Poetry

Burn out (and other states of being)

I.

I feel like roadkill

Something made flat and stagnant,

guts picked clean,

trapped in transit

Formless flesh

that used to be an animal

II.

Dead of night. 11:13PM.

Typhoon of traffic

slowed to a trickle,

blistering bitumen,

turned cool as glass

She—

Leo moon,

Sagittarius sun,

Capricorn rising—

tip toes on too-worn

converse, toward

my final

unresting place.

 

She takes kitchen gloves from

her tote, delicately

pries and peels me,

pets me and seals me,

in a ziplock bag

to take me home.

​

There,  I am submerged,

in turns, in a mixing bowl,

with a slurry of rubbing

alcohol, water and

anti flea & tick shampoo.

 

On a plant-cluttered balcony,

she dries me, takes the time

to check my fur, identify me,

sews my fettered flesh into

a coin purse,

to sell on her Etsy.

 

I am strange now,

macabre and off putting,

something else entirely.

But I’m valued,

check the heart count,

tens of people want to buy me.

​

​

My Own Personal Pompeii

What you have to understand is:

They didn’t know.

They didn’t even have a word for it.

 

The term volcano wasn’t invented until the 1600s.

To the people of Pompeii, it was just a mountain.

 

It had been there all their lives, a fixed point,

looming in the distance and immutable in its enormity,

its nature. 

 

’Til the tremors started, & the sky was choked with ash,

& red-eyed, chests heaving, the Romans discovered far too late:

the fiery river of Tartarus made real in their own backyards.

 

Perhaps they thought it divine punishment? Damnation

delivered Express by impatient Gods— A reflection of

human nature. Perhaps, face down on granite floors,

pleading, praying, they thought

why me?

 

As if this had never happened, as if they were

the first. When really, it was always inevitable,

boiling under the surface of unshakeable old Vesuvius.

 

That day the Romans learned, you need not

know the name of the thing, for it to burn you.

​

​

The Unreliable Narrator

I think about the tortured artist a lot.

The idea of turning pain into art

taking sorrows, ugly feelings

moulding them like dirty, wet clay

‘til they form a shape that means something. 

I wonder if it becomes cyclical too.

 

Artists, writers, tend to exaggerate

You can’t simply translate thoughts to page—- 

no one would read it.

So you add colour. You add a soundtrack.

Place a teardrop on a page, a bruise on the mind's eye.

 

It starts to blur together after a while.

 

You’re writing epithets for your father in the notes app. 

Memories turn to sprawling hyperbole.

‘Oh that’s a good one’, you think.

Is that what it is? Is that what it was?

 

You write the words. You make the art. You add the colour. 

You sit on the floor of your shower when you’re done

and wait for the feeling of catharsis that once came so easily. 

 

You think about the tortured artist and wonder if it’s cyclical.