Poets of pretentiousness
say my poems are ****
they think emotions lie inside
large words that no one gets

Poets of Pretentiousness
say the shoe doesnt fit
watching them contort their feet
to walk within their niche.

Sympathy I feel for those who haven’t seen what I’ve seen, and for those who have felt what I’ve felt. The embodiment of my regret, shining with all the light once saved me, now engulfs me in torment of my mistake. As I orbit in harmony with the rotation of a green star, that is much more than just a green star, I ponder what my life would be if I still had my green star. I know that in time, this green star that means everything and more to me, will collapse and perish, but we will only be able to see the star frozen in time, that very instant before it collapsed, desperately clinging to one single moment. I still cling to that moment, the moment I saw my soul break free from the chains that I thought would hold me down perpetually, in her eyes. I don’t quite know how it happened, I wasn’t looking for it, I wasn’t on the make, it was the perfect storm, I said one thing, she said another, and the next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my days in the middle of that conversation. It’s painful to admit that I ruined the most precious friendship I’ve ever had, which tends to sting more when she was the only genuine friend I’ve ever had. I prefer solidarity most of the time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t long for a companion every now and again, but lately that desire grows stronger and stronger, holding on to the memory of the companion I once had and lost. My life on Earth, my past life, would be considered prosperous; I was one of the top aerospace engineers in the world, which is a very time consuming and painstaking practice, but exploring the unknown territories of the universe had always been my passion. I didn’t have much of a family, my mother and father passed away when I was 22 years old, and my brother and I severed ties shortly after the death of our parents, and I had not desire nor time for a significant other, let alone the willingness to dedicate my life to another person. I always believed that I embodied the definition of misplacement, I never seemed to fit in any particular group of people, nor with any other person, really, I enjoyed getting lost in the sea of my thoughts, riding the waves, pondering ideas, asking questions that can only be answered in theory, which essentially renders me incapable of interacting with others. However, being your own best friend can sometimes lead to psychotic thoughts of self-loathing, and eventually the last straw broke the backbone of my perseverance, and I convinced myself to commit suicide. Originality and pretentiousness ****** me, demanding myself to end my life a way no one else’s life has ended, and my imagination spiraled into a storm, brainstorming my own demise. My most recent endeavor at the time was to manufacture a personal bubble that would sustain in space, and condensing a spaceship into the size of a smart car was the threshold between my pathetic life of this planet, and self-destructive glory. After a year of an extremely unhealthy intensity of research, my talisman of my soul, my most cherished invention, my cosmic coffin. I traveled from my home in Anchorage to the highest point in Alaska, Mount McKinley, and inserted my body comfortably inside my space bubble and proceeded to ascend into my eternal salvation, ascending towards achievement of my life’s dream, ascending the edges of space, where no human has ever occupied in history. The butterfly feeling in my stomach, caused by the sheer joy I felt, is probably the closest feeling I had ever felt at the time to true love, the irony of my affection for death. As I slipped past our atmosphere and found myself floating closer towards the stars and planets, I sat down and enjoyed the galactic show of entropy before me, and after a while the visual melody put me in a hypnotic state, and before I knew it I was being stated down by a saucer shaped spaceship with luminous blue lights encompassing the round edge of the ship. I felt my capsule gravitating towards and entering the ship through a small hole on the underbelly of its structure, that appeared to look like a portal. As I passed through the light I was being observed by a feminine looking blue creature, with bright green eyes that sparkled like emeralds in the moonlight, and long, luscious blonde hair, straight and smooth as silk. She was tall, which I realized as I stood up out of my capsule, about an inch taller than my six foot frame, with long, skinny fingers and decently big webbed feet, and a long slender tail hanging down from her backside that wasn't quite long enough to touch the ground. She had shiny, scaly skin that had a deceptive rough appearance in texture, but felt soft and smooth when her hand reached out to embrace mine, and she said, "Hello, I am called Elora, what are you called?" Still in shock, the only awkward response I muttered was, "Eric" and she asked, "Why are you here Eric?" As I regained my quick wit I declared, "Does anyone know why they're here?" She smiled, exposing her sharp white teeth and proposed, "Well, you can help me find out." I think it had something to do with the adrenaline rush caused by the mystery and uncertainty of the situation, but I caught myself grinning, I didn't even realize I was smiling, it was an odd, unfamiliar feeling, but I was madly attracted to this blue angel from the stars. I spoke to her about my life on Earth, and my elaborate suicide plan, and she explained to me that she abandoned her home planet Eridani to conduct galactic research, and that she was from the Altair race. She elaborated on how life on Eridani did not satisfy her, and that she would spend her life roaming around nebulas, exploring galaxies, researching stars, and documenting her experiences. She showed me a star that she claims as hers, a green star called Zohra, which was her favorite star because she said she could only feel happiness when looking at it, to which I said, “It reminds of your eyes” and she looked at me and seemed flattered. She loved that star, her eyes lit up brighter than the star itself when she would stare at it, hypnotized at the sight of it, which I cared little to notice because I couldn’t look away from her. I couldn’t quite understand how someone could be so invested in something like that, something that just sits there spinning and spinning, peacefully participating in the orchestra of the universe. I think she was so fascinated by this object because she felt the same disconnect from others of our kind. The lonely, outcast feeling connected us, ironically, and we carried on intriguing conversation for what felt like an eternity, and I only wish that conversation could've lasted longer. I found in Elora what I had not found in any human being, she understood me, to the point where I was convinced she had mind reading abilities, and her understanding me didn’t diminish her interest in me, like what usually happened to me on Earth. I found happiness in her company, I found salvation in her embrace, I found unparalleled beauty inside and out, and I found myself in our friendship.  As time slowly rolled on my affection for Elora grew increasingly unbearable, and eventually the realization dawned upon me that I had to inform Elora of my feelings for her. We were accelerating towards the Crab Nebula, and I noticed the blurred blue light in the center, wrapped around by streams of red and yellow light, holding the blue heart in the center together. Elora was to me what the red and yellow streams were to the integrity of the Crab Nebula, without those streams, without Elora, my soul would fall apart and disburse, just like the blue light in the center of the Crab Nebula. When I turned, looked her square in her eyes, her gorgeous eyes that were accented by the light emitting from the Crab Nebula, those eyes that pull you in and leave you in a trance, those eyes that display the beauty of nature condensed into two little spheres that seemed to effortlessly gaze inside my soul, breaking down every single wall that I have ever built up to hide myself from other people, and uncover everything I so desperately attempted to hide deep down, and I said to her, “You are the only reason I’m still alive, the only reason I still want to live, the only other soul that accepted my lost, broken soul, you are the most amazing, most beautiful creature born from the stars we now roam around, I tried to die to see what heaven is like, but heaven can wait, because there is nothing more I want than to be with you until the day my soul slips away from my body, I am madly in love with you Elora.” I poured my heart and soul out to her, bleeding out every ounce of passion and love and sophistication to her, exposing every bit of my emotions, leaving me naked and defenseless before her. Different scenarios raced around my head about how she would respond, and she glanced down at the ground, looked back up at my blank face, and she said, “My people do not love, we do not believe in love, and we cannot love. Love, no matter how polarizing it may seem, always fades in time, everything fades in time, love fades in time, ideas fade in time, you will fade in time, I will fade in time, in the end, nothing is perpetual.” My heart sank down into my stomach, and right at that moment I grasped the idea of why they call it “falling in love” because I landed harder than I could even fathom, I did not know that such powerful emotional sorrow could physically hurt so bad. I dropped down to one knee, and the streams of tears ran from my face and splashed down on the ground, like delicate little glass beads shattering as they made contact with the surface, shattering like my heart and soul. The pure agony and embarrassment of staying with the love of my life, whom I had just made an absolute fool of myself in front of, was enough to crush any man’s esteem, so the only rational option I could think of was bail towards my space bubble, and go as far away as I possibly could from the light that saved me. With every inch of separation between her and I, my heart and soul grew sour and stone cold, and new theories to rationalize my reaction and actions that followed. As a child I went to an amusement park, and I was particularly frightened of a certain attraction that lifted you straight up, a couple hundred feet, and dropped you straight down, and now I realize that my fears of love are comparable to this ride. I was so mortified by the ascension, which precedes love, that I could never enjoy the thrill of the fall, even though this time the safety harness didn’t soften the landing. I came to the conclusion, after years of thought, that I could not blame Elora, it was who she was and there was nothing she could do to change that, and instead of accepting the fact that she did not love me, I cowardly abandoned the only thing in my life that I gave a **** about, I ran away from the only other being in the universe that could make me smile the way she made me smile. After years of solidarity and self-loathing I realized that I would much rather spend my life with Elora, even if she didn’t love me, as opposed to regressing back to my lonesome life, only surrounded by a vast, more captivating scene. The only reason I am still alive is because I have not given up hope that one day I will find Elora again, and I will beg for her forgiveness, and hopefully I will be able to cherish every precious moment I spend with her. I solemnly believe that the slim chance will occur that I will once again see that face, gaze into those eyes I once did, and curse my old self for being foolish enough to leave her. I am not certain, but I can only hope that she is at least indifferent to encountering each other once again, but if she denies me I cannot blame her, because after all it is my fault for my impulsive escape. But for now I wander as a nomad amongst the stars that form constellations that all remind me of Elora, watch the planets rotate, and reminisce on the time we shared together, the time I took for granted, time that I consider to be the most precious moments of my life’s experience. I spend most of my time roaming around Zohra, which was where she and I parted ways, in hopes that one day she will return to her favorite star, to find me right there waiting for her, however patience has not served me well, and my actions which I so deeply regret caused her to abandon the star which she claimed as hers, the star that radiated happiness upon her, the magnificent star that embodied her in beauty and essence, to avoid the thought of me leaving her, which is justifiable because she was probably very flustered by me scrambling to leave her after my episode. I rotate around Zohra, observing its physical qualities, seeing Elora’s face every single time I look upon its surface, but one day the light exiting the pores of the planet grew significantly brighter, and Zohra began rotating and shaking at a phenomenally fast speed, and I witnessed Zohra swallow itself in a supernova, creating a black hole. I interpreted this to represent the death of the hope I had to once again see Elora, or maybe time had taken her like time had taken her beloved star. I allowed myself to succumb to the irresistible force from the black hole, and the death of hope I had to once more see the angelic face of my love, swallowed my space bubble and my hollow body occupying it, to the point of no return, where I can no longer regret what I had done to her, because in time, my love for her destroyed me.

It's dark and the light leaks out
like the change in my pockets;
like the blood from her nose;
like knowledge from my head.

And I can feel myself being
  swallowed by this systematic
long dark. I cannot remove myself,
  a gut-worm in the lower-mantle
belly. Watching video-cassettes of
  my birthday. I don't know what
happened to my birthday video.
  I don't know what happened to
my parents or what I did to happen
  to them.

The light leaks, again, and I
choke on my celebri-thoughts;
mentally-******* to the
waves I'd give on a book tour
or studio lot. Talking about some
movie that made some money,
somewhere in Santa Fe or L.A.

The news is channeling my president:
a swollen man that is the physical representation
that a lot of American people are parasitic;
lovers in racism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia,
homophobia; scared of everything except the 'straight-talking'
magnate they put in office. Not playing president; playing God.

I'd hate to get political, though. I'd hate to ramble on
and on about something I don't know enough about to
**** myself over. I can feel myself picking up steam.
I can feel myself getting redundant but embracing the
bruised ego and poor technique. Loving the entrails
spilling out of the splits of my fingertips;
more beautiful than the brains I bashed on the sidewalks
of old Morgantown. Morgantown, a town so kind you
are gently destroyed by its over-crowded masses,
dying to be different or drunk -- I suppose that's not very
different than most places.

But let's get back to these trees that I haven't even talked about.
Let's get back to the kitchen table with the hollowed hard-drive,
with wires and cords flopping to the sides, like a
gutted spaghetti eater with poor stomach acid.
How terrible. I'll never forgive myself for that last line.

I feel so rudderless. So cynical with a touch of cliche.
I keep pushing back that age for success, thinking
that I have the luxury of choosing. My vocabulary is
limited. My intelligence is assumed; probably a void,
where delusions manifest and asian **** rewinds and plays,
  rewinds and plays.

‘…. and now, here’s Rick with the latest Market news…’

‘Val, trading was very brisk today, with a number of influences
that set the market off to some defined trends and statements.
Of course, the Human Virtue Exchange always seems to rely
on the volatility that resides ‘between the ears’ as noted
by the veteran brokers on the floor, but the sharp ranges
of prices offered versus profit taking has set the bar
very high in the relative value of Basic Human Virtue.

Now to the numbers: Courage [WHOME], Patience [PP],
and former market darling Perseverance [GULP],
all varied widely today on news from Washington that
their value was doomed to fall in the light of the expected growth
of Persistence [IAM] which history has shown to be a marked drag
on just about everything. Outside of the self –efficacy bazaar,
old standbys  Ambition [HVY], Curiosity [WDF], Industry [HAHA] and Temperance [BFD],
continued their free fall into uncharted areas of cost and return.
Some analysts feel these virtues could be a real bargain in the future
despite their history of poor performance. Could a comeback not seen
since collapse of the Protestant Hypocrisy Era  be in the works? We’ll see as the lack of movement in the Kindness-Generosity-Forgiveness-Compassion Index [FARAWAY]  
leads many to believe that the end of Politeness [UPYRS],
Un-pretentiousness [ME-ME], Self Control [NWAY] and Sportsmanship [LONGONE], may lead to a complete miss-understanding between casual market players and devotees to the cause. The ratios cannot lie.
But without a doubt, today’s big winner was  Self Respect [YUP]
which jumped and amazing 40 points before active trading ceased at the bell. So people feel real good about themselves for reasons
that cannot be explained by the Ego File Indicator alone; this causes this reporter to predict that Naval Gazing [MOM] remains a ‘Hot to Trot’ stock fund
and the Vanity market is always a good bet.
Now, here’s Carl with
today’s Human Emotion Exchange report……’

“Studying at ------- University
Would afford me so many opportunities
That I could not find elsewhere…”

Personal statements are always BS
Filled with flowery phrases that
No one
In her right mind would ever actually use
My sentences had started to look like
A thesaurus had come along
And vomited up last night's party all over them
Who even talks this way?
Who can take himself so seriously as to think
That his pompous-assery would go unnoticed?
Moreover,
Who seriously wants to read all of this
Pretentiousness
Splattered all over the page
As though some English major's senior thesis
Had been brutally murdered?

“I am ready to bring my own
Determination and
Motivation
Into the equation to improve the
Lives of patients.”

I am disgusted with myself
For trying so hard
To impress a committee of nameless, faceless
Academics
To convince them
With fancy words and pretty sentences
That I am the best person ever
The more I write
The more I wonder if it even matters
If it's really so important for me to become a
Well Connected PhD
Doctor of Philosophy
Engineer Extraordinaire
Patients are going to keep dying
And there's no guarantee I can do a **** thing about it

“The Institute of Biomedical Engineering teaches engineers
To work side by side with clinicians to deliver
Meaningful healthcare results.”

Meaningful
Healthcare
Results
What a wonderfully vague phrase
It means nothing, really
Not without context
But it's Impressive and Dynamic
A phrase a committee would salivate over
(Because "drool" is too simple a word for them)
It's not enough for me to just come out and say how
For my entire life
I've dreamed of myself as Superwoman
Armed with engineering skills and a well-stocked lab
Ready to take down human suffering
I just want to heal people
And blood makes me faint
So I can't be a doctor
But I know my way around a lab now
And I can make medicines
In fact, that's all I want to do
Is to make new, better medicines
To grow cells and tissues and cures in my bioreactors
To make someone, anyone's life a little less painful
And these things cannot be told in florid prose
Because these are the messy parts of life
These are the parts that ache and ooze and itch
Keeping us up all night
Until words blur together
And all that's left are limbs and bodies and faces
So you can throw your thesaurus out the window
Because it's of no use here
None of the BS is helping anyone
Pretty words aren't going to make
A failing heart grow back
And this personal statement isn't going to
Purge anyone's cancer from their veins
But this person
Untroubled by higher diction
Might just do something useful

Spring does not occur
in verdant shocks and celebrations
of garden blooms and animals *******
it's a slow parade
it's a hostage situation

there is a crow
dodging traffic for roadkill
there is a boy
who loves a girl who doesn't love him

The Twilight Man
finally learns how to cross the street
alongside school children

The thin ice
which still resides
on the concrete
dares you to be the first to traverse it

and the snowbanks
which lay before you
feign alpine hazard

and I wonder what the naked tree branches are saying
as they reach for the sky with twisted fingertips
with their meteorological braille
we confuse for variations of shade

they say give us back the sun
and we'll give you our leaves
there is a book in each tree we do not cut down
and we read it as we breathe
a forest is a library we breathe

Spring is resolving hostage negotiations.

There goes Lady Fate,
donned in solar sparks
and her lace corset
whose  overt promiscuity
catches the attention of
one unsuspecting astronaut–
his helm fogs as he exhales,
his breath crude and lascivious.
Even Neptune’s eyes themselves
glitter wetly with passion
as she struts towards Polaris in
her pinprick stilettos.

She adjusts her stance accordingly:

I. Purse lips into a smoulder
(might as well look
pretty while ya get the job done.)

II. Aim for the desired target
(that there’s the bull’s eye.)

III. Wreak havoc
just as any Fate is meant to do.
(But, of course.)

She picks up her staff and fires.

The universe tremors
in an unbridled spiral
of colour and chaos
as the planets
d    a    r    t
about like billiards,                                    
                          colliding/|\with/|\ the/|\ stars

who,  in the midst of the madness,
d i v e r g e and c r* o* s s
for fear of being vanquished.

A cluster of mismatched constellations
and forsaken cosmic particles
settle into a state of
mutual negligence and destruction.
And, together, they liquefy into
a festering pool of molten silver.

Lady Fate grins–
yes, she has the stars right
where she wants them now–
and, in a final act of defiance,
she strikes against the earth
and watches with satisfaction as
it hurtles towards the silver
and sinks down into the molten
like an eight ball.
(And everyone knows it’s
Game Over
once you’ve sunk the eight ball).

From where she stands–
bent over Polaris
in seductive pretentiousness —
she relishes
in the screams
of some wretched lover–
the first to ever be
betrayed by the stars.

Burlesque fatuous is the implication of your emotional daily pretentiousness. I am seldom, otherwise a psychopath, able
to own fraternity which I can't
discernment or jester because there is an art to love and ******
And it's a conventional edit to your own dullness. I am vivid,
Debris to impersonation.
I am absent but identical
to thin air. I am a Prometheus
Arabian night in Lysistrata premise.
My words may remind you of the day I held your eyes in infinite cluster. Perhaps my love isn't enough for you to understand. For example, the glassed vain is paralysis iridium illicitness which is svelte to inadmissible synthesis. The cloud let are torsion, assail with cypress and impossible solariums; and the propane was a sensation of disjointed loveliness.
Every time I go for a walk, mosquitoes understand my lonely talks because they sip my blood at a quarter past ten but these glazed roads scrutinized my wrist, escorted vernal preposterous blue/purple relentless ghostly cheekbones.
Thought I could festive the blaze among the cedar bridge road
but take a pause and look at my skin and thighbones,
Preterists to flowered unless I smile and tell you
"This is heartbreak"*

*Unable to keep up with your facetiousness, personality failed me temporarily. Mind melting in a moment of dissonance,
This cognitive refrain refracts the 'I' that oscillates accordingly.
One's morphology, tuned to its own metric of change.
Hypnos whispers and sleep beckons, taunting insomnia (which makes a mockery of all humans) but Morpheus has no time for anything less than grandiose archetypes.
Last night I may have dreamt or drunk some foolish things, told people the truth untruthfully, let slip more than I should have.
What a pity, secrecy. They say
information wants to be free.
Who lingers in the details?
Past memories are liberated only by the present. I stand here in the downpour, soaking it all in.
Compassion, god is in the rain.
My fulgurite heart resting on the palm of a deity, at a tilt, slowly it's sliding off; when it fell I gasped.
The reflection of wide eyes in each of its atria, emotion flowing through these venae cavae, those
dilated eyes shimmered before it shattered, gleaming with passion. Us, in the blink of an I.

IM SICK AND TIRED of you thinking that the only thing I do on a daily basis is get up drag my feet to go and eat my cocoa puffs, sit back, max and relax, watch cartoons and reminisce about 8 tracks.
NAH **** THAT!
Because it doesnt matter to you that I’ve proven how intelligent I am,
because
you still think my skin is a sham and I’m supposed to be in the back of a classroom hardly able to read and write my name because thats how the
“good” ones have been tamed.
But the lights are dim back there because the brighter students get the brighter lights in the front row chairs.
My hand is raised the entire hour and 15 minutes but you never even attempt to stutter my name.
Because what I say is not your reality.
As far as you are concerned it is incorrect. I have tourettes with absolutely no regrets as to what I say,
but I’ll make **** sure that you know the truth.
I get my paper back and it says “plagiarized”...
now what the **** makes you think that?
Because I can use words that have more than 3 syllables and form a sentence in your vernacular this is syntactically more capable than anything that your low IQ has ever been able to form easily?
I apologize.
For not being politically ignorant
ebonically incorrect
and generally not being dumb enough for you to laugh and point to call me ******.

Please, Slim Shady...sit the **** down...this is grown up talk now.
Realize. The colonizer knows not of his privilege because he blindly walks with it.
While we, I mean me, walk very knowingly with shackles and chains with your name, that speak she has not yet been tamed with every jingle, and threatening step that I take toward the invasion of your future.

I’ve taken all your required high school courses
******* Pretentiousness English 3 and 4.
And my score means absolutely nothing, despite the fact that it is higher than your front row chairs that stare and nod robotically, because they are afraid to question your ability.
Understand...your PhD means jackshit to me.

Don’t hurt yourself in trying to comprehend.
You’d probably go insane but lets not try to think about that.
Lets get back to your wack *** philosophy that I because I don’t speak in the proper vernacular I don’t know nothin’.
Like the fact that what I just said is a double negative. But see its funny, because when I use ebonics and incorporate double negatives to illustrate a point, I’m ignorant.
And yet Mark Twain is a literary genius for doing the exact same thing.

Would it change if I said that Mark Twain was black?
But I wouldn’t do that.

It would set me up for an attack and you’d try to have these literary comebacks and I’d have to smack....
some knowledge on you.
That your Twain, got his twang from being in the main presence of we. And yes I mean we. As in people like me, and Talib Kweli. Or to date back in history Phillis Wheatley, who messed with you psychologically, but you thought she was too stupid and you are too naive to see that she was an O.G.
The true original gangster.

There are too many -e’s
but they are necessary to eeeeeeevoke,
no elicit the response your failing to recognize that your ties to 21st century humanity are short
ragg’ed
and slowly splintering away.

You missed those entire 3 pages in your history textbooks when it said that
BLACK doesn’t make any less of a person.
BLACK is a crayon color.
And BLACK doesn’t even exist in skin color...we are brown.
That was another thing your genius colorblind mind refused to recognize.

I am stamping “plagiarized” on every Mark Twain book ever written because our swag was stolen!
In 1492 Columbus sailed to ocean blue
to give us diseases and call us illiterate savages.
Thats not very nice...better table manners would be appreciated. (And we’re the savages)

YOU CAN TAKE THIS PAPER AND...
use it as a book mark. Those history books are screaming your name, its time to answer your call.
Come back to me when you realize that I am intelligent and hold the key to all that is not  a rainbow
or unicorn and fairy princesses.
We all live in reality that your bright lights and shiny piece of paper is blocking you from seeing.
Come to the back where the lights are dim,
and your dissed on a whim,
but it helps you realize that just maybe...
your life is plagiarized.

You're becoming and comely.
My elixir of redundancy;
the effervescent efflorescence
of my eloquent pretentiousness.

Whatever.

I try too ******* hard to impress.

dipping his appendage
into a place of unfaithfulness
ended their relationship
in glacial coldness

the wife
couldn't bear
the disloyalty
and the pain
that her husband
wrought upon her heart

all the while
he was playing a cruel game
telling his wife
that he loved her
his words of love
were but a unfeeling
lot of pretentiousness

his mind and appendage
were as one
he just had to have
the strumpet
who caused his marriage
to come undone

the wife is always the victim
she pays a high cost
for her husband's duplicity
in fooling around
with a brazen *****