prep plate.
Angel hair pasta and party tutus lend
The way to a day of un-structured seasonal
Affective bearings to laugh with quenched
Teeth but I’m not equipped with a mechanical
Pencil racked in my mind like a tool
Box with rusted hinges. I linger
On repeat and listen to lyrics I haven’t yet
Memorized. Airplane mode pilots the words
Discharged from my jaw and the base
Unit ricochets like broken beer
Bottles blasting on exposed brick like an art
Deco start-up studio with painted hearts of human
Children precariously hanging from wacked
Walls not ceilings abstractly shooting forward jumping
Through my eyes ensnare pupils rip and roll rest
inside my head to heal the unexposed abscess only seen
on the interior floor exit plan.
wilter
Sealed plastic zip-lock bags dwarf
my sense of purging the heat suppressing
the guilty snowflakes currently residing
in my throat and their words interlacing the elderly
American constitution. We write as the children
of our fathers consumed by the retracted
colors of light we mourn like token
books and flatten like heavily processed
hair. My ears tinker with time as
the toilet paper tepee
dwindles in what once a linen closet now
what is to be said about prior
passing and the pasting of my head
to his.
Control.copy.paste
Unfiltered gasps of undiluted reams
Of office paper stuff my esophagus. you close your lids and staple her lips to yours I toss the draft
Aside cast my cradled
sleeve on yours-on mine
Red road kill rests on the bridge
Of my nose I stifle the sting of unaquainted smears of
Fetor spewed about along
His very amygdala. Bastard- children expel
Themselves from my lungs
And rest their ill fated apathy
along the lines of my collar bone and carve their initials
Into the soft side of my skin
Administering irregulated injections into my veins they sing
To me and other decomposed fecal matter waiting on the stoop waiting for him to bring
about the high
Speed internet connection that defines us. Until then our eye lids drag us down to pocket
sized screens until our pupils dilate- big black
Voodoo dolls deem your worth and mine the street lights
flicker and the faces of the bastard children drown
out my own miseries.
plastic containers.
We are pretend plastic souls trapped
in timed dolls- punching the radial pulse
in ticks to tempt. Thoughts littered
like an East coast beach. Each brain wavers
like a coiled cat thrashed
by water. We bow our heads like a slanted
roof to satisfy peering
eyes. We pretend like plastic
bags over our heads and the necks
of sea turtles. We guard our own
bodies with the care of a child
doing chores on a Friday
night. We smother each of our (own) egos
with keyboard text. We detain
our bodies with the satisfaction
we falsely breed.
Cherries sedated
Crooked corks topped our
tilted necks we craned
to drink Cabernet only with stemmed glasses teeming with red
warm tears she drank hers
with ice in her own
peculiar way we manifested bodies boardered against one another smothered souls in detained solitude crowded I crossed my
manners over him and piled along
his checkered stark
skin ran beside me as I tried to pull myself along to roam
the risk across the born the
woken the lovers the
gone we were all gone.
The Elect.
He sat in his glorious golden throne, peering at us from his forty-fifth tower floor of a predecessors’ pedestal. His brittle corn colored hair and caustic words smeared his essence across the realm. He gawked at us as we fumbled our falls and hid our faces from foreign onlookers- looking to us- and finding his lies- our lies, covered in plastic. His name made some shake, most wake, dictated conversations that were once ours to control, now he titled himself, entitled himself to a life of evasion, inconsequential pursuit, and dictation. He deemed himself infallible- to promote- to decree- fiction upon each fact despite expertise of minds unlike his and various recognized data. Walking like an elite, then a king, then a God- determining the fate of which, we, ourselves wrote. He trumped over us all.
Stringent
Blinded by the words we stare. Of contracted readiness an eagerness to blare the screams of our dear commander. But we never stayed out of sight. The mind is never out of sight but range. We sat in our deranged designated spots like private school children with plastic red cups. And never aloud questioned the world. But authority and our thoughts never heard because we didn’t know this or know any better but the hums and the mums and the cold, hearted weather. But we never did know about the black ballet show because we sat. We sat in our frames of our pretty dumb minds and lined the outskirts with all of the blinds and blood on the ground. With plastic white gloves we all hate to get dirty. Because someone once told us that we should stay here.
The Voice of the Island.
Sadie was six when I was twenty three. She had caramel blotted freckles engraved by light beams and a different bathing suit for every day of the week. She lived on the island- a place, people like me- never lived. We both rode the same yellow bus, five days a week- she would say she was tired, so I'd place my staff sweater on my lap- as a pillow. She'd rest until we reached the rotted iron gate and entered the island.
The other children sat in gray, leather booths, facing what they believed to be North, what they thought was facing God. Their faces were the color of the bus, inflicted copper colored blocks as a courtesy of the sun- a courtesy, the sun never inflicted upon me. Today, Sadie rolled her sticker like a joint.
Every summer- Sadie told me- she and her blond little sister, went to camp for half the summer. When they didn't attend camp Sadie and the blond traveled to Disney World and other hot places she couldn't remember. When they weren't living in their upper east side castle, she called a home. There were seven bathrooms. I had seven cable channels.
During the academic year, she attended the Brearley School, or the Buckley School- did it really matter? Sadie and her sister danced ballet at a place she only referred to as "The Academy" and took fencing and horse-back riding lessons with regularity. I worked fifty three hours a week that summer.
On the last day of camp Sadie cried, slow shrinking tears as I held her hand, escorting her off the bus. She hugged me and peeled away her sticky arms from mine, disappearing behind the door to her summer home. This is when I first wondered how many years it would take for me to hate Sadie. I imagined it would start when she was a wife or homemaker, after she graduated from a private college with a degree she only used as a means to prove her eligibility. She waved a solemn goodbye, from her second story bedroom window. I looked down at my floral vans; the only time my feet would ever step on the island.
her.
There was something
about the way she parted her pink, contrived,
testified lips. Polite mannerisms.
Dressed in demonic black, studded
pearls. But that didn't matter. Along convicted
ropes to relinquish the manner-
of which, we're all construed. The links
between your contorted crossed legs
and aged, ashed limbs. But I never
knew the convictions in sense- with the neon
blue flashes in her eyes that always
got you high. In the flow - the external
stream that whisks like I'm drowning
in my own spit.