Every problem that I've ever had has turned rotten in my mouth.
A stone or a bezoar stuck in my throat.
A heavy dark bird resting solidly on my chest, softly chiding me to accept, accept.
House of life and death,
Security and emptiness.
It's all one and it's all nothing while life seems to promise forever.
That stupid lie we tell ourselves while we're still too young to know.
I don't want you to go.
I don't want you to go.
Please keep me young enough not to know.
I don't want you to go.
Tag: life
Stagnation Vacation
I’m writing songs in the wake of our four years.
I’m writing songs in order to bury you.
Our final few months were spent dragging along our former selves.
No room to adjust to the growth and no chance to heal the scars.
During this time I loved the shell of you. Waiting for the inside to match what I saw of your exoskeleton.
You had the ability, you have the ability to fight it and you don’t.
By the way,
When you said you wanted a threesome I didn’t know it would include your mother too.
No acknowledgement of relationship until you decided you were through.
And now that you’re fucking some other bitch you have the nerve to say get over it.
You said that you loved me, and that “we got to”. Some empty words are never true.
You gave up. You stopped trying. I hope you got my letter.
Almost-Haiku
Dreamt you wanted to mend things
Woke up in a sweat
Whispered “empty promises”
And slept.
An End to The Means
I apologize in advance for the mess you’re about to read, I just watched a movie where the dialogue/thought processes of the characters were similar to this, a sort of ongoing never-ending cacophony of words. Sort of dreamlike where you start somewhere without knowing how, and end up somewhere else without trying to.
So afterwards my thoughts were following a similar pattern and that’s kind of how I’d like you to read it. (Or not that’s totally up to you)
I was going to post it without any kind of explanation, but I wanted you to know what you were getting into. A true word-vomit of a pseudo-intellectual run-on sentence fueled by memories and fears and whatever else was going on when I blacked out and wrote this.
Enjoy. (You probably won’t I don’t think any of this will relate to anyone except me lol)
Where do you stop and where do you end and how does anything even begin if you’re waiting waiting waiting
I come to the conclusion that this was all madness and a mistake and we got to but that was your ending not mine you act like you have a right to choose when I had no say in the matter it’s a choose your own adventure which should be something mutual you decide hey let’s go to page eleven not I’ve read ahead and this is where it’s supposed to end-this is where we go and drag me along to whatever future therapist appointment you put me through and there again I see a face your face in everything and everyone and I need to live in the present but what is the present anyway standing half naked in the bathroom fallacies running running in a head that’s turning towards nothing but guesses and wishes and fears
Suddenly the kitten is the cat and the child is the woman and oh she has so much to bear how can she know it all now when she has an encyclopedia written in Spanish French Japanese and she never took her studies seriously so what’s to learn where to go
A poet and that’s all a lover and that’s all a person and that’s all nothing more just friends just hiding behind things no one wants to say or feel or judge to be true if there’s anything to judge at all I would blame you for lying and what is that anyway but a sorry excuse to be blameless when no one can be
You put on a sweater and tell me run on poetry is meaningless coming from a mind half jumbled with numb thoughts of disaster of hope of certainty dashed by someone else’s fears delusions surviving on conditional love a tired old speech falling on tired old ears that never listened when they could deny deny deny any attachment any abandonment any admissions at all
Lying for the sake of it a mother ambassador cell warden general hopped up on concern dished out in quiet mumblings a beseeching of truths too dishonest to matter a frog in hot water doesn’t realize the lies its mother tells until they become its own
A speech from lips shadowed by another’s and who could go on anyway scrounging after love after acceptance after peace after misery after missing love connection home it’s winter and there’s no one to come home to
Not the right kind not the permanent kind always fluctuating nebulous none committal cyclical hypocrisy But that’s just it then toothpaste on the counter never a lover chirping to the sound of diligent waves and a love without conditions was too foreign to calm could not be enough
Figure it out a purring sense of broken edges bent into places you never said you’d take me
The trance is gone.
Possibly Everything
Cleaning up corpses on the freeway,
Bloody spatter for miss November.
Moving on from Hollywood.
We’ve missed November, I’ll start when it’s over
And over it’s been in my mind again.
So it goes, lost in the wind.
Circling back, dropping the pin,
In a room too full to notice it’s ran out of gin.
Startled into recompense;
Turning it over til it all makes sense.
November was missed and I’ll start again,
Buckling under the rain.
So it goes, running thin.
You’ve grown too fat, you’ve gotten too short, the mind scolds the broken heart.
She’s working around it but nobody notices the note left out in the bin.
So it goes,
Missing November,
She found it hard to remember,
Her way back into life again.
So it goes.
Don’t stop me.
This one was kind of a mish-mash of ideas on my drive home late at night, hence the sort of jarringly different stanzas as the tone of it changed once I got home to work on it.
I tried adding little transitions between stanzas as a way to make it flow a little better. Not sure how well it worked but I liked it enough to publish it, so.
Thank you for reading!
-T.D.P.
The Hazards
I want you to know that I’m trying to hate you.
To put every little thing you’ve done into a box and throw it into the river that made you realize you still loved me.
Let it sink to the bottom along with your near-death and dissolve into spent memories settling into the sediment.
Sway and move with the current.
Lost love,
Lost time,
William and Margaret,
A watery marriage bed,
Left to drown under the force of a Mother’s love.
But I pulled you and I called you here,
And now instead of saying goodnight, I’ve finally found the breath to say goodbye.
Bitter in its Sweetness/Estranged
Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud;
You left me and I’ve nowhere to go.
You carried my heart with you,
You carried it in your heart.
When the door closed and the sun set
You took my heart with you,
You carried it in your heart.
You told me I was whatever a moon has always meant,
And whatever a sun will always sing is you.
You carry my heart with you,
You carry it in your heart.
And I wish you would bring it back.
Tryhard
Sometimes I convince myself that my teeth could bite through metal
That the razor edges would do nothing to the soft parts of my mouth
That I wouldn’t bleed
Sometimes I think that I could crush glass between my fingers
That the glazed sand would find no purchase on my soft tissue
That I wouldn’t tear
Sometimes I imagine that if you were here I would be able to stand it
That the sound of your voice would be nothing but a residual melody in my mind. Your face an inkblot.
That I wouldn’t crumble.
But I know, I know, I know.
The moments tick by and I know.
I bleed, I tear, I crumble.
I am no match for the dreams that play in my head
Empty Prospects
Sifting through pain in search of growth
Pyrite in all its glitter
Could never amount to gold
Unintended Consequences
Push and pull
Out of control
Well let’s go since you seem to know
The way.
Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
When it ends,
Before it ends,
Will you keep me here in your mind
For awhile?
(Hidden away in the pocket of a daydream)
How much is too much to ask of you
I was hoping we could talk it through
Before you’re gone with the morning
Not sure I need to mention it but just to be safe: line five is from the Arcade Fire song No Cars Go, which is sort of what propelled this poem.
Woolgathering 