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Virginia Apr 2020
Perceived perfection
So untouchable
Desperation grasping
Yet held far out of reach
Cherished in heartbreak
Preserved beyond embrace
Separation prevents
Defamation
A sacrifice
With nothing gained

Presumed paltry
Defective at distance
Horrid by the mile
Yet proximity brings tranquility
Intimacy that
Mends the mirror
Seals the cracks
Rudimentary becomes
Paragon
A sacrifice
Which gains everything
Poem 17 for National Poetry Month. This may evolve into a series, specifically on the forms love can take. Amusingly inspired by my reflections on a fan fiction I wrote in high school.
Lexington Warner Apr 2020
we talked
about?
um
all our
fathers
questions
raised but
never
answered
Adam Schmitt Apr 2020
To compose the fractured consciousness like a million-piece mirror with something greater than glue, The Galaxy of thoughts and their accompanying peopledness swirls fresh and new this morning, propping me up instead of weighing me down.

I have the footprints of some road signs that I ran over one day, the car ploughed through them all going off the shoulder of the highway and up the muddied neck of creation.

If the world has fallen, where does one lie down at night other than under the rubble or under the stars?

There hollers a man, soul searing, guts thoroughly wrenched, but he Blocks the doorway of parties with hidden interests, all of them equally Drunk, though sober, Boredom is a clever disguise.

The man who moulds his breath into that violent Release also works on the artistry of his face. For a man with nothing to hide your face can never have too many lines, and he's carving out a clay masterpiece though his life is a kiln of grief, the Cold Furnace carries on around him, Robbing itself of the simple beauty it produced long ago.
freeform writing that I made in an old school notebook. I thought it was an interesting series of words so I published it here.
Virginia Apr 2020
Every day we'd sit
to the soothing voice
of the afro man,
dabbing his brush
into happy little bushes.
Now those happy little accidents
are gone far away from you,
so far, his 'fro
seems nothing more than
a bush on the side of the road.

Describing his wispy voice,
the gentle stroke of his brush
brings a vague smile,
but only just,
a mimic of the joy that comes
to my lips as I
reminisce,
selfishly
before you.

A child then,
I barely knew my colors;
yet you helped me
bloom a rainbow garden.
And when I knew my colors well,
you embraced the forests
I drew in blue,
the models of spacecraft
from distant worlds,
imagined by foreign minds.
I wept only once
in front of you,
a rare tantrum for a childish thing.
You cleared my tears
and left me beaming in my new
ballcap.

Older now,
I describe the colors to you;
you recall the meaning of two
or three.
Life has turned you
back into a child:
screaming outwardly,
weeping inwardly.
The things you know you should know
escape you,
things now beyond
your comprehension.
Decades upon decades
you experienced the magic
your fingers could bring to the
canvas of our lives.
The watercolors now bleed into
vague puddles of tan,
oils run thick and drip,
matting the carpet.
You tantrum against the loss
of yourself
as I dab your tears
and offer you the hat
of my memories
to sustain you through the fog
laid heavy around your head.

So I tell you the story
of the afro man,
dabbing his brush
into happy little bushes,
and we navigate this
not-so-happy little accident
that is you
lost on the last leg of your
life journey,
hoping my smile
will stay contagious to you
until that last step
that breaks the haze
and brings you home.
A poem dedicated to my Nana.
Ashlyn Yoshida Apr 2020
Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a house full of shadows and mirrors with no one to help her out but herself. Cobwebs covered the corners and her feet and her eyes. At some point she had given up from leaving and stayed still for years. One day, there was a knock on the door and the girl shivered off her webs and slowly walked over to the locked door to set her ear against the cold wood. She didn't hear anything else other than a shuffle and the sound of footsteps walking away. The girl went back to her place where she had stood and found a crack of light across the mirror. Desperate to see and to escape the shadows she tried moving the mirror to reflect the light tenfold. But she pushed too hard and the mirror feel and shattered. She sat there in the broken glass, blood dripping from her legs. She sat there and cried, angry for the hope she had gotten. And she stayed still for another year until a knock at the door was heard again. This time she ignored it. She ignored it so well, she thought, that even when it got louder she turned her head, piercing her feet on the glass that still lay around her. She muffled a scream and listened to the knocking. It had stopped, why had it stopped? She got up to check the door, wincing in pain at each step. But when she pressed her ear against the door once more, the sound was gone and replaced with the echoing footsteps of someone leaving. The girl, angered, stomped back to her place only to see the light again. She felt excited and tried to at least touch the light, hold it in her hands to feel warm. She took a step forward, crashing into the mirror that had been reflecting it, once more breaking the reflective glass. More blood and pain and tears. The next time she saw the light or heard the knocking she ignored it.
It took years, each one annually the knocking came and went and the light feel across the girl in her cobwebs, shadows, and mirrors in a locked up house that no one noticed, wanted, or saw. She felt more and more alone with each coming day, the knocking the only thing that made her happy because it meant that something living was there at the other side of the door. If only she could open it.
One the day she decided to give up all thoughts of meeting the one who knocked at her door, she stood up and walked across the glass, tearing her feet. She crashed into mirrors, ****** and bruised she reached the door and leaned against it, crying.
When she heard the knocking she cried harder. The knocking continued, three even knocks. A pause. And then three even knocks. It would do this one last time. The girl was fed up with the knocking by now, so she decided to do it to them, too. She knocked back three times after the second knock of theirs. She waited. The knock came from them. She knocked back. It continued until the light in the house moved to the mirror in front of her fully and she saw herself, blood and tear stained in the reflection. She smiled at herself. She heard something move, something metal slide from underneath her door. Something cold touched her fingertips as she wrapped her hand around it. A rusty old key. She used it to unlock the door to see who had been knocking for her all those years. She opened the door.
And there the girl was, smiling back at herself. "You made it."
The End
ignore the formatting
13 Apr 2020
reading his work always puts me in a good mood  

reminds me  
of how simple words  
can bear  
complex meanings  

how insignificant  
ambitions  
in the grand  
yet not  
scheme of things  
mean nothing  

the endless cycle  
repeating  
mistake after mistake  
until the lesson  
eradicates itself  

making excuses  
telling lies  
self medicating  
as though  
vitality depends on it  
/it doesn’t/

leaving
infectious afterthoughts  
before you can draw conclusions  
but not after  
you have already submitted  
to the beautiful mind  
that made you wonder  
why nobody listened  
not enough, anyway.
Posted on April 4, 2020
Velvel Ben David Apr 2020
The silence sang to me like no song could.
I stooped. I was half alive, I was alone, I was searching for relaxation.
I was looking for freedom from the nervous, shaking bundle of stick my body had to offer me.
But that’s alright, I tell myself. There’s no use being indignant.
“Your grandfather’s died” I heard through the phone.
I grieved him years before his passing.

Relief came over me as I awaited grief in silence.

What was more alarming was the manic girl in the corner with burn marks up her arms running treadmill, spinning bike pedals faster than light, with no care for how she exhausted herself.
The slap of her feet hitting the floor and her gasping.

More alarming yet was the woman in blue hospital pajamas chanting in a yell “nurse, nurse!” all day and night, after she had beaten her head senseless against a steel wall. I grieve her loss of cognitive choice

I had no time to prepare to grieve either the manic girl or the woman in blue.
In loss and in love, grieving is a process that starts from the beginning and can carry on past the end.

I can choose to endure.
Pain has neither the choice to cease nor exist.

Pain is stronger than me because pain doesn’t wince at the sight of me. My grandfather’s strength lives beyond the grave.
I won’t grieve what carries on.

The silence sang to me like no song could.
Velvel Ben David Apr 2020
In the courtyard
No birds, no bees, no beasts, no life
Dying flowers, dying plants, dying trees, thinning air
Red brick on crooked cobblestones on a poor foundation
Crummy TV showing bunk shows for people with free time
Scratched vinyl floors with water stains breaking apart
Seats taken by empty frames with empty minds
I’m waiting on friends who don’t know their way
If they don’t arrive, the day will remain the same
Nothing
Sitting
Drowning in the grey
g Apr 2020
wake up
there is silence outside
there is a song playing you don’t know the words to.
there are words, no, cameras on the walls
read them.
here is a microphone -
stop,
stand still,
shed your skin
we are spinning faster than your monkey brain can compute.
air thick with smoke, no —
suffocating planet shaking under plastic wrap.
did you know there are ammonia clouds on jupiter?
do you realise we are fighting over barrels of oil?
don’t touch me
because i don’t know if i want to die,
waiting for the end in the end times
copyright gb 2020
Ksh Mar 2020
Empty streets, flickering lights
Not a soul in sight in the darkness of the night.
No fevered whispers, no drunken gait,
No flirty couples, no late-night deadlines.

The streets are devoid of life,
And yet you can't say it's dead.

People are living, breathing, sleeping,
under different roofs, in different rooms,
in varying states of ecstacy and misery and outright boredom.
In endless creativity and stuttering breaths,
witness the arousal and the ebb and flow of time
without so much as a second thought
to anyone outside the realm of safety and peace
within the four corners of their reality.

With each inhale, there is life.
Why can't we say that each exhale brings death?

For what is death if not simply as the absence of life?
When the glimmer in his eyes fades, when the smile you long for
doesn't appear, when you reach for his hand and find nothing but air--

Life.
It's empty.
Life.
It's meaningless.

I don't feel alive without you.
Yet I don't feel like I'm dead, either.

And so here I am, in a weird limbo that is just pain, pain, pain--
The pain of each inhale not bringing me what life is supposed to be
as described in picturesque scenes from tiny little windows.
The disappointment of every exhale that brings no end to this emptiness, this chasm of nothing in my chest that you once filled.

Empty streets, like veins that pump blood that refuse to sing.
Flickering lights, from my lighter that spouses one last, dying flame.
No fevered whispers, no drunken gait.
No love, no adrenaline.
Nothing.
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