#secondhand
Will I spend all the rest of my year wishing I could go back? Except that I can’t remember what it’s like to feel like a kid. Believe me, I’ve tried. I think I’ve tried harder than any other person ever. And it’s not like I can’t remember the experiences and the stories, then again, only a couple still come through from time to time. It’s more like I grew up way too fast. And I’ve never felt like a kid, so I can’t remember what it was like because I never lived it. I never lived it. Or maybe I just…never grew up. Either one is possible, but deep in my blood I know that I will always hope that the latter is true. I don’t want trauma. I want to be a kid. I want to splash in a puddle and laugh and be a child. And I can be. To this day I still draw with chalk on the driveway, wishing, praying, begging for the rain rain, go away, come again another day. But it doesn’t feel like what I want it to feel like. I think that’s why I try so hard to engulf myself in my other deep emotions. Because nostalgia is one I’ve never really been good with. I can cry, I can hurt, I can bleed, I can be numb. But I can’t think of my past and cry to go back. Not honestly. I guess I’ve answered my question.
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 7:25 PM UTC
I like the fresh air
Because it gives me a break
From your cigarettes
May 4, 2020
May 4, 2020 at 5:35 PM UTC
why do we have
to fix a heart
that we didn't break
in the first place?
why do we need
to suffer from
the pain caused by
someone else's disgrace?
why do we need
to share a kiss
with someone's worn
out pair of lips?
why do we have
to share the pain
of a stillborn future
and past what-ifs?
why do we stay
if we're not the first?
why do we have them
at their worst?
Mar 4, 2020
Mar 4, 2020 at 9:51 PM UTC
_You build your nest of pretty words,
Sly threads of verbiage,
Plucked from outworn phrases,
Secondhand sentiments and frayed metaphors.
A thorny simile, a faded pink ribbon,
Of rhetoric woven with silky streamers;
A warp and weft of fond and found,
Borrowed references and stolen verses.
You recycle the shining heart,
Of another’s penmanship,
Modelling it into a tarnished,
Uninspired and untitled composition
...OF YOUR OWN..._
Jul 6, 2019
Jul 6, 2019 at 8:41 PM UTC
1. you’re hanging on my frame,
and i’m
looking for something wrong with you,
and i’m
not finding any holes, or stains,
or stitches that forgot their function,
you’re unexpectedly immaculate
and just my taste,
a one-of-a-kind that makes me
believe in soulmates,
you fit just right,
the good kind of tight
that hugs every curve
desperate for affection,
compliments my most specific parts,
sparks joy through every
vein and pore,
lifts the highlights,
and drowns the low,
i can’t comprehend
what possessed your possessor
to let you slip,
so i flipped you outside in,
searched every seam,
and everything was
just as good as it seemed,
now i’m baffled that someone
banished your beauty
to bargain bins for this
beggar who can’t choose,
who’s spending her last dime on you,
so forgive my fears you’ll fall apart
secondhand has rarely taken me far.
2. you’re wrapped in my arms,
and i’m
looking for something wrong with you,
and i’m
not finding fault in your clumsy smile,
or fading facade,
or ink poked imperfectly
over scars,
or how you warm what
the radiator doesn’t reach,
how you learned the rosetta stone
of my love languages,
and lately i’ve been
desperate for affection,
you compliment my most specific parts,
exactly what i needed
cause i’ve never felt ease,
and we’re a crooked coordination
the kind of mismatched that’s pleasing,
still i can’t fathom
why you’ve settled for scribbled songs
when it’s symphonies you’ve earned,
so i turned you outside in
looking for one fatal flaw,
found it written in your
sobered skin, but i can
overlook an imperfect timeline,
i’ve wiped my own clean
washed it down with wine,
so sorry to cling, to become parasitic,
i’ll pry myself off, please just be patient,
and forgive me for fearing this is all in jest
i’ve just never had more than second best.
Jun 29, 2019
Jun 29, 2019 at 1:43 AM UTC
Nights Are For Stuff Like This
It's 3am.
The city's sleeping and I'm not.
Lights like scattered dots burn dim outside my window.
People are dreaming and I'm awake thinking of the
life that's been passing through me like second hands-smoke
lingering in the slowed-down traffic of my DNA.
Nights are for stuff like this;
stuff like silken roads through ragged hillsides,
feelings blacker than night that disappear in the
day light, prisms bouncing off grey ash, tiny sparks
falling through trap doors, never again to be seen
nor heard, nor taken for granted upon the long
laid train tracks of this ongoing dance.
Memory like loaded simi-trucks taking me all
the way back through corn fields and hay, through
old hard hitting rain that goes clank, clank in my brain.
Scars cutting through my skin opening again and again
like songs that you hate but can't stop singing on endless
streaming highways-hitching a ride inside my mind,
pitch-perfect pristine and off-key in the dark,
on a night like this blue black over amber gold.
I'm a million miles further away and one mile closer.
Signposts loud and large selling big hopes for
happy dopes, emerging eyes now gone from me
peering through clouds because they can, because
they probably always will.
Because who knows how far they've gone and how
far I've come on this night of all nights awake in the
grid of passing stars and dividing lines, now merging into
my lane for better or for worse where gratitude needs no
promotion, because it just is or is not. Because it can't be faked.
nor pimped. Because it has no need for
patronizing nor apologizing.
Because it's outcome, a side effect of nights like this where
everything makes sense and where nothing makes any sense
at all in this gigantic freeway of time that will eventually reach
a dead end. Where sleep will come 'cause the poetry will have
run itself off the bend.
Ah yea nights are for stuff like this.
Jun 26, 2019
Jun 26, 2019 at 9:29 AM UTC
The interrior was dark and dusty,
a second-hand treasury for searchers.
Deeply breathing the particulate air,
I squeezed through to my secret back room.
Care of J.M. Dent and Everyman,
there for sixpence, at pocket money price,
an unexplored world could be had.
Dickens, Dumas and Stevenson.
Jun 26, 2017
Jun 26, 2017 at 2:20 PM UTC
you cannot
create
something
and then just
abandon
it
because
I will
not
walk a
one-way street
and if you think
planting kisses
on my
lips
will keep this alive
then you are
pathetic
because
I am
not
a love machine
that you
can fill up
with
spare change
just to
empty
your pockets
Jun 12, 2017
Jun 12, 2017 at 2:43 AM UTC
i don't feel very
whole these days
that specific sticky
dusty feeling all over
my palms neck tilted
sideways running the
tips of my fingers down
rows of plastic cases
"oh are you over
there looking at
music again?" you
sigh but it's not
the kind of reproach
i need to defend
myself against because
you know i always do it
and i don't think you
really mind how long
i take because once in
awhile i'll find one that
you like or that i'm so
excited over you can't complain
and then we wander
through rows of
scratched dressers
winding our way
around old doors and
molding strips that had
a better life once
chairs and desks
dinette sets and hutches
a little bit of this
a little bit of that
a little bit of something special
laughing over
strange items
ugly clothing
even art pieces
and for an hour or
two i can feel the
stuffy secondhand air
between us clear
we usually don't
buy anything or if
we do it's not much
because neither of us
happen to have very
much extra cash
but once in awhile we'll
find a fifty cent mug
potato coasters
a solid wood end table
or a nice cd rack
a piece of someone else's past
and i'll load the
furniture into
the van if you let
me keep the change
i like thrifting
because looking at
items with unknown
history puts the
present into
perspective
gives us a reason
to go out something
to laugh about over
the dinner table
to agree about how
nice that cabinet is
or to disagree about
how ugly wicker is
instead of what
the other is feeling
because everything
is subjective whether
it's trash or treasure whether
it's mine or the next person's
and i don't feel very
whole these days
but on the other hand
i'm not yet in
the attic of the salvage
shop on the corner
and neither is
our relationship
Oct 18, 2016
Oct 18, 2016 at 11:46 PM UTC
Our love was a secondhand shop.
Faded and used,
you left me there,
decided you no longer wanted me.
I sit among the other used items
broken
and bruised.
Memories line the walls
and stock the shelves
of empty promises
and broken hearts.
Our secondhand love
is being sold at a discount price
with burn marks
and ripped holes.
You were just another girl
with clumsy hands
and missing pieces.
I slipped through your bony fingers
and you watched me fall
onto the dirt brown carpet.
I still have the rug burn to this day.
Your eyes
could burn holes through my skin
and melt me into the ground.
Our love was a secondhand shop
with memories burned into me.
Oct 1, 2015
Oct 1, 2015 at 9:27 AM UTC
the rim of your beer can
tastes like your stale cigarettes
i choke on the lingering flavor
persistent in my mind
you're overwhelming from afar
if we were closer perhaps
i would build up immunities
to your snares that have me
caught up and falling
head over heals drowning
only at the rim of your beer can
Jan 15, 2015
Jan 15, 2015 at 10:16 PM UTC
the rim of your beer can
tastes like your stale cigarettes
Jan 12, 2015
Jan 12, 2015 at 9:25 PM UTC
Love is second hand smoke
Poison
Its greasy fingers grasping your lungs
Robbing you of every last breath….
But
You like it.
Nov 5, 2014
Nov 5, 2014 at 10:52 PM UTC