Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Lorenzo Neltje Dec 2018
Tick, tick,
Down, down,
the watch beeps
On the hour,
Every hour,
I always hear it,
I go to bed at nine,
And can hear it counting,
Ten,
Eleven,Twelve
One,
Two,
ThreeFourFive
Now I have to wake up in an hour and a half,
I didn’t sleep,
Should I have done something instead?
Maybe done that essay,
Or finished those slides,
I have so much work to do
But I’m stuck inside
My own head, filled with
This fog of exhaustion
And confusion,
Why can’t I just
Fall
        A
               s
                     l
                               e              
                                           e
                                                               p
Instead of
Purgatory in my bed,
But I’m so dreading the upcoming hell
There’s a part of me that
Wants to stay awake,
Live through the hours
Because I’m not skipping ahead
Like a game, I don’t
Skip the night
Since there are things to do, right?
But I’m not even doing anything
Useless pictures fill my head,
Impossible to put into words,
Fantasies of a history
That never was,
A future that never will be
A creature, almost human,
Glowing with a white light,
With a voice that echoes,
Electronic and demonic
Keeping me awake,
My god, why can’t I dream properly,
In half-remembered fragments
Like my living nightmares
All seem to be...

Turning the alarm off at 6:30,
I realise I haven’t slept at all
I groan and roll over
Then get up.
We have work to do.
  Nov 2018 Lorenzo Neltje
Brent Kincaid
Many are hamster-wheel humans
So punch-drunk from assuming
They know the way things work.
The wealthy urged them to elect jerks
To run this country into the ground
And turn it into the worst place around.
It’s a sad tale, a ***** of a story
Where those with guts, don’t get glory.

It’s a horror story, like in scary flicks
Where when men in suits get their kicks
Imprisoning brown people and kids
And laughing about the bad they did.
Afterward, they say others are to blame
But make no attempt to hide their game.
They put thousands in jail and charge them
And sing out loud their lying anthems.

They say fake news is the real McCoy
But, the real news they say is a ploy
Honest people want to stop the plunder
That, up ’til now, they kept hidden under.
But now it’s in the open meant to appease
Ignorant white people that are hard to please.
They want whites in power, think that’s nifty,
No wonder they elect only those who are shifty.

Too many quit learning in school, after ABC,
And they have no use for the land of the free.
They liked how it was in eighteen hundreds
With slaves, inhumanity to those they plundered.
They got up in arms when a black man won
And the class war was once again begun.
The very rich told lies to change the rules
People began to act openly like rapacious fools.
This is the country of which we were once proud.
It’s right now being destroyed by the elite crowd.
  Nov 2018 Lorenzo Neltje
Brent Kincaid
In the fifties in the USA
It was sad, but at the time
It was a rock solid fact;
Flamboyance was a crime.
I had to wear a coat and tie
The uniform of every day
Behaving quite the normal guy
In every conceivable way.

To be a good Samaritan
And genuflect at the altar,
Wear the collar of a puritan,
And not shame your father
By being some kind of fool
Who goes against the will
Of a society that longs for
A conformity inducing pill.

I gazed longingly at clothes
Of fashionable panderers
With the color matching garb
That triggered the slanderers.
But more than their profession
I saw their ability to strut,
The fit, the material display,
The magnificence of the cut.

And I had trouble being
That kind of person they craved.
To me it was a boring ride
From birth, right to the grave.
I could not understand those
Who felt life was not for living.
What good were the gifts I saw
If I refused their very giving?

Not for me, even when young
To spend my time mud crawling.
I would rather spend my efforts
In verbal social brawling.
I rejected insulting phrases that
Proper people so often employ
And chose instead the descriptive
And openly proud ‘gay *******’.

I refused to let the common man
Who was afraid of his own crotch
Insist I be mute while he insisted
That I should stand and watch.
No, I would be who I was then
And reject their false packet
Of wearing the coat of social balm
Which I called The Straight Jacket.
  Nov 2018 Lorenzo Neltje
raingirlpoet
what happens when i no longer like your pink, sweet, version of me you’ve curated?
what would happen if i erased all colour completely?

no, i’m not talking about choosing blue over pink or yellow or green
“gender neutral” clothing isn’t any shade on the colour wheel

i’m talking about if i never associated the colour pink with femininity
and blue with masculinity

and yellow and green with “gender neutrality”

what if my life was just void of colour?

like if i were to say i didn’t feel like a girl nor a boy
nor the brief possibility of both

i just feel
like that grey space in between the most diluted shades on the colour wheel

would you still force me to call myself “daughter”?
  Nov 2018 Lorenzo Neltje
ethan
you have to find the stupid reasons not to **** yourself.

for example:
i can’t **** myself because i’m in marching band and we just got our drill. it would be selfish if i left a hole in our formations.

i can’t **** myself because my dad bought me a new package of that bread i like. it would be a waste to not eat it.

i can’t **** myself because my french teacher moved a girl next to me. it would be rude if i were to leave her without a seating partner again.

i can’t **** myself because my friends and i are in a gift exchange. it would be annoying if the person i got didn’t get a gift.

i can’t **** myself because my room is messy. it would be ******* my family if i left a mess.

i can’t **** myself because i have a group project coming up. it would be unfair if i left my partners to do all the work.

i can’t **** myself because it would inconvenience others. i can’t **** my self because leaving a hole would hurt their productivity. i can’t **** myself because me dying would mean that i never got to see the end of my favorite books, i never got to see my favorite tv shows, i never got to finish my favorite poems.

i can’t **** myself because i’m in marching band. if i do, i’ll leave a hole.
i don’t know if this is positive anymore
Next page