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The delusion of my abstraction

Hollow sound

Knock on wood

I am lost and found

I have a headache

In the left side of my head

A dull ache

And I am bereft of all I have claimed to have said

Murder

Murder me

I cannot weep

Like I think

I wilt and brown

And the sun shines down

Burying me in the light

Suffocating

All I knew

Was wrong.

All my life I waded to meat someone of my own species to stumble blindly upon the thicket of a tarantula's nest was never my intention.  The desire to live in his house overwhelmed my sense of propriety and drove my nonsense south.  I fell in love with his best friend or so i claimed, manipulative girl i aim to be.  Now the shy why of the polisce wasiting for my lines cocked out and i aim timid now.  This time i will wait for him to come to me.  Hold tight and pliant, Daddy finally revealing himself, or at least this time i realize creystalize and dknow what i knew all along.  Daddy's mine.

As an editor for my school's literary magazine, I get exposed to writing of every caliber and I'm still surprised by the amount of awful poems I have to read each week when it comes time to critique (tear apart).  Every new batch of works is a not-so-cleverly wrapped pair of sweatpants on christmas morning and I'm a six year old who has worked exceptionally hard to be good that year.  One would think that by now I would have an impenetrable shell, shielding me from the effects of deplorable poems and that I could just slay them with the almighty red pen of justice and move on.  But I haven't.  It's genuinely bad for the soul to read a rotten poem and I need a doctor.

I'd have to say the most common offense is the belief that the first draft is the right one.  Many of these poems reek of infancy and with that comes a monsoon of other issues.  These include but are not limited to: a mystery fetish, clunky and awkward rhymes, and a sickening affection for nature similes.  

They never seem to have a good ending either.

Traces of You

If I weren’t so old I would know better

But I am without a sweater in all this cold weather

The flies buzz around this lit cigarette

Remarking nice ashes nice ashes my friend

I wait for the train that never comes

Waiting for someone to touch me again

Make me feel alright again

The zeppelin in the sky is dropping little messages tied to balloons,

One pops and lands at my feet it states,

“kill yourself before you get too old”

I wonder how I would do it

Make ribbons run over my wrists

Or fall asleep with fifty pills in my guts

Telling me why again have I come to this despair?

The ashes make faces at me

Smiling

I grab a torch and explore the tunnel

It is long and deep and no one comes down here

I find a photograph of my mother

Smiling

Everyone is smiling but I can’t find my teeth beneath all the fleshy blobs of my cheeks

I can’t smile anymore

I taste the lime coated with sugar

And wonder if in death it will taste as sweet

But all the ice cubes are melting between the weeds

And the drinks are never as strong as I need

The mother came to me once and could change shape

Into all different types of animals

Smiling

If only I could change shape

I would become a wolf and run wild into the night

Leave all this behind me and be free

But I can’t so I sit still

Trying to smile

Waiting for the train that has yet to come

This isn’t my first time.  The library is deteriorated and the books are spineless.  The doctor moves like a lizard and his face is encrusted in his glasses.  “Don’t you think that they love you?”  He asks me.  “My family, no, they simply don’t understand me.”

After all the complaints I lodge against them, they stand by me, even after I stole my grandmother’s car and drove it to the cities just to prove to her that I could.  Now, I want to prove to them that I don’t need medication but I have been court ordered, a Chapter 51 they call it, to take the medication.  I have no choice, I am a prisoner. 

As I write this my cigarette is mushy from my mouth and it droops between my teeth.  This is how I like to write, with a cigarette dangling, the smoke watering my eyes.  This is how I cry, otherwise I can’t.  Not anymore, not since the nightmares.  I once saw a giant black spider crawling along the ceiling in my bedroom at my grandmother’s house.  It was crawling out of my room but still it startled me as it disappeared behind the door. I lived with my grandparents for a summer before I stole their car and drove to the cities. I worked at Dairy Queen making milkshakes and blizzards, cleaning the bathrooms at the end of my shift.  My grandmother would let me take her car or sometimes she would pick me up.  That day that I stole her car, I was feeling anxious.  I wanted to do something anything.  I went to see the movie, ‘The Avatar’ before work.  During the movie these visceral creatures jumped among the seats and told me I was the Avatar, told me I had to find myself, perhaps even save the world. 

I was looking for any excuse, so I left the movie early, got into the car and decided to head to the cities.  I got lost on the wrong exit and had to ask for directions.  I turned around and headed back in the opposite direction.  The car phone rang, it was my grandmother.  I ignored it.  Once I got to Dinkytown, in Minneapolis, I parked the car and hid the keys in the windshield.  Then I walked around and hid in a bathroom and began taking No Doz.  One more pill should do it, and then another.  I wanted to purge all the food from my body and become lighter than air.  I started drinking water to make sure I wouldn’t become dehydrated.  Then I left and was walking past McDonald’s when my aunt drove by.  She begged me to get in the car but I refused.  I walked away from her to a little playground in the area and she had called the cops.  Two squad cars rolled up and next thing I remember is running.  Six police officers chased me down and threatened to shoot me.  I hid behind a building scared shitless and they pulled me out and sat on my back.  I screamed, “My grandfather raped me.”  They didn’t care.  It wasn’t the truth either, but I had had visions of being raped as a child and was hoping for sympathy, for some shred of understanding to explain why I am the way I am. 

When I was little, my hymen broke.  No one knew why.  I began to obsess about it now that I am older.  I thought I was raped.  I had nightmares where men would chase me and hold me down.  After all of these years it is strange that I start to think about it.  It never bothered me before but now I don’t know.

“Do I love my family?”  I know you’re thinking it.  Of course, with all my soul, but I swear they don’t understand me.  I swear no one does.  This is the cross I bear like Jesus, the founder of America.  Today, after my doctor’s appointment we went to McDonald’s and each had a milkshake, me and my nurse, Karri.  There is nothing more American than McDonald’s; the chain upon chain franchise of love that welcomes all of God’s children to feast on Angus burgers and fries.

I talked to my social worker, Brenda Huhn, today and I get to go home in two days.  My mother sounds surprised but she’ll tell my grandparents to come and get me.  I don’t remember the first time I was in a psych ward; I remember the third time, after I tried to commit suicide.  I told everyone I had fallen, but the truth was that I fell intentionally from a twelve foot wall on the midway.  I had been running from demons.  I thought the demon would steal away my light and I would die spiritually.  Suicide is physical death.  I ran into the street and tried to get hit by a car but that didn’t work.  So, I walked up the wall until I came to the right spot and had the right guts to drop.  I turned around, facing a large Menards parking lot, and spread my arms out then I stepped backwards and fell.  I struck my tailbone first then my head hit the pavement and crushed in three places.  I blacked out completely.  There was a man standing over me, holding out a water bottle.  He had called the ambulance.  I wasn’t wearing shoes or a bra.  I was in my Dairy Queen uniform with black stretch pants.  This is the psych ward I remember, in Saint Paul, it was called Regions. 

You came to me as a wolf and laid down your head on my stomach

I felt you sigh about me

That night you held me in your arms

So tight that my knuckles turned white in your hands

Sing me a lullaby baby

Make me feel at home

I miss you now maybe badly

But feel still that I’m alone

The shadows on my walls turn grey in bitter regret

That I never met you in person

That I never can seem to forget

All the nights in sleepless chatter

I told you all my secrets

And now without you to hold me

I sleep in my own caress

But I miss you

Terribly

Like a foot without a shoe

I don’t need you but wearing you around keeps me tender

Protects me from the ground

Sores in place of kisses

Blisters ripe from stones

I wander the streets without you

Trying to find my way home.

The warm taste of apple teases my tongue and I turn around to the refrigerator to seize one from the crisper.  I open the drawer and select a nice sized rounded apple, with no green showing.  I pull out the cutting board from the cupboard beneath the counter and reach over the sink to the cutting board to grab a steak knife.  I cut the apple in half first then gently remove the core in curves from each piece.  The bite I take is still cold to my teeth and I am careful to let it warm in my mouth before swallowing.  My mother comes into the kitchen.  Her hair is teased and standing straight up in a beehive helmet on her head.  The color is radically stained red and burns like her blue eyes.  She tans every day and her skin is dark, against the pastel pink sweater she is wearing.  Suddenly, I do not want to eat the whole apple, I will let the other pieces brown in a plastic baggie on the counter and devour them later when no one is watching.

“You haven’t finished drying the dishes, you know.”  My mother arches her left eyebrow at me and I retrieve the towel and begin wiping. 

Kiki comes upstairs dressed in fake plastic black leather and chaps.  The basement door is in front of the backdoor, mirroring it.  The front door leads out to an enclosed porch where everyone enters and leaves.  The basement walls are lined in red, orange and brown carpeting reminding me flames like the opening of hell.  The door is made of cheap blond wood.  I often sit in the darkness with the door closed and on the third step I pull away a piece of the carpet there in the wall that has no backing and peer into the cellar which apart from the living room area of the basement; I seek to see something move in the darkness.  Sometimes a queer feeling overcomes me in my chest, like when I miss a step and fall downward.  I touch my nipples and they are hard and I feel a pleasure in the sensation.  I fear it is Satan.  I do not want Satan to tempt me so I rock back and forth telling Satan to leave me alone, but I continue to sit in the dark of that step and seek for that feeling even if it means I might go to hell someday. 

I am thinking of this when Kiki asks me, “Whatcha eatin’ child?”  Kiki’s hair is long and permed and shares part of her body in a great mane.  I smell her hairspray.  She reaches for the plastic bag of apple slices.  I hand over the baggie of my treasure and offer her a slice.  She accepts it and begins to eat her first piece.  Kiki licks her fingers, and my mother smokes a cigarette, the ashes forming a great burning cone on the end.  “Ready for another round?”  My mother asks.  Kiki moans and nods yes.  She hands me back the bag of apples and the two disappear into the basement.  They will go into a room I am not allowed to see, one that my mother keeps locked from me.

My mother is a beautician.  Many ladies come to our house and have their hair done at our kitchen table while I sit beneath and listen.  My mother takes great pride in her ability to make them happy and offers them desserts and cigarettes and they tip her well.  She hides the money under the doily above the television set in the living room, which is adjacent to our kitchen.  She told me she has a secret bank account for tips, one that my father doesn’t know about, “Just in case,” she says.  I love my mother.  I love her dearly.  No one in our neighborhood knows about the secret room.  My mother tells me not to tell anyone, that it is our family’s secret.  I want to tell the kids at school about Kiki because I am proud of her but I know that no one would believe me and it would get me into trouble.  I pretend Kiki is my sister.  She and I play Barbies together.  Sometimes we spend all day dressing the dolls and preparing the room for the prom.  I like to make the dolls ‘make-out’.  Kiki just laughs and tells me I’m too young to know about ‘making out’.  I love Kiki too.  I hope she won’t go away like the last girl my mother brought to the basement.

Her name was Martha and she wore sequined dresses of red, pink, and silver.  Martha didn’t like me.  She told me I was a stinker and that I had a sour attitude.  She would always make demands on me.  ‘Bring me my nail polish and paint my toes’ she would say.  I didn’t like her or her toes. 

Roses are red,

violets are blue.

Dear Thomas Yorke,

i want 2 bang u.

It starts to rain outside and I go to my room.  I try to read a book but I’m distracted by the music coming up through the vents from downstairs.  I wonder what they are doing down there, and I desperately want to go and look.  I am lonely and feeling left out.  I go into the kitchen and steal one of my mother’s cigarettes.  I grab the lighter and light the tip bringing the filter to my mouth.  I pretend to be my mother and cross my arms and strut my hips.  I feel awkward but powerful.  The cigarette gets limp and wet in my mouth as I try to inhale like my mother.  I inhale too much and cough.  I wonder when my father will come home.  He’s often gone touring for long periods.  I wonder what he will bring this time.  Last time he came home, I waited on the rug by the back door for him all day long in anticipation.  He brought me a blanket.  It was soft and white with little balloons and stars on it.  I put out the cigarette and go to my room to retrieve the blanket.  I wrap myself in it and fall asleep watching TV on the couch.

In the basement she enters the further room with the locked door and shuts it carefully behind her. On the walls there is draped black velvet as a background and lights are stationed against the room.   She grabs the camera from on top of the silk stand and begins taking pictures of Kiki.  Kiki straddles the tiny horse rider that she bought for her daughter.  “Reminisce with me darling” She says.  The click of the camera fills the room and the laughter between the two women billows up.  She turns to the stereo and turns on a heavy synth of discrete sexuality.  She intends to sell these pictures through her magazine.  She is the founder of a lesbian pinup girl outfit that entices clit across the country.  She places down the camera on the silk pedestal and pauses to drink a glass of water.  These will be featured in the next issue.  Kiki will be the centerfold.  Kiki spreads her legs in a wide ‘V’ exposing herself in the open seat of the chaps, “A little pink” she claims, “for all my thirsty fans.” 

The next day is Monday and I have to go to school.  When I arrive we start with several worksheets that we pick up at the front of the class.  Today, our worksheets are about Thomas Jefferson and how he wrote the constitution.  I sit at my desk and begin filling in the missing words.  My desk partner is Adam.  His clothes are worn out and he’s dirty.  My clothes are neat and I take a lot of time in the morning to make sure that they are just right, just like my mother.  My hair is short too but its shoulder length so I simply wear it down.  Adam keeps distracting me from my worksheet.  I like that he distracts me but I need to keep my focus so I take my pencil and stab him in the thigh.  He doesn’t say anything, he just laughs.  The lead breaks off and I go to the front of the room to sharpen my pencil.  He doesn’t tell the teacher and I respect him for it.

At recess, I walk around the perimeter of the playground with the wind blowing against me, and I start to sing.  I sing to the wind in unutterable words with all my might.  I love the wind.  The playground is large, first there is blacktop, with foursquare and basketball courts.  To the left, there are the swings with wood chips beneath them.  To the right of the swings there are three large pine trees, shaved up to the tops, I call them the three wise ones.  To the right of the three wise ones are the grass yard, it is as large as a football field or so it feels.  There is a fence outlining the entire yard and to the left trees from the park overhang it.  There’s a fenced in area with heating and cooling machines near the school building and next to that there is a small picnic area with a table.  I am walking along the fence at the right under the trees.   

There are these strange girls who hang around the picnic area.  Sometimes, I probe into them and question them.  They tell me they will give me a screaming lesson.  I scream with them for a while but they tease me and tell me I’m not doing it right.  Then they go back to playing Sailor Moon, I don’t watch that TV show, I watch Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I don’t feel welcome to their game, they already have all the characters picked out so I drift away and decide to go and visit the three wise ones.  They form a triangle of dirt on the yard.  It’s large enough to fit twenty kids but I am the only one sitting on the exposed knotted root, my feet making mandalas in the dust.  I tell the wise ones about the screaming lesson.  I tell the wise ones I miss Kiki and that I have no friends.  I sit there until the bell rings and then I go and stand in line with the other kids.

At lunch I work in the library sorting books with Brady and Danielle.  Danielle has a crush on Brady and wants him to be her boyfriend.  Someone has returned the Guinness book of World Records, and I look through it at all the baffling accomplishments of the human race.  I will never break a world record but I want to now.  I think about the man with the longest fingernails and wonder if I could beat him.  My mother always cuts my nails too short until they hurt, so I chew them down now.  She would never let me grow them that long. 

It starts to rain outside and I go to my room.  I try to read a book but I’m distracted by the music coming up through the vents from downstairs.  I wonder what they are doing down there, and I desperately want to go and look.  I am lonely and feeling left out.  I go into the kitchen and steal one of my mother’s cigarettes.  I grab the lighter and light the tip bringing the filter to my mouth.  I pretend to be my mother and cross my arms and strut my hips.  I feel awkward but powerful.  The cigarette gets limp and wet in my mouth as I try to inhale like my mother.  I inhale too much and cough.  I wonder when my father will come home.  He’s often gone touring for long periods.  I wonder what he will bring this time.  Last time he came home, I waited on the rug by the back door for him all day long in anticipation.  He brought me a blanket.  It was soft and white with little balloons and stars on it.  I put out the cigarette and go to my room to retrieve the blanket.  I wrap myself in it and fall asleep watching TV on the couch.

In the basement she enters the further room with the locked door and shuts it carefully behind her. On the walls there is draped black velvet as a background and lights are stationed against the room.   She grabs the camera from on top of the silk stand and begins taking pictures of Kiki.  Kiki straddles the tiny horse rider that she bought for her daughter.  “Reminisce with me darling” She says.  The click of the camera fills the room and the laughter between the two women billows up.  She turns to the stereo and turns on a heavy synth of discrete sexuality.  She intends to sell these pictures through her magazine.  She is the founder of a lesbian pinup girl outfit that entices clit across the country.  She places down the camera on the silk pedestal and pauses to drink a glass of water.  These will be featured in the next issue.  Kiki will be the centerfold.  Kiki spreads her legs in a wide ‘V’ exposing herself in the open seat of the chaps, “A little pink” she claims, “for all my thirsty fans.” 

The next day is Monday and I have to go to school.  When I arrive we start with several worksheets that we pick up at the front of the class.  Today, our worksheets are about Thomas Jefferson and how he wrote the constitution.  I sit at my desk and begin filling in the missing words.  My desk partner is Adam.  His clothes are worn out and he’s dirty.  My clothes are neat and I take a lot of time in the morning to make sure that they are just right, just like my mother.  My hair is short too but its shoulder length so I simply wear it down.  Adam keeps distracting me from my worksheet.  I like that he distracts me but I need to keep my focus so I take my pencil and stab him in the thigh.  He doesn’t say anything, he just laughs.  The lead breaks off and I go to the front of the room to sharpen my pencil.  He doesn’t tell the teacher and I respect him for it.

At recess, I walk around the perimeter of the playground with the wind blowing against me, and I start to sing.  I sing to the wind in unutterable words with all my might.  I love the wind.  The playground is large, first there is blacktop, with foursquare and basketball courts.  To the left, there are the swings with wood chips beneath them.  To the right of the swings there are three large pine trees, shaved up to the tops, I call them the three wise ones.  To the right of the three wise ones are the grass yard, it is as large as a football field or so it feels.  There is a fence outlining the entire yard and to the left trees from the park overhang it.  There’s a fenced in area with heating and cooling machines near the school building and next to that there is a small picnic area with a table.  I am walking along the fence at the right under the trees.   

There are these strange girls who hang around the picnic area.  Sometimes, I probe into them and question them.  They tell me they will give me a screaming lesson.  I scream with them for a while but they tease me and tell me I’m not doing it right.  Then they go back to playing Sailor Moon, I don’t watch that TV show, I watch Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I don’t feel welcome to their game, they already have all the characters picked out so I drift away and decide to go and visit the three wise ones.  They form a triangle of dirt on the yard.  It’s large enough to fit twenty kids but I am the only one sitting on the exposed knotted root, my feet making mandalas in the dust.  I tell the wise ones about the screaming lesson.  I tell the wise ones I miss Kiki and that I have no friends.  I sit there until the bell rings and then I go and stand in line with the other kids.

At lunch I work in the library sorting books with Brady and Danielle.  Danielle has a crush on Brady and wants him to be her boyfriend.  Someone has returned the Guinness book of World Records, and I look through it at all the baffling accomplishments of the human race.  I will never break a world record but I want to now.  I think about the man with the longest fingernails and wonder if I could beat him.  My mother always cuts my nails too short until they hurt, so I chew them down now.  She would never let me grow them that long. 

Sun on the Horizon

by PrttyBrd

The looming pressure that overwhelms your senses as the bell within you increases and rings as it sounds in all of us that disturbs the silence.

There is no absolute silence.

There is always that tone like an endless finger tracing the lip of a glass.

I feel it most when it waits for me on the toilet, trying to release a shit.

Take this cadaver slice open the stomach contents like a a shark.

I have meat on my breath.

I have a bite in my bark.

Of all that happens behind closed doors like a watersodden carcass rolling in the waves of the shore,

it is not my doubt.

The odor spoils my god heartache and sours my mouth.

In all that remains, the pits have fallen out.

I am fruitless in the weeping for a savior,

for a bud. 

Mr. Lion scared shaking on the yellow brick road holds his tale in terror insecure in his manhood bulk woes.

I’m telling you vicodine works faster than courage and Viagra will keep you hard but that little sally Dorothy ain’t nobody’s used dog.

Janice loves Joey.

No longer by whim, found him in moustaches, costumes, hat brims,

            Secret little man licking sweet little limbs.

Janice loves Joey.

Sings him love’s little hymns, pick out old socks from second hand bins,

            Dress up as each other than candle stripper thin.

Janice loves Joey.

Wink the ghost air twins, winterizes her Chevy at the exchange rate drive-in,

Heading south, and north, and south back again,

                        Little little liars,

                                                Mush mush him.