24, In repentance

This is an old one, for a boy named Spencer Slattery, who I don't really talk to anymore but wonder about sometimes.

Resplendent Quetzal

 

Others have told me this, and that makes sense because sometimes I only see myself refracted in the eyes

of others but their baby blues never stick

(biologists have documented fifteen colors on the resplendent quetzal):

 

"You smile when you lie. I know that's not really much of a tell, but it's true. Your entire face lights up like it's fucking Christmas morning or something, and then you tell the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard. It's kind of classic"

I don't know what to believe any more but

I'm a mascot for what you've become, and I love the mayhem more than the love

and I read that off the printer paper and I'm like

damn, I'm an ass and a half but I don't care what you think just give me attention attention attention

(the skin of the quetzal is thin enough to be torn by daily flight)

 

I've always been able to tell when people were looking at me. As vain as I am,

it's not exactly considered a talent, more a natural ability.

in case you're wondering and I know you were, don't pretend

it feels like a hum buzzing just beneath my skin and

I like to dance like broken ankles aren't just a misstep away and the music vibrates

like mercury on my skin

but that might have just been a chemical juxaposition

(the resplendent quetzal is poorly adapted to cope with its environment)

 

And at this point in this narrative I'm pretty sure Enda St Vincent Millay ain't got nothing on me because

m candle isn't just burning at both ends

my candle is a firecracker torch pinwheeling across the dirty rhinestone sky

and this town eats its own puppies so as soon as I hit the ground with loafers

that cost more then I like to think about

I am sprinting, I am getting out of here until my lungs burst and my

legs are on fire but I am getting out of here

 

I am too

afraid

not to

 

(the last color of the resplendant quetzal is iridesence)

Oh my goodness, I feel like a genius

Totally just figured out how to upload blog posts from word, about three years behind everyone else. Here is a sample of my thinky thought pamphlet to start making up for things.

 

his brother and sister glare at him like maybe if he weren't around they could have nice things.

cheerfully unrepentant sociopaths

 

I could have gone to Reed and gotten really pretentious. Instead I came here and got kinda gay.

 

Mr. Picciotto: 'Do you drink copious amounts of coffee before coming to class?'
Student While Jittering: 'Nooooooo, I'm liiiiike thisssss allllll the timmmmme.'

 

when someone tells you who they are, listen.

 

He looks, for the first time since she met him, tired

 

a kindergarten teacher whose class are all armed with semi-automatics and filled with sugar and hate

 

that's my weapon right there

 

and as long as he was breathing he would Know Things about Shit

 

Bert's eyelashes were long and thick and his bones were thin as grass stalks. He could walk on his hands, recite the periodic table backwards, and set the whole damn thing to music.

 

get the hell out of Gomorrah

 

YES WE ARE ALIVE.

 

Do you think any of us are in a situation we want to be in here?

 

"Welcome to the new church! Can I get an amen!"

 

Ninety-eight years of love. He supposed he could have done worse for himself.

 

Floyd and Georgia are gettin' married…

 

Narratophilia

23, Welcome Back

for amina, who i love

and suddenly, my life doesn't seem such a waste,

pretty girl with flames at the tips of your fingers.

you wear your clothing like those girl saints wore armor

all hedonism and martyrdom

but you (you are the most you), never bothered to learn how to drown

so you butterfly through the water with a kind of glorious imprecision

and you've got this magic you deploy like chemical warfare.

Force of personality, you are the rajah of your own ottoman empire of oakland.

May you always be this, darling of the fates.

22, I'm so behind oh my goodness

The Young Musician (for willie)

His youth is striking.
With the arrogance of the unpublished, he doesn't believe them when
they tell him he can't save anyone, he's damn well going to try.
He wears his insecurities like a banner draped across his victor's chest
Lovely, manic eyes alight with possibility and when he sings, the mountains strain to listen.

(if you were a singer in your own time and place, you would sing those stones to weeping
but magic died with Brahms and you are trying for something alive)

And the arch arch in his back as he bows telegraphs this as good as a smirk,
he's got this shit down to a science.
That trill remind the listener of the numbness and purity atop glaciated peaks,
that crescendo evokes the magnificence of faith.
This is as calculated as chemistry.

But all these academics are a metaphor for the vagrants
that tramp along the highways tucked in the ventricles of our hearts.
That dirty thing called love,
love and joy and how sometimes i'm better before you get to know me
and the way you sometimes feel about a girl you just met
how you want to put her fingers in your mouth and memorize all her cousins' names
right now, this very instant
but you don't, so you won't.

This is what I think about when I hear him sing.
This is strange and good, and very, very much alive.

sidenote

The formatting on the poems is different then how I intended, always. Which is definitely a bummer. So if you could read them as a run on sentence in your head, that'd be awesome.

I guess this is what oh shit feels like (21)

tocsin/toxin

(the afternoon leaves my nails chewed and golden, but i swear
all this breakdown started with such potential)

tonight i am trying to fly on my cardboard and spraypaint wings and i just might
figure out the secret of uplift and rising, and i can, i totally can
if those guys over there will just put away their goddamn cameras

the reason i hung my ballet flats over the railing of the dormitory balcony in the first place
is because there's always a voice in the canyons of my head that tells me
if you bust all your crooked teeth, you'll be rendered perfect, weightless

this night is the first warning bell, softer than all the others.
tonight, i might be all magic but i don't know these people and i'm homesick
enough to go sit outside on the smokers bench and call my mother and cry

this is the first swallow of shame and it burns as it goes down and it's doled out in red plastic cups

(i'm trying to tell you the truth and the shape of things
but i'm afraid there aren't words for a truth like this,
a faith that makes you huddle in your closet and bawl and anyway,
most of the memories are a tangle of legs and pumpkin seeds
and it all smells like loreal hairspray and cigarettes.
the photos from last night reveal a distinct sensation of fluidity and grace
just restrained by the weight of misery-to-be)

i guess i'm in this here mess because i like striking matches and watching them almost,
but not quite burn my fingers, in the same way i like kissing girls whose last names
i don't need to know.
some people say that's a waste of matches and youth, but i'm eighteen
and there's arsenic in the water these days.

finally
stumbling down telegraph avenue, he tells me
angels are only good because they aren't buffeted by free will
and we'd all be so good, if we couldn't choose.

starting to scare myself.

The Plague Years

So. I believe in a lot of things. I believe in a really old school God, with sin and grace and all that. I believe in my family. I believe in my legs' ability to do anything I tell them to do, thirteen miles or two thousand meters. And I believe in poetry.

Look. I know there's hella feelings out there, and that people go through bad shit, but I believe that if you really want to say anything, you and your poetry have got to juggle two balls at a minimum (and I'm not even sure that's called juggling, I think it's called throwing two balls in the air). You've got to do beautiful, and you've got to do angry. Personal and wondering. Erotic and political.

Poetry exists to do something. Poetry shouldn't exist to befuddle or show off. If you haven't made your reader more alive by the end of the poem, fail on you. And poetry exists in community. No one I've met writes so well that there's nothing you can critique. No poem is sancrosanct.

These poems don't exist as a chapbook. If you really want one, let me know and I will make you some sweet sweet chapbook magic. But you've gotta let me know. I'm not detached enough to hand off my poetry to people who may or may not care and I don't think I'm hot enough shit that everyone should care about what I write. And, if I handed you a chapbook, there's no real way for you to tell me "hey, that verse makes as much sense as whale jewelry" or " that line makes me wish my mother was here." I write best for and with others.

So. This is a collection of poems around the idea of epidemics. Most of them are centered around real diseases, real biological things that happened. But when you are talking about epidemics, you have to look at the social aspect of them, and how all things connect, and interact.

So.

"At the beginning of a plague, and at the end, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not been yet lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth- in other words, to silence."
Albert Camus, The Plague, Part 2, pg.116