Month: February 2018

I have my father’s teeth, but my mother’s bite

This makes me good at fighting,

And bad at everything else

I snap bones

Draw blood

Break hearts

And still I swear I’m more of a lover than a fighter

More of a loser than a winner.

The kind of guy that only wants you when you don’t want him

The kind of girl that wants only what doesn’t belong to her

The kind of guy you write angry poetry about

The kind of girl you write breakup songs for

The kind of guy you don’t take home to your parents

The kind of girl who can’t be owned

This scared you.

Fight or flight?

You were never a fan of heights

So  you hit

And you missed

And I dodged

And I fell

Deeper

And deeper

And you jumped in after me

Still swinging and kicking

Swinging and kicking

‘I’ve gotta keep you on your toes’ you’d say

But I had fallen head first

Deeper

And deeper

I was too old for fighting by the time you caught up with me

By that time I was good for nothing

And you were good for everything

‘When are we going to fight?’

When are you going to start saying what you mean

‘Hit me’

Kiss me

‘Don’t look at me like that’

Make me

You hurt to look at

Must be love

Or at least that’s what my friends say

I don’t think love is supposed to hurt

I don’t see a point in that

Other types of love don’t hurt

So why should this

We always end up in this position

With you over me

Gives you a false sense of security

That you’re the one in control

I let you believe it

I, a wolf in sheep’s clothing

You, an angel in disguise

Y’know

Like that song you like

By that artist I love

‘You’re lying’

If I was you wouldn’t be able to tell.

‘Does this mean choke?’

You know it doesn’t

‘Coward’

Maybe

Dog bites and bee stings got nothing on you babe

But you’re still one of my favorite things

Scarier than any horror movie

Scarier than that dream I had last night

Scarier than your mom

We would have never worked

But we didn’t need the cards to tell us that

Did we

I can only love in ways you don’t know how

Swinging and kicking

Even skeletons need more than skinny love

Swinging and kicking

Red and blue

Swinging and kicking

But your drop was shallow

‘I do like you’

Deeper

And deeper

‘But we could never be together.’

Deeper

And deeper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the suburbs  (continued) // arcade fire

for seven years, the place i called home never truly felt like home. i always felt like the outsider, the outlier, the vines of kudzu that eat ate the trees and cover everything in green. i was the puzzle piece that never quite fit right. i was the flower that couldn’t be planted with the other seeds in the bed.

only after leaving to find what i thought would be my new home did i realize just how much at home i felt in hernando.

i spent seven years sitting and waiting, and in all that time, i never quite knew what i was waiting for. maybe now that i’m not waiting anymore, i’m realizing that what i was waiting for was for home to finally feel like home. i wasn’t waiting to find a new home or waiting for suburbia to fertilize the soil i was planted in. i was waiting to feel home, not just reside in it.

i wasted so much of my time and so much of my energy trying to escape, and now i sit here and miss home. i miss ladybug bakery and my chemistry class and la siesta and the kroger marketplace and commerce street. i miss the town i’ve come too know and love but didn’t even realize i love until i was leaving it.

i never expected to be sitting here at a school i’ve dreamed of for so many years because i saw it as my chance to get away from home and actually miss home.

maybe suburbia just creeps up on you when you least expect it, and maybe it crept up on me seven years too late. maybe that feeling i’d been searching for the whole time was always there, and i just had to sit down for a minute and find it. it’s the one puzzle piece you spend ages looking for, just for it to have been right under your nose the whole time.

i’m okay with admitting that i miss home. i’m okay with admitting that writing this series has helped me realize that the things i’d assumed about the suburbs are wrong. but if it weren’t for those wrong assumptions, i can tell you for a fact that i would not be sitting here right now.

for seven years, i let the suburbs motivate me to get out of them. i let them push me to want to find where i belonged.

i still don’t quite know where i belong yet. i don’t know where i’m going, and i don’t know how i’m going to get there, but i know where i’m from, and only i can decide where to go from there.

Over the course of a year, I have been trying my absolute hardest to change. At my old school, I was, well, weird. This ideology (that people enforced around me) reminded me of a hamster ball or even bubble wrap, something to encase my “all-around strangeness”. No one wanted to get my kind of personality on them.

In my head, I have always seen myself as the equivalent of human sludge. Slow moving, never taking form, and leaving traces where I go. This doesn’t bother me, as I want to make an impact, but other people tend to see me as some sort of detriment because of this.

I know I am a freak of nature. I am not wanted in a regular conforming society, nor do I want to be wanted.

Its as simple as this: conforming would kill me. To be the same as another carbon-cut life form drains me of my personal whatever-it-is I’m trying to seek. I purposely broke the fourth wall with the intentions of finding the fifth, if that makes sense. I am beyond the realm of normal, and I am having trouble even remembering what normal feels like.

(It might be that I have gone too far into the land of the crazies.)

I can feel this uneasiness collecting like dust along my shoulder blades. I am uncomfortable in this skin, same as the last. I will shed and shed and grow and break and build once more, but will ever be a definite concept? A whole substance?

Yes, that is what my personality needs-substance. I need to stop shifting with the water and lean into the comfort of just alright for now. 

Three years from now, I see myself being irrational. Twenty years from now, I see nothing. I guess that means my prediction of “dead after 23” must be what my future is expecting to happen.

(I don’t know what I am trying to get at, and I think I changed what I wanted the point of this to be.)

Anyway, at this school, I have been deemed as less than. A weaker link. Submissive.

I want it to be said that if any of you actually believe this, you haven’t been paying attention. I am playing this game like this on purpose, I promise.

My whole “thing” is that if you let people believe you are less than them, they will give you more information than they would have at first. I sit, I watch, I wait. (And I react crazily to throw everyone off my trail.)

Here’s my big secret, guys. This is it. I act on impulse to watch the reactions of others. I have no limits in order to understand the condition of my surroundings better. I am too self aware to focus on myself when I do irrational things. Instead, I am only focused on the social situation. Also, I do think through everything I do, and how it affects others. It’s exactly why I feel the need to do it.

I have never really needed to explain what I am to anybody, but I am starting to realize how off people are when they think they understand me. I would love for people to believe I am not just insane, but intuitive.

And if you don’t believe any of this, congrats! You are entitled to your own opinion. My praxis is something hard to understand, I get that. Just please, know that I let myself get pushed around or into situations it’s because that’s the only way I know how to “control” the situation.

(I am not making sense, sorry, I’m trying.)

I am the owner of a predicament if I cause that predicament. I create, then destroy. I am the beginning and end to my own problems, the designer of my catastrophe.

No one needs to give me excuses.

I let myself look dull for the sake of time. I do not have the patience to please everyone, but I go out of my way to do that sometimes, so that I might learn more a bout their human nature, and my own.

I’m just trying to figure things guys, and I’m not weak or submissive.

I am only waiting.

I want to swim in whiskey waters, become champion
of fight club, melt plastic cups of ramen in the microwave
and eat it anyways. I want to spray paint the police station–
but something nice like “have a good day.”  I want to wave
at the cops with  the residue on my hands, daring them
to arrest me.  Find fortunes fall from the ceiling tiles,
Love poems stuffed in the dashboard of used cars.
I want to feel the love and fortune, pierce my ears
when I’m angry and pop them when they’re infected
without flinching.  Dye my hair a new color every week,
shave it when I get bored.  Follow bike trails drawn
under bathroom counters, right beside the picture
of a chicken laying an egg.

I am nine years old. I can swim. I can fly. I can sing. I can be a giant monster if requested. I have watched the fall of the Roman empire. I have witnessed the death of the two million people plagued by the black death. I can twirl in front of millions warranting a standing ovation. I can become a God if enough determination is applied. I can solve all of the problems of the world if people were willing to give it over to me. The notion is that I am, I can and I will be. This applies in the form of excitement and reckless power. A power so strong that the very thought of it could kill a man or a thousand and it has. It has leached its way into everyday minds and hands. Basically forcing them to commit millions to their knees and to the dirt. The very thought of others rolling around in the muck is tantalizing in this nirvana type headset. It’s perfect in the sense that it is imperfect. The imperfectness is amazingly tangible, pliable, and addictive. Stepping into it is like walking on water, turning bread to fish, raising a whole sea with the flick of your wrist. Infinite in the retrospect of being mundane. The request and the freedom of giving a little to receive the world are imminent to everyone now. Your very fingertips tingle with the surge of 7 billion lives at your disposal. Truly magnificent and deadly and terrifyingly present. To say you want it is an understatement. You need it. It is used to fuel us. To push the creative energy that seems to bounce in our heads screaming for release into the air screeching its energy to the wind and turning the atmosphere sour. You could witness the rotting and corroding of a whole generation caught in the tide of our own fists. Almost like the hard-faced exterior of a dictator foaming at the mouth to be heard. They are more rabid than man, less than human. We could be more than that, so human that we change the name of the game. we could make our own characters, set our own times form, in a sense, our own world, our own existence. Without the consequences or the chains or the eyes. Just us and our determination for better or for worse. Even though the choice is sickening it’s still a win-win no matter the path. So what do you say?

Look into the mirror and realize you want to die.

Like a girl in her teens again obsessing over men who are not yet men and girls who are more woman than you.
First, you will go to class as if nothing ever happened, like everything is fine. You’ll make it to third period before you meet him, and he’ll be wearing your favorite shade of blue.
He’ll notice you immediately, and though you’ve never met before, the intensity of his stare will make you and anyone else think otherwise.
Instead of your name, he asks your major, you say Interior Design. And like smoke seeps into couch cushions, his energy, his power, seeps into you. You don’t want to die as much as you did five hours ago. You crack a smile.
Both of you are coincidentally free in the same hour. You go get coffee. You order a Vanilla Frappe and he orders coffee, black. He calls you cliché for your frappe and you call him bitter for black.
There you are, basking in someone else’s energy, one that’s not your own destructive rage and fury, and you love it. Yet you still don’t know his name, but you don’t care.
He says it’s time for him to go, that he’ll see you some time later, though he’s hesitant to leave.
You don’t pay attention to his farewell, as it’s almost impossible for him to find you on such a campus.
As days go by, you forget him. You are your own energy again, you are consumed.
You are sitting outside of a coffee shop, writing a letter to someone who will never read it. Then there’s a tap on your shoulder, it’s him. In green now, he looks more appealing and although you’ve never liked forests, this shade changes your mind.
He asks you on a date, specifically “would you like to go out some time?”
And you oblige. You haven’t been out in a while, so why not.
You find yourself in a bar, three drinks in and you’re still sober. He’s also on number three but spouting nonsense left and right at whoever walks by. He’s funny, really funny. You laugh so hard that your stomach hurts.
That night when you are alone, you want to die again.
You will see all your insecurities and they will consume you entirely.
You’ll sleep, trying to forget them for now.

I’m not going to call what I’m feeling depression because I haven’t been diagnosed by someone that has any authority to, but I don’t feel how I used to.  I don’t feel inspired to do things the way that I can so vividly remember having been.  I don’t know why.  Nothing’s changed externally.  By all accounts, I should feel no different, but still, I feel this sadness inside of me that I cannot explain.  I’m not suicidal.  I don’t want to stop living.  There’s so much more in this world that I still want to experience, but at the same time, I don’t feel like doing anything.  I hold out hope that this will pass.  I’ve felt like this before and it has always gone away before, but with that knowledge, I know that it’ll always be right around the corner waiting for me no matter what.  I can’t fight it off.  I just have to sit there and let it beat me until it gets bored and leaves, but I know that it leaving is only a break for it.  At any moment it could resume its constant torture.  All I can do is try to keep living the way that I was when it wasn’t there, but it only produces a cheap imitation.  I’m sure someone will notice it eventually, but I don’t know.  Maybe they won’t, and I just notice because I know the way that I should be.  Maybe they have noticed and have chosen to not do anything.  I don’t think I even want help.  They couldn’t help if they tried, honestly, but knowing that they were trying would mean something.  I don’t know if I would try.  I could say that maybe I don’t understand what it’s like or what to do, but that’s a lie.  I know more than I can even express of what it’s like, but in the end, I might just be too selfish to concern myself with the whole thing.  Maybe I wouldn’t even notice because I’d be too concerned with myself.  Maybe that’s what it is.  Maybe everyone is too busy paying attention to themselves to see the way that I am.  I can’t even blame them.  I know that I’m no better.  Maybe this whole thing was just a way to justify my own selfishness, or maybe it was a cry for pity.  I don’t know, and I don’t think it’d change anything if I did.  I really just know that I hate myself sometimes.