Splinters

I feel lack luster
And dusted
Dusty white plates busted
On the floor and spreading splinters
A porcelain powder dreary winter
Working its way into the grain of the wooden floor
And now we can't walk with bare feet anymore

Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 

Paranoia for Dead People

What if it took off my hand
What if it took off my arm
It smells like antiseptic and I'm selfish
It's grating to go through the seasons
And it's tiring to walk to the end of the street
My stop is next and I'm glad
Because I'm gagging from the dentist office smell
Even the smallest sounds are ringing in my ear now.

...

The people who are the best at taking love are the worst at giving it back. The kind of person who is so easy to love and just absorbs everything you gush out like a sponge… they hide it away somewhere. Like a rodent, they have some secret pocket in their cheek where they stow all the love away and slowly eat it over time until they get sick of it and, without ever giving any of it back, they decide they have had their fill.

Paraplegic

Dust in my throat and no one knows
Spider webs winding up my toes
And in my ears faint whispers glow
My eyes leak and green plants grow

Am I a ghost?
I cannot feel
Am I a vapor?
I am not real
Nothing feels a part of me
I could be floating on the sea
Am I solid?
Or am I mist?
Not cold or hot
Or that or this

I could be nothing but a faint consciousness

I could be something, but I might not exist

And if I don't, I wouldn't know
There's no one here to tell me, so...

How do dead people feel.

“You’re so much more than the crack in my side
You’re the only thing that keeps me alive.”

I scrape out the words on cardboard and pieces of paper. I have been too listless to try and figure out what it really means to me. These days I write down the words first and just hold on to the rhythm of them. Meanings… don’t really mean much anyways.

I can give it any meaning I want to in retrospect, later, when I feel better. My mind will be more vivacious, hungry and beating again soon. I just need rest now.

Stream of Consciousness for Dead People

Water moves in drips and waves

And it lives in valleys and caves

And it comes and goes and never stays

The layers, the liquid, the fog and haze 

And a million miles of coral blades 

That guides ethereal glowing wisps

of long lost prehistoric electric fish

That have eyes that pop and teeth that are hooked and brains that are blackish and concentrated into a disc

Of clearish languiousity and luminosity 

Enough to tell that the bottom of the ocean is a skin away from hell 

And a hair short of flesh from the press of the earth

In a jar, we all start and we end on a hook 

Through the eyes into the veins and ventricles and chambers til I feel

Like embers beneath your feet 

As you brave the waters 

Brimming with eviscerated reptiles 

And scented with dead roses that fell from the porches of people who live near the sea, in the dark

We don't think about roses in the dark.


Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 

Grave News: The Year Long Feeling

Grab a grain from a clock and toss it into the sink
The subterranean world of dishes as they clink
Dully under water and a thousand grains more
Of all the rice I didn't want that I bought at the store
Floating sadly and swelling
Crisp color is draining
And everything is a shade of grey and it's all blending together between the blades of the knives that were all used for butter and the residue coagulates and one falls and crushes
slowly into a sponge and emits small rays of light that somehow fell through the window and turned white in the
water

An entire year I've been angry that I can't sleep every day.
I've just wanted to sit and be very quite...
But I can't
I can't, so I crawl on the floor just to make it out the door and hope that the world will swallow me whole so that I don't have to go to work anymore.
I do not turn on the lights when I get home, it is dark forty five minutes later
I'd rather drown in the grey rice water than light up the room and see all the places where there should be faces or a painting or a desk or something to dust or somewhere to rest
I want to walk through the house and know I won't trip til I fall in my bed and wait for a dream or a nightmare to start flickering in my hollowed out skull.

Featured on SYWZine on April 11th.