Monday, September 20

fellow inhabitants

i found everyone in the world
dead in a room filled
with the promising light of dawn

alone,
i will discover everything there is to know
about the birth and death of the universe
before i discover anything about myself



Saturday, September 4

my heart holds more and more

life shows its cold self in marred bodies,
pinks purples reds of flesh, folds and incisions,
the gore reminding us what
our insides really look like; scenes insensitive
to our dangerously
and
beautifully crafted
hearts.

fresh memories of summer fool me
so i remind myself they will grow old
may we always curse ourselves
for not savoring it a little bit more,
just a little bit more?

i remind you that our time together will end,
and that it is ok.
i tell you, 'we can love in spite of it,'
and the occasional
sighting of spilt organs reminds
us what we are made of

Monday, July 12

stories

when we are asleep we know everything;
our dreams cannot fool us, only waking life
we are our own gods, the storytellers,
i am living alone in an asian metropolis
i am living in a cottage with mystic people
i am having a love affair with someone i
see occasionally in real life,
but have never actually spoken to.
we do not question boundaries and
despite the strangeness, nothing is absurd
when we wake we have tears in our eyes

Thursday, July 8

we are/i am , pacing amongst thousands and millions of other lonely humans.

mundane activities increase in the summer. they plead for company the most, as the passing of time is fatal.
i was always lonely in the shower . always.
and i was always aware of my shortcomings that are a result of being still only a kid. those feelings made time slow and stretched it thin across short periods, almost unbearable, but nevertheless bittersweet; perfect for nostalgia to be felt in the future.
summer led to too much time to sit and think
which led to too much time to be drunk
which led to too many conversations in which i butcher my thoughts and express them, prematurely in crude formats.
these poisons of the idleness of summer-bodies led to the worst moment:
re-realizing i've only ever really known the loneliest people
i'm drawn in to them and expect to find comfort in the shared trait, but there are moments when you lay right next to them and feel they're just as lonely as they were without you;

my stomach sinks
i can smell my own fear



Friday, June 25

blond girl who used to wear pink berets

you played the violin and it made me feel like i had travelled back in time.
i painted begonia eyes with coral hands on a flesh mountain that month,
when you lived by the warehouses.
we were less human, run on electricity,
our teeth would do funny things and i felt like i was in a soft fishbowl
or a television set, contained and safe with round edges
and we would buy pop from a machine next door
for only
a quarter. and
it made you feel like we had travelled back in time

Thursday, June 24

new age bullshit

i'm watching people i used to want to know in plastic lawnchairs that reflect a sick dull light of new age northwest bullshit and i feel my own young sallow eyes that can't drink in anymore
i checked "no" bubbles with a sordid smirk for questions like "do you ever drink until there's nothing else to drink?" and "do you ever drink to feel better and relieve stress?"
and no i've never blacked out, never done coke, never took pills never never
but i didn't tell enough lies and they're making me come back,
the catholics are making me come back once aweek for two months.
i could tell the lady felt funny when she asked about what kind of things me and my friends talked about and i got all confused and looked out and window and said "strange things i guess?"
i used to pretendsilly, a teeny oblivious, that i was a little black girl who lived in georgia and had peach cobbler and sunday school dresses and a big smiley momma's lap to sit on
nowadays i think about things kinda similar like living real simple in chicago or pittsburgh or new orleans
i was born in DC in sultry july of 1993 and i do miss the fireflies and lightning bolts but now i live here
and it's dark and the buildings are new and the streets are stagnant
worst thing is we stopped learning how to love when we learned how to be scared and sorry
futility blooms in our hearts like a smoked salmon coloured poppy

Tuesday, June 15

(Requiem æternam)

like an atheist
in a cathedral:
if this feels like holiness
what must it feel like
to the pious?

at home still

i was a towering dandelion seed, carried wayside by the legs of an ant
swayed by the wind that should have been strong enough to pull me off with it,
not gripped in a creatures jaws so much smaller than i.
but by some miraculous force of ant-nature, i was kept at home still,
through currents, on ant feet, on dirt;

blanket of human

i wish you would smother me like a
blanket until i'm damn positive that
(unlike two Oceans meeting via fictional borders),
we'll always only be Capable of being
two separate creatures that stare back at
each-other exchanging mysterious emotions through
nothing but senses and Trust

Wednesday, June 9

milk

guts made of milk fat spilled on roadsides underneath the phosphorescent residue of human thought our memories are moving a thousand miles an hour spun by velocity like gossamer wool along cosmos
when i drink soymilk my spit is iridescent white like the walls of your soul that burn white because i am telling you thank you thank you on the last day of your life

Tuesday, June 8

downsides of going to highschool in a college town

1.your name looks so good on paper and the poems that follow make me nostalgic for something i never had kinda like how i always wanted to go home but home was never physically real; i think there must be wax paper covering the insides and outsides of my body and the mix of urgency and bleakness is melting and fusing the paper and i together
i can't see beyond the sunspots seeping through orange eyelids, i can't see beyond this futuristic june i can't see whats happening in anyone else's heart
or in wyoming
or down the street
i can't see how many people died today, and maybe i'd like to be able to,
maybe i need to see what they thought about last

2. maybe it's that i'm not smart enough, or that i need the years to move faster than my mind because i've lived less time than you and i want to catch up so i can be your friend;
we can make hot dogs on sundays or sip cocktails fast on wednesdays or cry on saturday evenings after we are reminded of the things that break hearts .
i need to become less sad or scared or something but i don't think we can ever become good again and maybe i even hope we don't because the only memories i miss are the saddest ones .

3. the biggest problem is that when i'm drunk i feel like an uncouth fool, i feel like an off colored joke; for once, i need to meet you when my senses are still acute because i don't know you yet, i don't know about your ex-girlfriends and your mother and the things inside you, i just know the look in your eye because it's similar to the look in the eyes of people i've loved, disillusionment having lost its freshness, now it's just tired but i know we keep waking up for something


my dreams over the ages


-dream of stairwells, tumbling aluminum cans, broken teeth like chalk

-a dream of an sweaty underwater ship where whales had to work, "making spices", with no breaks until they died

- a dark green tinted dream of a funeral of a russian man, whose open casket is walked down the aisle in a badly lit cathedral- the strangest thing is that the body is missing arms and the head is displayed on a silver platter.

-dreamt i was insane and lived in a vast white asylum and made escape plans that made no sense in the bathroom stalls

-the longest dream i've had was about a woman who ate a starbucks, a camera and my car; she eventually ate me in a parking lot on the edge of the sea in alaska

-had a dream that my cat was with my in my bathroom while I was washing my hands, and he said hello, and i asked him why he never spoke before, and he told me he always had thought about a lot of things, and just never possessed the ability to communicate them to me; abrupt end

-dreamt about a windstorm so strong i got stuck lying down on the sidewalk, unable to move, unable to open my eyes

-had a dream about smoking in bed with theo, wasting paint, and the news channel reporting on the sudden migration of talking chickens across america

-first bad dream I've had in years: huge ugly goat that looked diseased and had extra arms, walking around moaning. i chopped its limbs off, terrified

-had a dream we went to this school in the herald building, but it was bigger and all destroyed from recent terrorist bombs, and we learned about self defense in little circles together; the students thought it was funny that you were in high-school because you had a mustache and wore a leather jacket and looked at least 22 (which you are, in reality). occasionally our teachers would be shot dead in class by snipers

-dreamt i was on the east coast in a beach house with a lot of rain and thunder and a 8 inch record. i played the record and i believe this is the first dream in which there was music. it wasn't actually anything like music though, instead it was more like the feelings you get when you hear music, but coming out of the record player in the form of sound

-i dreamt tova played a glass trumpet
in large, dark concrete rooms with a band uniform on

-there's a dream I know I must have had years ago, of a field at the edge of a forest, with an industrial city is in the distance. there's no sun anymore, and everything glows sepia in the moon light; there's no language anymore, no memories of the past, no one else alive. there are only quiet machines in the distant city, moths, dirt, everything is dull and washed out---there's a sense of finality as well as eternity. you can see beyond the field but you know this is the last place to be, you've always know it, its been waiting,

Monday, May 31

bedridden

i want
i want to be normal again i want to go home and by home i mean the northwest i mean the wilderness i want to be
outside
and in the sun, i want the sun back
they made me watch more vietnam war videos and them boys said everyone was scared
they said they just wanted to go home and get drunk and go on a date
that's what i want to do too
i wish they had been okey them boys i wish all fifty eight thousand coulda made it home
i want
to learn how to appreciate but it's been years and i know now, its gonna be hard
i know about the rosenbergs about gus garcia about emmet till and all the soldiers all the soldiers
i know about your son and i know about your friends that died
and it's still tough
but i know, stuck inside for two weeks lying in bed i know
one day it's gonna be the birds that save us
it's gonna be everything we've thought about and then the crickets and the ol sun goin down and we'll be alright for a couple minutes

Saturday, May 29

1988

mercy upon lonely teenagers
kids whose thoughts sound like post-rock or shoegaze
kids who silently mouth words to songs on the bus
mercy upon lunch ladies
what are there homes decorated like,
and who loves them?
accidentally stepping on dead birds in the wet grass
overcast june
mercy upon the boys who graduated from high school
and still can't spell

Monday, May 24

pt 2

how many times will you end up dodging death?
will you go out with a bang, sputter and hiss like hot fat,
oh will you,
will you light up the faces of bystanders?

Friday, May 7

the self destruction of the able-bodied

now,
I remember why I drank in the first place:
when i'm not drunk i have one primary emotion
that is accompanied with sad smiles

without a human,
it might look like imperfections
barely visible on painted walls
it might feel like stark sunlight
hitting the houses' faces at five

it might be silence

i think maybe
if it were possible
i should take the time
to sit and stare at the ceilings
for days
until i figured something out
figured anything out

Wednesday, April 21

cost-co poem

wide-ass screens
bloated body parts

dinner is $3.05
and all the condiments come from pipes

life would be so easy
if we hadn't already been disillusioned

Friday, April 9

?

moving fingers over metal points, over cartridges
alas, softening bullets with familiarization
is
impossible.

Friday, February 19

a life spent restless ends in a sleep unappreciated

it's sad that i only saw your downfall.

Wednesday, February 3

semisweet sharks

waking at night to find your insides still wispy
and your eyes still heavy with overlapping hangovers;

heart-strings strung through legs
knobby knees tugging organs each step home;

taking a drag as if smoke
could fill the cavities in your chest;

Saturday, January 23

vegetable

like a human vegetable
would you like me to sit and wait
would you like me to ripen

i think you are mistaken;
i am not waiting for anything

there are seagulls
and 4.pm light cast on solitary figures
we are sitting, separate, thinking
i am the one drinking water and looking angry

who would know that i am in-fact content

who would know that there is nothing more to wait for