L

#16

I find it difficult to be honest in any way. I twist my life into lies so I can amuse myself combing through the tangles and pulling out clumps when it comes to that. I loved, I'm sure. I can remember and describe it as clearly as I can my last acid trip, but I swear it happened. Not that my word means anything anymore. I'm tribeless, lawless, and heartless. I don't love anyone anymore. I'm not sorry
even though I should be.

#15

Don't worry
because
every lie
is made
up for
by a hundred
moments
of pure
heartfelt
honesty
of the kind
the world almost
never gets
to see
because they
are
almost too
fragile
to
survive
in this atmosphere.
I'm so cool
and I'm
also extremely
fucking
lonely.

#14

I fall in love
time and again
with fucking assholes
with style
who don't care
more
than I don't care
and speak
in sarcastic
tones
and lower
their eyebrows
incredulously
as I tell them
half-truths
they mistake for lies

#13

I
finished work too late
to crawl
into bed with a lover
or show up to a party
with any hope
of catching
up with the drunken
twenty-somethings
who annoy me
with their laughter
and their youth
unless I've had enough
rum to
call
them friends.
When they're like this
I hate that they
are as real as I
am.

#12

I have much to say
on buses and
in cheesy diners
with happy yellow walls
and one-dollar coffee and
on
the street
amongst the filth and
here, whatever that
means.
In the halls
of academia though
I'm one thousand
words
short
and I've said all I needed to
say.

#11

I'm searching for words
hoping that this one
will write itself
and I'll think afterward
wow,
I can't believe I did that.

#10

The woman
behind the counter
told me
that there's
a girl
who looks just
like
me who
works at
Subway
who never
ever smiles
like me. It's
not hard
to smile, I
said, remembering
being a child
and realizing
that everyone
loves a smiling
child
and I sure did
want to be loved.

#9

It was just a little hair
growing a little higher
than the rest of my eyebrow.
I wouldn't have noticed it
if it hadn't been for the magnifying mirror.
I took my tweezers
and tried to pluck it out
but it resisted
so I scraped away a bit of skin
and tried again.
Then I got mad
and started to dig
and the next day there was a scab
with that same hair
growing through it.
I tore off the scab
and forced my blood-stained tweezers
under the hair,
the little shit,
and pulled.

#8

It was as if some parasite
had wrapped itself tight around my arteries
and sunken its teeth into the backs of my eyes
forcing me to gasp
and cry
and scream
"Get this fucking thing out of me!"
even after you threatened to put me away for good.
But maybe that was me in there,
the soul I am now in want of,
now dead
shriveled
rotting
deep below my skin.
Sometimes though
I swear I can feel it stirring.

7

I wear a collared shirt
with the sleeves rolled up
and shoved above my elbows
and a tank top
underneath because
that's the way the boys dressed
in small-town California
where I grew up envying the way
they were allowed
to experience life
all of life
while I stood off to the side
eating chips and listening
to the radio.

#6

You've gotten old, man.
You're not sharp like you used to be
when they called you an intellectual
and practically begged you
to write papers and give lectures.
Times sure have changed.
You should know
that the faces that look at you
with their dead eyes
have no idea that you had all the potential
anyone could ever want.
To them
you're just rambling,
rattling off the beginnings
and ends of phrases
and forgetting what goes in between.

#5
Robert Frost as a Modern-Day Environmentalist

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I think we will run out of fire
Burn everything that burns up nice.
I think I know enough of hate
To say that water for the ice
will meet its fate
by human vice.

#4

I may have forgotten your face
your name
the sound of your voice
the words you really said
the expression on your face,
but I remember how tall you are
and how you stood in front of me
using the barrier between us to give
yourself reason to forget that I'm human
and that you are too.

#3

I am Bukowski's dead pen pal,
spreading patterns of ink over a page
while wishing that the soulful men
whose company I keep
would see me as something more
than warm flesh beside them
or at least
try
to love the body that holds them while they sleep.

Hank loved me
but only from a distance.
Had he come closer he
would forget
that I am anything more
than bare life. I would
forget too.

I'm worried about shutting down again, going on autopilot. At a poetry slam the other night, the featured poet announced that he had gone a number of days, I forget how many, writing one poem every day, and that "if you haven't tried it, you should." So I will. I plan to post them here, maybe to help encourage myself to actually do it and maybe because I hope that someone who can relate will find them this way. Here are yesterday's and today's:



---------------------------------------------------------------------
July 15th, 2009

I've been asked three times in the last two days if I'm a writer. I've said no each time.

I love being in school and being young and living in Canada's beatnik-central but I'm starting to notice how unreal it all is. It's a fantasy world full of people who feel that they are disillusioned- how's that for irony?

My on-campus fuck-buddy to whom I've never really spoke asked me today if I felt alright. He said that I had seemed uneasy a few weeks ago and that he had forgotten to ask. I was surprised he knew me well enough to detect changes in my moods, but I suppose I have been visiting him weekly for a few months now.

Maybe, I thought, he's just ultra perceptive. Surely he doesn't care.

We'd already established that we will probably never be friends.

Are you a writer? He asked. It seems like you should be.

He gave me a book of poetry to take home. Some student publication. I cracked it open on the skytrain and saw his name. I flipped to where his writing began with the line,
Rain hammered the roof of my sleeper-car and laid a rhythm along the iron length of the Greenlamp.

I've now slid the book onto the shelf, where it will remain next to my copy of Brighton Rock until the next time I feel ashamed of the falseness of my life and move all the fiction out of my room.

So no, I'm no writer. But there's certainly nothing else for me to be.





-----------------------------------------------------------
July 16th, 2009

I lay down next to you
on the floor
of the apartment you
were worried was too messy.
Your breath smelled
fake
It was the gum you used
to cover up
the smell of coffee
and a day of mindless adventure

Even though I
wouldn't look at you
I knew
that you were looking into my eyes
when you said not
to feel pressured to do
anything I didn't want.

You looked in my
eyes again when
you told me how disappointed
you were that I didn't
want to fuck,
and when you forced
your thigh between mine
and held my hands above my head

Tell me if I'm
making you
uncomfortable, you said
while your crotch grinded
against my own
and I tried to kick you
off. And I think to
myself how much
better
it would be
if your breath still smelled
like coffee.