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Oliver Henderson Jan 2017
you tapped my shoulder
and whispered in my ear

"thats wrong. fix it"

my gaze followed
your long, boney finger
down to the skewed papers
on the desk next to mine

i simply shook my head and answered with
"no, thats not mine to touch"

i started to ignore
your fervent tapping and whispering
but it moved up
to screaming and shaking my body
i couldnt hold myself back any longer

i quickly grabbed the papers
and filed them
making sure they were neat
before setting them back down

you were happy
it was casual
it was normal

so i started to
live by your rules
letting your gentle taps and whispers
tell me what to do

i would fold my gym clothes
in the same order every day
i would sanitize my hands
before and after every single class
i would fix peoples binders, paper, and pencils
just to please you

then it changed

others started to laugh
mess up the clothes i neatly folded
push my papers out of order
hold me back
as they made everything crooked
watching me struggle against their hands
as i tried to break free
to fix it all

you were screaming
telling me how those fingertips
were touching my body
infecting me

you were violently shaking me
saying how wrong the mess was
that i had to fix it

fix it
fix  it
fix it

i still do as you say
abide by your rules
the laughing and taunting
has disappeared now
as i freely fix my things

theres the occasional question and statement
"why dont you just leave it?"
"it isnt that important"
"the mess wont affect you"

none of them know
of you looming behind me
a strict ruler of my mind
telling me they were wrong

no
none of them will know
they wouldnt never understand
how important your pure touches and words are
to the filthy, messy place
that is my mind
Mizar Shephard Jan 2015
People can control a lot. Your emotions, your apearance to them and the way you seem. They have full control but don't know how to man the system. The whole emotional pad is set up with color coded buttons for the controler to figure out. There's no way all the systems are the same, they have new colors. You can stick with one pad but sometimes other controls intrest you. And maybe your hand is too small for a lever on a pad, that means there is flaw that doesn't compare to you. There's no need to abandan that system. You learn to gear away from that part or find a way to use it. Sometimes when gears are rusty there is a way you can clean them out and fix them, this is called improving a person. This might be mixed with the way you might see a gear a different way, in that case, if they ask you politely with their Politomiter, accept that they just want to be themselves. And that is a fulltime atomatic H.U.man.
Rissa Lav May 2018
It’s the mornings you wake up and the heaviness of your eyes are nothing compared to the heaviness in your chest. It’s the moments throughout the day you’re surrounded by all that love and adore you and you are still drowning in the loneliness. It’s the nights you lie awake wired with a megaphone prompter set to the highest volume in your skull repeating all of those thoughts you swore you’d never say aloud. It’s the seconds, the minutes, the hours, days, weeks, months that you feel as if you feel nothing in attempt to feel everything and you’re trying so hard to get to the surface of land while you’re drowning in the middle of the ocean, too heavy to swim. You see where you want to be and as you move every joint in your body, you’re going nowhere but down. Down. Down. Down to the bottom of your heart, down to the bottom of your stomach, to the bottom of your toes. The fuzzy feeling of a television on the fritz the black and white static going in and out, the blurry vision of nothing while all is in front of you and yet you are still sinking, drowning like the fish that can’t swim, you’re still watching that grayscaled fuzz and listening to the muffled up noises on the television that you can’t clearly make out while the remote is in your hands. That’s the worst part about it. That’s the ugly truth of it all. That our struggle, while it entails pain and chaos, we have the controls to change them. Our stories are complex. Maybe we can’t change the characters or the rising actions. It may be possible that the ****** is our of our control. We can’t do anything about how we got in the middle of the ocean, or how we turned the broken channel on, But within the falling action of it all, we can get ahold of it. We can grasp at it, tug on it, and we can morph it into our life jacket. We can build it into our own remote controler, we can change the perception of it all. The plot twists, the cliffhangers, those are what we can encompass and embrace, what we ourselves control and can incorporate to change the story. It is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate a story or poem just as it is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate our own story. Because in the end of it all, it comes down to what we are doing about it. Are we the ones putting rocks in our clothes so rather than our floating, we proceed to the very depths of suffocation? Are we the ones that pressed the volume button on the remote in order for the static to grow higher and higher to the point of deafness? As you reflect on your story, are you reading your metaphors right, are you interpreting the imagery and creative visualizations in a way that shows beauty within the ugly, are you appreciating the art of similes and detail that you were able to create throughout whatever your story entails? Or are you so engulfed in your ineptitude to look at the whole picture as just that, with no interpretation of it all? You only read your monologues rather than the dialogues within. You sparknoting your life. Have you ever taken an exam after sparknoting a book and it’s only when you have the lines of the paper in front of you that you realize that you know nothing? That’s what you’re doing when you only dwell on the obvious of your life. You’re not searching within to fill the plot holes and answering questions that are worth answering. Take advantage of syntax. The descriptions of the water, how cold it may feel emotionally and physically or why you can’t seem to turn the channel of your television when it’s only placing you in a realm of distress. You see what everyone sees, you know what everyone knows without ever understanding. It’s the words in between that tell a reader what to feel and why you feel that way. You’re cheating yourself out of individuality and the acceptance of a resolution worthy of acceptance. So as you write the rest of your story, write it in a way that will make you content with the ending. Give yourself an ending that you are satisfied with, that makes it easy to close the book and start on to the new one- because remember, you are not the only one reading it. Be proud of your story. Give your character the lifejacket. Give yourself the life jacket.

— The End —