C.T.D. Writing

Writing blog. All writing belongs to me unless otherwise stated.

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July 12, 2016 Charlie Leppert

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My book is finally here! If you know me in person hit me up, or check it out by searching Destinations by Charlie Leppert on Amazon!

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Hey everyone! My kickstarter is funded! Thank you so so much to everyone who donated. There are some updates up on my blog about the next few steps in publication - and more to come soon!

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Hello, everyone! Today I’d like to introduce the cover of my collection “Destinations!” You can check it out and donate here. Thank you so much to everyone who has already donated! 😊🌿

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My new book is ready to publish, but first I need your help! I need to raise a little more than $800 to actually publish the book, and I need your help to fund it! Any donations are so so appreciated, and if you can’t donate please share! I want to bring my poetry to the world, but I can’t do it alone. Also feel free to check for updates on my website any time: http://www.charlieleppertpoetry.com

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Hey, Tumblr - I need your help!

So, many of you have probably red the poetry I post to this blog once in a while, and hopefully you enjoy it. This year, I will be self-publishing a collection of poems for school, and to help raise money for college next year. I need to raise about $800 before I can publish the collection, though, and your help would be incredibly appreciated.

If you can’t donate, please, please share this post! If you’d like to read more about my collection, how to donate, or just to take a look at some of my poetry, please visit my website here: http://www.charlieleppertpoetry.com And my YouTube channel here: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsB7IMJBqtTiapoNYPO3URw

Thank you so much for your support, I am so excited to share my work!

Strength and Solidarity, Charlie

[tothelimitsofyourlonging]

Just A Phase

I still remember my Emo Phase, Remember being a Mall Goth, Straight Boy, Glam Punk, And Baby Butch, not Necessarily in that order. I still remember calling myself Lipstick, Chapstick, 100-Footer Lesbian, Could never forget my Panromantic, heterosexual, Gay Panic, tight jeans phase, My Long-Sleeves-All-Summer, Kate-Moennig-Wanna-Be, Joan-Jett-leather-pants phase. I still remember owning At least ten shades of lipstick And never being ashamed to wear them. Maybe this is my Brooding Academic Of 1950s Gay Boy Or Reclaimed Queer Slut phase. Maybe this is my Poet Phase. Maybe this person won’t be tomorrow. Maybe, even if it’s just a phase, I don’t have to pretend it doesn’t matter.

-Charlie Leppert

[ctdwriting]

Houses

We are all houses, maybe. We are all made of locked doors and hallways, rooms stretching as far as the eye can see. We invite each other in, open doors and wait for the dust to settle. There are paintings lining the walls, and we are all fumbling for the lightswitch in the dark, and some of the doors don’t have keys anymore, and some of the doors don’t need them. There are doors I don’t open, spaces where the good and the bad live, undisturbed in what they are, and I am home to them. I am a ramshackle cottage, maybe, or the rotting ruins of an empire, or a graying motel on route 303, or a thick-banistered colonial, built in the 1930’s, to house a writer. I have a fence made of kitchen doors and sundials. I have brick walls, with weak spots, where you can peek through and catch glimpses, but the center of myself is well guarded. We are houses, maybe. Or, maybe, we are desert sand lit from behind by early moonlight. Maybe we are all small trees, spry fingers stretching for sunlight they will not reach, roots sinking, gnarled, tangled, ancient, deep in wet earth, the tips of us traveling for miles. Maybe we are built out of leather or flower petals or rose quartz or iron. Maybe we are tectonic plates. Maybe we are always sliding. Maybe we are finally still. Maybe we are, or maybe we aren’t. Maybe we are all faded carpets in a forgotten room, in an empty house built for all of us, with the light falling perfectly through the windows. But, then again, maybe we are still those houses: Little, perfect houses in neat, polite rows with fences to keep the dog and his teeth inside. Maybe there are cities of us in a million different colors. So, maybe, we are houses, and winks are shutters opening for a single moment. Maybe, the centers of us are as sacred as bedrooms and churches, and when you walk my halls and feel the dust on the picture frames under your fingers, there will be things behind locked doors that make your heart break or beat faster. Maybe letting people through those doors is dangerous and frightening and, maybe, love lives in the center of us, with all those rooms full of broken and beautiful things. But, maybe, a house is still too small for all that we are. We are all a universe, maybe.

[ctdwriting]

Kissing You (and Other Extreme Sports)

Kissing you is something I’ve been looking for words for, searching under your tongue and behind your teeth for language that feels like lips on skin and hearts beating in tandem, but all that comes to mind is that if the existentialists are right and in the end, nothing actually matters and everything that happens between now and dead is just wasting time, kissing you makes that time worth wasting. But that is a fucked up thing to say, so instead I can tell you that when I am feeling far away, I can feel your tongue dragging me back to earth, and I can look for words to say that kissing you is feeling the bass punch your chest when the music is so loud you can’t hear it anymore. Kissing you is the screen door slamming and the sun beating heavy on bare skin. Kissing you is December’s sin. Kissing you is heat lightning and summer thunder rolling in on a hot north wind. Kissing you is like whispering, you keep flicking your tongue across mine like you’re telling me a secret. Kissing you is like realizing there’s a hole in the ass of the jeans you’re wearing halfway through your presentation. Kissing you is like an avalanche of heartbeats pouring into my living room and drowning out the T.V. Kissing you is deafening. Kissing you is like parallel parking perfectly. Kissing you is like setting last year’s math notes on fire. Kissing you is warm hands on cold skin, or stepping out of the cold and into personally produced summer. Kissing you is like being pushed out of an airplane and landing in the palm of someone’s hand. Kissing you is fucking terrifying, and its also fucking beautiful, and its all that I can fucking think about, and its all I see when I close my eyes. Kissing you is a full cup of tea, a blank page, and a good pen. Kissing you is route 80, an open sky, and a full tank of gas. Kissing you is the exact opposite of an existential crisis; not realizing that, one day, I am going to die, but realizing that, in the time between now and then I am going to live.

[ctdwriting]

Spin the Bottle, Reprised

Empty Blue Moon bottles remind me of your lips on my neck and the chill of suddenly understanding what want feels like when it shivers across your skin. For two days, I could not stop shaking. I was thinking of skin and teeth and tongues and doing my best not to think about it. But the more I tried to stop the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The feeling of fingertips stayed on my skin for days and I have no way of equating the way complex feels when its a word that sounds so fucking simple. When I close my eyes I can see the ridges of collar bones and the realization that empty and full don’t have to be opposite, and that empty isn’t all that you or I have to be. I want to drink you. And I hope you get to add me to the list of things you wouldn’t have done sober but would have regretted missing out on. I hope you get to taste me in every half empty bottle of Fireball. I hope you get to pretend that your fingertips are mine. And when morning came and you were pressed so close that I could hear your heartbeat, I saw for a second what might be and would could have already been and the fear set in that this could be the last time that I got to see you like this and my fingers went numb. I want to drink you. Maybe, one day, we’ll be something better than desperate lips and guilty clutching to each other’s skin, eyes heavy with wanting what we think we can’t have. I want to drink you. But all we are now is spinning.

[ctdwriting]

Sunday Morning, Sparkill, New York

Last night, I had a sex dream about you. I was wrapped in his arms, but we were sloppy-mouth, skin-on-skin in my sleep. It’s been months since I stopped confusing fascination for infatuation so I wonder why I’m finding it so hard to stop thinking about you. I guess I just don’t know when to stop.

I do not feel trusted or trustworthy, but all I really want is just to hear your secrets. I’m not naive enough to think that your sadness is beautiful, but god knows that you are, and I am drowning in my own inability to distinguish safe feelings from the ones that leave me cold-sweating in your sheets.

And when he left in the morning, and I was left without arms to hold me back from my own fantasies, I was colder than I have ever been, but avoided your skin as well as I could. And I know that cold is the only temperature you come in, but I am adjusting to the winter. I have never been so afraid of finding heat in the cold.

You invited me in but I waited on the threshold, not sure I’d be able to leave once I entered. When I finally found myself on your floor, I was playing off-key Noah and the Whale on your ukulele and that song makes me think about kissing you. A lot of things make me think about kissing you. I’m sorry, I still think about kissing you.

When it was time for me to go, you left the room before I could open the front door. I said goodbye to your empty living room, and your cat. I went home, trying not to wonder if you were just tired or you didn’t like me, or you liked me too much and it made you nervous, because that didn’t really matter. I went home, and started trying to forget.

[ctdwriting]

Spin the Bottle

The first and the last time I kissed you was not memorable. It wasn’t exciting. We were tripping over carpet edges, puking in your downstairs bathroom, shirtless for no reason, drunk. There was an empty rum bottle spinning at the center of a circle, knees to knees, we were lips pressed surface to surface, no passion, fulfilling the dare of the spinning glass, I could feel the metal on your teeth behind your lips, I didn’t understand why I liked it. You tasted like the mouth of an empty rum bottle: there’s nothing past those lips, but you know how much has had to spill to make that much empty. I want to drink you. It was first thought in my head, when we were drunk, mouth to mouth, unexciting, doesn’t-mean-anything kissing, I want to drink you and I still don’t understand it. Both of us were loving someone else that night, and I didn’t know yet which of us would wind up with a broken heart first, and I wonder, if I did, if it would have changed how long I let my lips linger on yours, to something beyond casual, that night. I want to drink you. Consumption is not a sex act, but maybe its a metaphor for that combining of bodies, for understanding silence, for understanding solitude, for filling the empty in me with the empty of you.

[ctdwriting]

An Open Letter to the Bored Ones

To Whom It May Concern;

I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

I can’t be the only one who lies awake at night, thinking up something they could say to spark a new friendship, something they could drag an old friend into. I can’t be the only one who feels this desire, this passion, drive, craving, this wanderlust. There has to be someone, somewhere in my vicinity, who wants this.

I want to be free. I want to turn off my phone and ride my bike to nowhere and do cartwheels down the sidewalk and stroll barefoot in the grass. I want to walk into town and jump fences and dance through convenience stores and tumble through doorways and drink tea on the roof. I want to go from the movies to the park to the streets to the bonfire in the backyard. I want to feel that wind-in-your-hair, too-scared-to-stop sensation, like running from cops and pool-hopping at midnight and getting kicked out of the mall for riding piggy-back through Urban Outfitters.

I want it so badly I can taste it. I want to wake up with the birds and run down the main roads at five a.m. and read Kurt Vonnegut at the edge of the dewy football field while the little gray-green bits of plastic turf cling to my skin. I want to drink strawberry wine we smuggled into the basement and kiss the wrong person because it seemed like a good idea at the time and do something a little bit bad for me. I want to listen to crappy rock bands that mistake volume for quality in a dirty, black-walled venue that smells like cheap beer and cigarettes and sweat and hope. I want to walk the woods and fail at skipping stones and kick sticks off the well-worn paths left by the potheads and wanderers who are never quite lost. I want to lay in the sun and race in the dark. I want to break the rules for once and giggle as I wait for the principal.

I can’t be the only one who wants nothing more than to get out of this town, but have a few fond memories to look back on when I, inevitably, come back to visit. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want these to be the worst four years of my life. I want my life to start, and I’m sick of waiting around for it; I want it to start now, and I don’t want to do it alone.

I want to take you with me.

I want you, whoever and wherever and whenever you are, to run with me. I want to take you on an adventure through my darkness and to the farthest corners of your crooked heart. I want us to feel that too-scared-to-stop, flying-hair, sneakers-on-pavement sensation, and I want someone to lock eyes with as we struggle over the fence. I guess it’s selfish, all this wanting, but you can’t really blame me. I got a pretty defective lot in life, but I can’t let that define me. I am not the people who failed me, nor am I the people that I have failed, none of us are.

Forget about everything that holds you back. Forget about the grades and the boys who threw gum in your hair and the girls you broke your heart over and the ones who broke their hearts over you. Forget about anything that doesn’t make you happy. Stop reading Wikipedia definitions of sexualities and go do a little field research. Stop blogging about your unhappiness and find a way to fight it. Stop dreaming and writing about vinyl records and adventures and city lights and first kisses and class pranks and go out there and do.

If you’re looking for a sign, this is it. I can’t be the only one who wants this, and I refuse to be. I refuse to be the only one who is bored with the every-day and is ready for something extraordinary to happen to them, or to make something extraordinary happen. For once, I want my life to be one of those tacky teen movies, and I can’t be the only one who wants that. I can’t be the only one who wants their life to be a Stephen Chbosky novel instead of an episode of Glee without the singing or comedy.

I can’t be the only one who wants to know what it’s like to fall in love with the world and everyone in it, and I can’ t be the only one who wants to know it all. I can’t be the only one who wants to really live.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re starting to realize that you can’t be the only one, either.

  With Warm Regards,

C.T.D.

[ctdwriting]

CTLWriting is now CTDWriting

[ctdwriting]

Early Sunsets

Sometimes forever falls short.

Sometimes the sun stops listening

to the Almanac and goes to bed early.

Sometimes she was all you needed.

Sometimes she was too much.

  And I can still hear what you’re not saying,

it whispers from the back of your words,

from the bottom of your throat.

They sound beautiful, darling, darkling,

sometimes I still pretend they make sense.

  And sometimes my bones started talking.

They said “I know something you don’t know.”

They said, “I have something that you want.”

They said, “I know something you don’t

want to know.” And my bones, they were talking,

  and sometimes they still do,

‘cause I realized that the pills I swallow

to keep them quiet, just make enough

static noise to drown them out. Fill up my head

with enough sound to sound silent again.

  And the doctors are much better

at makeup than they are at healing scars,

and that cover-up doesn’t always

match your skin, and sometimes

you can still tell there’s something under it.

  Sometimes I’m a shot in the dark.

Sometimes I’m staring down the crosshairs.

And sometimes empty pages still don’t

have enough room left to fit me. Sometimes

there isn’t enough time before the sun sets.

 -C.T.D.

[ctdwriting]

Brought Up That Way

I was raised on cicada shells.

  Raised on black tea, two sweet and low,

half and half instead of cream.

  Raised on fat free, low-carb; raised

on Weight Watchers- a gold sticker

for every pound my mother lost;

raised on coffee stained moustache.

  Raised on a cigarette hole, burned in

my father’s favorite sweatshirt;

raised on three-room apartment,

no furniture; raised on bagels-

the good Jersey kind with cream cheese

and lox; raised on saying “fuck you”

without a single profanity.

  I was raised on the smell of bleach,

and Swiffer Dusters; “very black”

mascara wands at traffic lights; raised

in the back seat of a convertible I

would learn to drive on; raised on

the smell of ash and coal; on “a man

who stacks his own wood is warmed

twice.”

  Raised “man of the house;” raised to

know that that doesn’t mean too much.

  I was raised on mowing the lawn,

turning over the soil in the garden,

planting this year’s seed on the bones

of last year’s crop.

  Raised with four cats.

  I was raised on cheap wine, on Woodbridge;

raised on long car rides; I was raised

on “eat when you’re hungry

don’t when you’re full;” I was

raised on lazy Sundays; raised to know

that when you’re body says something,

you should always listen; raised

to speak the same language as my body;

raised on “yoga is good for your body

and even better for your soul.”

  I was raised on chasing monkey-finders,

follow white spinning circles on the

clouds back to whatever shitty restaurant

that they’re welcoming into town.

  Raised to follow smoke.

  Raised not to smoke.

  Raised to be lady-like; raised to raise my voice;

raised on power tools and lipstick stains.

  I was raised to raise hell and I think

that sometimes you

can just

tell.

 -C.T.D.

[ctdwriting]

Stranger Things

I once fell in love with a cute girl

on the subway for exactly fourteen

minutes, between when I got on, and she

got off. Dreads piled on top of her head,

orange dress, reading on an e-reader,

no doubt something good. Of course,

I didn’t really fall in love with her,

but given the chance, I liked to think

that maybe, eventually, I could have.

We made eye contact across the aisle,

and I blushed away but she held strong,

slight smirk that said, “Yeah, I knew I looked

good today. Definitely keeping this dress.”

  And I once fell in love with the way

he said “Here’s your change, have

a nice night.” And when the name

on his little tag finally changed, I

congratulated him and I swear, that I

could have loved the smile he wore.

And maybe that skinny ShopRite cashier

didn’t look at me twice, but for all the time

I was doing the grocery shopping, I

made sure to check out in his aisle.

And maybe he didn’t even know me,

and maybe I didn’t even know him,

but there was always something to looking.

At this point, you may be questioning

my sanity, or maybe, just thinking I’m

just a little too enthusiastic, but there

is so much beauty in this world. So

many faces to fall into, so many eyes

that tell too many stories, and I am just

trying to hear them all at once, and maybe

I shouldn’t just go falling over strangers,

but this one could be the one, or just

someone, and I’m always looking

for new someones just to talk to, just

to learn about. One thing this has taught me:

there is always something new to learn about.

  And you were a lisp with collar bones.

You were in love with someone new but he

was clinging to your shoulder blades

like a tattered cape, and god, I wanted

to join him. And god, if I had known that you

might have wanted me there, but maybe

everything happens for a reason

and maybe the universe didn’t have enough

reasons to make what could have been be,

and maybe the end of you and me

is just friends. And maybe its never the end.

But I know that you know I’m always

still looking for ways to turn that bend.

  And you were wrong place, wrong time,

right voice. And I was right time,

right place, wrong song, I know.

You were curly-haired, red-dyed,

rough hands, forever. And you

were a stranger with dark eyes.

And you were just a single moment

with forever lined up behind you,

dressed all in black and white.

And you were like the sun,

with your pepper-freckle face,

and I never fell in love with you.

But I could have. My god, I could have.

 -C.T.D.