"bookmark" poems
Late night car rides,
Empty pints of *****
A one-night ecstacy,
With a heartbreak dawn:
She shows her shallows,
As if they're great depths;
A cry of sorrow? Honey,
You ain't seen nothing yet.
She's not an open book,
She's just a bookmark type of personality.
Stuck between the pages of something more interesting,
Like a catalog or a Cosmo magazine.
Oh, she's always just caught between someone's pages,
With bits and pieces of their's stories rubbing off on her,
But them words don't look the same tattooed on her, oh no.
So stop pretending you're the deepest sea,
Your pretentious crap never fooled me.
Aug 6, 2014
Aug 6, 2014 at 12:45 PM UTC
Americana is not Greyhound.
People come and go like life,
Attached to the waiting random.
The road feels longer,
Relief of excretion and sanitation,
Home spreads everywhere.
Sitting strangers are stories,
Riding by unknown sceneries,
Thinking about their hometown,
Wondering if they will reach their destination on time.
Earphone music connects memories to a person so vividly,
It feels like a new chapter in my life,
Bookmark the important ones with parts of me,
It feels like I’m departing,
From something small to somewhere big.
It’s
already
an adventure
once the first
step is made
with you.
Oct 27, 2014
Oct 27, 2014 at 3:09 AM UTC
day through night, i face the same fate
my flesh inches closer to its expiry date.
a hell:
my mind is at its limit,
and my body; no longer mine.
each minute goes by, i pray to gods,
every holy name, those i've never heard of,
pray, pray with all my might -
choose a different girl to feast on tonight.
my face was stolen from a world of debris
to support a family i'll never again see
i sold myself, let me be bought,
for just two coins, a price of naught.
a customer.
i tell myself,
don't open your eyes,
don't move a muscle.
hands on my thighs - deja vu
my body to her is just revenue.
memories of every night still live within my body - a bookmark telling me i'll never be my own. a constant image of flesh flickers behind my eyelids every time i close my eyes.
give me my body back.
Dec 9, 2018
Dec 9, 2018 at 11:49 PM UTC
Write me your vows on paperflesh
Pen me your desires in lovers blood
Slip it in an envelope, seal it with a kiss
And I shall trace it, with the same pen
dripping still with lover's blood.
Curve your spine over my desk
And spread yourself open as a book
Desire lines penned upon your chest
Heartstrings bared, across open pages
covered with lover's blood.
Bookmark the chapter of desire
Close the cover in the dark
And retrieve my pen, an empty needle
from ****** page fold.
No longer dripping with lover's blood.
Nov 10, 2011
Nov 10, 2011 at 10:59 PM UTC
For the readers
Nerds, geeks, book lovers
Wizards, Hobbits, and Tributes,
believing in unseeable lands.
Minds grow restless to travel
through the fluttering pages
of these paper portals,
Bookmark today and visit
another version of reality.
Brave enough to love
people they can’t see.
People they will never meet
People who would understand them
The way no one else does
Smart enough to know
this world isn't worth staying
Dystopian lands often favorable
To our own growing demise
Wholeheartedly believing
in the fictional and loving the unreal.
Attempts to turn the nonfiction fiction
To self hypnotize away today's chaos
You must have one hell of a heart
to seek refuge
in another's imagination,
and be able come back
to reality when your done
and try to to love this world.
Nov 8, 2018
Nov 8, 2018 at 1:42 PM UTC
This is a bookmark from your life
a bookmark in mine
a piece of paper
briefly stopping time
bringing our together our stories
or else maybe a thorn
burying itself
within my heart
' Felicity', your name
means joy but can you bring me any
did you even know
he would give it to me
the glitter, single yellow feather
carefree yet placed calculatedly
upon the red background
red as your distant country's flag
I forget how old you must be now
six, I presume
you've not yet started to ask
about his life yet prior to you, your sister
& your mother
& why should you
my moon faced stranger
all fortune cookies & rice,
straddling two worlds
from birth, a similarity
that in any other life
would make me want to call you
' sister' & forgive everything
Your birth, he
did not deserve, not being a loving
man, as you will find out
once you've grown
out of being a toy
& start to rearrange
the furniture of boundaries
if you should ever find out
about us, my mother & me
& what he did
that will be the time to see
if your heart's worth loving
if so, just call me
I'm leaving you my number
in my mind
Sep 25, 2015
Sep 25, 2015 at 7:33 AM UTC
"I knew this girl once,
she had long hair, so long it whispered tiny kisses along her hips and waist
she had the oddest bluest eyes i'd ever seen, the color of the sky right before it gets completely dark
her thick, long eyelashes framed those eyes, and freckles formed constellations across her cheeks
i could almost draw the big dipper and Orion's belt on her milky white face.
She didn't know i existed but i admired her from afar. I could tell she was educated- She always had some form of poetry in her hand. But of all the things i could have noticed about her i noticed her bookmarks. She would lose them all the time, i would see her chasing after the scraps of paper as they flew through the wind down the street. She'd stick anything in between those pages, wrappers of all sorts, leaves, pennies, shoelaces, once i even saw a page ripped from a different book. It became my favorite game to guess what the next bookmark would be. After awhile she stopped chasing the various bookmarks across the city and she cut all that long hair off, then awhile after that she started using unoriginal, uninspired plain old bookmarks.Then even awhile that she stopped bringing books altogether, until one day she didn't show up. Nobody knew that beautiful, mysterious, bookmark making girl was locked up inside her own mind. Nobody knew she hated her long hair and her freckles and even those baby blues. Nobody knew that she couldn't stand to live in her skin anymore so much that she swallowed a couple pills one night to ease away the pain. Even worse was she didn't know i watched her for so long and thought she was the most interesting human being i'd ever encountered. That girl committed suicide because she hated herself learn from her mistake, my mistake, everyone who ever noticed her bookmarks mistake, and don't do this, don't off yourself with a .45 before you've even had a chance to live" he's desperate now
"please please you don't have to do this" he sputters
I answer simply " I never was much of a bookmark girl, i always dog-eared my pages"
bang
Nov 6, 2013
Nov 6, 2013 at 6:35 PM UTC
when she says she is empty,
she is not asking to be filled.
stretch her thin and you will see
gold
peeking through her worn body.
stretch her thin and you feel her
fire
burning what you hold.
do not hold her.
when she says she is numb,
she is not asking to feel something.
do not wait out her novocaine
mood
drooling down her chin.
do not wait out her novocaine
high
she is elated.
do not bring her down.
she is a bookmark holding someone else's place:
do not move her.
someone left her,
waiting,
she does not know the other side:
that does not mean you show her.
someday she will be fire.
she will dry all that she has soaked with her
ravine heart.
you will follow her black markings to something
gold
she will be followed.
do not be surprised when she does not moan,
she will not moan,
she does not feel.
she is still ice.
when she says she is ice
do not try to melt her.
she will be fire.
Mar 27, 2017
Mar 27, 2017 at 10:46 PM UTC
Like a drug taken for a quarter century, this writing doesn't help like it use to...
See,
I'm starting to feel like it's working against me
Holding me here in pain and misery
Cleverly disguised as creativity
I use to lie and say it was a way to get rid of all this negativity
But I've spilled so much blood and tears onto stationary
...and not even purely metaphorically...
I should be completely empty
Hell, I think I might be
I think it's moved onto draining my energy
Can I still call this writing therapy?
Is it healthy or does it keep me from a new me?
Holding tightly but in spite of me
Hiding a different side of a complex personality
A new level of maturity
Is it actually helping any?
Today it's hard to say, but maybe
Unfortunately, it's something I'm good at, a skill I enjoy and I don't have many
So I've begun to notice I look at it differently
It was suppose to help me let go of the painful unpleasantry held in many a memory
But it woke a part of my ego that I didn't know would grip so tightly
It might have been a mistake to rely on it so heavily
It's no longer moving along the story
No cautionary tales to learn from because they never become history
It becomes a bookmark that I don't use properly
I never move it to the page I left off on and now, I must admit openly, I'm doing it purposely
I keep the worst of me right next to me, close as a frienemy
All because I notice I DON'T write when I'm happy
And I like to write so I dance around emotions strategically
I don't know if it's anything worth saying but writing is calling and drawing me in closely
A ghostly presence that when I look closely I see my identity
It hasn't always been but is now a big part of me
But does it want all of me?
Can't say either way with any certainty
No AH-HA moment, no clarity, only a death grip on disparity
So I recklessly walk the line of happy and tragedy
Like a DUI test on the side of the freeway, drunken pageantry
Eyes closed usually
No thought of mine or anyone else's safety
Dangerously close to calamity
And I just worry
©2024
Jan 3, 2024
Jan 3, 2024 at 6:32 PM UTC
I wrote titles on strips of paper,
Books that I planned on reading,
On my shelf that contained one empty shelve,
I rolled them into *****
And threw them into the cup,
Shaking up the titles,
I get a Mo Yan.
Then I get a Charles Dickens,
The paper ***** get reshuffled again.
I pick again, it’s Mo Yan.
The third time, it’s Mo Yan
READ ME, HE YELLS.
His short stories were read,
a few months ago.
Chinese folktale like stories,
With satire of Modern China.
But none of his novels,
were touched.
In one of them,
The bookmark stops at 300.
Apr 9, 2014
Apr 9, 2014 at 2:54 PM UTC
for AR and Maria, oh heck,
for The Crew
**A dog ear is a phrase that refers to the folded down corner of a book page, a dog ear can serve as a bookmark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears**
~~~~~~
we fold a page corner down,
here we pause in this poetry book,
for now, a marker of incompletion,
or not
a passage, a phrase,
whole stands on its own,
but today crew,
slated for an exit,
a return-to-someday,
but aside, aside, discarded till...
*all on that day
run to the mountain,
the mountain wont hide you
run to the sea,
the sea will not have you
and run to your grave,
your grave will not hold you
all on that day*
so I, sinnerman,
injured my book,
I hurt that page
disgraced, act of disgraceful,
but
I am injured
and don't have no cares
but come the day of
return
the day I hope to must to believe in,
twice as much,
all on that day,
when the sea,
the mountains,
and the risen dead,
have me back,
to my proper place
even though
will be dog tired,
to that dog-eared page,
in that worn old notebook
return,
pick up
my sticks,
my pens,
that have no erasers,
start again
just where I know,
just when I don't,
but this why I know,
but to that dog-eared return,
the page where
I died,
I shall return,
all on that day
~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to all on that day?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to all on that day?
Run to the moon, "Moon, won't you hide me?"
Run to the sea, "Sea, won't you hide me?"
Run to the sun, "Sun, won't you hide me all on that day?"
Lord said, "Sinner man, moon'll be a bleeding"
Lord said, "Sinner man, sea'll be a sinking"
Lord said, "Sinner man, sun'll be a freezing all on that day"
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to all on that day?
Run to the Lord, "Lord, won't You hide me?"
Run to the Lord, "Lord, won't You hide me?"
Run, run, "Lord, won't You hide me all on that day?"
Lord said, "Sinner man, you should've been a praying"
Lord said, "Sinner man, should've been a praying"
Lord said, "Sinner man, should've been a praying all on that day"
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to all on that day?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to?
Oh, sinner man, where you're gonna run to all on that day?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4h55nVbt4c
May 18, 2014
May 18, 2014 at 11:41 AM UTC
The mind is like an unapart book with a bookmark. Words surround where you are; thoughts. They are written on your hands. You feel them. They are inside two sleeves. All of them. The book is you. The walls surrounding within hear the words and their ears respond in ink. The walls are thin paper that never are as blank as slight movement from the wind, only always catching stick figures, shot like fingers. All of you moves and touches paper all around you. You are weighted down in ink. The present moment between dreams practicing in that mind. That mind alive and thinner than one stroke, briefer than lines from the fast belly curves of your heart. Moving.
Oct 4, 2012
Oct 4, 2012 at 11:26 PM UTC
i take what i love about myself and wear it as a badge of honor, but at night i stare at the ceiling
and list all the things i hate. i stamp it in a
journal and time-date it, bookmark the
page i left off on and i put the leather
bound away. once a year i visit
what i hate about myself and
find that as long as the
feelings are inked
on a page and
not weighing
heavy on my
chest, there
isn’t much
to hate
at all.
May 16, 2021
May 16, 2021 at 10:29 PM UTC
...
*And just like that, I was drifting again. I was slipping into the folds of static, describing the abyss as I drowned. I fell from altitudes of happy to suicidal in only a manner of insidious seconds, because that's how it goes. You think you have what it takes to be ice but in reality, you're only shattered water.
It comes when I think of them. The urge to succumb into my own ghost has never been so appealing until now. But there are visitors here, the twins grief and guilt have been uninvited guests in a home held together by dried flowers for ceilings and walls of teeth. I have learned to confuse my name with wreckage under their supervision.
The brothers tell me how to do it, how to **** myself without hurting anyone else that I love. But they only speak their diseases to me when all my fight has bled out onto the kitchen floor as the latest mosaic. Then they feast, and teach me the art of being empty through their hungry wolf bites. I remember how to breathe in a shallow way so my skeleton won't fall apart. I haven't had to do that in a very long time. Guilt reminds me the idea of shrinking is hereditary, while grief tells me it's time to practice that now.
When I want to hurt myself I want to do very strange things. I want to ask cigarettes to try to strangle my lungs with smoke as weak as a newborn. It reminds me of what is missing. The sweetest punishment is often the deadliest. When I want to hurt I pick fights with my grief or guilt just so I can lose again, just so I can keep the moon in the same spot in the sky. Just so the stars will pity the same people. I am sick, I am sick, I am sick. Welcome to the sickness, amen.
When I want to die, I rinse my soul out and leave it to dry. Like a flower that will become brittle and turn into a bookmark to mark the page where my life left off. I allow myself to deliberately stop holding the weight of the sun and I allow the sky to crush me softly.
I let the tsunamis out of their cages.
I cup his face,
he is beautiful and he is holding what remains;
I will let love hurt me in unspeakable ways,
until death too, dies.*
---"How to turn cancer into god."
Mar 31, 2017
Mar 31, 2017 at 12:10 PM UTC
Pressed flowers
Forgotten in the pages
Of the that book
Oh what was it called
But anyway,
That book is sitting
In my father's bookshelf
Somewhere between
A history of the civil war
And an encyclopedia from 1949
It is lost in the depths
Of my mother's bookshelf
There the book with the pressed flowers
Covered in dust and memories
Waits for me to recapture the lost moments
Collecting and absorbing the words
And ideas trapped within the binding
Lost flowers, pressed in time
Lost in the pages of my childhood
Bookmarked, forever.
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 11:28 AM UTC
*if only I knew how to love...
for my Victoria
winces-grimaces, that these words even leave my fingertips,
reminiscences, a chrome bookmark tab full of decades of near misses,
instances, subway sideway stolen daily glances of she who would be the only, the one, but one day failed to appear, left to dream peer,
and/or
decades long of romanced lasses, flying spectacular super crashes, when my heart-blanched, lanced, and the lawyers danced, poems shriveled as dried ink crack'd and words rusted shut,
cut by so many p'raps, and ugly motives, beautiful covered up, disguised as synapses of sin and insincerity, and I,
the sad man,
both the sinner and the sinned against,
totalities, of shoulda-woulda-asked/kissed-her-gallantly,
activities, when kisses were doorways to trap door rooms
and an over decorated monte cristo prison cell
ah well
the 'and yet,' the 'but for,' a single finger, sealing silenced lips,
passions mourned and irrevocable sensations, frittered, fractured,
all that I calmly called love was sprigs and broken branches,
cut flowers destined to shrivel,
not of what I believed in, something akin to a tree rooted, an oaken strong unbreakable love
of this certain, all approximations, all failed incantations,
for surely, if but only one escaped, could have been saved,
and if truthful love it was,
I would have known it,
for would I have dared to let slip away?
Jul 14, 2017
Jul 14, 2017 at 6:05 PM UTC
Pushing my mother
in her wheelchair
through the forest
in the park,
I see my sister
picking up a leaf
and handing it
to mom
who asks
what should I do with it
and I suggest
using it
as a bookmark
for her daily words
and so I put the red leaf
in her pocket
and we roll on.
Oct 8, 2011
Oct 8, 2011 at 7:19 AM UTC
Scribbled in a pre-sex haste
of hormones and awful
music taste,
your name on the back of a receipt
is no way to treat
a one night stand
that you met at the bar;
held hands with in the street;
and subsequently left when
the night became light and neat,
tidied up in a 10am alarm clock
call.
Could’ve waited until
we were both awake,
that way the alcohol would’ve warn off
and we could take this major issue
for what it was-
excitement;
and much anticipation; and placing into
action every lesson learnt from Nick Hornby books,
or pieces of information tucked
deep within our internet bookmark lists.
At least stay until after
Desert Island Discs
next time,
because then buses shall be running
on time, and you won’t have to risk
the public transport roulette table
that spins around this town,
this great noun in the Anglia east.
Now it's the news, and the news
is you've gone. For a moment
I slipped back into a sleepy cement,
making for rough fingers-
that last night made the ascent
up to warmer climates.
And now back to lonelier nights
and Nick Hornby books,
afternoon wake-up calls
from Mum, back home,
asking how to download
the latest Google Chrome.
Feb 14, 2013
Feb 14, 2013 at 6:00 AM UTC
I kept the pages of your heart
Bookmarked
Knowing that one day I’d lose my place
In them
And that you might
Open that book again, and show me where I fit
Sep 22, 2011
Sep 22, 2011 at 11:58 AM UTC
You told me all poetry is about *** or God
Because you know that I have a map of your body well memorized in my mind
And I touch your hands like I'm turning the pages of a Bible
A bookmark I forgot about from the chapter in my life when I believed without reservations
But I love you like a sinner because it seems
you are my last chance of paradise
Oct 12, 2017
Oct 12, 2017 at 4:52 PM UTC
flipping the pages of the last book you made me read makes me feel like i've been suffering dyslexia for some time now
so hauntingly familiar
not in any way foreign to me
a photo falls so delicately onto my stained rug
the photo i used as a bookmark
the photo of us i've kept hidden
and forgotten
the photo of you handing a couple dollars
to somebody not in the camera's view
the photo with me beside you
gratefully smiling
as i munch on a waffle
the waffle i spit out right after
the photo that reminds me of the horrid taste of that waffle
it's taste almost as bad as what i feel for you
Jul 9, 2015
Jul 9, 2015 at 5:05 AM UTC
The Poet is the language,the mystery of Monalisa's smile,
the brush of Caravaggio and the finest painting of Vangogh.
The Poet is the sonnet of Mozart anf the symphony of Bach,
a tragedy of Shakespeare and the saddest verse of Pablo Neruda.
The Poet is the blue Danube in waltz and the Swan Lake in Ballet.
The Poet is the renaissance of passion and the remnant of life,
the dilemma of morality,the shadow of deed,and the ombra of sin.
The Poet is the fantasy of each Sunrise and the illusion of every Sunset,
the wave in tide of wishes,carried in a bottle to dune drunk shore.
The Poet is the believer, dream lover in a hot passionate crazy affair,
the magician who creates fables and fairytales from a deadly reality.
The Poet is the worker who works and works to survive,to cope in this
demanding,sophisticated,stigmatic concrete hypocratic world.
The Poet is the thief of time,with eyes flutterin on late nights,
Still loyal to the pen,His thoughts in verse,bleedin fragranted words.
The Poet is an Omnipotent servant,with a will to ask and crave to learn.
A Philosopher,whose always an amateur in the pursuit of wisdom.
The Poet is an eternal slave of His Muse,the beverage of inspiration,
the spouse married to literature,adulterer of lyric,deceiver of prose.
He Knows no lapsus in all that is scandalous,royalty or sacred.
He is the artist, musician, actor,the clairvoyant of destined paths.
He is the cheap clay's mold,carved in the sculpture of the next century.
The Poet is the unfinished book,the chapter in yesterday,
He is the Nobody of today and the bookmark of tomorrow.
T H E POET IS YOU ! ! !
Nov 6, 2010
Nov 6, 2010 at 10:29 PM UTC
at the desk, applying for jobs
there is coffee in my cup
and paint in the creases of my fingernails,
on the wall, a whiteboard with new song lyrics
and a list
of things I need to buy,
of course, once I have the money to buy them,
which brings me back to the desk
which an empty bottle of Cabernet Merlot
sits with an empty glass
and notebooks and a mason jar
with cloudy brown-red water
from the bristles of my paintbrushes
my coffee is cold
the french press is in the kitchen
but my flatmate is filming in there
so I’m stuck at my desk
with two sips of cold coffee left,
applying for jobs.
I feel very fragile
right now,
partly because I didn’t go to a job interview
today,
partly because I didn’t go to a job trial,
on friday
though I don’t want to be a waitress
and **** modelling for art classes scares me.
there’s a plant on my windowsill
named Lucy
and she doesn’t have to do anything
and there are two vanilla candles and an incense holder
with lavender incense burning
but **** all the things that
"bring peace"
like small plants, candles, incense, crystals and photographs;
I want a healthy and clean life,
so I have these things
part as a protection
from my own mind
but to be perfectly honest,
I’m at the desk, browsing jobs online,
saving them for later into a bookmark folder entitled
"Wellington Jobs"
instead of actually applying.
Nov 24, 2013
Nov 24, 2013 at 10:08 PM UTC