oh no writing

in which the author writes bad prose

[sexhaver]

shopping list

eggs

butter

listening to shoegaze over laptop speakers at 1am after a few drinks and realizing how cripplingly alone you are in the universe for a split second before the feeling fades and you’re left with the faint afterimage of it burned into your consciousness like closing your eyes after staring at the sun

milk

driving in rain so light that the lowest wiper setting is too frequent and everything is coated in a fine mist and you see how long you can go without clearing it off the windshield

looking up at a city skyline and wondering what would happen if your current field of view was projected backwards through time to the mind of a caveman

Chips Ahoy (not the store brand stuff, they don’t get the texture right)

trying to remember the sound of their voice and the smell of their shampoo and the way they laughed and not being able to and not quite crying but coming close enough to make your friends ask what’s wrong, you don’t look so good, to which you reply that you’ve just been tired lately

a sense of purpose

waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat for no particular reason with the lingering taste of a nightmare hovering over everything

contemplating suicide in the abstract instead of the concrete, much like how astronomers contemplate the heat death of the universe

it’s middle school and you begin to figure out that laughing at people’s jokes and always being funny and irreverent gets you more friends than being yourself so you put on a mask in public and only take it off in the privacy of your own room

it’s high school and you’ve refined your mask from a crude approximation of a person into a fully fledged personality complete with idiosyncrasies and nervous tics and on the rare occasions it comes off it seems to stick to your face a little bit but you think nothing of it because you have friends now

it’s college and your mask is your face now, the only one your friends have ever known, and you can never take it off or even admit it exists because there’s nothing under it but a crying middle-schooler and sometimes you try opening up and tearing it off and it takes patches of skin and hair with it and you try to put it back on as quickly as possible so none of your friends see you like that and hate you like you know they would if they could see you

a gun

[bedofproses]

You can only cower behind a shield for so long before it becomes a mask. You can only cower behind a mask for so long before it becomes you. Find a new shield. How long have you been doing this? How many layers of obsolete identities cover your heart? How many layers of bark cover the acorn a tree once was? How long have you been you?

[bedofproses]

Voyager 1

We stare at the stars instead of talking,

but neither of us notices the difference.

Every piece of hay we are sitting on was once alive,

and the dirt was once plants and animals

(or maybe it was rocks - third grade was so long ago,

and my memory is fading).

Voyager 2

stars are made of carbon, and i know this because

the light leaving you

takes eight and a half minutes to reach me

[bedofproses]

I have been tired for the last nine years and sorry for longer. You say it’s all right but I still see you look both ways before crossing the street, and I know it won’t be okay until I’m five again and listening to my mom explain that dogs do go to heaven. “Sorry” means you’ll never do it again, and my apologies hang suspended in midair like unopened Hallmark cards for government holidays.

[bedofproses]

Polarity

A tree, falling in the forest,

making as much sound as possible:

“Look at me! I am here!

I am falling!”

The bluebirds turn their heads in shame.

An emperor with no clothes on

parading through the streets,

acutely aware of his nudity

and even more aware

of the knives being thrust in his back.

The crowd is deafening.

[bedofproses]

Parable of the Prodigal Son

The sun descends,

a son dissents,

and neither of their parents are the wiser.

The night sky watches like the family

dog, like the plant on your windowsill you forgot to water:

you change in front of it because it doesn’t matter.

Dawn:

sun, ascending;

son, assenting.

[bedofproses]

My body is a temple:

stone, hollow, usually empty,

used more for parking than for worship.

Here is where some teenagers spray-painted me

on a dare; here is where the preacher stands

with his acoustic guitar, desperately trying to reach the souls

of kids more concerned with what happens after school

than what happens after life.

The organs are crumbling to pieces, their delicate innards

smashed or stolen, their respective thieves long gone

(if they ever existed in the first place – after all,

those things are delicate).

[bedofproses]

Fuck You, Dad

Icarus, carefully

slathering on sunscreen

as his father’s cries fade

and grow

and fade

and

stop.

[bedofproses]

Daytime TV writes a list:

here is what you will never be;

these are the depths you will never sink to;

these are the heights you will never reach;

here is what you could be, for the low,

low price of $19.99

(plus shipping and handling).

It never gets around to what you are –

but then again,

stating the obvious

is just rude.

[bedofproses]

How to Act Better

Bury yourself. Faults are not photons; measurement isn't change and self-obsession is not originality. Bury yourself. Hunt down your pulse and lace it with a steady IV drip of platitudes: "are you all right?", "I'm worried about you." Choose your costume carefully. Bury yourself. Cling to her; freeze; ascend to martyrdom as the Titanic flashes S.O.S. Morse code blinks at the iceberg and cameras roll and the ocean is a pool and the night sky is a green screen and there is enough room on the door for both of you. Bury yourself. Let your tombstone become your face.

[bedofproses]

scientists tell us that all water

is old water,

that there is no room for originality,

that everything is recycled.

the anguish of Achilles bleeding out

face-down in the Trojan dirt

mingles with that of a stockbroker caught

in the ebb and flow of the markets,

and what I am trying to say is that the tears

navigating south through the canyons on your face

may have once wet the cheeks

of Alexander the Great

for the same reason.

[bedofproses]

maybe someday, long ago,

someone was crying the same water as you

for the same reason.

[bedofproses]

i want to punch a wall until my knuckles shatter

and my tendons snap like ships let loose from their moorings

and hand is worn down to a ruined sack of shrapnel

and when the pain becomes unbearable and the end of my arm is a ball of fiery agony, maybe then

my body will hate me as much as i do

[bedofproses]

our love was like an ice sculpture

artificial and beautiful in the sunlight

even as that which made it beautiful destroyed it