One Week, Three Poems

For my spoken word class. Credit to Professor Herrera for throwing us out into the deep end early and often.

Fuck to Feel Alive

I’m lost surfing through the tidal waves of the day to day, the week to week, the end all be all do-what you can never enough existence that we try to call “Living”
It’s as bleak and as bright as ever, like a cascading orange burst adjacent to our perceptions.

As I feel the razor slice through the layers of my life I’m desperate to recall anything, anyone, anywhere that makes me feel like I’m something meaningful, someone divine, somewhere spiritual.
Instead the blood begins to seep out like droplets of a past I never had, a present I loathe, and a future that’s as fated as it is damned.

I try to tap into the glowing arms of nostalgia, but all I can find are girls with paper thin personalities, wafer thin bodies, and a shocking sincerity towards submission.
All I want to believe in now is the girls who taste like sin

Every word she says is lathered in seduction, so confident in her belief that every step has a purpose, every word a meaning, every gesture a sign.

I can still picture her in the hazy distance like sepia-toned Perfection
Did she break out of the chains of her expectations or is she still struggling, grasping, holding onto the arcane notion that her place is to kneel just a little lower at the feet of her newest escape?

We want to feel pain because we live painless lives
We make love to feel loved
We fuck to feel alive
The bleeding has stopped, but I still enjoy the scars.

Nostalgia

My mind works overtime every night, throwing out ideas and promises and thoughts and musings too often to control them. I feel as if at any moment I could float away into the clouds, either because I’m that worthless or that important. I thought I’d think about one thing while drifting off but instead my mind has veered like a runaway train between sanity and fulfillment. Mostly though, I think about the past, about nostalgia, about the way it was.

Objectively, I know that my four months in Ireland were good but not as good as the memories suggest. Laughing with Dave, Kevin, and Robin over Dave’s solemn insistence that he was more likely to use his penis as a comic prop than for sex. Trying to explain to many a drinker that Bush wasn’t evil, just very very incompetent. Getting drunk because of the moment, instead of in spite of it. Girls with something more to say than agreement and a nod. We’re all too busy popping pills and heading towards a vague sense That Everything is Wrong but It’s Not My Fault.

Maybe the Irish have it figured out. Or maybe nostalgia has sunk into me the way it did to Don Draper. All I know is that there is that there, life was worth chasing. Here, Life is too new to truly judge, but at least I’ve got my running shoes on.

Another election, Another Audition


Another election, another audition
I’m overwhelmed by the carefully calculated,
Audience approved, mandatory message masturbation
Promoting another pointless Celebration
Of our broken down and bastardized
Assembly line, Pre-packaged Bullshit
by the best at K Street

There’s the battle damaged, war ready
GI Joe of a man
More apt to punch Cobra Commander
Than contain the careers of combat
Where men hold their rifles high,
But Hang their heads low,
As they stand united in prayer
That the Gambler didn’t gamble
Their lives away

Then there’s that empty suit of a man
Balls not included
More content to hurl words like “Hope”
“Change” and “Believe” in the air like
potpourri for the masses
Than challenge the charity of his contributors
300,000 from Stanley, 400,000 from Chase, 650,000 from Morgan
9 million from Wall Street
The numbers speak for those who cannot

This talk of
New Frontiers, New Deals, Contracts, Promises,
Revolutions, Revelations, and Change
Have been thrown around longer than our faith in them
The only thing new about Obama is the
Color of his skin, not the Content of his speeches
And if you think “Yes, We Can” then all I can ask
Is if it’s better than the magic act of the disappearing
Straight Talk Express

Myth of the Maverick
Myth of the Message
What’s the difference?