Tag Archives: poem

I Am In A Room

8 Feb

I Am In A Room

I sit in a room that is silent.

Yes, there are cringes and twinges of floorboards

and pipe songs and even the echo of someone upstairs,

but the cosmos is always ringing a little.

It is silent.

…

My mind makes its war in the room –

plastering memories along the molding of the floor

and hanging dead hopes from the high ceilings

and using the walls to buttress itself as it catapolts

its knives and leers and cocky little smiles,

knowing that I on the couch could have done better.

There is no noise in the room;

I am breaking.

…

The ground is a minefield.

I cannot move from this spot for fear I shall explode

one of its tricky little pitfalls,

and trip the explosion it’s loaded in my brain

with the fire of one toe placed wrongly.

It’s not a dance.

It’s not a limp.

I do not move.

I am silent.

…

I breathe.

The one defiance against death,

this slow, meaningless rise and fall

that is the only assertion that I still am

within this tired, still un-noise.

I make no sounds.

But I make change with the room.

A dollar-fifty oxygen,

a 23-year exhale.

Or something like that.

The math’s never really made sense

and I am too quiet to ask.

Maybe I am being shortchanged.

I really don’t know.

…

I am in a room.

And the room and I are silent.

The cosmos is ringing.

But this room has no door.

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The Fear-Killer

4 Jan

The Fear-Killer

I fear.

But fear is the mind-killer

(so Dune says)

so I accept boredom instead,

the mind-number

that will let me flit from thought to thought

without falling in so many of these dredges,

high as a kite from not paying attention

’cause if I can’t see you

then you can’t see me

(so says the rules of childhood)

so it must be the same with pain too, right?

…

I do not accept melancholy

but it comes anyway,

the mind-trapper.

The slow sludge death of neurons cannabilizing themselves

in an attempt not to feel at all,

something so much more empty than numbness.

…

I am told not to accept nothingness

but I make it come anyway,

the mind-ender.

I do not face it with fear but with relief.

Fear is dead.

I am the fear-killer.

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Causality

3 Jan

Causality

It’s an odd place to live in

the universe

when you’ve got causalities like

making brownies ’cause your toes were numb

or deciding you’re going to live

because you’re going to die.

…

We learn to love hurt

because love hurts

and it’s more painful

when you hurt love.

…

We try not to,

but that’s not the way causality works.

Not when good intentions pave the road to hell

or maybe just divorce,

since we’re not really sure

we aren’t just giving ourselves hell anyway.

…

You can have pain from nonexistent things.

There are phantom limbs, after all.

Why not all those other extensions?

– for Patrick

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Fire

26 Nov

Fire

You wake up burning.

The fingers around you singed to the tips,

begging you to turn their ash into words.

You wonder where the smoke was.

Fire is a cathartic being

but a cathode to an anode is dangerous, too –

just ask some suicides.

There is no logic if you can’t trace the smoke

but not many people know those patterns;

that’s why you’re always explaining yourself.

You miss when the world knew,

when your compact body and compact mind

were taken for simple –

or simpler, at least.

And maybe you agreed with them, back then.

Maybe you wanted to.

But the tips are still shaking with those red afterthoughts –

embers. You know their name.

You sit down to paper and let your hands bleed,

wondering what they have to say this time.

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Show Girl

9 Nov

Show Girl

Once upon a time there was a show girl.

Show girl.

Show girl show me woncha show me watcha got

said life

said strife,

the pot boiling hot.

But what you find in hot water

is not learning how to swim

but that climbing for your life

is the only way to win.

So the show girl, she showed she

had what all she got

and learned that when you show your stuff

it’s a gallop,

not a trot

’cause you’re flying the hell away from here

in your lipstick wings and eyelash tickets,

run run and they won’t find you

in a character, they can miss it.

So you smile and you wave

and you keep your spirits up

or at least that’s what your pretty glitter says

(you know they call it make up?)

and if you’re showing off

and showing up

then they can’t fault your act

and as long as your always never yourself

then there’s no wrong

that’ll get you smacked.

Smile, pretty show girl,

woncha show ’em whatcha got

said life

said strife

and their boiling, roiling pot.

So show girl, she pretty smiled

and said if it gotta burn,

best be hot.

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Scroll

2 Nov

Scroll

Scroll.

Scroll past the horrors

and the laughing

and the tawdry chaos that is

the two entwined

in our click-click world.

Scroll past the flinches

and the caught launching

and the revved-up pain

of past insult

in those little typed letters

thrown atcha on the screen.

Scroll.

Scroll past the reminders

and the forgotten

and the once-favorited yesterdays

that are too stale now to trend

or teach you anything new.

What was that again?

Scroll.

Keep scrolling.

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Old and Greats

11 Oct

Old and Greats

They tell you to just bleed on the page,

all those old and greats,

as if we still had the time to dig at our wrists

with their sharp-cut fountain pens,

as if we still had ink like that.

But we don’t patch our trousers anymore

or wear scuffed shoes

because our shoes aren’t made

of that kind of material anymore;

we hide our wear and tear now.

Rhetoric isn’t an art like it used to be,

and we spend too much time hiding our bruises

to remember how to properly wrap a wound

once we have let it bleed

and bleed

and bleed

all over that godforsaken fucking blood-soaked paper

that all those old and greats

told us would be our salvation.

They all went crazy, you know.

Wonder we are too.

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One More Month

9 Oct

I went to the desert and did not see a Blood Moon,

only the end of an eclipse, subtle as my waning sanity

with both of them blowing over dust.

Sand and detritus, that’s all they shine light on,

and some hills in the distance

that I know I’m going to have to drive through again.

Once you go over you have to come back,

that’s the only way to have gotten somewhere.

Make it back to town again

and the full orb’s back to full bright,

just like nothing ever happened

‘cept for one more month gone by.

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Missing

29 Sep
Missing

There was a time

when you and me

were a single word,

and all I heard

in the beating, fluttering earth

was the breath

of you next to me,

when my curves fit yours

because that was home.

My body’s lonely now,

now that you and me

are two different words

and I can’t hear you anywhere

in this silence,

because I don’t remember what it felt like

to hold your hand anymore,

because you decided that anymore,

you didn’t want to hold me.

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Hamster Wheel

21 Sep

Hamster Wheel

Life is an odd sort of hamster wheel –
you have to give money to make money,
have worked to get a job,
have a job to get the work.
You have to written to get good at writing,
put in more to get some not as hard the next time
and put off now for later so that later can be a better now.
Or at least, that’s what they tell you.
Me, I think we could make some different decisions,
and maybe there wouldn’t be so much sawdust
milling around our feet.
But then again,
maybe I just haven’t been around the wheel enough times.
Maybe once I’ve listened some more,
I’ll know better what I’m talking about.
Or at least,
that’s what they tell me.

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