"bolded" poems
There’s a sign posted outside of the classroom door,
Printed in big, bolded, letters
Forming the words:
“No Phones.”
What?
No phones?
A student, a girl, to be more specific,
Has her phone out in class.
“No phones.”
“But I need to text my mom!”
Excuses, excuses.
What?
No phones?
A student, a boy, to be more specific,
Has his phone out in class.
“No phones.”
“But I need to text my dad!”
Excuses, excuses.
“No phones.”
“I need to text the girl who never replies.
I need to call the girl who never answers.”
The room falls silent.
A heavy, chest crushing,
Silence.
A few days before,
A girl was found hanging by a thread.
She was the girl who needed to text her mom in class.
“No phones.”
“I need to talk to the boy who never speaks,
I need to contact the boy who never goes out.”
Again,
The room falls silent.
A bone crunching, skull splitting,
Silence.
A few days after the girl,
A boy was found with a bullet in his head.
He was the boy who needed to text his dad in class.
Wait.
What was that?
No phones?
Oct 30, 2017
Oct 30, 2017 at 3:53 PM UTC
Stumbling and mumbling like a bumbling idiot
Feeling like a toddler who is barely learning how to speak
The first steps, tiny baby steps
Into this territory called "love"
"Kiddy crushing, puppy loving" --
That's what they all call it.
Tongue twisters, tying my tongue into tight knots.
These feelings puzzle my brain.
Questioning every movement, every moment
Waiting patiently for everything to click together
Two halves of a whole taken apart
By those who think they are better than us
Word goes around and around
But never seems to land on the truth
Avoiding all the right answers
Even if it was right in the center,
Bolded, capitalized letters, and highlighted
Just for you.
It will slap you in the face and tell you,
"Get your head out of the clouds!"
Because you need to realize that real life is not a fairy tale,
Not a story straight from the classics.
It is not told at night before your bedtime,
Before your parents tuck you in and kiss you goodnight.
It is something learned from experience,
Something that walks in at all the wrong times.
It'll walk in through the doors when you're crying
And it could walk in during breakfast while you're making your favorite morning coffee.
It even walks out, sometimes unannounced
Even during your happiest moments.
Because that's what love is:
Unpredictable
May 10, 2013
May 10, 2013 at 11:14 PM UTC
skipped the chapters in the book of love
you on page one
swang from the rafters with the morning dove
rise the evening sun
my letters were bolded
yours were second best to none
more italics and stressed sentences
you a peaceful minded friend
more than previous pronoun
promised to the end
you on stages of laughter
agreement to disagree
me, i went past the laughter
straight fits of arguing
apologies and sorries
lead me into these trees
promise not to skip the page without you next to me
Oct 4, 2012
Oct 4, 2012 at 11:07 PM UTC
melancholy blanketed the whites
scarred voices muffled by
a ****** mind.
an avalanche stuck in my soul
severer than a bee at a forked road
how confused!
red-cheeked petals and afternoon birds glare
in confusions at the footsteps :
unbalance, shaded, muted!
the green umbrella's warm, so scorchingly cold!
all embittered, by solemn beams of the soulless sun.
their eyes widen,
for they had never seen such lone,
for such lone, rare, is forbid to the sons of nature,
never belong to happy child's arms,
that dreams in a mother's charm.
grieving droughts in the air and grass,
no dews, why!,
yawned the madden, soporific rabbit
Ah, so wild.
the windless noontime cross, my quivers stopped, mild.
lashes waxed, blacken like a coal,
mind stuck in a haze, or maybe a threatening maze.
stiffness of the air injected to my nostrils
into my white tongue they will soak, like perfumes to a clothe.
Selene will gaze angrily at this and say,
why no, it shouldn't be in there!
the midnight orchids waver and frown.
soon the frothing dreams peter,
but the bolded letters in a white board stay,
my chair stays.
creaks of an abominable burden became a din.
The smudges of grey-white dust I smelt
hover gaily in the air of pompous breath.
spellbound by the stagnant languor,
mazy, in hallucinations of the heat and homesick.
I sought the fount of hypocrisy and vile,
my hiding nonchalances rosen
(towards a flock of friends)
and loathes to an abominable sun frozen
(I wished it to die!)
Tilted to the windows,
I saw nothing, but fatal secrets of a heart rosed
like window dust to a nose.
Jan 2, 2014
Jan 2, 2014 at 3:45 AM UTC
Please parent me from 3,000 miles away
on your ten minute break
text me questions
Make small talk
Remind me of every little mistake
It’s quite endearing.
That’s all the time you have for me
Unsettling how
In those 10 minutes you turn my world upside-down
Make me feel like a child again
Incapable, helpless, scolded
Certain words bolded
In your messages filled with regret and hate
For four years straight
It’s getting pretty old now
Your words getting colder now
Still don’t know how
You get away with it all
Make me fall
For your fatherly charm
It quickly turns into words of knives
Just as I disarm
And let you back in
You break me down again
Emails telling me just how horrible I am
My friends are left to pick up the pieces
Again and again and again
Each time I think
Maybe he’s changed
Maybe it’ll be different
Maybe he loves me, misses me
Maybe he’s the daddy I used to know
The danger of my maybes:
They never become his truth
As he sweet talks his way back in
Then takes a shot in the dark
With his military aim and malicious heart
“I love you
How’s school?
Congratulations!
I’m so proud!”
Then I blink.
“Grow up!
Stop blaming everyone else
I cried because you didn’t call
You’re selfish, you’re jealous
You don’t know how to love
You don’t understand
If I didn’t run away from you I would be dead”
This pattern is getting old
Tiring my heart and soul
Building up my wall
Blocking people out
Because of the way your text SHOUTS
I am the target of your regret
You are a fine shooter--
Always manage to get
A bull’s-eye
Straight to my heart,
Then the tears start
For days on end.
I am a crying criminal;
A walking zombie in someone else’s life.
I believe all that you say
You’re my father
Shouldn’t you tell me the truth?
So I really must be all those things
It’s all my fault
I’m a bad daughter
A selfish person
The me that I knew is all lies
My own father hates me
So everyone else should too
Oct 25, 2012
Oct 25, 2012 at 1:54 AM UTC
smother optimism.
erase JUSTICE
after it's penned in bolded capitals.
Jul 9, 2016
Jul 9, 2016 at 2:14 PM UTC
- on the prompt "Falling in Love (more than once)"
I thought about
this prompt you gave me.
A girl on a train,
I had fallen in love with,
Silhouette of her hair
border lining the darkness of eventide
towards Bangalore.
We met in a ground a year later,
no intermittent contact held,
like quantum-entangled electrons do,
dumbfounded how it'd happened.
And again on the road in Bangalore
three years later.
A direct line to the eye's sight,
first time, under a morning seeming streetlight.
A latch bolded in the color of the eyes,
I longed to deep dive in.
Words finding silence at the wrong time,
so they resorted to not all things
and happenings having reasons
and fear of consoling a needy
in a fear of an upside down going failure.
And like between life and death are only breaths,
the silence between the sentences
was filled with ours
and death by chocolate,
and thoughts of silences
of the other's mind, unheard of,
aware only of an unbeknownst wind
of familiarity of an unknown kind.
I had fallen in love multiple times,
which is to say I'd sifted through
the earth to the other side
and started rising, from it, in it.
Following down the gushes of time
sinking and rising sensations
of guilty pleasures in the chest, insinuating
that the thing of beauty is a joy forever
but only when not possessed.
*********
There's an old man, my mother's father
not loved by anyone, angry all the time
illogically unnecessarily hurting others,
drunk trashing long hair and glasses,
rusted in the smell of decay.
I make me fall in love with him,
again and again and again,
so that he knows he's not alone,
always.
Apr 10, 2017
Apr 10, 2017 at 6:25 AM UTC
Eyes staring up
To the lovely and strong
Oh, Middy Ocre
Play me a song
That song you do play
The hum of my life
It's always to stay
Stuck in like a knife
I know it quite well
I've heard it before
The sound of my hell
A fresh closing door
Slammed square on my jaw
What did I expect?
No one ever saw
The sounding prefect
I came, then I went
With hardly a glance
I knew I was spent
I had not a chance
For that song in my ears
And everywhere else
Never drew tears
But bolded itself
It stood way up high
Embrazoned in gold
I started to cry
Belittled and cold
Feb 19, 2013
Feb 19, 2013 at 12:44 AM UTC
Crossroads may break ties
Or patch hearts
And as we go our separate ways
When shall we meet again?
With nothing but a map in our palms
And eagerness in our hearts
The time that passes with each passing
Is slow to end though quick to start
Half-world travellers
And wanderlust
Will we still carry
The same old dust?
The stains that plague us
Though we abhor them
Against our own will
Define us
Laughter lines
Italicised
And bolded underlines
Slowly time affixes its mark on us
And the creases make a path
Even then as days of past
Will spirit still be stayed?
When we endeavour to change our paths
Will we find our way back home?
The light is on
As always is
And hope is keeping vigil
Some shall never return
And even if they do
Things change
And feelings pass
The glory days
Have come and passed
And we will never be
As golden as we were
Time can never bring us back
To remedy our wreck
Can we ever move forth
With the lingering longing for the past
To relive days of serendipity
And to find the people we lost along the way
That only begged us to stay
Bravest is the soul
Who can master the tides of past and present
And forge on with nostalgia at the back pushing
While running into the imminent unknown
Perhaps transience is inevitable
But so shall transcendence be
Happiest are the souls
Who are full of hope and vigour
And though crossroads they break apart
Perhaps we'll meet elsewhere afar
Jan 21, 2015
Jan 21, 2015 at 2:45 AM UTC
Today's the first time I've allowed your image to play across my field of vision in a while.
I let myself remember the smile that made me come alive and I'm rotting.
I was always taught not to trust the things that were unknown but the only words I ever believed were those you spoke to me in a language I never knew existed.
I studied you like I did for all my tests in high school. I memorized what I thought was important. I looked at the main points on the outside;
I never connected the dots.
I didn't analyze the deeper meaning of those bolded words in your textbook.
I wonder why I was so shocked when I failed the test.
I've taken plenty of these tests before. Just about all of them are the same.
You were just one of those teachers that knew how to make me feel like I would pass.
That deep, red ink you used to grade my paper matched the fire in your eyes when you handed it back to me, as well as the blood spilled now across my skin, yet again.
That half-smile written across your face
I'm looking at it from in the grave
So it looks more like a frown, to me.
Oct 15, 2013
Oct 15, 2013 at 7:08 PM UTC
once, I got a letter in the mail
I knew it was for me because the handwriting was illegible
and the stamp had a middle-finger
instead of a queen
whoever wrote it knew me well
because the sealed it with a
**** you
and a big, bolded
go to hell
May 29, 2015
May 29, 2015 at 2:45 AM UTC
I wonder if she saw this coming
DID she even think to change?
NOT herself completely but just enough to regain strength?
WHY would she let herself go?
DIDNT she feel herself slipping away?
I miss the happiness in her laugh
TRY i said to her with every breathe i took
I can see her face wash away
HAVE i even tried my hardest
TO keep her here
LET alone, save her from herself
GO she screamed as i stood there silent and stiff
THE eyes of a lonesome girl drifted down
MIRROR mirror on the wall
IS that the girl i should have become?
MY heart sank in my chest
NIGHTMARE or real,my body is at rest
Aug 20, 2015
Aug 20, 2015 at 10:06 PM UTC
I gaze upward
Knowing the sky will lighten soon
inklings of sunlight
now trickle through cheap plastic blinds
dappling the floor with pockets of filtered yellow.
Opening flowers with its fluorescent glare
feeding, eating, replenish.
File darkness into a folder
effectively beginning the day that
echoes with whitening shadows
launched, the golden king rises.
Lick the recycled air in
initiating start-up sequences
kindle drifting thoughts with mental lashings
etch bolded clarity over italic haze in order to
Sever the entanglements of sleep that
croon you back with features
retaining the warmth of your ghosted visage
engulfed in a flower patterned duvet
and the promise of bliss, but
mind the time now
if the alarm is singing...
now,
go.
Jan 23, 2013
Jan 23, 2013 at 9:40 PM UTC
There is no such thing as time,
Just Globe and Mails that go unread,
Mugs of tea that go unsteeped,
and musings, oh so many musings, that go unconsidered.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
In the silence it ticks on…
So keep sighing, with no means to
an end that is inevitable yet
elusive, advertised nowhere
in the bolded Times New Roman type.
So let those breaths rattle through your chest
and remember:
a stopped clock is wrong 22 hours of the day.
Jan 26, 2013
Jan 26, 2013 at 10:13 PM UTC
You are the voices in my head
You are the snickering beneath my bed
The flashbacks,
The voices;
You are.
You are the moments I never want to live again
But you are.
You are my over and over
You are my blood, you are my pain, you are my why.
You are.
And you are the reasons my communication is impaired
Lips cold,
And locked.
You are,
You were
My emotion.
My unaccompanied darkness.
A thought to lay down to.
You were a highlighter to my paper,bolded
Any other words
As if, forgotten
But
You are my strength
And by that I mean the reason I can run,
Run away
There should be more to me than just you
There is
Oh, but you,
You are.
Mar 12, 2015
Mar 12, 2015 at 11:57 PM UTC
If I’d told you anything I would have told you
how I smiled through my tears
when the nurse thought it was the needle
I was afraid of,
how I took enough anesthetic to keep still
a two hundred pound man
but be still my heart, they don’t go by weight,
they feed it right through
to your heartbeat
and how much I wanted consciousness,
to lose the teeth but not the wisdom,
how much I wanted control over my person
that I don’t have over my people.
If I’d told you anything I’d have told you
how your people and mine are at war
like ginger ale and jello,
like the syringe in the drawer and
I bought you a small leather-bound
copy of our favorite play,
the skull will pass between our hands
without a sound,
how I woke up faster than they expected,
everything was worth awake,
they added motrin to my vicodin
and when I finally let myself be swallowed
it was by a too-large army t-shirt.
I’d have said,
my eyes have darkened to the defensive green
they’re wearing over there,
and Arabic is such a pretty language
but mine is bolded blocks,
a defense force defending a country
and a country’s defense of itself,
which is more than I give me.
And you’d have said, I’m sure,
what a waste it is that such a high drug tolerance
is wasted
on the cowardly
Jul 18, 2014
Jul 18, 2014 at 10:08 AM UTC
Words
Loose as old rusted nails plunged in the wall
Missing picture frames of smiling faces
Slip, slip, slipping
Blurring, running from lips held tightly
shut.
Whisper, please whisper.
Don't say a word.
Take it back, pull it back in
That large bolded word
Traveling past
Like a missed Sunday Train.
Sep 14, 2012
Sep 14, 2012 at 11:03 PM UTC
I’m tired of silences,
lingering and vapid,
exhausting our connection waiting
to be founded by our lips too busy
sipping distilled influences so
that we might have the courage to
give ourselves away
Promise me your gaze
by showing me some truth
and swear on your last sip you've
never been this exposed
Confide in me your current thoughts,
despite the dancing static generating
from the nerves bubbling your insides
Let's spill our guts rather these beverages
and soak up our regurgitations
with dry expression, absorbing every
last bit of dejected rejections
Speak erratically and emphatically;
my preference is your face bolded
with a gleam in your eyes,
quotationed brow, and when you blink,
I'll drink your experiences, glean your aimless
journey, until I'm intoxicated by your
imperfect perspective
Jul 5, 2013
Jul 5, 2013 at 4:25 PM UTC
The dry eraser has a soft, light, grey fluff
with a brush black finish,
that's been tainted by the imprints of black ink,
and a black rectangular prism,
that also has the word "EXPO" bolded in large letter
in an organized yet artistic fashion
as if to say,
"I erase ink"
This particular eraser has...
Nov 1, 2019
Nov 1, 2019 at 10:27 PM UTC
Oh, what an ironic crossroad.
Depending on what I learn, or who I've known.
This static plagues my head until it fades out into the grey.
The page is ripped out it's missing as they say.
Tell me what I need to know.
Describe what makes me whole.
How can I repent after all of the damage I have done?
I've lied and I've stolen.
I've tried to stay golden.
The paint chips off and the copper stays showing.
I never stood a chance and I'm feeling content.
The words said are clear because they're black and sit bolded.
Apr 24, 2014
Apr 24, 2014 at 1:59 AM UTC
I remember
when i was young
and life was just a dream
i loved the simple things it had
like the vivid outlook on life itself
which wasn't all that bad
Dec 9, 2014
Dec 9, 2014 at 7:44 PM UTC
from his hand, the cotton folded,
and from hers, she spun rough string.
then from his, the letters bolded,
but from her tongue no songs to sing.
from his heart, he felt no pumping
her cuts and scrapes had not left marks,
from the wheel, he heard the thumping,
from her eyes, she looked as stark.
their posture spoke obedience,
with feet and arms that hurt as such,
in their thoughts, all fists were clenched,
though their souls felt cold to touch.
from his hand, the paper stolen,
and from hers, the same, again,
and in his mouth, the gums were swollen,
her eyes, a place always like fen.
“respect” their cold leader once said,
“is what you ought to have.”
their labor left them feeling dead,
and for this, he had no salve.
from the thread they harvested,
they sewed him his expensive clothes,
and once the laborers felt bested,
he raised his hand, more came in droves.
Oct 30, 2018
Oct 30, 2018 at 6:36 PM UTC
Hair secured like a bonnet around the back of her mind
flowing down like a water-fall divided by crag over cliffs,
I look back and its in a tail but hardly pony, almost as long as our conversations, talking about the tunes got me loony,
cant wait to call you roomy, see you when your'e moody,
Soft hands molded like the clay they manipulate,
Soft words bolded by the way they abdicate, from her lips,
Oh my, you have me falling, floating, oh wait I think I just tripped.
Nov 16, 2017
Nov 16, 2017 at 11:34 AM UTC