Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
—Kurt Vonnegut
all of this should be here, now.
and i should be here now, too.
but i’m away a lot of the time.
the sign has been turned and pinned to the door,
“sorry folks, out to lunch, indefinitely.”
That’s not quite the news others would be looking to hear.
and to be honest, I wouldn’t really be bothered unless
there were more people in this world than just I.
but that is not the case, not in the least.
I sit here and sit amongst everyone else who is
some distance from me
but is actually right at the tips of my fingers at the same time
and i look back and wonder and wish that I wasn’t
quite in this reality. but another. or another.
and that is why nothing changes. And that is why
this does not matter, to me, that is.
I do nothing but dream,
dream of better days,
better times,
better lives,
but i don’t do much in the way of changing them.
I just sit, and hope
that someone will come along and change it all for me.
wouldn’t that be nice?
Forgetting existence with you
Surely, this couldn’t last forever.
The world is imperfect
after all. But,
when I open my eyes for the first time in the morn,
new to all that I see,
as an infant from the womb,
and your delicate gaze greets my own,
i’d ask your forgiveness for my thinking
that we were the last two people in the world,
and that I am disheartened when I hear the call
of some friend off in another room that let’s me know
that we’re together
but seldom alone.
I open my eyes in the morn
as if I am removing a pair of man hole covers
from the street above,
letting the light pierce through the darkness
into the depths of runoff from the past storm.
my cellphone vibrates violently
“Look at me, you bastard” it sneers
as it screams three times before it ends,
as if it were the tuning fork of satan.
I open each message with disdain,
and respond always with a hint of anger
to my friends, who have done nothing wrong.
(Source: vampire-renee, via strangersinastrangeland)
taking the sun away
Reaching towards the sky late in the day,
as that’s the only time I’m able to reach it
(i’m far too lazy to awake early in the morn)
I stand on the tips of my toes
and jump like a taunted schoolboy at recess
trying to retrieve his golden hat from the bullies.
It takes a few tries.
I stumble down to the Earth once or twice,
scraping my knees on the dirt.
I almost decide to head back inside
to put my head down on the desk
and pretend the lights are off,
but I do get it
eventually.
After one leap that was particularly high
I stretch upward with every tendon and bone
and grasp the sun,
a glowing baseball,
or a smoldering wad of crushed up drafts
of essays for history class.
It doesn’t feel like I thought it would.
My hands don’t burn, or even get warm,
they just glow. And everyone around me
has already packed up their pens and books
into their backpacks,
and headed home for the evening
where they settle down in their beds,
happy that the sun has set just in time for their dreams.
it’s simple
as the light from the sun.
as the dew on the grass.
as the call of the blue bird.
as the silence of the gentle rain on the pond.
as my tired eyes
can’t quite see what is happening right before them,
but they try,
they don’t know
it’s simple.
What had Happened
It’s funny now how you can so easily erase me
from the edges of your life,
in the sense that it also is funny that there are a few survivors
after a bus collides with a guardrail on the interstate.
But that’s a different story entirely,
the newspapers will be up in arms for weeks about that,
but not so much about what has happened here,
between us,
the real news;
The News that has made headlines over and over again in my head
every time I find myself wondering how you could be smiling
in all these pictures I scroll through
as I politely talk to you in my thoughts,
holding eye contact as mother had taught me
and listening to everything I think you would have to say.
It’s only funny to me, now, as I look at you
smiling, in old photographs
taken after what had happened to us
that your expression doesn’t change,
even as we discuss
the matters at hand.
