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 May 2017 Cate
Charles Bukowski
"--you know, I've either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I've sold my house, I've found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and
the time to
create."
no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you're going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you're on
welfare,
you're going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you're going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you're going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don't create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.
 Apr 2017 Cate
Ashley Moor
I was born
backwards.

I was raised in a place
with no name
but I can still find it on a map.
The first words I wrote
as a child
were of Dorothea's
funeral procession
and the brown linoleum
on her kitchen floor.

Now I can't seem to remember
her hands.

She grew up slow,
sifting the dirt with her hands.
Time moved against her
so gently.
Dorothea wasn't scared
of the wind.

Dorothea died
two months before her 90th birthday.
I shut my eyes and smell
the rain from her front porch.

I close my eyes
to feel the open windows
of my childhood.
I remember buying ice cream
on the first day of Spring
at the cafe close by.

Why do we run from
what we know?
I want to find
all of the years
I misplaced under my fingernails.
I want to see
Dorothea standing in the kitchen.
I want to see
my mother happy.

Childhoods
lay dormant as death
but I have faith
that they find us,
eventually -
face down in the debt we owe,
dark, dim,
hungry for summer.

I believe in the reincarnation
of Dorothea
because I have found myself again
in her ghost.
I found the South
embedded in the spine
and scripture of poetry,
back porches,
pink houses,
love on an acre of bones.

I stay up late
to write myself into the arms
of an existence like the one
of Dorothea.
In memorium
 Apr 2017 Cate
Ashley Moor
In time
I make it out of the arms
of my trailer park childhood
and into a resting silence.
In the desert
I am dripping blood
onto the things I own
from the inside of memories.
I grow older
and forget the bottoms of lakes.
I grow older
and forget the bottoms of lakes.
So,
I will move to the city
where I tell everyone
that I don't make company with ghosts;
that I haven't carved
photographs and heirlooms
from my spine when no one was looking.
How I never think about
your head on her pillow,
still.
My silence will rest on you,
gouge holes in the months
spent wandering through the east
with no mouth to speak.
I thought that you would
teach me how to speak,
my mouth to your ear
in such a tangled honesty.
But instead I sit dumb and dark,
waiting for you to reach me.
I just wrote this today.
Atoms swirl atop his head, a lattice of electron wonders
Words pool from her head, inky swirls on coarse parchment
Splatters of colours spread out, a mind of inspired chaos
Logarithms cloud his eyes as he speaks the language of algebra
So much talent in so many minds
Make us so beautifully human
Felt inspired
We only burn for one more heartbeat:
Our tears fall through the stars,
Then all our passions melt away
In the heat of their melancholy flames.
The world quivers under
The weight of your words:
"I love her. I love her."
Your heavy breath blowing out the candles
That burned in your eyes.
As I reach to pluck your celestial body
From the lonely sky,
You waste away
Waiting to catch her gaze.
You need her strength; I need your light.
We ask one another,
"Is it worse to love from afar
Or to watch that love die?"
 Feb 2017 Cate
Callum Hutchings
My room,
Both a death camp and a safe zone,
Rather wither away,
Than face execution.

Open door,
Deep breath,
Failure.

Hand over my feelings,
back to bed,
laying there,
friends were a conspiracy.

Leaving this house a teenage floor of lava,
To the armory,
Wield headphones and an over grown coat.

Open door,
Deep breath,
Stand.

The sun hurt as if i just left a space ship,
Fear of both know and unknown,
On this planet I was the alien.

Open gate,
Deep breath,
Walk.

Pavements conveyor belts,
Pushing out ghouls of society,
Cubicle bound,
Grey walls.

Yet still asked why so scared,
Of what I wish was just in my head,
This earth,
The land of dead.
The punctuation is a lot different in this than previous poems I have wrote as this was a spoken word poem I used.
 Feb 2017 Cate
Callum Hutchings
I stare into glass eyes with a saddening
lack of depth,
we are all contradictions to the idea
of a free spirit
how are we free without knowing
we are yet released from social borders
our natural state
man made

We inhale time
not smoke,
lines turn night
to day
stuck with the same kind of people
no room to grow
instead we bury ourselves
underground

collapsed.
Its been a long time since I wrote so this may not be up to standards
 Dec 2016 Cate
Richie Vincent
19.
You cut it open and let it fill the gaps with your blood,
You're exhausted,
The clouds in your head do everything they can to stick around, you wish people would do the same,
You are not surprised anymore,
You destroy yourself to get a taste of the bad because you've had the good and it just doesn't give you the high you crave anymore and you hate it but you can't stop,
You can't stop,
You're lighting fires, starting riots, you even take as many pills as you possibly can but none of this will make you feel anything and you're left feeling as empty as you did when you came into this,
Have you ever looked at yourself? I suggest you don't

18.
There are cigarettes on your breath,
Your eyes have bags under them that could hold the world and then some,
People come and go now, and you care a little bit, but not enough to do anything about it,
You got your license over the summer, the highways around here know you better than your family does at this point and you think you like that,
You think if you run away far enough from all of this that it'll go away,
You make yourself as busy as you possibly can in hopes that it will take your mind off of all of this,
You still think about her every day, but she doesn't think about you anymore, you don't do anything about this,
It's getting cloudy again,
You don't sleep as much anymore

17.
You get upset because you care more than they do, but you don't say anything,
You start to wear colors again because black just doesn't make you feel as pretty,
You want to feel pretty because they're  pretty and they deserve someone just as pretty,
Your demons aren't as ugly as hers, and you fight hers off to make it look like yours are as weak as your grandfather's spine, she doesn't buy it

16.
You lose your virginity,
You feel powerful,
You feel broken, but you feel powerful,
Everything hurts all of the time but you don't want to realize it because you're in love and being in love is powerful,
You watch her smoke cigarettes,
You smoke her cigarettes,
You break yourself on her because it is the first and last time you will ever feel like you're able to pick yourself back up when heartbreak pushes you down,
Your parents don't believe you're depressed,
You don't eat as much,
You can't sleep like you used to be able to, it hurts you,
Your best friend tells you that the only reason you're so sad all of the time is because you don't believe in God

16.
You start to believe in a god and you start to believe in yourself but you forget the difference

16.
You get high for the first time and you realize why addicts choose to live in their worlds instead of ours

16.
You wake up and you feel nothing

16.
You wake up and you feel nothing

15.
You try homeschool this year because your private Christian elementary school never prepared you for public high school and they force you so far into the ground that being a corpse sounds better than being a flower in the soil, you believe every word they tell you,
You isolate yourself,
You listen to extremely depressing music and you like it,
You start to wear all black,
You feel alone no matter how many people are around you,
You throw yourself into the snow on a cold December morning because at this point you just want to feel something, anything,
Your parents don't agree with you,
Your mother tells you to pray and your father doesn't even listen to you,
Your mother gets breast cancer this year,
You ask yourself how the anxiety is still letting you think for yourself since you realize something so deadly can spread so rapidly

14.
Your uncle takes his own life,
This is the first time you really think about death,
You wonder what it would be like to be like them,
To wake up and never feel anything ever again, and you kind of like it,
That cute girl you really like smiles at you in the hallway now, you've been at her for months,
It's funny how young love starts to take roots,
Everything is fine now

13.
Moving schools is hard, this is the first experience you have with losing friendships,
It's crazy how often they come and go now

12.
You can't even remember the last time you didn't get more than 8 hours of sleep,
Your dog is your best friend,
You don't even think about the color black, your favorite color is red like fire

11.
Your best friend's father kills her mother and then himself,
You wonder what it's like,
How wonderful it would be to make someone stay forever and never be able to leave  

10.
Your grandmother is alive,
She has a funny smell around her whenever you visit her,
There's this weird stick in her mouth that looks like it's on fire,
You don't like it

9.

8.

7.

6.
You can name every single kind of dinosaur that ever existed and you love hot wheels,
Your favorite food is peanut butter and jelly, but you only eat it if your mother makes it

5.

4.
Your grandmother loves to buy you toys,
She tells you that the memories are worth more than the money,
You remember this specifically

3.

2.
Your second birthday party includes a ball pit, hundreds of balloons, and all of your family members,
I wonder if this is what my funeral will be like

1.


0.
Your mother and father meet with the doctor again,
You're on your way and they've never felt more excited in their lives


I wonder if they ever wondered about how their little boy would grow up,
I wonder if they ever thought about how I would turn out,
I wonder if they ever wondered about everything that would happen to me

It's funny how everything someone experiences in their lives molds them into what they become,
Out of everything, I wonder what it was that made me so numb

Sometimes life feels slow,
Other times it feels like it's going a million miles an hour

Sometimes it feels like I'm living in dog years because I've seen too much to be this young
 Sep 2016 Cate
Tyler King
"You are my drug, I'm addicted to you"
Says the poet, immaculate, grinning his way through juvenile metaphors and picking his teeth with the bones of the dead horse he's been beating, Slick ******* on a stage locking eyes with every girl in the room, cocky enough that he thinks he can make every single one of them think that this poem is about them, and that they'll just -get it- , that it's just a -metaphor- of course he has no experience with drugs, he's never watched anybody wither away to nothing, he's never had an itch that took his body hostage at a cellular level,  he's a real -stand up guy- he's just -sensitive- he's a real ****** honest to god artist standing before them and from there it's all but too easy to ******* his way into some casual ***,

"It's always someone nice who gets killed, it's never some toothless ******"
Says the comedienne, immaculate, laughing into television cameras, and everyone gets the implication here,
The ****** is not human
The drug addict does not deserve life
If you made the choice you should pay the consequence
Stop breathing while people who actually deserve it are dying
Don't talk to me about the socioeconomic climate that breeds drug use
Don't give me statistics
Don't you dare send those rats to rehab, if they're going to live they should do it behind bars, locked in a cage like the vermin they are

"I thought I could stop this time"
Said my best friend as I wrapped a blanket around him,
He is weak, he is ice cold and still sweating, he is on three day withdrawal and he will relapse tomorrow once I have left, he will have been dead for nearly 4 years by the time you hear this poem, and the silence that follows will take shape, and it will whisper,
"Good"
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