Writing Club Project #20: “Signifying Nothing”

There is no symmetry between entrances and exits, a departure cannot be balanced out by a new approach. But there’s a universality to the imminence of tragedy that no one will ever admit to because people are all “unique” and want it to be their very own. But you can’t really capitalize on disaster.

So I find myself under the influence of a disconnect, a sentence
break,

There are so many ways that I daydream into every you:
wistfully,
ceaselessly,
placidly.

Just like the many ways to desire:
incessant,
eager,
undisturbed.

I’d assume if I had an out of body experience, I’d never want to go back in. So please raise your arms to the sky so I can delude myself in thinking the arches were made for my ascension, but the sky will always be hemmed with lacerated clouds sluggishly bleeding out the horrible weather stitched right in.

And skies will always strike me as more terrifying than open water; at least the ocean houses a floor and an exit.

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Writing Club Project #19: Reply

“If you’re looking for love, you can look for that door.”

In most cases, doors will lead to nowhere.
This is a call to arms. Arms being desensitization, weariness, being jaded.
A call to stomp when asked to tread lightly. Having the disturbed disturbing.
A call to check your romanticism at the door.

Just because your excess of emotion tips and overflows, I feel compelled to believe you.
But I can’t say much of a downpour that’s desperate for my tears to complete the metaphor.

Risks are declared calculated only when you get out of it alive.
This is another call to give them a run for their money.

Refusal doesn’t necessarily mean an abandon.
And love isn’t everything, but I find it most in its lack.

Writing Club Project #18: 2:47

2:47:
I carry geographies across my chest, but it’s too dark to see.
Light has been outlawed and I will mistake the metaphor for truth; I am a pen in the dark, but still speechless.

The back and forth is just back, back, back. Fraying the nerves at the tips of my fingers in anticipation of writing something at the slightest.

I promised I wouldn’t run and I chained my feet to the ground, but I can’t help it if I’m miles away sailing in the blank white of my paper.

I’m writing in the dark again.

I saw your moon unhinge itself from the red thread that held it up to the sky. It fell and it was so lackluster and underwhelming that I couldn’t see it all the way to the ground.

But my consolation is that some places learn to make their own stars, so I’m never really in the dark.

And after an eternity spent in that nook in my brain called “wit’s end”, I look up and it’s just 2:48.

An Ode to Two Men

-1-

Time is glacial and your unraveling is even slower.

Hey, you.
Hey.
Lightness and you.

I can choose to delay gratification.
But it feels
that I am missing
out.

Your voice echoes in the hollow,
my ribs vibrating like tuning forks.
A hasty expulsion,
but at least my chest is drumming out a pure tone.
Like me to you.

A vast nothing.
But a sentimentalist like me can never go long on nothing.

At times, it feels like I could make a sky out of the look in your eyes.
I would camp out in the open to admire.
Make a blanket out of that smile, the curve of your lips.
And let it pour.

-2-

You are darling but never beloved.

In the folds of these pages and your words, I fall in love with the people you create.
Lust… A want amplified by knowing they are yours, never mine.

A loss never incurred but felt so tremendously.
Your absence noted
because it’s a calm
that paints the room in
discontent.

I’ve attached to your belt a bag of seeds.
Come spring,
I will follow the

t
r
a
i
l

of flowers littered
in the hopes of reviving
the desert that I killed.

Recall everything: imminence but never impact.

Strained Refrain

In the day to day usage of my human shell,
I’ve noticed more burn scars than any other indication of use.
More than the average.

Both my hands burned in the tribulation of growing older.
On my left arm, a burning coal fell leaving
an archipelago on my skin.
A constellation.

Ask me what each one means

My mother, saw in me the need to burn,
Started giving me the random cloth or two to incinerate.
How to douse my timidness with lighter fluid.
How to satiate compulsion in the face of disenchantment.

My father, saw in me the need to maintain it,
Taught me exactly how to build a fire to last the night.
How the logs should be just so.
How to appreciate control and finesse over a crazed burst of hellfire.

My cousin, saw in me the obsession,
Shoved a burning lighter to my face.
Because if she didn’t,
I sure as hell would have.

He came to me, ashen and begging.
“Let go.”
Now I may not have claws to leave marks,
But everything I ever let go of has left me burned.

No One Ever Really Called Him Henry Bukowski

In this life but in a hidden stream of consciousness,
I have an older brother.
The alter egos love him.

He did nothing for me.
He gave his heart to every pretty girl that passed by and said:
“Hey, I won’t let you love me.”

That man is not my brother,
because I let him not let me love him.

I never knew anything.
Because I never tried to write.

But when he did disappear,
I came out of hiding.

Treading lightly,
on the dirt that his heart helped write.

Sanctity knew better days,
but I had to have his words
rise up
from my feet
to the heavens.

He had the unshakable notion that the medication won’t work without
swallowing the entire ocean.

You see, he didn’t let anyone love him,
so the ocean took him in
with the closest thing it could manage
at an embrace.

Miserere – A Hardly Qualifying Narrative

My heart tied itself up in a knot,
as if stopping some overflow.
Keeping it inside.

Nothing hurts more than being present but unable.
Like every nightmare where you’re running in place
for your life and there’s nothing you can do.

In anhedonia I will take you in the smallest of doses.
Because I was taught to look for that line of strained muscles
whenever someone smiles;
“It’ll take you home.” –Baltimore–

I am strung high and tight.
Impossible to unwind,
But somehow you can unfurl every
word I dress myself with.
Reduce to little utterances of vowels.
Evolutionary language decomposition,
or being a proper moron,
scantly clad.

I can’t bare the crosses I’m bearing.
And I can’t shake off the cliche.
Summer, really?

Be still, heart.
The blues will always have me
And more often than not
I will have them
Back.

One more method of struggle then a step back.
A form of self conflict. Influx
of you to aid in amplified misanthropy.
And surprisingly,
Life redux.

You have medicine
and you have poison
and the dose that makes the difference:
In my need for none I beg for
both.

I saw the way you held your light, it wasted no space.
And I see
and see
how it dances and plays around, only because it’s light.

Blinding and I am still recovering.
I refused the medicine;
Sacrificed it for the divinity in being blind.
Maybe I am closer to heaven,
but still virtueless in
my inability to cry myself blind.

Null

I only started calling myself a writer when I had a dream of Sylvia Plath
beckoning me to her kitchen.
Since then I have not been sleeping;
I have been dying little deaths
buried under the sheets.
Sometimes I welcome them, but
death mostly chooses to leave me awake and wondering.

I want to die, it’s why I write.
My life is the length of a pen.

I don’t want to die alone.
I’ve littered my bed with paper so I am never alone.
My pen rests under my pillow
as if some sword
to ward off my detriment.

But I’ve long since cleaned my bed.
The flow
of inspiration was
inconsistent and
I found more stability
in my hand grabbing my neck
until the sound of my pulse resonates
loudly enough to
lull me to sleep.

Sometimes I think
I should have been an escape artist.
They never die.

Nihil Obstat

Nothing shall redeem this, but
read me when you’re vitiated by quiddity;
pneuma.

We were all agents in orchestrating this infinity we live in;
an infinity of still thought.
You are a horizon that incarnates
the connected space of truth. Alas,
my perspective is a sense of vertigo
that has me stumbling in and out
of grace.
The dissonance I constantly breathe
in attempts to exhale harmony
is a sacrificial ritual:
Please, once more.
Once more, let me find rhythm.

I am ready to be forgotten
now.

Imprimi Potest.

Writing Club Project #17: War

Your boots stood towering by the door.
Skyscrapers mirroring your very stature.
They explain the heaviness in your step.

I am not fully awake until the third time
a nightmare drags me from the bliss of sleep or oblivion.
But I wake to greet the sight of your boots.
With each pull of consciousness they move in-
cessantly closer to the foot
of my  bed.

Beckon, coax, draw, entice.

You’re fond of walking.
You would walk straight into the first glimmer of happiness.
But would you want to walk into me?
Do you know what they call people who walk out on a war?
Cowards.
Do you know what they call people who walk out on their families?
Cowards.

I’m sorry, I glued your boots to the floor.