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I'm learning, ever so slowly, what people mean when they say I'm "rough around the edges"

I'm becoming softer
The heavy, angry punk music that used to play from my iPod

Has become softer, slower
More hopeful

Is this what it means to find peace?
I never understood God.
Maybe I still don't.
On second thought,
I still don't.
I never understood how anyone
Could follow something they can't see.
Something they don't truly understand.
I'm starting to think God is around.
I'm starting to see the beauty of life
Maybe because I'm at the bottom
Maybe because this winter has been especially hard.
Maybe because I have reason to look to the cosmos.
Who knows.
There isn't a temple I'd set foot in.
But God,
If you're listening.
I'm here.
I need you.
Something beyond other's words
Prove to me things will be okay.
10w
But baby I don't know how to ask for help
 Jan 2016 Caroline Lee
R
we write when we're at our weakest
we write when we've been cut open
we write when we're bleeding
we write when we're dying inside

Not all those who write are sad,
but all sad people write.
You may not agree with this, but generally, it is true.
I've always thought it a bit cruel that
my mother named me Trista Joy.
Doomed to a fate of being pulled,
polarizing at two ends of the spectrum of emotion.
Smacked into the middle of a war
that has been waged for thousands of years.
Millions of lives lost to both happiness and sadness.

A walking contradiction can only move about in one way.
Circling what I thought I knew, and what really is.
Am I meant to be extreme in expression,
ferociously flippant from side to side?
Was I born without the ability to reach the medium?

A children's movie once taught me that
happiness cannot exist without sadness,
and in that I often find solace.
But I live in a world where people run, fight, and hide
from half of what I am, and obsessively strive for the other.
It gets exhausting, suppressing  the spring loaded spirit that is being sad.
Happiness can only hold its ground for so long.

It's great to meet you, I'm Sad Joy Sullivan.
"Write a poem about your name."
I've left a part of my heart in Denver, Colorado.
Four twenty somethings jumping into the the freezing
lake head first from the mountain tops just to see
what it's about. We counted flannels and puffy vests
and tried to calculate the net worth of this place.
Rooster cat opened a up a blank wall to me where
I blew out my brains and left my phone number.
Remember, your neighbor might be lonely.
Lavender lime muffins and clouds intricately laced in
patterns meant to hold the sun hostage for but an hour more
as it gently strokes the broad shoulders of the 14ers backside.
Without them, how do you know which way is west?
Check out the Rooster Cat Cafe and find my hand written poems in a community sketchbook.
There were actually three sheets. I put two on top of the third because the bugs are real and were on the original unstated third sheet. Sometimes things smell like my grandma, but the scent has no name. My mom is over protective of her 107 year old wood floors. We've talked a lot about silence, but how often do we listen to what it is trying to say? I don't understand the physics of sound,  but there is nothing you can't understand without google. This poem isn't about you and we weren't wrong about the strobe lights or the fact that we had never been so ******. I wish you were here again.
A subsequent prose poem.
2 fitted sheets, stretched and tucked atop each
other. A nesting home for soft bugs with thousands
of legs, in which you cannot see.
Why does it smell like Michigan basement
bathrooms, and size 4 feet in turtle sandboxes.

Painted, chipped, salvageable wood only shows
it's gritty teeth in the day light.
leaking through shower curtain rings on
the makeshift curtains like pool water
through the cracks in your smiling eyes,
blue goggles, the ones that cover the nose.

the longer you listen to the silence,
the louder it gets.
or is that the sounds of fan blades
ripping through the indescribable texture of
the stale air you swim through each night.

You'd swear you experienced a sonic boom here,
the bull whip cracking from over pressure. or is it
under pressure? I always thought that pressure
weighed like pounds and tons. I still don't
know if that is wrong.

I won't remember the sound of your laugh,
or the way you smell, or the clothes you wore
when we met. Like a good poet should.
But I'll remember all the things we forgot
to do together. All the times we spoke but
got too high to listen.

High, like the time I told you I thought
the trees and the sun were making
strobe lights for our long drive into
October. Flashing light in the car windows,
as we drove down the open freeway.

It's easy to remember the world
was made for us, when we are
alone, here, in this room, together,
like we were before, and will be soon
once again.
Find my subsequent poem.
I'm trying to meet new people and everything in between.
I like to get drunk on patios, porches, tailgates, and float trips, and any outdoor scenario.
I have a definite weakness for all things sweet.
Pipeline rig welder in the making.
Ask me, voted most likely to succeed in highschool.
I watch too much netflix and enjoy crying over Frank Ocean.
I am going to sue the **** out of you.
I'm a guy that sometimes carries a pocket thesaurus.
Socially conscious dude who probably drinks too much.
Amateur chef. Banjo Jedi.
New to this Midwest life.
Found poetry from tinder descriptions.
I wish we named every rainstorm.
Hurricanes get everything, but
It's easy to have everything when
All you do is take.

I used to think that falling
Asleep was the same feeling as
Earthquakes shaking the grounds.
Don't get stuck in the chasm.

Washed up memories, shoe box
Chachkis, left untouched through the
Eye of the storm. Who knew these
Relics would follow you here.

Crying as the pouring rain stops
Is impossible.
All of the tears have been taken.

But rippling water is overrated.
Have you ever seen sand slide through
The Sahara Desert.
I've been there. I've seen it.
I watched as each minuscule grain slid
Down the valley ridges built from years
Of wind storms making piles.
Piles idiosyncratically stretched across its reddened face,
Maybe modeled by the smoldering surface of mars.

Lay down and let it wash across your leathered skin.
Sensations spreading, each nerve on every centimeter of you
Lighting up, marquee, competing with the hot desert suns.
A million dandelion spores dancing ballet.
Tip top, tip toes to a tarantella timing.
Buried under dunes, only too soon to
Uncover you once again.

You wouldn't believe how something
Solid can so namelessly float across the land.
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