Needlepoint threadbare caucus with an instant Kodak box camera filled nitrite
Like the sun-kissed barely lit beaches over Normandy
Stormed into the kitchen with a missile and an avalanche to overpower the pirates
With their long-forgotten and ill begotten flagship armada
The flowers hang low and the nooses lower with ever-present danger of going over
The needle hits skin puncture left right down touch your toes uplift like the cross
Arms hung low over the alabaster sky with a long trench-coat and wary eyes
Cloud cover start to blow the cover and touch the roller coaster coffee cup sitting
With an eye to the glass and the telescope lens flare catch like the door latch
Down to the basement with the worn out sofa sit alone like the bedraggled soldier
With his dog tags hanging like a sign of the times down to where his feet locked
To the floor in an instant with the bombshells all around and a seductive twist
The ring and fling the pin out count down begins to the gravity shift consciousness
Like the cancer patient under the knife the tumor’s removed the chemo begun
With the bulb burning down over a hospital bedside and the white sheets lingering
Smell of a machine gone bad turned tail like the redcoats running down the chute
With the mail to the end of the day the laundry’s out to dry on the steel clothesline
Their bolt cutters damage the elderly couple hanging from the tree with the cymbal
Underneath like the gong of the undertaker the dam’s release
The water runs down to cleanse the disease and carries the pathogens to find their caprice and restraint held back on the man in the chair with vacant eyes and half
Muttered prayers to an unknown God with long white beard
Sitting alone under a payphone like the cold-dead wires of a long gone bee hive
Mind pictures play off the words on my tongue like an over-told rhyme
The nursery songs and bells and whistles come together to form an indignant sound
Like the steel clap trap of the boot black against the pale white walls of the by-gone
Era with a viscosity of ancient monolithic capacity
Sourdough rising like the falling red sun over the horizon sit and contemplate the weather-worn-battle-torn visage of man remembered yet never met
Till death and earth turn and burn in the ascending light of the pale moon
Wolf-howl over the distant city lights like the mournful wail of a banished soul
Away from home for ever so long with a comb to the palace in the heart of the beast
It sings for summer and faraway places of the corporeal magic in an elemental fashion show sip the martini glasses ***** and break and shatter like popcorn
In the kettle boil over the levee let it sink down into the visage of a man in the underground coat around the tails of the whipped dogs running like hell.

Change.
Less like the turtle that peeks out of it's shell
and more like the orchid blossoming for the first time.
With little rhyme or reason,
the unwatched season will pass you by if you let it.
The fortune unfavoured or the sunset unsavoured,
they will pass well over the horizon
if you refuse to give them your attention.

So it is,
so it will always be
and so we see that every opportunity
that is given to us from the hands
of God... or whatever...
is a lesson that we must learn the first time
lest we have to learn again.
Nine times out of ten, what you want
is not just going to strut up and knock on your front door one day...
but on that one time where the stars align
in your favour and you are given the chance to shine,
you have to make. that. count.
If you can focus every bit of talent you have
and crush it down into the size of the head of a pin,
then that's many times better than spreading it out even.
Men live and die under the eye of criticism
and if you can rally yourself to what you want to do
and what you believe in...
Then you can make it through.
I'm not in the habit of making promises,
but I can assure you that there is not many thing in this life
that you can't overcome if you try your very hardest
and someone who will do their best 100% of the time
is worth their weight in stardust.

There was a time when I would've fenced down a giant,
but at the same time was facing a tyrant
when it came to my own emotions.
It was all false notions that it was too hard or too painful,
when instead of blinking the tears away
and etching a smile on my face,
I kept thinking that there was more to a problem with one solution.
You've got to try.
You've got to deny that there is anything
that can stare you down or tear you down,
you've got to plant your feet to the ground
and sound every alarm.
Because you are not giving up.
Not again.
Not this time.

I can only write on the computer.
And I suppose that that’s not really the right thing to say, because people are going to say that I really am part of the next generation who survives solely by technology.

I really do try to write on paper, but I can only use pen because pencil smudges too easily and the end gets so dull,
So when people say that they can’t send me a link to one of their favorite poems because it’s on paper, my respect for them goes up by about sixty percent.

The part of writing on paper that scares me the most,
the part of speaking in real life that scares me the most

is that I can’t delete words.

On Microsoft Word, I can go back and add words into the middle of my poem, I can look at it as a whole and as a half and everywhere in between,

I can delete half of it and forget about, and that half will be lost forever.

But the way my fingers sometimes stick to the keyboard reminds me, I think, that the words that I’ve deleted stick with me forever, no matter how lost they are.

They’re not in some vast, infinite vacuum of the internet-

but stuck to my fingers because that was the only physical presence of those words at the time they were given life.

(Baby ducks follow the first moving thing they see when they hatch,)

And it’s some weird, modern folk tale, how the words got life, and how the words died.

So maybe if I’m the only one who can’t write on paper, then this word carrying curse is the punishment?

It’s a special flaw that makes the protagonist unique but relatable, (along with making her not able to spell anything and not able to talk to people)

And if poetry is just rambling and writing is ranting, then what are words.

The cancerous cells in a slice of bone marrow?

More likely some hellish creature that comes out of everyone only at two in the morning,

or the sticky stuff that I feel sometimes on my keyboard (or is it my fingers?)

Because my sticky fingers are a word’s physical form,

and if you think about it, you really can’t ever touch a word. They’re either soundwaves or dried ink on a dead tree, or pixels on a screen.

(or on your fingertips or your tongue.)

And I carry them with me everywhere, on my tongue and on my sticky fingers.

I grew up in suburbia-
With picket fences as white as the faces
Who say they're godly enough to save babies
(As long as they're not queer)
Because we don't have to live with the fear
Of corpses lining the sidewalks
Of our perfectly landscaped yards
We have no guards firing on peaceful protestors
Because our children are filed into orderly lines
Laid out for them at birth
But for what it's worth, we teach them of racism
From a white textbook that lies about founding fathers
Where segregation is just a word and
Oppression is hardly even mentioned.
Our children, who play at the age of 6
And lose their innocence at the age of 16
Suburbia is a life of it's own,
Gangly arms and legs
Like the teenagers who starve themselves
And steal their parents liquor
Just to get drunk quicker
Ignorant of those on the streets dying of hunger
No wonder I yearn to be far from this hell I call home.

Allen Ginsberg once said
“America I’ve given you all and now I am nothing”
The Wonder Years once said
“Suburbia I’ve given you all and now I am nothing”
But I’ve found fallacies in both of these,
I feel it’s more like
Suburbia I’ve given you all
And now I’m an awkward 20 year old
Who doesn’t know how to talk to black people
Suburbia I’ve given you all
And now I’m way too confident walking around the city at night
Because I forget there are communities
Where people actually have to lock their doors,
Suburbia I’ve given you all
And now I have a 16 year old brother
Who thinks the word *** and **** jokes are funny
Suburbia I've given you all
And now my father hates that I'm for gender equality
Well dear daddy,
I hope this offends you.

Because I am offended
By a community that tells **** victims they were asking for it
I am offended by a community
That tells my best friend Liam
That he's just confused, that
His love for Adam is an abomination
I am offended by a community
That offers equality as thinly veiled oppression,
With houses decorated in the decadence of degradation,
All the while their perfect sons and daughters
Are dying of depression because
The hilt of a gun is so much quicker
Than the drugs of their addiction

Suburbia, you are the seed of suicide
Feeding off of your violent silence,
Your white fences slice our tongues
And leave us mindless.
Suburbia, you have betrayed us.
Taught us ignorance is bliss with
Algebra instead of how to do taxes,
Spent more time worried about
Girls' shoulders instead of *** education,
Taught me not to speak unless
My hand was raised as if praise
Is given to authority without question,
Funny how they forgot to mention
Our country was founded on rebellion.

But suburbia, I forgive you
And so I humbly ask of you,
Find the keys of compassion within the heart and
Shed the lock of ignorance that grips your mind
The door may be rusted but it can open with time
Suburbia, I beg of you
Join us in the war of love
Let us all raise our fists and
Paint peace signs on our wrists,
We are disobedient dandelions swaying in the sun,
Words of kindness rolling off our tongues
Like pacifistic shots of a gun
Firing respect instead of rounds
And burying hate instead of bodies in the ground.

I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach the child I will never have
     that the locked wooden box of dated but unsent letters hidden beneath her bed
          will one day become a novel.
They are all addressed to you--
   just as every thought I think echoes with your name
              every song is about you
              every tear burns my skin with the acidity of your touch
         the smoke from
              every cigarette tastes of you.
It is you.
It is you
             who is the black mist enveloping my lungs from the inside out,
It is you
             swirling in my hollow veins
                as they wrap themselves like chains
                   around my organs, screaming for night,
and you capture my beating heart.


And it is you
     who tells us to teach our children
                         to make sure to say their pleases and their thank-yous,
And we taught them not to talk to strangers,
  but we never taught them to say
                                                      ‘no’. --
Now I don’t speak to the kids hanging out on the corner
And I don’t speak to the man when he pulls up his van,
And now I don’t speak
                                  when I'm lying in bed
you never taught me to say no
I don’t speak when your hand runs down my body
          like I am something you own
          like my bones are the ivory keys of a grand piano
               and you must hit every note on your glissando
descending
   to
hell.



I don’t speak as you wrap yourself around me
metal chains on a summer’s day
I close my eyes
            and listen to my organs screaming for night
                   like a child who just wants her bedtime story,
                                                          ­   her mummy to come home,
                   like a child who is not afraid
                               of monsters in her head,
                          or of monsters under the bed,
                          or of you,
Lying
     beside her.


And we scream for night
   And we close our eyes
      And we float up into a moonless sky.
The definition of a black hole is
               ‘a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can
                escape’.
If it is the matter that creates the pull that traps the matter,
   then you are not so much in me
         and I am not so much in you
               as we are trapped inside each other.
The world made up of people and
      people made up of world,
                                          like Romeo and Juliet,
      we do not exist without the other,
                                          you and I.


For the words
           immorality and immortality
                                            may be frighteningly similar, but there is a difference between
                 apathy and anaesthesia;
I do not close my eyes to shut you out,
           I close my eyes because it is only darkness that can make the space between my bedroom walls appear infinite;
           It is only music that lets me hear your screams as you suffocate mine;
                  only smoke that lets me taste your toxicity as my ashes spread like a virus through your veins.


I want to die.
And I'm taking you down with me,
   So don’t you dare tell me to teach the child I will never have
      that her scars seek attention,
         or that she needs them as proof of what you have done to her mind;
   Don’t you dare teach us that the rope from which we hang is a diamond necklace;
          that corpses are more beautiful when drained of blood,
             that we are more beautiful when broken.


Dear world,
   I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach me that my suicide note is poetry
     when our existence is intertwined
          and my death is yours,
          and you are too cowardly to do it for the both of us,
  but, darling,
                    so am I.
So please,
   I beg you,
You can make this out to be a love note,
                                             a letter in a bottle,
   just close your eyes;
      float up into a moonless sky;
         dissolve into infinity.
                                            Die with me--.
                                                           ­                                                       *j.s.