Traditions

    They sat there, on the porch in front of shit-
colored apartment doors, bloated orange
and gaping mouths. The old man lips
curling over toothless gums, grinning
and grinning.

    Halloween, All-hallows Eve,
was a week ago. And these squat old men
are sagging, drooping, ignored. I feel pity,
helpless pity for them;
    They will die soon.
    They are dying.
    They have already died.
    They are rotting, decaying.
Turning away from this mockery
of life, I don’t want to think about wrinkles
and death, even this warm colored death –
the last burst of life before cold, like autumn. The stench
or the thought of it, is suffocating, squashing. Squash…

    I’d rather be Cinderella, where the pumpkins expand
and then return to their shape. I don’t want to be
a murderer, cutting smiling faces into my victims, I don’t want
to be the maker of their mockery, I only mock
myself.
    Honestly, I think I am taking this
        much too seriously. They are only
    just pumpkins and I’ve carved them
    since I was a kid. I’ve already tasted
    their seedy blood.

*Just a lil something I wrote while at work. I actually thought of it while I was walking to my car from the apartment to head to work. The title is still kind of ify…a work in progress I suppose. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this one…:)

 

Real California April

I want to be gently

pasteurized, like my organic

milk, with the red carton

and cartoon cow in green

flowing fields, Horizon.  This 

is what pasteurize brings 

to mind:  

Soft breezes

in tall grass, mild in touch,

unlike the mowed blades

of my childhood, that cut

the skin like paper and itched

even through pants

and long sleeves.  

Pastures…

that is where I want to be,

with the clarity of sun-crisp skies.

I want to be pasturized, my skin

smelling thickly of earth and absorbed

rays, in that harmless, ignorant

way.  Hair streaked with blonde,

scented by my wild flower chain

on the crown of my head. 

 

Great cheese

comes from a happy April, no wait…

from happy cows.  I’d like to be

a happy cow then. 

 

Syllabarfs

For my poetry class this week we had to write a syllabic poem…you know, the kind where you can only have so many syllables per line…we didn’t do anything so formal as iambic pentameter or anything like that.  We just had to have a chosen odd number of syllables per line, plus a few other minor rules.  Well, I suck at that kind of poetry, it’s never been my prefered method of writing.  So I wrote one fantabulously crap poem and turned it in.  Of course I’m not actually happy with what I turned in, but no going back now.  But since I’m bored here at work and trying not to focus on the fact that my stomach is churning unpleasantly and I feel like I’m going to puke, I decided to write another syllabic poem in case by some weird turn of fate, I’d have the option to turn in a different one.  So here is my second craptastic syllabic poem (untitled as of yet):

It is always the little
things that get to me, ya know?
Like that time you didn’t say
hello when I got home late,
though you already knew how
bad my day had been. I left
then, hoping you would notice,
but as usual I don’t
exist, except in silence.
I’d feel better and much less
guilty if you just called me
a bitch. Then there would be no
reason for me to believe
I was imagining things.

Now I sit here, mentally
constipated, just wishing
to projectile vomit words.

*Meh, I don’t really like this one either and I think it is sad that it is potentially better than the other.  But..whatever… And obviously I have vomit on the mind considering I’ve referred to it four times now in one post…haha…blah.

 

All Our Mothers

The nameless first, my mother…the one that stretched skin, innards, and legs to release
      me from captivity-
            but she didn’t prepare me for the wild.

Gertrude, my mom’s mom,
      she died when Mom was only weeks old. A bad blood transfusion.

The phantom woman that birthed my brother in a dump
      …name unknown, among other things…
            authorities think she called the priest
            to let them know where he was.

Grandma Jane,
      my mom’s mom,
            but really she’s her aunt,
      Gertrude’s sister. But Mom needed a home,
            and Grandma needed a baby.

Our real mom, my brother’s and mine.
      She inherited us with a missing uterus and malformed
            ovaries; the only mother we have ever known.

 

Another Day at Work

the blurred static sound of quick rain,
thumping against itself, resounds
in my head and I can’t decide
whether the noise comes from the micro-
wave, cooking my canned soup, or
the computer server, closeted
in black metal behind me, or maybe
from the pixilated chaos
of my own mind.

the energy drink I just finished
surges through my veins
and my limbs are twitching
in restlessness, even my head
sways from side to side, the twinge
of bones, muscles, and blood crowding
my ear drums: first left, then right,
then left, and so on…