White boy afraid of the mirror
White boy hates history class
White boy wears hood up, always
White boy afraid to go outside
White boy is all apologies
White boy prays for baltimore
White boy doesn't talk much
White boy thinks he has no right
White boy ashamed of who he is
White boy sorry for his skin
White boy can't explain what he is feeling
White boy can't sleep no more

When we first met you were a firework,
Soaring through the night sky,
Hurling yourself into an explosion of color and light,
I watched from below in awe of your presence,

When we first met,
I had butterflies fluttering in my chest,
newly awoken and freed from their cocoons,
With a thirst to see all of what this new place had to offer,

When we first met,
I was a boy who had been growing up just a little too fast,
The parts of myself I thought I lost long ago
came stumbling out from their corners and onto center stage,
Making me feel younger than I have ever felt before,
Putting laughter back into my vocabulary,

When we first met,
You were a girl with a smile and so much to give,
Armed with a desire to wrap this world in your arms
and whisper that it would all be okay in the morning,

Dear unrequited lover..
I know this dance is a slow one,
My feet are clumsy and my arms are heavy sometimes,
But this song is one I can move too.

Slow and steady wins the race
so please be patient with my heart,
I'm back to notebooks filled up past
the brim with simple love poems
and an empty bed to preach them to,
She has done and filled me up,
Put light back in my smile and
remembered that blue is my favorite color.
So even with hearts beating fast
playing kickball inside my ribcage,
I will walk slow, remember that
slow and steady will win the race,
So hold my heart, and teach it patience

Sweat out the best of me,
them lessons are bruises on my collarbones,
I am starving, hungry for the answers
searching for the right reasons
and the wrong women to share my nights with,
synthetic synonyms and rosary beads around my neck
kiss your letters off into the wind,
these apologies are nothing but repetitive

My voice echoes with longing
Lost, searching for protection
I wear my raincoat most days
just incase the sky decides to open
and I am left below, out in the rain
searching for shelter in all the
wrong doorways

What makes you?
Write a poem on what makes up yourself or a person you are interested in. The "recipe" of this person can be structured however you want, be creative! Title the poem "Recipe" and use #recipechallenge when you are done! If you want your poem to be read message konr or The Creep that Loves You and we will be sure to read! Have fun and enjoy! :)

Things fall apart,
Flowers grow between the cracks,
The sea will hurl itself into a fit,
The inside of our bodies
will do the same.

To be brave enough
traversing this hurricane,
Is a paradise at sea

Back over seas
What a nightmare of a memory
Making mountains of men
What dust I have become
Such a parasite of a man
I've come to this land
Sold it my innocence
There is not enough person
Left in this body,
To make it back home

Do you remember when we sat on your roof and listened to Wu-Tang?
The kush smoke filled my lungs but burned in the most wonderful way.
Put our conversations into the rolling paper so I can inhale that night over and over again, and get high on the memories.

Warmth passed between our bodies,
Your skin was soft and wet,
Let me breath out your name
bury it into your chest,
sweet sensation of touch,
oh how you ****** me,
gentle lover, silent sinner,
I have never craved the taste
of anyone as much as yours

My father loves his whiskey,
He tells me it reminds him of his home,
Nights in Dublin and Irish winters,
He danced with my mother under the moon,
Across the rivers and between the cracks,
Father do you drink to remember?
She still loves you all the same,
Oceans divided and still she remembers the barley,
All of the bar fights, and the serenades that sprouted,
Father do not be afraid,
For she still holds your heart

When the woman you love is a poet,
It is hard to tell the difference,
between a poem and a conversation,
When the woman you love is a poet,
She will never speak her thoughts,
I have to decipher the lines,
When the woman you love is a poet,
It's hard not to be ensnared by the words,
And remember that the notes she sings,
Were not all for you

Ashamed of my complexion,
Ashamed of all the words,
Ashamed to show my innards,
Ashamed of all the long nights
and the actions that took place,
Ashamed of the women I fed empty promises,
Ashamed of every goodbye,
Ashamed by the way it all played out,
Ashamed of the confidence I carried,
Ashamed of the crown I wore,
Ashamed of the mirror,
Who am I,
and what is left of me?

We always reached for the mountains
All the roses were the color blue
The ocean tasted of honey
We were invincible
Never afraid of the monsters
that lurked just behind the corner

She is in love with the stars
All the unknowns, the expanse of the sky,
Tells me about the everything and nothingness,
Most times I don't really understand
Too infatuated with her eyes, wide and gleaming,
Twin Orions,

I try to explain to her my love affair with words
The everything and nothingness they hold
Recently her skies have been flooding my pages,
All the blacks and blues that hang high above
Staining my notebooks cover to cover

After the towers fell,
My father went off to war,
12 months later he brought back the battlefield
We didn’t talk about it much as it just hung there,
Afraid of the left over land mines, we would tiptoe
around the room, through the kitchen, back to bed.
-
My mother is a bottle,
Empty now but the glass corpse still outlines her frame,
4 years sober, going on 5 after her brother click-clacked his way out of our lives,
I tattooed the day he passed on my arm,
1. to remember him and 2. to know that today is better than what my life once was,
-
I read somewhere that conversations are like knife fights,
Ive chosen my words carefully like dull blades,
So if I am ever to strike a nerve it won’t leave anyone bleeding,
I am afraid of blood.
I hate the smell,
the taste, the color of the stains it leaves,
The consistency,
I am afraid of bleeding,
I am too vulnerable in this world to hurt anymore,
Every breath closer to the minute i’ll break,
I am afraid to break and i worry about how many pieces I will leave in my wake
and if anyone will be there to pick them up and glue me back together,
Today I am happier than most days in these past years,
She has taught me patience,
All I worry about now is losing her warmth

You were an architect to my fears
Knew the walls that would cave in on me
the corners I sought shelter in
Built cathedrals out of my vices
Monuments for my shortcomings
Raised cities, lined the streets with my body
Named the neighborhoods after the parts of me
I wished to forget
All the good in me is timber inside a burning building
Making ashes of the man I once took pride in being,
You hold all the blueprints,
Know my alleyways and sewers,
The backstreets and corners that make my chest,
I have no more steel to make this foundation stable again.

I've grown tired of love poems,
They are all dried up ink,
Forgotten valentines,
Stale ideas to think,
Upon receiving your letter,
I remembered the weather,
Care package bouquets,
and I hope you get betters,

I write about love,
I write about my mother,
I write about the early years,
The flowers and the valentines,
I write about your smile,
Pretend it is something heaven sent,
That your skin held all my secrets,
and that we asked for nothing in return,
I write if nothing to be honest,
For my pen holds every truth I know,
Remember this when you choose to forget,
For I do not know how

This love ain’t easy
This love has scrapes on it’s knees
This love forgets the words sometimes
This love ain’t easy
This love trips on it’s shoe laces
This love has sweaty palms
This love ain’t easy
But it’s all the love I got

Conversations of the islands,
Paper lantern illuminating,
All the glories that you are,
I wasn’t even in the mood,
Just needed to be close to you again,
Watching the rain on your glass,
And the laughter in your eyes

She smiled like a fist fight,
Lips curled into an apology,
Sipping on that darkened bottle,
Wishing for the winter,
Fishing for the rain
and spitting away the sun,
Planting all the daffodils
with the sharpest of knives,
She is an island,
Lost at sea,
unaware of the times,
Smiling like a fist fight,
and a garden of knives

Your spine curves like a saxophone,
I intend to play our symphonies
on the pearls that decorate your skin,
That trumpet in your throat sings
loud and full of life,
Please share it with me tonight,
The metronome across your chest
is a warm reminder of who I have
been looking for,
We do not even notice the broken
strings we share in our necks,
looked past tongue tied apologies
in the midmorning outros,
lay with me here tonight,
as if we were a chorus,
in just the right tune

Baltimore is bleeding,
Boys in blue blind to faces,
War being raged over races,
Can't tell what this place is,
Blocks where I spent my sundays,
******* with police and gunplay,
Hood up to conceal my color,
Complexion passed down to me from mother,
Hard to find peace when the avenues erupting
Nothing seems to matter when you're fighting for something,
So please pray for this forest of concrete and lamp light,
Scared for the events that are coming after midnight

All those who fought with silence,
Used their words instead of violence,
Tattooed scriptures upon their thighs
Battled the lows with ballpoint highs,
Burn away the fracture pieces,
Iron on the tainted creases,
This purging was our way of survival,
Poet's own parables a secondhand bible,
This was love, this was hate, this was rage,
This was anything we could confess in midnight haze,
Dream out loud all you silent eyed fiends,
For this was nothing but the fuel of the machine

The clouds grew heavy
Their bellies swollen with rain water
They stared at me as I glared back,
My gaze split the sky like a knife
It poured for days.
    
   *  I was a mess,
     I was soaked,
     I was a sponge.*

I tried to ring out all the excess,
All it did was leave me drowning in a puddle
of the parts of myself I no longer needed,
My air tanks ran dry
My body felt heavy
I was sinking for years.
It was hard for me to watch the ones I loved
lowered 6 feet beneath the soil,
It was even harder to look in the mirror
and see a breathing corpse stare back,
My insides were withered like the winter,
All I craved was the heat,
The south was a distant memory,
Fluttered away so many years ago
on a night with the full of the moon and the big of the sky
The sweet song of the willow in the most humble of tunes,
Oh how I have grown now.
Look how these bones have changed.

Stop before crossing the street,
look both ways for landmines,
my father on the battlefield
where this killing is justified,
from resident streets in ferguson
to gaza strip homicides,
My palms clasped tight in prayer,
from humanity's suicide

I’ll hold you like a memory
Hometowns between sheets
Make midnight forever
Like winter is always
Make love like jazz
Play trumpets with dreams

I ran my hands across my ribcage
Like there were strings between my bones.
That if my fingers plucked the right ones
The music would flow up to my throat
So that with every exhale, a chorus would
Escape from the peaks of my lips.
And that just maybe the song that played
Would make its way to another heart
Still willing to listen to the rain.

The Lines drawn,
Your heart claimed Eden,
I dare not intrude,
Fears of the serpents held,
But Forbidden fruit
never looked sweeter

Heaven faced
Angel of the night
Wings and all
Took me to Hesperides
Dropped me amongst the willows
I sang her songs
Mourned her sorrows
Got drunk on her words
Slept along the riverbank
Woke to the silence of winter
The lonely of the rain,
Wishing for your gentle wings
To take me once more