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blklvndr  Jul 2014
My Ibuprofen
blklvndr Jul 2014
I keep my ibuprofen in a Marlboro box
hidden deep beneath the pages of books that ever so kindly let the time pass by.


I take my ibuprofen two at a time
because they always used to tell me “good things come in twos..”

I guess that was true before I met you.


I swallow my ibuprofen with anything I can find because substances like this are highly divine, one of a kind.
Ryan A Flournoy Feb 2014
Submissive my body tender and weak.
Closer to death my body must be.

If I must attest then it's fluids at best.
Submissive my body the pain and the rest.

I should have known from the jump, for I had not been foretold.
Steer clear of its wrath, it's no common cold.

The fight continues, the world on a spin. God speed to you and this ibuprofen.
ethan  Aug 2018
closeted
ethan Aug 2018
when i was a freshman one of my friends told me that there was a girl who was talking about me
asking why i was pretending to be straight and that everyone could tell that i was gay
my friends and i laughed it off like children and i quipped “i’m not pretending anything, just ask anyone and they’ll know”

now, i think of the rainbow socks, the only thing i own with a rainbow on it, being shoved down to the bottom of my sock drawer as if it would pop out at any minute and proclaim it’s existence if it were any higher. now, i think of the rainbow highlight that i applies in the bathroom at midnight, pausing every now and again to make sure i was alone. Now, i think of the pride nail art that i scrubbed off my nails minutes after i painted it on. now, i think of the last word in a poem that i wrote and turned in, scared i was being too obvious with the word they.

now, i think of the horrible creature sitting in my chest that simultaneously begs to never tell my secrets and to also scream them from the roof tops. i think of the sludge that lives in me and climbs up my throat, whispering safety into my ear while also ripping apart everything it touches. i think of the pain i feel whenever i say that i’m gay, because it makes things easier if the works sees me as a girl who loves other girls.

before thinking of this poem i had sat back and wondered how many bottles it would take of the various prescription medicines that my parents kept in the kitchen cabinet to **** me. when i remembered the name they would put on the tombstone i stopped and walked away. i remember the time where i couldn’t walk away and i had reached in and grabbed a full bottle of ibuprofen and i took a single one, hoping that my screaming head could be sated by the feeling of a single pill crawling down my throat.

i had a dream last night about someone called addison.
they looked me in the eyes and before i even knew what they looked like their physical form flickered until they were a bright shining star in a vaguely human form.

they sat next to me as we floated in a void on a picnic blanket and they put their arm around my shoulder which felt like a hug from someone i used to know but had forgotten
i stared at their glasses that looked too much like mine as they flickered in and out of existence and they told me i was not where i was supposed to be.

i didnt ask them where but they heard it anyways as if breaking into my thoughts. they answered that they could not tell me and when i thought why they said they didn’t want to spoil the fun of a brighter future for them and me.

i woke up with the taste of lavender on my tongue and the desire to change my name.
i’m not sure who i want to be
Edward Hynes Jan 2
"Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:  
Birth, and copulation, and death.”*

But though he repeated them twice,
Those aren’t all the facts when you
 come to brass tacks,
Eliot left out a line:

Somewhere between copulation and death,
When you’re well along, but not near
  your last breath,
You find that the facts when you come to brass tacks are
Ice, ibuprofen and time,
My friend,
Ice, ibuprofen and time.

               


*T.S. Eliot, from Sweeney Agonistes.
Al  Sep 2016
ibuprofen
Al Sep 2016
in my sweaty palm, melting
is medical-pink candy coating.
the pieces click, clack, roll around,
and the generic sugar tastes sweeter
than ever, sweet like a fever, sweet
like smiles under the concrete bridge.

tastes like sweet'n'low piled high in one-
dollar coffee drained in two seconds,
like buttercream frosting smeared
across your arm. tastes of the indoors,
of doors shut, of stale snicker-doodles.
it is sugar that tastes like promises gone far.

when i swallow (that is three, four, twenty more)
i can taste it in the pit of my stomach:
sweet, sweet candy coating masking
the poison, the anodyne, the analgesic—
candy coating to cover all the little scars.
i was an idiot.
Lauren R Dec 2016
Hey kid, you've been dead a few weeks and I'd just like to say hello. The ground has its first December coat of fragile snow over your dead body and I know you can't feel the cold but I'll tell you right now, I can see my frozen toes, just barely move them, breathe up into the sky, Id be lying if I said I still cry every day. But, I'm lying to myself if I said that I'm not trying to take back your pain every day in a way that won't make your heart start beating again.

I wonder if those butterflies ever drank up the nectar from your blood, probed their soft tongues into the velvet of your cuts, those razor blade ribbons, oh holy romantic, how you bleed like Mozart and bleed like ballads of classic rock stars, how they whip your face with sour sweat and drugs and drugs and drugs until you find yourself half asleep, brain swept under the rug.

Did you know only 1.5% of drug overdose related suicide attempts are successful? Beautiful blonde martyr for an ugly catholic high school in an ugly state in the ugliest of its hearts, how does it feel to be 1 in 100? How does it feel to be a rarity, carbon pressed into diamond? How does it feel to be cry for a week, left in the grass to roll like waves, buried without a name and a face and a grave?

In the latest of solemn sleep deprived nights I press my ear to the chest of the 100th depressed boy I come across and don't feel Vicodin climbing up his arteries, don't feel Klonopin, OxyContin, Ibuprofen. I can't seem to find the one, who knows, maybe you were it and all my efforts really were wasted. All those nights I've stayed up late did nothing. All those knives I stole, all that blood I wiped away with t-shirt sleeves, all the blankets I've put around stupid shaking shoulders, all the bittersweet will this be the last time your skin is this warm hugs, God did they mean nothing at all?

I lock my jaw into a permanent silence, buy back time by putting my money where your knife is. I take bets on when someone will die next. I read the label on every bottle of Xanax. I roll over in my bed again and again, and try to put you to rest again.

Amen.
Your obituary never made it into the paper so I wrote it on my own

— The End —