Every year I am in highschool I become more disillusioned with the world around me. i am a rebel trapped in the body of a functioning member of society. It is the slowest way to drown.
It’s hard to believe you are the hero of your own tragedy when you can’t draw the line between angst and a deep understanding of what the world really is
Hormones, pheromones and genetics make up more of what we like than free will. Every great love story serves as a bi-product of biology. Romeo and Juliet killed themselves for a love that existed because he smelled like her dad or something. There is something deeply unnerving and very calming about how little of our lives we actually control
Sadness is a form of protest. At this point even hatred is welcomed. Any kind of emotional response is better than the slow acceptance. The give-in. Apathy is the most dangerous of human emotions because it rots you from the inside out, it leeches away your soul.
She told me I had eyes like a goldfish and Iaughed like we were the best of friends and she had made a fabulous joke. I slipped on my passivity like a coat. There is a certain pride in staying silent in the face of injustice. It is a low form of resistance but at least it resists. I laughed and agreed. There is no courage or pride in participating in your own downfall. It’s like being handed a rope and tying the knot, smiling.
In a generation that feels nothing (absolutely, beautifully, nothing) love is a concept we throw around like pennies. Everyone has pocket full and alone they stand forgotten and obsolete. It takes a long time for it to be worth anything and most of the time it never is. THat’s what we’ve become. We throw pennies away like spare change and wonder why we only get pennies in return, never change. And why everyone is so desperate to give it away.
Remember the night we rewrote the Holy book? Took each word and cupped it in our hands like it was time shifting and sifting through our fingers
We stitched lines out of missed opportunities, punctuation out of regret
You will remain editor in chief and also muse for every poem I paint in my head
Even though the dust has settled on our Bible
But I remain
i will remember when you used to want to save the innocent
from the swinging pendulum named justice
as lady liberty cried over her children like a mother at a grave, planting
roses for the spring
i will remember that you used to get on that stage and shake your ass like your name was monique and the room was an adoring crowd with every eye spreading love
but your name wasn’t monique and the stage was my living room floor and that adoring crowd was just me
but lord you would make them silver dollar bills shine in my eyes
i will remember that first smoke then choke then smoke and choke again
and all the consequent ones, with my paranoria mirroring your arrogance
we are the same code in so many molecules and if you stretched out my electrodes
there would be stained, word for word and line for line the conversations i have with you when you aren’t present
and memory will become more beautiful in the retelling
and reshaping, than it ever could have been
we will erode at the truth until every jagged edge becomes smooth
and supple beneath our ever grasping hands
each word will be a marble dropping from our mouths
creating ripples in the ponds of our lives
and we will be young again
and we will look infinitely more happy in pictures, than we ever were in the moments captured, forever
and to our children, this will be the definition of hope
and when i say our children i mean yours and mine
because the only children in my future are pen and paper
matches and fire and smoke
that will knead at the fierce emptiness in my belly
And truth.
I’m going to die in this cell of a 28 by 44
Alone. In the company of shadows
and some days, this will be enough
and on the days it is not,
then
I will miss you.
I’m sorry I did the Sudoku last Sunday before you woke up,
then lied and told you the paper didn’t come
because I just wanted to lose myself in something tangible that I didn’t understand
and the numbers did that
I’m sorry my priorities aren’t straight, that my grades ebb and dip like the sea when you were the golden girl, always
I’m sorry about the piercings I never told you about and the times I told you I was in study group when I was kissing the sky with hemp-stained lips
I’m sorry for never listening to your stories about your heroes, that my birth stopped your chance of being a hero for anyone but me
I’m sorry that isn’t enough for you
I’m sorry that I tried to kill myself last May, I know that was hard to explain to your friends, harder still to explain to your parents.
I know that wasn’t easy.
I’m sorry that I am an anchor and the umbilical cord that once connected us is now a chain, or a tether
Keeping you to this Earth when I know it is the last place you want to be
I’m sorry ma, that you’ll never forgive me for that
I’m sorry that I feel too much and do too little,
I’m sorry that you had big, big dreams and nothing came of them
I’m sorry the closest you come to fulfillment is when our dog wags his tail at you
I’m sorry I dropped painkillers like tic tacs in my bedroom when you were sleeping in an attempt to feel nothing
Even sorrier that I stole them from your cupboard
I’m sorry that I hid the key to the box in your room
where you lock up the medication so I can’t OD
just so you don’t make the same choice one day
I’m sorry I will always desperately love you like a sinking ship
and that you will always be my iceberg,
or am I the iceburg and you the titanic
I’m sorry I had sex on the couch in the basement when you were home
and that I hid a boy in my closet while you talked to me on my bed
and that I wore my hickies like bruises
and my bruises like hickies
I’m sorry there’s no happy ending coming for you
I’m sorry there never was
I remember watching my friend’s face when she learned
that her best friend had died, how it had contorted
and her scream, ricocheted, in a way I didn’t know sound could
through my consciousness,
And later, as the days turned and she kept moving
though the world went in slow motion
they told me she was strong, that her composure and
lack of tears were signs of strength
and Icould never quite understand or agree with this logic
because to me, even if she had beat the floor with her fists
and smashed windows and ricocheted through my consciousness with her screams
and she had made rivers of tears that grew into the ocean-sized holes inside of her
I still would have found her strength unimaginable
Some memories last longer than the ink I will write this with
You would have been my everything, if I had let you.
I break my own heart so no one else can enjoy the satisfaction
of each note reverberating
Everyone said let go
So this is me letting you go
this is me unravelling every string in the house and untying
every knot that would have held this together
there are things I was never any good at
like painting my nails
playing guitar
and being neat
I wish I was neat and organized
So I could always find you
i seem to be constantly misplacing
and forgetting where I left you
but you are always in the last place I look
I find you in the rivers called my veins
where you end up near my spleen
and my liver, detoxifying all the poison in me
instead of in the compact box
I have built for you
In my chest cavity
you always spill out into the inbetween places of my life
I am messy with chemicals but
I promise to tidy the place up a bit
Sweep the cobwebs away and find a home for the skeletons in my closet
that is not my closet
I always pledge to pledge the ghosts out of my attic
I am missing things I have never known
I struggle with cleaning my act up
but everything has a place and yours is between my ribs
I keep misplacing you
and you end up in the hum of my teeth when I am preaching my poems to the choir
instead of telling you please, don’t go
I want you to stay
I will offer you a cup of tea and the places where my limbs meet
I will offer you a shot of my successes
If you will down a cup of my sorrow with a drop of sarcasm
There is talking and then there is speaking
but communication is not my forte
I will be your runaway lover
I will run away and then hope
to find you just where I left you
which is never where you should be
There are things I was never any good at
Like shooting hoops and shopping
and letting you know that
there are times when I want to be alone
but there are also times when I want to be found
When I am hoping that your x marks my spot
and that I have remembered to put myself on the map
Let me be a river snaking its way across your landscape
Let me be that vital and that quiet
Let me fade out into somethingness
and let me be your nothingness too
There are things I was never any good at
Like singing in the shower, doing long division
and loving you
There was a girl I used to know, and you know how the story goes
She was pretty, smart, witty and kind
And going, going, gone
I asked my mother where she went
SHe said we don’t speak of these things
That dead is dead
But dead is not dead when Susie just needed to talk
And Billy just didn’t see the point
When Carol felt hopeless and Lukas felt alone
And they all fall down
No I know, maybe it is not polite to speak of these things
Because our youth are taking the one way ticket out
No return ticket please, I intend on staying there for a while
But we don’t speak of such things, it’s not polite to speak of such things
The tragedy has become an epidemic
A poison seeping through the veins and contagious
The children are the infected who won’t seek doctors
because they all know what happens next
You can’t tweet away your loneliness, or tumble your despair
You can never post enough statuses on facebook
To cure yourself of what’s eating you
Attention-seeking, angst-ridden, hormone-stricken children
In the golden years of their life
Would never do such things
Must have been troubles at home
But it’s not polite to speak of such things
And girls, who count out pills like hopscotch numbers
And then wait finally for peace
And boys, who play cops and robbers except they are both the cop
and the robber
and their state still enforces the death penalty
But dead is dead
When they line the coffins with red flags
And weep and wonder what could have been done
Tell them this
Tell them that dead is dead
And it’s not polite to speak of such things
I, must be a mechanic
Using my words to build and repair
your rusted interiors with flashy new ones
safe and secure, fun for the whole family
Because you were a fixer-upper
If there ever was one
I don’t know very much about engines
And God, I wanted these words to be enough to save you
build you a bridge out of vowels with consonant foundations
Simile smiles with cliche tongues
and pulses beating loud as the ignition
I don’t live
I dabble in reality
And I don’t love
I crush
because crushes, can’t crush you
Like a ton of steel can
SO buckle up baby cos we’re in for a bumpy ride
Take me on a road trip with your smile
Crash into me so for once I can feel
Something
Anything
Fill my ears with your squealing tires so I know, now
That some things are louder than regret
You’re missing parts that I don’t know how to replace
And you used to putter along just fine
but now you’re worn down and tired and I am tired
of chasing after you with grease on my knees and my heart on my sleeve
There is dirt on these hands that will never come off
You did that, you do this.
And yeah in this concrete jungle I guess you could call me a grease monkey
but hey, at least i know how to swing
and miss-
just once,
I would like to have a thought that my face deemed insufficient
For my veins to scream out
Marching with red feet across my face
K I’M COMING BACK TO YOU LATER, YOU DAMN ROSACEA POEM.
YOU ARE LONG OVERDUE IN THE WRITING.
I think, all I need to be okay with my life is
A kettle and some bad intentions
Because there is nothing a cup of tea can’t set a little righter
And because my good intentions never do me any good anyways
So what the hell and hello
How’ve you been? Casually dropped after the tone cos I’ve been better and I am better
I just wanted to say that you were an entire paragraph in my suicide note
Line upon line stitched to my skin
Asking for a little forgiveness and asking for a lot
But I, I was your dial tone
If I was ever anything at all
Because your lips never quite spoke through my receiver
When my cage opened and I flailed for a life line
SO I lived off banana muffins and nutella
and reality tv for a week, warp my reality for a moment please,
And my pulse beat in time to the dial tone
That I held to my ear
Speaking to the operator in silence things that no one dare say out loud,
My mother, scared of what I might say in the silence never let it grow
Kept it clipped like my wings
When you used to help me soar
Did you notice the empty desk, the space where my hand once waved triumphant like a flag
My nation of words slumped to half mast,
Mourning for what was to come, they do not call them red flags for nothing
Because I died, I did die despite my diagnosis
I died and was born again a week later in a hospital bed
With nurses who would slouch and sigh in corners of my room and deflate
Like the empty cavity in my chest that the machine said was still beating
But I didn’t believe was there at all
And fed me weak smiles and strong tea
Oh and good intentions, nevermind the good intentions
