Category Archives: the poetry

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And Sadly I’m Still Here.

​I wish I had

A word erased for every one that got caught

For every thought I can’t shake an opposite;

Some cheap balm for useless wounds.
To erase letters to replace 

Single letters stacked before 

De words:

Disrepair and

Drink up,
I have a minute left to pretend so I’ll spill words:

Fresh paint

Stale soul
Roll thickly the layers so that they’ll replace 

Cover over and fill in all my gaps

Dry bubbles permanent craters against my skin

As desperate as I wait to be erased

And replaced by words in my cotton ears:
De-I’ll never do it again,

De-I didn’t mean it,

De-you’re the only one in my world.

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the beginning.

the Knowing gets underneath my skin & sticks
to the places I can’t wash off.

crusted yesterdays are deep beneath my nails,
blurring colors I can’t describe
& can’t recall.

beneath all this rests
clean-slate-sublime,
words I cannot find.

I sit
& let my shoulders settle down beneath my collarbones
for the first time.

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and never getting up.

now is the instant
i can feel it even though i don’t know why;
and i’m
one minute off the hour.

i run on
intuition alone, this time,
and it works, thank god,
because i’ve
lost my feet in the fall.

somehow i end up on the sidewalk
in pieces
held together by cheap twine & the fact that my mind is
sedated.

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2190.

to the sky with my arms
stretched
losing touch with my fingers & letting
my hands crawl away.

to get lost in the clouds
would be to say i was found in the first place;
i thought i was, once,
but i was mistaken.

taken backwards through time i’d blame clock hands if i hadn’t
noticed the new lines by my eyes &
those on your forehead.

there’s a lot here, to tell,
but why waste these moments on words when
the sky can say it all;

i watch the dusk turn grey & get washed away

& for the first time in a long while
i can breathe.

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a little bit scratchy.

it was dark out; still not certain what that meant.

head-in-the-clouds optimistic
but also
eyes-in-clouds blurry,
often wondering;
is any of this real?

wondering how others could just,
be in the world.

i was always
clumsy & distracted by
my nervous shoulders, my clenched stomach,
my foggy head.

i was always
stuck with me circling calenders on the dates —
whispering words that sound more like wishes
even as soon as they’re said.

i grow older but, even still,
my mind can never keep up with the time.

i change my hair color & try to convince myself
that things are different, now.

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like banner words & things.

words on strings,
flapping in the wind
like loose confetti.

too terrified to find us here, now,
we focus on the forevers
& the ‘when‘s —
the befores the yesterdays the never agains.

so caught up in remembering
we don’t remember to forget
&
the time sand-slips ever-on

whether or not we’re watching.