"barcodes" poems
if i show you
will you understand?
how i've outlined these arms
vein after vein
where sunlight runs
i see only
lines to trace
i got a barcode on my wrists
scan me for the price
of beauty
i am as expensive
as what people think of me.
do you know what it feels like
to attach your worth
to weighing scales
and waists that never
slim down?
is this why they call them
shoulder blades
to cut through
your skin
to be called
"pretty"
thigh gaps that map
the distance between your legs
to make you
matter so much
you can't stand on your own
feet.
when you walk the shoes
we wear
will you know?
the path to be
called beautiful
is full of
self-hate
and we pay for that bill.
Apr 30, 2016
Apr 30, 2016 at 9:12 AM UTC
your heart pumps kerosene
to your matchstick veins,
& maybe i imagined things,
but i remember your eyes as ember rings
& i can't wipe my memory clean
of the dingy debris--
the delicacies of your legs & knees--
this fire's not extinguishing!!
those ashes you disguise as eyelids
won't keep me from the iris
i know i'll find inside them
& i'll skim past your skin grafts
to your smoke-smothered stomach
then plummet to your flame-engraved pancreas
((scarred from swallowed promises)).
these propane x-rays
can't scan the barcodes
on the charcoals
that the holes in your heart hold
Feb 7, 2010
Feb 7, 2010 at 7:57 PM UTC
Sometimes I steal
from grocery stores.
Nothing serious of course,
sprigs of cilantro,
basil,
snap garlic cloves,
sleeve a single strip
of green onion,
occasionally, palm a jalapeno
I think it is the tiny thrills
of being a petty villain
that provokes me.
The warm slick sheen
of salty palms,
brow sweat, and
the shivers of pulse
that drums
my heart
when door greeters pull me aside to
verify receipts,
and never notice my aroused pockets
tight and bulging
pickpocket produce.
I'm no outlaw
nor bandit,
I do not pillage or
plunder,
I know the gray lines
that divide
good and bad,
because I'm at one of their
thresholds.
The cashier checks my driver license,
and address before feeding a worthless check
into the scanner
where it gets tagged and stamped
I feel no thrills,
no bad boy euphoria,
I am too numb for elation,
and too numb for shame.
This crime Is justified.
I have three more days
till payday
and hope the check floats
Last week was a short paycheck,
gas prices are high,
rent is past due
cigarettes aren't cheap,
and then there's that drug habit.
I could only write it
for twenty five over.
It's going to be a hard stretch.
I stuff easy cash
into my front pocket
and try to catch the eye of a pretty cashier
an aisle over.
She drags barcodes through laser red eyes
that decodes sale prices
She doesn't notice me,
but she might not be into bad boys
A small girl waits
in a shopping cart
with pigtails
and new teeth,
holding a children cereal that comes with a prize.
Her mother does not see
her kick off her shoe.
May 30, 2013
May 30, 2013 at 7:24 PM UTC
summer light
drinkable
through
yellow straws
parched grass
gasping
for cups
of yummy
liquid
boys with limp
fringes
awkward
stubble
like barcodes
girls lap it up
thirsty dogs
in mulberry
skirts
cusp of eighteen
walking
with dragonfly wings
sunset colours come
ooze through
gauze
darkness on lips
presents a kiss
Jan 8, 2015
Jan 8, 2015 at 6:47 PM UTC
her lips are red;
but overflowing,
barcodes on her wrists;
to scan self worth,
her hair is no longer long
nor smooth,
these purples and blues on her back;
has been a map of memories,
those crimson red nails
suits her the most,
that smile on her red lips,
oh so beautiful,
oh a beautiful wreck.
Apr 27, 2021
Apr 27, 2021 at 9:37 AM UTC
We are taught that we inhibit a sphere
Earth is a triangle, that is a point I would like to clear
Triple 6s attached with zeros govern the prism's corners
Infiltrating the angles we base our views on, they program us
Masters to butlers, the barcodes on our foreheads put a price on us
Never the less, Try an angle
I bet they'll confess, we are equal
Amongst other 'triangle' stories, I'd like to tell my own
Of a man's soul with a triangle embedded,chiseled like statue stone
I see that soul within us all
Culminating to reach apex by parallel lines that can let you slip and fall
And with every fall the try angle's base stretches and widens
I remember looking at a perspective drawing titled 'Life is a journey'
Shaped like a triangle was the everyday boulevard traveled by many
At the start of life, objects were big, bright and colourful
Far into life, objects become small, dull but meaningful
Never the less, a triangle has 3 sides to it
Listen! My stanzas confess and guarantee to it.
Jan 27, 2015
Jan 27, 2015 at 5:54 AM UTC
We're all mad here.
Surviving dead
Blood thirsty creatures
Silvers and golds
Notes and cards.
Screeching screams in the night
Wolves silenced by the frowning moon
Yelling children
Drunken fathers
Thieves of innocence
Food that cannot be eaten
Metal to metal
Guns n' gangs
Hunger
Poverty
******
Rage.
Creeping
Stalking
Taking
killing
Creatures locked in prison cells
Creatures lurk, disguised in disguise
Turf wars
Wolf in wolf's fur that fails to fit
Fits
Slits
Titbits
Pistol whips and
Quick tips
Trenchtowns
Slums
Poor millionaire
Plural.
Misoverstandings;
Understandings, we'll call them.
Look down
Sit down
Shut down
Lay down
Sign out.
Credit checks and barcodes
Exploitation
Infusion
Confusion
Institutions
Misuse
Abuse
Abstruse
Man's soul misplaced
And
His eyes
His hands
His heart
His love
His peace
His life
Alike.
Nov 20, 2013
Nov 20, 2013 at 12:30 PM UTC
Childhood stress is not living in a two-story home
when your best friend does,
even though your mothers are the same. All day long we talk
about weeds and leaving our husbands for each other.
Then, you go on to ask
why should anyone wear clothes if they just leave scarlet
dents on our skin, then you will answer,
someone’s branded us with barcodes like cows.
I once cut my ****** the right I think, while shaving my legs -
cried for weeks afterward wondering
if I would be able to breastfeed twenty years from now,
thought if I could not, I would be less of a woman.
This was before I met my girlfriend who has a ***** and is
just as much as a woman as I am,
this was before I learned that womanhood is a fine powder in
your soul, like ******* but not only white, brown too
and black and mine is pink, and womanhood is
every color of the rainbow and gender is fluid fluid fluid.
Childhood was ignorance of ignorance,
adolescence taught you everything you needed to know on
hating the unique,
but in adulthood, that can change, we can know better.
May 19, 2013
May 19, 2013 at 6:31 PM UTC
~
"Why is there only one chair in this room?"
"This once was an island." She replied.
"You favor this place then, I take it?"
"How can I not," said she. "The dawn here is quiet."
"Not on this floor, you are much mistaken! The stairs are like an avalanche."
Looking down at herself, she quickly changed the subject. "There are barcodes on each breast now."
"I see. Were you nervous?"
"Only when focusing on the morning break," She confessed. "Otherwise I was much like you--killing what keeps us alive."
"Is that so bad?"
"I wonder. Sometimes I still feel the bruises." She stated. "But I am told this is normal."
"What else did they tell you?"
"To quit worrying about not being built to scale," she stated in displeasure.
"...and?"
"For me to prepare to fall again for the apocalyptic things written in the sky," She admitted with a wicked smile.
"What's so funny?"
"I recognized your handwriting long ago," She uttered into the centrifuge.
~
Jul 14, 2024
Jul 14, 2024 at 8:54 AM UTC
123456789 10
111213141516171819 20
212223242526272829 30
313233343536373839 40
414243444546474849 50
515253545566675859 60
616263646566676869 70
717273747576777879 80
818283848586878889 90
919293949596979899 100 End.
Computer accuracy is suicide.
Crash to stop in time, make any sense of it?
There's no one to blame
Lie, rot, consume ashes of burned thought.
123456789 10
Talking about it makes it worse.
Serious study ... ... ...
Action noise figures.
Equal to a fasting
Serious consideration ... ... ...
Excessive knowledge
Excessive explanation
Excessive detail
Excessive Interpretation
Excessive study
Excessive Excesses
fatal.
Sharpen you bury yourself
ink pen
institution of barcodes
all is null
excessive null
in school
fatal.
May 5, 2012
May 5, 2012 at 6:02 AM UTC
I found you sleeping with price tags
like tea bags
little men inside the barcodes
Dragging you to the forest
I plant you by your shoes
Digging your heel into the Earth
to feel its heartbeat
I told you this story once before
The little men are trying to build a cage around you
But I won't let you be
no Gulliver's Travels
I send them scurrying like ants
to Noah's Ark
They set sail for Wall Street
Only one sprout comes from
your veins
And waterfalls have hope for you yet
Jun 8, 2015
Jun 8, 2015 at 1:30 PM UTC
i made several etchings in my sketching pad
some wretched reachings at the love we had
with pencils & stencils i outlined our path
but my designs were confined to crimes of the past
filled with charcoal barcodes all sparkling black
the receipts that we keep to compete & compare
arguments we begin just to mend & repair
i yell & yell trying to tell if you're there
but the transactions happened & it's been a year
i'm fading away but i wont disappear
i'm still here
Feb 7, 2010
Feb 7, 2010 at 7:32 PM UTC
I’m sitting on a fume couch with ashtray
legs, counting the khaki strands
in the beaded curtain that dices
the hallway up into barcodes. The table
by the fridge is a cable spool lead-
painted to match the molding. Around
it is a mesh-back lawn chair, a SoCal
fold-out from a SoHo dumpster,
a spill-trayless booster seat,
and a bottle cap barstool. Everyone’s
wearing second-hand sport coats
with seam stitches as loose as telephone
wires tacked up with undersized lapel
pins.
**** Capitalism. **** Disco.
Bathe Avant-Garde. Eat Paint.
Bleed ******* Smoke Local.
Espresso, Or Genocide.
Dresden Was A Lie.
Shrink-Wrap It All.
Everyone is clustered around the cinder-
block stand record player, grooving
to the pops, looking like a rag-tag tide
change beneath the broken-oar ceiling
fan. Everyone’s wearing ironic scarves
tight like corporate ties to keep their throats
from popping ten-cent parasols, loose tobacco,
and ******** Amid their rubber flower talk,
I can pick out San Pelicano, someone critiquing
Keats’ “Politics,” and a rant regarding some
guy downtown’s stab at post-contemporary
Pointillism in some gallery I’ve never heard of.
They’re flipping between topics like a Moleskine notebook
while I skim through a copy of the Onion,
teasing the edges with a lighter I found on the floor.
Apr 14, 2015
Apr 14, 2015 at 9:00 AM UTC
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
When you ask me
How are you today?
Across the steady flowing river of barcodes
You want nothing from me
My robotic response:
“good”
I'm compelled to tell you that I am angry
I missed the bus this morning
I am grocery shopping
Which is not fun
And you are out of my favorite brand of deodorant
You do not look at me
You do not care
I do not care
I am swimming upstream
In and around milk cartons
And sticks of margarine
Beep.
Beep.
Jun 13, 2010
Jun 13, 2010 at 2:32 PM UTC
October 12th, 1998: This is not an apology.
♐ ♐ ♐
Most days I feel like I’m underwater. It’s like a dream where I’m never dead, just not living. Because the living cannot feel this dead. I whither away into isolation singing sweet melodies of love and peace and hope and **** and loneliness. Most days I just smile.
I am a fake. I am a liar.
I am an incongruent youth; unable to be constrained by the freedom laces of society. Tie me down and watch me run, trickle, run like an avalanche down the face of conservatism. A cheap hotel ****** musk and sweat and suits and scandals. On-the-course-to AIDS infection loose ends who walks the streets in pristine filth. The incongruent youth, or what we in America call sick **** and shameful liars.
I am confused. Standing here on the edge between glamour and reality I scream into the nothingness, the watery void, a stark reality composed of my dark humor and evanescent solitaire: How can thunder roar so loud? Why am I part of this ambient isolation? How can you do this to me; to us? The beautiful few and we are beautiful, trust me, we are in the clouds searching for each other, beguiling and anonymous as we may be waltzing merrily through nighttime New York parks searching for rarities. For others. For God. And into the emptiness I whisper: Why is this park so big? And the trees so thick?
I am waiting for "someday." But this someday, this could be, this will be, would be, won't be for awhile. And this moment, this here, this now just passed. So let's look ahead and hope it gets better, because our lives are 1942 cattle cars riding away from the nows that just passed. Moments of incongruence on a grand scale. One night stands with our own hands and imaginations. Moments we thought we knew.
I am an inconvenience on the path to wholesale liberties. To children wrapped in barren barcodes that read “no real identity” when the red dash of judgement steamrolls their sides. God forbid the glamour mix with reality. Because when you are a somebody, you can never be a nobody. And nobody wants the incongruent youth to keep thinking. Because to think is to love. And nobody wants us to love.
This is an apology. I am sorry if I’m not what you meant for me to be. Terribly sorry if I love the wrong music or words or styles or *** is all I can think about. Sorry, but I can only love the beautiful few. I can only smile knowing I am a real somebody in all this hate.
Knowing I am a fake. I am a liar.
I am a human being. Hardly. I’m nothing but an incongruent youth.
Mar 4, 2012
Mar 4, 2012 at 3:11 AM UTC
*Covered with concrete walls
A rapid combustion
exhausting the world
Our brain doesn't worn out
Life is easy as a dream
We don't need to lift a hand
It's not a movie, it's just technology
Codes and scans, nothing's real!
It seems not a big deal
No one talks, just too busy to innovate
Skyscrapers and big gates
No more clouds to see, it's too late
You'll never get lost
if you are shot by a GPS
There's nowhere to hide
They'll track you even
you're in the other side
No more heartbeat to rate
just a beep from a screen
of that metal pulse they create
No more green to be seen
And it's not even weird
Barcodes and eye scanners
Detect your battery status
You build not dreams,
but power controlled
by the founder
No more gray matter
just chip being programmed
Oh, right!
And there's no more people
since that bombing started
Everyone's greeting
is a whirring
mechanical noise
For we are all nothing
but a bunch of machines*
-A
9/1/14
Sep 1, 2014
Sep 1, 2014 at 6:02 AM UTC
“But maybe your real job is shopping…”
Sleepwalk through stock footage. Life as
documentary. Soundtrack of horror movie score:
ambient electronica, bubblegum nostalgia and
**** love songs. Everything becomes
visual metaphor: blackbirds, barcodes and
birthday candles; Big Pharma pick & mix;
lipstick ritual; pigeon superstition; fraying flags
of fading empires; migratory patterns of
shopping trolleys; special offers; fantastic prizes.
Worker bees are vanishing - they all want to
be queens - and our hives overflow
with honey, but are empty and dead. We got
infected with aspiration, with individualism.
Generically unique career consumers: remember
when you were more than your credit rating,
more than your demographic, more than your
market-driven self-diagnosis?
Dec 8, 2018
Dec 8, 2018 at 5:44 PM UTC
The preschoolers
Are perfectly
Lined up
All of them
Staring at me
Fear widening their eyes.
I'm just the
Ticket girl
Passing on their
Papers
Before they step through
The gate.
And I've been there
Too
Scared and
Alone
Reduced to a name and
Barcode
Rushed along by
Those taller than me.
The only difference
Between you and me
Is that I'm too
Old to cry.
But I can
Guarantee that in
Fourteen years
You will be
Just like me and
Your tiny
Hands will have
Painted nails and a
Clipboard
Clicking your pen
Counting the
Blonde heads
At your feet.
You'll be
A different barcode
And you'll be the
Ticket girl instead of me.
And when you get home
And your stud earrings
Have been removed
Will you still be
Nothing more than a
Slip of paper
The water vapor that clings
To the windows?
The same
Ticket girl
Hesitating
At the gate?
You and I
We're both the same
Thinking today
Might change everything
We must be somewhere
Now
And we've
Stalled
Hit a cleanly painted
White wall
And hidden ourselves
From stepping out.
From barcodes we come
To barcodes we return
Whether or not
We're tall
Enough to be the
Ticket girl.
Jul 31, 2016
Jul 31, 2016 at 7:39 PM UTC
I wish that I could
once again see
through the eyes of a child.
Where pillows are clouds
soaring high through the sky,
elevated above the rest of humanity
and suspends throughout positivity.
Where the wind sounds like wolves
howling into the dark night,
heads tipped back while they cry to the moon.
Where everything is innocent
and the only thing that you needed
to worry about was whether or not you'd be invited to your friend's birthday party.
You always are.
Parents like to make things fair.
Where the barcodes on food packages
are not just the key to counting your ribs each morning
in hopes of weighing less than your bones.
Where the American dream is more than being
the skeletal version of yourself,
more than hunching over a porcelain sink each morning
with your heart in your hands
and your tears making tracks to the emptied cage that contained the battered thing.
Where you fear the darkness
because of the boogeyman or the monsters in your closet
rather than the ones that walk
alongside you on the streets
or even the ones that haunt you
every time you close your eyes.
Jun 6, 2017
Jun 6, 2017 at 12:06 AM UTC
In this land, in this world,
In this time, in this place
Behind these glasses
Beyond these fingers
Lurks forever now
The subconscious beast.
In this fortress, in this tent,
In this steel scaler of skies
There is no safety.
There is only sadness and
Sadism and ***
In this realm, in this womb,
there is only death,
But no so strong a brew
As in that old place of blue.
There is plenty of time to
Linger between the notes
And the ceiling tiles
Where they store bodies.
In this book, in this song,
choral choirs sing past pages
and pages of long legs and
headline barcodes and
hairline calendars.
There is no peace here,
No last dedication to mark
The passing of Father Time
or Mother Season.
There is no monument to
White and black;
All sins are marked in
Black and blue,
Like Earth, the brighter side
of a black eye or a
Black hole.
In this landscape, in this plays cape
There is no escape.
May 22, 2014
May 22, 2014 at 12:12 PM UTC
American barcodes
All sit with a grin.
American barcodes
Can’t you see my skin?
American barcodes
I’m wearing my mask.
American barcodes
The police don’t ask.
Sep 16, 2020
Sep 16, 2020 at 4:34 PM UTC
I came to Barnes Noble
to feel like a writer,
believing that my proximity to books
would anoint me
kinda in the way
hugging a good-smelling friend
makes you a part of them
if only for a while.
I'll take that...
smelling like a great wordsmith
If just for the time
I rub against them.
So I sit in the museum of
colorful covers
and barcodes
channeling Billy Collins
or Susan Wheeler
(maybe Dr. Suess)
glowing with empowerment,
while my ostentatious
and somewhat snooty tablet
stands arrogantly atop
this cafe table
in parallel unity
with the Caramel Macchiato,
because poets know
Starbucks is Popeye's spinach
for authors.
Then clumsy fingers
pound out
keyboard percussion
swelling into
a privilege of honor
that God would
love us enough
to give us words,
and people,
who will sustain us
in their admiration,
right or wrong.
Where the meager difference between
walking among giants or peasants
will only be known
after we are long gone.
We write
not so that we are known
in this moment,
but that we will be
criticized by the future.
I pray I am hated more than you all
a thousand years from now.
Mar 7, 2014
Mar 7, 2014 at 12:28 AM UTC
You could pay to know the truth
Or just read between the lines
People speak in coded words
And their meaning
Isn't always in black and white
Apr 13, 2016
Apr 13, 2016 at 9:21 PM UTC
The market's crashed.
I've gone bankrupt,
no matter what I have to scan.
I decided my worth a long time ago.
Let the barcodes reflect that.
Apr 28, 2017
Apr 28, 2017 at 11:53 PM UTC