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7.9k · May 2016
Obesity
Clem May 2016
my subject, mrs. ((brown?))
for this speech is
going to be: obesity. ish.

you see I remember
the article you handed out to us,
loos-leafed,
fresh-pressed,
a dry white piece that told,
in simplest terms,
the most inarguable & bland facts
about !healthy eating & !weight loss!

but mrs ((whatever)), I want
to tell n and the entire
******* crisp class,
that obesity is a load
of steaming ****
from someone who’s really fucki
ng sick (you know how much
better it stinks then)

that obesity
was made to be glorified,
I don’t tell you this—
I ****** jiggle it to you,
grab my santa clause puch and
shove it at you--

tick tock
we wait for the clock
to tell us what
s to come,
except it makes us guess

--see this:
a mid-age woman, mother,
fat & previously fat,
goes in for stabbing pain in the chest, or
chronic diarrhea,
seeing stars & no energy left.
((this happens))
the doctor says,

well let’s weigh you n see
if you’ve lost
the weight I told you to lose before
remember Sharol

now Sharol..,,,, sweety…..
you weigh 55.62 lbs over the
state-set “healthy limit”k,
so we’re just gonna give u these
diet pills & I promise they work,.
all nach-yer-awl u see, none of that
waterweight ******* [! excuse my language]

and in about 3 months you’ll lose
half that overweight,
and I promise the starsll go away and you’ll
feel right tip top okay now that’ll be
$60 & come bac k in a month to tell me
how much you’ve lost okay

haha but that’s alrightright?
she was unhealthy
&
doctors make you healthy

only her brain cancer maybe, or like, colon
cancer or literally anything other obesity

kills her in about 3 months
bc the **** doctor would only
pretend that she cared
what
was
wrong with Sharol, sweety…,,,

im sharol and so are you and
so is your uncle & so is
your mother, probably
because most of us are “obese”

& the only cure for obesity
is the cure for the term
“obesity” you see
listen i wrote this angry i know it's not good
5.0k · Dec 2016
pre-halloween
Clem Dec 2016
I am not who I think I am—
I never said I was

Sometimes I’m
a monster—
swirling, yellowgreen skin,
bristly coils of
hair sticking
out,

strumlike underneath
your fingertips—

sometimes I’m
a normal guy,
angry and hungry
with greasy-tousled
greasy locks—

or a subaverage
woman,
curvy and compassionate,
warm *****
beckoning to all
bereft—

most often, I’m a
translucent ghost,
too little there
yet not enough gone,
genderless,
formless,
obsolete
i wrote this before halloween... hence... the title
1.2k · Nov 2016
Bluejays and Cardinals
Clem Nov 2016
Nothing is more chilled
than slanted sunrays through pines
trembling with want

Nor nothing worse than
the young cardi’nals trilling
out to the white trees

Voices unfalt’ring
answered only by echoes
of forgotten spring

Cold, thick powder snow
blithely reminds us of the
small, white spring hen eggs

that, forever lost,
cracked among the ****-strewn straw,
oozing into earth—

and I think of you,
whispering back to the birds,
just as lost as they

waiting for pre-spring
dew to unfreeze from the grass
that you may lap it

with painful blue eyes
like black-stripped and impish jays,
looking down on all.
haiku. partially inspired by the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
1.2k · Mar 2017
marlboro 72s
Clem Mar 2017
I buy the cheapest cigarettes
that I can find
sometimes subsisting solely
on my own fears

too busy counting
and alphabetizing
all of my past traumas
to get to work on time

I’m too young to
feel this old
I’m tired of being
so tired

I’m still waiting
for my life to start—
I’m dreaming of a day
that I can feel young—

as young as these
bones that creak under me
and this flesh that bulges and
sags

as young as these eyes
that do nothing but stretch
and dilate
I’m always so afraid

but I don’t see ghosts anymore
it’s trite to say that what I fear is myself
but I know, I know how evil I can be
and I’m afraid of everything

how do I keep going under
the weight of myself?
why do I try when all I do
is waste so rapidly away?
Clem Nov 2016
Now let’s see what I can make of the chronology of Chase.
Some thick wet messy bird *****
missing its mark, a drop, browning vent
feathers, another drop
oozing perfectly in, to the oviduct, where
minerals and fetus and pre feathers formed.  

And now a slanted eye, lid half closed
after the fashion of a laying chicken hen,
a hen in its own right, Suzie Susan the bird,
sunflower seeds and malnutrition gracing her final
August days,
sits atop what can only be called a
cardboard cruelty to squeeze out the
rock and continue his

cycle
backward.

But: before.

The same lidded look, a male somewhere gesticulating
split rock shale hued feathers and
pink scaled lizard feet,
gripping,
as the unbelievable ordeal of egglaying begets
what will become a creature
((Chase))

and then warmth, a spot of raw pink
skin, so much like a goose bumped wet frozen bird
in the *** a day before supper,
warms the egg to a precise temperature
((Wikipedia knows what))
not to cook, but to love.

So many cages.  Straight up and down
black white silver metal plastic
bars, maybe a metal floor and maybe
unbreathable glass,
maybe even pine.  

How he made his way into a
rabbit’s cage much too sideways for
any bird, losing feathers from
eating buggy dry dusty seed which he loved
almost as much as procreating,
I wish to Hell I knew,
so I could ***** about it too
and hate not only myself, my parents,
the wooden door that ended him,
but their rotted brains as well.

Made perches.  Not safe, but sound.  
Wood, sycamore, not disinfected, but worn
down to a point of home decor.  
Birdshit everywhere, which was lovely
but I didn’t remember to clean it because
I was too young to know about anything
but Phantom of the Opera, dragons that have wings
and front arms always, don’t you dare ******* say different
because I will end you,
and the occasional long thin scab on the arm.

But, living.
Sitting by me -- hating me in a way that spoke
of kindred love and bond --
and nothing at all of the $3 diet that he somehow subsisted
on for possibly four years,
possibly thirteen,
or the improper bars slanted with thick white and gray urate and feces
paste uncleaned unchecked and untouched.

Or even the of the hard saved handful of cash earmarked for a
slightly less inadequate cage (but a cage nonetheless)
traded instead for a Nightmare on Elm Street box set containing
movies 1-6, plus 7, and Freddy vs Jason as well but not the remake,

but definitely of how someone, maybe me, taught you how to
whistle the Andy Griffith theme song even though I never watched
the dumb old show, and how to whistle
like a construction worker with a mild *******
after an unintended female, with the “best ***
I ever ******* saw,”

and of strict bedtimes always met with a decent blanket,
and maybe even of the bird-like night frights in which
I felt my heart leap, and I turned on music for you with the
useless old sixty pound boxy computer that happened to still have
a working copy of windows media player installed

and singing Billy Joel’s Lullaby which had nothing to do with you
or I and everything to do with divorce and dying
but which was perfect,
and put you back to sleep without a broken neck or wing,
yet.

Does it matter if he’s a bird or man?
I tell you that he’s both.
He ate and shat and ****** and loved
and sang and slept and had grumpy days
and happy days
and ****** people off and was too loud
and was startled by screams
had to face the still silent unmoving sickening pregnant heat wave of grief
had favorite foods and songs and tv shows,
lived in boxes and only wanted out.  

Greedy how he chirped so high on top of his lover
doing the tail spinny grindey dance against her pulsating *******
center, and squirting
secretly much like the **** before him, whatever
and whoever he was, his eyes
wide and mouth open slightly.  

And then her fat cinnamon body lay so many
thick shelled deadly pearls,
which were empty but never cold.
They loved their empty stale stagnant infertile eggs, by God,
these two perfect doomed parents given
not nearly enough to survive the
war of childbirth and rearing,
which they only tried out but were not privileged to suffer.  

I would’ve named his sons Columbo after some name
I read in a book or maybe an online forum, that is
supposedly Italiano and supposedly means “dove,”
the fat birds of varying white and gray hues with the occasional
dazzle of blue or brown or black
that embody all the soft qualities of Chase, and Suzy

and I would attempt to end the misbegotten trend
that started when I named Chase after the gorgeous golden Aussie
character from House (which someone of my age probably
shouldn’t have watched)
and add some little Renatos and Ninfas and little
Agapetos or maybe even Uccellos or Ucellas.  

But what would have been a family of tiny winged storm - skies
brought instead a slowish painful death, that could have been
oh so easily prevented and fixed with a little bit of love,
some mercy, some money, a vet, and possibly a fingertip amount of
dollar store canola cooking oil.

And Chase, what can I say of how you screamed an elegy, a dirge
more harrowing than Percy Shelley’s or Rilke’s or that poem Billy Collins
wrote about nine eleven, more true than the entire ludicrous book of Lamentations,
simply by screaming extreme, shrill and for so long, so long,
so through that the house shook with it and I cried too?

You wailed with a small dry wordless tongue
that shot into my ears and to my skull, brain, gray and white matter,
that absolutely trembled with the familiar horrific confusion
of suddenly waking to find that someone is gone and you
don’t know how but you know you’ll
never
see them again

you’d never stroke the smooth laughter of
her cheeks, you’d never press your small warm chest
against her wide brown wing again, my love,
and I
would never remember
where the hell I laid her body,
lost the grave that you needed to touch and
maybe walk on and sing to,
once more.

But this wasn’t your life.
That instead was summed up,
concentrated into the small pregnant moment when
It Happened,
the flash and squeal of your body being
broken, crushed smashed practically severed,
dazed and shaken and slowly shut down
over the span of a weekend,
again
and again as it
replayed in my mind --
again, again,
again, again.

But these are only words and you can’t
exist in them except as a small sliver,
a fragment of soul, a quick whiff of heartbeat --

but I didn’t lose your grave.
There’s a soggy ground where you were lain, and a small wooden
plaque over your bones which painted with the words:
in pace requiescat,
which I admit I only know from Amontillado,
and the day and month and the year that you died
because you, the great mystery, have no birth date.

And I would proceed to cry and hate so many people,
myself, and you, and firstly my lovely parents,
who allowed you to die and pretended to apologize,
but most of all I would hate the world,
for swallowing up and making me think
that a part of your flesh, sloshy like the soil,

was absorbed and embodied as fresh growth on your
large drooping willow tree

and that if I stroke it,
when I touch it with these fat white fingers and let
the bark pierce my skin roughly,
rub it red and ****** dry,
that I am touching you

and letting you know
I remember and that Chase -- you spilling of bird
***** and calcified ****
that somehow became a grayish soul that God hardly
gave enough moons --

I’m sorry
I hit you with a door
trying to close it,

but less sorry that I killed you and more sorry
that it was because, out of grandmotherly fear,
I never let you learn how to fly,

I clipped your wings and you, and we were so clumsy

that you ambled head first into its already severing crack

I hope wherever the hell you might be --
birdy paradise, Dante’s hell where lovers fly and that is torment --
that you have wings,
and they aren’t clipped,
and someone cleans up your ****.
Sometimes a bird is just a bird.

Am I pathetic for being so consumed by grief over a literal cockatiel? It's not even a metaphor, guys.
860 · Nov 2016
Queensnake
Clem Nov 2016
I am a motherless neonate
I am lapping up dew
with my forked tongue
I am sliding my plated belly
over the cool wet grass

I am entirely my own
I am scouting out rabbit dens
ambitiously
I am engulfing beauty
with my deep, long belly

I am a parentless subadult
I am basking out
under a full white moon
I am flicking out
my black-tipped tongue

I am an unashamed *******
I am unperturbed in my solitude
I am studied only in myself;

In another life, perhaps,
the sudden ruffle of leaves
to the left
would stir me
but here in my reptilian hide,
I am unflinching

I am a motherless neonate
and I blame
no one
841 · Nov 2016
Flesh Fire
Clem Nov 2016
I can’t be delicate,
small, sad-looking and innerly folding,
my legs will never oragami-fold themselves
over my tired tired fat chest   .

I am blessed to be big, though
my *** is a curse, how it juts and forces
itself to be known by peoples’ eyes and
rudely introduces itself to chairs, knick knacks,

anything unfortunate enough to exist
within its gargantuan wake  .

I am blessed to be huge but small,
I am blessed to warmly ******* and spill
my flesh over everything I touch & taste;

I am forced to give myself up to
the world, to give my huge body up as
comfort to the multitudes of humans
I love and crave and want and dream up

because they will never find me small and cowered,
will never offer their bodies
to comfort mine, assuming instead that
my huge warmth can sustain its
own flame .

My own body can’t contain the
sad swells and lovely lakes that surge
and bash against its own hide  --- - ---

that’s why my stretch marks
leak and tendril their way
around my arms,
my belly folds,
my underloved thighs,

and I wonder why we both want
to tender my fire
to a low smolder
and let it fade out

do we
think that trees with thick
lush, curved and pink
foliage are somehow
whole-er
than trees with paperthin leaves?

my bark still craves
the sun, which sometimes
comes in the form
of human flesh
about pining after people, and being lonely even when you're with someone you love. nothing is ever enough.
797 · Nov 2016
Loud Borderline
Clem Nov 2016
i’m a naughty lil borderline.
I don’t kick and scream, just
glare n fall asleep
for 12 hours.
I’m not a good, quiet borderline,
I’m not a pretty skinny brunette,
I dare to be fat
i dare to be queer.

I don’t hallucinate my demons,
i hop e i never do

i’m a naughty lil borderline.
i make friends and ignore them,
i don’t do any cool drugs
i imupulse-buy snakes
and cigarettes
(sometimes cats)

i storm out
i cut myself
i cut all ties
i double text

i am too progressive
i dare to love
i dare to be a misandryist
and a humanist
i'm really not trying to glorify drug use here.
792 · Jan 2017
"WRONG"
Clem Jan 2017
Nasty.
Things have started
to get nasty, people
have stopped pretending
that they are not evil

the fabric of fake nicety
has been scorched down
and we fight in the face of
a wrinkled green gremlin

whose name is many
whose language is disgust
whose heart is sealed shut
whose pride is gleaming ****

Disgusting.*
How did we get here? we
huddled, tired, hungry & poor
standing at her pale jade door
being told we’re a liability

pushed out of homes we own
and families we’ve raised
to the streets, making noise
fighting though we’re so tired

It’s how they want us—
tired from years of fighting,
too tired to keep on.
But we’ll never stop.

Though their name is many,
ours is more. The teeming
multitudes arise to take

his place. We protest. We resist.

Nasty.
The gloves are off,
and we persist.
737 · Dec 2016
11.22.16
Clem Dec 2016
numbness upon
beholding
mangled roadkill,

i cried for hours once
when i went to the skating rink
instead of the carnival

most outgrow
their crybaby stage

i grew into
mine

i love to sit on
the sharp-****** shore
and watch, wait
for the next wave
to destroy 3 months' work

the gritty, hamd-scooped sandcastle
mercifylly spared by some
of my white-tipped peaks

obliderated
by the occasional
flash of monstrosity
im a ******* jfc
Clem May 2016
You can’t ask me what is wrong,
because it’s always something different.
You can’t ask me why I’m acting this way,
because I can’t explain it.

I will tell you I love you,
and for a while my voice
will echo back the stone walls
of your throat,

and then I’ll find myself alone
in a taunting, repeating cave that lies.
It doesn’t matter that you say you love me,
or that I believe it.

My love is strong and deep and fiery;
it imprints itself like a brand on my own flesh.
I imprinted on you, like a mother duck to her
babe, or maybe it goes the other way.

You can’t ask yourself what went wrong
unless you want to come down with
me, briefly, into my net of nonsense
and mental illness.

There you’ll find my mother,
and the time in the first grade
when I was molested,
and the time I stepped on an ant

and cried for ten minutes.
Listen.
I am a wave, an ocean wave.
I crash and roar, I nurture and heal,
and tear myself down
every time I breach.
I will take you in my warm
embrace, and we will for a while
float, but the time
will come
when I will have to drag
you against the glass-sharp pebbles
at my gargantuan belly.
i'm really sorry
580 · Mar 2017
Grimace
Clem Mar 2017
I am not here
very often anymore
I am far too busy
staying under the covers
listening to the monsters
growling from under my bed
and by my bed, I mean my mind
how cliché is that?

I am usually in
my car, my broke ***
big red SUV that needs
its AC recharged and
a shift solenoid replaced
and it’s good that I can’t
lock the doors because
I don’t have the key

And I think that’s pretty
corny but accurate way
of describing who I am
I have the means to get
it all going but I lack
the self-control, the
the tools to keep it all in
and to keep myself safe
one day it’ll all come spilling out and
it’ll be all my fault

I make friends with rocks easier
than with people,
and I’d rather hang out with my
dog than with my friend
who I love and haven’t seen in months
because it’s easier
I’d give anything to be able
to take my pets with me to the grocery store

I don’t know how to love
human beings
--I only know how
to fear them, or
to pine after them from far
away
instead of interacting

I don’t have any little nuggets of wisdom
for you—I’m a borderline, a recovering nihilist,
I have spirits for friends and I worship
old gods shrouded in mystery
I wish I had a gender to cling to
and I wish that I could feel loved
by other humans

my boyfriend and I always fight
because I’m so insecure
because I’m borderline
because I have PTSD
I’ve spent 20 years trying to
cope with untreated mental illness
and a million past traumas

although I’m scared of losing him,
although the things he does
bother me because I’m scared
of how different we are,
I love him more than anything
But I’m afraid he loves me more than I
love him

because when it comes down to it,
I think that I still feel
more connected to
my little black mouse, Coffee Beans,
my temperamental python, Macchiato,
my dog, Joy,
than I ever can feel to him
to humanity

I never learned how to be a person
I was too busy trying to figure
out what I did to make my parents hate me
or how to stay safe from their rage
or how to make friends,
or keep them

too busy pretending that
the terror I lived in was normal
that my parents never hit me
so their screaming insults and
gaslighting shouldn’t touch me
pretending that she’s right—

I’m just a drama queen
and mothers are allowed to
call their daughters names
and punish them for crying
mothers are allowed to
make their daughters feel
so worthless as to be subhuman

I never got to become a person
I was only a mirror image of their abuse
waiting for my life to start
so that I could have friends, so that
I could have a name
and likes
and a style
and, maybe,
someone to love me

and now
I have a car, and although
I can’t afford the gas
I’m comforted by the thought
that I gave something akin
to freedom now
that I can go to the store and
buy food that isn’t filthy and rotted
that I could jump in and drive away
and never come back
if I needed to do that  
and one day I will
527 · Dec 2016
grim reaper at speedway
Clem Dec 2016
I wonder if other people see death like I do.
I do not mean in a faux-macabre way,
a sad tween way.
Picking through the 3 isles of candies at
Speedway, I sometimes catch
a whiff of
death and
I don’t mean to, but I know that
my eyes must fill with him &
I wonder if the cashier
sees
anything,
,

Have you caught the glimmer
of an adult-to-be coming to terms
with the conflicting emotions
around death,
the desire, the fear,
the terror after horror,
the longing that subsides only
with time
504 · Nov 2016
Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Clem Nov 2016
There’s a pile of orange cat ***** on the sofa
whose back has been stapled and thumb-tacked
onto the framework it’s, where it peeled.

There’s clumps of dog hair like dusty black clouds
clinging to the stairwell corners.  Dog *****, cat *****
and miscellaneous other stains splotch the gray carpet.

There’s windows coated in years of gunk.  There’s a child
whose life has been shattered and carries on with a
tablet.  Chickens roam and **** on the deck.  

I don’t emerge.  My room is half-painted, hot, and dark.
I don’t emerge from my cage.  Litter boxes overfilled out
there.  Hate out there.  The air is heavy and thick.
481 · Nov 2016
Generic Love Poem
Clem Nov 2016
I went
downtown
alone,

I crept
along
your old haunts

I found
a well sat
cubicle,

and curled myself
up

in the
thought
of us
450 · Nov 2016
Mother Daugher Ballad
Clem Nov 2016
I had a dream I killed you.
Threw knives at your fat chest,
held you under the bath
water when you were a baby.

Pinched your nose and covered
your mouth with a pillow,
gave you a razor and made you
do it yourself.

I woke up cold and strangely calm.
I woke up tired of both of us.
And under the yellowed, motheaten blankets,
I realized:

it was what we’d both always wanted.
in the perspective of my mother, toward me.
407 · May 2016
Average Yearly Income
Clem May 2016
average yearly income: 7k, maybe I
live with my parents

national
poverty income for a
household of one (1): 14k

except im not a
household of one

I’m a household of:
me,
my cat,
my dog,
my betta fish & his snail friend,
my demons

and they all try to eat me out
of house and home

and then I deal

with what spirits I accidentally
call from their weird etherworld lives,,,,
into my little windowsill with its
candles and rusty cauldron,
scarf cloth,
n lost intentions
362 · Dec 2016
clouds?
Clem Dec 2016
i dont like lines like "i feel empty,"
"I am nothing"

but it's hard to describe the world from behind a thick-gray veil ,
peeking out, hands incapable of parting
those layers of gossamer

without reverting to the pithies i garnered
from young, only-just-realizing-angst

small glimmers of light or dusky shadows
pass across my roughly shielded eyes
sometimes,
for moments

my hands are not mine
my feet are not mine
I can't tell who
that hairy, unkempt,
ball-of-fat person is
glaring at me from behind the mirror,
the thick threads

someone else
has been sleeping
in my bed

someone else
has been writing
my tweets

someone else
has been
driving my car

i'm in limbo and i'd
much rather be
totally gone than in wait, wait, wait
for the day i wake up and
realize all They--

the person who stole my skin--

has done to hurt
the ones i love--
350 · Dec 2016
Christmas
Clem Dec 2016
i heard
the storm
outside.

rivers of rain, like streams of sweat,
dribbled down the drywall of my room
through the holes in the insulation
and the faulty, redneck-rigged flue

it felt
a bit
like May.

can't blame myself for being
discomfitted by rain in december
but the snow that falls in march
bothers me much more.

i saw
my
reflection

in the tepid pools leaking on my floor
winking back uncomfortably
as mold grows in our walls
319 · Dec 2016
facsimile
Clem Dec 2016
a world
of nostalgic
facsimiles.
i met someone

who looked
like you.
She looked at me

with the same eyes
you used to,

the cruel mix between
devil-may-care
and miserable.

searching vain, searching
ridiculous,
I make a joke of myself--

remember
the time
I bought a
scruffy looking
black mouse

from a pet store
at whim

to replace the one that died
when I
was 6

but I can hardly replace you
with this pale
stranger

but i can hardly lay
your own few-ounce body
to rest
303 · Feb 2017
03.2015
Clem Feb 2017
By 3 months a fetus has developed its own
unique set of fingertips and by 10 it's supposed
to have developed a sense that s is loved--

so why am I 12 years old and feeling
like no one could ever love a body
as scarred as mine? I am a flower and I

am my own sun but I'm 12 and I haven't found that
yet. You're the fat clouds that drop
hot rain on my forehead and I do not

realize that too much water bogs roots down,
severs the nodules that keep it down. Rips
it from the ground so that I have no earth.

I am 12 and I have my first F and I'm
sick deep down because I know that it's
all I'm worth. My mother has

taught me how to love--with poisoned fire,
with words that speak of anything but.
And I scramble to avoid blaming you

for the 4-foot child that thinks
death is the ultimate prize, I refuse to
face your cruelty and call it abuse.

You'll never be out of the rain, they would
say--you'll find a dry patch, friends,
love but you'll never be out of the

downpour, hand-me-down hate cascading
in rivulets so much like blood.
"Family" is a bad word that turns my veins cold

but I will tell you that I love you, and I'll
get the words back, sandwitched between
bouts of rage and nights of crying myself awake.

I may never leave the shadow of your claws but
I will cling to this semblance of me that I've dusted
off of filthy bookshelves, piles of clutter, and sunlight,

do anything to keep it from crumbling
under the force of our years. I
am my own mother. I am my own sun.
meant to be read aloud
this one is also old, and not good
295 · Nov 2016
Talons
Clem Nov 2016
Some create life via conception,
                but I create myself
every day with underpriced filter cigars,
                McDonald’s foodstuffs, &
the “healing power” of “These 10 Weird Rocks”

It’s quaint.
how some things throb behind my eyes
                & terrorize me even when
                I have no reason
                to            feel anything

but, that’s human.
                To experience without conceiving,
to know is mythical.  

you  are organizing yourselves as if you’re important
,
I wish.
If i was important, the world would move,
and I would move with
it, out of this
broken leather chair
covered in stains
264 · Nov 2016
one night in december
Clem Nov 2016
Something is broken.  And something hides out, cold, in thicket brush
shadowed by the thundering asphalt, tugging at its sleeves while
marveling of how the stars create such snowy, clear cold that touches their nose, their toetips, and their still forming *******.

And yet, awake.  They feel something warm-- click, slip, whip and crackle at the touch-- sparkle, like a human heart, nestled between gasps and shouts of their mother
in a rage.  There is a moon tonight, and her fury does nothing but deepen the chill
of the skin of their bare wrists against the weeds.

And something is broken.  And something wishes to recreate its sparkling whiteness
with warm sinews, blood-- a new heart, perhaps. Tiny fingers curled inside their barely
warming winter coat, they head for the house, where the hearth is slightly less freezing.
258 · Feb 2017
5.18.15
Clem Feb 2017
A long road, flat, hard,
dirt-strewn, and I
am already out of water.

My canteen's filled with dusty
stones from the bend by
the red brick schoolhouse

I passed a few years back.
The night is brief and I am
as white as the water-thin

moonbeams, a crumpled
piece of copy paper never scribbled on,
that bounces off the toenails peeking

out of my shoes. The cool watery
light offers no relief here in
my sun-baked pilgrimage.

Behind me are the dozens of city
lights that kept me sane for miles--
ahead is only the deep yellow sun,

and the threat of smoke.
No travelers join me here.
No lonely cur falls in step with me.

The crows even reject my
bones--I am not done yet.
At my feet, my empty canteen falls.
idk dude i wrote this 2 years ago and i forgot it existed
243 · Dec 2016
slugs
Clem Dec 2016
We are hollow—
not vessels, not bottles under the tap--
Not empty-to-be-filled;
we’re empty-to-be-empty;
those shriveled dried egg pods

you find on the beach,
never meant to hold more
than the potential for a full-grown skate.
Souls were there once, but they died
quickly after we emerged from our casings.

You aren’t sad—
you’re hollow, and I do not infuse
your shell with the warmness I
feel for you, a shell topped off with empty,
any more than a dry cup

can love itself to fullness.  
My fat arms will never be able
to trade their misplaced heat with you;
How hilarious to picture empty eggshells
walking around town, watching tv,

driving to work or, most ridiculously, feeling,
or attempting to mesh their bodies together.
How laughable, you hollow thing, to think that
our egg-thin forms could warmly interlock.
Why, you’d crack in half—you’d splinter—

and not yolk, no no, nothing so concrete, but
merely the memory of yolk would spill
out, ooze out,

get under my dry crevices, and make
my aridness
a lie.
171 · Nov 2016
prick
Clem Nov 2016
If I die before I wake,
tell them I wasn’t ready.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
so the ones I love will leave me be.
Tell them I hate their guts.
Tell the ones I hate,
that they are who
I always wanted
to be.

Tell them.

How my last breath was spent
crying over my own ills,
how their names never touched
my tongue.
Better stay away.
My love is cold & selfish,
my *** is wet and quick,
and yawns in between.

— The End —