Late night car rides,
Empty pints of *****,
A one-night ecstacy,
With a heartbreak dawn:

She shows her shallows,
As if they're great depths;
A cry of sorrow? Honey,
You ain't seen nothing yet.

She's not an open book,
She's just a bookmark type of personality.
Stuck between the pages of something more interesting,
Like a catalog or a Cosmo magazine.

Oh, she's always just caught between someone's pages,
With bits and pieces of their's stories rubbing off on her,
But them words don't look the same tattooed on her, oh no.

So stop pretending you're the deepest sea,
Your pretentious crap never fooled me.

"I knew this girl once,
she had long hair, so long it whispered tiny kisses along her hips and waist
she had the oddest bluest eyes i'd ever seen, the color of the sky right before it gets completely dark
her thick, long eyelashes framed those eyes, and freckles formed constellations across her cheeks
i could almost draw the big dipper and Orion's belt on her milky white face.
She didn't know i existed but i admired her from afar. I could tell she was educated- She always had some form of poetry in her hand. But of all the things i could have noticed about her i noticed her bookmarks. She would lose them all the time, i would see her chasing after the scraps of paper as they flew through the wind down the street. She'd stick anything in between those pages, wrappers of all sorts, leaves, pennies, shoelaces, once i even saw a page ripped from a different book. It became my favorite game to guess what the next bookmark would be.  After awhile she stopped chasing the various bookmarks across the city and she cut all that long hair off, then awhile after that she started using unoriginal, uninspired plain old bookmarks.Then even awhile that she stopped bringing books altogether, until one day she didn't show up. Nobody knew that beautiful, mysterious, bookmark making girl was locked up inside her own mind. Nobody knew she hated her long hair and her freckles and even those baby blues. Nobody knew that she couldn't stand to live in her skin anymore so much that she swallowed a couple pills one night to ease away the pain. Even worse was she didn't know i watched her for so long and thought she was the most interesting human being i'd ever encountered. That girl committed suicide because she hated herself learn from her mistake, my mistake, everyone who ever noticed her bookmarks mistake, and don't do this, don't off yourself with a .45 before you've even had a chance to live" he's desperate now  
"please please you don't have to do this" he sputters

I answer simply " I never was much of a bookmark girl, i always dog-eared my pages"

*bang

This is a bookmark from your life
a bookmark in mine
a piece of paper
briefly stopping time
bringing our together our stories
or else maybe a thorn
burying itself
within my heart
' Felicity', your name
means joy but can you bring me any
did you even know
he would give it to me
the glitter, single yellow feather
carefree yet placed calculatedly
upon the red background
red as your distant country's flag
I forget how old you must be now
six, I presume
you've not yet started to ask
about his life yet prior to you, your sister
& your mother
& why should you
my moon faced stranger
all fortune cookies & rice,
straddling two worlds
from birth, a similarity
that in any other life
would make me want to call you
' sister' & forgive everything
Your birth, he
did not deserve, not being a loving
man, as you will find out
once you've grown
out of being a toy
& start to rearrange
the furniture of boundaries
if you should ever find out
about us, my mother & me
& what he did
that will be the time to see
if your heart's worth loving
if so, just call me
I'm leaving you my number
in my mind

935

This is what it says
on the front
and
on the back
of
my newest
bookmark.

On one side
the number is green,
the other side
shows a
red number.

It used to hang
from the rearview
mirror.

My car was in the shop.

The problem was minor,
but set me back by $65
nonetheless.

So,
I paid $65
for bookmark
#935.

The cashier swiped
my card and didn’t
look me in the eye.

I swiped
my new bookmark
and felt just a
microscopic
bit better
about
the
money.

Not
really
though.

*
-JBClaywell
© P&Z Publications 2019

The mind is like an unapart book with a bookmark. Words surround where you are; thoughts. They are written on your hands. You feel them. They are inside two sleeves. All of them. The book is you. The walls surrounding within hear the words and their ears respond in ink. The walls are thin paper that never are as blank as slight movement from the wind, only always catching stick figures, shot like fingers. All of you moves and touches paper all around you. You are weighted down in ink. The present moment between dreams practicing in that mind. That mind alive and thinner than one stroke, briefer than lines from the fast belly curves of your heart. Moving.

My friends I did not want to be,
With you, I needed, here with me.

The words I said, misunderstood,
I'd take them back, I wish I could.

We can't get up without a fall,
Maybe we will, by autumn call.

Bookmark in place, I bid ado.
With these last three words, I love you.

The key to friendship is my bookmark
I am scared to loose it
Cause if I do I may never know where I am
This book is my life
Without this bookmark I have no past,no present and no future

Weeks gone by                                          
And I still miss you                                  
Every day                                                  
           ­                                                       
I feel so empty
My heart aches
& the tears won't
Stop flowing down

You knew the little things about me            
& when we talked                                    
We always seem to                                  
Pick up where we left off                          

I don't know if I could ever
Close the book
& leave it on a shelve
As it ages

So much memories                  
& yet I can't no longer            
Write in it because                  
Things changed and                
Your day came quick

The page where we'd
Left off will
Forever be on hold
& the bookmark remains

I don’t like having to put in the effort on things that leave an extra page missing
I can’t trust it
You’re every little thread I’ve tiptoed around
Making sure I don’t move on unchartered space too quickly  
I felt like you didn’t want that too
With your experience and all
Your chapters have started
There have been important people
Leaving fly leafs
Or bookmarks
Waiting to be scanned through blankly
Or
Revisited
I don’t know who was important enough
And I’m too afraid to ask
As to who
That little thread head was
So I made a subtle investigation
I’ve wandered around some parts of your book to merit
Audible versions of this girl whose book
So well covered
In dusted promises and doodles
There was an innocence left of her
That was so kept
She needed to hold my hand
To lift her pages so slightly
“Careful”
She whispers a great deal
These past few months
She’s trusted me with
The choreographed pressure of how
To feather the leaves of her past
On good days she’d read back ours
I’ve quoted enough lines and characters and memories
To entertain her of how it once was
The threads vibrate and echo
Reiterated but answers back the same
The untangled locks at least
I’ve seen fly leafs
Those were left with no closure
“We kind of just stopped talking” or “can we not mention her”
I’ve seen bookmarks
Of relatives and family and friends
And lovers
The bookmark had thread hair that tangled up so much that it left an aching worry in my heart
She was a lover
A lover with a bookmark
The bookmark who echoed a little too differently and brushed my skin too often when I’d lift a page
A little too close to the chapter on which she was written about
I don’t have quotes on her
But I have their stories
Stories have become our currency
The currency that equaled trust
The same currency that taught me how she was
And how to be
The currency that mattered
I’ve invested on these stories and have managed the skill of being gentle
I was the chapter that started after the messed up spool of the thread head lover
I guess that’s why it brushes in so close to me
I’m worried that I’ll end up tripping over thread, hold a page too tight
That I’ll rip down my own pages
And mess up perfectly fonted words
Forcing you to
Close down a chapter of me with a torn out page
You were too sentimental to throw away
And just be left as not even
A bookmark
But rather a poor excuse for a fly leaf that
You’d rather not talk about.

you know that, only in england
you can wear a t-shirt in january,
and concede that (it's chav scots
clearing the path):
reading a søren kierkegaard book
qualifies you as mentally ill?
odd, isn't it? read a philosophy book
get a psychiatrist... where's the ******* bookmark?

Her hand is a bookmark in my heart,
So many smoothed pages ago.