Monthly Archives: November 2017

Ten Poems (11-26-17)

4 Replies

1:
I used to tell myself,
When I talk to myself, which is frequently,
That all I needed was one person to care about me, right?
I’d tell myself, just one.
Who cared if I was dead.
But I have that now,
I’m still unsatisfied.
I want someone true, and loyal to worry about me.
To love me.
And I worry this is escalating.
That maybe I’ll get that, find a perfect relationship, from the books,
And I’ll want more.
I’m worried I’ll never be satisfied.
That my only moments of peace will arrive in two second snippets of peace I find sometimes when I’m driving on the highway, and the sky looks more orange than usual.
I worry that I should have been a stoner, at least, at last, at peace with himself.

2:
The meaner I am to him, he closer he pulls.
Because no. He doesn’t understand me.
Do you have to understand someone to love them?
I don’t think so,
In fact I think the opposite is true.

3:
What do I tell him?
Would you please fuck me in the car so I can get it over with?
Doesn’t strike me as having a high probability of success return rate.
How do I say,
I’m not sure if …
If,
I missed that boat in high school and college,
That no one ever made out with me in the backseat,
But instead people fucked me over in other, more fun ways,
That I don’t know how to do anything,
But I’m tired of having people make fun of me for it,
I shouldn’t have told him I was sexually assaulted, maybe he’s nervous now.
Maybe he just doesn’t care one way or the other, and is along for the ride like the rest of us,
Coasting until you find you care.

4:
I’m all at odds and a mess with myself,
Unsatisfied, angry, and mad that I’m angry.
I can’t seem to think in a line without a minute of self-doubt and stubborn focus on something useless.
I want attention and loneliness. I want a friend, companion and perfection.
I want my hair to look as beautiful the day after I wash it.
I want to make sense.
I want to know what it is that I want.

5:
A cardinal hits my office window everyday.
Repeatedly.
He makes it up higher on the window some days than others.
You hear it hit, reverberate, then scratch again.
I feel like that damn bird,
Trying to get to where I wouldn’t fit in,
Hitting the glass, thinking they look like me over there,
And bouncing back,
Getting brain damage,
And trying again in twenty minutes, hoping maybe the glass has changed.
Forgetting I’ve tried before,
So excited someone looks and sounds like my reflection.

6:
I pull down my bottom lip in the bathroom mirror after I brush my teeth but before I’ve showered to take a look at my skull.
It’s supposed to remind me of the shortness of life, and quick approaching death, look, see your skull with your own hands.
Instead I become obsessed by my plaque. Hoping I’ll never have to get dentures,
Dreading when my gums never shrink back into my brain.
Live your life, live your life, look what you have left.
Instead, I become more obsessed with my future.
Will my teeth ever be straight?
What would they look like if I got braces?
Does anyone remember when I got that crack?
Oh my one baby tooth is still there. Isn’t that nice.
Watch my desperation for topics, once the dread of life sets in.

7:
I went to a neon art show.
I went to a local fair trade gift fair for local artists.
I went to a park with fishing next to the Colorado river.
Look at all the things I did.
Look at my pictures as proof.
What more do I have to do to prove myself to me?
Why can’t I be good enough for me?

8:
I’m worried I’m picking these fights,
I’m worried that I’m not as smart as I think I am,
I’m worried I’ll never find a pair of boots that truly fits me.
I’m worried that I’ll lose my home and my job at the start of the year.
How I hate applying for new work.
Have I written this already? I worry about that all the time.
Let’s try this again.

9:
I’m getting ready to leave here again,
To find another job in another new place,
Find new coffee shops to type in,
Different stressors to wake me up at night.
New people to forget,
New memories to hurt,
But away from here, away from the heat.
I want to leave because I don’t feel at home.
I think I’m looking for community.
For beauty, friends, and lovers.
And I think I’ll always be looking.

10:
She told me to be careful about sending mail here in my name,
Because I’m just a guest,
They might get in trouble with the apartment company,
She’s right.
I’m temporary.
She’s made fun of me for it.
I’m living boring,
Off the kindness of family,
And a lucky office job until the end of the year.
Then I’m free of commitments.
To become that person who leaves again.
People forget to remember.

Ten Poems (11-12-17)

2 Replies

1:
We don’t have souls; we’re just our bodies.
Not much better than ants,
Smarter, with a larger, more complex society,
But you kill us and we go away.
There isn’t some spirit that survives.
It’s all very simple, he told me.
And I thought he had no sense of the silliness of life.

2:
We sat in the back far corner of a studying-type bubble tea place.
I don’t think I’m the person he invites out to go drinking.
But, I could be myself with him for a minute, which was great, because I was sullen and being assholeish.
I used crude language to be fun.
I updated him about my life, my dates, my non-ending sinus infection, and my fears.
I listened while he had to remind himself to come back to his body, because his depression would take him somewhere else.
I laughed at his stories, and his breakups, hookups, and drug use.
It was nice to be friends for a minute.
To think to myself, we’re friends, I can do this.
I can buy life insurance,
And have tea, normal-like, and find a way to make it.

3:

4:
He gave her what she wanted.
That’s the refrain.
She wanted another child.
She told me, my mother,
She was thinking about getting a donor, if she didn’t find someone.
Were we not enough?
Are my sister and I not enough?
Is that why my brother gets more money and attention?
He’s the boy. The youngest, the one really wanted?
She told me when she forgot she was talking to me.
They were getting divorced soon anyway,
She said there was no way.
I’m thinking I was the one last try, the goodbye, or the accident.
At the same time she was mock-trial arguing women’s reproductive rights at her law school,
She chose to have me.
And I sit here on a Sunday afternoon wondering what I’ll do by accident,
And what I’ll get because I want it, one way or the other.

5:
I wore a tank top that showed my bra
So he would look at my cleavage.
It’s the one thing about me I thought he might like
But if I’m resorting to skin,
It means I’m desperate.
I’m not sure which shows more strength,
The persistence of trying without hope
Or the courage to have confidence in what’s left of my body.

6:
Will I be my mother and have no long-term close friends?
Will I have no one to hang out with on Sunday nights?
Because I want that.
The casual, they just show up.
I’m tired of having to plan it.
I know it comes with time, trust.
But I want a click, I want luck, I want safety.
I guess I’m sacrificing the opportunity for something better, to settle safe.
I think I’m okay with that.

7:
Be proud of your failures.
What an un-American thing to say.
Us, the people who can’t take seriously the things we didn’t do ourselves.
Unless you’re talking to businessmen who are telling you about how to build a better life using these three principles,
I don’t see anyone taking that to heart.
I see them pretending to brag about the things they did that went wrong,
To fool themselves into an excuse for bragging, and follow step three written in the first book they’ve read in years.

8:
It’s like she forgot she left.
She was telling me how bad dad was to her when we were little,
With a casual wave, before you remember.
I told her, when it was just me and dad,
When she was in school,
He was calmer by then.
She looked at me in shock,
Still never seeing that other people have lives too,
That might be just as important, painful, or meaningful.

9:
I don’t open up to him, I don’t feel safe.
I like him, I’m attracted, but I don’t feel I can be myself.
Is that because he’s more attractive?
Or because my body knows he’ll hurt me, and it’s keeping me tucked away,
The me who has no boundaries.

10:
I’ve been staring at a age-spot that appeared on my hand.
I remember the wart that was there for years and years.
The constant shame of my hand, the constant hiding.
Right there over the third knuckle.
How often I would pick it apart, hoping I could make it go away without showing anyone.
Without creating another problem for my mother.
Who tried to ice-burn it away with some over-the-counter contraption she picked up on her way home when she was only going to the grocery store for one thing.
I was fifteen before we went to the skin doctor and the third thing he tried made it vanish.
And I wonder if his spot on my hand if from the cream they used.
If this is a delayed reaction, to the fact I hid my shame,
And didn’t tell anyone about what was wrong until years later.

Ten Poems (11-7-17)

3 Replies

1:
I can’t be honest with you,
I got enough sleep last night.
My usual self-medication hasn’t worked. My brain isn’t foggy.
All I can do is sit here and calculate all the ways in which I made mistakes are wrong,
And be hungry even though I just ate.
I can’t seem to write.
So I’ll just tell you what happened to me this week.

2:
I broke down in my sisters kitchen chopping vegetables on a black floor tile counter.
I called my mom.
I’m not good enough mom,
I’m breaking.
She said, have you tried painting? Or buying something for yourself?
I needed someone to sit with me while I coped.
The things I thought were all I needed to be okay turn out to not be enough.
I just want someone to care about me.
I just want to do something in an office.
I just want space to cook, and enough heat to not be cold.
I want enough jeans that fit without holes.
But I’m still not okay. And it’s not fair.

3:
I planted plants.
I paid too much for the bag of dirt.
If I can keep something else alive,
I can keep myself alive.
My friend got a cat even with her allergies.
Homeless people with dogs tend to be better off.
Something about dirt and full circles,
But really, it was the first time in a while I’ve wanted to do something,
So I did it. Hoping I’d want to do more things in the future, instead of just more sleep.

4:
My Dad’s slipping.
He says I’ve told him that before. He didn’t know it was getting worse.
Of course it’s getting worse. This kind of thing doesn’t get better.
Am I not important enough for him to keep details straight?
Or is part of his brain dying?
He doesn’t understand how to tell me it will be okay.
He doesn’t understand how to comfort.
I don’t know which one of these will break us, but it’s around one of these corners.

5:
I met someone off an app for coffee at my least favorite coffee house.
We both get bored at live music.
He seems nice.
Not attractive, but nice.
And now we play my favorite game called,
What will I do to eff this up?
Text too early?
Sing along to songs?
Be ugly with double thigh dips?
Forget to drive you back to your car?
How will you Seinfeld me out of your life?
Go give me something small about myself to mull over for a couple weeks.

6:
My sister says I don’t need a lot from other people.
I’m pretty self-sufficient.
That can intimidate some people.
I bought life-insurance today.
Is that what she means?
I monitor my credit score, and don’t have debt, so one will love me.
Here you can have my paid-off car and my healthy relationship with my brother.
Can I have a date for my work Christmas party?

7:
I love romance novels.
I have to read them on a half-empty brain or I get mad at the sexism and assaults.
A refuge is predictability. It’s calmness because nothing will go wrong worse than you can imagine.
There’s so little secure in my life. I want someone else’s love to have a plotted existence.
I want structure to give me meaning in what I see everyday, so I find that in trashy books.

8:
I misplayed at cards on Wednesday night.
I shouldn’t have been cocky or smiley happy because we were winning.
He huffed away mad.
I forgot to hide myself, and I was shot down for it.
It’s not unusual.
I’m always mad that they’re people.
I want them to be people I already know.
And I want them to like me because I’m perfect.

9:
I made a pineapple upside-down cake.
That was the highlight of things I did I’d never done before last week.
I remember when I tried to do something new everyday so that I could tell the days apart.
I see people, and naturally compare myself, and say, wow look at that. They’re experiencing life. I want that. And instead, I arrange pineapples on brown sugar for my brother-in-law.
I cut cherries precisely in half, instead of falling in love.
I change the recipe just a little bit because you should mix the butter and sugar together before adding the flour.
I don’t take a road trip. I don’t spend money.
I save money for later in life when my back will hurt worse,
And I’ll feel guilty for not having lived while I was young.

10:
I only lived there a year.
My sister reminds me, like somehow I didn’t earn anything.
Like experience is something to earn.
Like she knows I can’t claim a place because I was there a little less than 400 days.
Don’t be dramatic, you’re just the same as me, she says.
You’re life doesn’t have my value.
Look what I’ve done in that time instead.