This Is Not A Consolation Poem
We met long after you had begun steadily swallowing vials of poison,
until it turned your insides green and I saw the looks you shot the others
while you convinced yourself that I was the object of their glances and
it was only a matter of time before you turned your suspicions towards me,
as if I were merely a delicate flower that would blow away with any gust
of wind but sweetheart, I fear that the poison has reached your brain,
clouding your vision so that my affections would go unnoticed because
you’re too busy worrying if I’ll decide to up and leave.
Unwritten Series: #3
“Feel the rain on your skin/no one else can feel it for you/only you can let it in”
Poems are secret messages that lie hidden among a slew of metaphors where only
deep scouring will uncover the rawness bled out into verse and being validated
for expressing thoughts in beautiful phrases holds a measure of consolation
towards being thrust into a jungle, only instead of lions and tigers you face peers
with knacks for bubbling in circles that somehow dictate levels of success to come and I find
it hard to believe that the value of X merits so much attention when kids are scrambling
out of their skins in desperate attempts to share opinions that if warranted unpopular
will be forever ignored, much like a book left in the pouring rain, discarded,
where the pages have stuck together because no one bothered to salvage the clean
loveliness that is a window, however small, into someone else’s world and creating
waterproof words that demanded to be read
has saved me.
Unwritten Series: #2
“I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines.”
Caution: refrain from looking back at poetry written too far
in the past so as not to induce dizziness and nausea,
side effects of the obscurity and angsty
outpour of “restricted” adolescent feelings,
the reason for their restriction being that
no one cares to hear about them
but
if I had a time machine, I’d go visit myself
in the third grade and let that eight year old know
that the poem about bees was phenomenal,
despite being told
that “it didn’t flow,”
that the rhymes weren’t properly understood,
that my poem was wrong.
Dear Ms. Kotler,
there is no such thing as wrong poetry and I can start a sentence
here; i can capitalize however i Like
and my poems do not have to rhyme.
Unwritten Series: #1
“I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined.”
Freedom of expression has significance attached only when accompanied
by the realization that one has something worth expressing to start with and
if writers are not born but sculpted, some of us remain brittle masses of stone
while the Davids of the written word glance over their pen-marks with scratched lenses, since
beautiful statues do not coincidentally crack in all the right places but
delicate hands bearing chisels and mallets shape jagged edges into soft curves and
seven year old me was unaware that she was being sculpted when
Natasha Bedingfield crooned to a classroom of second graders encouraged
to write about their lives, the event of the week being allowed to stay awake
until nine thirty and I slowly learned that I feel and its many variations
make the grown-ups clap, and stringing together words that taste sweet
at the front of your mouth in a particularly interesting order is called
pretty prose, when if you look at just the right moment when your mother sees
the strings of love across white paper in messy seven-year-old scrawl,
you’ll discover a chest-swelling pride in pinning emotions to the walls of hearts
even if it’s only the byproduct of a roughly sanded statuette.
On Erasing My Mind At Five In The Morning
Your sweat-soaked sheets bear no remorse
to the love we made, escapism at its finest
because the weight of the world dissolves
as the lines of our silhouettes blur and I’d wear
your shirt afterwards as an excuse to keep it
as I wonder why I feel alone with a blank mind
unless you’re the one erasing it, hard,
every movement of your hips tearing another
thought out of my head until there are no more ideas
to rip from my mind and there remains nothing
keeping me together, save for the muscle and bone
that supposedly keeps my body from falling apart
though I secretly think that if you fucked me hard enough
the stiches in my body would come undone and I’d
disappear.
Koi
I’ve always clung to wispy fibers of you
because you fall through my fingers like the trickles
of water that dribbled down my arms when I tried
to catch the fish in my grandmother’s koi pond,
the rainbow tails slyly evading my grasp.
In English lit we learned that a sign is composed of two parts:
a signifier and a signified, where the former is the symbol itself
while the latter holds a variety of meanings, unique as my sooty fingerprints
on the collars of all your white shirts as I burned the books you bought me
for every anniversary and maybe you’ll realize that the bonfire
in our front yard might mean S.O.S instead of fuck you
because ships sink and there’s a hole the size of California in the bottom
of our little canoe so maybe promising to kill all the spiders wasn’t enough,
maybe pretty words don’t make up for the cigarettes I smoked because you asked me not to
and the day I asked to driver to stop the bus so I could sprint
three blocks to apologize for those damn cigarettes that burned my mouth
for wanting to die too fast, was also the day you stopped loving me and this explains
why you sit there, watching the boat sink as I try desperately to patch the damage,
expressionless while a single koi dances through the wreckage.
A Non-Traditional Mother’s Day Poem
Choosing to stray from the Hallmark-instilled renditions of how to express love,
I wouldn’t be surprised if the pink and green heart-shaped cards
were constructed by single, balding men in their forties, lacking the slightest notion
of the significance of maternal instinct, so casually ignored by
an alarming amount of mothers, because strength must manifest itself to accept the
challenge since mothers are more than stocked cupboards and spotless bathrooms
but necessary for days when the bitterness of the world catches up to you
at nights when monsters steal out from inside the darkness and try to crawl inside you
as you dream. I weep for all the mothers who bear witness to their children’s realization
that vacuuming under the bed and locking the closet door doesn’t always stop
the monsters inside their heads from making appearances.I am expected to loathe
the world regardless of whether the world cares if I loathe it or not; my anger itself
merely the frustration of being knocked over countless times and how flawed
the system must be, to turn me against myself.
My mother and I share the system’s burden, communicating through sympathetic looks
when strong gusts of wind threaten to blow me over, and I dare Hallmark
to make a card to try and match our army of two, though I doubt they can make anything
quite as bulletproof.
