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 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
i inhale the things you say.
the frozen words burn my lungs
as my knees reach the ground.
i’m incredibly tired.
                                        still,
i act as a servant,
a lamb to the slaughter.
but this time,
i, the lamb, know what i’m in for.

despite everything i’ve been told to think,
your words are simply more than sound.
words hurt me far more than they should
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
thinking back to my days
of endless waiting—
time was a straight line
with jagged edges,
sharp and slender crowding images
made my head go
                  in my hands
and my arm reach over
     the bathroom cupboard.

blood peeking out cautiously
in a fragile line trapped on my skin.
looking down
           at what i had done
truly stung like the blur surrounding me.
relapse
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
end
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
end
if you open any old dictionary
and search for the word “end”
you may find so many definitions
for three letters in the thin yellowing paper
sitting still as they have been for so long.
three letters that will always remain
stained forever as an encumbrance,
forcing me to believe
that everything is but a straight line
that at some point is cut off
and usually gets lost along the way
long before then.
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
my teeth
              are thick blocks
                                         of white.
that only seem to find pleasure in
interrupting my speech
and my smile.
they chatter while broken
      words
          and phrases
crawl hesitantly out of my mouth.
i carefully mold the definitions
and the
wrenching metaphors
into clay that’ll dry up in the sun, and
      drop
              like a pin.
and i feel my bones come together
in my state that i call my own
                  plucking
           my eyelashes off
clipping the idea of being full grown.
i ignore the fact that some things are inevitable, always cautious not to be too aware
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
pov
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
pov
what i see
is a completely separate being
moving in the mirror.
i watch you spit toothpaste
into the sink
and cry off your makeup
that i saw you spend hours on
this morning.
i’m stuck
in a two-dimensional buzz
and i watch my body do the things
i should be doing every day.
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
only sometimes i find myself still punishing the same ill feeling, creeping up my back and around my spine. this is the kind of hindsight that sits on my shoulder and watches me breathe. how else do i get rid of my headache? i have been something of a promised wish, a shallow pool of sin in the very center of my body. and it feels like i'm buried alive, like there's thick mud clogging my throat, like i'm suffocating from some other sickness. what cannot fool me is what breaks me the most... what strikes me the hardest comes from far, far away.
 Jul 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
i had a dream where i walked outside and it was the right kind of cold.
it was the kind of cold where you can take off your jacket and feel the air biting onto your flesh like sweatbeads in the summertime.
i looked down and i was 13 again when things were bad but not yet worse
and i realized the more i dissect my happiness the more devastated i will become.
and eventually i'll be a highschooler doing lines in bathroom stalls and drinking my dad's tequila
and nothing will feel the way it's supposed to.
my burnt fingertips will touch bodies and bottles and i will sit smelling of smoke,
and i'll only see two stars in the sky.
it won't be raining but i will feel water running down my back, soaking my clothing and the almost black dirt.
i woke up from my dream on the first day of the year and i sat in a hospital gown with the faint taste of blue raspberry on my teeth
and i wished i would've died a little sooner,
because tonight it's even colder and the stars are shrinking and i didn't give my body a chance to grow up before i did.
it's terrible that you don't regret it until it's eaten you whole.
i am back
porch talk, simmering in a Bud light sauce
everyone chair-rocking, even the boxer dog,
in his self-propelled 360 degree swiveling chair
eavesdropping and spy eyeballing the farm for
strangers and any creatures as of yet, unsmelled

get done with weather, the crops,
the neighbors,
the weird, and the truly neighborly,
grandkids escapades, hopes and desires, comparative literature and regional dialects and philosophical dialecticals tickling,
bs’ing and tall tale telling,  breathing the windy geography of the air over the land that dictates the how we live,
open another Bud for the buds,
did I forget to mention
farm equipment?

skirt politics cause nobody wants any
nothing-to-be-done-****-aggravation,
leaves nothing mo’ to ramble on about ‘cept the

absent women

no worries all above board no secrets uncouthed,
but the mood softens as the pale daylight wisps come rarer
as now
nearer to nine pm, obvious saved the best for last,
a very manly-way of ordering things,
big silent pauses in the converso conversation,
guy-sighs many,
as the last essay of the day is being jointly authored,
denotating the generalized listings of
how they drive us crazy,
listing the repetition of ever changing instructions,
which doesn't recognize bi-coastal mannerisms,  non-differentiating
just  humanism-isms

and the peculiarities of each (a list kept)
in a compare and contrast,
an end of the day summation,
and the boasting-outbesting,
of each of their
specialisms
which is sadly now forgotten and which haven’t been
brain-recorded so cannot be disclosed
other than it’s now ten
and all that’s left is
to sleep, perchance, to dream,
of private things
and bigger and better
John Deere tractors
Songs of Oregon  No. 4
 Jun 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
i'm pooling blood in the basement,
you're crawling beneath your own spine.
you are sick, you are holy
you are shattering under cynical lights.
no one knows how to wake you.
so we sit, we watch.
we will do anything just to slip into your mind,
to use up all the stars inside of your stomach.
i want you to sleep until noon
to slice across yourself
to surface your sins.
im still trying to forget how cold your skin was
im trying to forget the way this is.
 Jun 2024 Mateuš Conrad
sophie
tonight feels infinitesimal so i curl at your feet like roadkill, dead but still full of hunger. i tell you in tears that i can't stop wishing myself away. what do you do to this feeling? how do you punish your pessimism without getting sick on the carpet? everything always takes me back to your eyes. and i cant stop thinking about the decay of all of it, the things i can't even remember. i am still hungry. there's a bearskin rug by the door. you eat fruit to the rind and you smoke to the filter and i love you more when you leave the cabinets unlocked. thank you, for all the horror.
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