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.