"gumball" poems
i always find you in the strangest places.
i find you in song lyrics, dog toys, and timber old spice.
i find you in chicken flavored ramen noodles, every shade of blue and purple, and horror movies.
i find you in rainbow coloring books, permanent markers, and colored pencils.
i find you in the grass at memorial park, folded slips of paper in my back pocket, and gourmet lollipops.
i find you in hot fudge sundaes, too-big tshirts, and icp snapbacks.
i find you in chik-fil-a receipts, gumball machines, and arcade games.
i find you in white roses, blue ribbons, animal crackers, and sour gummy worms.
i always find you in the strangest places.
but these strange places are everywhere.
Aug 26, 2018
Aug 26, 2018 at 1:06 AM UTC
1.
People say you can tell a lot about a woman's style by what her nails look like.
For my mother, acrylics with baby pink sparkly french-tips.
For the blonde sitting at the nail dryer, coral.
Something about the color
looks strange with her new engagement ring.
She talks about how the second time she hung out with her fiancé
she asked him to paint her nails.
Her mother, who she insists she'll pay for, gets french tips.
They look new and fresh in contrast to her tarnished wedding ring.
The little girl with skinned knees and bug bites sitting in the chair across from me asks for blue polish on her toe nails.
Her mother tells her she should get pink.
2.
The act of women getting their nails done reminds me of warriors being armed for a fight.
long acrylics,
pointed,
rounded,
squared,
all fit for different types of battle.
Pointed for the woman who has to walk home alone at night,
rounded for the woman in the workplace who must work harder than her male co-workers,
and square for the woman at home raising her kids to know that strength and kindness
are the same thing.
3.
The women who work here speak better English than most high school students.
And their accents tell stories that I will never know.
An older woman speaks loudly and slowly,
she treats them as if they do not understand.
She will not speak to anyone but the owner; she wants him to translate what she wants to the salon workers.
What she doesn't realize is
that she is the only person here who doesn't understand.
4.
The little girl's doll is named Tessa.
She tells me that she likes my hair and shoes,
even though she has been told not to talk to strangers
twice in the last hour she has been here.
She asked her mother for change,
we all assume it's for the gumball machine in the corner.
She puts all of it in the charity jar.
I hope this girl never changes.
5. Having bare nails in a nail salon
feels the same as being naked in public.
6.
I feel terrible for laughing at the women trying to walk in those little salon flip-flops.
Some look like ducks,
others look like trained Barbies;
marching
newly polished,
ready for the world to chip away their coating
over,
and over,
and over again.
Feb 4, 2017
Feb 4, 2017 at 5:04 PM UTC
I was last on the register, so
as soon as I said
that I was still there
everyone stood up and left.
Katie was still there
and she pointed at me and
asked me if I was coming tonight.
I said that guessed not and she asked me
If I knew that she wasn’t
my girlfriend.
I didn’t answer so she informed me
that I wasn’t allowed to be jealous that
she goes to parties that I don’t.
I asked, ‘what party?’ and she rolled her eyes
and left. I walked out of the classroom alone and
wondering what the hell just happened.
James saw me across the yard
and shouted
if I was coming tonight.
I told him to **** off
and walked quicker
every time he tried to
call me back.
A few kids on the bus
swore at me through
the open window, their
middle fingers and crude words
working together in pitiless tandem.
I turned up the volume
in my ipod
and kept on walking.
It carried on snowing. It had been
three days now and three times
we had been called to assembly
so the headmaster could announce
which schools had been closed for the day.
That morning he was
proud to tell us
that we were the only school
in the area
to still be open.
The snow was four inches deep
and rising and grey and dangerous.
Through the frosted windows
in the front door I could see
my keys. I kicked the wall
and nearly shattered my toes.
I climbed over my gate to the back of my house.
For a while I thought about
breaking a window.
The cat found me and pawed me shins
and I told her I was sorry,
but I couldn’t let her in the house.
I sat in a frozen plastic chair
and looked across the white
and green garden. The cat
joined me, and sat on my lap,
her body as close to me as possible.
I zipped her up inside my jacket
so only her head poked out and
we sat there,
watching cartoon’s on my ipod.
Batman fought The Joker again, and
Gumball finally got to kiss Penny.
The Joker escaped again
and Gumball realised
that it was all a dream.
It got cold and dark and eventually
both the cat and I fell asleep.
My mother shook me awake
and unzipped my jacket to let the cat out.
She asked me if I had a good day at school, and
I rubbed my eyes
and told her that
I couldn’t remember.
Oct 12, 2012
Oct 12, 2012 at 10:53 AM UTC
I’ve had this red heart shaped locket
for 12 years now.
I got it as a gumball prize
at a rundown Chinese restaurant
(maybe in Germantown?)
A lot of the paint has chipped off
and the tiny keys to it are long gone.
What shows beneath the paint
is shinny tin.
When I was a tacky teen
I would wear it clasped around my
neck imitating Sid but not
knowing it.
I always wanted someone to give me
something like this
but I impatiently jumped the gun and
cranked the dial of the machine
myself,
and the tiny Valentine rolled out.
(SINCERELY, YOURS TRULY)
No sentiment to share.
Now I’m nearly 30
and it hangs on my key chain,
a teenaged 50 cent memory
amongst adult responsibility.
If you see me standing crossed arm at a show,
and spy my red locket,
know that I’m an advocate of
living in the past,
and harboring silly passions.
Oct 1, 2013
Oct 1, 2013 at 1:24 PM UTC
Let it always be
Us beneath this tree
Brittle leaves in our hands
Are crushed forever into sand
And someday so will we
And I want you to know
I'll hold you through the snow
The treeflowers will bring
Us their fruit in the spring
So we never have to go
I promise to stay true
Like the strong wind which blew
All the leaves from your hair
They turned to dust in the air
And one day we will too
Oct 31, 2011
Oct 31, 2011 at 4:46 PM UTC
I am a ragdoll stuffed with two-cent cotton imitation in a factory in China.
My arms and legs moved by hands seen through mismatched button eyes.
my only desire is to be like other dolls: Barbies, Polly Pockets. Big eyes and plastic bodies.
My pills come in a bottle like a gumball machine, dispensing one brightly colored sphere at a time.
Pills to make me, like them.
The artificial emotion seeping into my veins.
Sweating out my pores.
Plastering smiles on my face, and ironing rainbow patches behind my eyes.
A giant sugar-coated crutch shoved under my armpit.
Force-fed lying happiness.
Here comes the choo-choo into the tunnel.
I am a cat eating grass to make itself *****
I want to move my own ragdoll arms, sit up without a metal pole behind my back.
I want a straight line stitched on my face so I can choose to make it go down.
Or up,
Or diagonal,
Or shed my potato-sack skin and metamorphose into a trumpet.
With freedom to resound over mountaintops,
Dribble liquid gold from my singing mouth.
But I am a ragdoll.
Whose head is stuffed with two-cent cotton imitation on a factory floor in China.
Whose only desire is to be real.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 9:43 PM UTC
When the gore began, it was just a flowing river of reddy blood.
Out of an aquamarine fireball of yellow out of the Sahasra,
I was nowhere but inside my head.
IT was pale green and bright indigo all around.
Crowded.
Enchantress Revealing.
Twists and turns did not stop the telepathy.
With a pastel smile on a pale beige brawn, everything blended in flesh and blood of my dreams.
Were it mine?
Or was it that of the girl from the screen?
For more than a hour, I loved everything that I despised and the other way too.
In fact, I was even one with the smudgy blades of the cooler fan in front.
When it ended, I knew perhaps the rainbows and rainclaps on every planet across the cosmos.
A day after, everything is monochrome with a dash of anger.
Apr 26, 2017
Apr 26, 2017 at 6:30 AM UTC
And oh I ache, like a creaking door, like a rusty faucet pipe. I can hear all the blood running it's errands in the sides of my head, it's this bathroom, this ******* bathroom. I feel like the turning handle on a mall gumball machine, no, then I feel like the ******* gumball, and I fall to the little black crevice with door, and you roll me out and pop me into your mouth, chewing hard and your spit is turning blue and I'm getting softer and softer in your lips. A caged Ocelot, and all I have to look to for a golden tomorrow is the poster of all the colorful wildlife, advertising this sickness. This pinging on a metal ceiling. This brownness. But my posters are of a different pair of devastating blue eyes that I know are evil too, but I pacify myself with the thought that they are so light because they are pure and clear, not because they are cold and hard. I started crying in my sleep. And I wake up with the streetlight shining through the window from that ***** alley that I love, and my face is so wet and so pink, and I say it's better that I cry unknowingly than consciously. I beg and toss for migration and distraction, chaos, oh baby where did you go? You can't leave me here with loose pieces of skin and a sick heart. You can't pick off the bottles on the ledge one by one with a rubber band and some pebbles and leave me with nothing. All I've got left are some nail polish bottles, some concert tickets, a few empty backseats. Things are either so incredible and hopeful or so ***** filthy, like gas stations, like the inside of ovens, and my fingers are becoming calloused. I'm floating like a cherry in a ***** shirley. Oh come, with your fingers in my hair, and kiss me.
Aug 20, 2014
Aug 20, 2014 at 4:37 AM UTC
You toss my heart around like a toy yo-yo on a thin fraying string
Oh please watch that string,
Fear swells in my throat like child's gumball
Please don't let that string fray to far
I'm trusting you with so much
But Please Please don't let my heart go swinging into an abyss
Jul 8, 2014
Jul 8, 2014 at 3:34 AM UTC
My car broke down
Across from the mechanic's shop,
I'm bowling a perfect
zero
with the bumpers up
My shoes get stolen
Barefoot in the tire lounge,
I chip my tooth on a gumball
the dentist pulled
the wrong teeth
he said it was my fault
so I apologize
I'm late for work
My boss is yelling
about something
I zone out
I don't explain myself
I get fired
I pack my box with nothing
but static air
filled with three-and-a-half
years
No one says goodbye
No one seems to notice
Except you
You call my name
You hug me
for the first time
ever
You even asked me
to call sometime
There's nothing else
I can do
but smile
and be smitten
from your laughing
at my new gold teeth
Jan 16, 2014
Jan 16, 2014 at 2:49 PM UTC
a genius metaphor
that displays wit and insight
is more a matter of inspiration
than of the will
I did not experience
the PCH a day removed
if not for the use of a muse
is the sun nothing more
than a mass of flammable gas
or perhaps a nuclear gumball
leisurely crushing the horizon
radiant backlit heavenly body
meets with a pacified body of water
for a consensual coitus
orange and purple
two thirds of
the secondary color wheel collide
panoramic dusk in the rear view
as the moon prepares to mount the sky
gathering waves like a shepherd
lazy tides that vacation on sandy beaches
beaches that conceal mysterious truths
beneath cold infinite grains
tucked inconveniently between my toes
Dec 14, 2012
Dec 14, 2012 at 12:07 PM UTC
The screws are tightening round my skull
In the same place where all the voices come from
Though this is no accident, no health misfortune
By now, yes, I’ve begged for it, begged for it to come
You call yourself a killer, well then finish the job
You call yourself a thrill, but the ones from me are all you’ve got
This terra is not my pill, when all kind monsters are forgot
As the real terror slaps on Maybelline, straps on a guitar
Somewhere in Xayide’s lair lies my memories
Packed like spheres of glass in a gumball machine
Someday I’ll return to sepia and monochrome
As another Dorothy clicks her heels…
(Going anyplace but home)
Nov 30, 2011
Nov 30, 2011 at 9:27 PM UTC
The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.
The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.
Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.
The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.
Oct 24, 2014
Oct 24, 2014 at 2:21 AM UTC
Crosses in the sky
With belief, emphasized
Create a force field of light
That wards off invaders
And curious crusaders
All their silver ships
Crashing and burning to bits
Right next to our southern cactus
Crosses in the sky
Now that all faith has died
Create nothing but an off-blue sky
That welcomes all others
With tendrils, who hover
Now, intentions are smudged
Will they ask us to budge
Or turn us into sludge
We kept them out before
But we still took pride in war
Now we’ve woken up
But our eyes are still shut
Brain got bigger but it
Beat our hearts to a pulp
The missing element
Of a radar that’s bent
Still, a burning cross
Is better than none at all
We can watch it while the grey ones
Swim among the telephone poles
With nothing inside we’re filled up
Like a gumball machine of lies
Brain got bigger but it
Beat our hearts to a pulp
Nov 19, 2011
Nov 19, 2011 at 6:57 PM UTC
Poets are sent to a special kind of hell;
Where you put in a coin,
and the gumball colour you want comes out.
It is by being given what we feel we deserve
That we run out of things to write.
Sep 25, 2013
Sep 25, 2013 at 3:46 AM UTC
I'm counting roses and the sun's rays
and the leaves on trees that love to sway.
The rings on the stump that have worn away
I'm counting the very days.
I think of lilacs and TV screens
and all the movies from the nineties.
A bug's life turns into an adventurer's dream
Puddles become lakes,
leaves become rafts that the storm drain takes.
Hunting for clovers with four leaves,
Videographer of childhood memories,
Trips to the diner and gumball machines
How lucky to have known the Kodak queen.
Maker of cards and lover of art
no matter the inexperience of the artist.
I never found a clover with four leaves,
but I know I'm so lucky
Dancing, swimming, and jumping on beds.
Dressing up like a princess.
Light of our lives is what you said to me.
You're the brightest star in my memories.
Is it easier in the morning
to talk of days of endless play?
Is it easier after mourning?
I guess it's never the same.
Is it easier in the morning
when the dawn breaks?
Is it easier after mourning
to see that nothing forever stays?
No it ain't.
Dec 27, 2023
Dec 27, 2023 at 8:59 PM UTC
So often I write the phrase “the wind whispered”,
but the wind is not whispering now.
No.
The wind is screaming violently in my ears.
The frenzied scream of rebel soldiers in the midst of bloodshed
cognizant of the ****** that lies ahead.
Maniacal.
Yet, it is not the howling air I think of
even as my hair is tossed in all directions,
like bowing trees appeasing a hurricane.
There is no time to think of the wind.
The concrete is only thirteen stories away.
Somehow I think of something even less relevant than the movement of air.
I was nine.
The ice cream truck parked next to the football field
playing that song.
The one that calls to children like a Siren.
The proud trumpet of capitalism.
I approached,
“I’ll have the pink one please, with gumball at the bottom.”
“You got it. That’ll be a dollar fifty young man”
my hand slides into my left pocket –
quarter, dime, penny, penny, dime.
Right pocket -
Dime. Dime. Nickel.
Impatient eyes.
Back pocket s-
Nothing.
Horror.
Embarrassment.
Then the man steps up from behind me,
gray hairs creeping out of his nose.
Gold ring, with a ruby red stone.
Three dollars on the counter,
“Make it two of the pink ones.”
My mind has not seen that man in years.
Perhaps I have made a mistake.
Then I see her eyes,
and I know have not.
Mar 2, 2013
Mar 2, 2013 at 10:00 PM UTC
maybe it was the sixteen bars
or the sixteen hours
or the scent of desert flowers
got me drunk
got me dreamin
maybe it was the real ripping at the seams of yr mask
how fast we shed sick skin have thinned
air in valleys consumed
mountains
throbbing in my view
have worn stones
too
many burdens
carried
maybe it was the runaway fame
the shame in her eye
stopping for highway change
desert empty
empty me to be filled
follicles to grow again
gumball heaven
altitude
high
It's alright, It's Ok
It's Ok
To faint in living rooms alone
To wake to dogs panting
To panic in cities you have never slept in.
Feb 19, 2014
Feb 19, 2014 at 3:30 PM UTC
When I was six,
I loved a boy,
He proposed with a
Dora the explorer
gumball ring, and
It was the best day of my life,
until it wasn't.
When I was thirteen,
I loved another boy,
I kissed him,
and felt loved,
and it was the best day of my life,
until it wasn't.
When I was fifteen,
I fell in love with a boy,
and even now,
after so much time,
every day is the best day of my life,
and it always will be.
It's true what they say about young love,
Your mind is new,
and you don't know how you'll change,
but there are the youngins that love you,
despite all that.
believe me, I know.
Because I will always love a boy with
ocean eyes and a silly smile,
and you can just discard
what they say
a.s.
Nov 26, 2015
Nov 26, 2015 at 1:29 PM UTC
my how everything changes
so slick like
one minute
I'm admiring the thickness of
your tongue under a
green shaded desk lamp
and then the power is out
and the fire is talking ****
and roads split open
and miniature elephants
crawl up
screaming like orange juice
and the next minute
I'm knotted in our plastic tablecloth
splattered with red & blue fireworks
and then I'm trying to
find pluto in a gumball machine.
Oct 21, 2015
Oct 21, 2015 at 9:39 PM UTC
The tick of toothed gear
Gives handfuls of a surprise
Mike & Ike tasters.
Nov 19, 2018
Nov 19, 2018 at 4:50 PM UTC
VII
The water starts easily, helplessly
licking my tires with passionate peace
As the current builds I can feel my hubcaps rusting
peeling away all those years of clacking British
pavement
and dogs taking a leak despite scolding
strangers
and children’s bouncy *****
gliding just short of an auto wreck
the icy ocean digs underneath my doors
it cuts my cushioned seats
like cobra teeth
Tearing away the midnight kisses
rides to dark places
and the beautiful dusk rainfalls
--If I think a while, in this bubbling
reverie
I can feel the sizzling raindrops
pattering
When the water reaches my wheel I
moan my engine
collapsing inside, wishing I could cry
but any oil would float away
and infest the souls I know will soon
surround me.
It isn’t long before I must hold my breath
and my wheels gently feel a folding of the floor
wood splitting shatters the still air that has
entranced me into my imminent
sleep
nothing, nothing
I all rust
looping bubbles and
twirling like a gumball down the
candy store machine
fallingfallingfallingapart
I explode on an ocean floor
with no hope of returning
even the memories they gave me won’t set me
free
so I only
watch the dust
settle
settle
Jan 14, 2017
Jan 14, 2017 at 1:47 PM UTC
I threw a quarter
into the wishing well
and the well
granted my request
of course all I asked for
was a gumball
still pretty cool.
Mar 28, 2016
Mar 28, 2016 at 2:01 PM UTC
As I chew a gumball,
My teeth begin to hurt.
I chew and chew and chew,
Eating up its greatness,
Only for it to wear my teeth down.
Am I a wounded warrior
In the battlefield of growing up?
Do I continue to learn lessons
By making mistakes every day?
These concepts throw my brain around,
As I stand pondering the abyss of thoughts.
Look at me,
Find my faults;
Look at you,
Do you see it too?
Jun 27, 2016
Jun 27, 2016 at 10:04 PM UTC