"juke" poems - Hello Poetry

do you ever wonder about the difference between looking at something and the hallucination created when looking past it? if you look at your hand it's all you can see but if you look past your hand there are now two of them sometimes it's hard for me to remember which is real it gets me thinking about how my father used to wake me up in the morning by rubbing his stubble across my face i spent my 11th birthday under the assumption that he might come back if i drank his aftershave like maybe if i could turn blue if i could be his favorite color on our bathroom floor he would forget why he left the paramedics were all sobing as they pumped memories out of my stomach i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it burned a hole in our refrigerator coughed up the day the divorce papers came and my mother took a baseball bat to the mailbox i've been choking on the splinters for 17 years it's been 17 years since the last dinner plate exploded on our dining room wall 17 years since my mother started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table 17 years since italian night at the restaurant on the corner where the juke box spat tired music and like so many other things it stopped working when you left i guess it's no coincidence since the juke box went quiet that the cds in my car only skip on "i miss you" i've been hemorrhaging memories for so long and now that i'm looking back i can no longer tell the mirage from the truth sometimes i swear you showed up to my graduation and last time i was at your apartment i can't remember if the imprints of my hands are in clay hanging on your wall or if they were left in the mud the day god had the audacity to let it rain or maybe it's like the time i saw someone crying on a bridge now that i think about it i can't remember if it was me

0

Jun 20, 2014

Jun 20, 2014 at 12:53 AM UTC

TomLeveille

məˈräZH

do you ever wonder about the difference between looking at something and the hallucination created when looking past it? if you look at your hand it's all you can see but if you look past your hand there are now two of them sometimes it's hard for me to remember which is real it gets me thinking about how my father used to wake me up in the morning by rubbing his stubble across my face i spent my 11th birthday under the assumption that he might come back if i drank his aftershave like maybe if i could turn blue if i could be his favorite color on our bathroom floor he would forget why he left the paramedics were all sobing as they pumped memories out of my stomach i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it burned a hole in our refrigerator coughed up the day the divorce papers came and my mother took a baseball bat to the mailbox i've been choking on the splinters for 17 years it's been 17 years since the last dinner plate exploded on our dining room wall 17 years since my mother started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table 17 years since italian night at the restaurant on the corner where the juke box spat tired music and like so many other things it stopped working when you left i guess it's no coincidence since the juke box went quiet that the cds in my car only skip on "i miss you" i've been hemorrhaging memories for so long and now that i'm looking back i can no longer tell the mirage from the truth sometimes i swear you showed up to my graduation and last time i was at your apartment i can't remember if the imprints of my hands are in clay hanging on your wall or if they were left in the mud the day god had the audacity to let it rain or maybe it's like the time i saw someone crying on a bridge now that i think about it i can't remember if it was me