Sicker than a sticker on streets like splat
Whatever the word was
Just jiggle the keys and I’ll juggle the rest
Categories
Tag: Writing
Categories
Morning Egg
It’s still early enough
And I need to get the juices flowing
My fingers and hands stay remarkable still, though I’m an anxious mess each morning
The execution is so key to the end result
The first, loud click is heard throughout my apartment.
Then the next
Before I know it, I’m looking at a short two sentences sure to start a verbal war on Twitter.
I start, “This may be an unpopular opinion and I may be suspended for it…”
Categories
Unloving Love
Today, I’m at the freehand on Ohio (19 E), feeling fortunate that I can leave
then to
somewhere to sleep the same night
then to
my need to rush the gauntlet where people (are meant to) battle to meet (but ultimately fall short of) my lofty expectations
then to:
negative ruminations behind
and a mind to be sure when this happens next time…
I’ll end the war in a loft
some place more than just “somewhere to sleep the same night”
If I wasn’t before
Well then now I am.
You can’t make me,
But I am getting out of the car
And this is the end of the road
It’s been six years and I haven’t seen that face since then.
What do I have a spare tire for? I don’t even know how to drive.
I told my friend I didn’t have friends and he agreed. I wanted to meet new people, but then I couldn’t find any good reason I’d leave my place to meet people.
Categories
The 12:20 Ride
Alecs was lucky to be able to hop into this Uber. It was under $8 on a route they’d been taking for months. At the beginning of February the price averaged as low as $6. These days, the lowest has been $13. Now, the other passenger pipes, “Why don’t you try driving for Lyft? I hear they pay well.” It donned on him: ride share apps are so communal in their design that the people (passenger and drivers) will always be on the same side–despite some of those thinly-veiled attempts to pit drivers and passengers against each other, disguised as emails explaining price differences.
Although he had a question for the other passenger, he thought it better to let the thought die in his head than ruin this ‘carpool’ that landed them together 2 days out of every week at 5:40 each morning.
“Why would you want someone to drive for the company with which you chose not to do business? For whatever reason, this Uber ride made more sense for you. In my case the decision was financial. Whatever your reasoning, you got into this car using one app and suggested the driver do the exact opposite. Perhaps this is part of your grand scheme. The more drivers leave Uber, the less drivers the company will need to pay for idling. The cheaper your Uber rides will be in four months. For about eight weeks straight. Right before the prices soar again. You know, due to lack of sufficient drivers.“
The most difficult part of Alecs’ days were sharing spaces with strangers and trying to prevent a screwed up face. Now all is covered like silent show and long gone are the days of shared rides. What was once nonsense-talk to carry on conversation, now feels like a monologue belched out on an island shared with no one. What some of us wouldn’t do to catch water-cooler talk! To speak to someone in the car and get as wrapped up in details as you both allow until the end of your trip together. How deeply we used to be wrapped up in the details!
Now I am supposed to grip your hand back
Otherwise you’ll try checking my pulse
Be alive. Stay present.
I was supposed to lean against you
but splashed Slurpee in your frozen lap and now you’re bluish
How long was I squeezing your hand?
Like a doula, you let me realize when the nerves were gone
And simply didn’t call me again.
resistance is futile.
thinking of us daily
prepared you for me
since before you’d heard
of resistance.
and still
you have wanted it.
Thanking fading sins
Doubt of consequence is seeping in.
Each one shaking with feeling, but wouldn’t say, “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.”
The wind hinting-hurling at a tempest mind says to the emptiness in waiting…
Though it was to be filled with faith—
Being whole unknown to us—wholesomeness unknown to us also, “May I wonder?”
“For sin, taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me.”
Until, in some way worthy of your grace.
Your giving of it making it so.
May I believe there is nothing more to abhor of myself if you have found something worth loving?
Or have I once again shown my brazenness?
Categories
Put Out What You’ve Set Ablaze
The scent in those leaves is yours
The heat of the tangle we share
The hit of this tango we’ve skipped
Long lost in the jungle we wait
Four limbs to be strangles in “yes”
Head light from the toggle and twish
I’ve longed to be headstrong and wrong
Five eyes to be open and melt
You’re mine from the tangle of trust
Knee-deep–
I’m yours from the break of the day
Put out what you’ve set ablaze.
Categories
Utopia Was Real
Utopia was real
At one time
It was not new
Was not unlikely
Was deserved
At one time
Till then, again
Endure this hell
Categories
Should Not Even Be A Word
What is not gradient?
What flow of time isn’t eventual memory loss?
What remembrance wasn’t each day feeling the real thing less and less and then transferring sensation into delusional perception—for the sake of not fading?
What isn’t gradient?
It should not even be a word.
What catatonic love wasn’t daily forgetting why anything was worth the efforts?
Who is born as man?
Who is born, skin already taught?
Flesh nearly ready to burst?
Ready to give up into deadly
nothing but still
Floating into air like interpretive dance and all muscles pulsing?
Who is born man?
What song isn’t transition from now until the end?
Categories
“A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst”
( This piece was recently published the Hawaii Pacific Review. That enough was reason to open it & I was more than pleasantly surprised❕💬 )
by Hosho McCreesh (from A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst) At the chalet and you’re guzzling down bombers of Farmer beer, and the occasional measure of …
A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst
Categories
Let It Not Be
The chosen ones made idols.
Statues of gold and genies right below the present, True and Living God.
Stay far from gold.
Whatever you should decide to arrive in, let it not be gold.
Too oft does gold stimulate hungry pupils readied with greedy hearts waiting to make of you a statue and symbol of meaning in their eyes.
A symbol of something foreboding. Coated completely in matte armor.
Turning shiny in the sunlight
Then back to its lusterless base.
I am the River Moldau collecting beneath crossed ankles.
I am the sideways push to get out from your path.
I am you, stained grey-air ash.
I am warmest French bread and condensation on the plate.
Me and the droplets waiting for spreadable Everything’s Better Butter.
I melt right down to sticky glaze thinking those sweet cherubs had to be consoled of me. Seeing those faces in the yearbooks past, I wonder if I’ve done my job well enough.
Old friends I’ve tormented tell me it made them stronger — made the smiles afterward longer lasting.
Over the years, these dear little snots got softer around their edges.
Posters reading “you are beautiful” and “it gets better” went up.
The board said it warmed some certain groups of students.
“Which ones?” I spat.
“Well, all of them,” they declared. Setting up undue refuge from me.
As in wartime, the sour times do not simply cancel out the daydreams. On the contrary!
They’re complementary.
I alone embedded memories in them with the tools of emotion. Pathos my only lesson plan.
My methods remain tried and true!
Those little suckers pained and stretched and waxed greater.
The biting complements the saccharine.
My old friends, they tell me, “Everything in my life comes back to my times with you. What I wouldn’t give to taste the daze again –– sour, sweet, then gone.”
Monday May 11, 2020
Categories
key click?
Key click and key click
And decline with surety this and the next also
“Could these pieces be any more hollow?”
“These aren’t writers. These are twenty-something-aged children”
So the poems and the flash fiction and the creative nonfiction are sophomoric
So I begin hating my job as an editor
This publication is small so
Perhaps this explains the mediocre writing
Perhaps this is the “At least I tried” publication
Although, each of these ‘writers’ have given a more honest try than I have lately.
At least they cared to write something.
Will I?
