Poetry 33 - Granted Abilities

I did well
pretending to be a better version of me;
an MP3, sold with more exclusivity.

I am a cup of water,
posing as the sea.
To desert hikers -
there is no difference.

A picture book to the illiterate,
cryptic meaning -
empathy and eyes, the only tools to read it.
Sorry, Hellen Keller.

Granted abilities:
Eyes.
Empathy.
Gates to the same city,
separate cemeteries.

I did well jumping the fences I could not see.
It's like spotting symbolism the author didn't mean.

"All Men Are Created Equal" - A Small Reflection

Unfortunately, humans are animals, and “some animals are more equal than other animals.” While it’s nice to think we’re all the same and no one is better than the other, we are often either beneficiaries or victims of our circumstances. While this does not eliminate the ability to improve one’s state or establish oneself as equal in relation to whatever they wish (other people, specific people, gender, person of different faith), it does step upon that goal.

All humans are created equal when our genetic lottery is dismantled. It is not self-evident that we are all equal because of this, but it is self-evident that we all should be. Jefferson’s statement is a step forward with backward phrasing: “men,” as opposed to “people.” Jefferson is a beneficiary of his era, and his words a victim of it.

Poetry 32 - The Beach

Drag your wheels on sand,
the foundation of a world,
with windows shelled, pearled.

Beneath where you stand,
a city united under a cigarette butt flag.

The mayor, lavishly dressed,
ready to delve in.

I was your concrete boots,
when you went swimming last summer.

Poetry 31 - Photojournalistic Suitcase

You are the only baggage I need,
the only mementos I want to keep.

My suitcase,
carrying my heart on a flight
through white puffs of water
on the way to someplace better.

My suitcase,
waterproof, fireproof,
failsafe.

I’ll keep my secrets in your hair,
and they’ll ride its waves unnoticed,
and I’ll put my heart beside yours.
Strategically placed, made to –
harmlessly collide.

Then again, you’re better than a suitcase.

Lend me your memory,
I recall your eyes are HD,
with specs that make the best jealous.

You are a guru of focus,
total clarity
with unwritten captions.

Had you been a photojournalist,
you wouldn’t have needed to type a word.

Poetry 30 - Psychiatric Stigma

I.

Life in light beams projected on blank boards and empty screens. Instant replays of disappointments, fumbled opportunities and bad hits.

On blank boards and empty screens, the blood shows such a contrast on paper-white tile. It’s like dried and dripped polka dots of red wine on the dress of a depressed giant.

The blood shows such a contrast on paper-white tile. The outline of a better life, in chalk by black numbers on yellow plastic.

The outline of a better life, on display in old wall engravings. Asbestos incentives, get in the attic. Take a deep fiberglass breath, and fetch my skeletons.

II.

On display in old wall engravings, Stories of better times, yet the writers never lived them.

Stories of better times, I’ll get you a canvas, paint me a paradise. Make it worth a damn.

Freeze.

I’ll get you a canvas, just let me be your brush. The happiness is in the strokes. Happiness is ice.

Freeze.

Just let me be your brush, the sword or the dagger or the spear, stop the world right here.

The sword or the dagger or the spear, let the ink bleed through. Nothing will happen, but the pain will meet paper.

III.

Let the ink bleed through, “psychiatric stigma follows you,” onto the next page, “everywhere,” when you’re twenty-nine, “for the rest of your life,” onto your resume.

“Psychiatric stigma follows you,” At least we can mark your baggage. Dress up, grab a scarf. It’s a cold night, and you can’t stay cooped up inside.

At least we can mark your baggage, there is an awful lot. Get your keys, your little poem book, lucky charms, iPod full of happy songs.

There is an awful lot, you’re not coming back for a while. You’ll still be in the atmosphere, but never back down to Earth.

You’re not coming back for a while, you’re a dot in the sky, you’re wings with no body. Your words are of a flyspeck dialect.

IV.

You’re a dot in the sky, growing, as you aim to splatter back. You were so low, we just needed to get you a little high.

Growing, as you aim to splatter back. you will become a shirt with a stain. And that stain will keep you out, forever, like a tool of repulsion. You are the end of a magnet, being pressed to the wrong pole.

You will become a shirt with a stain, it will not yield to bleach nor soap nor scrubbing. You are bound to it. It is Jesus, and you are the cross.

It will not yield to bleach nor soap nor scrubbing, no, it does not make a difference. You will wear that clothing sewn to your body.

No, you are not allowed to be anything. The planets won’t align, you can’t expect the universe to be that kind.

You are not allowed to be anything. You are not allowed to have a future if you have a past.

Reflections #2 - To Those Two Teachers

Thank you.

        You two people have been insanely influential in my life. You have taken me into your home. You have communicated with me, not just talked. You have both inspired me to take a career path that is, to say the least, stressful and noble. I don't see either of you very often anymore, for one reason or another. Usually, I'll make the plan to and be too worn out by the end of the day to see you two, but know every single time I don't drop by that I should have. I think of both of you a lot. You've been kind to me and you've communicated with me and I miss seeing you two everyday. I hope I'll see both of you soon.You both are always in that grey area between family and friend. I hope I can see you again and communicate with you as if I'd only been gone a second to use the restroom, or something along those lines.

-Chris

Poetry 29 - Love and Sleep

A breeze, a breeze, then humid heat.
The fan circulates our sweaty air,
and we dismiss the blanket in bed.
We do this every-so-often;
lay down, cover, uncover, repeat.

The darkness never dims her bright complexion
as she lays, enveloped in her peaceful sleep.

This is a new level of calm,
once unbeknownst to me.

A calm,
where matches and razors and empty stomachs
don’t plague the center of the storm which it is.

A calm,
where she finds involuntary serenity.

A calm,
where I can bear witness to not happiness nor pain,
rather true neutrality in an unbalanced soul.

This calm,
smells like the green on trees after rain,
and looks like the sky, mid-July,
controlled explosions, artificial rainbows and smoke.

Her skin is the feel of polished marble in mansions,
dedicated to the millionaires of tactile art.

I think I hear a faint singing in her chest;
it plays on a kind repeat, what a lovely beat.

Poetry 28 - Frozen Flames

What happens when you freeze a flame?

Is the water melted?
And is the fire gone?
Are there ashes?
Or a puddle?

Will it burn your face if you get too close?
Will it freeze you?
And will you get frostbite?
Like the people in Minnesota,
who go out in the Winter.

What happens when you freeze a flame?
Does it go out?
Or does it take shape?

Poetry 27 - Fish Glass

Shimmering sharp shards of glass swim in my head,
like a chandelier fallen into the ocean,
Katrina met my windows,
and broken transparency does all but pierce me.

Weights ride like I’m their only train –
transportation only to the grave.
Burden, bury me?
Burden, bury me?
Burden, be my shovel,
and pad the dirt.
Smoothen my grave,
even out this dead piece of Earth.

The world made me go swimming,
and I dove in.
I have been diving for years now,
and the pressure is increasing.
Oxygen masks –
exchange and refill,
whatever is needed,
I’ll still burst.
I will implode.

At the end of my life, let them know.
I did not float, I dove.

Poetry 26 - Cute/Corny

I love you more than Americans love football and beer.
I love you more than Canadians love hockey and curling things that aren't their hair.
I love you more than the English fear the dentist.
I love you more than Russians love Russia.
I love you more than Hazel loves Gus' hamartia.
I love you more than Tumblr girls love a good John Green reference.
I love you more than emo kids love penance.
I love you more than Italians love cheese and pasta.
I love you more than hipsters love poetry that doesn't rhyme.
I love you more than the bar in hell.
I love you more than the turtle loves its shell.

Poetry 25 - Morning Mourning

Morning Mourning

The atmosphere within these walls concentrates on my shoulders and back,
pinning them to the padding beneath.
Sunshine paralysis.
Piercing the consolation darkness,
disturbing unconscious effective thought to arise
effective action.

Movement is painful, arbitrary, reasonless,
yet its emphasized, so-called “importance”
terrifies me.

I am sweating like 21^st Century polar ice caps,
so pay no mind.
There is comfort in heavy cotton,
and I’ll weather the heat until I melt,
as long I don’t move from this space.

There is no cosmic mandate
to do anything.
I will lay and procrastinate and starve in this bed,
if I may? –
as long as I do not leave this space.

Scrape
me off this mattress,
I am the roadkill of my mind.
I am the culmination,
of too much and too little.
I am the unbalanced standards
in a southern education system,
a national downfall.

Fall,
into my slumber,
because I can’t spring from every
existential crises which overtake me.
If I don’t burn to death,
these conditions will force me to freeze,
just not in this space.
As long as I do not leave this space.

That intruder – that light,
burning my eyes.
I swear,
it’s like window-shopping
in a crowded smoke shop.
It’s like a knife of brightness,
is stabbing me to breakage,
and stopping finally,
but only so I can witness the damage.
I turn over.
I pull over the covers.
I am unharmed,
as long as I do not leave this space.

Dear God,
take my thoughts, take my brain.
Peel me before I wake,
because I am unsafe here.
I am in an agreement,
to which I never signed.
I am in a world with two options:
I can live or whine,
live or whine.

Peel me before I wake,
for I may not do so.
Peel me before I wake,
for I hold a broken dynamo.
Peel me before I wake,
because for god’s sake,
here is the only place I feel safe,
just as long as I do not leave this space.

Poetry 24 - Purple

Accidentally filling that gap
of that “grey area” between the calm and urgent.
The middle ground of the hyped and deflated,
which gives sense to bystanders uninterested.

Two extremities
producing center point,
like the outstretched arms of a bullseye.
Not too different from an overshadowed flute,
it remains, though only with intentional recognition.

Purple is when you wish to both love and leave,
yet you are chained by its apathetic in action disposition,
so you do neither.

It is feeling a soft cotton pillow
while laying on a sandpaper bed.
It’s like eating expensive, classy food,
with flavorless, diabetic side dishes.

Purple smells like the dumpster behind the Febreze factory.

Poetry 23 - Frustration

I've had it up to the final line on my
"Shit I Can Tolerate" measuring cup.
Frustration fills it like a faulty faucet
fixed above a drainless sink.

When push comes to shove,
it shatters to transparent reflections of its makers.
In the sun it will helplessly shine,
and spitefully blind the dimmer mirrors.

Hell,
when push comes to shovel,
you'll be in the landfill.

Poetry 22 - Reluctant Sympathy

The footsteps of his atrocious ambling
are agonizing ticks
in the hospital halls.

"Please leave,"
are words which never escape my throat,
because they are swallowed.
They are swallowed.

The flowers are left,
but I'm not dead.

Sympathetic scents.

Do we leave these on graves,
because we're hoping the dead will smell them when we turn away?
Granted, they want to.

Poetry 21 - Broken Mirrors

It sat in front of me,

still and blueish.

Inconsistently colored,
smooth texture.
Hands like paper-thin, living leaves
of northern grass.

The lenses were covered,
but lifted, there was a reflection –
I digress, reflect –
Reflection.

I wish I could wake this corpse,
so it would look at me.
My favorite thing about eyes
is that they double as mirrors.

Poetry 20 - 8 Reasons Why It's OK to Lie

Ten Reasons Why It’s OK to Lie:

Eight, because harmless impulses could be humorous.
Seven, because the truth is boring.
Six, “truth resists simplicity,” and I can’t clear up the grey.
Five, your parents are on their way home and the party isn’t quite finished.
Four, you can’t run out of lies, but you can run out of truth.
Two, because you skipped number three.
One, because you’re a writer and that’s how you make your living.

Poetry 19 - Cosmic Paradise

The pale skin of a tanned girl,
which I touch,
which my fingers glide around,
like I am sculpting a recreation of her beauty.

Blue eyes may match the moon,
but for brown eyes,
where have the compliments gone?
Dare I tell her that instead
her irises match my lungs?

Whatever the case,
I must bask in her warmth.

Because
in this room,
I found cosmic paradise,
a heavenly escape
with heavenly standards,
a chaotic representation of grace.

In this room,
she holds me like she walks through air,
like she is my tightrope savior,
speeding on thin ice above the world.
And I am the same to her.

Poetry 18 - Internet in Person (When the Internet Closes at 12:00AM)

When the Internet Closes at 12:00AM (Internet in Person)

Work to do, Reddit to scroll,
and the time is dwindling
like snow under salt.

The Midnight Community Library opens,
as their browsers close.
The last minute workers and others alike
fly into the building.
They are burning and the library is a waterfall
of knowledge and connection and business and recreation.

The printers’ noise matches that
of the youth music room.

The quiet consolation chamber:
the sad part of Tumblr,
crammed into one room filled
with crying teenagers
and
weeping elders.

So much humanity,
humanity, humanity, humanity.
Communion,
squashed into one building.

This is
the internet in person.

Poetry 17 - Academic Achilles

My academic
Achilles bothers me and
also my GPA.

Poetry 16 - Half(ish) Shakespeare

In the layers of
haikus unfinished,
and between the lines
of poetic lies
is where I reside.

Tampering with rules -
and making my own
and making lame jokes
and glibly dancing -
syllabically
tampering with rules.

Cut Shakespeare in half,
toss out the rhyme scheme,
the historical,
wordy pertinence,
and you will get me.

Oh, yea, also add
poor punctuation.

Poetry 15 - Excuses

My grades are lower
than a redneck's IQ, and
please pardon fatigue.

Poetry 14 - Delight

If delight was a color,
it would be white,
as pale as a writer in Starbucks.
If delight was a taste,
it would be just like the creamiest milkshake.
If it was a feeling,
it would be smooth as a certain organelle.
If delight was a smell,
it would be in my Febreze can.
If delight was a sound,
it would be as beautifully staccato
as melodically tapped keys.

Poetry 13 - Writing Standards

Love poems are boring and vain,
seldom do judges side with them;
they’d rather have some elitist fuck try to be clever –
making metaphors for their machinations.

A lot like the early Harvey Milk,
we all know what we’re against in writing.
But what, exactly, are we for?
Scanning the streets for a good pick up,
but poetry is not a whore.
It will not be screwed by popular consensus anymore.
It is the ugly truth
buttered so beautifully we are willing to face it.
Yet we get bored of it.

Euphemisms, are vapor cigarettes for those who smoke solely to die.
Wistful of
no love, no rhymes no cheesy compilation of complaints.

Have we gone too far in our construction of boundaries?
Always avoid alliteration.
Are we making poetry a crappy cut-out of what the esteemed want to see?
Are we making writing washed-up syntactic patterns of what the noobs need to follow?
A hand-me-down style that happens to still look “cool” to the kids;
a societal expectation the hipsters don’t protest on Tumblr;
a silent cycle that we’ve allowed to slip through the most critical fingers;
the systematic aspect of art,
causing literary devices to essentially become the Easter eggs of modern work.
It is
the promoted arrangement of vague, vile reflections of those thoughts that make us happy,
because we don’t have to think them up –

the Zen stupidity we embrace.
Glorified, forged feelings to which we pretend we relate.

Poetry 12 - Nature

I was told haiku had to have nature involved.
This haiku is called “Nature”, because I’m a deep human being.

Nature is a bitch,
So I won’t write about it.
Counterproductive.

Story Time 1 - Old, Co-authored Short Story

Zombies vs. Moms 
by Emme McCarthy and Stan Cavanaugh

Once upon a time a kid was playing his video games all day. That kid woke up at 3:33am specifically to begin his game. It wasn’t even a fun game; it was about zombies and stupid people. It was 8 am now and his mom was calling him to breakfast. He didn’t answer. Instead, the mother’s call to her son was met with loud shooting and various exclamations of a certain word of “F.”

His mom was calling his name “Jacob,” “Jacob, time for breakfast.” He still didn’t come, so she just decided to clean her gun right in front of him. (It was a machine gun.) It released an average 91 bullets in a span of one minute. Jacob did not look up. Jacob sat there, cleaning his own gun of pixels on the television screen.

His mother glared at him with immense disdain. Then, she had an idea. She was “cleaning her gun,” and she shot Jacob 91 times in the heart. Jacob collapsed to the floor, sliding of the sweaty couch in which he had sat for hours. He was nearly split in half from the multiple bullet wounds his mother had inflicted. Her child looked up with eyes almost as bloody as his body and uttered “The graphics,” pausing to gather the remaining energy from the blood that hasn’t fully evaded veins “are so real.”

 

So this is the story of the mother who killed her kid.

 

What’s the moral of this?

Don’t play video games to much. By the way, dear reader, this was just a hallucination of Jacob. 

Thank you.

Poetry 11 - YJP

Pizza and filming.
Do I have good lighting here?
Your YJP News.

Poetry 10 - Morning

Wake up, no shower.
My eyes burn into my head.
God, I need more sleep.

Poetry 9 - Pissed Off

Little sounds bug me,
breathing is suffocating.
Yes, I am pissed off.

Poetry 8 - The Beauty of a Villain

Villain minus ill,
just recreating evil.
Compulsively vain.

Confederate Flags

As someone who's spent most of my life in the south, I still don't understand why everyone has confederate flags everywhere. It's not a about heritage. It's just stupid. I like how Frank Underwood puts it. "First of all, you never start a war you can't win. Secondly, you never raise your flag for such an asinine cause like slavery."

Poetry 7 - Defective Product

Notes: Yes, this is about suicide from my perspective. I wrote it about a week ago when I felt really down. Now that I feel pretty good, I've decided to post it. Whenever I feel shitty again, I'll probably post a very happy, positive poem that will more than likely be written today.

"Here lies a defective product,"
of love and lust and anger and humanity.
"Here lies a defective product,"
basically me.

I took my fathers belt,
because my own does not fasten the same.
I wrote the note by hand,
because I don't know if I'm being truthful enough to type it.

It is in pencil,
this document is transient,
do not preserve it.

Getting it around my fucking neck is the hardest part.

And, now I know comedy is art,
so forgive me if I'm being a joke thief.
I could never really work on my own,
and so here lies a defective product.

Poetry 6 - The First Ten Minutes

Short explanation of this poem: I do this Teen Trendsetters thing as a volunteer where I go to an elementary school and help little kids read. I usually get there way ahead of everyone else and it results in me having to wait in the cafeteria for the other volunteers and the students we help. I'm mostly alone, but the teachers and administrators of the school walk by from time to time. It's really awkward for me.

The kids aren't here yet,
neither are the mentors.
I sit alone and eat the reminiscent time.
I make sure the teachers outside,
do not hear the mutters from inside.
I make sure the administrators do not see me struggling to be,
and I make sure I am on my phone,
and make sure I'm not melodically tapping my heels on the single stair that is the stage I sit on,
and I make sure they have no probable reason to find me insane.

Nonchalant eyes, swipes on a screen,
happy smiles in silence.

Someone shoot me.

Vonnegut's Advice

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or just think at some point, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Poetry 5 - Being an Intoxicated Minor After the City's Monthly Gathering on Main Street

This is a short, somewhat emo poem.

To consume,
liquid euphoria in Friday’s fest of loneliness,
is to invite a literal poison inside,
and dance in your brain,
as it stabs you in the back (liver).

Still,
it is the emotional lacing
to a logical progression of saddening
events,
a showing of life in desolation,
like a landing pad in the desert.

“I am better now.”

Reflections #1

            Kurt Vonnegut once said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” This quote always tends to show up at one point or another when I talk to my brother. It’s like an old tattoo that you forget about until you roll up your sleeve. My brother, Ricky, taught me a number of things from the importance of recognizing the legitimacy of other people’s narratives to simple things like how to download movies, but other things I was taught internally anger me now, though I can’t be angry at him for presenting them, since they were meant to be said for my benefit.

            While I was still in middle school, I had a tendency to rebel against rules or policies that I considered redundant. One of those things was the dress code. We were required to tuck in our shirts and that ticked me off, still does. I would be sent to discipline all the time for not tucking it in. It got to the point where one of the deans threatened expulsion if I continued to disregard the dress code. 

            I came home that day, and my brother happened to be over. My parents thought the idea of having to tuck in our shirts was stupid as well, because it affected the learning process in no evident way. In the midst of me whining about it, my brother cut me off: “That’s a small price to pay for a free education though, isn’t it?”

            At the time, I didn’t have enough knowledge to realize that it wasn’t necessarily free. However, this was a valid point, because it is ostensibly free due to the way our system is set up, and it does not cost me, as an individual 7th grader at the time any money. I was at a loss for words, because I just didn’t consider that. I acted well in school after that.

            While I was doing well, and while I was also beginning to make good grades for the first time in my life since elementary, I noticed him start to reward it. He would do that in both financial and emotional terms. Financially, he’d take me to football games or take me to places like the movies when The Dark Knight Rises came out over the summer that led into 8th grade. Emotionally, simply by saying things like “Keep that up, and you could end up in a major university. They recognize that kind of thing. Turn-arounds, people getting better, it’s something institutions look at.” I thought he was full of crap back then, but it was flattering to hear. The turn-around thing I think is true now, since Mrs. Delk, a teacher of English for I.B. and creative writing for nearly forty years mentioned the same thing to me last year. It’s a comforting idea. 

            At the time, I couldn’t pick up on the fact that what he was doing to me was called “operant conditioning.” It didn’t bother me that I was acting because of the potential rewards that I might find in life, but it did bother me that I was acting. Every time I look back on how I felt, I notice that I either did not feel, or I simply felt bad. Most of my 8th grade year was spent in adolescent depression, which is nothing unusual. My grades were higher, but my eyes cast low. My “intelligence” grew, and my heart shrunk. These poor feelings were a side effect of denying myself the joy of uninhibited action.

            While being wrapped in the “good” behavior I was rewarded for, I was also held on the outside of a glass box, holding in that “bad” behavior for which I wanted to succumb. Not all of it was bad, though. One of those “bad” things was becoming a writer, was going into the arts. My brother is going to USF, studying organizational communications, and identifies as a humanist and an existentialist. Ricky was the judge of what behavior was good, and what behavior was bad. 

             I think about going into the arts everyday, and it’s always countered in my head by the scolding that I fear my brother would have to offer in response to me doing so. He tells me that I should try to get into a major university, that I should begin a portfolio to get myself on track for a healthy 401-k retirement. All of these advices are benevolent, or at the very least seeming as such, but they don’t always suit the person I am. One of these instances is actually the portfolio incident that happened just months ago, when I said “I don’t really want a 401-k plan.” My brother said that was stupid, said social security was going to dry up well before the age I could retire. The conversation went something like this, starting with my father telling my brother that he should help me develop that plan:

            “I don’t really want a 401-k,” I said.

            “That’s stupid. You’re not going to be able to retire.” I laughed at that.

            “I don’t really plan on living THAT long.” He looked at me, dumbfounded.

            “Still,” he said in a disappointed and condescending manner, shaking his head           “why WOULDN’T you want more money?” I sighed, shook my head, and we continued with whatever we were doing that day.

            I understand that it is necessary to have money in order to participate in the economy and get that it can help some people live comfortably. But that is entirely subjective. I can live happily in a studio apartment in the deep south with an old laptop and a bunch of books, though I’d prefer to live in a studio apartment in the north with an old laptop and a bunch of books. Regardless of what I wanted, I started to work on a portfolio that is subject to change, you know, because I’ve lived less than a fourth of my life expectancy and there’s a plethora of problems I haven’t even begun to deal with yet.

            Freshman year was the best year of my life in terms of creative productivity in YJP and Mrs. Delk’s class, making it into the show class after my first year and pulling first place in the district poetry contest for ninth graders. In addition, I began the year with crappy grades and had a lousy two-point-one GPA at the end of the first semester. Then with enough coffee, serotonin boosters, and helpful teachers, I ended up with an A in every class for the next semester. I brought my GPA up substantially, to a three-point-one. I’m closer to a three-point-five now, which my brother tells me to aim for, so that I can attend a major university directly after high school.

            I get told by my parents and peers and teachers and sometimes my brother that I am “very smart.” Flattering, though as soon as I don’t get something in class I spin into an existential crisis, because maybe, I’m not as smart as I was told, or I’m not smart enough, or I’m possibly stupid. I could ramble on about how we’re all stupid, and that as much as much as we come to know, we will always know less than what is out there to be known and the best we can do is try to not be stupid. But that’s for another discussion.

            By the time I graduate high school, I will have four years of YJP, four of FEA, two years of French, and over 200 community service hours, maybe more. Saying that to myself really falsely inflates my ego. It sounds showy and kind of pretentious to me, so when I look back or forward on the good things I have done – or will do, I just say, “good for me.” I know that these are only small and personal achievements, and sometimes I wish I was more modest and acted less like a semi-narcissistic bastard.

            With all of this considered, I am standing here today wearing a polo and slacks and parted hair, because I’ve pretended to be that person. I have pretended that I am someone who wants to go to college right after high school, though I’m in no hurry to do so. I have given into the standards set by my brother in order to function in society in an acceptable and even respectable fashion.

However, I still plan to go into the arts. Kurt Vonnegut also said that was a way to really hurt your parents, going into the arts. In my case, brother, though that’s not my intention, just as his intention was not specifically to push me away from writing. I understand that art is not considered a way to make a living, but it sure as hell makes life worth living – or at least tolerable.

Poetry 4 - Medicine That Makes Me Sick

A sonnet about antidepressants:

We want some pretty words for ugly times,
hope new made to delay our resign.
A catharsis, refreshing church bell chimes.
A happy reference, better-day shrine.
That offer in human medication,
expensive drugs to treat our worries.
Magic to maintain sophistication,
complete the day with no mental flurries.
We want to believe more than Duchovny,
but proof we need never seems to come up.
Decrease heart, increase productivity,
drop your thoughts in the world’s bottomless cup.
We are affixed inside false, glassless screens,
lying and reenacting daily scenes.

Poetry 3 - Transient Hopes

Transient Hopes

Still young and lively, yet fallen. A drooping plant, not dead.

At fourteen, I was going to change the world.
I spoke aloud, thought against the grain of cultural stupidity,
fought stifling teachers with the once revolutionary words
of my punk rock verses.

The next year came — nothing changed.
I still wore that crappy orange school shirt as uniform,
still dealt with the global problems that I wanted to fight,
and I couldn't risk another suspension — not in vain;
no martyr would die without the definite assurance of a promised social change.

If you want to change the game, then you have to play it.
So I played, and so it goes.
Now, three years later, my black shirt has been bleached white.
I did well all year, did not rebel, kept my unacceptable words in check.
I still try for change.
Hoping that life for the world and its constituents will build up, rather than break itself down.
I still project a decent vision around me, and still work towards it, as I wither under the weather of the world.

But as honest as that last corny line is,
inside of me, are broken values and bitterness.
Worst of all, is the appealing abomination that hides on my back:
apathy.

Poetry 2.5 - Limerick

Dinosaur Arm Blues:

There once was a dinosaur with small arms -
He couldn't hug or set off fire alarms.
During emergencies, the dinosaur would cry.
His reach was shorter than a boxing fly.
In the end, he grew long arms with Lucky Charms