Thursday, June 27, 2013

Masochist.

We were like a factory
the innerworkings of clocks turning together
all so time stood still
at the clamor of our whispered names
we shuffled through the steam of our heat
fogging each others eyes like swamp windows
we moved across the conveyer belt
two undefined unstamped licensed plates
ready to be pressed
we played tetris with our bodies
scored higher than any player
we were the fucking game
points reaching the board
as a shriek was heard from the stationary nerd down at Pizza Castle
we made an effort that no one could defeat
but what you didn't know
was a that only I played
to beat myself
I was a played out black and white movie
wishing for someone to chase the plane I was leaving on
I was a Marilyn Monroe masochist
wishing I could choke on my own pearls
and scratch my sides with my diamond friends
praying my scars would paint themselves
into something gentleman prefer
because I could scratch the seven year itch
straight across my collar bone
bite my lips bloody
in the attempt to make a face I never found attractive
belted my hips
to signal your fingers out of my area of weakness
because the truth is
I never knew what love was in the first place
because I taught myself the hurt of every heart beat
the pain of every high pitched "Happy Birthday, Mr. President"
I taught my self to tighten the ankle straps on my high heels
even when they're contrived from barbed wire
because I have to find a way to let your hand wander down the small of my back
without shivering in the wake of your fingernail traced pattern
I have to figure out
how to stop my shivering when I'm anything but cold
I have to stop thinking
about everything I wish I was
and for once
fit with someone else
by being nothing less than
what I already am***

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Fingers Crossed



We are crossed fingers
Not meant for telling lies
But only to be close as
Rings sliding past knuckles
Cigarettes in-between
And pressed to soft lips
My hands are little
Fingernails like flowers
Baby daisies growing out of palms
Your hands like tall palm trees
Down long LA streets
At night
And we cross like fates
Like Hollywood & Vine
Because a woman isn’t always the muse
I am inspired
By crossed fingers
By crossed paths
By romeo and Juliet
Star-crossed lovers
Because I’m overly romantic
And love poems are always bad
Unless you’re in love
And hate poems are bad
Unless you’re breaking up
But I’m selfish with my pen
When it comes to you
As I hold the grip with crossed fingers
Imagining us like
Kindergarten fingerpainting
The messy mixing of colors
In heart shaped palettes
Legs twisting in tangos
Heartbeat to heartbeat
Making compound time
Counted on fingers
Crossed when hands kiss like lips
We are crossed fingers
Like yours when you left hoping
I was as pretty as you remember
Crossed fingers
Like mine when I wished for affirmation
That you were here
Crossed fingers
That we could meet halfway to
Cross our fingers together instead of
Alone in crazed hopes
Because it’s juvenile
When your heart beats pop songs
And walking feels like jump rope
But it IS juvenile
Because you’ve tripped and now
You’re falling
And all you can manage to do on the way down is cross your fingers**

Bicycle Wheel



You make me hate
With every lip curtain drawn to show bad teeth
You make me hate
With the same unwashed jeans and the pompous walk you place in them
Swaying hips like panties that you wish you could wear to wrinkle
You
Make me ungrateful
For how truly good everything is
And everything I’ve missed
You’re a broken bicycle wheel
Squeaking with skids
With wishes to be holding couples and children
Jealous
That you’ll never be a ferris wheel
Because you won’t
Despite how hard you try and you know it
Lying while you sleep, eat and breathe
Until they turn into lies you believe
You live in shoeboxes on garage shelves
Confining yourself
And constantly complaining
That you’re not somewhere else
I don’t know if you wish you could go back
So you can rectangle stories
Or hope to restore some kind of former glory
You make me hate
Because I see how much you do
Everyday
In the way you caress
The womb you’ll never possess
A childless mother always
Because instead of pride
You own curses
Crumpling up who you are
And throwing it at everyone you meet
Fucking everyone who bends over
To pick up that crumpled sheet
Because you only believe in who you think you should be
Instead of owning yourself
You’d rather own me
Plastic rather than rubber
Discount training wheel
Just embrace the fact that bicycles are beautiful, too
That’s all I want from you
You shouldn’t long to be wheelbarrows and Michelin men
Because you are spoked Huffy black
With no need to pretend
So just stop
And enjoy once around the block
Instead of gathering spider webs
And sitting in the same spot
Wear your webs like royalty robes
And rust like unique coloring
You deserve more than you give yourself
Because you take more than anyone else
All this life is
Is give and take
So don’t stammer on empty mistakes
Stop taking
Long enough to give
You are the wheel of someone’s first bike
And that should be enough
Stop taking in hate
And give in love***

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Spud

He was a potato
spotted spud
straight out of the bag
raw
and heavy like kitchen baseball
unpeeled
and from the ground
normal
with all-American roots
like spaghetti curled around forks
on mom's homecooked Saturdays
a backyard
Babe Ruth potato
so right-brained
it's left
when I can't comprehend
how he sees colors sometimes
because he comes from crooked treehouses
and thanksgiving football
he comes from
jeans and t-shirts
and fingers rapidly alternating between x and y
to shoot spaceships
he is raw rooted potato
where everyone knows what they're getting
while he's holding the hips
something fresh
oven hot
sour cream and chives
cheese melting
golden sunrise
Paula Deen butter for days
rich with freedom and taste
I was a baked potato
from wheelchair childhoods
to canvas splattered Saturdays
roots created in royal purple
veins with treble and bass
roughing it up in aorta bedrooms
I am the buildingside paintings
of little girl letting go of red heart balloon
I am the loaded baked potato
too rich
next to others like me
because all I need is the norm
the brown paper bag boy
who comes to lunch with PB & J
next to my Bento Box
He's the calculus
to my yoga
the Chuck Norris to my Madonna
Because New York needs Broadway
like it needs Wall Street
like hands need holding
like opposites attracting makes cliches
easy
because we could be french fries
in pigeon bird beaks
we could be baked chips and curly fries
I'll be the barbeque to your pringles
and the gravy to your mash
because you look so good
you could be a salad
handcrafted for wedding receptions
through family recipe
I would gladly call you my sweet potato
despite your lack of orange
because I'm Au Gratin for you
wrapped up in foil fairytales
because I'm steaming under eccentricities
and sometimes, I just need
 a plain
potato. 

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Call Me T-Swift



They call me the Taylor Swift of slam poetry
Like they know of every inkling in my writing
That I manufacture made-up manuscripts
Written for me by someone else
Because to them each word is a catchy line from the underworld that is pop radio
They begin to shed tears as it infects the veins in their hands
Turning bloodlines to map patterns
With blood racing with the roof down belting out Our Song
Until their fingers grip pens like a constant snap
Making rough love with old notebook paper
That still has its edges
And they find themselves trying to write like me
Steal the synergy
Of my cute and free soliloquoy
About the boys who’ve wronged me
They’re only pissed because it’s so damn catchy
Clinging to the hemangeomas of their peeling poems
Because I seem too mainstream
Too big of a dream
An underlying scheme
Because they try to find something fake about me
But themselves is the only fake they see
Everything big and fake like the 80’s
You can hide behind your Dolly Parton’s ladies
But I am as real as teardrops on my guitar
I am as real as a Red kind of love
I am as real as a state of grace
I am as real as three chords and the truth
World changing
So call me Taylor Swift
Don’t care if you think that shit fits
Cause much like your muffin top jeans
I am overflowing
With success you’ve never met
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
So we are never getting back together like ever
Hide behind your coat, I’ll brave the stormy weather
Because I could go bowling for broken hearts
And strike
Because I knew he was trouble
He said forever and always
He was treacherous
And he turned my world sideways
It’s not wrong to write about love
Over and over again
When your heart’s still getting new stitches
Embracing what it sees in mirror each day
Someone else needs to know that I feel that way
Don’t let yourself hate
Just because everyone relates to a broken heart
Even you
So mad props T-swift
No matter how many guys you’ve been with
You always get back up
Show the world your scars like tattoos
And you’re not so bad off
Kissed a Kennedy and John Mayer
Wrote a song about ‘em later
Each time a heart breaks
I’ll use the Taylor Swift intake
Take memories to notebook lines
Make him he wish he didn’t screw up this time
Because when he hears this rhyme
He’ll know his name was on my mind
and he’ll watch me making my own life
 wish he’d been a love song instead
I’ll always write what’s in my head
Because I’m real like a broken heart
And you’re real like lies about how you don’t know every part
Because you sing along whether you want to or not
Because you know what it’s like when love’s got you strung up and shot
So call me T-swift
I’ll write your heartbreak
And let you hate on me
For saying what you can’t say***

Pan



I am the shadow girl
My selfless years have just begun
As I wrapped selfishness in juvenile signatures
And tucked picture books underneath me
Reminiscing in the tootsie pop lunchbox days
And lacing up ribbons on dancing shoes
Remembering
The lost boys always manage to find me
and love me like the mother they never had
In neverland
They worship me for mere cookies and milk
And I tell them they were owed this
They became lost with mama’s shouts down the hall
And plaid robe mornings
Where tears drew up panels of gone daddies
They became lost when the broken world
Cast off together and traded for separate
And untied constellations that connected wishes left on stars
And my heart beats for giving
When all they need is to be found
As they teach me comic books and taco bell
Church camp chants
At a middle school dance
We hold hands
Reminiscing what they thought was love
When they didn’t know what mutual meant
And girls left kisses on their doorstep
And hearts at home
Because they didn’t know the gravity of deep dreams
Of a young boy
And they thought eyes were backwards telescopes
And big things were small
And I love
Stitching their broken hearts
And standing where new beginnings start
Hours of grand theft auto and youtube karaoke
Dancing dorm room production numbers
Past quiet hours
Laughing and crying
And showing them that I never had to give birth
To be a mother
I am the shadow girl
Loving lost boys
Like brothers
And still searching for the most lost of them all
Because he never grew up
Or answered any of my phone calls
I believed in his flight since we were kids
When no one else did
I’ve always been his
I am Wendy
Searching broken tree-houses and basement boxes
Because Peter Pan
Is the only man who can fly me to
The second star to the right
Because he never grew up
He just disappeared
And I know he’s there
With my heart on his sleeve
He had the heart to leave
And I continually search shadows
Because without him I become the lost girl
And I love the lost boys
Being the mom they never had
But I’m a half-ass mom without a dad
And pan stole my heart
When he told me to believe
As he sprinkled out stars like maps
For tomorrows and yesterdays
We were born to sway clouds
And defy plans
Prayers to father time
To make adventures
Like rocketship raucous
His eyes are an atlas
Of worlds I’ve never traveled
And I’ve loved him from afar
As I kept wishing on his star
That he’d come back
And we could be a fisher price family
Kids playing grown ups
Wearing shoes too big for us
Just to walk like someone else
Because we are serendipitous wishes
And chances chosen by children
Free and brave
Watercolor emotions
On canvases of pictures I painted of him without looking
And I’ll paint them with a pinky promise
To stay lost until he finds me
Because our pact is one I can’t explain
As I build soup can telephones
For us to stay in touch
And fishing poles to cast
When we sit on cushions of the crescent moon
And remember forevers
When we were young***

Friday, December 14, 2012

He will answer...



For the victims of the Connecticut school shooting. All of my heart and prayers. 

Dear Santa
A common conversation starter
Around December
As carols are sung
And little angels scribe dreams
On lined paper
To someone they’ll never admit
They put right next to God
As they address heartfelt wishes
But we live in world
That intercepts Santa
By mixing up Christmas with the dates of Manson murders
Because the sicknesses
Have only become mental
Killing the world
 the black plague of imaginations
We are plagued
With those who believe
That our children deserve to see
Deathbeds before bunk beds
We are plagued
With fathers who believe that bullets
Are the only way to get to a child’s heart
We are plagued
With unanswered Santa letters
Or were they letters to God?
Because the purity of heart and mind
The innocence is being eaten alive
By insanity
Instilled in adult psyche
We have laid to rest Roosevelts and Kennedys
Voices that could’ve colored black and white
We have laid to rest common ground
Because with each lost dimple and dance on tiptoes
We have laid to rest life
Mothers who will never dress daughters
Daughters who will never steal lipstick from mothers
Fathers who will never play pigskin in the park
And sons who will throw to themselves
As more puzzle pieces disappear
Till the big picture is full of holes
And adults don’t write Christmas letters
Because all they can think to do is argue
Over the root of the situation
The left
And the right
Is it really worth the fight?
Because when it comes down to it
The only thing we’ve gained
Is loss
Children who will never floss
The two front teeth they wanted
As they watch a red Christmas
Instead of the white they’ve dreamed
Because Red is the only color that can comprehend to be seen
As their families decorate trees an empty green
Kicking themselves for kisses
They didn’t give on Friday morning
And never knowing Christmas spirit again
Because it will only be an
Anniversary
A Red Christmas
Cruel reality
And those little angels
Will meet the man they’ve been writing letters to
Long before they were meant to
And he will answer.