014 Redshift
AuntieBelle
Highland Park is the stoner park, everybody knows that. You go to Highland Park to smoke ****, you don't take your kids to Highland Park. Well, you might if your kids are total potheads but then you'd have to buy a lot more ****.

-Belle B. Blazed
 May 2014 Redshift
Hayleigh
I bit open a lie and it tasted like you.
a month ago, i got in a car accident that totaled my car.
i was making a left turn at a stoplight
and the driver of an suv was paying no attention to her red light.
she barreled into the front end of my car at full speed before i even saw her coming,
and then everything was shattered glass and metal colliding and screeching tires
and suddenly my airbags were puffed out like sinister clouds and my engine sounded like a death rattle.
when i opened the door to get out, the hinges grated like a scream.

but i wasn’t hurt.
i cried for six hours that day but i went to school the next one.
everything was fine.

it's just that since then, everything in my life resembles a car crash.

i smelled burning for weeks.
i still blink and see spiderweb patterns of broken glass.
i cried for two hours when i realized i lost the cd i made
just so i could listen to my favorite songs in the car.
when i hear the song that was playing, i have to turn it off.

my father picked up the shrapnel still on the street a week later
and gave me my charred, crumpled, unreadable gravestone of a front license plate.
he straightened it out and put it on my new car when we got it.

i broke up with my boyfriend three weeks ago
and as i left i heard sirens from inside his house.
the day after that, i was talking to another boy
and his promises sounded like ambulances with no paramedics on board.

last week there was a fatal car accident half a mile from my house
and i couldn't breathe for the rest of the day after i heard.

i have to turn left at the stoplight where my own accident happened every day
and when i turn i clench my fists around the steering wheel
like it wants to tear itself out of my hands and maybe it does.

i still check left and right and left and right during turns
even when someone else is driving.

call all of this a reaction to trauma,
but honestly i don't know what's wrong with me.

all i know is i cried with frustration, immature, pathetic,
when my mother and my father couldn't find a new car.
all i know is i grieved for my ford focus
like it was my only friend in the world.
all i know is i keep talking about this accident
even though i’m even getting annoyed by myself
and my fingers on the keyboard sound just like the policeman's as he wrote up the report
as i perched on a plastic backseat, shaking, face covered with tear tracks,
waiting, alone, for my father to arrive so i didn't have to be an adult,
waiting, alone, for an explanation of why this happened to me.

all i know is everything in my life resembles a car crash,
and there are sirens in the distance,
and i'm still waiting for the smoke to clear.
performed at poetry slam 4/25/14
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