"thumbnails" poems
Set fire to the Antique Shop,
We’re one step ahead of the cops.
Mannequins of Elvis begin to melt.
Free from past matters; free from guilt.
Promoting the prosperity
As we hoard hostility
Androids ambushing Arkansas,
They seek to find ménage trois.
Achieving self-awareness
They want fill the void’s emptiness
Chugging R & R by the fifths.
By our thumbnails we dangle off cliffs.
Thread by thread, the veil unfolds.
Standing all alone, I’m left in the cold.
Show me how much you care.
Push me in my wheelchair.
Listening to what drives you crazy
Eventually helps you stop being lazy.
Lilly is spinning me dizzy
She belongs to the world of yesterday
The haze is now fading away.
If only I could stay
for just one day
But Behold
I feel you should be told
I have come from the end
When the Earth is condemned.
As I tell the tall tale,
How we came to live in hell,
once we found the holy grail.
“We overcame our fear
The classified was made clear.
We launched all the nukes,
By order of the Skywalker named Luke.
The framers were lousy architects;
They left the balance completely hectic.
The CEO’s got away with fraud.
Thinking their work was the will of God.”
I met you in the gloomiest bar.
We speed across the town in my car.
Questioning why we remained silent.
The flickering florescent light compliment
The tone of shallow yellow paint,
I can finally hibernate.
After I left the oblivious,
Do I finally notice,
It’s hesitation that leads
me astray from redemption.
TJW 2013
Oct 22, 2013
Oct 22, 2013 at 6:14 AM UTC
Stick around and taste the honey on his cold, stone lips
and trace outlines of every skin cell around the thumbnails he uses to push lovers' pins into the ground.
Stick around and connect the dots on every leaf his messy hair has trapped
while I sip my coffee in the window,
watching the rain pour down.
In the meantime, race the raindrops in hopes for a beam of light, because the clouds never clear in his foggy, misleading, choir-like singing eyes.
May 21, 2014
May 21, 2014 at 1:42 AM UTC
I was charcoal drawings, you were taking camera snaps,
Frozen moments, mosquitos stuck in amber traps, handicapped,
You were Polaroids, stretching out a memory,
I'm only broken since my etching now will never be.
My work might feel saturated when I get all "introspection-y"
But I'm so exposed, we're all contrasted and you look like silhouettes to me,
I try not to let them get to me, those polarising statements,
I bite my thumbnails inside a lonely, idle basement,
And I shudder when I think what state that time will lapse the world into,
It lends a resolution, the pics'll frame you and I'll persecute.
Feb 7, 2019
Feb 7, 2019 at 11:12 PM UTC
Stained sand, we
saved for grey days
that never arrived.
Rivers greeted
prying thumbnails,
which remained
ready, but unclean.
Romance clucked
through the crook
of an armed shadow,
where she melted.
Sherbet floated
like ***** on
her shuddering
upper lip.
Aug 22, 2012
Aug 22, 2012 at 9:40 PM UTC
my grandfather Edward
left home when he was a boy
and changed his last name
in his teens he was arrested for stealing a cow
then he joined the Air Force and became a photographer
smoked ***** with fishermen
photographed bombs being dropped
then he married my grandmother Evelyn
and they had 3 girls
one of them died as an infant
and one was my mom
i remember him as a quiet man
i was very little
he smoked a pipe and carried a pocket knife
he twiddled his thumbs which had no thumbnails
and in 1994 when i was 7
he shot my grandmother in her sleep
then himself
and i will never forget him.
Nov 27, 2015
Nov 27, 2015 at 11:58 PM UTC
I hope one day you get ****** around so bad
we can relate about it together, so sad.
I hope one day you can be sober
so we can talk about this,
so we can think it over.
And maybe then I could look you in the eyes
and not see a filmstrip rolling of your lies.
Just thumbnails to leave out the details
so we can talk about this,
so we can think it over.
I hope one day you live alone in silence
and we can never meet again
so this **** doesn't happen
all over just like this,
and it's over.
Feb 7, 2011
Feb 7, 2011 at 11:23 PM UTC
my neck hurts from tilting my head back and trying to squeeze the infinite sky down into my finite peripheral vision
i like feeling small, being compacted under ever-shifting air particles
that have been carried around this earth who-knows-how-many times,
and they'll leave again soon, they have no obligation to me, but they let me inhale them
and absorb them into my bloodstream
I Want To Find a Pair of Eyes Like This
I want the stratosphere condensed into speckled thumbnails,
two-way mirrors that watch me undress my thoughts while simultaneously
showing them to me as they are,
knowing spheres that see through me but enjoy me as their lenses
i want them i want them
i want to find a pair of eyes like the sky
Sep 20, 2013
Sep 20, 2013 at 10:08 PM UTC
He fondled the lines on my palm with tips of his fingers
Convinced the heavier with a gentle urge to seek out moonlight
Suggested to the thinner to inch upward as if it had lost its way
Pressing lips softly against skin unhinging secrets onto landscapes
that scream tears, whispering with gazing fingers, secrets unspoken.
Holding there the traces of his lips caught beneath a scar on my shoulder.
He steadies, pushing breath against body. Somehow, somewhere lost inside
And searches for me where he loves to hide.
Burning prints on skin as the rhythm of his words fill me.
The rough and the swollen seeking light and answers with skin.
A thumbnails half moon moves across my thigh quietly to his sense of Grace
and he is back inside waiting in the black that surround him warm and wet,
sweetly anchored as he softly strains for light—until…
a stretch of skin,
a pull of flesh
is known-
and bellies tremble beneath curious shapes into confused laughter and breath
His eyes are mine as I collapse and he finds he’s way inside…again
Feb 10, 2012
Feb 10, 2012 at 8:31 AM UTC
You sit next to me,
most unwillingly,
and I can't help but stare.
You have remade yourself;
a group of working parts
of which I am not apart.
Same beautiful woman.
Same beautiful pride,
with that air of regality
that leaves everyone else
pondering their inferiority.
However, now there
is something new.
An awe inspiring anger
that flushes your cheeks
and clenches your fingers.
You are gorgeous when you're angry.
You have this face that you put on;
a flare in your eyes and a
compression of your lips.
You would never let yourself
come down from this ledge.
--even though if you jumped
I would catch you, I promise--
You have remade yourself
into a new whole and
I have received my eviction notice.
But I know it's not as simple
as you allow it to be,
I can see the digs in the edge
of your thumbnails
where you bite into them with
your index finger.
Signs of stress
to anyone enough to know.
I see it in your flippancy.
You are not a reckless person, always
careful, calculating risk and reward,
but you've thrown
caution to the wind, it seems.
Perhaps an act of revenge,
perhaps of retribution,
it doesn't make a difference.
I only watch in wonder of the woman
I escorted out of my life, as
she sits next to me
unspeaking, unfeeling.
And I've never felt farther
in my life.
Feb 23, 2014
Feb 23, 2014 at 2:38 PM UTC
[we live]
these
days
eyes, raw ringed: mauve.
dustcurtains. lung-still
and dry
cover gasping-
fingers sanded down, dusted away
to later be inlaid
with something
else.
grappling clever-
broken bird feet.
the gaping is wide enough down here
even
for you
wanting to be a victim of something good-
lapping up *** of(f) belly hair
entangled.
and
as every human speck
fights for selfpreservation- without clairvoyance or beauty.
as the mud pumps.
as carmen plays.
as we die again in less than convenient specificities.
we will be replaced.
like furniture.
and those who seek to optimize everything
right down the efficiency of shampoo in the shower-
will leave with nothing
more than a clean head of hair
to fall from these, slowly
or quicker than that- depending on the mood of it. and things like
cancer.
and when the chemicals
find you
laying there alone. and sleepy
they will know to carry you outside into the yard. where the grass is
waiting
and the road is waiting
and the rain.
and the sound of cars.
and of trees.
big-fucking-trees.
roots gnarled meanly into the dark.rotty droppings of their boughs.
cold. mighty- dragging their bruisey knuckles against the
dirt
trees with ghosts
bigger than your thumbnails.
older than the grossest things in your
waste-basket.
tree-er than
tree.
and when the car swerves
and hits
i will be there.
sinking with you
into the the reservoir
doors closed.
belted.
and good
.but
i will be
and we
fall apart
don't speak
for days.
learn of the other too late.
Mar 22, 2016
Mar 22, 2016 at 12:27 PM UTC
Anything?
You say I can write anything?
Doesn't that sound menacing
Can write about meddling?
Like medel working
Writing about working with bronze for a bronze medal in medal working writings?
But you did say I can write anything?
I can write a dot.
But would that make you all distraught
Cuz wouldn't that be breaking the rules and I got caught
Then putting me in a cell to rot
Because that's not what you sought
But you did say I can write anything
What if I wrote the rules
To reverse the angle and make you all look like tools
For giving me this freedom, I'll makes y'all look like fools
Because now I write the rules
I can write my own legacy
My own footnotes, thumbnails, header with a 3 paragraph body
My own legacy
Ecstasy
Effigy
Hierarchy
I'm *****
Fallacy
Prophecy
Literacy
But what if I don't write anything?
Anything at all?
Leave my pencil on the paper so someone can crumple it into a ball
Or something worse, they would scrall
All over MY paper, my power
Devour all of it's potential.
Hell no.
I've invested staring at this blank paper for an hour
Better get to writing
The-
Aug 30, 2015
Aug 30, 2015 at 5:30 AM UTC
Sweetest ceremony of self,
Proud of the moons on my thumbnails...praising their rounded edges,
Soothed by the skin on the arch of the sole of my foot,
Finally, pleasurably, softly coexisting with myself,
A lazy stretch in bed on a Monday morning off,
The way the weekend falls away,
Blowing your nose and breathing deep,
Simple pleasures all encompassed in this body that I feed,
Exactly enough is what I need,
Luxurious and obvious, to exist in this bliss.
Apr 1, 2019
Apr 1, 2019 at 10:49 AM UTC