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.