Unfinished
I am grown weary of these boys who break us,
of burnt fingers from hot coffee
and not quite enough substance to the cup.
I am grown tired of these days that crack us,
of bones knocked brittle
by the wear and tear of an all-too-ordinary misery.
I am grown numb from this buzzing in the background
of all the past little onslaughts
that have left us printed with the ink of yesterday’s news.
Magic
I want a world where there are dragons.
I want a world with traveling circuses at night.
I want a world with flying carpets, mermaids, selkies –
where colds, flu, and heartache can be magicked away
with nothing more complicated than some herbs in a pot
and the right words, already written down in a book for you.
In this world of pragmatism,
it’s too hard to know the right words to say.
I want a world with beasts and beauties
requiring no photoshop to recognize,
where illusion makes you think about what life is
instead of trying to convince you the other way around.
I want unicorns,
phoenixes that can rise from ashes and second chances that really matter.
I want the impossible.
I want something more than indeterministic fate.
I want a way to cats-cradle the strings of the universe together
into something better than what it handed me to start with.
I want not the power but the plausible hope
of a world where your will could actually change things.
Where try hard enough and you can succeed,
instead of just the lie they feed you about that here.
I want a world with beautiful rules
and even more beautiful exceptions,
instead of just the shit stochastic
we all give our breath and brains and beatings to.
I want a world where words can fight fists
and win in the moment, there and then.
Words can already bruise people beyond belief
but at least with magic they could provide real safety too.
I want a world with fewer bruises.
I wish more people just hid flowers up their sleeves.
I want a world where more hearts could roar
when they hear that uttered, muttered phrase –
Here be dragons.
I want a world that will offer me greater possibility than this world has to offer
where the only magic that people can ever know –
love, hope, faith, dreaming, a kiss –
is more often that not mere slight of hand and even the best of pixie dust
will end up dead.
Flame
Love should not be a burning flame
for a flame can be blown out;
one wind misplaced, a breath astray –
and then no more but doubt.
You watch the smoldering wick burn down
to nothing more than ash,
and you wonder and wonder again and again
if this lighting was too rash.
You got too close; the flame too hot
for you to stand there long.
But you had hoped, again and again,
that this candle would prove strong.
Love should not be a burning flame
for a candle dies when the wax runs out,
and you’re left with nothing but a puddle of tears –
and those cannot smolder doubt.
Oh dear Poe and Dickinson, I don’t know how you did it.
Work-From-Home
I am going crazy
sitting inside this house.
They call it freelance
but I call it shut-in,
this endless typing of nonsense
onto a dead screen like it’s a friend
because it’s the only thing I’ve got
to talk to,
all day,
all the time.
I will tell you my stories,
dear static of electrons and gigabytes.
I will tell you all these things
inside my head,
poured endlessly
into the wasteland of a blank word document.
That’s all you are, after all –
a parched desert that we try to fill
with the thirst of our souls for someone else,
anyone else.
And so we write stories.
The only breathing
is the rustle of the blinds in a breeze
because I left the window open again,
a forgetful reminder that there’s a world outside.
But I can’t write out there.
Too much glare across the screen
and my fingers lost the quickness of pen
in favor of jabbing at keys in frustration.
Quick, spiteful precise stabs,
anything to flood my message across that empty line.
Lines and lines and lines,
meaningless lines we try to make say something
about our loneliness
but not about our loneliness,
about something else that would be greater
than just telling the world the story
of sitting for the slow-drip torture of seconds
as our life wastes away
down the drain,
a straight shot from the faucet
because all we have are the too-hard chairs
that become our companions
and remind us constantly of the discomfort we sit with.
There’s too much bitterness on my tongue
for me to keep drinking coffee.
We try to say something other
than the sounds of a silent house and road work outside,
because that’s not a good enough story
for a mind crazed by sitting endlessly on the inside,
calling it freelance
but dying from shut-in.
Inspired by the fact that the lack of adequately stocked kitchen cupboards and a typo, a compilation poem of fairly shitty verse accidentally by my roommate and me. Enjoy. Laugh. Deride. Whatever.
A Pitcher Thought
We do not have a pitcher thought,
a tall, cool draught of hospitality
and ice cubes to offer on a front porch,
a long pour of shared success
with its sugary taste, satisfaction.
The pitcher is a self-sufficient plant,
a long tube and a cup held up by itself.
Very scientific.
Very exotic.
Very sharp.
It’ll hold the water for you,
pour you a little should it get too full.
Stand beneath its bower;
it will provide.
Tempt you to come closer, peer into the depths,
let it discover the taste of your soul.
A depth where there is no bottom,
only an end.
The pitcher is a carnivorous plant.
It’s a vessel for thoughts –
thoughts pourable,
and fluid;
magnetic poetry.
Happy Pi Day, lovely readers! A late pi day, to be sure. Now readers, I’ve got a challenge for you all!
Let me first introduce you to an amazing magazine called Fireside. It’s a crowd-funded fiction production that states its mission as “finding and publishing great storytelling regardless of genre, and fair pay for creators.”
Both of which are awesome goals. Espeeeecially that second one, about fair pay for creators. The forces behind Fireside are writers and artists and musicians themselves, the lovely kind that understand the financial shit that most creators have to put up with. They’re in it themselves, really. So they want to pay their contributors as well as they can.
And they’ve got some friggin ridiculous quality contributors! Chuck Wending contributes short stories, Lucas J.W. Johnson is giving out copies of his experimental fiction and music project as one of the perks, Hugo-winner Galen Dara is the magazine’s illustrator… seriously, it’s a giant compendium of artistic greatness.
But… if it’s not successfully funded, the magazine won’t run this year. AND I WOULD REALLY LIKE FOR IT TO RUN THIS YEAR. You know. Just a little.
So, I’m beseeching all you readers to help with a challenge. It’s pi day. Let’s celebrate! I want to see the number of backers that Fireside‘s got go up from the 208 it has as I write this post to 314 (get it, 314, like 3.14, for pi? eh? eh?). And I want to see that happen within the next 24 hours.
We can do it! This is the internet! The massive force of world culture! It only takes $2 to become a Fireside backer. That’s less than the cost of a latte. I really, really hope we can get 106 people to pledge $2 for cultural goodness.
And, beyond the awesomeness of being that much closer to another year of Fireside, I’ll add to the perks too! If we get up to 314 donors within the next 24 hours (so we’ll say 9pm PST on Saturday), I’ll release a cool little poem that I wrote for pi day and that’s been all artsy-ed up right here on my blog. MORE POEMS FOR FREE WEEEEEEEE!!!!!
If you do go and back Fireside but we don’t get up to 314 donors, I’ll email ya the pretty little ditty. If you comment below with your email address or email me with it. Honor code, people. No saying you donated when you didn’t. Doing that would make you a shitty person and I wouldn’t like you in real life. So. You should just go give Fireside $2 to earn a poem and my good favor. And then share! Ask your friends, your family, your coworkers that you only talk to for a very awkward minute while you’re both in the elevator! Do it! DO IT!
become a Fireside backer here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/firesidemag/fireside-magazine-year-3
Streetlights
What if I just walked around the city,
sometime past the hour when the streetlights come on,
and slipped a poem under the lonesome-looking doors?
Anger
I told you that I needed to
but could not cry,
and so the sadness
just settled there,
like murk in the deep waters.
And you, you just drew me
in a magic circle against the world,
an untouchable white line
of your arms around me.
The oddly comforting weight
bearing down on my shoulder blades
while you hold me to your chest.
And for a while, the world is blocked out;
can’t get past you to harm me.
And I am safe.
I don’t know if it’s the anger or the upset
that’s making me so touchy,
jumping at every noise
because my sensitivity’s been turned to high.
I can feel the pulse in your neck on my cheek,
and for a while, my muscle twitches
try to sync to that evenness,
the lub dub of your heart underneath.
The only beating I can handle,
here in my overly caffeinated jitteriness.
At least it stirs my consciousness enough
that the murk is disturbed, too, wells up
in the deep and churns the water so that
no particulate in particular is noticeable,
and once more emotionally homogeneously obliviated,
I can get going on my day.
Quill Aquiver 
Against the Reader
4 Maysource
The public is a cruel beast. Fickle and finicky. They will fight for a hashtag today that they won’t even remember trending this time next week. It’s a short-term gratification like that, when you serve up an endless hors d’oeuvres array of choked-down phrases and coughed-up inanities. You can only fit so much lasting grit in a hundred and forty characters.
The public is a wild beast. Running here and there, grazing from whatever pasture happens to have seeded the greenest virility. Sweet and fresh, even the hardwood trunks must extend new tendrils to grasp any notice. It’s a sort of reversed food chain out there; if you don’t get a bite then you have no reproducibility.
They will rave, the public. Protest is too archaic an art form these days; throw slime or shout your garbled grumbles the loudest and it’s those stitch by stitch tears to rags that will gain you internet power. Meanwhile the authors will hide behind metaphor, saying we said something not what we said. Confuse them enough to ignore you and die dusty encased in the walls of your study; or ply a trickster twist on a trope masked enough to pass for ingenuity and garner your two minutes of fame on a Google headline. Leave the reader shaking and wagging their head – at least then it’s intentional.
There is no refined when even the gatekeepers have become so crude. Taste is torture in a bittorrent world.
Simile is useless. Nobody likes anything.
The public is a cruel beast, you see.
Tags: against the reader, age of, commentary, condemnation, confusing, confusion, digital, essay, experimental, hashtag, metaphor, poem, poetic, poetry, prose, public is a cruel beast, rave, technology, war