Orange You Afraid of Rhymes?

Flarf and Barf

[noah-e-swim-blog]

The End Could Be Anywhere  ;

In August, an eager winter found me to tell me it was time to fly, but by September, I had found him:

The warmth, the boy in his button-up jacket. He keeps out the cold  for the both of us.

I forget I am sick.  I forget.  But the boy in his button-up jacket,   I remember. My weathering gasps  deferred the bomb the day I said “hello” to him.

I may fly before I see him again. The end could be anywhere. But I keep breathing, keep thinking of him.

I, the semicolon; he,  the warmth.  The cold. The warmth, I hold on a little longer.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

Quest

The way that I fall in love and the way the lion devours the gazelle involves the same quest for nourishment.

So when I say I so ravenously love you to the bone,  I, unfortunately, mean it.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

I don’t...

...think  we need to know how to love ourselves before we love someone else, but I think we need to learn you don’t save a drowning child from the sea by choking the air right out of them.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

If I Rearrange the Letter Just Right

Anxiety becomes a tiny axe I use to cut down the trees, so that I can see when gremlins are coming to hurt me.  

Most of the time, such a tiny axe does more harm than good.  The trees never amount to anything, and the gremlins never come.  

My therapist told me the gremlins don’t even exist, and I should give up a tiny axe for a paintbrush, pen, or diazepam prescription

But once I saw the gremlin, perched outside my window with a silent engine. I had cut down enough trees to see him there, stalling.

I hid until he was gone and didn’t see him again ‘til the news showed a picture of an AMC car  and a wanted men.

Sometimes I wonder if  he was searching for people unarmed with a tiny axe, as if the weapon that took my air with the trees, somehow gave life to me.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

3 AM Attempts at Writing Poetry

I discovered 

that “coquette” and “cokehead” are slant rhymes,

and that an orgasm sings like opium sometimes.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

I have learned

to love with a blindfold:

no men.  no woman. All who touch me 

are gods.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

Loot and Locked Lips

Like a kind little thief, 

I returned to you 

everything that once was mine:

the vinyl records, my nights of sleep, 

the key to the very core of me 

that is as welcoming as a vandalized window, 

now.  

But the strawberry lip balm you stole 

from the convenience store because I said

even the roughest of robbers steal kisses

instead of looting banks some days, 

I kept for me.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

The Real Love Poem

If you love me, let me go eat Qdoba 

[noah-e-swim-blog]

The Goodbye Trio

All of your poetry is in suitcases,

now.

It moved me the way a train

moves its passengers—

past the low of the valleys

and to a mountain’s peak,

where it cannot stay

for long

before returning home

to only wait to leave again

like a railway ricochet.

 I chugged along

for so long, and now I stand—

My thumb stretched high

In the air, telling you to both

go on without me and to take

me with you.  

 Your farewell will take

almost all of the fractured half

that was already left of me.

I have one nimble heel on the platform

and the other on the track.  My body 

has become the crossroads 

on the very map of you.  

 But

Chugga-chugga-choose

someone else to sit in your sleeper;

I have lived

much longer with much less,

and I will go on that way,

too.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

Big-Ass Winners

And as I sit and watch my country argue over who is the “special snowflake,” the quiet avalanche

b

    e

        g

            i

                n

                      s.

Perhaps I am WRONG. But this, too, is wrong. 

None of us are the big-ass WINNERS None of us are coming out ahead. Some of us, simply, are closer to the middle of the food chain and the few that are on top are like cannibals devouring  other cannibals.   Watch the bloodbath on your TV set and tell me war is the answer.   Drug war.  Religious war. Gender war.  The war of the parent cutting a sandwich into quarters  to feed four mouths.  

None of us are the big-ass WINNERS None of us are coming out ahead.   

Does anyone understand or do some just stand left and some right while the rose in the middle—the national flower, the national martyr— is left for withering?

[noah-e-swim-blog]

Parasitic Wasps and Parental Wisdoms of No

Out of the mother’s womb and into the real and sad world- that’s how it all begins. The parasitic wasps soar like ravenous hawks above a green and manicured garden.

To keep their kind alive, they thieve life from another kind. Often the caterpillar  that is ready to weave their castle and chrysalis will never awaken again; think of it as the entomic equivalent to dying in your sleep while dreaming  that you were almost airborne, erroneously aerial, flighted and free.

To breed more parasites like a contagion spread in the womb and out into schoolyards, the wasp injects bastard babies into the body of the caterpillar. Maggots thrive on the thorax until the brain is defeated, like the body and the soul had been.

And just like that, the fluttering hearts that once created symphonies of unspoken dreams in classrooms  without the plucking of vicarious violins

become the chatter of insects born in corporate cubicles— an inescapable shape for the cycle to begin again.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

a passing thought

To love someone is to love all of them, even the part that does not love you anymore.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

W[ea]ther or not

So we quarrel, girlish flesh against girlish flesh, and swell our bellies  with the hate of a hurricane; it’s her I can’t hate, but I do it anyhow. 

The curves of her bust fit mine like a puzzle; two buds of the bosom, two women at war from across the room.  

Upon every double x, I place a hex.  The newspaper says another of my kind has been stripped of her threads, and left for death on her mother’s lawn.

I could mourn and learn but I don’t.  The government thieves a dime from every dollar, and I rob a doll from the shelf.

When will I stop? Don’t we already bleed enough? A sky  full of blackbirds and I aim for the other dove.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

Bracelets

Well

I only smell a rat in a house of hungry dogs and the kitten hasn't purred for days.

Another daughter sent to the slaughter because she’s told she’s just mutton or the guttural mutters in cinemas where greasy men sit, masturbating

to yellowed images of Monroe.

It’s a proverb the pussy-loving hounds whisper to the girls in no skirts, miniskirts, long skirts, the nun’s habit:   to shut up, not button up- to let their  cleavage become leverage for a mixed martini, a taxi ride to a cheap hotel room paid in full.   

Tell me rape culture is the fault of my own architecture Tell me how the gaping wound between my legs resembled a temple to dismantle. Tell me the pay gap is a myth, that feminism is a myth. But I’ll persist and rat you out with paws and laws in an orgasmic clause.  

It’s be bitter or be better; be brave or be braver

I wear the chains placed upon me as jewelry.  

[noah-e-swim-blog]

When I Realized my Ex was Trash

I believed

I loved him

the way a drunken writer

believes their new story

is a masterpiece to shatter

the glass walls of libraries

until they sober up the next morning.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

No More Mistakes

I let you watch me die

the way you watched your

parents die, and I always said that 

I’d be the dam to hold back the waterfall

of acid rain that has disintegrated the plants

blossoming on your porch step the way that a baby

blooms in the womb of their mother 

as the umbilical cord tethers their neck

until it snaps.

 I saw the warning signs

outside of the house that lent

itself as a funeral home to your mother

and your father.  The neon paint

had been etched away by the acid,

and I said to you how it looked like 

the claw marks of a feral animal.  

 “Will the wolves stay away?”

you asked me.

 The beasts drew out my blood

like seductive vampires

a year before I even discovered

endoscopies, colonoscopies, 

or animals clothed in the skin

of a healthy, 20-something woman.

“The wolves will stay 

away,” I told you,

just like your parents told you

as you watched the cancer gnaw

the meat off their bones

  and now 

mine.

[noah-e-swim-blog]

When the Neurologist Told Me I’m just Anxious

The man who loves me

is the man who dares

to carry me when I can't even

hold my head above a puddle

of evaporated water. I shiver in a dry rain. My heart

palpitates in paradise

but he keeps enough cool

for the both of us.