[x]

4pmtired from counting all my stolen stars, tremble love, hard
to be branded skinny when your scale keeps jumpin' murder

thunder like sweet hot tea, raining down inside my ribs
beating like hard bass, vibrations through my sneakers,
tastes like Wednesday night full of pretend, treadmills until
I taste size zero, icing on top (buttercream)

pink lotion that smells like raspberry waste, soak into my skin
so I feel like pretty, enough to stand out in
the sugary sun and gleam like vintage fog, scarlet-letter phantom,
prozac tainted girl, baked with allspice and cloves
ginger-bread ideas

if we all shared my concept of beauty,
the streets w

ThousandOur silence lasts for miles,
tangled around my ankles and throat and
stretching down the highway to end at your
computer screen. I like the way it tastes,
like bitter chamomile and rust.

We crawl
from morning to dusk and drink too
much coffee and watch the Bruins pound
the Jets and forget that once upon a time,
we said we'd get married.
Sometimes our fingertips remember the tapping of keys
on late nights, our poetry and faith streaming between
our eyes in rivers of need, and we
cave inside. Just a little, though.

Mostly we sleep beneath the fluorescent lights
of God and sex and grocery shopping,
and we pretend we don't see
t

Tastes Like a Tuesday Harem words
whispering on the
edges of windows
frosted with moonlight, a breath from the firefly, a finerfly
has never been seen
he sees the letters I type at 2am
and kisses the girl that mocks the divinity of
placing and placating the words on my screen with
everything hidden in spaces and brackets

and I write my dances like I take my tea
bitter and without reprieve

On Waitingnothing seems worth writing anymore

yet all my bones are coiled in anticipation.

I'm a poet lost, ya know.
And all our stars, they're leaking
oil and pizzazz. Something
grand is building in my marrow.

PaperbackI still dream
of running away to Boston,
catching a muse like a cold and
living somewhere cramped. tiny.
peeling blue paint.

my muse would probably work someplace
with indecent fluorescent lights, like
Target. I'll find it while shopping
for popcorn and tampons, and we'll
live happily ever after inside
my old diary, sleeping on a bed of
blue ink and scribbled love notes.

if this isn't a morgue of half-baked hopes,
tell me what is.

I see your token aspirations and raise you
my dreamed up myths; bruised, pink and blue,
and waiting on a producer to turn me into a dozen
dollar industry. that's my proclamation,
make of it what you are.

I still

SawdustI need purgatory, to send
scalpels and butterflies sliding down my spine.

I need a blanket so I can
crawl over my best friend's grave, keep us warm and
ward the ghosts away.

If you could taste mania, it'd be fresh strawberries
and cream, vanilla and
sawdust. The flavors of morning and newly-bought coffins,
the fresh-car scent included for only two-fifty.

I need to be sliced open, given new
veins and a new heart, because when I promised to eat
three square meals a day and never ever remember my dead best friend,
I forgot that I can't reset my eyes.

Have Your Cake, I'll Eat It Tooand suddenly you are a martyr for
having been left in the dust?

being fat does not make
you a pilgrim towards a fulfilling
culture.

weighing in at an outstandingly
self-righteous 115, being skinny is no longer
a compliment. I was given a card
by a woman whose eyes burned leftovers
and TV Land re-runs--

"Real Women Have Curves! Embrace True Beauty!"

and thus, because my faulty genetics
have dictated my bones be brittle, my
chest be flat, and my hips be disappointingly
narrow, I am not a real woman. I must be something
in-between, a martini of lipo and a fading 90's
anorexia fad. someone forgot to feed me.

this shaming, bone h

AubadeI am
no goddess of
articulation.

I am abrupt syllables,
Bezaleel staining dog-eared dictionaries--
a cinder from God's own panic attack.

So when my shivers are redolent, seeped
in Earl Grey and the sound of
her whispers against the underside of your wrist,
I can string together phonemes
that ardent logophiles slaver over.

This is me, understood--
not a poet, but
an
anxiety disorder left to pens
and paper.

Bostoni.
we meet in a unremarkable
space, a breath of
caffeine-induced insomnia and winter
cyber-poetics

ii.
you cut away a chink of
argent armor, a piece of
normality, a slice of
Boston sky
and my heart decided I wasn't so smart anyway

iii.
I twirl around carousels with the closest
body, closest touch, a hybrid
of addiction and disgust while you
ride the bench behind me,
eyes glazed and paint
chipping

iv.
you watch through
dictionary lens, see me flying through blue
and grey, bones skimming ocean, poetry breathing
in place of collapsed lungs
I tie you into knots and hide so you can't be undone, can't
quite forgive, and I wa

Mirrorsartificial modesty, dusted up in powder blanche,
a skyward taste of infinity
anorexia breathing over tealight bones, turning them
into negative need

and all I ever wanted was a mirror to lie to me,
tell me I reflect a little je ne sais pas

so I steal your societal image
strip until all I'm wearing is pride and 5am workouts,
pretending I like the way fake sugar tastes
and the way needy eyes penetrate

taping stars beneath our eyelids to
replace dessert and coffee,
we slip heaven over our shoulders and march towards our
adoring fans (being pretty is killing us worth the effort)

you may have daddy issues, but I'm just vain.

Room Temperaturequicken my stride to match
the base of your pulse--

coffee, no cream,
a notebook filled with trifles and
sometimes, notes of interest.
she looks at me as if to ask,
why are you here, too?
but there's no answer i could give,
because the august heat is suppressing our
so-called intellect.

i watch him straddle his seat
backwards, almost as if he were challenging a rule,
but we all know it's because it's more comfy,
not because he is a rebel.
he stares at her notebook,
and i want to give it to him, since
he looks kind of lonely with his baseball cap
turned like that. but i don't say anything,
and her dusty eyelids close.

there'

Try to Rememberand wouldn't it be lovely,
if we could breathe in the ocean,
harboring rolling foam in our aching souls, soothing
aspirin to our cracks and bones

I'm sure there's plenty of room in
your hollowed out heart for fish and
sand, salty lovers, a captain's dream
in a place I found no solace

you are loveless, prettier than
pearl and not worth as much. singing skeletons
to sleep every night must have made you
falter, because there is no such thing as giving up,
giving in,
only bowing down to let the whale
swallow you whole

and wouldn't it be lovely,
if we could remember, I don't know,
I don't know, I want to remember.

we used to be i

Achromatic Dreamstoday, god gave me present.

-
i.

stilted windows, white bones
decaying lungs and my mind races
at the rate of a lone moth's jaded wings

we taste better alone

ii.

clemency is earned
by the damned, by the damned
arbitrary sacrifices

we belong to nobody

iii.

and she bowed with artless grace
kissed the sky, shed stardust tears
choked on angelic moonshine

we draw our own constellations
-

today, i gave god presence.

IsI have found that I am
anything but helpful in the most awful
of
situations.

I do not run, but rather stand
still, letting my shadows whisper
condolences I fail to give. My
god does not believe in prayer, and I can send
a wish to the cosmos, but a still frame
of grief is easier to paint.

I don't believe in meanings
and paths, and I haven't cried
since I realized religion is
not a drug. I am
stoic.
Bearing and
burying
these tragedies in my
rigid back. I am straight lines at funerals I
will never attend. I am
stony-eyed over lost lovers
that never meant a damn thing.
I am still,
because motion means

giving up.

Linoleumwe are pondering
silence,
needle/thimble/tremble. i stitch
us a home in awkward conversations.

this is the great city,
dim lights to give us
sidewalk halos. we are inconvenience
stores, bubble gum kleptos,
and that's how we know
none of this is a dream.
it burns too real, leaves fingerprints
on our sight. this is dusty
and stale.

this is life,
magnified.

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More from *Shairese

She Cries ContentI am counting
wishing wells, practicing
my thesis for every shooting star
in my mirror.

I have to admit, I
don't know what I want,
so I paper-punch holes in your
sky to replace the supernovas I
stole. I needed them
for luck.

We are unsure,
unsightly,
perforated lovers at perpendicular
angles. All our reasons are
blurry and
Schrodinger would
agree that we probably
shouldn't observe them.

Speaking logic,
I find it funny
that Euler's formula was considered
a jewel when it fails
to count our
cruel edges and
double-faces. I can't use
numbers to solve our mystery,

a still painting of
frustration and
blindness. You see me
as on a distinct, sep

Free to Violent HomeI am exonerating you from
blame in my scheming nights.

I register a 4.2
on your Richter, trembling bones
from your ribs to your
pelvis. I would like
to tie you into knots, leave so you
can't be undone. Swallow the key, burn bridges in front
of the armory until you
finally
agree I can't be beaten.
I can handle so much more than this.

You can sway
between guilt and violent
bedroom fog, rip my
thesis from the
pithy air between us--
I can break so much more than this.

What you mistake for need
and innocence is, in reality,
calculated dispassion. I
am stubborn, reckless, tumbling
headfirst into hurricanes and
sharp things. I've never known
how

Somewhere PedanticI thought I could
taste webbing in your
literary prowess, your
soft-serve words showing
up
on my heart monitor as beautiful traps.

You are a kaleidoscope of
mirror-images, reflections of
poetry I swear I've heard
before. You are
the
apotheosis of
all things clinical summer--
a bite from the sweetest part.

You make heat and panic
rise up inside my trenches, a thousand
soldiers penetrating enemy forces
with guns and sweat and all the things
that cling to human. It is more
than war--it's being thrown face down into
mud and metal, grinding teeth into
earth, tasting the only real
thing ever existing.

Your soldier-bound tendencies
make you all t

JaybirdsThere are too many
'could-haves'
on the Facebook page of your dead best friend.

So a note to all of you
over-achievers, the junkies for caffeine and
paranoia, the self-righteous losers catapulting
off the pock-marked, Cover-Girl face of the world--

there is such a thing as a final
good-bye. Don't waste it on
clicking back to Google because your

dead
Iwishhewasalive
dead
best friend's

last status was something you could
have commented on.

seeminglyi have vanquished teeth and
bones,
wrecked fallen boughs with snow
and ghosts.

this is what i fought for.

now that i have plumped out with
wisdom and chocolate cake, now
that i wear loose pinstripe pants and
heels everyday, now that i go to bed
a little earlier and dream a little less,
i have, seemingly, won.

i've never worn makeup like i do now--
i build my face with cream and rouge until i look
like a middle-age social worker. my gait is brisk,
my words clipped and tight.

i am the product of rules and
regulations, finally adhered to--

i am not the bone-thin girl with
over-sized sweaters and coffee lips
anymore.

and when my baby kinder

Vietnam, PapaI think you must have
missed me, right as I was coming in.
The rest of your life spent
serving a sentence to a country you already
defended, cells multiplying as college kids
protested your thousand-yard eyes.

Politicians used great men to
play country chess over the Mekong, shoving
Saigon lovers and colors through the
barrels of your guns. You were one of the great,
lost in gold October, passing by moments before
I barreled through. It's not fair the only
name I could put to you is Swamp Rat,
not Grandpa. Secret agent orange destroyed
more than just your cells.

I'm still going to remember
hazy, azure moments I was too late
to see, but if I

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[x]

Regenesis

by *Shairese, Dec 21, 2012, 12:28:19 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I am wavering

between stick-thin
and fuck-it 125.

I am on the border
of a future in statistics,
facing north of a lifetime
in psychosis, and

I tell you, I'm getting better.

My days
are no longer measured in fake sugar
packets, eyes brimming with
caffeine and spite.

No, now I am
laundry baskets and
accordion files, my
ribs lined up neatly in place. you cannot
call me a skeleton now.

I am wavering

between two blurred out lines,
and I think

this is called love.

Regenesisby *Shairese

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

where manic mauve finally meets
healthy heliotrope.

(sidebar: I said I would write something! Huzzah!)

*pazlowq Jan 15, 2013 Traditional Artist

I wanted to write on this a looooong time ago, actually found some time to write something up now...

The notion that the narrator is struggling between these two modes of thinking, that is seeing herself as either stick thin or f--- it 125 I enjoyed as the premise of the narrative. I actually think the third line in its vulgarity interjects an element to this that maybe makes it more about self acceptance. Perhaps this is too revealing about how little I know about women, but I'm assuming that 125 is stick thin weight as well? I kinda figure that since its about bringing her mind into a place where she's able to see her weight as being f---able (to use the verbiage of the poem) so her actual weight is 125 and she's just figuring out how to view that.

The way I read the third line is its trying to use 'f--- it' as a notion of desirability. Perhaps this was an intended added dimension in choosing that phrase, but it seems to suggest that her introspection on how she views herself may have been started due to intimacy problems. As a result she's taking a hard look at herself and when the phrase 'this is called love' hits at the end it does with a double meaning: as obviously indicated by the middle stanzas she finds she's able to love herself, more subtly that resulting correction leads to a restoration of intimacy with her partner.

Short but really strong, very nice bit of writing!