booklover's blog

Let's scream dreams to flat screens and claim the

thirsty theatrical world, reeling in the aftershock of the

thousand songs it's heard.

Plastic screens cast faces in empty shades of pale and the people

fight for pieces because no one wants to fail. Let's paint pictures in the

oil-scraping sun and let's scream dreams at the

unresponsive million, begging for that single drop of

recognition, let's cry superstition at any apparition of the

unattainable, the half-suspicion, the terrible attrition, the unsustainable –

we live corrugated cardboard, hollow empty boxes,

banging on the locked doors, writing love songs for the

unsung, because we're always young, erudite and Read more »

Bruised and rotten skyscrapers are drowning in our
sky, yes, they scraped and scarred away the ceiling and it
washed up, higher, higher and now we are sinking in the
smoke-stained air. It suffocates, it clogs and clings and rings of
rotten melted metal music made of unsteady
offbeats and rattling seaweed and
plastic bags whispering and smoke sighing and
no words.
Our sky is a ragged shoreline of
shadows, we wash up on its edge,
crying that we want to climb and crawl higher, higher, our words
drowning in the smoggy sky and the
greasy ground, the tangle of streets and
feet, a monotonous maze of sad suns.
They wind, ant lights under the great green clouded crumble that
arches over us and eats our skyscrapers and
drowns our lamps in a million,
a smoke-soaked mirage laced by
washed up clouds.

Can you read a

city

in her words? She has

cracked concrete capillaries and

straight steel bones, and the wind-worn walls hold up her neck

straight. Can you read the torn telephone voices that

crisscross and tangle the black wire veins that

wrap around her arms

and drip from her head like hair

and spark wild snaps of light into the

wind? Read more »

I would like to go to somewhere upside down because I

want to see the world upside down and see a sky

inverted and wonder where I am. I want to taste the

wind of someone else’s world because it would taste like

dry grass, sea salt, sand, asphalt, heat, cigarette smoke, different

words. I want to live the exotic normalcy of someone else’s highway and

hear the twisted, upside-down, tied-up rhythms of someone else’s

songs. I’m desensitized to this place, I am too tied up in its boring

intricacies of trees and cars and words-on-repeat to even see it, it is a neon blur

across the dusky face of normal. I want to fall into someone else’s world-on-repeat and

Read more »

We are smoky ghosts and all our words are laced with

radio static, we are missing, whispering, we are all but

gone. We are one clumsy cluttered kind in these cube rooms and we

tear at the edges, we open up the waxy plastic walls and the holes let in wind

that smells like

something else – like maybe woodsmoke, dead flowers, dry twisty scarves of

air, like piano music, like maybe an Ideal. So sunshine is sour, it is shallow, it is

so so simple unless analyzed and extracted and synthesized – we must infuse it and

confuse it with

Worth. Our words are deep – we dance with subtle profundity and usually it isn't

so subtle anyway, most days we whisper our delicate daydreams into songs and Read more »

I am lightheaded and insubstantial, everything is

empty. All the air is gone and a vacuum of space and time is

everywhere, it’s everything, it ate 3 pounds of essential organ and now everything is

a perpetuation of tedium. I blew up a bright hot air balloon and it floated away,

my lungs emptied my head in a rush of dying blood and now I

lie on the ground and watch the airplanes skim by. It’s a torn edge of loneliness.

Do you know how you used to lay in the grass, before you were afraid of

deer ticks and losing time, and it was summer and the clouds drifted drowsily and

the long grass itched and the hot scratchy sound of the insects itched and the sun was so bright and

if you laid still for long enough, you could  feel the earth moving and you suddenly realized

that you were  balanced on the edge of the sky?

You could fall up into it if you overbalanced. I am overbalanced. I am

tripping on my tongue, and if I lie long enough, I can taste the edge of loneliness and everything Read more »

Things were nice when not confusing, I think. I’ll promise

I won’t substitute some sentimental words to make it better,

I won’t lace lovely lyrical lies into the lithosphere and paint over our eyes Read more »

He peoples poetry with the people he never met.

He might have found them but they fell into the space

between the table and the wall and when he looked again

someone had swept them away from under his feet and

they were already in the garbage bag on the corner.

He is a television man on the driest channels, he is only visible when Read more »

Big words

poetry

our didactic

spelling bee.

No crescendo Read more »

Clocks march memories like mutinies,

faster, faster, slower, gone.

Clocks sweep seconds like sawdust,

a thousand thirsty Thursdays falling into Read more »

Dear,

So, have I lately told you that I am, in fact, happy? I know that it might be confusing because I am so susceptible to terrible moody changes of mind, but it's true that I am happy. I have been happy for weeks and weeks, months really, probably possibly years. I'll admit that this happiness has been interspersed with terrible bouts of unhappiness, but that hasn't made it any less extreme. Read more »

I do not like football games because I do not belong at them. I know all the faces. There are hundreds of faces that I choose not to speak with. The lights make the sky paler but it is dark; only they will push back the dark. The rain is only visible in front of the lights, along with the sparks of a hundred thousand mosquitoes that flicker and skid wildly. Read more »

There are

52

weeks in a year, 12 months,

365 days, 52 weeks,

525,600 minutes, divide that by 60 and we get

8,760 hours, those are the ones

I know, but there's an awful lot

more than that and I am discovering it in September because Read more »

I listen to a lot of people that I shouldn't and ignore a lot of people

that I should, does it sound like I could

be a poet, and I'd hate to status-quo it and say that I'm me and I'm free and

I'm an absentee from reality and I could say that I'll divorce myself from

anything you try to enforce, reinforce, but centrifugal force would Read more »

I base my theorems on the times you could have cried,

but mostly on the times that I lied, and my

calendar coded continuum of you is

tied up in the things that I think you'd say or Read more »

Last week tied up its midnights with a new

family, and I am still on these weed-torn streets, still

slipping on these cobblestones

but night feels too normal, hollow without

marshmallow smoke in the air and guitar tangling the

branches, and dares, we are scared, it is

dark (wide, lake-side, open, dangerous dark), and a Read more »

It's been so long since I tried to write something that rhymed

because I figured out that I can be innovative and creative and

transcend your clean neat rules, but not this time because

I need the help of patterns to live, to forgive, to

figure out why it is that summer is not quite real living

and if it cares how the sun comes and the sun ends and the sun goes and the sun bends Read more »

I sometimes think that

if only I tried hard enough,

I could pick apart the threads that hold this tree bark roof together

and see what knots make them connect, the thin fickle roots Read more »

In June 2007, I was twelve years old, very nearly thirteen. I had read the first six books of the Harry Potter series a dozen times each. I was in Michigan, visiting relatives for a few weeks. And the seventh Harry Potter book was about to be released. Because we were in a metropolitan area for once, rather then a tiny Vermont town, attending the midnight release was not only possible, it was necessary. I found a black witch's hat with a green rim and used masking tape to attach blondish-white yarn all along the inside. I wore black, with striped green and black tights. Read more »

yes,

the nice words don't make sense, and

the sky is dusty, dirty white but it is mixed like

spilled tea over your little warm suburbs with the flowers on your

brown grass lawns or your sky-chopping building tops or

someone spilled sky-coffee over your mountain slopes and your little green

hills and your hot highways through hot air with the air conditioning dry and cold. Read more »

I was reading a book in the dark, dark room on a nice, nice day

because I had forgotten to turn on a lamp and I only had 156 pages left and

you know how it is,

the protagonist was in some dreadfully exciting peril, and- Read more »

Italicized words are from the song "For Good" from the musical "Wicked."

there was a day when I played

wooden-worded plastic music and it was maybe Read more »

I like this

inconsistency, this, this,

insanity,

this spin-in-circles world that

rocks with deja vu and dead cliché Read more »

I don't know how to speak of this anymore

I don't know what I'm standing for

because I used to watch my feet and straighten them

automatically because they were crooked and

awkwardly-footed and

now I do it naturally,

easily,

unconsciously.

you write nice essays, and your poetry is pretty good too, Read more »

Deja-vu-nastiness is infiltrating

every corner of our lives. It is

sliding itself into the corners of our

boxed hallway lives with the water-wrecked Read more »

making up missed schoolwork makes me sick.

the music festival was so incredibly worth it but now I wish

I wasn't up late feeling sick and writing that research paper ("An American Hero")

that was assigned half a month ago. I chose Walter Reed as my subject (yesterday)

because yellow fever is not nice and because I lost the (rather ridiculous) fight Read more »

The end of a concert always accelerates and falls out of control

into something better.

(I think we call it music)

It's true. Read more »

I can make myself not care, you know.

Of course you don't know, because I haven't told you

and nobody will ever tell you

and you will never know.

But you could. Read more »

I could taste definite happiness this morning

(which is such a nice phrase. I want to bottle it up

and let it go somewhere).

I opened all the windows and the wind Read more »

I want to slam this poem and scream it

to the skies and

hope that someone else besides me cries

because I want to shake the clouds with thunder Read more »