"waterboarded" poems
Forgetting is…
Forgetting is being told you've had two birthdays, for the fourth time,
Talk about a surprise party.
Forgetting is calling a number that has been disconnected for nearly three years and still expecting an answer.
Can I leave a message?
Forgetting is family portraits with a stranger in each one whom you cannot help but miss.
They say you have his smile.
Forgetting is not being able to close your eyes for longer than 8 seconds without thinking yourself 800 miles away.
How did I get here?
Forgetting is waking up from nightmares 7 times a night,
Right into another one.
Forgetting is the feeling of walking into a room and not remembering what you came for,
All the time.
Forgetting is wondering why the words "I love you" sit perched on your lips ready to take off,
When they have nowhere to land.
Forgetting is coming to in a room you don't recognize and slowly realizing that it's yours.
Welcome home.
Trying to remember is...
Trying to remember is running face first into a brick wall that you used to know was there,
Didn't you?
Trying to remember is riding a bike up a hill without any pedals.
Remember that time?
Trying to remember is being waterboarded in a bucket of question marks and memory fragments.
How do you feel?
Trying to remember is looking back at what you had written only moments before and being convinced that someone is in your house
And they have your handwriting.
Who's there?
Remembering is…
Something I've forgotten.
Aug 11, 2013
Aug 11, 2013 at 10:55 PM UTC
Do you want to tell me that everything will be fine?
That my home away from home will always shine, and when I go home everything will be as simple as these god **** rhymes? (fine)
As optimistic as I'd like to be, the truth is that home isn't always full of laughs and good times
It's a feeling that I would imagine a sunset experiences when it bleeds through the lines
Like a waterboarded painting leaking over the sides
Because even a home is a home when a parrot in the corner of a crowded cage cries and confides
When the people inside it's broken record of a mind, are filled with resentment, angst, love, and lies
Because even a home is a home when I find myself arguing with a parrot all day, you see,
Home feels like home because you cared to stay
Because you would sit there and listen to her tell you that she's scared all day
And you'd stay to wake up to a parrot singing gunshots
And it's arguments about the same 'ol lot
And you'd listen to it whine after its fought
With the invisible man that took his life because of the gang green rot
May 17, 2014
May 17, 2014 at 12:33 AM UTC
in pealing season, she is a girl of lousy ingrowth
she is an unkempt corner; kitchen sink. legs pulled like knives. phone call her curled tendons; isolation in
grit and fibril
she is women with wings. this is how we stymie the rapunzel. we carve the ugly into her. we teach her to wear skin like saran. skin like punishment
cut-coin the rumpelstiltskin. how she is wound and string, paper-doll; bird-in-a-box
how we wring the juice of her on washcloth. hung upturned from the ceiling fang; plucked and feathered
like apology. cherry-picked; veins like mikado. how it is dark and she is blind-bat wind-warriors; waterboarded with no hands
upturning the paper boats of her in every follicle; how the flipswitch insecurity eats her like pickle. in a storm
she is neither nor tongue nor limb
just breast, bone, the weight of mirrors
how we jettison when the grief is heavy. abandon. thick, empty abandon.
alone in grit-cusps when the monsoon has eaten into the white, wispy mortuary. dark in hallways; yet pale and slender. she is beautiful.
we lift her ribbed corpse off the shoreline.
we unload the offering like red carpet;
this is how we wrap her in white and weary-eyed
translucent. how unavoidable we become when we are the last hope. crippled. when we look hope in the eye. askance. how she will beg you to look at her with the heart in the honey-jar; torso in tourniquet
how the walls are ripped in shades of askance. how we look away.
how us, walls, look away.
how, us, walls, askance.
how we drip of askance; how the pink flesh and cherry-limb slips like matchstick on brushfire
how there is purple and primrose and bruise
there are some spots on the floor where it still reeks purple and yellow and bruise
how we are
lousy
ingrowth
here. how we
try
to
pluck
and erase
Apr 27, 2016
Apr 27, 2016 at 8:33 AM UTC
a withered husband,
failed by life
tells me the story
that keeps him
up at night-
thrown in jail
for showing his face
in a white neighbourhood
after light
while he was being
waterboarded for
his tardiness, his
wife was being
sodemised by
men in uniforms,
trashing their shack
and leaving her with a
child with blue eyes
-he was left with
ptsd and an infant
that was birthed
out of a crime
he now awaits for an
apocalyptic flood
to take him out of his
grief knowing that the
love of his life went
through hell knowing
he could’ve protected
her from such demise
he now screams to
the sky asking his
cancer-freed rib and
his adopted son
who left him in this
prison - where is
his rope or knife.
-t.m
Jun 8, 2018
Jun 8, 2018 at 7:03 AM UTC
I cannot get anything down.
I squeeze and suffocate,
choke the words out,
waterboarded with books,
until there is some water in this ******* drought.
Blame it for the lack of ingenuity,
for the life-long ambiguity,
how I cannot get my message out,
no matter how much I scream and shout.
The more I write the brighter I burn,
but like a fire I go out,
forgetting everything that I learn,
lost in the smoldering embers of doubt.
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 2:50 PM UTC
How many ppl
My age would rather
Jump than swim
How many ppl
How many backdoor deals
Does it take
To rip apart the fabric
Of your society
How many ppl my age
Are fiscally waterboarded
Would rather be boarded up
Than on the outside
Watching everyone get bled dry
Jul 7, 2015
Jul 7, 2015 at 4:35 PM UTC
Your information is recycled
Layers of stereotype driven crap
Fed down through the ages
All that changes is the pixels
Caricature faces are blown up like balloons
And handed to all those who seem a tad different
******
Freak
Idiot
**** them**
Humanity swimming through a swimming pool
of their own ***** each new swallow
Has less truth than the last
We swim in circles
Complaining
Drinking
Never thinking beyond the box
Which is now our home,
Swimmers longing to roam are pushed below the
water line, being waterboarded
Traditions hoarded
While research is squandered
Grabbing hands take only that which pleases them
Ignore all reason
Tis the season to be ******* stupid.
Sep 8, 2015
Sep 8, 2015 at 7:08 PM UTC
Dentistry is being
Waterboarded by Morlocks
Who keep saying “Relax”
Mar 13, 2018
Mar 13, 2018 at 5:18 PM UTC
I am stuck.
Been reaching towards the world forever but they laugh, "What a schmuck."
How did we all end up here?
Staring in the mirror like it has answers, alone in my house of Dies Drear.
I got better, but then I got worse.
Fixating on things that mean nothing, "Why that dude drive a hearse?"
Why do I feel so rehearsed?
Why does this feel like the same verse?
Because I am not even my self when I am at my worst.
I keep praying for better answers,
Keep praying that I find someone else to fall in love with, bad track record with cancers.
I keep praying he'll actually call.
Ten days past and more and more I feel like I'm being waterboarded under a waterfall.
I have no reason at all,
As to why I should wait around, must be the impending scent of fall.
May 12, 2014
May 12, 2014 at 12:25 AM UTC