sound pounds through my head
the sharp click of the forks against plates
and the scuff of my boots on the floor
light refracts against my eyes and my retinas cry
there's itches all over i cannot scratch
and each smell is a toxic chemical
forcing their way through slim, crowded canals,
synapses, etc.; into my throbbing head.
and all that's left is this image
and sound and smell and itch
of you making some other girl laugh,
and no matter how hard i try,
no matter how much i want to
take your hands and kiss your face,
i'm not strong enough. i can't do it.
i can't let myself go like that
without knowing
without seeing and breathing and believing
that you want it too.
you see, the problem is, when i look in your eyes,
i can't tell if it's your passion burning
or mine reflected that i see.

they say
plant your fingertips against something
solid and concentrate on what is at hand
but all I have been able to see behind my eyelids
for many months is your face
and the wood resounds with the beating of your heart

love is a sad kind of trouble
for, knowing what its like to
exist unwavering in perfect happiness,
I have the days I have to fake my way through it.

Plant your fingertips against something solid and concentrate.
I put my hands on your heart, I focus on your rhythm.

honey, no one is an actor.
we're just people stepping into others' lives
the stage lights help
they burn out your fear and give your sweat a source.

honey, no one deserves it.
you're not born with it, you grow into it,
you don't guide it
you let it guide you. you do what is natural and what is true.

honey, i may not show it
but my skin is a silken cage
full to bursting with butterflies with razor-blade wings.
i just don't let it get to me.

honey, don't you get it?
theater, and the arts as a whole, it's life
it's blood and sweat and breath
don't say it's not your "thing" and don't say you've never done this before
you do it every day
every step you take forward is action and reaction
every word you speak has festered in your mind,
memorized for centuries and just waiting to be free.

and all that matters is
if at the end of the day your heart's not in it
wholly and completely, doesn't matter how well you acted,
you've failed.
and if your heart is in it, all of it,
wholly and completely and unbiased and unashamed,
doesn't matter if you skipped a page and a half
(the audience hasn't got the script memorized)
they'll see your passion and they'll know
you've won.

i open my brothers door
silver hinges creak against white wood
earlier today a girl broke his heart
or what was left of it

Hey. (i say)
Hi. (he says)
Are you okay? (i ask, stepping forward, breathing in)
Yes. (he does not seem like he is lying)
Are you sad?
Yes.
Do you need a hug?
No. (he is lying now but i let it go this time)
Okay. (i don't hug him)
Okay. (he turns away)
Goodnight. (i love you)
Goodnight. (i love you too)

softly the silver hinges let the white door click
into place in the white doorframe in the white hallway
in the neat white house on the snow covered hill
where a feeling like sin seeps through all the white cracks

Oh, ******, my little Spanish sorrow,
Me encanta la camino captó la luz en tus ojos
Me encanta la forma tus sueños flotan a través del mundo de dormir
Oh, osito, my little love,
Tú, que hace reír a todo el mundo,
Y tú, que me hace cantar,
Te amo, y no puedo ayudar pero de amar todo de ti.
Oh Catalina, my lost one,
Te extraño, y me da dolor en mi corazón
Te extraño, y me da dolor a amarte así
Oh, mi amor, mi vida, mi sueño, mi esperanza,
¡Lo poco de tu me queda!

"You're a killer, son. 
I can see it in your eyes. 
I don't know when it'll happen-
Maybe the first day on the front line,
Maybe when the guy next to you
In the trenches gets his head 
Blown to bits, but some day
You'll snap. 
And it'll all become a game to you. 
And it's a game you're good at. 
And it's a game you like."
These are the words the veteran spoke
Over my father. This is who he said
My father would be. And so he ran away. 

My father took up his pen and he wrote
And he took up the mainsheet and pulled it in
Til the sail hugged the wind, and he did it for years,
But it wasn't enough for him. In the end
He studied business and now he's an
Entrepreneur, building homes and food and lives.
Recently he's been talking about starting to
Sail again. He could've been world champion, you know. 
He says he left to start a family. 

There are days when I look in the mirror,
Deep into the eyes I inherited from my father,
And wonder. In them I see his own passion 
For the written word, for the wind caught
In the sail and the water stormy and deep beneath. 
But I know there's something else in there too,
And there are days when I hope to God it's not
That same look his honorably discharged uncle saw
And scarred him with so many years ago. 
But even worse, there are times I pray it is.

I think they've got it wrong.
I don't think the point of life
is to be productive. I think
the point of life is to live,
and if you can look back on
what you've done and say "I
changed that," if you can say
"I opened their eyes," if you
can sit there and not give a ****
about productivity and your
titles then I think that just
maybe you're doing something
right.

there are
a thousand pockets
of wilderness 
in my city

where 
the thick evergreens
almost
drown out
the sirens

at their least
they were silhouettes building
notes out of the crimson fog
slowly swallowing the stage

but all the rest of the night
the bass taught my heart
a new beat pushing
its throbbing hand deep
into my chest and demanding
life and breath

guitars riddled my skin
piano keys pulsating in my fingertips
and the drums
the drums made me dance
up and down and
with my hands in the air
like some wild crazy lover

have you ever heard
three thousand people singing
their voices all rising
heated in the night
its not our faults
if we forget the laws of physics
they abandoned us first

on a scale of one to
netherlands
how dutch is my sweater?
i'd say it's a solid Amsterdam.

Time hasn't been good to you, has it?
It took you in its rough hands and it threw you up against that wall.
It was slow torture to you, all those questions of how and why,
When no one would even tell you who or when or where.
You didn't even know what life was then-
That first sunburst, first roll of thunder,
Didn't make sense, not any at all. Not to you.

You try to forget but it's not like that this time.
You try to talk about something, anything else-
And yet your life just comes spilling out; a torrent,
A cascade, a parade of all your worst daydreams-
****** in front of his face and clogging his ears and nose and mouth,
Congealing in the winter sun. And suddenly you feel that weight fall off your chest,
And stand, leave him there; dying, drowning, choking on your memories.

If anyone needed the drug it was you-
You needed the weightlessness, the carelessness it lent you.
First the Vicodin and then the morphine, always on the hunt
For something stronger, something that could really ****
All that pain and time and **** piling up inside you. And you found it,
Found your release, that sweet drifting sensation it gives you
And no side effects! Or so they swear, all the ones who went before you,
Walked down that road lined with needles
And turned it into one paved with something stronger,
That one drug you'll never get enough of: **words

You can pretend with a day of words unspoken
But the noise is still there-
Lingering beneath your skin,
Running through your veins like electricity.

You can think that you are silent
That they don't know your name (brother, sister, friend)
That they don't notice you (you're not invisible)
I? I am all of these things
And none of them. I am silent,
I am invisible, I am alone,
I am words unspoken, I am names unkown.

You don't know me, know me at all
Until you have climbed your mountain
At sunrise and breathed in
The whole world stretched out before you
And sighing and singing with you.

You don't know me, know me at all
Not until it's the silences that whisper in your veins:
Blood hidden under skin, breathe it out and let it in,
The morning tainted pink by your breath.

You're always running away from something, aren't you?
I mean, all of humanity is constantly trying to fix,
To solve, to make right. We search in these nearby places
For the answers, and don't tend to realize that yes, the
Answers are out there, but they're on top of that mountain
Or over that hill and all the while your heart's saying,
Why don't you look there but your head says No
No no it has to be this why on earth do you listen to it?
And you run and you hide away in that laboratory of yours
And mix together this amount of comfort with that amount
Of painkiller and think that somehow it has to be complex,
It can't be simple. I'm here to say that yes, yes it can. It really
Can be just that simple. It doesn't have to be long and
Drawn-out and rewritten and careful. It can be something
Short and sweet and spontaneous like a first kiss or a
Mountain flower, something alive and growing and changing,
And not concrete; not once, not now, not ever.

I don't know how to fight you.
I don't want to hurt you. I don't want
To argue, or even to be angry.

How do you do it? How do you
Take all my scars, all of them,
And rip them open like that?

But the worst part is, you bring me
To the verge of all my secrets, till
They're on the tip of my tongue
And dying, just dying, to be told.

You're my brother. And you are
So completely evil. Such lies should
Not have to live in one human being,
Not one so young as you.

You could have been like me. We
Were born with equal chances in life
But where it mattered most, you
Chose instead to take the easy way out.

You might think you're a rebel.
Because you drink. Because you smoke ****.
But it's just what everyone expects, all over again.
A broken record.

So why is it that we are so different?
It's because I grew up without a shadow
Cast over me by you, but rather in the light
That you refused to even see.

The difference is you fight against
The sense of justice in your gut,
And I fight for it.

some people
(like me)
don't necessarily expect
an ending. we just
write and write
and figure we
probably won't ever
run out of words.

other people
(like you)
put an algorithm to it
write an equation for it
comment on style
and tone and metaphor

i know what those words mean
and how and when and why to use them.
i just don't give a **** about stuff like that.

I'll be your best friend and your first kiss
I'll keep you safe from the filth
On the streets and
I'll keep you warm and
I'll keep you safe and steady.

I'll stand beside you when you're weak
I'll stay up all night with you when you're scared
I'll make chicken soup for you when you're sick*, you said.

But you're not here now
And for just $20 and a trip to the store
I can have hot Top Ramen and Matt Damon
And the tangy kiss off cough medicine
As it slides in careful milliliters down my throat

Sixteen is the age everyone always wanted to be.
Sixteen is rebellious, a freshly sparked fire,
A girl and a boy, living forever in the midnight hours.
Sixteen is freedom. Is dancing. Is music. Is life.
Is when you're supposed to be fully you, as best as you can.
Is the year your lips are round and red as apples,
The year your skin and hair is soft and smooth again,
The year your eyes still flash like two great and ancient stars.
At sixteen, I always thought, I'll cup the world in my hands;
At sixteen, finally someone will love me, finally that star will fall,
Finally, finally, I'll be free.

The world's supposed to end couple months after I turn sixteen.
I guess it won't be able to handle me all grown up like that.
But how the hell did the Mayans know?

My grandmother likes her poems neat
She likes them pink and cozy, without heat
She likes them simple and likes them rhyming,
Cute and kept in time-ing.

My mother, she just likes poetry
Doesn't write it, doesn't recite it
Reads it, sure
But not much else.


but me, my poems are all over the place

up




or down

maybe left                                                             ­                        maybe right

i make em whatever the **** i want
so long as they mean somethin real
somethin true, somethin beautiful
not short or sweet necessarily                maybe if i want to

maybe.

not my fault i was born when i was
not my fault i was raised like i was
the world around me is what i make it
here's what i think, go ahead- take it
i can't help it that i'm young
can't help it if i'm dumb
i look at you and try to understand anyways
but you say it's a matter of time, a matter of days,
say i can't be this or that cause of my age
well **** that, tell it to my rage
tell it to the tears the course down my face;
tell it to my people, the whole human race;
tell it to the butterfly who was born yesterday,
say they can't be beautiful cause they'll waste their life away
you can't look me in the eyes and tell me my life
is a waste of space, just meaningless strife
towards goals i'll never achieve
for people that you don't believe
can change the world
hey, watch me do it anyway.

This was us,
Back before the world turned to ****,
Before high school invaded and told us
We probably wouldn't ever be happy,
Back before that long cold November,
In the days we were sure she'd come home,
When we thought everything would be fine;
Before the sickness claimed another
To come and take her place in the ranks of the dead.

No. This was the day when
We placed chains of daisies on our heads
And declared ourselves the kings and queens over everything,
Said we would rove the world over,
Then raced, screaming, into the Puget Sound,
And laughed as the freezing salt flooded our lungs;
The day we lay in the firelight and toasted Starbursts
And let our laughter loose to join with the smoke and float
Up through the hole in the roof of the longhouse to mingle forever
With the naked San Juan summer.

This was us.
Back then, we could've lived forever.

it should bother you
that ive been alone in my room
all afternoon
with my homework and have only done
five problems
it should bother you that
i delete my internet history
day after day after day
but its only because
i dont want anyone to see
that ive been reading the works
of liars and ****** and thieves
it should bother you
that you didnt know this about me
but it doesnt
my inner communism
or socialism
or fascism
or racism
or feminism
or radicalism
should probably be something of your concern
but its not
you dont care that i sit here
and drown in the words of dead poets
or revolutionaries
or just people
no you dont care
you stopped caring when i said
no its my life not yours
and slammed that door in your face
and you took one too many
of those sweet little pills
it should bother you
that youre dead and gone
but it doesnt, it doesnt, it doesnt
and it wont
though you still hang about me
you miserable ghost
just sit there in the air
above my head
and just dont care
no matter what i do
i cant make you go away
cant make you see what i see
cant make you come back to me

Huddled deep in the dark quiet of the ever-turning earth
Like a secret kept for years, a secret kept from birth,
Taking the form of sorrow as it slides down your cheeks
And shattering simply against the hospital sheets.

It doesn't make sense, you don't understand
This was not what you'd hoped for, not what you'd planned
You thought there'd be life, thought there'd be breath
But what you see before you is cold, silent death.

It swells up inside you and bursts at your seams
Invades your thoughts and twists all your dreams
Till something inside you first cracks, then it snaps
You don't know what can fix it. Nothing, perhaps.

When it's dark outside I'll take
your bandaged hands in mine and we'll
switch on all our own lights,
Write illegal fire across the canvas of
the crysatalised night sky,
Explode with life and love and hope
our star-drenched moon-struck eyes
till white sirens bleed their warning over the city.

Chain-link fences can't hold us back
we know these streets and they know us
all too familiar the scraping of knees
and palms as we skid across the asphalt,
then whisper away into vanishing night,
cursing the cold winter days.

She reads the works of other poets as she lies awake in bed,
And she wonders if this is who she is. She thinks
She may have seen a little of the truth once or twice- but
She's not sure. She will know when
It happens, or perhaps doesn't happen,
But either way, she will know.
It's after two in the morning and slowly
She closes her eyes and slips, without forewarning,
Into the future.

My father's father was never the best sort of person. Once
He gave me a necklace. It was a pink crystal
On a single black cord. I never liked it much,
And cannot say why I wore it, but I can still see
His thin frame, sick even then, with that white
Surprise of hair shooting out like a cloud from his head,
Aged eyes hidden by dark glasses (the refusal to grow old),
Folding in half to sit next to me on the robin's blue eggshell
Porch, and me rubbing my feet still against the concrete steps
As my brothers dueled with lightsabers across the dead July grass.

I can only grasp at the few other things that I remember about him-
The smell of cigarettes & alcohol clinging to the walls of the guest bedroom;
His sunken face (soul gone for hours yet);
and the oxygen machine into which he breathed his last. His funeral
was a circle of strangers, standing
Somewhere out in the woods around his jar of ashes.
Someone, probably my father, played a song on his guitar,
Bittersweet notes echoing and echoing through the September of the trees.

It's a song we sing at camp, in the summertime,
And by the time its last note is just a whisper,
I excuse myself and slip away to look up at the stars and because
I can still feel my own life force fading into the night, like his ashes-
The last fragments of a shattered life,
Left to the mercy of the northern wind.

The dreamers are here again, they say
They see our eyes drawn open, they see us blinking in the sunlight,
Taking tentative steps towards each other, away from the walls and into the fields
Where off come our shoes, and we run, barefoot,
Into water splashed with sunlight, and through the sky the great golden orb arches,
Spinning summer into the north.

I know what they're thinking. They think we've stopped dreaming.
Because we open our eyes and laugh with them,
Because we're consciously reacting to this reality,
They think it's the only one that matters.

They think that somehow, being awake means we're not asleep.

You'd have to be one of us to understand how many worlds you can coexist in at once, without losing sight of ourselves.

It only took a couple cuts, a couple hits in the right places,
A few diseases filling the right spaces
To end his life.

It only took a thousand years, a hundred love letters,
An entire movement born
To describe it.

It only took the first glance of beauty, first flash of light,
First footsteps forward
To convince them to tears.

All dressed in black, there they stood,
The formal entourage for the dead,
As in their eyes the rain-beat mud
Wrote with explosions what no human will read.

In a city where it's all about control
The students and the teachers are the oppressed today
This entire school is just a straitjacket
Waiting to reach its fingers of conformity up and around our throats,
Waiting to twist all the differences out of us,
Waiting to write a curriculum, a test that can be taken,
One to measure our minds, our thoughts, our hearts

Don't those ******* know
It's not their job to compare us?
And besides, you can't gauge emotion
Or tell me that my heart is below average
You can't say to me that I'm not thinking properly.

*******, there's no "right thought" I can have.
It's not a matter of how much I love or who.
You can't look at me once and say you know my soul.
But you would love that, wouldn't you? You'd love
To label everything, and neatly shelve it away,
In some great and empty vault, where you'll only constrain its potential.
By writing such a test you would be condemning all of us to eternal emptiness.

at 1 am between the last curling step of the escalator
and the corner of the wall
a girl sat sipping tea
feeling perfectly at peace
you could see it in her face
in her knees on the frozen concrete
in her fingers gripping red and swollen
even as the wind wound itself around her body
slipping through the cracks in her stained uniform
you knew that she felt at once
alone and at one with the world

I wish I could fix you,
Take all those broken pieces in your head
And glue them together again.
Then maybe you’d see yourself as the person you are
Rather than the one you wish you were.

I wish I could fix you,
Take all those little things about yourself
That you hate and let you love them.
Then maybe you’d learn to be the person you are
Rather than act like the one you wish you were.

I wish I could fix you,
Mend you; make you into someone who believes
In life and love again.
But I can’t. I don’t know who you are
And I don’t know who you wish you were;
All I know is there’s a stranger on the bus
With silver tears falling down, down, down
Trying to hide the emptiness in her eyes.

I wish I could fix you.

imagine,            just imagine;       it says,
                                                                   it calls, it cries
against               the                             magnificent                                                                         vacuous
                          everything                 it echoes and                 whispers
            with the                  voices of                          the mind.
but no one                       strains to listen,
                not one                        thought             in its head                                                            will unwind.

                                                                         we                cannot      convince ourselves of life
beyond what we see,  we do not think
in                          concepts                                    of                                               infinity.

and here we find                 the             error       in       the        humane-
  here lies our great struggle,                                   here our great pain-
                                  we don't want to let go of what makes us unique,
                                                          don't want to     l   o    s     e       ourselves to the concrete
   the cities will rise up and the nations will
                                                                             f
                                                                                a
                                                                                    l
                                                                                        l,
                                                                                                  
                                                                                            but we can't find the method in the madness of it all.

Deep beneath the ground, there she sings
The girl, the one with ivy leaves in her hair
Sings a song to the birds to the trees
To the great wide and wonderful everything she sings

She's been dead a long, long time
The girl, the one who sings to everything
Winter came and carpeted her grave in snow,
Huddled on the frozen ground her headstone lay

Into her dark hair she weaves the ivy leaves
The girl, the one whose grave is covered in snow
In her soul she plants their all-consuming seeds,
To come and cover the winter over in green

In a castle far away, there she sang
The girl, the one who sows the ivy seeds
Sang a song to the birds to the trees
To the great wide and wonderful everything she sang

She would have lived a long, long time
The girl, the one who sang to everything
Before her grave was dug she knew the world
All covered over in the green of ivy leaves

If only she hadn't fallen in love with the boy
The girl, the one who saw the green of ivy leaves
He took her heart away with him, away to the war,
Left her to face the winter alone and heartless.

She wouldn't have caught the chills then,
The girl, the one who gave her heart to the boy
Wouldn't have frozen in the castle made of stone
If she hadn't loved him enough to stay alone.

They found her in the morning, all the colour fled
The girl, the one who loved him and froze
From her cheeks and heartbeat from her hands
And her eyes wide, frozen open

He shed a thousand tears for her, you know
The boy, the one who lost his love to the cold
Cried until there was nothing left inside him but his fear
He squared his shoulders, ready to face his fate

He lived his whole life true to her, you know
The boy, the one who cried a thousand tears
Lived until it was all used up, then walked down that road
And joined her deep beneath the earth,
Where they now sing to the great wide and wonderful everything,
Planting ivy seeds in hope of spring.

I could not find you in my lonely empire
Of winter’s empty skies, covered in clouds
Nor in summer that singed the sky with fire
Not lost in the depths, not wrapped in death’s shrouds
Where is it you went? Oh where did you flee?
I think you may have taken my heart too.
Why did you run so far away from me?
You left me alone; all I knew was you.
Hoping you'll see me without you, friend,
Realize what you did to all my genius,
In absence I'll come to a horrid end,
How could you let these days come between us?

*In the night your voice whispers love anew
And there is nothing, nothing I can do.

I am lazy like
A slow clock,
The hours dripping away off me,
And only occasionally paying attention
While I dream away all of the past and pressing minutes
Into something resembling my own form of happiness,
A small slice of heaven meticulously created
Over the years, and only when my headphones are pulled from my ears.
I have all the time in the world.
I don’t have anything at all to say.
To anyone. Until I am
Perfectly distracted, and you
Kick me in the leg and tell me to stop wasting time.

Indescribably brilliantly unique, that's you.

Racing through your veins is a something,
A liquid fire,
The spark of newborn infinite life.
Here, you say, here is where I want to live, pointing to a picture in a magazine.
Even though you know it's not
Realistic, you still dare to dream.

Like a song born of the stars, like
Opening my eyes to moonlight, you've given me
Very little and yet
Everything my soul needs.

You and I are not forever, I say. You know. You know
One day we'll die, one day we'll make our homes
Underground.

Tigers, he said, and pointed a shaking hand
East and off into the jungle where
Through all the darkness shed by trees,
Emerged the tigers, their bodies cast
In regal orange, black and white,
Reflecting over shifting sinews.

The could have taken the village easily-
Any man could have. But they didn't.
Instead they lived among us, like some kind of protection,
Sleeping across our doorways and leaving in twos
To hunt. They never attacked us though,
They seemed to understand this place belonged to humans.
I don't think they wanted it anyway.

They didn't stay long, the tigers.

I guess they missed the jungle.