A Bedtime Story
Once upon a time,
There lived a girl like you!
Lily was her name,
And her eyes were bright and blue!
Everyday she woke,
As early as the morning mist
And she was never in trouble,
As she was no pest.
She obeyed her parents,
And was the teacher’s pet
She was loved by every kid,
And never did she fret.
She had a thousand friends,
And read good books
Such a happy life,
Gave her good looks.
Never did she lie,
And never did she cry
And never disturbed her mommy,
In the name of a bedtime story!
Its half past nine,
Lily’s time to sleep
And every good girl like her,
Would have gone to sleep.
Tucking you in bed,
Let me leave now, my darling
Have a good night
And let us meet in the morning.
Birdhouses
Missed my chance to mean something.
Missed my chance to glean something.
Premonitions of deposition
got me sleeping with the lights on.
“Off with her head!”
Too many are predisposed to pointing fingers—
too many are desperately self-absorbed—
while at the end of the day they’ve
got enough skeletons in their closets
to fill a morgue.
Hang my head and paint.
Hang my head and pray.
Try to keep these colors from mixing
and turning gray.
My mind’s a faucet and it’s had a leak
since the day that I was born.
Thoughts fidget in my head;
fronts collide and cause a storm.
And I’m constantly torn.
But hey, haunted is the new norm.
Words trip over my lips.
Angry, in rare form.
Apologies stuck between my teeth,
enameled vises indecisive.
Tears stumble from the precipice,
my new creative license.
I’m running out of colors.
Too young to take a loss.
My echo-chamber brain is...
gold overgrown with moss.
Stipulations stir me from
hibernation; incubation of an
overactive imagination;
then insomnia pipes up
and steals the rest of
my vacation.
Sensory saturation.
Asservations, prerogatives unclear.
Thoughts medically
coiffed and curled under the
guise of motivation.
Afraid of medication.
Call me a rebel in
this Xanax generation.
Just a taste of progress
feeds my phobia of success.
So I stagnate
and create into a void—
no return address.
Heart punching in my chest,
punching tickets to worlds unseen,
as eyes wide shut I fly away on
every dream.
A civil war in Converse.
Imploding. Needly needs
threaded with routine.
Alphabet soup spilling out the seams.
Taste the words, bittersweet.
Conceived on a whisper,
but born on a scream.
Reality demeans, so I recede.
It’s nice in here, so I concede.
Phobia of progress is comfortably
killing me.
So till I can breach the slump
of “comfortably numb”
I sit and paint birdhouses.
It’s surprisingly fun.
#fiction
Neat story with this one. My dad’s been making birdhouses and I’ve been painting them and it’s SO awesome. Super relaxing stress-reliever. That basically inspired this. It’s a fictional tangent from a troubled/unstable narrator who also paints birdhouses. Their fiction insecurities and struggles. Injected with a few of my nonfiction insecurities and struggles. So...a mixed bag. Also, I wrote the first draft of the poem, then saw the challenge, then was inspired to photograph the birdhouses. Dunno’ if order matters.
in-between takes and too-high stakes
Having been a background extra, I was glad to see a post.
We’d get imdb credit that we all wanted the most.
I drove a ways to get there, saw some people that I knew.
A charismatic worker had such knowledge for his youth.
He passed out props, worked stand-in, picked my wardrobe, this and more.
I liked the sharp intensity he effortlessly bore.
The fact that he died instantly while driving home that week
was surely consolation, but I’d rather he’d have peaked.
I got that credit promised on the imdb site,
but equally important I met Adam on that night.
SPIRIT OF AFRICA
Oh! Africa the mother of all lands,
The birthplace of the very first man,
How badly have you been treated by your brothers,
How badly have you been damaged by those you accepted in with a warm heart.
Oh! Africa the mother of the magnificent river Nile,
That has been flowing since the beginning of time,
Your history has been rewritten and fabricated by those who never existed when the great Sahara desert emerged from beneath the waters,
Your children was taken away in chains and the milk from your breast was sucked by others.
Oh! Africa the mother of many wonders of the world,
The majestic pyramids, the elegant Mount Kilimanjaro, the vast Serengeti and the alluring Victoria falls,
Home of great men,
Home of gold laden wealthy king Musa Mansa and the great freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.
Oh! Africa the black colour of your skin is a thing of beauty,
The melanin on the body of your children is priceless and sheen,
They say the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice,
I say the black in the berry is what's sweet in the juice.
Loreley
A city of wonder
Truly a magnificent place to visit
With interesting lore
My interest is surley kept
On the edge of the Rhine your natural beauty shines through
Oh Loreley, how your name is so well known
Every one knows your name
How are you able to handle the fame?
Loreley, oh how wonderful is thy name?
...Loreley...
A picture is worth...
I couldn't find a picture, Because I was subconsiocously looking for a picture tat was really worth a lot to me. I didn't know if it would be one I edited, one I've never seen, or one I keep close. I looked into my folder of pictures I hold close, but none of them were something I'd be sharing. And then I found a meme. I'm glad you saw this, but that's all I have to say about it.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EBpsYz2o4j7J2zT8ChV-m9xYYxrvqQZu3znl28cxhKk/edit
Nostalgia
Summer sunsets setting over
a thousand rows of corn six feet tall
beaming over gravel roads full of pot holes
farmer boys and chicken girls
’fuck you’s and ’ain’t no’s
Thirty Bald Eagles spread-wing over a farmer’s couple o’ dead pigs by the road
fields of cows and a random chicken
an apple tree by an old farm house
beer and smoke, an old bottle of Coke
That’s where I came from
and I miss the hell out of it
goddamn it I do
