Catching up with my posts for National Poetry Month…
Friday
Green eyes turn yellow
Color blind and out of breath
Sparks between my hands
Saturday
Tendrils of muscle tighten jealously around my bones. “Don’t you leave, too,” they whisper.
Sunday
“Fixing It”
1. Wrap it in a bad sweater and leave it in the sun.
2. Whatever you do, don’t let it drive.
3. Tell it you’re going to the beach ~ it will come with you.
4. Teach it a new language.
5. Bake it a lemon meringue pie.
I like how you think
Stars are for getting back home
Love is forgetting
Don’t call me “baby”
Not in that voice not in this room
Not like you know me
You’re not the answer
This isn’t where I woke up
Just where I tuned in
You are so gentle
The way you keep me awake
The way you kill me
Tell them it was me
This is such a bad idea
They will believe you
They call me trouble
You call me when you can’t sleep
And we call this love
Remember my eyes
Call this number tomorrow
And ask what I’ve done
Two small holes seeping wretched proof
invisible fangs slither whence they sulked
In some place I once intended to travel
I’m sure they have a word for this, for you,
The ragged fury of a cornered, simple mind
Tears open a place you once held on to
Two small holes sucking in the poison
That pools in your indifferent pallor
Enchanted with your own self-righteous whimpering,
Like a stray creature clenching your teeth
Believing the world wants to see you on your knees,
You “borrow” your loathsome cries from those who know better
You take with greedy, accusing hands
A wounded creature lusting after its own madness
Draping sheets from your ceiling to shroud faces that visit in the dark
Mocking the lies you fed a mouth that loved you, endlessly.
I don’t drive the bus.
I only sit, and wait, and miss it once in a while,
And feel really lame because not even the bus driver wants to see me.
In the windows of
Bakeries
There are sweet things
Like couples and baby orange trees
And they wait there
For everyone to need them
And for everyone to see
How happy they could be
Your excuses are expensive
Could be sold as vintage
The way you touch me is
So familiar
Makes me wince and
I’m out of paper
So let’s play connect the miles tonight
We’re still standing here like
Trees on someone else’s stage
Now its high top standards in a low rise world
And nobody hates a pretty girl
Am I the only one living in this place?
Nothing’s changed since I left yesterday
Mama’s still in bed, says she can take the world alone
There’s ringing in my head but nobody
Runs for the phone
How sunrise looks just like the sunset
If you play it backwards in your head
I taught you
What to hold
What not to bite
Patience
Your eyes are like the solution to an equation;
Not necessarily solved
Your hands are like the face of a clock,
Always the same, but pointing different ways,
Maybe I stare because I’m trying to see what everyone else does.
I can’t dance so I make you can’t dance with me half the night to music we both hate,
Do you hate every second?
Am I just one more thing pulsing through your veins that shouldn’t be there in the first place?
It’s called vocalization, the first step to localization, coming before even a proclamation,
Furthermore a demonstration of our capacity for
Absolute, complete, total, undignified self-awareness.
I don’t have the heart left to create instead of imitate,
Everybody’s busy with their own shit anyway,
All I hear is people saying “same shit, different day,”
And I cry for the nights spent all wrapped up inside myself
And he was the kind who held my hand so gently,
but he held my hands to the cold on the floor
because I guess the only thing I was really good for was
something to lie on top of to keep himself out of the dirt,
He’s a good boy
If you look at him right
Sticky sweet and hard to avoid
I wish none of this had ever happened.
I wish we’d both just gone to bed like we said we would.
Unfortunately, I love you;
-Irene
[This work composed of excerpts from poems, letters, journal entries and songs written between 2005 and 20011]
I love your old soul
Beautiful beyond compare
Make me a sandwich
Sit here for so long
The room will remember you
If you move past this
I am here to learn
Paid graded quiet taking notes
Memorize my dreams
Practicing deep breaths
Live the life I have chosen
Past keeps me awake
Brighter than the stars
With eyes that glow vacant blue
No more drugs for you
Wearing a black hat
Drinking my dreams like coffee
You exhaust my heart
Hopeless romantics
Dislike my sense of humor
Too twisted to love
Planting a garden
For company and wisdom
Flowers might fix me
I want my own home
So I can walk around nude
And bake apple pies
Dreaming about you
Waking up nervous and tired
Hitler, let me sleep
Without you I’m weird
Come fix the TV and then
Ignore it with me
I’m yellow and blue.
Cowardly and all alone
Or a tuna fish?
No more blue sundays
You should stay here and cuddle
There’s nothing out there
Hotel sheets are hard
Pretending to be in love
Stone cloth tears my skin
Don’t you come closer
Under my skin is all scars
Every broken word
I love being young
Laughing at the way you trudge
Don’t try to free me
Birthdays are so sad
Puppies make terrible gifts
At least cakes don’t die
Goodnight, Irene 