stab push lift pour

stab push lift pour

a ghost of memories past

a small boy no older than 12

he had curly black hair just like mine

he had brown eyes just like mine

he looked just like me

but thats because he had a last name ... just like mine

this was no tragic accident

but a carefully crafted punishment of a young boys mind

and the piece by piece fragmentation of his soul

every hurtful word, every disgusted look, every should turned

slowly braided itself together to form a string of ideas

every moment of hurt, every memory of pain, every day of neglect

slowly looped itself around him and knotted everything together

as if it was a gift of a ticking time bomb, wrapped in images you wish to forget, topped off with a bow of stripped and flattened emotions , signed with a card that simply says ... **** yourself

they say no one is responsible for his death, and the kids who teased him said " I was just joking"

well here's the punch line, i wonder which one of you ran through his mind when he finally kicked the chair out from underneath him

he stepped up on that chair with his final words that should be as historical as "four scores and severn years ago" or as revolutionary as "I HAVE A DREAM"

and hearing his last cries would be like hearing a nuclear warning siren... a scream of an inevitable end

and walking in and seeing his body hanging there like a forgotten halloween decoration was as sickening and heart breaking as seeing a ******* painted in a synagogue

i still keep his noose and i keep it mounted on the front door like a wreath , as if to say

HANG YOUR PRIDE AND OFFER A HELPING HAND BECUASE IT COULD BE THE LIFE LINE SOMEONE NEEDS

please , from a father left incomplete because they are burying a part of me

stab push lift pour

stab push lift pour

You are a waterfall
Cascade out of open Berkshire mountain faces,
Stone lips painted red by your words.
They say red is the color of love but I can't feel anything but
Empty
Indifferent
Inside when I see the blood in the corner of your mouth.
You don't care
Chase your narcotics with tequila,
Follow your *** smoke with an inhaler,
I watch you drift.
Do you remember 5 year old me
Hugging you round your knees and
The way you ran to grab me when I tumbled into the creek behind your house?
I do
Your hands are warm where they brush mine
When you ask me to refill your glass
I didn't know you drank ***** by the travel mug now.
4 ice cubes.
I lean in the bedroom doorway and watch the mice scurry beneath your couch
And I think about how those same warm, now-swollen hands
Built this place.
Forgive me.
I have intruded on your aging privacy,
Gray hairs in the 3-day stubble on your bloated chin
As you gasp quietly, eyes shut over decades of memories.
Your steroids have inflated your stomach more than the lungs they were
Supposed to heal and
You shuffle so slowly down the stairs I
Shift uncomfortably as I wait impatiently to get around you to the car
Fleeing the air of decay and the whiskey on your breath.
New England roads are good for thinking.
Surrounded by ageless forests I think of my aging family,
Of you, Grandfather,
Your hacking cough sounding like the Massachusetts thunder
Across the lake.
2 hour car ride to see the rest of the
Degrading homes once owned by
My father's father's family;
Your family.
I see a waterfall in the distant Berkshires.
We are part of 1 family,
But I can't feel the love I see in my father's eyes, red from tears at your impending funeral.

She hated herself.
Her friends all told her how beautiful and talented and wonderful she was,
And she said thanks,
Mirrors rising behind her eyes so they only saw what they wanted to,
Not the poisonous
Self-loathing boiling beneath the skin
She sliced open in secret, in bedrooms and bathrooms,
To let out her fear.
Her darkness was so close to the surface if
If it was a snake it would have bitten them,
The way the razor blades bit into soft hips the she thought were too ugly
And into her tongue, to stop her from
Spilling all her painful truths.
Open-handed words ***** slapping hitting her head
Against the wall of her daddy's office
She hid that mental bruise with fake smiles for weeks as it faded,
Like her scars faded to be replaced with new ones,
Like her heart faded until she was just going through the motions.
If someone had bothered to research the skeletons in her closet
Maybe her mother's scream wouldn't have ripped through an octave and a half in shock when she found her daughter
Hanging like a forgotten Halloween decoration in the back bedroom.
She left a hole in her sister's heart the size of her smile and
Her grandfather couldn't talk except to mutter "What a waste!" and
She broke her best friend down to dust, not knowing that he cried his strength away at her funeral and his tears fell on her casket.
The air in the church is full of echoed voices, hushed
"She was beautiful"
"I loved her"
"Why?"
Maybe if the voices had never believed her lies,
She would still be alive.

Not everyone is born to be happy.
I know this because there are people
Whose lives are torn apart
Day after day, by demons
That live to taste their tears.

Not everyone is born to be beautiful.
I know this because of the futile hours
I spend trying to overcome my poor eyesight
And make myself look pretty
In the bathroom mirror.

Not everyone is born to be loved.
I know this because of the lonely hearts
That call out in the night,
Beating and breaking as they wander
Until their bodies give out.

His wrists are my favorite part of his body,
Bones pressing delicately through pale, unscarred skin in a way mine haven't since the 6th grade.
The only bones showing on my body are my elbows and knees, just barely
And the worried bones of my insecurities.
I wish I could see my shoulder blades and hipbones.
I'd never hoped to be a skeleton but
I'd hoped to be proud of my appearance.
Even though my best friend tells me that I'm pretty just the way I am,
I know I'm not as pretty as my sister;
We're twins but no one ever believes us
She has gorgeous blonde hair and pale skin and sky blue eyes,
Hourglass shape.
I think she got the looks, but I always hope I got the brains.
Today I don't know which is the better end of the deal.
I know I am fat. I don't need any doctors or parents or bullies to tell me that
My curves are not big-*****,
Obesity doesn't run in my family,
No one runs in my family,
And by no one I mean me.
My every outfit is prefaced by compression shorts and slimming colors and self-conscious shame.
My stomach has ugly purple stretch marks like tongues of hungry fire
Burning away my self-esteem
Summer evenings aren't fun anymore
When my father tells me I'm too big to swing on the swing set
And my mother asks if I'm pregnant.
I'm not.
I'm a size 14. My mother thinks I'm a size 10.
When I try on the too-small clothes she brings home  
I cry in the privacy of my bedroom mirror,
Oceans of salted pain worry over my face,
Try to rinse away the guilt.
At least I'm not an ugly crier.

I hate red.
Red is the color of his lips when he whispers in my ear,
The color of his dress that one time we danced,
The feeling in the back of my eyes
When I'm told I am not
The same to him anymore,
No longer worthy,
He is a bee floating from flower to flower
And I am the sunset-colored blossom too shy to walk away.
Red is the way I begged my sister to let me wear her crimson blouse when I went to see him
Because I know it's his favorite color
And I didn't care that she yelled at me later.
Red is the fire in my stomach that pours too much smoke into my lungs,
Leaving me choking on secrets, and fear, and
Emotions that don't deserve to exist because
I knew all along that this was going to happen.
Red is the way I should be angry but instead I feel numb,
Numb in a way that no scarlet late-night passions or self-inflicted bloodstains
Will banish.
Red, like the shadows in the night that are too unique to be ordinary black,
Instead creeping over tired limbs with a vibrancy
Out of place in the grey shades of my thoughts.
Red, the feeling of heat in my sternum when he said he maybe liked me,
The way my face grew warm with my sister's teasing,
The way my heart fluttered too fast,
Catching me off guard when he held my hand,
The confusion when he wasn't  comfortable with me,
The savage resentment taking over my mind
When he confessed his non-attraction to me.
Red, fading slowly to the dusty leftover
Pink-brown tones
Of roses left too long in a vase.
I hate red.

College is a cancer clinic.
At this university, you either live long enough to die,
or die until you want to live.
Kids drag backpacks like bags of morphine,
and are attached to their planners like they are their heart monitors.
You do your own chemotherapy,
as you poison yourself with debt,
and Friday night nickel shots.

One: Sleepy
When your spine takes cat-like curves into the recesses of blankets
And crickets and thunder and howling wind all sound like peace
And puzzle pieces fitting splendidly against each other
You’re sleepy when your eyelashes are weakly magnetized
And pull gently towards one another in soft but stuttered motions
When white noise and static fill your ears the way that water can sometimes fill a glass a little bit past the top without spilling
And you look forward to the lure of dreams or of dreamless nights
Because you know you’re sleepy when the only reason to be awake in the moment
Is so that you can appreciate the split second of falling
When you finally lose consciousness

Two: Bored
When you switch from counting ceiling tiles to counting the colors that you can find when you close your eyes with varying degrees of tension
And you’ve become so bored with distracting yourself that sleep seems like the only genuine option
Even if you’ve only just woken up
Even if you’re not feeling comforted by darkness and silence yet
Even if distractions are abundant
Because they just aren’t distracting enough
Sometimes boredom summons misery just to occupy your mind
And you’re bored when you remember you were supposed to be in bed an hour before
And you actually listen to yourself and go

Three: Drowsy
When you wish you had longer limbs just so you could properly drape them from the edges of your mattress and stretch at better angles
Suspecting that maybe the odd crooks in your bedframe are the crooks that have been thieving in bits of the night and stealing the ends of dreams and the beginnings of alarms
You’re drowsy when you can feel the burn of smoke sloping against the walls of your lungs
Even when you’ve been breathing clean air all day
And the dizzy spin of the room is more of a waltz that’s moving just a little bit slower than expected
Until you turn the music off

Four: Fed Up
When stress is snapping at your synapses and igniting fizzling fireworks at the back of your throat
But the forward corners of your eyes pull together to shut out the world
Because ignoring is a temporary retreat into forgetting
And permanence isn’t something you’re in the mood to believe in any way
You’re fed up with the world, and with existing
Or maybe just being awake
When you know there are better things that you could and should be doing
But shutting down is all you can manage right now

Five:  Faint
When the world appears not only blurry, but verging on translucent
And there’s a steady hum lacing the edges of reality
With sporadic jolts of memory forcing twitching sensations down your back
You’re feeling faint when you’re hopelessly holding onto consciousness
Because you’re a little bit afraid of falling
But you would never admit it
Because there are too many blank spaces in your vision to allow for any vagueness in your thoughts
But sometimes the body can’t keep up with the mind
And you collapse all the same

Six: Weary
When time seems to thicken and stick to your skin
Weighing down your movements like steel beads of sweat
And pressing palms to your eyes almost seems to drown out sound as well
You’re weary when the grass feels a few inches too long and the ground seems a few inches too close
And the ends of your limbs feel as though they have been reaching for something a little bit too far away
And you have only just given up
So you grab handfuls of the clothes you have on and pull them tighter against yourself
Forming an artificial blanket
And imitation slumber

Seven: Exhausted
When you can feel static buzzing through your veins
Stretching capillaries into threads to keep yourself sewn together
Knowing that consciousness could spill from the cracks in your skin all too easily if given the chance
And your eyelids hold together like the grand doors of a cathedral
Opening only with a struggle that everyone tries to make seem effortless
You’re exhausted when you’ve been writing this poem for days trying to find the words
To properly describe different degrees of fatigue
And you’re sure that you’ve probably recycled a metaphor or two but you don’t bother to double check
So you keep trudging along
Until nothing makes sense anymore
And the seams that encase your consciousness begin to strain
And snap

Eight: Hyperactive
When despite all reason dictating that you should be experiencing the drag of being awake for too long
You see clearly and think in double time
With energy flickering behind your irises
Foreshadowing the dread of sunrise
You’re hyperactive when you’re knitting your voice with your friends’ voices in a collage of laughs
Each indistinguishable from the last
And you start counting the stars with flashlights until
Like sugar and smiles
And fast cars on icy roads
You inevitably
Crash

Nine: Emotionally Drained
When you’re worn to the point that mental distress manifests itself physically
And you can feel the chains of your own thoughts around your wrists
Almost wishing they were tighter so there would at least be proof of their damage
You’re emotionally drained when you can scream without making any sound
And you've perfected the syncopated rhythm of a nervous twitch
You realize that you've been grinding your teeth for the last two hours
So you switch to biting your tongue
And you don’t rest
You don’t rest until there are tears mimicking a Jackson ******* on your pillowcase
You don’t rest until the clock is judging you for testing it
You don’t rest until you feel empty
You cannot rest when you feel empty
No matter how desperately you wish you could just fade
And drift away
You do not
Rest

Ten: Tired
Just…tired