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I am stubborn as a seashell.
With persistence,
I keep washing up on your shores,
begging you to keep me
and hold my hollow bones like precious stones.
i might add to this later i just needed to get it out
 Oct 2013 Gloria Ikeji
Kayla Lynn
My cheeks
                               Flush red
And my knees
                                   Go weak

A school-girl
                                           Crush
On the new kid

Except this
Isn't school,
This is                       work

And my                           mind
Goes places it shouldn't
And before I know it
I'm                                          imagining
Us in the back room
Lip rings                                        entangled

I shake away the             thought
When you walk past
I try to                                          play it
                                                             Cool
But the only thing
That comes out of
                                               My mouth
Are quiet                                           stutters

Cheeks growing      redder
Knees                              weaker

Oh­, the things          you
Do to                               me

Of course
That's when
                                               She
Goes through your line
And                                             greets
you with                                              
                                                             A kiss
Of course
                Of course


How could someone
                                 Like you
Be alone
                                 Like me...?
© November 2010 Sarah Lynn
 Oct 2013 Gloria Ikeji
r
I won't deny
October brings me 'round
September flies
October settles me down
Pumpkins and Halloween
I love to discover
New visions and carvings
Of jack-o-lanter
Handing candy to smiles awonder
Wish my young childhood days
Of October I remembered
But still miss sweet Septembers

r
If you call it a digression, I have to agree
Not every mundane occurrence can be made into poetry.
Take for instance what happened the other day in the bus
An aged woman was struggling to cope with the office rush.
All the men occupied their seats looking the other way
Offering her a seat being too heavy a price to pay.
Of the all one kind soul vacated her his seat
I call him kind because not many like him you meet.
The episode could end here with her polite thank you
The act wasn’t so great that more than it was due.
But that woman god bless her kissed him on forehead
Said, ‘sweet angel, you are in heaven made.
A stranger though in you I see more than my son
Our paths may not meet again but my heart you’ve won’.

What’s there in this account of a mundane occurrence,
To make from it a poetry and burden your patience?
 Sep 2013 Gloria Ikeji
Powers
You said your words always came in threads
Stitch me up
patch up my insercutries with your sewing machine lips
let me use them to sew the memory of you into the fabric of my mind
I want to embroider our broken pieces and make a quilt out of us
 Sep 2013 Gloria Ikeji
Sam Moore
1.
it was my first cigarette
in weeks that i hadn’t found
half-smoked on the asphalt
and it still tasted like something
leftover from somewhere
i don’t belong;
its smoke drifted through
the evening city mist like
how our voices used to harmonize
but only when we weren’t trying.

2.
on the blue line through
south central i heard someone
say “i could’ve been president
of the whole world, could’ve
taught y’all something about
success” —
she wasn’t talking to nobody
but the whole train listened
and in that, she taught me
more than any textbook
ever could.

3.
when you stand on 5th
and san pedro you can’t see
nothing besides the cliff
at the end of the world,
but instead of clouds there’s
puddles of ****, instead of
waterfalls there’s shopping carts
filled with people’s whole lives
and everyone down there is
shaking their heads at you —
leave, leave unless you know
what falling feels like.
You ask me to enter to the tilt of your head towards the computer screen
and see, in two words my definition -
bipolar disorder.

You do not look at me, just talk at me
medication? last relapse? severity of episodes?
You count failings, the moments in which I have lost my mind
and you reproach me for them.
You, as you two-finger-type a cold clinical echo of me,
I, on command, recite the past transgressions of my sanity
and you have me – three inches tall on my knees,
in a disease that thrice almost cost me my life
and in your Jobsworth view you tell me I will get ill,
as if this weren't a fact I fight and fear daily.
You with your tunic, blue, cold as your indifference,
announce this, as if calling time -
self-important, unfeeling, with one eye on your watch.

And I smile at you apologetically,
honestly offering up my mindfulness, yoga, medication compliance,
self awareness, begrudged reliance on those I love to wave the red flag
if the waters I get into are too deep.
You are curt with your nod - as if all this is folly between now and the inevitable.
My recovery, my striding, my passion and profession -
All folly.
You are doing the last offices on quick time
because your time is precious and short
and not to be wasted on crazy dreamers with barely a shot in hell

But even with every mental regression, psychotic expression
manic obsession and abyss of depression -
still, still, the world needs more of mes and much less of yous.
So make your disclaimer and write your reports
I'll chant, share the truth in the streets and courts
My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.
Today I went down to my Cafeteria,
As I approached I was filled with hysteria,

I saw a girl limping to the same place,
Looking at the floor as if it were a reflection of her face.

She was walking at a very slow rate,
I thought this would be a way to make a friend by fate,

I lunged for the handle to hold open the door.
I even looked  over and smiled some more.

She looked at me and we met eyes,
I expected a smile in return, I saw nothing but demise.

As she walked away i started to wonder,
What happened to this girl, why she was so sundered?

I hate the people that hurt her so bad,
That when a stranger is nice, there is no reason to be glad.

I hope one day she can smile some more,
Rather than walking around staring at the floor.
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