#dailypoemproject

[halffacemonologues]

Image for Poem #38/103 from the Daily Poem Project

[halffacemonologues]

Daily Poem Project #38 / 103

“Yo! You want some poetry?” She calls out to me from across the street. The traffic blurs her like yesterday. “Something to make you feel something? I little dribble from the nib of my scribble? Wrap you up in my pages like a soggy t-shirt,  soapy with thought bubbles bursting on my nipples.” She’s the suddy singer wringing out the shouts from the grumpy thunder cloud. This stage is her shower-time.  Naked in the rays of the spotlight. “You like the dope of confusion? I can write you riddles about simple things!” How sexy is complex? How sexy is “Yes”? How sexy is wet? Well I’m sodden. The roof of my mouth looks like wrinkled finger-tips and babies bath-feet. My mind a constant slimy drip, down through my sinuses. Clearing my throat, using my notebook like a tissue. These words are sick and sticky. Remnants of the yesterday we left on the stove for too long.  Now the whole place smells like hot metal. Discard it all with the burned rice you scraped from the bottom of the pot, into the bin of ‘What’s Forgotten’. Rotting concepts spotted with the ink blots of these bleeding images. Rummage through the living room of my memories, scattered with old pizza boxes and socks I once lost games in. Sweat and orange peels stain the cotton, along with blood from shins. I know her… but did we compete or were we on the same team? I’m a thinker, but when I write, I write to win!!! I’m biting lips and kissing red and setting echoes deep into her mouth!!! I ‘whisper shout’. That kind of intimate secret that belongs to the world, so she sucks it off my tongue and announces it through a megaphone. My thoughts are not mine to own. She’s handing out my hopes like buttered popcorn in greasy boxes. Each one exploded in my mouth as I made out with sunrise on Day One. We looked into each other’s eyes and laughed about “This one time…”, but then forgot it with the rest, as our love became blind in the flames of indigestion. We looked too straight and stared too long. We loved too fast and swallowed without chewing. But regurgitation is not an option, we’ll have to let this pass through us.  Her face is a sunspot set against the city dew. This block is brand new, we only wrote it this morning. …but her face; it’s as though someone tried to rub it out with a smudgy eraser. Then she says it… she tells me her name. It’s an unapologetic reminder of the poem we fought before. Pinning metaphoric badges into each other’s skin as a collection of dead butterflies. All the beautiful moments we tried to capture forever… All now lost; surrendered into yellow dust. She has a bag of the stuff. “Wanna do some rust?”  She doesn’t seem to remember me. “Flickers in your eyes like celluloid dreams”. The screeching smog turns to perfume. I know her smell. I know her name… it was there in the beginning. She crosses the road as though each car is a horny teenager she can reject with a glance. She crashes into me, her body is a bastion of ‘No Retreat’.  I know she would be the final wall to fall were we ever beaten. If we were ever eaten by the these hungry wolves we cry. We tell the world we are home, sick. We can’t come in to work today. We tell the world this lie as we lie happily homesick for the housing of each other’s hug. As we map a track from the bathroom to the bedroom in underwear and business ties. As we hold up fingers like guns pointed at the ceiling, demanding the world “BACK-OFF”and let us live these lives…  The yellow specks begin to itch like pollen. My eyes puff up. The rust has set in. My eyelids squeak like hinges on hospital doors. Her breath tastes like disinfectant.  I’m looking at the present like a reflection in her glasses. I thought we were wearing Milkweed Monarchs, but were they only ever dreamflies buzzing around the carcass of the discarded truth? Next to the drybone chicken and that puddle patch of soup we spilled that first time we danced. We didn’t care at the time, but now maggots eat the carpet and we don’t get many visitors any more. So we cut down the telegraph pole next door, dip it in tar and punctuate our story with a definitive period. A sticky black dot which signals an end… which signals that we can go back to our thinking to conceive of this all again. What some may call ‘days’, we simply call our ‘pen’. As we scrawl this life into being and eagerly read ahead, toward our favourite moment; when Love raises finger-guns at the ceiling. When Life is the antithesis of ‘Dead’.

[atlastalisman]

Daily Poem Project #38 / 103

“Yo! You want some poetry?” She calls out to me from across the street. The traffic blurs her like yesterday. “Something to make you feel something? I little dribble from the nib of my scribble? Wrap you up in my pages like a soggy t-shirt,  soapy with thought bubbles bursting on my nipples.” She’s the suddy singer wringing out the shouts from the grumpy thunder cloud. This stage is her shower-time.  Naked in the rays of the spotlight. “You like the dope of confusion? I can write you riddles about simple things!” How sexy is complex? How sexy is “Yes”? How sexy is wet? Well I’m sodden. The roof of my mouth looks like wrinkled finger-tips and babies bath-feet. My mind a constant slimy drip, down through my sinuses. Clearing my throat, using my notebook like a tissue. These words are sick and sticky. Remnants of the yesterday we left on the stove for too long.  Now the whole place smells like hot metal. Discard it all with the burned rice you scraped from the bottom of the pot, into the bin of ‘What’s Forgotten’. Rotting concepts spotted with the ink blots of these bleeding images. Rummage through the living room of my memories, scattered with old pizza boxes and socks I once lost games in. Sweat and orange peels stain the cotton, along with blood from shins. I know her… but did we compete or were we on the same team? I’m a thinker, but when I write, I write to win!!! I’m biting lips and kissing red and setting echoes deep into her mouth!!! I ‘whisper shout’. That kind of intimate secret that belongs to the world, so she sucks it off my tongue and announces it through a megaphone. My thoughts are not mine to own. She’s handing out my hopes like buttered popcorn in greasy boxes. Each one exploded in my mouth as I made out with sunrise on Day One. We looked into each other’s eyes and laughed about “This one time…”, but then forgot it with the rest, as our love became blind in the flames of indigestion. We looked too straight and stared too long. We loved too fast and swallowed without chewing. But regurgitation is not an option, we’ll have to let this pass through us.  Her face is a sunspot set against the city dew. This block is brand new, we only wrote it this morning. ...but her face; it’s as though someone tried to rub it out with a smudgy eraser. Then she says it… she tells me her name. It’s an unapologetic reminder of the poem we fought before. Pinning metaphoric badges into each other’s skin as a collection of dead butterflies. All the beautiful moments we tried to capture forever… All now lost; surrendered into yellow dust. She has a bag of the stuff. “Wanna do some rust?”  She doesn’t seem to remember me. “Flickers in your eyes like celluloid dreams”. The screeching smog turns to perfume. I know her smell. I know her name… it was there in the beginning. She crosses the road as though each car is a horny teenager she can reject with a glance. She crashes into me, her body is a bastion of ‘No Retreat’.  I know she would be the final wall to fall were we ever beaten. If we were ever eaten by the these hungry wolves we cry. We tell the world we are home, sick. We can’t come in to work today. We tell the world this lie as we lie happily homesick for the housing of each other’s hug. As we map a track from the bathroom to the bedroom in underwear and business ties. As we hold up fingers like guns pointed at the ceiling, demanding the world “BACK-OFF” and let us live these lives…  The yellow specks begin to itch like pollen. My eyes puff up. The rust has set in. My eyelids squeak like hinges on hospital doors. Her breath tastes like disinfectant.  I’m looking at the present like a reflection in her glasses. I thought we were wearing Milkweed Monarchs, but were they only ever dreamflies buzzing around the carcass of the discarded truth? Next to the drybone chicken and that puddle patch of soup we spilled that first time we danced. We didn’t care at the time, but now maggots eat the carpet and we don’t get many visitors any more. So we cut down the telegraph pole next door, dip it in tar and punctuate our story with a definitive period. A sticky black dot which signals an end… which signals that we can go back to our thinking to conceive of this all again. What some may call ‘days’, we simply call our ‘pen’. As we scrawl this life into being and eagerly read ahead, toward our favourite moment; when Love raises finger-guns at the ceiling. When Life is the antithesis of ‘Dead’.

[halffacemonologues]

Daily Poem Project #35/103: I’m enroute with a long mouth sucking on the miles like a thickshake straw. It takes more than a chunk of ice cream to deter me. All this travel is making me worldy, I’d prefer not become too 'worldly' academic so I’ll stick to the kid speech. Forgive me if I missed a few statues and monuments along the way - I got caught up chatting in the subway, sitting on street corners in the middle of the night, stopping cars to look at drivers eye-to-eye… with you. I miss you, like I miss my right eye, like my depth perception is messed with in your absence. I’m splashing on the surface, but I need you on my shoulders to push me to where it matters. Let’s use each other as a ladder; you on my shoulders, me on yours, you on mine again. Bending spines into infinite 8’s, inflating our floatie wings to paddle out beyond the breakers. Piecing the waves back together with naive confidence that everything can be made better if you mean it. I hold a barrel, you hold a white horse. We look at each other smiling, but I admit that my arms are quite sore because I still have a surfer in mine… on a longboard, about to be eaten by shark, who swallowed a scuba tank yesterday… a rusted one that was attached to a diving camera rig… You tell me to be bigger than the ocean and I immediately cradle the wave like a slippery lap cat. It purrs and you stitch the white horse back on top like a mohawk of salty seagulls. I hand it to you and you release it back toward the shoreline. We watch it sink slowly into the sand. Its fluffy white wig washing back out towards us like a nostalgic toupée. We dust the coral off our knees and you ask me what I want to do today. I take a picture out the window and remember I’m on my way to see you. You float back to your body with the rip tide. My lips are tired but I keep sucking on this straw… soon I’ll hear the slurp of the last drops of clouds and I’ll be landing back down into you… --- for my SamRam thank you for piecing broken waves back together with me and all the other impossible adventures we find ourselves in.