Mistake love

Went to a poetry workshop with Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib today and he had us do erasure poems based off of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.” I’ve never done one of these before but I think they’re pretty cool.

Mistake love

I know I’m dying

Grab my hand

I can make good forever

You can tell the pain loves you

I love you

We’re a nasty scar

Love’s blank lips kiss the King

Queen is screaming

You’ll come, darling nightmare, forever

The pain loves love

You love nasty

I’ll love torture

I didn’t love forever

It’s over

#68 (30/30 #1)

Seeing my vocal folds for the first time

I sit in the chair

not comfortable and too medical

all false confidence

and all real terror

the doctor is calm

her gold necklace shining in the light

and mauve eye shadow cradling the wrinkles around her eyes

my voice teacher

nervous

tries not to be

a small squirt bottle is inserted into my nostril

sniff

swallow

the taste of kerosene toothpaste running down my throat

I laugh and say it’s lovely

and describe the taste to my teacher

she tells the doctor how excited I must be

a small camera

the size of a pen tip

on the end of a spaghetti noodle wire

is gently prodded into my right nostril by the doctor

she is calm

and I pretend to be

and my teacher pretends to be

she laces it through my nose and it gets stuck

I feel it like a welcomed unwelcome guest

slithering through my caverns

tickling my hairs

and it comes out

the doctor smiles and unlaces the wire

its rubber rough against the skin

and tries again in my left nostril

the rubbing continues and we are through

pathways that connect in some secret way

and I can feel this eye

in the back of my throat

like a convulsion

or a tear

I had been holding in

but I am calm

the doctor turns the lights on

and I look at the tv screen over her shoulder

while she looks at the screen over mine

and there they are

my loves. 

#58

I am tired of us not being enough.
I am tired of hurting.
I am tired of needing help.
I am tired of knowing no one can help us.
I am tired of people expecting us to be better already.
I am tired of people rushing us to be better already.
I am tired of having to believe we will get better.
I am tired of not knowing when we will get better.
I am tired of not knowing if we will get better.
I am tired of being a cautionary tale.
I am tired of being a resurrection narrative.
I am tired of this pain being inspiring.
I am tired of this pain.
I am tired of being tired.

#41

I miss how you always used to fit right. Without you I write poems with confusing Halloween metaphors. I’m tired. Baby, please come back.

A poem I wrote on a pastry bag

This banana bread
in my head
not made of lead
with this I was fed.

So, what are all of these numbers about?

I've started writing love letters.
To my voice.

You see, as much as I involve myself in any other activity, the way my throat feels is always one of the dominant thoughts in my mind. That tends to happen when speaking about other things (which should be a distraction) is painful enough to draw attention to the very thing that you might want to set aside for a while.

So I can't ignore my voice, even if I wanted to... which I really don't.

But the thing is, I need these reminders of why I even bother to keep going against the pain and setbacks and frustrations.

I need the reminders of why I love this part of me so much.

I need these reminders of why other people love this part of me so much.

So, from now on, I'm going to try my best to write one love letter/poem to my voice per day... which really means that I'm using my inner voice to communicate with my outer voice. Deep stuff, huh?

I can't promise that I'll be able to do this daily. I'm a college student after all. I can guarantee, however, that these letters will be almost as much about me and my life as they are about my voice, because we're all really intertwined right now and probably always will be.

I'm not going to advertise these letters on facebook unless I think they're particularly important, but you can go ahead and put your email address in the follow by email box on the right side of the screen to get updates whenever I post something new.

#5

Darling, I just wish I knew how to fix you.
Why were you so scratchy and low today?
Did that hard lemonade hurt you?
If it did, I'm sorry,
because it sure tasted good.

#4

Darling,
I thought we were getting better,
but you tell me we're not.
I'm sorry that the place I love the most
is maybe the place that hurts you the most.

#3

Darling,
Today you reminded me
just how brilliant you are.
You can mold yourself to shapes I've only imagined
and follow cadences you've never marched to.
I love you for that.
I'm just so sorry that our play has become painful.
Remember when it was only fun?

#2

Today the doctor told me

that I’ve been swallowing wrong this whole time.

I’ll relearn,

but I wonder if this is why life without you

has been so hard to swallow.

(From April 2014)

#1

This time last year I was crying over a boy.

This time I’m crying over you.

It’s pretty much the same except the boy was easier to get over.

Darling, I beg you, please come back.

(From April 2014)

Persona Poem

This month I've been taking part in a 10/10, where I'm supposed to write 10 poems in 10 days. Prompts have been posted on my school's poetry slam page. I've been cheating and doing the prompts out of order and not on the days they've been posted, but whatever. Here's a prompt that I was particularly nervous about, but had a lot of fun with:

PROMPT #8: This prompt requires a little research! I think that New Year's time can be very wistful and full of bittersweetness. Or else it's just an arbitrary marker of time. You know, either or. There are OODLES Facebook statuses with summaries about the 2013 year. PICK ONE. It can be a stranger, it can be yourself, it can be mine, whatever. Pick someone's (probably too long and indulgent) 2013 New Year's status and write a persona poem from one of the events. Try to make it funny and wild and exciting! (Don't worry about whether or not you're actually funny, just try to be). Test out funny voices to read it in. Make up words like Dr. Seuss. Add dramatic pauses. Fling rainbow dust across the span of the universe. Make this event seem like the coolest, most entertaining event that ever happened.

For some reason, I'm friends with like 5 million people who got engaged this year, so my newsfeed had all sorts of "2013 WAS THE YEAR I GOT ENGAGED" statuses. That served as the starting point for this persona poem, which is completely fictitious and not actually about anyone I know or anything I've experienced.

We met each other in our freshman year music theory class.

I was a beautiful angel of dominant seven chords,

He was a pretentious douchebag.

The first time we talked was at a party.

You know, one of the ones your first week of college,

Where nobody has ever had alcohol before,

So everyone is puking in everyone else’s faces?

Mmm yeah. Romance.

Love smells like partially digested pizza from Little Caesar’s.

Everyone is a little different when drunk,

But at the time I thought that everyone was the same kind of drunk: freaking annoying.

I went to the party to pick up my roommate who was passed out on a thrift store love seat.

As I woke her up and let her lean on my shoulder, ready for the long trek back to our dorm room, she vomited all over my sweatshirt. The sweatshirt I didn’t even like. The sweatshirt I wore specifically because I knew she would vomit on it.

What a sweet girl.

Like I said, nothing smells like love like vomit does, which I guess is why he came over to help me take her back to our room.

Everyone is a little different when drunk.

He was the type that rambled about Wagner, Foucault, and Freud.

All the way back to my dorm room where we dropped my roommate off.

All the way to the lounge where I had been doing my homework.

All the way to 2:00 when he finally fell asleep and I could finish my music theory homework in peace.

He was the most pathetic 18 year old drunk philosopher I had ever met, and that made me love him.

I realized that I had been spending too much time searching for a love that smelled like roses and chocolate.

A love too sweet to be of any substance.

And here I had love in the form of an inebriated 18 year old misquoting Europeans into a puddle of his own bile.

This love was gross. It smelled bad. It was too human.

But it stuck.

The first time we kissed was after figuring out how to spell Neapolitan 6^th chords.

He had mellowed to the point that he stopped trying to show off his smarts around me.

He wasn’t as pretentious as he once was. But he was 5 million times more awkward.

When we kissed our teeth knocked.

Our love smelled like the gross fake Chinese food we had just eaten in the cafeteria.

When he asked me to marry him it was cold, grey, pouring rain, and muddy.

The forecast had been for 75 degree sunny weather, my favorite.

He had intended to have a bunch of people come and sing some stupid pop song from the radio,

But everyone was sick with the swine flu or something.

It was just me and him and the rain and the homeless guy passed out on the park bench.

“You’d better have a good reason for making me come outside in this, idiot,” I shivered.

As he got down on one knee he slipped in the mud and the ring he had been saving up for for months flew out of his hands into a puddle.

Embarrassed, my vomit- smelling, teeth-knocking, Foucault-quoting idiot sat in the mud, covered head to toe, sitting cross-legged. He smiled nervously.

I went and picked the ring out of the polluted water and sat down next to him.

“Yes.”