#chris writes stuff

[im-chrims]

Whenever I think someone can hear me singing I start to quiet down, or just stop entirely. I can’t help but wonder if you would mind. If you walked in on me singing a song would you stare? Would you listen? Even if the song is tragic? Sappy? Not something you’d listen to? Would you sing along with me or tell me to stop? Would it make you feel something or would you be distant? Can I sing you to sleep? Would that be too much?

[grufaine]

Cholesterol Preservation

I have a yearning to be dedicated The heart is all of me, the coursing of blood That sways without consideration is heart And the clots that deter the course With worry and care are also heart

To think even a miracle is a temporary solution And as such, life is miraculous and temporary I was blind, now I see, and I still have problems

The strain that’s meant to lead to shine While shoes keep tracking in The miserable path called Perpetual course correction

I want to jump hurdles for you I want hold out my hand Armed with a plate of cake And for you to be hungrier for my hand To be laid out main course to nourish

I want to be done wanting, for my heart To be all clogged To be a soft patch on a rocky path Plush for aching heels and not much else

But I’m so many streams And so many dams And so much

[grufaine]

Ezekiel’s Futuristic Lazer Bones vs. The Evil Empire

I’m ready to say I like it when you’re here When you’re here every rock is diamonds You’re a better friend than diamonds, you’re my B***F*****F**L*** I’m not sure you understand, I’m a bouquet of party balloons 4 u

I’m a crybaby for the way you are I’m a crybaby for the whole world, why Is it this way, why is the way of the world This way, why are you better than the world Why am I unequipped for the way The world doesn’t live up to your standards

We’ve got trouble A whole new caliber of disaster This is Life with a CAPITAL “L” And L is the Roman Numeral for 50 And I will remind you 50 times if I must That Life is full of nasty things all over And I feel, desperately, a need To not become a clod of dirt in your mouth To convince you, you can sugar, and you should

I know it’s tiring I know it’s a big concrete slab of “F***M*L***” right now And I don’t wanna say “suck it up” I’m just saying, when you can breathe Breathe bottle cap candy

That you came to this world helpless is true What isn’t true: That you ever stopped needing help

Responsibility doesn’t have to be cold This is my love song for the human race: Fuzzy blanket 4 u Music box crank it 4 u This my devotion it tru Fuzzy blanket option 4 u

Did you think skeletons don’t have the fab capacity? Let me tell you: Skeletons are every color lustrous grains This is my glitter painted skeleton, and it is ready

It’s time to be the infantry By which I mean, it’s time to be a crybaby Rising out from the cradles of death And the swaddling bands of indolence

I call to your bones, rise up First a shaking, then a rattling Oh you multicolored bones, come together Ye rainbones, glitter and flesh come upon you Breathe in again, let the wind into you The world possess you again, Life

Our bones were greyed, they said Black and white, or shades of grey And so Eternity return to us our color And with color: hope | union | linkage of appendage

Me + U = We There are infinite hues, there is infinite light We risen disco bones, exceedingly numbered Shake, rattle, rip it up, patty cake, patty cake Roll up the dough and bake me the bread of Life

There’s a technicolor future waiting for our dexterity To undo, rebuild, provide peace for posterity The graves been getting louder and they’re ready to burst The Earth wants dead the grey nations, the Earth wants built the Spectral Union

Rise bones, with emotional unbinding waves, rise bones, with precise digits Rise skeletal armies, gasp in infant restoration, and gleam infinite hues

[grufaine]

Ekphrasis After “Study of Loss and Longing” by Josie Osborne

A little birdie told me you were back in town My heart became a ballroom So I searched out the note you gave me in ’44 My heart was violins and cellos, and my dulcimer Played remember the year of peace and calm When my palm met your palm At night under winter moon But with you warm as June

Then I read the note again Remembered your cold shrugs My heart began to piano, the sound faded And the room became static and sepia

I gripped a fountain pen Wrote, “What will come of the returning” My heart became rolling timpanis

I am old but I am more than decay I reach out like the shrillest sirens This is a spear called desperate yearning Soaring thru a lightning-filled chasm

I feel almost embraced By something I can’t grasp

There is a dance between wishes One is called hope, one is called pining In the middle there is a year of peace and calm Lived, unlived, and painted on my heart In the middle there is a bowl of fruit punch And there is me, pouring carefully, and there is you Approaching carefully

And I see hope is fragile And held with cautious fingers And that precious moments are fragile And if not worshipped, are desperately tackled

My heart is slow, paced out pizzicato I am going back to sleep

[grufaine]

The Self as the Sparkles of Sparkling Grape Juice Desperately Trying Not to Go Flat

The moon is making an Ever cyclical attempt To inspire you, to Make you stop and listen, to make You slip reflectively into yourself, contact Your buried enthusiasm drowned by expectations and the gaslights of the smooth, who with Little more than whims convinced you to abandon all Your more precise intuitions, that Is the way you arrived here with trembling sunken eyes, it is How we failed to realize that each part of us coming together is alien Life, but we know that the sky around you is the sky around Me, and it occurs to me That there are chisels manically striking inside you, which Is true of everyone, which is Never settled until collapsed dissipation, like everything That’s evolved, including The squiggly arc of civilizations, like the fizzy nature of myself

[grufaine]

Charli Ray: A Pantoum Using Lines Derived Solely from Songs by Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX

Any time of day, boy Beaches and oceans for my baby Follow you home through the rain ‘cuz I need your love I need it even when it hurts me

Beaches and oceans for my baby I’ll stay until the sun comes down I need it even when it hurts me I can’t control it anymore

I’ll stay until the sun goes down I love the poison I can’t control it any more I’m paper and I’m snow

I love the poison I wish that I could change I’m paper and I’m snow Barely even there

I wish that I could change It hurts but I can’t stop Barely even there You make it hard to breath

It hurts but I can’t stop Follow you home through the rain ‘cuz I need your love You make it hard to breath Any time of day, boy

[grufaine]

Every Child of the Stars Wants to Be Cool but They’d Be Better Off Sincere

The sky has turned raw meat pink

Everything at once | Tell me what you see It’s the way we constellations   It’s the way three notes are one chord The sky is burning film, tell me do you prefer preservation or comfort, or is it better To create small fleeting spaces How far can a bleeding heart really reach Can you salve what you can’t touch

The sky is abstract expression You can fly above the clouds but the sky is still above you Every star is bigger than the Earth, sure, but why do you feel like a speck Every star is a speck from here, and is it raindrops on your head Or sweat on your neck that got you here angsting

The sky is like a sub-atomic particle Quantum physicists discovered that certain sub-atomic particles have different traits Depending on whether or not they are being observed The sky is like that, like a fortune cookie, waiting for you to crack it open and gain insight

And tho the sky can contain us all, many billion breathing creatures What are we to do, and how’s it gonna be? Are you going to just stand there? When the Earth melts and the screams of “we fucked up” reach Alpha Centauri  Will you cling to the searing concrete Or will you bust open the fire hydrants Realizing love would have conquered all if we would have let love make us angry Enough to do something more noble than tolerance  

[grufaine]

3 Fixed-Form Poems About One Person

Dearest Where are we now Ghostly Earth, time like oxygen These archived canons, the way we paint the future Your Mufasa Mirage persists And you teach me Again

If you See me again Don’t expect me to speak clearly You have had enough. You have been in luxury I know the difference between Meteors and The Moon

Dear friend I like being Friends. I like being friends that don’t See each other eyes. I don’t wanna fall for you The way I always fall for the Life light, the way I fall