Author: Katherine Westbrook

I am tired of filling my truck with gas. Tired of watching The Andy Griffith show before I sleep. Tired of washing dishes only to eat off of the dishes and then wash the dishes and wash the dishes. I am tired of feeling my hair grow through my scalp. I am tired of the sun rising (but not bright enough) and the leaves falling (ever faster) and the colors changing(why is everything gray?), and I am tired of waking up again and again knowing what the day will be like. I am vomiting my repetition upon the flat line faces I pass in the same hallways, same lunch lines, same reality (that somehow doesn’t exist outside of me.)

The last three days were Thursday and the day after Friday lasted ten seconds; it doesn’t even count as a weekend when the new week begins before the old week can end. I am ending. Finally, my spool of string unwound and pulled taught to the simple center.

Life is like string in that sense, I guess.

There are people in my current reality that hurt me, and me them. I use people. People use me. I let this happen, all the while knowing what kind of cycle I am creating. My family disrupts the cycle to only make another. I am small and large and this paradoxical ignorance is killing me. How do you break the mold you’ve built for yourself when you’re all out of acrylics? How do you leave your body without dying inside and out?

How do you expect me to change? How can I rebuild the bridges I’ve burnt without wounding more people? Where is my God? Why does there need to be “A God” for me to try? I should be able to do this on my own.

And the gist of all of this, the meat and potatoes this nonsense, is that I am, per usual, messing up my life and the lives of others. I don’t want to keep doing this to anyone. I am so sick of hurting people, and I have no idea how I can even begin to make up for it.

My inbox will never be empty. No matter what diet I’m on at the moment, I’ll never pass up a trip to Taco Bell. I want to be a better human. I want humanity to sound like something I’m managing to accomplish.

Sixteen candles sprawled over vanilla icing and lighter fluid.

Take one back, tuck it in the shirt pocket of our father, for every year after he would feather the wings of you in a ruffled manner,

hollow grammar and time to kill. Climbing past Saw Tooth mill and screaming at  the top of lungs and teeth when it finally hits you:

freedom can be found in the gut.

Was there ever any reason in your eyes to kill the boy next door?

You slept soggy and senseless after seeing the lips of his mouth turned upward, Saw Tooth smile, (he was with you at the water tower, ground cut between each palm like pages of scripture,)- he is holy , but alive in only the back of your mind.

There is a small blue blanket in the trunk of your Chevy. There is a bottle of Vodka wrapped underneath, underneath,

underneath the bridges, we escape our realities. We are the goblins hiding under and the people walking over and (you tend to see things). Wrapped sterile in the sanity of being no one.

This makes you someone.

We are good

girls. We are innocent. There is purple near our irises and our hearts are strung together on twisted twine- we are empty and throat slit.

If I could make up one good story about our times together, you wouldn’t be there. I am ruin brutally beaten by another, our mother, father,

brother (hold my hand and tell me the truth).

The vase sits on the table, untouched. Wait a few years and  the mounds of dust will crack it through the center. There are no windows in my house; people don’t want to see the things that fall apart at  the fireplace. Brash black eyelids droop heavy over our frames.

There is no screaming (we have grown out of that, like old pairs of shoes).

Tell me there will be more than the darkness after death. Tell me of the wildflowers poking their heads through before Hell’s wrought iron gate. Tell me it wont hurt too bad.

People can change, and people can remain.  I am one of both, as I have no idea where my mind left me.

I am a body against the asphalt, highway stretched beneath my palms. I will sleep against the desert sand, hand in hand with the ghosts I’ve caught.

And it’s rambling, I know, but there will always be  laughter behind a dripping red grin.

(Again, and againandagain)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I dream, I am stitched into different skin. I break into blue for my father, a cold purple for my mother.  They are Mary and Lucifer on a merry go round, and round and down the staircase with a thud. I can see the black lashes thick with blood and one hand on the bible; hearts swollen and pounding. Our generational gore is still glinting beneath the floorboards of the basement, let me tell you.

With every sleepless night, there is a small piece of my lungs that stays treading water. I am somewhere expanded beyond the horizon of my eyelids while the air slips past my face before I can catch it.

Dreaming and breathing are more alike than you’d think. I tend to drown before I make it to this part.

How do you know what your words feel like if you can’t see them?  I ask the reflection.

It’s simple, she says. I see you smothered in these letters like old acrylics ; You are drawling  and dripping. Too simple, she says, and my legs cave inside like  mountain valleys.

“Good Thing,”  Katie was shaking her head. “Not usually.”  “What’s your trouble?”   “Nightmares.”    “How much is there?” no one asked. “A million, a million.”

The pill tapped the counter at Katie’s right hand.

No sign of anyone, the lights were out here too.

“God!” she screamed. “Judas!”

Nothing.

The third match would not light. “You’re a fool to betray me.”   “Who are you talking to?”

Katie put her hand over her mouth. Katie

-Headaches, Katie.

Suspect that Katie wasn’t Katie.

Katie was dead, wasn’t she?

Katie- I must think of her as Katie–

“Medication will kill you, I always say.”    “You use it too?”

“Since I was a baby.”

There they go again. And again. And again.

I became more captivated by grace than the mere idea of God as the years went on, as the years fell on. My body ran like a thread in an old blanket, it ran from my skin as a wounded dog would, hungry and frothing in the jaw.

And still, it seemed as if my suffering was merely suffering, though it came went in cerulean forms.

There’s so much powder, white hills. Tasting strawberry mixed with stomach acid and sinking lower by the minute.

3;35, and the angels keep singing.

 

“Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth Death.” (James 1:15)

There were six cars ahead when I heard the screaming. A boy and a log truck, pancake cooked against the pavement. Six cars scrambled to back away and I biked forward, through the scene. Blue lights blinding, no one could see.-the boy was not dead; he had fallen asleep. The Red was dreamspilling from the left ear.

Trusting someone is harder to do when you can’t trust yourself. There is a  thin line between nostalgia and homesickness. I do not know how to reminisce without a home, so I stack my cards on the streets curbs and play until I find myself in a passenger seat. I haven’t forgotten the sleeping boy.

We are all (at some point or another), put into a box. We fill the shoes of someone before us. There is no originality in life- you are eventually going to realize you only believe you’re different because everyone else feels exactly he same way, and ,when you do see this truth, you will want to die.

Don’t worry, that’s exactly how each person besides yourself experienced it.

(You see, we are in a circle loop of the butterfly effect, and this time, there’s no retracing your steps.)

Mary threw her legs over the Thanksgiving dinner and carved her baby teeth from her gums instead of the Turkey. I see no problem with this. Let Mary bleed from her jaw, eat the Turkey with your fingers. Better yet, go Vegan.

There is nothing beautiful about sadness. The idea might be to the existentialists who are always to high, to be anything but high, but in reality, sadness is nothing but sadness. There is good feeling that comes from sadness is when it ends. ( If ever.) There is nothing if you sit stagnant in the Sad.

Romanticizing numbness only makes you more numb, not in love. I think a lot of people don’t understand that yet.

We are covered in Sins. In our lack of grace. (Or too much of it?)

I don’t walk through the valley of death because my legs are tired. I take a nap in the gutter, then go back and play cards. Build houses, watch them crumble. The sheep follow me now. I know no God, no masters, nothing is mine and I am nothing.

If ever I get the chance, every sidewalk light will go out.

I am not afraid. You should be.

 

 

An airplane is midflight when each passenger drops dead, all but you. Pilot sunk low into the front seat, you, strapped into the metal death bad, what’s next? This is normally the part when “Cut!” is yelled across the stage and the screen rolls into black paneling. All fourteen dead bodies will rise and look for the snack table. Real life becomes less real again.

To You, the one I keep writing to:

I am sick of things not working the way they are supposed to. I lose my phone at least twice a day, I run into the drawers on my cabinets, forget to clean the spot of toothpaste on my glasses, halfway write an essay for ten more minutes of gossip with friends. I am tired of what life really is, and also tired of the live reality that I actually want. It’s not real, its a façade, an oasis, a place I would never be happy in, and I know that. I thrive in the midst of Hell, and its always been like that. I am not one for stagnant waters, and, every now and then, a little sea monster coming to chomp my sailboat in half is enough to inspire me, if not push me to keep swimming.

Sometimes when I am eating food, I forget to chew and swallow so much air down with it I gag. Sometimes, I wear shirts with holes in the armpits. Sometimes, I don’t do my homework but pay for someone’s dinner and then wear my contacts to bed. It’s a rough time, but also a generous one. Little things like these help me appreciate the nice parts of life. If everything was good, I’d be more boring than I already am, which might kill me. I want to paint daisy’s on the tips of my friends’ eyelashes. I want to breathe underwater like a goldfish and gulp down the pennies thrown into my koi pond. I want to be able tot hold my breath for more than ten seconds. I want to feel something.

And that’s why life has to be the worst thing I’ve ever experienced – so it can also be the very best thing I’ll ever do. (Duh.)

I plan to laugh when I stub my toe walking out of the girl’s bathroom. I will cry during Dove skincare commercials with no shame. I will yell and twitch and hurt and love and be too much for even me to handle.

And it will have to be enough for the both of us, because I am tired of apologies.

 

Sometimes, we just need that one perfect song to help us through a situation, whether it be a hard math test you’re trying to ace, writing poetry at one a.m., or just if you are having a bad day. Below, I’ve listed a few of my favorite songs that I listen to on specified occasions.

For anxiety, I listen to slow songs, such as:

• Daydreamer, Adele -Best lyrics:  (making up the past and feeling up his girl like he’s never felt a figure before)
• Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers- Best Lyrics:( it’s not warm when she’s away)
• What Makes A Man, Dallas Green- Best lyrics: (what makes a man pray, when he’s about to die/ I think I know/ I think I might know)

When I’m in a cheery mood, I’ll stick to happier, upbeat songs:

• Murder, Alana Davis– Best Lyrics:( there’s a bleeder in my kitchen, and he’s pouring on my floor/ there’s a killer in my hallway, and he’s scratching at my door)
• Sleep to Dream, Fiona Apple- Best Lyrics (you say love is a hell you cannot bare/ I say give me mine back and you can go there, for all I care)
• If it Hadn’t Been for Love, The Steeldrivers -Best Lyrics:( never would ‘a seen the trouble that I’m in if it hadn’t been for love)

Finally, when I am feeling down, I will listen to songs I know every word to:

• Fast Car, (acoustic version by Jusin Bieber)- Best Lyrics: (He says his body’s too old for workin’, I say his body too young to look like this)
• Antichrist, The 1975– Best Lyrics: (My wife inquired of understanding/But of course my dear, you can’t/She said ‘How can I relate to somebody who doesn’t Speak? I feel like I’m just treading water/Is it the same for you?/ Is it the same for you?/Well he comes and he goes, so capricious./And his work appears so rushed.)
• Palisades Park, Counting Crows– Best Lyrics:(you walked into the bar like some Saturday star, stud straight on spiked heels, and needles, and nerves/and you’re a downtown pride, fully amplified Clyde, gin-tight and aging, but well preserved)
• I’ll Be Good, James Young– Best Lyrics: (but the blood on my hands scares me to death/ maybe I’m waking up today)

These songs inspire me to be better with each day, they help me grow and learn and thrive.  Music is a good source of relaxation and inspiration. It can change worlds. I hope that me sharing these will help you in the future as well!

 

Pride

It comes in many forms, take grip onto the soles of our feet; it either holds us firmly in the ground or keeps us stuck in stubbornness to the point of arrogance. Taking pride in something or someone is a noble thing to do- it takes confidence  and courage to stand up for something and be the only one fighting. However, pride can turn peoples’ brains. It can sway ideas and linger of the new possibilities ahead if you decide to let your love of something overshadow what is right and wrong. The overflow of emotion that coincides with pride: love, fear, hate, anger- each are used as a tactic to win an argument. Prideful arguments are usually seen as a competition rather than a discussion because the entire talk is emotion-based, not factual. Taking pride in someone for their actions can be a positive thing, whereas talking someone up because you are proud of them, just to give yourself an edge or more power in a conversation is negative. Having pride in your work for example, as a painter, can be promising for your career. The flip side of this is when you are not humble enough to accept given criticism. Say someone doesn’t like your art. Say there are improvemtns to bwe made. Humilty needs to be shown in these situtations, just make sure that you do not confuse pride with worth.

There is earth in your teeth. Lighter in palm. There is running. You wipe your brow and swallow gravel. Again. A brush past through hallway corridors. Sweet copper lines down your chin. They call you Red. They do not have eyes.

Flipping through magazine pages. Cut. Strands of silk fall through the paper. Into your hands. The eyes of a cat, one nose from a woman advertising her cheeks. Or her lips. Or the gloss coating them. You cannot tell.

Schoolbooks beat like butterfly wings against your ribcage. Everything painted in blue. So much blue it burns. There is a clap of lighting outside and it does not startle you. You present a poster with glitter glue and Ronald Regan facts. The glitter melts on your tongue.

People taste how empty feels.

You are saturated. You are the crater on the dirt where the sea used to be. Someone has eaten the ocean.

A mother washes dishes. A dancer’s grace (fallen down). The windowsill light casts halos above her brow. You rock back and forth, forth and back on the bathroom floor when she sleeps. You pull the word “afraid” from your throat as you shake. It comes tumbling out like string. The walls crumble like cardboard houses. It all feels terribly real.

A broken bottle slices your tongue when you blink. One, two, three. Blink-black brittle-bloody-dropping-down-again- again.

The mirror by your bed has hands. Clinging to  the corners, stretching the edges so you fit between. You are too whole. You bite off a piece of arm, a tear of skin around the ears. You stick it to your bedroom wall. It slides down to the carpet within the week. The dust mites piece you back together. Stiches snug.

This brain tugs taut as needle and thread. Another whisper of smoke. Cigarette kiss. Welcome in the hurt the way you pray. Be silent when you scream. Cry. Eyeballs freeze with winter weather. Slit your body through. Bleed out on the hardwood floors. The stains. They call you Red.

They do not have eyes.

You say you love her. Spit it out.

The glass between our faces will break one day. You keep tapping.

Tiptoe over trauma and bury dog bones. Visit once a day. Stop visiting when it snows. What about promises? Perception. Prove a point. Be mindful to be forgetful. You cannot find a good song to fit this. No emotion. Black hole looming and crunch-

the bones are broken now.

Include you. Include you. Need you. No one needs this. Vanilla smile and warm milk. Sickness is a state of mind.

You sleep below a motel bed. The world is shuddering. Holy is a brutal word.

No one can make you say it. No one can make you do anything. You read a Bible once; you could’ve done better. No matter. When the air congeals, when the birds fall dead mid- flight, they will know.

They will all know one day.

What a terrifying thought.

We meet beneath streetlights. They break our bodies orange. I kill my fears by kissing them upon your palms.  You share secrets. Ears are disintegrating. Your knuckles protrude. Angel- white.

The sun stopped working today. We tried shaking it, you put it in rice. Nothing changed. Not even a flicker.

You  stay miserable and underneath wet blankets.

You feel heavy. Heavy feels alone.

 

 

 

 

I was looking around for new inspiration to write and  I fell into the trash category of our blogs. I am using the titles from each of these “trash”/ unfinished pieces to make a poem, so you might see one of your titles being used!

(no title)

mid day thoughts

rumbling through my one track mind in

colors like the sunset

its kind of painful to bear behind eyelids

but I take the heat anyway

defending the brilliance in the way one

hides beneath orange streetlamps at midnight

in the downpour of rain

just waiting

waiting

 

something I have noticed lately

within the realm of my usual

existential crises

is the lack of the teenage cliché

people keep talking about

boy meets girl, they make out

they breakup

but people usually forget the 3 am secrets they share

before the rumor, the ruin

the running

 

carousel horses have caught hold of my head

and they spin faster than my

seven -year-old self remembers;

concrete nightmares, out of hand

and stuck tight as the noises

in the spaces between hotel walls

 

colors

colors, too many

too far an expanse to imagine

without getting too creative

floating ’round in ideas ever- changing

and losing grip of reality

 

I have been building unity in this

oppression of myself

it’s healthier this way, I suppose

when the brain loses hold

all bets are off

birthdays have the feel of business meetings

and the color blue ceases to exist

 

I go back to the orange streetlamps on the corners

looking dimmer than before, but still

reminding me of the sun

I go back to the places that have burned

me into the dark, warm

earth and smile

I close my eyes and think about it some more.

 

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/190417890478034496/

Link above shows picture inspiring the poem:

Apartment Mentality

Four tiny walls

tiny kitchen

tiny molded toilet and overdue rent

angel white tapestry

separating scenes of the city and sounds of

lost people remembering again

blue speckled pots and pans and spoons

falling from countertop to living room

floor, the door concrete and

warped in the dark when speakers below blow

brilliant red chords with no room to reach out

so they reach up instead

dirty socks line the doorway, Chinese takeout

the last excuse to leave the room

a dove perch on the open balcony, as far as the

eye can see

nothing but little people doing little things

smalls as dust mites or spider bites

scrambling like eggs in a frying pan across the expanse of

big city spread out beneath

each person looking up and biting off small

chunks of their own sky, that is,

within 1000 square feet of carpet.