more poems

Transit

It’s not unusual for me to think of you on the bus.

This tinny room of hushed tones

like a motor. We pass all the places we spent

our short time. A morbid tour

of our beginning and end.

I know better than to listen

to the whispers. I will hear things

I don’t want to hear.

So I just let the soft voices lull me

into a beautiful ignorance. A lullaby

of smoke, but not quite fire.

I never much liked your poems

but I loved that they were yours.

I couldn’t make sense of them.

But now I try to remember them.

A single line maybe. Some scrap

of understanding. Some scrap

of foreshadowing what would happen.

What was always going to happen.

Another tool for torturing myself,

as if the photographs and messages aren’t enough

to force the air out of my lungs

and onto the page

over and over again.

My journals grow weary of me:

the skipping record that I am.

There was a time where

the whole lot of us sat on rooftops

and did crosswords under the careful guise

of appreciation for the written word.

There was a time where we all existed

under stars.

But the bus is moving forward now.





Rubber Duck

I used worry I’d get sucked down

the drain with the bath water.

I was told I was small.

I guess I didn’t understand

that I wasn’t that small.

But I had my warrior with me

to assist in my fears:

a little black rubber duck

covered in tiny skull and crossbones.

A pirate duck maybe?

A poison duck?

Didn’t matter to me. I loved that little guy.

I clutched the hard rubber

in my uncoordinated, meaty, toddler hands

And watched from the far end

of the bathtub as the water drained away.

The college I ended up at was way too clean.

It was as though

there were no people at all.

No graffiti in the bathrooms

or accidental splashes of paint in the stairwell

or remnants of papers shoved into corners

for the curious to inspect.

But then there was the duck.

First there was one in the hall,

then, two, then three, and then a couple more.

They had on various rubber duck outfits

for their various rubber duck employments.

It was aspirational, really.

But one day they disappeared

taken away by some serious stranger.

I imagine they said

“I will have none of that rubber duck nonsense in my halls”

and threw them down a well

or something equally as dramatic.

And for weeks, the English department mourned

our unusual squeaky friends.

Then a miracle occurred.

A rubber duck as magnificent as they come

floating in the middle of the fountain safe

from the scrutiny of the halls.

And all at once

there was hope.

GoldenGrime

It's not easy to hate this magnificent artist

who’s synthy-grunge-pop lines the gaps 

between brain folds with fizzy gold

that weaves between those painful memories

and softens the sharp impact with its filigree insulation.

Yet, it’s hard to love this horrifying artist 

who chatters about deeply personal matters to the public

exactly how you would. Yes,

she's far too much like yourself. 

But that push and pull to this artist

finds you in equilibrium.

A tightrope you have, apparently, decided to walk.

Some might call it the line between the art and the artist

but it's far more than that. 

If you look at it from an odd angle 

(or spend any time ruminating)

you’ll see that the line is the seam

of an envelop, stamped 

and ready to send

containing all the misplaced care in you

and all the flailing reckless humanity of her. 

You see her in a dream one night:

from across the floor

between the strobing flashes of dark 

her hair lights up yellow 

and swirls in the artificial wind.

She is persona.

She is music. 

She owns that stage.

You think of what you might want to tell her,

but she stopped being an inspiration years ago

when she sold her voice to the computer

sold her heart to the world’s #1 gamer space billionaire

and forgot that she crafted this world she created

to try to connect her heart to the rest.

But you might hold her by her arm,

if she’d let you. And look

past her eyes and ask 

the impossible yet essential question

of “why?”