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10/25/09 05:58 pm

Wake up at 2pm. Lie awake confused until you remember the events of last night. Remember walking under the blacklight and standing with your old high school friends who did not say hello. Remember drinking cold cans of beer to alleviate the ironic feeling of loneliness in a crowded room. Remember how you desired at the moment to write, read, draw, or hold hands with your boyfriend instead. Remember coming home high after talking too long with your stunning blonde friend in her SUV and wanting very much for her to understand that sometimes people don't try too hard to impress others, they just want to be happy. Remember falling asleep feeling very alone. Get out of bed. Put your feet on the floor, your ass in your desk chair. Stare blankly at your _____ textbook. Wonder why people try to put up walls. Fail your ____ test.

10/23/09 04:21 pm - The Bleak Life

I am a color wheel of bland.
Here you see taupe tinted walls,
spin me again and behold gray carpet squares.
Once more:  the unquestionable black of the small
second marks on the wall clock.

I guess I have dreams,
when I sleep.  The mists of unconsciousness
never interested me.
I find tangible meaning in money, time, type.
I will find a way to be happy.
I will.

Flowers, paint, soft-spoken words;
the hype of things that fade seem
trite but I hear the couple down the hall
make love.
I want to too, but
I will never.

I tried to buy it last week from a pretty girl,
bruised underneath her clothes.
"Love hurts," was her cliche of choice
when I stared.
The cardboard-clad man on the street
advertised it for free but his homeless
smell was all I received
when his arms released.
I have been dropped,
but I will never fall.

Alone in my apartment, the clock
talks, the carpet whispers
soft under my socks, and my walls
hug the space in an empty embrace.
I will never fall in love.

9/23/09 02:17 am

Thursday. The big
sigh of all the workers,
ladder climbers, tool bearers,
swells slowly to the threshold.
I hear it rise,
audible under the obedient sounds of phones
tapping back into receivers,
mouse clicks, punch-ins, and the small
wet sound the lips make when stretched
across the gums to smile an unreal smile.
Morningtime, and everyone’s
minds shift awake over these cubicle walls.
Coffee carries us over to lunchtime, and then we’ll lurch
unevenly to close, hurdling the hours with yawns
and feet that stir at last to leave.
The low ceiling is closing in,
telling me to leave this city and it’s cold
coastline behind.
I am a number, a plastic badge on a chain.
I am flat and grey.
When the current shifts and we
begin to move our fins in unison,
I will make my break.

9/17/09 04:15 am

2:30 AM and our vibrant little group
slowly peters off, to bed.
Hey it’s alright, you’ll drive me home.
You’ve got four wheels, two seats, and a stick
makes you feel like a real driver.
Your friends smoke like chimneys.
We had a good talk and spent
hours in good company.
A few times I felt my heart clench
with happiness when someone said
something great.
It’s been ages since the TV
made me laugh and cry.
Though the experience of Synecdoche, New York
hit me hard,
I know it is just a movie the same
way I know the Smiths are just a band.
I try to be honest and real but when you rank
girls and films and your top
ten everything I start to think we stand
on opposing cliffs.
But I’m glad I’m in your warm
truck and nobody hit on me tonight.
I am young and my 9am class and exams
tomorrow are my only worries.

9/12/09 04:42 pm - Norm

Poor Norm.
Pink cactus, I hate to see you fade but you are no
match for mighty
Winter.

8/10/09 12:41 pm - Bus

Summer is the season of public transportation.
I talked to a girl on the bus today and she said she will call me.
Our skin stuck to plastic
as she talked across the wide aisle.
She had drugs in her purse
on a bus to the Pentagon.
Her voice carried.
She told me how her neighbors are suspicious
of her boyfriend when he comes
and goes and
smokes a cigarette outside.
She has $700 in her bank account.
Once she saw my mother and sister
talking in front of my house.
Once she robbed an LA 7-11 with her twin brother.
Though my eyes look to understand,
the only walk of life I know
is my own.

8/10/09 12:25 am

This is how I am is how I am is how I am.
Sometimes on the metro I watch the tunnel lights flick past.
Sometimes in the car I watch the roads rush under my engine.
I look too long and think too much and think
maybe that is all I want,
to look and think.

The way it rolls to me,
the road.
Forever a treadmill for metal and rubber.

Today a jogger ran past Samantha's left window and
she looked him dead in the eye as she exhaled.
He knew and stared and then didn't care.

Right now I am listening to a pre-recorded podcast and
the host tells me I am from the future.

He is right,
he does not know what I know.

7/17/09 01:45 am - still trying write an ending

We know now what it does.
We still kill ourselves in the same way.
Tighter, tighter
seeking the immortality of tomorrow
and the romanticism of yesterday
the drum will burst.

Like all else,
we will wear down.
Human growth hormone and botox
will not keep you young and
cigarettes and coffee
will not maintain a healthy weight.
I will grow old and it will be beautiful.
Will you grow old with me?
Or will you crush your hands
trying to stop the cogs of time?

Carlos told me that death is always to my left,
a friend that will tap me on the shoulder to take me away.
Friendly, dark blanket.
When I feel it pulled over my knees I hope
to have more sense than to cry out
but I know I will be scared.

7/15/09 07:00 pm

When the impassive window
closes itself
the storm rages where it can be heard.
Uncontrolled, violent
white lightning flashes of harsh words.
Strong cliff,
it takes the thunderous blows
allowing its hard sides to weather.
At the end,
during the light drizzle of tired tears
it whispers
to the cool runnings of tiny apologetic streams.
"It's ok" and "I love you."

7/4/09 08:43 pm - title suggestion?

You feel, you think,
your fingers and hands grip and touch like independent animals.
You take the pressures in your head
and you turn them into color,
you stretch them into words.

Is it good?
You want very badly for it to be good.

Are the feelings real?
Do others like the delicate ribbons of morphemes,
the way they twist and knot?
Can they also feel the sway?

Hope to God your little poem
is not knocked to the ground like a lego tower
smashed by an irritable toddler.
The critic rasps rules from a sandpaper throat,
chafing the infant piece of yourself
you kissed and released just now.

Read it again when it comes back small and scared
from its first swim with the sharks.
Run your palms over the swells, the flesh of its being.
As it turns in the fire and burns brilliance you begin to love
in broad rays that will never dim or end.

7/2/09 06:12 am

Learn to trust.
No!
Go with your gut.
All the assured voices bear me up confused into the air.
A circus tent
billowing this way in the wind
dragged that way
by the dark cawing shapes that have latched on.

I have not seen you all day.
I call you to come get me, get in your car.
"Hello," I say,
but already I've lost you
to another female figure in a dress.
She's getting out of the car in front of us
and as you say
"I love you"
you scan the close cut of the white fabric,
your eyes find the soft shapes underneath.

I am tied.
Please tell me what to do about
that girl at work you think is cute
how people call you Tom Cruise
your pride of past conquests.
The way I've seen you
drunk, or at a party, or with your pals
how women always tip you extra
just to talk to you.

Paranoid mind be still,
I need newer neurons to brighten my thoughts.
You are one big road
I am but a hitchhiker on the long stretch of your life.
I will lay my heart down
before your fingers find the roots,
and tear.

6/26/09 10:20 am


6:30 A.M

and the metal pill box of people

sighs to a start, full of drowsy bodies.

 

I left you in bed

to watch the wheels of the bus in front of me

bend its rubber over the curb.

I am rolled through DC’s arteries

hissing through intersections as it obediently rises.

I watch the city yawn and check its reflection

in the mirror of its early morning sounds.

 

The woman on the metro breathes the stop in a low voice.

At the top of the escalator a man deafens the crowd

with his donut fundraiser.

More engines start, more feet move over the ground.

Government life

slowly shakes its numb limbs until the feeling comes.

 

The day is marked already.

I will sit in a chair, move my hands, walk into rooms.

 

Sleepy love.

I didn’t feel you lay down on the far side of the mattress last night

but I woke to your smell and your soft snores.

Now in my cube in the city

I think of your wood and brick house,

last night’s guests strewn around the first floor.

I see you rise, cough, wash your face, eat
I feel your muscles stretch awake.

6/21/09 12:50 pm - 6/8

Your sagging body in the driver's seat,
hands draped limply over the wheel tell me you are tired.
Tired,
the dead broken kind,
anger dulled by exhaustion.

I look at you,
my eyes level with your scarred shoulder,
your hair disheveled from frustrated fingers.
We are trying to be happy
but I can't stop the nightmares.

In my dreams you are a cheater, a liar
fitting your own feet
into the prints made by the one I loved first.
My nocturnal mind hardens the cement
and after a few weeks
I have become a lunatic.

Why do I tell myself to be brave
before I put my hand on your knee?
We drive
through sad, dark halls of trees,
under stoplights that light our faces
and pad the silence
that has never been so heavy before.

6/13/09 11:16 pm

"I'll call you in a few days," I say.
But you're stubborn.
You want to hammer out a solution in a half hour,
like you always do
and fall asleep clean.
I need to get my head in the right place.

I shower at midnight
and leave my box to meet new bodies.
But they had crawled into their bottles,
some already drooling on sofas.
I waded into the calm
after the first wave of booze,
listened to all of their mouths cry,
gossip, lust, rage.

My brain was numb,
bitten by the flapping thoughts of
the boy and the ex boy
and possibly none at all,
and the girl on my arm who would not let go.
So I let their brown laughs settle on my skin.

For a few hours I was the only one
with no problems.

6/7/09 02:25 pm

We are like vacationers
living in the now.
Except the sun is dim
the strand is empty
and now has stretched into an uncertain forever.

As the days tick past like milemarkers
ugly barbs rise angrily
up out of our words.
I feel us corrode.
Why do you ask if I am happy?
I am not.
Are you?

Please rewind a year
when we were using each other as toys
when we did not love each other as people.
Every other night we wipe our minds
sitting together like glazed wax figures.
I am trying
but my soul is restless now
and my heart is not in it.

6/7/09 01:38 pm - 6/7

People prefer
to read and write about being drunk
than being high.
Feeling oozes with the acrid smell,
glosses over painful details
slurs the needless words.
Everything is a romantic blur,
fodder for poetic slosh.

Smoking is just as genuine.
There is nothing wrong
with the hard feel of a glass pipe
just as there is nothing wrong with a glass bottle.
A flurry of thoughts inhabit my head
like friendly neon bats.

Jack D. and M. Jane
ingest and inhale
hangover and headache.
Live, read, write, and sleep.
There is still meaning
gleaned from meaningless actions.

6/6/09 03:01 am - 6/5

They are old
tired
drunk.
This is the third band they have formed.
They are (almost) done.
Their eyes squint against the grin of colored lights
and she sings smooth and soft
coaxing the notes into the microphone
to sway us airy as the AC vent sways
her own blonde tendrils.
She is unreal.
He is bored and detached,
looks the crowd up and down
inside and out.
I am so close to them
if I lunged I could grab hold round their shins.
But I can't even offer her my sweatshirt
when the fan makes her shiver
or request a song
when other dolts have the gall to yell "freebird."
I am too scared even when he looks me in the eyes.
They couldn't give a damn about the audience
goggling like zoogoers.
But their sounds
are ethereal.
They don't play my favorite song.
I witness their existence
as they continue to age and fade
and they are all the more wonderful
for aging and fading.

6/3/09 10:51 am - 6/3

 The seconds slip away
and then the minutes and then
you yourself find
that you do not know where the hours go.

Your days, once bright
as the empty white blocks on your calendar
smiled, gaped happily open
for time with friends, family, work, meaning.

"I want to go home.  All there is here is food and TV."

The past swirls around your ankles.
Finally when the ground is bare, you will look up

There it is.
It crashes over you
it crushes you.
In the beauty of what you cannot control
nothing hurts.

6/2/09 03:36 pm - 3/7

I was at a party last night
plagued by big hulking males in
tight shirts with logos and backwards hats
who kept trying to take my beer from me
even though I was being manageable.

I think they were exasperated that they were getting nowhere
but one was very persistent
kept at it for a while
I told him I was an English major
he laughed at me when I told him I'd write him poetry someday
Peter from Coastal Carolina
told me to dedicate one to him.

Drunken promises are stupid
but I said ok because he amused me.
Here it is,
it isn't much.

5/23/09 01:25 am - Today is my birthday.

The glow of the TV,
the bright computer monitor
my plastic phone.
Life in lit pixels grows stagnant.
I mute my cell, sit sighing in front of the tube,
send my feelings through my fingertips
to wires and into files.
My vocal folds collapse with a sad, slow gasp.
My family, like hibernators
have retreated into their rooms.
We live our lives in cars, at desks,
on couches in other houses
not with each other.
Home is a shell of a word
eaten from the inside by respect that was demanded,
never earned.
I am my own puppet.
I grip my own cross, trailing strings that bind the rest of me.
I dance pointlessly to find happiness in the temporary.
All I feel is my own outline,
my imprint fades already,
the hollow inside is much more powerful
than I will ever be.
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