Eggshells

I’ve spent the last year inspecting my ceiling.
Every night or free afternoon, I crawl into bed.
My massive, hopelessly needing bed.
And I lie on my crooked spine and stare at it.
I think it changes everyday based on how lucid my dreaming is
I suppose I could say that about anything these days though, couldn’t I?
That everything changes based on my perceptions of life.
Or just based on how tuned into reality I am.
It’s a funny thought.
My ceiling is eggshell white.
I remember picking out what white I wanted with my mum in the hardware store.
“Ivory or snow?”
I don’t care, mum.
“Well it makes a difference you know.”
No it doesn’t, mum.
“You say that now but, we will come home with snow you’ll realize you wanted a yellower tinge and we should have gotten ivory.”
Fine, get ivory then.
“I think we have egg shell in the basement. Let’s save us the trouble and use that.”
So we did.
And now whenever I crawl into a state of disillusion and forget what the world is supposed to feel like under your fingernails or through your hair when you’re sitting in the sun, this is what I see.
An eggshell ceiling.
Which, in retrospect, sounds graciously poetic.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to concentrate so hard that you become lighter than air and float up into my ceiling.
I fear that the eggshell colour influences how durable it is.
As if it literally might be eggshells and I could burst through it and keep going, further and further until no one can find me.
Maybe if we had bought ivory that day in the hardware store it would be tougher and hold me in.
But, honestly, I don’t know which is scarier.
To be trapped, safely bound, into my room by the ceiling above me
Or drift aimlessly until I hit a satellite dish or even just an airplane or tangled in a kite and fall back into the great atmosphere.
I wonder where I’d land.
I wonder where I’d end up if I just started to drift.
Would anyone notice?
Of course they would, how foolish of me.
A giant gaping hole in my fragile ceiling.
Even if no one went in my room I’m sure they’d notice when the rain that fell through the hole started to flood my room and leak out from under the door.
I wonder what the world sounds like from so high.
I wonder if it’s noisy up there.
I wonder what colour your ceiling is when I lay there now.
I hope that it’s eggshell.
Or cotton ball, or wedding veil.
Something you could tear through and drift through until you found me.
Fucking hell, I want you to find me.
I’ve spent the last year inspecting my ceiling.
I haven’t found anything interesting out ab

Into the deep

Swimming in a duvet ocean tonight
Sandbar pillows and turning tidal wave sheets
With the little strength you muster, your knees hug close to your chest
And your fingers grapple the ends of your toes.
Crooked, cross eyed toes.

You rock your body back and forth
A sinking ship, much like the Titanic’s twin, you lay
Back and forth
Back and forth
And forth again

You inch yourself backward towards his body that isn’t there
His body that lies in Davey Jones’ fucking locker somewhere at the bottom
Of your bed
You wish he were surfaced and floating
His arms tucked around you like a life preserver
Keeping you from falling deeper

Though you do not wish to touch the muddy bottom,
You would rather lie in your duvet ocean than reach the shore
Than see land, and feel sand and know there is no grater comfort
Because perhaps if you stay in the sea, he’ll come back to you

But, to wait,
To wait in this bed and feel so alone and so empty,
To feel this pathetic?
God, look at you.
You used to be so well within your own company
But, now you can barely hold a smile in an empty room.
Saddest sight in the world lately is your own reflection
And of course you’d sleep in a pool of water
So you can admire it all the while.
The only thing that could make you sink is an anchor heart.
You have one.

Why Now?

It starts with the noises you make when you chew
Chomps and crunches and loud, obnoxious bites.
It sounds like grinding bones, molars pulling flesh apart
Incisors tearing muscle tissue
Hungry for hearts, for young molded minds
Hungry for pride, hungry for soul
Hungry for tastes about me you don’t even know
It shuffles along to the coughs that you make when you drift near the edge of asleep
Dry, crusty, pale and sickly.
It’s nails on a chalk board, it’s a thorn in my side
It’s excrements of all the things about your lungs I hate
The way they breathe, in and out, in and out
Keeping you alive
It’s all the mucous of your tired life, feeding on my happiness
Feeding on my well being, a being you have never met
A being as a child whose problems you fixed with dolls and bikes
A being who you made cry each night, who you ignored, who you neglected
Who you saw fill with tears and pains and sealed with band aid remedies
As if my heart could be bought so easily
I cannot breathe beneath your heel
I cannot live under your roof of burdened possibilities
I am full of wonderment
And you are full of selfishness
I prayed to make you proud
With crimson lips, a pair you parted you request I rest my gun
For I am no sign, no light, no quantity of life you wish will succeed
By this milestone I do not want you to know me better
I want you to see my successes and wish you had patted my back
Not turned to it with yours
I want you to revel in the glory I have made myself,
The future I have built from scorn and tears and waiting countless hours with wishes that you might see me and recognize I am a person who came from you and wishes you want her heart to be apart of yours.
Why only in my faults and failures did you see me?
Why never in the times I needed arms of comfort, or eyes of warmth did you see my reflection in your own.
Why now, when I am all decided, do you want to be a father?
Why now, when I am done learning right and wrong, do you plant morals?
Why now, when only do I wish I was free of torture you call protecting do you want to escape me of dangers that are you are judging by their covers not their contents?
Why now?
And why not then?
You chose your battles, now was not one of them.
Do not wait for me to cross the finish line, for I will run right past you to the arms of someone who saw me when I neared the ocean
Not now, while I am drowning.

The Sorries

For all the mistakes I’ve ever, I’m sorry
For every equation, mathematical explanation
For every wrongdoing and in shoeing and for every left turn I ever made, I’m sorry.
For forgiveness, I am sorry
For apologies sake, I am sorry
I was born in sickness and from the moment I walked I felt Atlas’ burden on my shoulders
I am selfish, I am unruly, I am forgotten and regretted and in debt to the people who reached out to me
I am moving forward, starting backwards, put my arms around my head for I am shattered
I have a heart with an empty home and clichéd voice with whose words I yell, I roam a lonely earth and put arms around my head, my mind in fact, for I am shattered.
A race of humankind I cannot love nor relate to and I feel like I relate to you but lately I feel as if I’m drifting backward
And not to say I’d like to move away from you but what else can I do when life is moving me backward
And backward, and backward and like a future so pre determined I feel as if no choice is now my own and no choice is ever free will
No cosmic force would remember me and I am sorry
I do not want to be something you forget and you’ve always told me I am something you remember.
In a shade of cobalt blue or a burning red or a golden yellow, I want to be a colour you cannot describe
A taste you yearn for, a smell whose memory remains
But all the same, I want to disappear.
I am sorry in terms long over due for all the things I do and have not done yet because you don’t deserve their scorn and yet I cannot leave them behind for parts of me for which you fell for remain inside me, and always will.
I am sorry for who I am and choices made and I will always be here whenever you decide the pieces I can’t leave behind are pieces that you cannot forget.
I’m sorry, my makeups both genetic and aesthetic are not pieces I enjoy or wish would stay a little longer
And for this I am sorry, and all in good time I will make up for all the sorries given, driven, laid to rest here in these words.
I am sorry for things you don’t deserve.

Anchors

Unrequited love is the most important part of me
And those of us who chase it, thrive on it.
Thrive on the knowing that you can lock a stare, can hold a kiss
Can catch a person’s breath so easily and not know why, but know you can
And just easy
Poof, vanish, like a magic trick gone in an instant
The beautiful assistant sliced in half put back together and carried off stage.
That’s you.
It builds up inside you, this kind of love.
The instant fix, disposable razor, freeze dry food kind of love.
It makes homes and communities, sky scrapers where tiny people work their lives away in boring cubicle jobs where there’s two ways to make it to the top:
Sleep with your boss or kill the guy who’s in front of you, waiting in line to make his family proud, his wife look at him with lingering eyes and to hear his children call him “dad” not “Hank” or “Fred” or “John”.
And after a while when all these little pieces of unrequited love have made their homes and cities and churches and supermarkets and fall carnivals and hospitals and high schools, you’d think your heart would explode, your body implode, your existence just shatter but it doesn’t.
You start to think after all these little pieces have left and found their own love but not unrequited love but real love with families and hugs and kisses and birthdays and fights and sleep tights and story books and fairy tales, you’d think you’d want that too.
And maybe I’m supposed to.
Maybe all the unrequited chaser should want that but I don’t.
I tell myself “alone forever thou shalt die” and an uncomfortable silence rings in my ears and chills my veins and calls me names and I want out
But lately I don’t.
And lately I just want to be alone.
Maybe forever I don’t know
I’m still young and unrequited aren’t I?
I want to be alone
I hate everyone too much to let them linger
Only in my thoughts they can
And when they try and stay at first I am okay and like it
But it hurts, that they love me, that they cling like cancer and get to know me.
I hate them.
People. Ugh people.
I hate people.
Unrequited, forever alone
I’d like to stay my own world, one person
I like myself enough to be alone
Leave me alone
I don’t want lingering love in tangibility I want thoughts to write about
And be alone.
People are not anchors but they will certainly bring you down.

These literary works

The smell of books
So comforting, a brand new car
Cracked spine, so fresh
So breathable, knowledge in a form so palpable
Words so strung together as if they were a random line of words
That took 1600 years to come about
Infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters hitting the keys
800 times a second in hopes we might have sonnets, we might have psalms and yes,
Books as beautifully random as these.
I dare not ask who hates their smell, their texture, ink, they’re fresh cut pages, their hardcovered beauty.
I dare not ask who hates what they might stand for. For freedom, for knowledge, for courage and strength
I dare not ask in fear I’ll hear a great regress of moans so far the craters of Saturn’s moons might crumble.
I dare not wonder whose young girls troubles are more important than the sound of 500 pages turning
More important than the imaginary friendships that you form with characters whose lives remain unlived through tales of fiction as tall as sky scrapers
Whose drama is shallower than the depths of seas that captain Ahab sailed
More unsettling than the heartbeat beneath the floorboards
Shakespeare had no fear
Edgar Allen Gun Show
Orwell he was legendary
Ms. Austen we can’t compare to thee
So tell me, are your words, the ones you spew more literary works of art?
I dare not hear your answer
Infect me like a cancer, books
Pick one up, our generations fucked.

Good Morning

Good morning
No I never heard those words said
Replayed, over in my mind 1000 times and still they’ll never get old
Good morning
Never felt them hit me, a bully
Laughing in my face I dare him punch me
And secretly a coward I hope he never will confront me
Take my lunch money
Milk change Bus change waiting for some world change
This is for the nocturnal roamers, not the daylight welcomers
The need my morning coffee not the hit the day 5’ers
Good morning
What do those words even mean anymore?
Everyone is boring waking up on the wrong side of every bed
Every stranger’s bed, familiar beds, hospital or motel beds
Beds made of out sticks and stones that break your bones
And back because they’re not made to wish-stand you
This life was not made to sustain you
80 year just sounds so long
I’ll take 60, maybe 50. Half way to 100 is enough
That’s enough; just enough, no more please
The sun’s raise are alarming, not near charming
And how can you greet days with sweetest smiles
Like you’re made of OJ, jam and cereal.
Like somebody pushed you out of sunrays womb and begged you to come find the moon
And give up when it comes out.
Good morning?
Please, maybe I am just bitter, too old a soul for this body in which I do wither
But goddamn, I hope that someone hears my words from on the earth
Or distant worlds and finds me and tells me there’s a place where no sun lives
And humans thrive with no Vitamin D, the place for me
Good morning and good night.