Fatale
Everyone knows that you’re just
waiting for your film noir moment,
where shadows are richer than the pale of her cheekbones
and the dark glossiness of his hair
You hate to admit it, but you know
a rich shadow spends more than
your waiting will ever earn.
The currency of shadows is breath and
an inhale that’s sharp enough to cut diamonds.
Your inhale isn’t sharp enough to cut diamonds,
and everyone knows you’ve tried.
Neither are your hipbones or
your blood red nails, painted with real blood
because it’s cheaper than polish,
or the daggers you shoot from your eyes.
They fall worthlessly to the ground,
a short, ineffective flight with broken wings.
The syncopation of your breath
will never conjure control,
iron chains that only get heavier
when someone’s saccharine ideology of love
overcomes their desire to lift your chains
off their shoulders.
Your breath produces a cloud of smoke
from a recently extinguished cigarette.
The still-glowing butt was too dull to
make it past the cutting boards, and
your producers say it isn’t extreme enough.
They don’t think a fading glow is entrancing;
it could never tie anyone down.
They’re sorry, but they’re exploring alternate options.
Passion can’t be measured in gray areas.
Emotion is explicit and you dream in drama.
How sickeningly benign. You won’t survive
a monochromatic world of perfect passion.
It takes too much energy to be that generic.
It’s exhausting, and even if your breath is dull,
I swear I can still feel it.
You can empty your lungs and
pour out Iris, and she leaves a rainbow trail
in her wake.
Your most base, most human instinct,
just breathing gives a fuller color spectrum than
your film noir moment.
[part of my nightmare/lucid dream. It’s actually more disturbing than it sounds.]
I run through the halls of a hospital trying to find a bathroom but I can’ see one anywhere and I am barefoot and people keep looking at me and asking what I am doing there, but I keep running. I stop when I pass a very old couple, and it looks like the old man is listening to music. I ask him, pretty loudly, if he knows where the bathroom is, and he just smiles blandly. I ask again, louder, but a woman with purple white hair pulled back into a bun wraps her beige-sweatered arms around him and says that he can’t hear me; he’s deaf. I realize that the earbuds are not earbuds, they are hearing aids, and what the fuck does that say about our society. I apologize and am about to start running again when another woman stops me, and I recognize her from some early subconscious time when I met her on a train and told her that once I had seen a old blind man being led around by his wife and that’s how I knew love existed. She had said she may have seen the couple before; they took the train every day, and now she is shaking me by my shoulders and saying this is the couple that she always sees, are they the same? and I say no, but this is love too, and we wept into each other’s hair. Hers is coarse and the color of 90% dark chocolate, with copper tips like lit fuses on corkscrew curls. When we finally pull apart, she says we should meet up sometime for coffee the next time I am in Boston. She’s older that I am, an adult, and I she makes me feel juvenile but appreciated. I hear my mother and my sister calling for me, and my mother’s voice is disapproving of my new friend. My mother wants to leave and take me with her, but I’m running down the halls again. I can outrun her voice with my bare callused soles slapping on the clean white tile.
Darling Avocado.
Soft and fragile and
you tap down expertly with a
butter knife until
you’ve crushed it and the span of
green is lumpy and bruised and maybe
a little bit self concious?
It used to revel in its solidity before
you hacked away its skin and
tore out its heart
and it sat and waited for someone to
consume the remainder of its body
but even it didn’t see much point in
half a heartless shell.
Aging and unobserved, it
always holds that secret that
it was possible it was still worth
something (maybe not,
that was a secret too).
And now it’s smeared on a bed
of wheat toast and it hasn’t really
decided which secret is more relevant,
but it can only guess from the way
it has been salted into oblivion that
there isn’t enough flavor to just
let it lie.
Sometimes,
the universe is so fucking disturbing
when it’s gray too many days in a row.
Or when there is not nearly enough caffeine
to wake me up for a 9am lecture, with all those
revolutionary thoughts that my adolescent
sponge of a brain soaks up and
immediately sorts into that mountain called
Things I Will Care About Later, Probably Never.
These are the days when I don’t want to wake up
because I am warm in my bed and this can
sometimes be found in the thesaurus
under suicidal, but only by definition,
not by feeling because these days are when
I’m too lethargic.
These days are the ones where the universe is
my best friend
because I really enjoy
having an archenemy.
It’s not sad that I’m disturned by the universe.
Aren’t you too?
You aren’t disturbed by the expanse of everything
and how there are statistically
so few planets that can be filled with people
like us?
Fuck, I don’t want to find them.
I don’t want to find people like me.
I’d rather keep being happily disturbed by everything
and be afraid of anyone and everyone and their
electric touch, because I’ll never shock you.
I’m content to never interact with the universe
because that makes me a god, and I
will fucking tear your wold down
until you’re raw on the inside
and you think your sick and twisted
and your world is wasted on your empty shell.
The day you realize you aren’t important enough to
be sad is the day when
you won’t shock me either.
You sort through me
faster than you
smoke those cigarettes.
You’re poison but
fuck
you taste sweet.
Dear universe,
I apologize for the lack of activity here. I actually have been writing quite a bit, but it’s all terrible, angsty, uninteresting and quite personal, so in order to avoid bothering you all with my incredibly shallow problems and the fact that sometimes, I’m quite a head case, I am going to use this vacation to mentally detox and try to write something that doesn’t sound like a song by The Used.
Sometimes I forget that it’s difficult to write in bubble letter cursive and do swirly details with chunky tipped markers. I fucking hate PBR though so it’s fine (plus my ballpoint pen FFFUUUUU face is mad at it anyway)
(Source: ritual-madness)
