thin ice

1. my eyes burn, my head hurts. my face is stiff and salty. why am i so emotional. why am i so goddam weak. from the bathroom floor the world just looks different. from that point of view i see it for what it is. depraved. pathetic. or maybe what i see is just a reflection of myself. i don’t know. i don’t want to think. i want to be done. it’s all the same. two steps back, then two steps back again. from the bathroom floor the dark seems to go on forever. i breathe in blackness so thick but so good. its draped over the floor and the white porcelain bathtub that i can’t see but know is supposed to be on the other side of where i lie. earth shattering pounds in my ears. tsunamis of despair drawn from within me then dumped over my head like some kind of sick joke. It’s not real though. I refuse to admit the realness of my condition. A little hiccup in my act, is all. When I’m done with my bottled up release, something in me says, Get up, this is insane, be rational. Something in me sounding far too similar to the nonsense that flies from all directions outside the bathroom door. All I am out there is fair game. But even here, something noisy and suffocating has wormed a way into in my conscience. Something locked me out and changed the key. When all i had wanted, was something to believe in.
All I got,
was something to destroy me.



2. Inside, an unexplained weight pulls on the core of my being. A feeling as heavy and cold as an entire Arctic glacier. It silently presses its mass on the world, sometimes melting, then reforming, but never completely relenting.

It just hits me sometimes. How perfectly, terribly, alone I am.

Dust dances before my eyes like I’m in a dream, little fluffs illuminated momentarily by the winter sun before disappearing once again into the cloak of the shadows. The pattern of the slatted window blinds casts thick yellow stripes that melt into the walls and into me.

The stillness of it all hurts tangibly, in a far-away, dull, kind of ache. Like an itch on the inside. How do you scratch that? I shift uncomfortably, my movement lifeless - that of a puppet. In my ears, unsaid words seem to echo on repeat, their meanings undefined but haunting. I wish I could catch them and write them down, but as with everything else I want, they elude me.

Like this, I sit and I exist, pretending that nothing’s wrong,

Like this, I drown, quietly, in air.

anatomy of a girl

anatomy of a girl

a cross on the shiny metal steeple,
a cross hanging by her lessening heart

yet the cross she breathes for,
that real, warm, pulsing peace,
fades further, into the foggy, dream-deferring distance,
the closer she crawls on unfaithful hands and knees

pathetically

a prayer is always melting on her tongue
like candied fire or bitter snow
but never body temperature
oh, it's never just right

a stone-cold pinkie toe
curls emphatically,
waiting, wanting, freezing.

an ink colored sadness collects like dust bunnies
in the crevices of folded skin

it spills over, staining the fluffy carpet
and silk sheets
and other luxurious things
oh, how useful they are now.

look closer -
the fine wrinkles
drawn by divine mechanical pencil
bag the inner corners of
young eyes - too old for their age
they don't need kohl to be darkened

the four sides of the empty picture frame
hang upon her South-facing wall
oh! the empty picture frame
hangs like wooden blasphemy

I hope you're not too busy to believe me,
but the lost generation - it's always the current one.

.

She’s either really into it, Or she’s not.

Take a look around
Happiness explodes from every face, every voice, every thing that happens
in a slightly disturbing - disturbingly attractive manner.
Like playing with fire of the - emotional sort.
then without warning
the sudden, prodigious lack of it turns the world and everything in it
black and blue, a tinge of gray. Maybe a hint of red if she was feeling lucky.
It’s like, her own personal lens of hell, those colorless eyes of hers.
It’s like, Who turned the Fricking Lights Off?

Her ability to be completely polarized is

uncanny, to say the least.
To say the most,

it is a curse.

Untitled

When i walk through the halls with my eyes to the floor
i look up briefly as i pass the library.
You're sitting in your usual spot,
surrounded in a crowd of happy nuisances.
boy, you never change

When you catch me looking at you
it seems as if your cold blue eyes turn into a pair of
warm rippling oceans, full of mystery and humor.
Drowning me in your depth, challenging me to break.
i'm always the one who looks away. always.
boy, you never change

Sitting in some class that i try to pay attention in but can't,
i think about the golden time
before i noticed you. When i was closer to you.
It's funny how life works because
now we barely talk.

All I can say is

boy,

I sure hope that

you never change

It's funny because I like to stay up at night putting together outfits. Diggin through soft mounds of cotton, knowing exactly what I'm looking for but keeping my eye out for the unexpected. The clock goes round so fast.

Before I know it it's already morning.
But for the first time in hours.
I have no idea.
what to wear.

we who overflow with emptiness

No matter how fast I run, no matter how low I lie, no matter how far I get.

My outstretched hands, with trembling laced fingers,

seem unable to contain the right words and actions.

No matter, no matter, no matter, no ma-

But I need them.

In this strange world I need them all the time.

The mysterious treasures slip through my grasp

just as I recognize their mighty worth

effortlessly spilling into the thirsty cracks of the lonely dirt road:

lost forever in the layers of archeological time.

I like to imagine that Hell's angels plunder our losses.

The ruby of "right"; the diamond of "normal"; even the

tarnished golden locket that knows my childhood.

Lost by the work of a single drop of Rain that provoked

a tsunami.

It was so fateful, yet so inevitable

As the shimmering skin of my cup bulged with despicable eagerness.

I am a gray situation.

Dragging hopes even blacker

is the realization that things were not always this way.

Regression demoralizes faster than you can say

“it’s ok”.

And by the time you do, it’s too late anyways.

For every leaf and every love apple that falls

thereonafter

just sits suspended in the atmosphere.

Unable to rise, unable to fall,

unable to escape the middle passage.

It’s an arms race of everything,

when what we want is too much,

and what we really need, who knows?

My needs

I surrender to the One who promises gain from loss.

I surrender again, again, and again.

Confusion

I wonder if this is what being old feels like.

Having so much I could have done, but in the end it doesn't even matter because I haven't made anything of it.

Sitting around on my rocker waiting for miracles to happen, after I've finished crying.

And then they don't.

repeat.

Hello world, feel pity on me. I'm just a poor little rich girl.
Cuz these days, I'm not even living a reality.
I'm a part of some kind of sick dream that I can't wake up from.

Why even try.
Why is it so much easier to close my eyes and forget it all.
TO GIVE IN.

Alive, but dead to the world around me.
Hopelessly. Utterly. Depressed.



Dear Society, I'm experiencing heartbreak of a different kind.
Oh fuck love, sadness is blind.


But you wouldn't really understand, now would you.

Erosion

The raging silence throbs like anesthesia
seeping under my fingernails, through my pores, tunneling into my ears
i don’t know how much more i can stand
Picture an isolated island, lost in the vast Pacific,
beautiful shores and majestic rocky ledges
standing helpless against voracious froth-crested waves that pound and never tire.

And one thing about the Pacific is,

it never loses.

The Epilogue

Words lost by mandate
but never completely gone,
hovering like smudged ghosts
quietly yearning to be freed
in knowing that they will never be read
existing a low-key existence
indecipherable
Their remembrance and reality forever grafted

on to little scraggly rolls of skins
formerly sweet and rosy, tenderly pink, and fragrantly fresh
Perhaps still so on the inside but
currently tattooed muddy colors from the mistakes of people's paper tongues

Rubber never decomposes.
People seem to forget that.
I learned it in the 1st grade when I accidentally swallowed my bubblegum.
And remembered it today as I was cleaning my desk. Wipe as you will, vacuum until you're blue
but the poor little devils must co-exist with
the rest of us.

Unanswered Questions....
Where do they all end up anyways?
What were their black scars meant (or not meant) to say?
and

Why
in the world
would anyone write poems about eraser shavings?

Unkempt

Unkempt

Sometimes the hardest part of doing is getting started. That's the way it was for her at least. She would sit, defeated before the battle even began, at the bedside. With the weight of the future, present, past, and the mysterious 4th dimension fully upon her and around her, sinking with her into the crickety mattress. Her breathe trickled in and out of her in a shallow stream as she sat as still as any living creature of flesh can be. Unable to take the first step in the "journey of a thousand miles", or however that proverb went. She wasn't dogmatic or particularly stubborn. It wasn't that she didn't want to do what had to be done, nor was she afraid of failure. After all, how badly could a person mess up the mundane process of brushing her teeth or giving the common courtesy of returning a friend's missed call. Alright, she could probably think up a million horror stories for every scenario out there. Creativity is not meant to be a curse and sometimes the devil twists it to grow into the form of one. But for her, idleness borne itself not of arrogance, conscience laziness, irrational fear, or even the destructively rudimentary nature that haunts us all at times.

In the beginning, even she dwelled unaware in the deceptive murks of sadness.

It grew so familiar in so short a time, and it not so much showed up in her life as it did fade and slither unnoticed, gaining more and more territory over her each moment, not unlike the rotting of young innocent love. The powerful domination of her dark friend seemed normal. The coldness settled in her bones and her toes and her lip, turning her life and her words brittle, icy, and utterly alone. Sadness reigned, a great hazy veil over the city that altered the appearances of every corner of sky and expanse of cement. It ran rabid and silly in the alleys, scaring the creepy stray cats and nestling greedily in everything that accidentally came in contact with its oscillating form. She became the master of silence, its right hand queen who knew it so well that she and it were basically married.

All of this happened within a messy thing called subconsciousness.

Meanwhile, in reality, she began to wonder why everything started working in slow motion and gas-guzzling energy-inefficiency. She brought her knees to her chin and kind of set her head upon them to give it a rest. Her milky, hollow eyes peered over the edge and watched as she wiggled her toes experimentally.

Well, I suppose I'm still alive and in once piece, her breath seemed to say, hot and slow, as it flowed over her cracked, dehydrated lips.

Sometimes she wished she didn't have to know what was going on. Sometimes knowing makes things like starting more difficult. Sometimes it does harm to unmask the gruesome face of the terrible guest, because whoever said ignorance was bliss was obviously not ignorant. You only know what bliss is once you lose it, and then it just seems more blissful than ever, like a sweet dream that taunts you with the stolen candy as it floats off into the closed sky. You will never know the dream again as it disappears forever, just like terrible tendrils of clear steam.

Make up your mind

Make up your mind

Sometimes she got annoyed by everything: the sounds, the smells, the hustling and bustling crowd that never seemed to thin out on the sidewalks. When all someone wants is to be alone and sort through reasons and feelings, it is very frustrating to be subtly denied that constitutional right by the current state of affairs. Such busy affairs, people and love-sin infested affairs. The lines on her forehead furrowed to form a landscape of hills and small valleys on her face. She swirled her pinky-finger gently around the the rim of the plastic $0.99 coffee cup of which the contents had long gone cold and undrinkable. She placed her tired forefingers in the tender spots on either curving side of her nose, as if to hold back all the tears of joy she wasn’t crying, before her hands slowly slid over her eyes in the familiar way they usually did and acted as a curtain to the unwelcome heat of the reality we are all forced to face. She sighed ever so prettily yet so deeply.

When she opened her eyes, they wandered across the aisle to a girl, dressed in a suffocating, pressed beige business suit. Then she noticed the wild frazzled man in a distressed black motorcycle jacket, sitting across from the business girl. The man said something, his gruff voice lost somewhere in the aisle, in the drone of cafe clamor. Then the girl thew her head back and laughed. It was the kind of laugh that shined and sparkled with the full release of built-up “I just can’t take it anymore”. This was the kind of laugh characterized by a smile that reached behind a person’s eyes, a white flash of teeth that could free a person’s soul, a silly sound so similar to the absolutely pointless yet impossibly pure cry of a newborn infant. Things like this stranger’s laughter have the touch of angels and remind that a whisper of love can blind a whole world of hate.

What a beautiful couple, she thought, her hands now calmly cupping the coffee drink, for she was just the kind of person to admire unconventional beauty.

The clean, pressed girl leaned towards her greasy, unkempt counterpart, and he to her; their lips brushed for the slightest moment in time. It was the simplest moment in time. It made her wonder if such a sweeter second could be remade in the next 30 years of Hollywood; she decided not. She looked away from the girl and the boy right as the magic ended. For the sweet moment had turned into that awkward moment when your object of fascination, usually another person, somehow feels your eyes. But it is so premature a feeling that both parties doubt whether it happened at all, and most of the time conclude in their respective minds that it probably did not.

To emphasize her decision, she set her eyes straight ahead to stare at the back of someone’s graying head, someone probably just like her-tired-self who needed to refill her tank with caffeine every once in a blue moon. To emphasize her decision, she took a nice long swig of the still, cold coffee from her $0.99 plastic cup. She swallowed painfully but did not cringe. She felt the presences of the man and the woman stand up. They walked to the exit door and the man tried to kiss the woman again but she turned away embarrassed. Her eyes darted around furtively like they were trying to find something, and then she walked briskly away in the opposite direction of the man. So much for magic.

When everything started rushing back to her, she buried her face in her arms, feeling stupid that she thought she could forget it all. She felt the presence of the waiter beside her table. He was saying Ma’am, Ma’am, Here is your bill, We have other customers waiting.

She did not look up - just kind of muffled to the waiter, Kind of like it is your job to wait. I think it would do them some good to wait.

Let them wait.

jazz feels like right now

jazz feels like right now

dooba dooba shwizz shwizz doo d a h h h

a perfect sundae of deliberated whimsy, and words melted together to create silence

topped with melancholy flats, heartstopping sharps and an audience to eat it right up

if I could make sundaes, I could be the source of my own inspiration

now wouldn’t that be f a s c i n a t i n g?

the sugar n e v e r s t o p s, rushing on and on in the sweet way it swings and catches you off guard

then catches you before you hit the ground, safe in its strong tan arms

that crazy swing dance can really get to my head

it’s tall, dark, and h a n d s o m e

it could bring a teenage girl to tears.

&it d o e s.

nightmare

loving you is like insomnia

loving you is like insomnia
loving you is like insomnia

but not loving you would be worse, like falling
fast, fast asleep
like dream, dream, dreaming about what could happen
instead of living it

you're something to see.

1. my mama once told me

night/'s words are made of butter

and when the sun comes up

they melt

sources::oneshadegray,hader

the trouble with heresy


icy table tops press airtight against burning cheeks
dead daisies lie dried and shriveled on dusty windowsills
with freshly bald dandelions as mates
that’s always how it ends up.
soft flurescent bulbs project a sickly blue on the linoleum floor
and clothe the room in hazy, glowing embrace
a pall that sings you sweet lullabies and little lies.

troubled, wide eyes and bitten lips
reliving days past in the middle of the night
sometimes into early morning hours
when horizon has barely broken
and nothing feels quite real

except a quiet padding of rubber sandals against chaffed white feet
in the back and forth patterns of rumination and great pondering.
an eerie monotonous song beating on and on and on.
teasing sunspots and shadowy characters skip across the walls
always a few steps ahead of the limp fingertips that trail aimlessly

wherever.

the body eventually throws itself in exhaustion
back into an open sanction of quilts and pillows
but the mind is forever reeling its line
farther out into deep midnight seas,
sinking past magical undergrowths,
that sway darkly with the tide’s relentless pulse.

uncharted on any map.

we’re not exactly sure, but

the hardest part of living just may be finding air for breathing.

poetry is for people who have too much to say. but don't have the ability to color within the lines. while trying to say it.

...#_*#*%_($

...lkh;dsfhlfd

lucid lucifer

I lift my fingers to touch

the soft fluorescent beams that knife through the atmosphere
My eyes sullenly follow the illuminations of nervous air specks
that swim and prance through the orange spotlight
like it's just a game.

A dispersed multitude of shadows
lazing through a world of viscous jell-o
and double realities
like little pink fetuses sloshing around the womb
wishing waiting, never to be, born
how tenderly unfortunate.
how practically insignificant.
Tired, I close my hurting eyes, turn off the lamp.
Fiery white hot specks exploding in my inner eyelids.

Like this, I sleep and I try to forget.

how do i help a friend

who's heart was broken by a boy I grew up with.
I thought he was better than that.
I thought they were cute.
but it never lasts...
And
I just really really really thought he was better than that.

Humanity fails me.