Author: poetryfest

He says reelection,
you say misdirection
You’re nothing more than your ballot
So long as a social order’s suffering is subjective

Elect Rhonda Tennant
Vote Bo Burgess
Are you a Staunch Conservative or Proud Liberal
Is your flush from the southern heat
or heralded shame

Make America Great Again,
Brandon
Someone has to turn this mess around
Our wines our ties yield fruitless aid

If votes are voices
Only the majority is heard
And we have turned a delicate democracy
Into a screaming match

Tune out your own temptations
for two seconds
You’d find no one really wants this
We’re just a collective offspring
Of a process that produces it

Birch trees
thin and scarred,
bending their white backs boyishly,
submitting to the wind’s will.
I lay,
imagining a storm
I sleep,
my mistrust of the ground’s good will comforted by felt,
and in my dream, they’re collapsing
under the pressure of their teacher’s desires
and burn,
struck by lightning,
their leaves chanting one last prayer
soothed by their own tunes, the acapella song of each falling leaf
I imagine a world where sprawling up isn’t an act of defiance
They weep, terrified by my nightmares
Scale-like tears hit solid ground
Trying to make it,
just one
generation
more
trying to endlessly sprawl towards the sun,
and bend
but never break.
I sigh deeply under their shade
Sipping on mandarin beer and boredom
I want to trust the tear-covered grass
I don’t want to sleep in a bed ever again.

keep caving in to miss you
Like I ask strangers for a smoke
Just as I convince my friends it’s over
Count’s up on promises I broke
I’m another party for the green light
All the way across the bay
Murmuring over the cold water
Rings like a funeral lead astray
All to repeat, rewind, revisit
Resuscitate the past
Walking these streets, a live exhibit –
Someone convinced each day’s their last
Know the backends of the alleys
Like I knew your body in the dark
Always walked this town, a phantom
Invisible, but left a mark
And I’m not a son or daughter
Only a thing that’s moulded wrong
And though you’d scoff, that’s the exact hell
You swore to take on in your song
The moon rolls those same eyes
It did when hearing your love confessions
Now it comes to call my bluff
When I say I learnt my lesson
Keep the aftertaste in my mouth
Let it burn, so I won’t cry
Ask for a cig, ‘quitting next month’
A double hit, a silent sigh
Lonely boat against the current
And I’ve been paddling all night
Haven’t gone on or gone back
But didn’t lose sight of the light.

You sit there, across from me
at the table— that look in your
hazel eyes, the look of disgust,
yet, it was all you— everything
you accuse me, were things
that you did, things you are guilty of.
All I ever did was love you—
blindly and regrettably.
You were the one to stop fighting
for this relationship, for us.
You were the one who gave up—
decided that it would be only you
that you cared about, leaving me behind
to pick up the pieces.

What has led me to this—
to stay here knowing I
will never be happy again
as long as I am with you?
What was it that I did wrong
for you to not want me anymore—
to not love me anymore—
to not desire me anymore?
There were so many times when
I stayed silent, not saying the things
I wanted and should have said.
There were so many times where I
hid the pain of being with you,
hid the sorrow in my soul because of you.
I wish I was never afraid of losing you
to the point I’d become complacent
in what has become our life together.

That look in your eyes, the look of someone
who hasn’t slept in a few days—
because you’ve remained high,
choosing that drug over me.
Without even caring how i may feel,
you say that the drugs make you feel
happier than I ever have, trying to hurt me.
The drugs, have started to rule your life,
and became a major control in our relationship,
without my consent— I just became complacent,
even though I tried to save you from destroying
yourself, your life, and us— eventually giving up.
When you’re high you go off into your own world,
forgetting me, not caring about me, and hurting me—
you have become a slave of the pipe and the feeling
it gives you, a euphoria I could never provide,
even with all my love and affection, so I just stopped.

You laugh at me, knowing how naive I am—
knowing that you have me trapped in
your web of lies, deceit, and confusion.
You think you’ve won, yet truly you have lost—
you’ve lost that once innocent nineteen year old
boy that fell in love with you, for he has been
replaced by a young man that dwells in pain,
self-loathing, and sorrow, that love that once
was there has died and has turned to hate.
You destroyed the joy and the magic that once
resided in my heart— a love that was pure.

That look in your eyes— that look of antipathy,
is one that you should have towards yourself.
I gave up on feeling anything other than it
towards you, if anything I feel only pity for you.

Contrary to popular belief,
no one really recovers from
life spent in an Office.
Those water cooler moments,
the staple, scissors and paper-clip wars.
the jargon, the sly digs.
the one-upmanship,
the name-calling
the insecure bosses.
Things we should have left behind,
behaviour suited to the play-ground.
All of that time, wasted in high level meetings,
and no thought given to the minions
who do the work, but get none of the credit.
All of that time spent thinking,
this will be our year,
when it never is.
It is a crap shoot,
where it is not about talent, intelligence,
experience or energy,
but who said the right thing in the interview.
It is about how good someone was fifteen years ago,
and no one wants to upset the apple-cart.
So we retire, or move into other offices,
with other sufferers, thinking this could be our year,]
and we all sit around, scratching at the scars,
thinking outside the box.

I am saying if you allow me to cradle you,
arms loosely bent around soft skin,
kiss up to here, and there, and the truth is
I can not help the words.
Let me stay longer.
Don’t leave so soon.

Let me stop a moment.

Right here is so possible. This. Us.
Expanding out and over what I thought
could be.
Words escape and become another thing,
and look and look and look until you realize midnight is no time at all.
That is something I know.
And I guess I know other things too.

Let me look longer.
If only to remember. To etch this feeling
line by line into the space beneath my chest.
Not yet, one day, but not here beside you in this bed, across
the air that divides us.
Let me look.

Peak Bisexuality is standing outside of the bar where the Bisexual Resource Center is having an event having a panic attack because you don’t belong here, you’re not bisexual enough
Peak Bisexuality is introducing your lesbian friends to the Ghengis Khan music video and having to point out the codpiece to them.
Peak Bisexuality is lying on a bed in a psych ward next to a girl two years and a world of experience younger than you never touching never indicating for a second anything inappropriate and the nurse comes in to separate you two and you can feel the electricity so badly you start writing poetry disguised as tarot card interpretations and you never see her again
Peak Bisexuality is coming out on Facebook and your cousins saying “yeah well you’re married so it doesn’t really matter.”
Peak Bisexuality is fucking a girl so incompetently she dumps you the next day
Peak Bisexuality is volunteering for a candidate because her campaign manager is unbearably hot and funny and maybe maybe she and her husband have an arrangement and you’ll be cool about it it’s fine to just look and nurse a little crush as long as you’re not making it their problem
Peak Bisexuality is defending a candidate because she really is the most competent you’ve ever seen but also her husband is stupid cute and outgoing and maybe they have an arrangement you’ll be cool about it it’s fine to nurse a little crush as long as you’re not making it their problem
Peak Bisexuality is lying in the bed of lesbians
Watching sapphic sex scenes with lesbians
Getting tied up and gagged by lesbians
And never getting in their pants
Peak Bisexuality is looking through your catalog and only finding one queer poem in the lot
Peak Bisexuality is not writing more about being queer
Because you’re not queer enough
Peak Bisexuality is your husband saying “no” when asked whether your joint
venture has any queer people in it “no, they didn’t mean queer like that…”
Peak Bisexuality is “let’s keep the stage for LGBTQ people” in the group chat
Like there’s only one queer person in the group chat
Like you haven’t been out in the group chat
Like you haven’t been slamming the door open over and over and over until your
elbows and palms are bleeding
This gate ain’t gonna keep itself!
It could, though

you were a wildflower thought
blooming in the corner of my mind

not loud
not certain
but enough to make me wonder
what it might feel like
to be chosen by someone like
you

you carried the storm in your silences
and i mistook it for stillness
your heart a locked room i was never
granted the key to
but oh, how i lingered outside
waiting for the light beneath the door
to shift

you were a fragment of a dream
i dared to touch with waking hands.

and it slipped
as all illusions do
not cruelly
but as if it had never intended
to stay

i do not curse you
nor do i beg you to turn around
some souls are comets
bright
breathtaking,
and never meant to orbit

but i am not empty in you absence
i am the sky that remains
i am
the soil
where softer things grow

and though you will not return
i will not close

i am still becoming
the kind of love that stays

goodbye, sweet maybe
thank you for the ache
thank you for reminding me
how deeply i can feel
and how softly i can let go

goodbye, sweet maybe
goodbye, soft glance
goodbye to the dance

we didn’t get to dance

I come to the woodlands for the air
For the hills and heavens and for the green
For the grace and the beauty
And to be with you
I chose these woodlands for you

I come to celebrate and to mourn
To thank and remember
To raise a glass to a life lived well
Whatever comes now
No matter the silence and solitude
I’m grateful
And quietly a better soul
Having walked by your side

i don’t like to eat
it’s nothing against food, i just don’t like to consume it
i want to be a model
you can’t be fat when you’re a model;
you have to be skinny
and you can’t be skinny if you eat all the time

i am lenient with myself though
i allow myself two full meals a day
i eat normally when i’m with someone else, but if nobody is watching,
i don’t have to
i give myself snacks though
fruits, protein bars, the usual
i do allow myself a packet of ramen in the occasion
i keep it tucked away so it’s hard for me to reach

my parents don’t know about my condition
it’s nobody else’s business but mine

i do workout quite a bit as well
if one has chosen the profession i have, you can’t just be skinny
you have to be toned as well
i work on my abs a lot,
they receive the brunt of the attention
my arms are flimsy; i don’t need watermelon muscles
i work on my legs as well
running, walking, jumping, dancing
anything really
my backside is alright too, but my breasts receive more attention

i don’t have to work on those
they’re big on their own
i can’t fix anything about them, without surgery, that is
i don’t mind them though
they’re not what gets in the way

i like the way i am
when i look at myself in the mirror, after i haven’t eaten in a while, i like what i see
i don’t think people would understand though nowadays, body positivity is crucial
but i like when i look thin
but people don’t like that
people think i am living up to an unhealthy standard, but it’s only my own

sometimes it’s hard to stay on schedule
food is tempting
but i remind myself that when i do eat,
i feel uncomfortable, not welcome in my own body
i don’t think they’re negative thoughts,
just gentle reminders

it’s okay that people don’t understand they don’t need to
only me
it’s my body