Author: poetryfest

and when I was walking home from that room
where we all sat in that red-hearted tub
I surely thought maybe you weren’t going to wake
in the morning when I’d come back
and hold you as you vomit up everything
from the night before and the night before
and the night before and I would part ways with you
in the day with your tears staining my skin.
Even a hot shower couldn’t wash away the streaks.
But I wasn’t sure if this routine would carry on
because I wiped the blood from your nose next to that haunted
room we fucked in, while those hyenas laughed
at the tissues in my hand. You didn’t remember
and you wanted more and more, and I couldn’t watch
you kill yourself even though you think you’re only escaping a part,
the whole thing dies, and you don’t realize that or
maybe you do but I’m barely hanging on.
A lot has been happening. I’ve been catching you
in a lot of weird ways and you’re not explaining things
anymore. You’re not talking anymore,
and your mouth is too busy with things that I keep seeing
when you tell me that you just went home, but that’s it,
another lie, and I’m back to pick you up— so we can go
sleep for ten hours at my house, and then tell each other all
the bad things we did that night, and go eat fast food in
silence, and wait for you to tell me you want to go home,
instead of our home that I thought you were building with me.
But that’s the thing— I met you with another promise,
and you weren’t looking at me but an hour later we were in love.
And everything was me and you and it was fast,
and it was angry, and convoluted, and made everything taste
metallic. Even our sex was who could get nearer to the jugular.
Maybe we hate each other, and maybe our love was just the hatred
in ourselves strewn into a sweaty situation, but I’d like to think that maybe
there will be one day when you call me to pick you up and you’re clean,
and I’m clean, and you just want to talk, and we do that. Maybe I see color
again, that isn’t red, and maybe I hear something other than my own heart
telling me death is only so many beats away. Maybe I taste something
other than the back of my throat caught up in wanting to say I love you,
but also fuck you, and maybe then I can forgive you.
Maybe now I can forgive you

I breathe my own fumes, lying up late at night in subtle hope for a change of pace
Fumes of body odor and cigarettes
Menthol and blue collar work for no pay
Nicotine and hard work in hopes for a body worthy of time magazine
Olfactory disappointment towards my own personal demons
Disappointment in words written to be seen not read
Disappointment in thoughts of leaping into the history books from golden gate bridges
The holy litany of loneliness
Dreams of reading a poet’s scripture to the stoned drunks in the grey cascades of dreary dusk.
Night after night being heard by my true audience
Who gasp at the glimmer of the microphone and the pinch of the needle in their arm
Of lulling to sleep the drunks with fists sore from beating their brains in for a chance at reprieve
Nevermore! Nevermore! Nevermore! To the days of seeing the suffering as tools for a
government profit and MK-Ultra experimentation
Nevermore! to putting me on a watchlist for speaking my mind!
Nevermore! to giving me amnesiac pills for disagreeing with you!
Golden dreams of heavenly messages!
Dreams of flight and revolution and jazz!
Dreams of countless women in my arms
Dreams to prove meaningless conquests of the obscene nothingness
LSD hallucinations of a golden Ginsbergian age of 1957
No change
Drunks still unconscious in vomit on the sandpaper sidewalks of san francisco
Meth addicts still shivering, shuddering, screaming, shrieking at the icy touch of memories
before their pipes
Opium sanitization of the mind
The forsaken buddha crushed under the corporate arm of the American dream
The smoke from a cigarette welded into the iron fibers of societal discourse.
Hitler’s Mussolini’s’ Vietnams and San Bernadinos all eliciting salty tears from the well farmed
crop of capitalism called the common man
Communist satans still ruling the eastern world from the west’s point of view
Let the learned shine and write soliloquies in the starless cell of sadness you have locked us
away in.
Let the fools learn.
Let the rich understand poverty.
Let the poor be fed
Let the right men write and let the wrong men read.
Let the great men cease to die and be forgotten by the generation of tweets and followers.
America i will not be put down for the sins of my father, brother, and friend,
I will not be silenced by my fellow man as I would not silence my fellow men.
A utopia built on steel,
Built by the legless paraplegic of a hivemind of smokers, immigrants, and poverty stricken
savants.
Who spent lunch money on marlboro reds in middle school
Who despise each other at the expense of brotherhood.