Elocutionists

remember there is no justice, it’s just us, just ice cold stares and no just love in dead winter glares or frozen snow season gloves. and i am an epicurean hologram stating the obvious to a person who doesn’t really have it all figured out but to be honest, no one really does so don’t take that personally. i only know you from poetic endeavors and while you claim there is nothing to see here, your living organisms juxtapose your mantra of transparency. words born from the mouth are not still and if we forget who we are, then we can remember we were born actual. stillborn kill cords and discord wave around dissonance fro

i am everything i never wanted to be. it's funny to realize, five years ago i would've looked at me and thought, "you are the worst kind of lost because you don't even know it," and now, i see that's what i was before. but i'm still just a fraction of an idea that tries so hard to show itself. others say i should speak louder, sing louder, just be louder; but i was born with vocal cords covered in bubble wrap. my fingers curled in, with my arms pushing against my chest in an x because it marked the spot i often fight to fill, while everyone else was armed with pitchforks and shovels and i clutched tightly with my fingernails and screamed

Ohhhh girl! You drive me - craaay-zeeee, when you ravage me so savagely, all disheveled so unmanageably. One, Two, Three, Four, Please miss I’d like some more. I done lost count about an hour ago. Hold me so tight like you’ll never let go. I see steel blue flames in your eyes when I try and peer into your mind, and just for good measure I’ma give you a little smack on the behind. All twisted up cause you got your claws in me. Blinded by this love so straight I can’t see.   Where we go from here? I can’t really tell? But I’m all in on this adventure, because you treat me so well.

scribbling down vicious verses on tissue napkins while seated at the corner of a sidewalk cafe is about as romantic, raw and honest a p(o)et   -outside of the four corners of your bedpost- can get if you've got that person dreading over drafts and dreams on end   -of you, for you- consider yourself a new owner it is now time to tame this p(o)et's perverse mane you've got your hands on a fragile purebred which can be very tricky for first timers

you are my kryptonite even though i’m no superman; i’m just riddled with weakness, but i must be strong enough to keep you. (you are a drug i can’t put down. i don’t want to.) we are standing on a precipice, and i’m realizing i can’t fly. (will you jump with me, lois lane? take pictures on the way down.) your hand is warm in mine and i’m not strong enough to let go. (stay by me. always.) be my strength, because i’m not a super hero and i can’t save you.

you always had this way of getting right to the very core of me, feeling everything more than it should be, polarized emotions. i would spend whole days with my lips quivering and my vision blurred around the edges from the dopamine you sent coursing though my veins like rapids. i was so close to invincible it scared me. i think that fear was the only thing that ever kept me grounded with you. you made me fear my own body. i saw the warning signs but that didn't make it any easier. winter winds would wind their way through and around my ribcage and leave my skin purple and blue and white. that was the most colour i could muster when the high

Hear me perform it on youtube. We are not more than each other but I bul-lieve virginity is a childhood disease; I know because my friend tells me I won't find a way to keep it. So I do keep it. You are not more than me, yet I bully you: 'sex is an adolescent dream.' You know because your friends tell you that you will hold someone close enough to have it. So you hold someone closer. And it doesn't bother me that I twitch from the grief, wince from my gut and ground my teeth for the truth; I do those things because this thought makes sense to me: I think I'm more than you.

-to Virginia The river needed you, pockets stone-heavy and gray as cloud as you walked, sailing, to the lighthouse. You were Rhoda in her paper boats, fleet sinking one by one by one by one by one more until tempest-stressed, you sank, slipping timid through the rocks, toes rooted beneath the water, beneath the earth-- to that space, where everything is linked to everything else and everything before and everything after, and every moment is a trick of the light captured only in that moment alone, and to be nothing is to be everything and everyone, and that moment's end is the end of a person and, consequently, the world itse

xvii. i want to write about how this world of absolute truth, knowledge, and solid food— that which we hold high between two fingers is always full of watery applesauce and little white half-truths. and about how utterly strange it is that all the simple things that people write about on pages are, in reality, very few and far between. xvi. and i want to write about how there is peace and war and poverty and treasure and cruelty and sometimes, sometimes, small and important moments of grace. xv. i want to write a poem about why the hell i'm wasting my time writing poems when i could maybe actually be doing something produ

While reading your name on a stained postcard I remember our days and nights spent alone I take out your picture and place it near me And bring your poems and letters by the fire I let your sweet voice whisper to me again Even if it's just a sound made by imagination Through the thin air I can see you once more In dreams you are a reality I cannot grasp You took me and swallowed my emotions Blood was a wine you liked to have every now and then In one breath I could give you my soul, leaving me Unconscious, bleeding, drunk, enamoured, dellusional You tell me this love is forbidden And every moment must be kept a secret Each kiss,

Oh Darjeeling things, Quand j’ai appris qu’un jour nous allions mourir, Une pierre est tombée du cortège, La pluie m’a poussée du sommet du roc, Dans un râle, Le cri a absorbé le cri. Oh Darjeeling sings, Les plus beaux chevaux des prairies, Aiguisent du regard les longs couteaux affutés de nos gorges, Qui raclent la terre ternie, Pour tes plaintes, fantôme. Et Darjeeling dreams, Qu’une fois peut-être, Le souffle reviendra, Et se mêlera à l’écume des jours, Plus heureux, mon amour… Soudain, ta nuque et ta peau, Les gouttes et les valses de tes creux, Endormis. Oh my Darjeeling… Gaëlle 27 mars 2

He told of how he'd found her when a comet streaked by overhead. While later, people asked where she had gone.   Listing distantly, replied, with heaven drifting from his eyes: She's with me now, a patch of blue, trusting where she takes me to from a world not meant for us. I'm by her side, and on the run. We stop and rest when evening comes to love her 'neath the stars when day is done; my feral one. And when the comet comes, she'll leave that day, and here I'll lay where I'll love her 'neath the stars when day is done; my feral one.

today’s reason to keep living:   i thought of this six word story: here’s a pen, let’s end this. i survive, a blossom that heaves through winter like a lonely citystate, an intemperate Sodom waiting for God’s discrimination. i see it foaling its own diminishment when it had no right to colour me. and i’m reminded of how i start each morning with an ambered prayer and end the darkness with a glass bullet that i have taught how to dance. still i spin an echo, a copy of desolation, the weight of a single judgment. i see the sun spill out of the dull morning. muted and mocked, caged in iron weights that tug