Illiterate Swine
What I know about living is the pain is never just ours
Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo
So I keep a listening to the moment the grief becomes a window
When I can see what I couldn’t see before,
through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind
and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.
So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don’t try to put me back in
just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better
but knowing as bad as it hurts our hearts, made of only just skin, knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming
let me say right now for the record, I’m still gonna be here
asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet
you- you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.
Raising your bright against the bitter dark
Your bright longing
Your brilliant fists of loss
if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that’s plenty
my god that’s enough
my god that is so so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over
“Live”
‘Pajamas and chocolate may go well together
but so do strands of inky black hair
curled up on your sweater
and so does this terror
this rippling Golden terror with its waves
if love were a gushing torrent
maybe sometimes
it should be allowed to flow to
a trickle
but one does not simply
throw their hands up and flee
at even the merest hint of confusion
for it is a duel ; one dark and twisted waltz
with the tender ghosts of yourself
so that is why i tell you to surrender
why the words roll of my tongue
dripping like honey ; a swift manipulation
you yield and pour and love without pretensions
But I get so small
we’re such puny little things
feathery and hollow-boned ; fuck off honesty
says the day to the night
leave me be , begs stability
i know that tolerance became a habit
but you exploded stars in-front of my eyes
and i can only take so much beauty
beauty that i swore was nothing to do with truth ‘
Screw falling in love.
My heart itself is already in tangles. A web of nonsense
and a drawerful of necklace chains that I will never
have the patience to separate. I am sounds mixed with
different mediums of light. Six thousand eight hundred
dialects of flesh that I don’t have enough time to
translate into words. This dictionary of skin is unreadable and
Latin is dead because of what we never had the balls to
tell each other.
I am swearing off of love because everything inside of me
is oil and vinegar and I no longer believe that it’s morally correct
to fall in love with the intent of both destroying and rebuilding
another human being. I am a forest fire and an ocean, and
my favorite color is the same as the color that hurts me the most.
I don’t want your sentimentality. Quit looking at me intending
to melt me. We all know it’s working. We all know what this heart
is capable of unfolding.
I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not
as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people
that leave different shades of blue inside of me.
The drowning. Your skies.
The outline of a blue jay on a porcelain plate.
For now, I am closing off these bones for someone who will know
how to trace me without me ever telling them what I look like naked.
I no longer want to seduce the words out of people just to see
if I can. The love that I’m looking for falls out of the realm of your lips
and my lips and our lips doing a dance that involves bodies and more skin
and your hair touching mine, gently, like two winds
colliding.
Screw falling in love.
It’s too much to handle when
I’m already having difficulties breathing and keeping track of my
heartbeats and making sure that my limbs are doing what
they need to be doing.
But,
men are so beautiful.
But this heart is so
fragile.
I am every vulnerability that the thesaurus has to
offer me and in a certain light it’s impossible for me not to pull you
towards me with the intent of kissing the very life
out of you.
What I’m trying to say is that you are not allowed in.
What I’m trying to say is that all I want is to open myself up and have you
rearrange me, untangle the gold chains of my heart, love me for
every shade of blue that I have hidden in the silent spaces
between parentheses.
I have sworn off of falling in love,
but I know that in the morning,
outside, in the pale frost of February,
all I’ll want is to hold another person’s hand, warm and
gloved, in their coat’s pocket.
- Shinji Moon
(this is going to make me melt)
“I like weird ass hippies
And men with hairy backs
And small green animals
And organic milk
And chickens that hatch
Out of farms in Vermont
I like weird ass stuff
When we reach the other world
We will all be hippies
I like your weird ass spirit stick that you carry around
I like when you rub sage on my door
I like the lamb’s blood you throw on my face
I like heaping sugar in a jar and saying a prayer
And then having it work
I like cursing out an enemy
And then cursing them in objects
Soaking their baby tooth in oil
Lighting it on fire with a tiny plastic horse
I like running through the fields of green
I am so caught up in flowers and fruit
I like shampooing my body
In strange potions you bought wholesale in Guatemala
I like when you rub your patchouli on me
And tell me I’m a man
I am a fucking man
A weird ass fucking man
If I didn’t know any better I’d think I were Jesus or something
If I didn’t know any better I’d sail to Ancient Greece
Wear sandals
Then go to Rome
Murder my daughter in front of the gods
Smoke powered lapis
Carve pictographs into your dress
A thousand miles away from anything
When I die I will be a strange fucking hippie
And so will you
So will you
So get your cut-up heart away from
What you think you know
You know, we are all going away from here
At least have some human patience
For what lies on the other side”
Dorothea Lasky
wherever I go
from the grubby old man
on the corner of the street
and the daunting shoe shop
where the pretty and snooty go
but of course there are parcels
socks in our post box too
and a pair at the bookstore
they bring them in new
or that single one from Mama
that I scavenged from her room
some with stripes
others with dots
another with little green reindeer
and one with blue monkeys
I could buy socks all day long
and emerge victorious
grinning, yes
but not too dignified
But I wouldn’t worry
about futile things
like dignity
too much"
I am only sixteen
but I can imagine myself at thirty-seven
and truth be told
I tend not to find the image
disconcerting in the least
In fact , it’s pleasant
in the wonderfully simple sense
with hair pulled back
and scrawny wrists
collar bones out
a bohemian elegance
with a loosely fitted shirt
nautical stripes
and navy blue jeans
the common kind
a black leather bag
the satchel open
and a paperback on Hegel
Hegel explained
No more cigarettes
I’ll be over that groove
maybe some pills for vitamins
or Iron
maybe even a divorce
or two
But groceries,yes
groceries in brown paper bags
organic vegetables
and all of that rot
frantic and fed up
stagger over
to the bathroom door
creaky and vulgar
an icy splash to smack
you awake
and then just a string
of consistent monotony
morsels of food tucked
into mouths
and gulps of coffee slithering down
with hair presentable
and a dress,a shirt,viciously pressed
obnoxiously clean;
impersonal and sinister
a wrinkle smoothed out here
or a loose strand of hair
tucked back there
and off we go
whisked away by
an engine
far out into the fog"
You can tell a lie
and run away to Paris
and never speak
to mum and dad again
because they think that
honesty and love and truth and
a sense of the absurd
and intimate little dreams
are all branches
of pure vice itself
But aren’t you a person ?
With a stubborn mind to
whisk you away
and a smothered intelligence
to guide you to obscurity
To crossing dimly lit roads
in the twilight
and buying bread at 4am
in France
or reading and running
and cigarettes when it’s dark
and hours of laughter
lighting up the sky
and all those things
that you never thought
would be asking too much
But what’s the use ?
why do I run on ?
It matters not
this vague little culture
It alters not
your silly little goals
Smoke. Or mist ?
Or fog, or gloom.
Hand-picked and plucked
From The flower-beds of a dream
With flashes and glimpses
Of brothers and books
And too many cigarettes ; frightful clarity
As we tremble and chuckle
And huddle over warmth
With dirty mugs and broken pencils
and an empty jar of olives
Intimate details I’ve come to rely upon
Just like those socks; tossed on the kitchen floor
Bewitching and stirring, this pang of grief
Though just a pang
careful now
Let’s not make such a splash tonight
Let me be okay with that subtle sense of happy
And vague notions of love and warmth
All those things that don’t seem like much
But of course this surely , is only a crisis
Perhaps the only one I can lovingly call my own
