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Olivia Mercado May 2014
I am in a desert town
Standing on the mountaintop
alone
Lonely growing up in a too-big house
seeing the world from behind the smeared glass of a
tour bus
while an automated voice drills in
objective truths
about culture
about what the Other's color of skin makes
them.

Being told to give money because God said so
Being told my daddy up in heaven loved me
whether he showed up or not
and I had to just
believe
and obey
Him.

I'd rather turn away
from that sunny desert sky, because it
burns
I'd rather jump off the bus
so I could stop feeling so ****
sick
and forget about what the color of my skin
makes me.
I'd rather not live to serve a god I don't
know
and never met
and a family who has never met me.

To be called a fellow person
rather than a tourist or
patron.
Because I know what it is to be patronized.
Olivia Mercado Aug 2013
I will keep pushing myself.
Keep going.
I will read Edmund Spenser,
Shakespeare, Wilde,
Shelley, Doyle, and CS Lewis
By the end of the summer.
You laugh.
Two weeks, one book a day, it isn't hard.
I only have four chapters of chemistry to finish,
Two chapters of AP Physics,
Four chapters of AP US history,
My personal reading list,
Four debate cases,
And a little light reading
(Judith Butler and Ayn Rand).
I WILL finish everything I have to do.
Refill the coffee ***.
I'll use more eyedrops.
Two weeks.
I will finish my summer homework.
Maybe I shouldn't have procrastinated.
Olivia Mercado Jul 2013
I have never held a hand
I have never kissed anyone.
I have never gone on a date
Or hugged someone
Not because they were my friend
(Or an eccentric great-aunt)
But because I wanted to.

I'm not ugly (I'd like to think)
I'm old enough to drive
And read Edmund Spenser
And apply for college.
Is something wrong with me?

To never be invited to share the world
Of teenager's deepest hopes and dreams
Never know that absolute sorrow
Alluded to by others
Never know that thrilling joy
Of being wanted.

I am independent.
Pure.
Alone.
Olivia Mercado May 2014
I feel my beating heart
and in between pulses
I see you all
feeling your own hearts
washed in midnight glow of computer screens
shining from your pupils.
Human
not abstract
Real
and very much
Alive.
Olivia Mercado May 2014
Model human interactions
as trees
or oceans
or politics
Model space
as a
sheet of rubber
Model  the beautiful and infinite
as something
comprehensible
and finite.

When did we get so obsessed
with understanding?
How important is it anyway?
Can't people be people
oceans be oceans
gravity be
gravity?

It doesn't matter how you model it.
No matter what,

everything

still

falls.
Olivia Mercado Dec 2013
When darkness whispers in your ear
Songs of death throughout the years
When you stand among the graves
Of vanished friends and summer days
When it takes you by the hand
And leads you to an ash-scoured land
And gently, with a seductive smile
Hands you a knife, wreathed in its guile
Wraps your fingers around its hilt
Sweetly drains away your guilt
Pause, dear friend, and think on this
Where was it that you went amiss?

I have been lost, I walk alone
Condemned by some veiled Heaven's throne
But I am a living mortal yet
I have refused the gods' coronet
I could claim to rule my death and life
Drive deep the bright and shining knife
But I scorn that Throne and Crown
God can keep his pride -- I am my own.
Olivia Mercado Sep 2013
Welcome home to me, my love
In this autumn gilded bright
The summer's lonely skies above
Are flecked with fresh and flaming light.

I'm glad to see you safe, my dear
The unspoken words still true
I'm glad to see our friendship here
Revived from across the ocean blue.

It's sad to see you torn apart,
It's good to see you home again.
I hope to spare your battered heart
From an ounce of unshared pain.

I cannot always walk with you
You cannot always lean on me.
But I know somehow you'll make it through
To become what I cannot be.
Olivia Mercado Oct 2013
The sweet song of the humming computer
Follows me into the corner of the room in my dream
Where I curl up and wake
To the softly rising sun in the west.

The sun gives no light;
It can’t decide whether to sing or not
Can’t decide whether to be real today.
I look to the half-light of the West
And back to the door in the corner of the room in my dream.

The door is black and deep and dark
And warm and inviting
With the smell of comfort and mystery
In air that I cannot breathe.

I follow the open door
And don’t amend the smell –
The smell of the nonexistent air
The smell I follow through the doors of my dreams.

And I follow and follow
Up stairs and through long halls underground
The feeling of the substance around me, the substance of the dream
Calling me to my friends and the memories in the future
The memories that are falling asleep, the memories
I want to wake
And drown with the light and rush of my lungs this morning.

The morning doesn’t exist.
The morning is afar away, in a different world, that a different me
Will never see again.
The morning is coming far too quickly,
But it doesn’t exist, and so I fear not and follow the door.

Think not.
Breathe not.
Sleep not.
Amend not.

I follow. Sleeplessly, feellessly,
Like a ghost in the corridors of sunless memory.
There is no dark.
We are lit by the days that are
In the air
That is not air
The feeling, the smell, of swimming
In body-temperature water
There is nothing to feel
To breathe
Or smell
But the dream around you
And your soul, at home, holds you back from breathing in too deeply.

A new place, slipping into the water
In a different form this time
--- but I have no form
I am all forms
The seal, the otter, the water-air around me
Swimming through and catching the flashing fish
The silver, sweet, tasteless, flashing fish
Imprints of glittering eyes that I dart after in my dreams.

A person.
Standing.
In the background.

Hello. I can see you.
You are blind?
Ah. We are all blind here. I see you in one guise, you see me in another.
I am the air.
I am the water.
I am that smell, that feel of feeling the dream
The clear mist around you
A bubble of translucent warmth without temperature

I am your silver flashing fish
I am your breathless dawn
I am your setting, rising sun
And I would give anything
To know who you are.
Olivia Mercado Feb 2014
All the poems I see are sad.
I hit shuffle for the hundredth time,
Hoping not to see the word "gone" or "pain" or "alone."
Once again, I am disappointed.
Yes, I get it.
We turn to poetry when our souls are darkest
To release our insecurities under anonymity
To see the yellow lightning bolt shouting,
"Someone cares!"
Into your darkness.
And this is all right.

But there is also joy in this earth.
There are weird moments when I feel happy
Even though I don't have a boyfriend
And my best friend isn't talking to me
And it's grey and bleak outside.
In these moments of inexplicable happiness,
There is just as much poetry
As there is in the moments
Of inexplicable sorrow.
Olivia Mercado Aug 2013
I love
The words -- I want to immerse myself -
Drown in them. They become all I know,
They are               me, the            very air
I breathe,                In and                out, in
and out,               to push,               deeper,
To submerge myself, and swim, until they
Drip through my hair and into my mouth
And                  my lungs, until I forget the
Air                  and the breathing, and all I
See                   is the universes woven into
Worlds, the story of humanity, each word
black and white and definite -- a symbolism
Of proportions: of ink and mere paper, made
Into something beautiful, that represents no
More than every human's deepest desire - to
Be free, to see the stars, the hope of release,
The things we get in stories, the many lives
That we live, over and over, flying away alone
For 50 years. Words are no more alive than we make them.
But they are *bigger on the inside.*
Olivia Mercado May 2014
swallowing
everything.
existence is merely the illusion of light inside a void
a narrative projected onyo the screen of darkness without
restraint
dreams are swallowed by the void and
make love to it
the children of souls and minds and nothing
*******
of hate

non-euclidean
stairsteps
breaking the sky
too strange to be horrible
yet too horrible to be
real

and so it falls apart
our projection shown for what it is
threadbare and disintegrating
revealed physically in our bodies
like everything we believe.

the desert of the real is upon us
and we are drowning in thirst.
Olivia Mercado Dec 2013
The snow used to be sparkling and white
Now it's grey
Worn thin by the lukewarm days
Tired of pretending it's Christmas already.

The birds don't sing anymore
And I don't blame them
It's cold and the sun has gone into hibernation
Nobody is outside to hear them anyway.

The scars on my wrist are healing
Just in time for my concert
Good. I don't want to explain.
I'm tired of pretending as it is.

4.0 student, captain of debate team
Painfully, incredibly lonely
Like the birds, hiding in the bushes
Waiting out the winter
Nobody's around to hear me sing anyway.

The snow is grey, worn thin with impatience
Tired
So very, very tired.
Olivia Mercado Nov 2013
I play two keyboards
Both are black and white
One has letters and one merely voices
Both have meaning, and power
To change the way people think, and see
My fingers pause
Over the keys
Ready
To make music.
Olivia Mercado Oct 2013
I walk down to the stream,
a ghost among the tendrils of mist
wakening from the moist air.

The half-moon gives a weak light to my feet,
but grows stronger
as the night rises
and shakes off the sleepiness of twilight.

Sitting on a rough stone,
I look into the shadows
and begin to think.
I pull out my flashlight, try to write,
then turn it off and stare at the stars.

Branches of the tree above me grasp at the wind.
I wrestle with much more,
but cannot grasp my thoughts
or the inconceivable movement
within my soul
any better than I can subjugate the bodiless air.
A melancholy that is not sorrow
settled on me a year ago
this night, in the dark of October's waning moon.

I stand up and leave the stone to wander.

I meet the banks of the shallow stream
and stand there for a while, empty.
There is nothing,
there has been nothing,
for twelve months
since I renounced my pain and bitterness.
Everyone tells you that somehow
love will find you
when you let go of hate.
Everyone is wrong.

The stars spin
in their slow, silent dance;
the highway sighs in the distance;
the moon rises slowly as it had done
for thousands of years.

"Speak!" I importune the stars.

They do not answer.

"Show me your light!" I implore the moon.

The moon hangs there,
still,
among the darkness of the stained sky.

"Answer!" I demand of the sky,
and the sky says nothing.

Twelve months of solitude,
of emptiness and silence,
hovering over the abyss.

I have looked into the abyss.
The abyss has looked into me.
And slowly, like the setting moon,
like the way a fever ends in peaceful sleep,

I begin to fall.
Olivia Mercado Sep 2013
Words are beautiful,
Precious things.

Please, respect them.
Think of all the books
That have been banned,
All the hopes and dreams and fears
Silent, or just
Unexpressed
Because the language we had,
The language we have shaped,
Was not enough.

"u" is not "you."
"&" is not "and."
"your" is not "you're."

I understand, in the world of cell phones
Of impatience
We want to get to the next word,
Already.
But stop for a moment,
Savor the taste of you,
Think about all that the word
Could ever mean
To poets
To lovers
To loneliness.

It is so much more than a letter.
And although the world is profaned,
I beg of you,
As a writer,
As a person,
As words on a stark white background,
Profane no more.
Olivia Mercado Jun 2013
Grey and vast, it comes to me
The darkness of the flowing sea
Strong as storm, hard as stone
Dark as midnight, white as bone

The end of all, the finite shore
Gives birth to salty desert swells
Infinite as breathing sky
Earthbound as the turn of years

It screams, it scorns, its wrath outpours
It cradles, soothes, and lends a home
It is the end of all that was
It is the birth of something gone.

Ancient years mar not the deep;
Waves drown human sentiment
Flashing, pouring, burning tides
Know not peace or lenience

As sea aches for the shore, my love
So I reach evermore for you
Shroud of infinity, beware;
You fall short of the human soul.

For the eternal, I will strive
For the gold I've buried there
Across  paths of the shining sea
I will return, and find You there.
Olivia Mercado Aug 2013
Bleeding inside
Like a clock, each tick
A silent sob, converted to noise
Noise that isn’t sound
Isn’t important
All it is
Is relief from the silence.

We want to be loved
We want to be found.
Each of us, alone as we are,
Unique, longing to be the same,
Longing to be together.
We love each other,
Give all we have away
Fall in love with everything
We lay our desperate eyes on --
The hills, the sky, the sea
We forget the spin of the earth
And the scythe of the end
And the burning words has been
For a little while
Consumed in the beauty
Of a soft summer evening
Glowing in the palace of memory,
Locked away for safekeeping.
We are misers of happiness
We bargain for empty joy
All we are, fleeting
Hollow.
Echoing in the winds of time,
Singing and laughing
Silently.

We are unique.
We want to fit in.
To be inside, to be known.
And so we act like we are.
Like everything’s okay.
Like a little girl dresses up like a princess,
Because that’s what she wants to be.
And for a little while, we’re happy.
But then we have to grow up,
Then we have to change, and find
Something different.
But we want something that lasts
Through the years
Through the centuries and eons,
Because our immortal souls
Long for the solid horizon
Of this storm-tossed sea.

What keeps you here?
Why do you keep treading water,
Keep looking around,
Like a ship will come soaring out of the fog
To rescue you?
Do you want to be rescued?
Or is the silence of the summer day
Locked away inside you
Good enough?
Are you good enough?
Is that all you want to be?

I want to be known.
Knowing is not enough anymore
Anyone can know something, can look in.
I want to be inside
Accepted, held
To know what I’ve never known
To walk along a glassy shore
With one who loves me.
To be forgiven, always and completely
Forgiven what I am.

But I don’t know how to say it
It feels heavy and immaterial
Like the silence in between the words
When the words don’t say anything
But suddenly they have meaning.
Between the moments you’re
Totally immersed in the living world
With all those people
Suddenly you stop
Suddenly you’re alive
You breathe
And see
You’re not alone.
Olivia Mercado Mar 2014
The sky is damp as a sodden t-shirt
Worn running into a hose
On the green of summer lawns

The sky is grey as a crone's tight bun
Conservative and chilled
Knowing summer's youth is done

The sky is proud as an archaic monarch
Much-loved, and yet much-feared
Intangible, yet all-encompassing

The sky is not friendly
It is not warm
But it is constant
Through summer days
Through greying hairs
Through the tumbling of kings
Olivia Mercado Aug 2013
The Northern wind brings storm tonight
Stirring the clouds with veiled light
The lightning cracks upon the grey
And shatters the dim twilight away
Rolling in upon its wings
In throaty roar, the thunder sings
The voices of dragons, lost and old
Ring out tonight in freedom bold.

They play with wind, and play with rain
And dance upon its midnight strain
Rev'ling in its freedom high
Drunk upon their battle cry
They hover now, on whirling clouds
Behind their dusty, swollen shrouds
Tonight the storm upon the hill
Echoes the dragons' voice and will.
Olivia Mercado Oct 2013
Singing angels of the deep
****** me into quasi-sleep
To wander far-off shores.

I see the sky of molten lead
I see the waves, restless and dead
The souls that sing no more -

Piercing cry and banshee's wail
Sound from behind the heavy veil
Of immortality.

Monsters, lovers, all the same
In this dark and dreary dream --
The veil keeps you from me.
Olivia Mercado Oct 2013
Dear mentor:
You taught me to see the world
Through the eyes of opportunity
Gave me the bravery
and the delight, and desire
To flout expectations
Disregard my GPA
And soar to new heights,
Taught me to value education
As the greatest gift that could be given.

Dear friend:
You taught me to smile
Because I could make a difference
To be kind,
Because everyone is insecure
To laugh when the stress overwhelmed me,
To see the humour in politics
And philosophy and the human condition.

Dear mentor:
You taught me about debate
Taught me about family
Beyond genetics,
Bound by common passion.
And when you left,
I realized,
You'd taught me, in turn,
To teach others.
Olivia Mercado Dec 2013
There was a girl who would dance in the stars
She forgot who she was when the dark turned to dawn
And the sun once came up in its yellow and gold
And told her to rejoice because she'd grown to be old.

There once was a child who loved to pretend
In the storm of his mind, the stout trees would bend
Hills slept as dragons and old sticks were swords
But the dragons kept sleeping and he could find no wars.

An old man was sleeping on a dark green park bench
He dreamed of the nights with his love he had spent
And then he woke up in the afternoon light
And tried to be happy, because they'd all been right

They said "Once you live past the dark horrors of night
Surely, somehow, it will all be all right."
Graduate with honors, a wife and a job
You'll be set 'till the night comes -- and you meet God.

The fight had been over for many years now
But it still didn't feel like he'd won, somehow.
White snow turns brown when the winter is done
It's hard to keep fighting when they all say you've won.
Olivia Mercado Jul 2013
I hold my viola cradled in my arm
Before a concert
Everyone breathes too fast
The lights glare, the conductor begins.

I roll out of bed at one in the afternoon
My old viola from sixth grade
Lying on top of its case
Begging to be played.

I pick it up every day. I don't know what I play,
I just play.
I make music out of my boredom,
Music that will never be recorded,
Songs that will never be heard again.

Every day, I see the odd instrument
I pick it up and begin.
I have nothing better to do. But mostly,
I don't want it to see it lying there,
Alone.
Olivia Mercado May 2014
You're looking down
please don't look down again.
We live in a culture of self-deprecation
and self-loathing
but we are not slaves to it.
Just because you feel like curling up like a hedgehog
doesn't mean you have to --
It's easy, and you're tired,
but you don't have to.

You are better than this.
You are better than whatever version of yourself
you see in the mirror on those mornings  you don't want to leave the house
better than your father was
better than I am, honestly.
There is so much goodness in you --
stop pulling back
there is nothing to be afraid of.
Trust me.
It took me years to find that out for myself.

— The End —