Posts for June 8, 2023

people alway told me
that time moves faster
when you’re an adult
and you wish more than 
anything to stop it

when I was young
everything that
mattered to me
had an expiration

the Nintendo games
and VHS from
that rental store 
of dry air and wonder

fireflies in a mason jar
with the holes poked
in the lid 

the times my father 
came in from Ohio
Friday to Sunday
my exuberant and devestating
bookends
no one knew
I would stay awake
and watch him sleep
to make sure he didn’t 
disappear

or that single week
in a dead heated summer
when my mother 
would step off the plane
each single day
I felt die in my chest
weigh in my stomach
I’d keep her awake 
all night talking
because she said 
we were night owls
and I thought 
maybe if I was 
more like her
she’d take me home

now I’m here
at the edge of forty 
and time has elesticized 
seeing myself 
within my sons
if I had grown in a house
that was safe 

I feel the end
of every single bit of me
coming in this dark 
swelling wave 

the one I know
I’ve been waiting 
to ride out 
kick my feet
one last time
with no plan
of coming back

I tell you 
I love you 
All day long
I have no idea 
Where the I love you’s go,
but I say them anyway.
I watch your brothers and sisters 
Trace your outline in, in every room 
Especially on cold, still days
Like today–
I hope you can hear me.
I hope you can feel within me
That you live forever
In the forefront
of this crack in my heart, 
Maybe that’s really “what’s wrong “
with me? 
Maybe, that’s why “it’s normal” 
Is the constant I keep hearing?
There should be a name for parents
Who have to go on existing 
For the people they love on this earth
Yet they long for a warmth of being held 
In a place where only you exist
Its a hard and fine line
To be walking and balancing on everyday
All amongst the living
I think it does have a name, 
it’s just called grief. 
It’s just that no one tells you…
No one prepares you 
For the length of time 
You have to endure it.
Maybe that should have a name? 

And maybe in 4 years I’ll be telling some stranger about you

And convince them you weren’t my first love,

I’ll make you sound like a hookup that  just went into overtime,

And how in the moment I was just head over heels

I’ll write you off as a boyfriend I just had in high school

Or a phase I was bound to go through

A lesson I had to learn,

I’ll tell them I finally moved on

Maybe even to the point you and I  could grab coffee

And laugh about how we were so young and dumb

And talk about how we knew it would never last

And our parents were right,

That it was just puppy love

Maybe on the walk home I’ll smile from how believable I sound

I’ll unlock the door and walk to my room

I’ll climb in my big bed,

And pull the cold sheets back

Making sure not to misplace the extra pillows,

That haven’t been touched in years,

I’ll flip the covers over me,

And allow only then to accept,

What you truly were to me

A girl once taught me the delicacies of hidden things.
She made a bible out of the thursday horoscope,
honed a weapon out of the moon’s curved scythe,
the blade a perfect curve to my neck, her hands.
I spider my fingertips over the reminants of night,
unburying braille, the stars splinter into my skin
until I am made of pinholes. I do not hold anything,
her love runs out of me slowly, diluted, meaningless.
Everyone is a collection of lessons, a game to learn,
so I become sweet to everyone, tided over with no
fucks to give. Fold myself into fractaled lists, I am 
this, this, this. She sees me in black and white still,
so I give up being beautiful. This is the second time
someone hopeful has told me I reminded them of
Angeles by Elliott Smith. It means something, but I
don’t gamble anymore. Every game of chance is one 
I loom towards in darkness, invincible if I let myself be,
knowing I’d rather pretend it’s nice to meet her than
ask her to go to hell. Now I thin into only photographs,
so thank god I spent time compressing my life into paper.
My highlight reel is a black screen, an apathetic night sky 
with no signs to guide me into anyone’s poison arms.
I’ll be the hidden thing, the secret revelation better kept
for myself, the hidden message that won’t unspiral.
I’ll never tell, Angeles. 

I still have your birthday saved in my phone.
I know it’s pointless to keep it. I don’t need it anymore.
Our friendship ended nearly three months ago. 
We parted through bitter truths and with even more bittersweet words.
About how we wished things were different.
How we wish we were both better.
How we wish that our friendship was more like it was before.
We grew apart, we split apart, it happens.
I don’t need that little birthday reminder on my calendar for the 3rd of September anymore. 
Sometimes I’ll scroll through the months in my calendar and hold my finger over the delete button. I never can manage to press it though.
It doesn’t matter anyways.
I’ve had it memorized for years.

It still feels weird to me. 
That after 4 long years of us being friends, you’re not here anymore.
It wasn’t sudden, you slowly drifting out of my life.
But there’s still a you shaped hole.
And you’re not dead.
You didn’t fall off the face of the Earth or disappear.
You still go to the same magnet school program as my sister and still live only 5 minutes away from me.
And I think that’s the worst part of it all.
That despite no longer being in each other’s lives;
Our lives still go on.

And someday our paths will cross gain.
It’s a small town after all.
We may run into each other again; probably at one of my sister’s prayers.
You’ll be a character dancing in the background as I watch on from the audience.
Or maybe we’ll run into each other on some unlucky Monday afternoon.
We’ll meet each other’s eyes. Or we won’t look at all. 
And we’ll pass each other by.

And I hope, someday, that I won’t be as angry. As hurt.
That I won’t stay awake at night remembering all the toxic things you did.
Or wondering where it all went wrong.
Instead I hope someday as I go to sleep, the thought of you will make me laugh.
And make me wonder why I even gave a shit about you at all.
Maybe if I’m lucky, someday in the far future, the thought of you will flick through my mind and I’ll realize I haven’t thought of you in awhile.
Or even better I’ll never think of you at all.
But probably not.

That’s the thing about loosing friends and bitter ends.
You can hate them all you want.
Or try as hard as you can to forget them.
But you still wake up with things you desperately want to tell them.
And you go to bed wondering if they’re okay.

But I hope anyways that I will stop loving you.
That this bitterness and anger that I feel will reveal itself as persistent grief and then disappear like smoke before my eyes.
I hope someday I’ll delete all your information and your number from my phone.
I hope one day that I’ll see that the date is 9/3 and I won’t even think of you at all.
I Hope, I Hope, I Hope.
But probably not.

You have to teach

the words

to dance

without stumbling

into cliche.

We never met.
You died when I was a kid
and never knew I existed.
But I see you sitting there
ramrod straight before the mic 
at a Senate Committee hearing,
eyes fixed straight ahead
pushing back against
an influence-peddling probe.
(Maybe you never apologized either.)

But you knew dirt,
you and Nixon peddling pink paper,
smearing liberals, 
ruining reps.
You, communist whisperer,
professor of dirty tricks. 
Yes, you knew dirt.

Damnit!
I wish we cold talk
as the republic
is stalked,
it publicly going  
where republics go to die,
and sworn leaders still lie.
You knew dirt.
What would you say to this? 
 
                                                                        After Murray Chotiner,
                                                                        attorney, political strategist,
                                                                        who ran Richard Nixon’s 
                                                                        early political campaigns
                                                                        and became the target of  a
                                                                        congressional investigation.

up and down and

Among trees and sunshine fields,
I played for days
imagining fairy lands within the moss
covered shade of a hillside yard
under the mimosa and apple,
with acorn cups and violet blossoms
using sticks to build tiny
villages camoflauged with leaves
and smooth brown stones to cover
the dark loamy floors.
Coolness and the scent of worm rich
soil filled my senses,
fingers digging deep, Oh the plans
and imagined dances of miniature
winged creatures. 
Innocent hours creating alone
no one interfering with the worlds
I knew, no one controlling time. 
I was the source of enchantment,
my mind could wander to
realms never visited by adults
who couldn’t invision the lives 
I lived among vast worlds.
What good fortune to have such
freedom to craft with my child’s
imagination, given the right to
reign over my quiet lovely universe.
I didn’t know then, how fast
the earth was carrying me toward
responsibility and loss. I couldn’t
be intruded upon by knowledge
of pain or unforeseen longings.
Oh beautiful contentment!
How vibrant and green the
colors of childhood blossomed
as I unknowingly traveled
on fairy wings toward the
infringment of life slipping by.

KW 6/8/23

7: Hannibal (2013)

roommate identifies STRONGLY with

sweaty, sad-eyed, sick man of

a million dogs from Dog Name, VA.

          (have you taken the Which Character

          quiz? they got Will Graham, me

          i’m the dead

          March sister; I wanted to be

          Jo when i was little,

          but you turn 13, and things take a turn indeed)

y’know, it’s nice to romanto-comedize the urge

to turn the haters into windchimes, hearts sublime,

paintbrush’s turpentine and mushrooms divine,

totemic altars and dysaemic pallors and

          dystomic fault lines faltered

and all, but it still kind of sucks to be

the one hook-line-and-sinkered, the one

with their stinking ankle in the toothy trap,

the gummed-on remnant cooked off the bone,

y’know?