Anyway
I went to
go stand in
the yard and
watch the stars.
I know you
think it's
indulging
a bad habit
But I needed
to put my
head in my hands
and cry.
(I think this was some kind of WCW or short-lines prompt of some kind, I don't think I'd do this otherwise.)
Surrealism
The whole of my life has come into my room
and it is surprisingly small.
Here is a bowl of my memories, wishing it were
silver-white but sadly just a
paltry mix of half-stories, jagged and bright.
(not sure what if anything this was in response to or if it's related to the next one:)
Untitled
I have gathered everything in the world
in a room, and watch it from behind a two-way mirror.
You can tell from my glasses that I am a scientist.
I record my data and
put it in jars and
label the jars "poem."
[Four subsequent lines violently scratched out]
Dear March: It's Not a Contest
When we go to visit my sister in the hospital,
I wonder if I am forgetting some magic words,
some good-sister invocation to make everything right,
but I don't remember one,
so I buy her a magazine and we play board games.
My mother and I fight about my headphones.
She slams the door.
I wonder if I can spend my days
shelving CDs—I especially like alphabetizing—
because as much as I don't want to stay here,
I don't want to go anywhere else.
"Has March out-February-ed February this time?"
my girlfriend asks. I wish
I could tell you she was holding my hand,
but she was typing,
thirteen hundred miles away.
New Year’s Day
As the bells chimed, there was a wild
electric thrill in the air, a hum
of possibilities stretching out
in all directions, farther than we could see,
and we were laughing, and
I squeezed my cup so hard that Sprite
was streaming through cracks,
down my arm,
onto the pavement,
but it didn’t matter because
one of us moved first and
the new year was a whirlwind
and right at the center were Holly and I,
kissing.
[a too-long and rambling meditation on February that I don't care to transcribe in full, although I like:
"I never met him.
It's all about Alyssa.
Except for the time it was my sister
watching videos with half her hair shaved off.
My mother said there were never any debts
but she was lying."]
[followed by an incredibly boring poem about attempting to buy a ring at Kohl's as some kind of metaphor for emotional progress, why in the FUCK did I even bother to write this. The margins are full of hearts.]
Here it descends into fragments that don't make a lot of sense:
- "The first thing is that I got kicked out of engineering school"
- "Too many days hiding in bed after too many nights awake doing crossword puzzles on too much Adderall"
- A timeline that doesn't mean anything that I can discern with dates like "1998--Honorable Equinox"
- "Grief & Loss, I lost"
- "People who don't care about anythin will never understand people who do" "Yeah, but we won't care." [--Angel]
