Tag: original poems

This Is Me

for flamecoloredskies ❤ 

vowels and consonants
will never quite fit properly into
my soul: my musings, my
passions. 
and as much as poems sing
truth, they will always skip
some notes– the ones we have not 
learned to write down yet.
it is scary, having
things inside you you don’t know
how to set free. 

so sometimes i close
my eyes 
and let my hands dance to 
the songs in my mind. and
when you look at the canvas,
you will see me
in the brushstrokes. i will see
a map of my mind, no longer
overlapping streets but
routes to places inside
i’d never figured out how to give
others directions to. 

i am hollow until
i give myself to a canvas or a song 
and let the pieces of me make sense
of themselves. 
then we can look at 
them and understand. 

No Sympathy For The Devil

My blood is too thick 
for Nevada. I’ve never been
able to properly explain myself 
in this climate– always thinking
that just behind some narrow door in
all my favorite bars, 
men in red woolen shirts are
getting incredible kicks from things
I’ll never know. 

I know
these people in my goddamn 
blood, though. Won’t be long now before
they tear me to shreds. 
Too weird to live, too weird to die–
just another freak, in the
freak kingdom, humping
the American dream. Never able to
accept the notion that
you can get a lot higher without drugs
than with them. 

But with the right kind
of eyes, you can almost see
the high-water mark– that place
where the wave finally 
broke and rolled back, 
that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of
old and evil, 
whatever it meant. 

Home

You are the
Kermit the Frog doll
I used to carry
under my arm.
The one
I’d never go anywhere without–
the one that smells like
my grandmother’s perfume and blooming
Michigan summers.

You are
my favorite pair of shoes–
the ones
that have my footprints
molded into the soles, and
creases where they bend at
the toes.

You are
the way my pillowcase smells
a week after I wash it–
a cocktail of
dryer sheets and shampoo.

You are hot tea,
a warm blanket, and
a book
while watching the
snow fall.

You are binge watching
my favorite episodes of
Friends in sweatpants
after a long day
at work.

You are every poem
in every piece of my heart,
the home button
on my GPS.

Apology to Myself

i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry

the words throw themselves off
my lips to become the ground
you walk on.

i’m sorry i wasn’t the one
you wanted to squeeze
into your daily planner in
slanted, sloppy script.

i’m sorry i fell so hard
so fast because i am
scraped up and
don’t know what to do.
i made you my
emergency contact.

i’m sorry i confused
us for love because
it hurts to see you laugh
while I am trying
to ignore the fact that
i am still on fire.

i’m sorry all I can seem to remember
are your eyes and lips and
laughter instead of the words
that hit me like
lit cigarette butts or
the humid silences or the hours
i spent worrying about someone
whose only mark on
my heart is a burn.

Summer Morning Symphony

sleepy skies and morning dew
play pianissimo, slowly
crescendoing as the
sun strains
to peek through
my window.
a quarter rest– just to stretch–
and the percussion of
socks smacking
wood.

a high C,
sung softly in vibrato
to the twin toddlers
sleeping
three doors down.
xylophone keys
falling
into
the toilet bowl.
quiet, frantic
glissando down
the stairs.
the
smash of the cymbals slamming
shut.
the final note,
the delicate
click of the key.
the applause.

Nectar

When she wilted on the wooden

floor and allowed herself the blows,
I couldn’t see the love

was gone, but I knew
I couldn’t save her.
When I found myself
cornered in the eyes of her

hurricanes, helpless
to the venom she spit,
I didn’t realize I needed to
save myself.