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4.9k · Apr 2013
Whisky Breath
Ben Holders Apr 2013
Whisky breath and
cold sweat stench
fill this room
as there are fewer hours
till work
than will sober me up.

One last cigarette
One more affirmation
To keep the promises
we will slumber past
their breaking point

Class can wait
Work can wait
Life waits for none
I wait
For life to
Become
More than cycle
Of light and dark

Of stagnant art
And stagnant words
That still drip
From the corners
Of my ethyl lubricated
Mouth.

That still pool in
Your soul as
You drift to sleep

Goodnights said to every
Underage youth now
Napping away
Morning rush.
3.8k · Jul 2013
Peer pressure
Ben Holders Jul 2013
Forget what you learned in the night  

The youth do not have it right

The wine plays tricks on young mortals

In the late moonlight

When reason was lost  

And caveman instincts run wild

And I think I want to rest awhile

But the youth will not rest

And the youth will scream you awake

And the youth will give you drugs

And the youth will fill you with worth

And the youth will leave you be

Only when the youth has burned you up

My body is on fire

And the youth dance in my light

The youth came last night

Like all nights, and they begged to dance in my light

I begged to dance in their light
Ben Holders Aug 2013
The wine plays tricks on young mortals
On occasions bathed in pale sunlight
Reason will be lost lost well before dawn
The youth cannot rest
Till only caveman instincts persist

Do not try and hid, nor sleep
The youth will scream you awake
And the youth will give you drugs
And the youth will drag you across town
And shove you into basements, backseats,
Dive bars, dorm rooms, and late night beaches
With swimsuits strongly discouraged.

And the youth will leave you be
Only when the youth has burned you up
Leaving you to the heap of a soul you have left
The youth came last night
To finish me off.
They came with whiskey and women.
And I succumbed to the temptation
Of another blurred night.
1.3k · Mar 2014
Lemonade
Ben Holders Mar 2014
I don’t hate love
And I don’t love hate
But I find the sour taste
Is best.
It reminds us what is sweet.
1.3k · Apr 2013
Walmart Stop
Ben Holders Apr 2013
I grab a cart handle and smirk, I have a cold this time
One less thing to worry about.
The wheel squeaks and pulls.
One more thing to worry about.

Shooters of wine greet and then mock
At my lack of age.
I turn down ails like
The pages of a well worn book
A no longer interesting text
On how to troubleshoot Windows 95.

Pages filled of colors and high fructose corn sugar
White bread and corn tortillas.
Clothing. Seems already dropping from the hangers.
Workers. No longer holding their heads up.
But wander the ails as I do.
I see the look of a job
Sat on too long and has staled
I see milk.
Organic milk.
And yogurt nearby.
Hot pockets.
Organic hot pockets.
Organic chips.
Bacon ranch organic chips.
It is all in the branding.
Less heat and more thought control is needed
For the American public than the average feed lot stock.
At last what I need is found.
And I can leave before I drown
In over-consumption .
Then back into the cold of February.
And into my van.
I cut someone off as I sped away.
933 · Apr 2013
Drugs on a public bench
Ben Holders Apr 2013
We are invisible when we are at our best.
And strung out in some park at our worst.
Ample source material
for PSA specials about why you should stay in school.

Have a cop yelling with a club raised
Some blond chick dazed
her boyfriend screams unfazed
By the violence inherent in the system
Ben Holders Mar 2014
Some days I wake up,
And the rent is due,
The cable is off,
My car won’t start
My job is the one I swore to quite months ago
Nothing can be done till payday
And I don’t care, I got the day off.
I can spend the whole day trying to pickle myself inside a SoCo bottle.
814 · Apr 2013
Kerouacian Summer
Ben Holders Apr 2013
Sing out for the repulsed.
The putrid. The obscene.
For all the children just find their way on and in the music scene.  
Sing out for every grandma that shutters as we walk by.
Sing out for every giggle let out at a government lie.
Sing in the artificial moonlight on streets that never see darkness or silence.

Sing in the drunk revelry of youth
and hormones and whispered sweet nothings
nether will remember.
And of looks deep into her. . .
eyes because they are truly the most beautiful thing you have seen this night.

Sing in voices too loud for the hour.  
Listen to the sound of youth plotting revolution and redistribution of power.
But are derailed when they learn the milk has gone sour
and someone must walk to buy more at two thirty on a Tuesday morning.

Sing of the truly mundane immortalized
in novels and short stories and twitter accounts weekly
as the clock switches from Friday to Saturday largely unnoticed.

Sing of me brothers and sisters.
Sing of me as I walk to my future
tired, weary, and feet covered in blisters.
For the walk is long, and time waits for no one.
Ben Holders Apr 2013
I will never apologies
for the actions of my hedonistic heart.

And my life is rented space
to portray my demonistic art.

Of bottles empty and broken,
of girls sleeping soundly in a room of people
People spending time to waste it away
like so many nights before

The quit rebellion that squelches itself
when the body begins to
die faster than intended.

But the ******* feels like ecstasy
scrapping my nose

And the ***** tastes like nothing.
And my soul feels heated and ready to die.
Ready to die for a little more joy.

And the night
And for all children
Who are at home
Sleeping
Safe
bored
To tears
796 · Jul 2013
Pedestal
Ben Holders Jul 2013
And my heroes uses to sit on tall pedestals
Above normal men
But they reached too high into the sky
The statues of my mind
Reached the sun and ignited
Turned to ash
And fell at my feet.
Heros made men
Once more at my feet
Able to sin like men should
On the dirt from which we all come
649 · Jan 2014
Different folks
Ben Holders Jan 2014
So I am Yin, and others are too.

Some are Yang, and I know not what they do.

But it is beautiful we are half of one

And not simply two.
635 · Apr 2013
Imagine
Ben Holders Apr 2013
Lennon said come together over me
And then he sank back into the dirt
He said to love
we said make his blood spurt

Tragic angels
are what we crave.
Like poor John
Plunged into an early grave.
There is a reason he started dressing like Jesus in 73
592 · Jan 2014
"It's fine."
Ben Holders Jan 2014
People disappoint on all fronts.

In every way you hoped they wouldn't.

In every way they swear against

People disappoint every day in ways they don't even know.
Ben Holders Apr 2013
You are no more flawed than the Auroras.
No more evil than wind flowing over the hills.
There is nothing lacking in the winding of a lake's bank

You are the naturally occurring phenomena
of atoms becoming apes
**And you are beautiful.
511 · Apr 2013
American spirit
Ben Holders Apr 2013
With ever sign espousing the dangers of heathenism,
This cigarette tastes all the sweeter.
I’ll gladly trade another year of life
For a calm head
And a deeper laugh
510 · Aug 2013
The soon over twilight
Ben Holders Aug 2013
Stone face of my childhood has cracked
The man who made me fear him, god, and the devil.
Now makes me pity him.
His thunder is gone and . . .
His mind goes all the time
I notice the jumps between visits.
I live far away.
The fall from human to . . .
To dust.
It is happening before my eyes.
And I weep for the inevitable.
This is the nature of things.
I am the son, I must watch him become once again
Stardust blowing across the ground.
475 · Jun 2013
Inside a shell
Ben Holders Jun 2013
I have so many

dreams in my ******  head.

They swell and flow and

jumble all at once trying to get out.

Creatures of my design

I have colors dripping from walls in my mind

Walls the lock me from my own kind

I stumble and fall and bruise my ego

On every little slipup

Every little conversation

The words are there on the tip of my tongue

They sit and rot

And then they become the words I should have said but forgot

There is a world I want to show

To let out and have it freely mingle

But there is a wall between me and

What I want to be.

It casts a shadow and I droop from lack of sun

people start to say I am not very much fun

It casts a shadow and dulls the colors

Kills the creatures of my mind

I watch them die all the time.
440 · Apr 2013
No one looks good in satin
Ben Holders Apr 2013
Having been is just as good as never been,

just harder to forget.

Who gives a **** if the sun is shining

when you are six feet under soil in an overpriced box?
438 · Apr 2013
Does a fool know he is so?
Ben Holders Apr 2013
My mind has great ability to keep the facts
Of the gazpacho government pigs
And lacks any ability at all
for simply math.

Truly, I am ether a genius or a lunatic
who possesses a lively imagination.
Or simply no one in particular at all.
A vapid existence of nothingness taken from writers
Who were in fact nothing, but quite good with words.
384 · Apr 2013
The Tangled Bank
Ben Holders Apr 2013
I have nothing to add
Nor change or even stage
To make sense of
Anything.
Even my own words.
368 · Mar 2014
A million little strings
Ben Holders Mar 2014
Everyone you meet takes something,
Leaves something with you.
Some get their hooks in and stay.
And stay.
And it will hurt to tear them out.
I close my eyes and pull.

I pull because we are the words of those around us.
So I pull
And pull more,
and pull more.
And tear more,
and give more .

Then I look back and see all the hooks behind me,
The hooks I put in other.
I hope they hurt,
Simply to balance the equation
Ben Holders Apr 2013
Please don’t ask me where I've been,

I don’t want to lie to you again.

And again.

— The End —