I wanted to write
Something perfect.

But,
“Pobody is nerfect.”

Every sunbaked afternoon,
And rainy day,
Every crunch
Beneath my feet
Of salt and snow,
Every deap breath,
On my way
To an hour of safety.

Did I ever tell you
That I liked to
Stare intently at
The fiber art on the wall
Of the third floor waiting room?
There one that looks like a waterfall,
One that looks like eggs,
And one that looks like
An angry speech bubble.

I remember being young,
And not telling you
The whole truth,
Then growing up,
And shifting uncomfortably
In my chair
While being more honest
Than I knew I could be.

You had a white electric tea ***
On your windowsill,
Kept company
By a stack of colorful mugs,
(The orange one was my favorite.)
I recall sipping tea with you
When I had a cold.

Pobody’s nerfect.
Who is “them”?
Feel your feels.
I am a mountain.

I talk a lot,
And I mean a lot...
I’m sure
You already know that.
But I don’t have the words
For years
Of smiling,
Crying,
And bad words,
Growing up,
Smeared makeup,
My first job,
And learning
To love myself.

I hope you have
A tea ***
In your new office,
And your cat clock.

I hope someone else
Gets to grow up
With your help,
And remembers the things
That I remember.
I’m sure many already have.

Thursday’s were for breathing,
Tuesday’s were for closure.

I’m going to live my life
Carrying your words
Tucked behind my ear,
And I’m going to make you proud.

Thank you,
For the high speed
Emotional
Puberty.

-Layna

And I am holding hands with my depression while it screams into a microphone
It's used to being center stage
The center of attention
Poking, proding
I'll kiss my love on the lips and it'll tug at my shirt whispering
"I'm still here"

It'll grab at me on car rides
Pinch my walking down the street
Make my nose bleed in bookstores
Break my fingers in urban outfitters
"I'm still here"
"I'm still here!"
"I'M STILL HERE!!"
Slowly getting louder as I try to push it down

Sometimes I muffle it
Quiet it
But I can never completely silence it
My hand slips
And a battle cry is released into the night
the duct tape wasn't tight enough
Or maybe my grip

I guess I stopped kicking it eventually
Stopped fighting it
Stop tying it
It was
The thing I kept in my basement but instead of me trying to make it stay and it trying to escape
it fought me to be cemented in my mind
taking all my resources starving me emotionally

Maybe sometimes physically

I accepted that it was a part of me

I let sing to me
Occasionally
After all
We're both in the basement
And we're

bored

It would sing things
Hopeless,
Frantic,
Scary things

They don't like you
There isn't a point in breathing it's mundane, it's uninteresting

You have hurt so many people and been hurt by so many people you're beginning to forget where the line is
And which side you're on

If she knew you now
She'd be disappointed
But she's dead
She died before you tried to let her learn who you grew into

They'll all die

You'll die

We are all just putting off the inevitable
Isolate yourself

You know you're happier alone
You know he doesnt really love you
So stop answering the phone


One night
My depression took out a knife
And slit her thighs
I was asleep but she bled on me all night
And in my dreams

I knew the warmth was from tragedy

Though I never bled with her
I let her keep me red

Keep me angry

"You'll never have a dad!" she yells.

"You'll never go away"
I frown at the shriveled little body of memories and chemical imbalances and tubes and guts and hearts and other dismembered parts
And I think

I've known you for so long
But i've never really looked at you

I am surprised
How different
How separate
We are

You grab me
Poke me
Yell at me
Hold me
Hurt me

But you

Are not

Attached to






                                 Me.

The beauty of walking in
the rain is that no one sees you cry.
instead, we are just strangers
getting water in our eyes.

your eyes,
waxy and chromatic
seeped through my clothes and
soaked my skin,
bent my bones and
dyed my concrete spine
blue magenta.

forgive me, forgive me
my revolving-door mouth,
my pendulum heart,
my clammy hands.

my religion is jazz but
i swear to God,
I'm Roman Catholic.

and so I brought you some tulips,

cause I can't lose you
to New York.

<•>
4/10/18 10:55pm ~ 4/22/18 2:02 am

Introduction

a simpler than plain fact,  
deserving reflection beyond the obvious,
containing obverse emotional mine field sonar arrays
floating on an ocean unhidden,
listening for the ocean's bleeping hid-dens,
before surrendering to its ****-sinking power of time/gravity
the better life elsewhere is always someone’s misery

<•>
confetti is just tomorrow’s garbage

someone stood on lower Broadway at 5am
watching the sanitation men sweeping up the aftermath of a super bowl  victor’s celebration, with broom heads borrowed from giants’ moustaches

passage of a single thought,
that the victorious celebrated on the parade should
a posteriori be required to participate
in this flip-side experience as
‘active cleaner uppers,’
re-enacting the famous Persian Sufi adage,

“this is too shall pass”

someone whispers we have blessed lives,
rich in the experiential, free of the dragging boredom
of the daily draining of making it, head well above of the
humanizing periodic regularizing water dunkin’ reminder
of just
or

“we too shall pass”

so even the confetti honorees must have too someone whose
life to aspire, the top of the heap, in chained food chain world

assaying perfection and the luck thereof,
picture perfect lives cannot withstand tsunamis of
waves eroding their shapes, wearing boundaries down,
do not forget the invisible invitation from the riptide
just beneath the calm surgical surficial surfacing disguises

if you face my book, will find in a later chapter prior
the fine sorry lines, the pierced titanium bulletproof vest,
the divorces of mistakes remade, the haunted envisioning,
the obligatory items that keep you awake, those awesome
responsibilities that take many small bites of a soul’s coverlet
that cannot be removed isolated jailed or desperate destroyed

confetti rained interspersed with droplets of sand grains,
this man of constant tomorrows, hopeful Mondays, bad Fridays,
is a man of constant sorrows,
pictures and poems life celebrating a never allowed to forget
lucky runs out like the string from packages saved
when no more packages arrive

when the packages no longer get delivered
oh that started years ago, when came the bile instead
of the blood’s replacement clotting factors

passing is a sometime thing
sometime is a most imprecisely defined terminus
sometime means that today’s confetti is a day away
as resurrected garbage
but nonetheless,
you are forever responsible for the cleanup


a picture worth a thousand words
but in me lives
tens of ten thousands words,
including

“this is too shall pass”

<•>
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2467058/writers-block-kick-the-editor-out-of-the-room/