"bathtubs" poems
they're saying "all you do is drink and cry", "I think you're bad for everyone" and you're not saying anything and I'm saying I love you,
I ******* love you
And maybe I needed something to bring me back to reality maybe these bathtubs are always a little too deep for me but I fit so perfectly in small spaces because I learned when I was 14 that i was never gonna grow into a butterfly
but my aunt still calls me hers and I'd still flutter my eyelashes on yours while the earth turned to ash because I like things ending so softly
and you are a ******* miracle if I've ever seen one I want to sleep with you so badly, on a trampoline in the summer and I want to watch you do bad things and smile so sweetly at you and you'll know that I don't give a **** what you do as long as you're still loving me while you're doing it because baby we've got this one life and I've been loving you as long as I have known what love is and I know it's in the way you whisper and I know it's in the way you say you're my world and if the world stopped turning tomorrow we'd be the only things still moving with excitement you make me so nervous and calm and nervous and calm and deep breath you make me nervous I bet you'll make me nervous when we're older and I'm making you pancakes and I feel your eyes on me and I burn my fingers but you always kiss them better baby
you're an alleyway and the kitten that sleeps there
you're the rain on the windowpane and the water breaking the levee
I'm drowning in everything I have ever said to you so if I say one last thing one last thing,
while you're not saying anything,
I love you,
I ******* love you
Mar 10, 2015
Mar 10, 2015 at 8:55 PM UTC
surrender hind-legs
targets yellow spines
yellow stems
flowers blend into frogs
tree frogs tree apples
tree fruit heart numinous
nervousness next level
levitation into vibration
watermelon seeds
stars, steam, sand and shadows
i allow
keep talking spinning
weaving the stars
love is a happy motorcycle
bathtubs zoological
sisters straight eyed sailors
cumber-buns saviors
yawning in the wind
at the hint of a spark
gravity embarks on sacred journeys
desert walks soul visions
quest into westerly winds
pools of tough romance tough love
chances are that now and then
we will pretend
that we are more compassionate
then we are
Feb 22, 2018
Feb 22, 2018 at 11:43 PM UTC
Got new job today
After hanging up phone
Went for smoke on deck
Looking up at gloom laden sky
Down at wet vermilion leaves
Felt nothing (empty blessing sickness)
Bored
Want for whole charade to be over
All this ********
Therapy and
ADD meds
That make me feel like a zombie
(Dead eyes in mirror look through you)
Abuse them anyway
I don't want to stop
Pretending
To be so much better for family
Really still useless (dead weight anvil)
Really still high dreaming
Of tall buildings on rainy nights
Or ketamine bathtubs
Ready for the end
Tired
Of worrying about the girl
Remorseful poison
Afraid it will take her away
Says she can't stop
Don't want her to go
Oct 8, 2014
Oct 8, 2014 at 10:04 PM UTC
Bathtubs spend alot of time empty.
When used they are never filled completely.
Maybe I'm like a bathtub.
Cold and clean.
Well...
I'd hope to be clean. But I find myself ***** more often then not.
But I could shine. I could be filled to the brink of overflow.
You could lay on me for awhile.. Close your eyes and just relax.
I'll wrap myself around you and welcome you into me.
Damn...I'm like a bathtub.
Nov 11, 2014
Nov 11, 2014 at 4:16 PM UTC
My heart is wrapped up in gummy wires,
Splayed on the ground like an ugly wound
It is frantic scream, a doe bleeding out
It’s not soft and it’s not easy and it doesn’t
Open up like flowers to the sun
It is dark castle, with secrets planted in
Walls and a torture chamber that calls out
“I promise I’ll hurt you so good”
my heart is not petite and pink-lipped,
it is not coy and delicate, wrapped up
in a beautiful box with a bow on top
my heart has scars
my heart is ragged and filthy
my heart is tired
my heart lies to me
my heart is not easy and refreshing
like a fairytale daydream
my heart is ******
and any poetry in her
is the ugly kind that spawns
like grass through the cracks
of the concrete.
My heart has a warning sign
“do not enter.”
It has a trap door you may fall through
It has electric wires sitting near bathtubs:
My heart will shock you.
But as ugly as she is
She keeps on pumping
Red blood like ******
Shoot up with love
And she’ll lay down her armor
And her scars will kiss yours
And turn them from black
To red to a fertile, nubile green
Oct 30, 2013
Oct 30, 2013 at 1:58 AM UTC
I come from
Bleeding gums
Skinny arms
And ketchup smothered chicken
From dyed blue hair
And chipped black nail polish
From
"There’s no use crying over spilt milk"
And
"You’re not the first person to fail history"
I come from
Cracked bathtubs
Cracked skulls
Crooked teeth
Oversized sweaters
Overly sweetened tea
From diabetes
Breast cancer
And depression
I come from black heads
And pimples
Frizzy hair
Half filled journals
Half empty coffee cups
Purple lipstick
Scars from dropping the oven mitt
Seared flesh on wrists
I come from
Cigarette smoke curling under summer skies
From fake fire places
Freshly baked cookies
Poetry in the form of blood cells
From mental hospital stays
From blinding headaches
That vibrate through teeth
I come from
Pentacle necklaces
And pearl bracelets
Apple perfume
New York City visits
I come from
Trees
And grass
And flowers
I come from the beach
From salty air
And sandy toes
I come from everywhere
And I’m going nowhere
Dec 22, 2013
Dec 22, 2013 at 7:16 PM UTC
Vast the landscape I watch that rolls out, ragged,
Before my eyes, hurt words describing, haggard.
Moby soothes me but a little as I watch still fractured sights
Of what was and is in Chernobyl.
Marshlands filled with death and mutation,
Homely houses putrid with abandonment and radiation.
Broken tokens of people’s former lives and loves –
Where are they now?
Their hairless dolls, sitting in the middle of rooms,
Bathtubs, broken and oblique, empty.
Soap washes memory and nothing else away.
The sky has spoken; it is broken.
Push the poison out to sea. To see
They hadn’t time to leave a memory,
But ran, already dead while living,
Not allowed to gather souvenirs.
There’s nothing left for them here.
But did they die?
Nobody told us where they went,
Or why
This happened.
They are gone now, dispersed in Eurasia I suppose,
Like ash in the wind, like their future or past ghosts.
They haunt the places, the buildings and the waters,
Engulfing fish, and drying fungus on the northern trees,
Watching wolves still move through winter freeze,
Still beautiful in the taiga sun.
Tainted yet rife with energy not destroyed,
Trying to paint its passion on the sides of walls,
To venerate the people here and their lives,
Their animals, their clothing only frozen.
Sep 9, 2017
Sep 9, 2017 at 11:35 AM UTC
when i was little, a kid I rode the bus with told me that alligators lived in the sewers. I still think of that to this day, and watch my step around street drains.
when I was even younger, I asked my mom how the stoplight turned from red to green. She said "theres a mouse inside of them and some cheese. When the mouse goes to eat the cheese, then the light turns green!"
I believed it.
And some days, when i'm driving aimlessly through town, I remember the mouse and the cheese when I get stuck at a light.
I've always been afraid of drains, whether in pools or bathtubs. Maybe it stems from the kid who told me the alligator lie. But either way, I still hate them. Possibly even more than ever.
I wish I had more memories of my childhood. The older I get, the more they become blurred, erased it seems. They survive through family photos stored in closets and old tapes with the wrong labels.
But for some reason, I do tend to remember the bad memories. Those never leave my mind. Like the alligators.
Now I am 29 going on 30. (Living the last couple hours of my 20's as I write this actually). I feel nostalgia setting in and I also feel sadness. It is officially the end of an era. My twenties will soon be a thing of the past. Just a moment in time.
We constantly grow. From baby to toddler, child to teen, and on to adulthood we go. Each year delicate as the last. Learning more about the world and the way things work.
I now know how traffic lights actually work. And I think I am certain alligators don't really live in our midwestern sewer systems.
And I'm also not ready to turn 30.
Apr 3, 2023
Apr 3, 2023 at 11:12 PM UTC
I have been to the mountains where I have cried.
I climb hills not for the vista.
I climb for falling down the rabbit hole.
Then, I plummet down the icy gully.
I have drowned in bathtubs where I have smiled.
I swim in cold bathtubs not due to recklessness.
I swim to delude my presence.
Then, I hitch-hike upto the peak.
I do these things I cannot understand.
Reality slips away,
like fresh snow and water slip from my bare hands.
I climb to the mountain and fall to the bathtub.
Jan 28, 2021
Jan 28, 2021 at 9:00 AM UTC
Bathtubs don’t work for quantum suicide
But every time I take one,
A part of me dies
What was nice under the crescent aglow?
Drunk on stars, or the moon lit show…
Ash of night, cradled what was once mine,
The repertoire of ever-syncing- jawlines.
Puissant is the chalice, its exaltation shined so bright,
Bestowed liberation underneath the chatoyant light,
The open windows left niveous fogs-
Breathed -stained –air, against crystal *****
Alive and one, under the entire earthly tempo,
Together left her organic imprints of art nouveau.
Beneath the warmth and petrichor ground,
The Lord and Lady commence to be crowned.
...Tree roots sink as veins of gods.
The serpent whispers his mellifluous facade...
The sharp shove of love’s first arrow
Lover’s spit, a seed for cupid’s bucolic furrow.
Scripture of Solomon’s *** temple of doom
All within the nicotine-stained-blue-infrared-bedroom,
Velvet allure, bellies of vigor,
The cold point, the pulled trigger.
Dance of Thelma, ancient cults of non-lovers
Feasting north, under the Horned God’s antlers.
The concoction of the widow’s deviated lust
Skins alive, the excited wolf-mans’ husk…
The gun’s mouth ex hailed bullets of smoke
Piercing hot wounds became tender lilts in up word strokes.
Still, they brought, perforating ice knives through the chest
Catching fades perpetually, just until two came abreast.
The shadow dalliance and hair pulls leave those weary,
The anise flower seeds sanction the suffering query.
What was once so beautiful at night?
Forgotten, as I turned red-haired-heathen in morning’s sight
So I take my hot bath, inure in my offing.
Emollient paean of the porcelain,
...which is my skin
See you, my ethereal being,
In short time spring will be fleeting
May 8, 2012
May 8, 2012 at 11:43 AM UTC
two MTA
workers play invisible baseball across platforms at Union Square
the runs in my tights mimic the skyscrapers
whose marks I see across the black sky from the rear
window while he ***** me in the backseat of his Audi
an alley in Brooklyn,
the threat of a subway slasher,
the likelihood of getting lost,
but the questioning by tourists for direction
if I say “I am one of you”, it
discredits my memories here:
[pumpkins on 34th in July
kisses in bathtubs in Meatpacking
top of the Whitney]
but I am not (yet) one of you:
impatient drivers,
L train riders,
rainbow bagel obsessers
I still feel a hand grip my throat when walking down 5th
and throw my bones off the Chelsea Pier
before I spend 11 hours wondering why I haven’t yet committed myself to you.
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 9:02 PM UTC
Glaring light
and white
bathtubs.
Steam and
high pitched
melodies.
Running water
spreading warmth
spreading legs.
Silky cloths
for the freshly
bathed human.
Confusion and
worried faces
all washed away
by lukewarm
bathtub water.
Sep 23, 2018
Sep 23, 2018 at 8:28 AM UTC
my mundane life
is all too trivial
I am a child
I still live
in my parents house
the one my father built
with his words,
the one my mother
blew spirit into
with her macaronis
the one I sat
in my room
studying in
useless packs
of forgotten information
trying
to cry.
into new notebooks
and ukulele
filling bathtubs
opening windows
letting air
form an air
of beauty
in my ugly
homely
country
unloved country
every being here
utters poorly articulated words
of loath
to you
how do you stand
so strong
whilst staggering within
adversity?
would my life
be more
or less
mundane
if I were nabokov
living in russia
transcending and transmitting
beauty?
coated with cold
and cruelty
thats cruel for cruelty
and aesthetics sake,
rather than
heat
and rage
and silenced
misery.
Feb 24, 2012
Feb 24, 2012 at 5:49 PM UTC
How old are we all, really?
All the years you spent playing catch up.
Running with your broken legs.
More sinister than it seems.
No patrol, no not today sir.
Dead hair in sink drains.
I forgot everything I ever learned at 14.
Fell down the rabbit hole.
Ivy clinging to houses, pulling down walls.
You're pushing up daisies, at least last time I heard.
Somewhere your mother cries and the bells begin to toll.
Blowing old dandelions out,
trying to cash my expired wishes and bring you back.
Wonder how old you were the first time you died.
I was 7.
12.
14.
After that, 16.
Ask me again tomorrow.
Drowning in bathtubs.
Falling out of nests.
Our baby bird wings weren't ready yet.
Cutting your hair at night, rainbows blooming.
Empty train stations with bricks as our luggage.
Nothing left to dream of.
Green water spilling out from beneath the potted plants.
Life is a domino effect.
I've been living in shades
since the day they buried me in robins egg blue.
All I'm really trying to tell you is babe,
I miss you.
Nov 9, 2015
Nov 9, 2015 at 1:42 PM UTC
I don't watch ****
You're more likely to see me squirreling away pictures of elaborate bathtubs, in shame.
Sometimes,
in the still of the night,
I look up well thought-out Murphy-beds and closets that disappear into secret home offices.
I keep a hidden stash of blackout poems
and lewd photos of street artistry around my neighborhood.
I savor notes my best friend gave me during middle school.
I walk a crooked walk down to the seedy underbelly of my past
and read feverishly all my past feelings and relive them to remember how vivid they once were.
But,
just like ****
in watching and re-watching and savoring all the same flavors
everything tastes like mud now.
Mar 17, 2014
Mar 17, 2014 at 10:55 PM UTC
The day we fell in love, the world stood still for the first time.
No movement other than the midsummer air humming electric,
the warmth of our words rising up into dense clouds
and gray atmospheres of sticky potential.
I remember thinking, as our dewy skin melted into the grass,
how strange it was that the world kept turning constantly.
Cars speeding on hazy interstates, babies being born in porcelain bathtubs.
Screen doors slamming in distant houses, ivy crawling across
the windowpanes of writers who will never see their name sprawled
across musky paper spines. Houses torched, brakes cut, hair trimmed.
Somewhere, an arthritic old man sets his newspaper down. It is raining.
He dances, flood water cascading around his ankles. He only thinks of her.
City lights paint taxi exhaust bright green. It is nighttime in the city
and teenagers drive recklessly through underground tunnels,
hands raised through the sunroof of their father’s cars
as the yellow light bleeds into their corneas.
Everything is set in motion, the day’s suffocating inertia of color,
a spinning top cacophony of mindless rebirth.
It is different today. You kiss me softly, velvet-lipped and eager,
and the world stops turning. The streets of Mumbai are silent.
There are no babies screeching in the quiet rooms
of church services, no hearts in the midst of being shattered.
The old man stops dancing.
His eyes are closed, her face still sketched on the backs of his eyelids.
The sky sees nothing but us.
Nov 15, 2016
Nov 15, 2016 at 8:05 AM UTC
this year is my year
i cut my teeth on the years before
i scraged my knees in '15
bled from my bitten tongue in ‘16
'17 saw me merciful and forgiving
and then loveless on the bathroom floor
sitting in bathtubs
my existence held
in the displacement of water in porcelain
this year is my year
try and take it from my bloodied knuckles
take it from my hanging jaw
the years before chipped away at me
with chisel and work roughened hands
the years before cut me out of marble
carved my mouth closed
swathed me in veils, made my stone flesh
look soft
this year is my year
your chisels will blunt on my skin
and when you turn your back
to find something sharper
i'll slip down the stone steps
leave my veils on your studio chair
and melt out into the night
this year is my year
there’s no material thing keeping me
nothing mortal holds me here
this year i am free to drift
between the realms and rifts of space
i will be interstellar
hung in the place between stars
this year is my year
******* try to take it from me
i wonder if the years before
made you into diamonds too
the only thing that can cut me now
is me.
Mar 10, 2018
Mar 10, 2018 at 12:56 PM UTC
fifty years later
you girls wear their old dresses
over sky
blue leggings
lace
and fabric that smells
of lost time
you found them
in stores
with high ceilings
and a sloppily simulated
rustic vibe
you love your
waists tastefully
cinched
and collar bones
concealed
you twirl before
the full length
mirrors and
wish oh how
you wish
you could
have been born
then instead of now
everything
was so much classier!
the women
were a different
kind of beautiful
women
who smoked
in their bathtubs
cardboard hairdos
unraveling
women
elbow deep in
baking
soda and dishsoap
soft secretive
smiles overtaking
their
faces
as they rattled
through the
medicine
cabinet
for a snack
(twice a day)
pregnant again
for
the fourth
time
yet
thin as a rail
somehow
ghosts
in their own
skin
silent but
deadly
crying manically
because of
the smoke
in their eyes
choking gently
on the powder
all over their tight
lovely complexions
dinner ready
at six
sharp as a rusty nail
fantasizing
about what it would be like
to fall in love
with another woman
scuffing their knees
and showing the raw
skin off to all
the young men
with sunlight left over
from childhood still
swimming in their
eyes
or walking home
in the rain
without an umbrella
and having that be ok
slapping their
own faces
at such trecherous
thoughts
obsessing
over how
their mothers did
it with
so much **** grace...
but yes
girls
their clothes
were simply
divine
Feb 2, 2010
Feb 2, 2010 at 11:33 AM UTC
Break
my <3
&
I'll
break
your
****** spine.
I'll curb
stomp
your mind
right back into
the gutter
it was hiding in.
&
I'll kick
your lie- leaking
teeth in.
Guess all the
Cut cauterizing,
Lemon- juice,
bathtubs
I bled-out
in.
Messed me up.
My bad for messing around
with
a ***** up.
Apr 7, 2012
Apr 7, 2012 at 2:03 PM UTC
now i know why twenty-seven
is the age where
people bleed out in bathtubs,
or asphyxiate in the attic
swaying from an angry beam
with a face as blue as
the gown their mother wore
when she introduced them to misery
in a hospital,
or put a bullet to their busy brain
leaving a red Rorschach reminder
of their final moments
on the hotel room wall
that will only be seen
by a 42 year old maid
amidst a guilty type of jealousy
she doesn't understand,
or standing with shaky hands in a kitchen
emptying a bottle of aspirin on the counter
& greedily swallowing the little white teeth
following by gulps of water that feel like boulders
tumbling down a throat
with nothing left to say,
or even spreading their arms wide
like jesus on the cross or like a relative
at the airport waiting for a delayed hug
& jumping from the highest bridge or building
they can find so they can feel weightless,
once.
Sep 7, 2012
Sep 7, 2012 at 2:06 PM UTC
little creature
little creature
little creature
You talk the talk, all sunken-eyed from a not-so-scant dilaudid habit
but you are a dilettante and can't straight walk the walk
compared to she and I, the comparable brunettes.
You go to the bathroom and snort drugs off your lap b/c u r v sick.
When your girlfriend goes to rehab, don't call me to **** you.
You want to **** me because you like the idea of being loved
and you are two-years-too-late out of touch with being a scene queen,
draghino druggies into bathtubs and baking with Lil B.
You're slipping
and I know that, for sure,
because you tried to kiss me
Feb 18, 2014
Feb 18, 2014 at 3:06 AM UTC
Bathtubs
don't encompass
the flicks of your upturned mouth,
or the etchings of chapped lips
that cut your tongue
when you speak.
Your milky figure
pours into the aquamarine warmth below.
The lavender colored bubbles
Pop
in eighth notes and song lyrics
which bounce off the shower curtain
to the rug,
and back.
The water overflows
its porcelain prison
to compensate for the greatness
in your voice
and gets hotter
with each and every breath
you release
from your fire-filled lungs.
It overruns the bathroom,
and floods the hall with each blink of your eye,
each wisp of your lashes,
the floorboards soaking in every freckle
until every surface of mine
is covered in every cell of you.
Nov 6, 2013
Nov 6, 2013 at 1:14 PM UTC
1.
Your love was words written in snow, and they melted into me, not a trace left in the morning as our bodies turned to fire beneath a thin sheet.
The waning heat as night fell returned with a palm to my cheek
And bruises on my throat
Colors that reminisced about sunset cigarettes
And fallen petals from roses cut off at the neck.
I wanted you to sever me in the same way.
2.
Head buried in the sand, I hoped my skin would absorb its hue.
Remember when we made dresses of leaves for cigarette **** dolls?
Those ******** were my friends.
You said that's why you didn't finish the last inch of your beers so I washed them back and watched you take miles and miles
Bottles breaking in quivering hands.
3.
I never minded the taste of blood, so I licked our wounds clean.
I'm beginning to question what "self-inflicted" actually means.
You should have brought me to the hospital that night
Instead you took me and I took another bottle of pills to try to better know that ever elusive quiet.
But quiet is a **** tease and you're meaningless to me.
4.
Silence and quiet are twins
Infantile in their ways
Two drunks stumbling through mounds of glitter from some winter parade.
Streetlights reflecting in their pale eyes
Frostbitten fingers itching at half-turned locks
Their sighs slip through doorjambs whispering of kisses and comfort
Weaving images of abandoned bathtubs into dreams of a lone child sleeping upstairs.
One who longs to be known, yet forgotten.
Dec 17, 2016
Dec 17, 2016 at 4:03 AM UTC
There no longer is light in once brightly lit blue eyes
The light has faded being overrun by
Rotting alone with the steam of the bath drawn
High in heat and low in self esteem
She sits wrinkling in her own decaying moods
The razored edge pressed against the bite plain palm of her left hand
The nails on her right too bitten and bruised from a nervous tick
That was earned over the formidable years of solitude
In the presence of a man, women or child
She chewed those nails untill only ****** stumps remained
To hold the blade against the skin
As she slits the frightened skin, it splits open against the cool metal
Repeatedly freezing her dead beating heart
Giving jumps to an amnesiac heart that forgot
The drums in which it beat alongside to the tune
Peeling at the edges to reveal a rotten core
Oozing with an unknown slime
The black coloured lumps of already clotted blood
From the twenty times before
She took the razor again in her hands
Again and
Again and over
Again.
Slowly and always she's been cutting off her life line
One slit of the vein at a time
Exposing the eroded mess of a body
And the tangles of a decomposing brain that is
Wishing away her life upon a dream
A dream inside the dream of a life that was not her own
The model who lives in anorexia, who cannot actually breathe
But it is what she wishes.
So her bones jut out like flags against the bathtubs silkiness
Her face is sunken, a hallowed place with no life
Her bones etched and engraved with years of fear
From the "dimples" and layers of fat that stuck to her like glue
The "flab" that was skin that hung loosely from her ribs
An aspiration that caused this illness
And set her on the course of searching for a homedial cure
Yet, she is not thin enough, so she cuts away the flesh upon her body
With salt mixing with soap
From her once bright blue eyes and
The suds within the steaming water
That lap against her skin like a cat tongue
Roughly tormenting her already devoured soul
A harsh reminder of what she could never have
So the resolution she came up was to carve away her insides
To give away her vitals to the poor children in the world
In an attempt to be rendered thin and to disappear from plain sight
But she still can't choose what stays and what fades away
Oct 15, 2013
Oct 15, 2013 at 2:27 PM UTC