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Heartaches that shimmer through my bed every night. Cold stones, broken bones, a red eye to Las Vegas with no cash and a knee splint. Sober days, sober nights, and what am I even doing here? Curse words, funeral pyres, judgment days, chattering teeth on the horizon and a disco ball lodged in my bedroom walls. I swear I’ve seen your ghost before, in a black and white film that I watched on late night television while I was high on *******. Dragging lakes, settling into graves, a judge pardoning a man I’ve never met. A night in New York, a terrible flu, thoughts about how the 1800s are as foreign to me as your smile in the reflection of a second hand microwave. I’ve been driving all night and all I’ve found were water towers and gated communities; summertime, brown grass, sprinklers and hands clasped together, all staring at me from a Polaroid I found in the neighbor’s dumpster. When’s the last time I’ve seen a star, when’s the last time I’ve put the pieces back together? A broken jaw burrows underneath the pool in her backyard, she was always so rich, always so well put together, I’ve seen her on infomercials, in dreams, her hair litters every empty elevator in Seattle. Romantic getaways, wind chimes, the sound of an ex fiancé wringing her wrists underwater. There are so many sounds down here. I’ve stuck a needle into the corral reef. The earth melts around me and all the stars slice ancient limericks into my bones. I found heaven last night in her backyard. It was shards of glass half buried in the grass.
I've been writing a lot of prose poetry lately. Here is one of my most recent piece.
Derrick Jones Aug 2018
Part 1: Birth

There is only flow when I go to the unknown
I roam an abandoned home
It looks like ancient Rome, frescoes and domes
I call out, the echoes tell me I’m alone
No phone service, I am nervous
I wander through these haunted halls
The size of a million shopping malls
I begin to feel so small
A sudden flash and I am dashed to the realm of vision
A photon’s silent fission causes a collision in my eyes
Chemicals climb my nerves like vines
They activate my brain
I gain the gift of sight
I can finally see the light
Technicolor sprites ignite from the night
They surround me and confound me
Dizzy with the brightness
My body dissolves to lightness
I am one with a firework show
I am an ember, drifting to and fro
I am the spark, the flame, the afterglow

Part 2: Escape

This house that was haunting me
Is less daunting in reality
To my surprise, I realize my eyes describe a scene I can’t contextualize
I’ve lost my corporeal form
I’m tossed but never torn
I am the fabric of the universe
I fold, tesselate, invert
There is no ground, no up or down
As I fill this infinite space
My mind is racing
My self erasing
I am carved into a simple tracing
I am a thought confined inside a casing
Cut down to size I rise to the surface
Shot into the sky, I gain a purpose
I stream toward an enormity  
I reach escape velocity
I smash into reality

Part 3: Dissemination

I am a thought that was caught
Shot into the moment
Because I am where the mind went
Sent into the present
A representation of an inner mentation
A random rumination
A rogue communication
An intuition loaded like ammunition
Fired from a rifle
Too late to stifle
I ram through the fog of resistance
I slam into existence
It’s survival of the fittest
If I fail to catch attention
I will fall out of this dimension
I am rescued by a mention!
My salvation is conversation
I am converted into sound
I reverberate through air and ground
My vibrations travel through eustachian tubes and neural grooves
I move the chemicals in your head
Make you think of me instead
Now I am yours to spread
Exhaled like vapor
Written on paper
Cell phones are my savior
With digital capabilities
I avoid temporal instabilities
Evade deletion by replication
Copy and pasted
Then excreted
I’ve been tweeted!
I spread through the interwebs
Integrate into inner webs
And now I am a part of you
Weaved into the heart of you
There’s no reprieve, no undo
I will influence the future
A humble contributor
Whether I bring shame or glory
I am a part of this story
For more poetry and essays, follow my blog on Medium at https://medium.com/words-ideas-thoughts
Thanks for reading!
Derrick Jones Aug 2018
My words start as vapor
eventually coalescing and manifesting themselves on paper
but they are never really finished, they just diminish
until slow enough for me to catch
and dispatch them for my own use
but the truth is that I am just taking snapshots of a train of thought
that stretches to infinity
that is complexity and humanity
that is me, and so much more
I go floating through the door
I am ten feet off the floor
Drifting toward the atmosphere
Not there, nor here
I am near and I am far
I rise up to the stars
So high that I can see the earth
So small and insignificant
Yet utterly magnificent
It’s a matter of perspective
Consciousness is collective
So my view is not new
It is you, and all of them too
One is a universe, two is a crowd
Seven billion heads inside the cloud
Causing blizzards and acid rain
Never pausing our lizard brains
Paws and claws and vicious maws
Tearing at our sanity
Glaring enemies of clarity
We strive for perfect parity
But we are but a mess
evolution made us malcontents
We are revolutionary dissidents
Overburdened by stress
Too afraid to confess
So we swim in sorrow and silence
A waking nightmare, a quiet violence
When the path out becomes clear
You will hear a resounding cheer
As the human race takes its rightful place among the stars
No longer our own adversaries
We will traverse the universe
Going supernova with rhyme and verse
No more fear for the reaper or the hearse
No tears, we will find freedom from the curse
And each person will feel peace
Perching on Saturn’s rings
But only if we stop clinging to the ground
To the weights that hold us down
Weightless we can face this
We can stare into the sun
See that the journey has just begun
Shine bright like enlightened beings
Light enough to float through the ceiling
Might be tough when your mind is reeling
But it is just a feeling that will pass
once you fly into the firmament
And finally find enlightenment
For more poetry and essays, follow my blog on Medium at https://medium.com/words-ideas-thoughts
Thanks for reading!
Brandon Conway Aug 2018
Stream of consciousness
traveling down tin cans and a string
going on about Romulus
and ramblings, vibrating in between
half a world away
keeping each other awake
thanks again
for the company
Derrick Jones Aug 2018
Calmer than I could be but more hyper than I should be
A still pond, ripples growing
My mind flowing and coalescing
Always going, confessing
Singing a truth into the world
A whirlwind of expression
Suggestions and impressions
My most honest confessions
Spending sessions crafting verses, masking the mundanity of humanity with rhymes and wit, because when times are **** we need verbal skits to help us forget
And when times are great I use words to celebrate, relate experience with eloquence and mount a defense against the sad times with these mad rhymes, counting my blessings as I undress the distress, caress these careless thoughts that plague me and harangue me, using language as a cage to contain and restrain the darkness because it’s far less work than acceptance. Language is the way out, reason supplants doubt and I can shout in the face of death, deface him with each breath, replace the fear with here, with now, with this moment and foment a rebellion against evolution, a thought revolution, and finally see that the solutions are the problems, every day you are solving them by being here, holding what is dear near to your heart and living as a part of this, as art instead of artifice.
Daisy Hemlock Aug 2018
I lay here in bed,
The thoughts in my head:
Grains of sand caught in a dance by the desert wind.
But as consciousness slowly slips out of reach,
They settle down somewhere else
Far away from where they started
In this tiny world of my mind.
I had to get out of bed to write this poem, but I didn't want this grain of sand to blow away and get lost forever. Sometimes I get lucky, and they come to me like that. I suppose many things come and go when you least expect them to.
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