sad kid @thomhenkepoetry - Tumblr Blog

IT’S HERE !!!!

I know it’s been SO LONG since I announced I was going to do this, but I’ve finally published a collection.

You can find it here:

NO HARD FEELINGS: poems and stories on Amazon.com

It’s only 9 dollars and has 107 pages of sad/funny stuff to read !!!!

Thank you for your patience and support. I spent a long time deciding which pieces to include, designing the cover, hiring an editor, etc. I’m very proud of this little book and I hope you’ll give it a read.

#poetryriot #LGBT poetry #gay poets #gay poetry #queer poetry #queer #lgbt #gay #poetry #publishing #writerscreed

I just woke up from a dream. You were there. And while it wasn't real, it was real fun.

VERB: to miss

@thomhenkepoetry

#poetry #writerscreed #poetryriot #spilled words #spilledink #wnq-writers #wiclit

hi!

i know it’s been a really long time and i’m really sorry that I haven’t posted. I haven’t stopped writing, but I have been spending a lot of my time working on a manuscript to publish, so i’m trying to keep some of those poems unread before the release of the book. i just hired an editor and things are happening!

i love you all and this wouldn’t have been possible without you.

*yay*

that’s it, guys!

I’m finished with the numbered series.

I’m going to start a new one soon, and sort through all the numbered ones to hopefully publish into a collection.

I was going to continue to 200 but I think its time I moved on to something else.

love u

#blog

your sorrys don’t count for shit.

I’m almost never sorry but when I am, I am the most sorry. I am so so sorry.

guilt can rip my ambitions like paper it tears out my hair puts weight in my gut and a rope of “I’m not good enough” around my neck.

guilt is suffocating especially if you were raised Catholic. peace be with you...

so, when I’m sorry, I say it. and I mean it. I love apologies!

It’s so easy to forgive when your perception of apologies is weighted against the overwhelming mass of your guilt.

I’d do anything to make it go away. “I’m sorry” usually helps to scare it a little.

but

sorry has never stung the way your sorrys do your apologies are different tinted, even. brushed with the fingerprints you’ve left on my skin

I know that they aren’t for my sake but for yours

let your atonement be not fucking with my feelings or maybe just don’t lead me down this dead end street

don’t tell me you’re sorry

don’t do things you’re going to regret.

-thomas henke (poem 139)

#poetry #poems #writerscreed #twcpoety #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #spilled words #lgbtpoetry #poetryriot #tomhawkepoetry #queer #gay #lgbt #relationships #love #liar #apologies #excerpt from a book I'll never write #excerpt from a story i'll never write

This evening is not unlike any other evening I have had here. I have several unexplainable and unhealed injuries, both physical and emotional. I am cold. It’s so fucking dumb how cold I get. I’m from New York, I shouldn’t get cold. I’m so stubborn about this that I can spend hundreds of dollars on a pretty new writing desk for my poems, but I can’t justify scraping 20 dollars for a proper blanket to keep my bones warm. Those wooden legs could start a fire but I would still shiver tomorrow night, so I write. I also light a candle. I use its little flame to search for God on the dark part of my eyelids. The place beyond them is large, spotlit, and empty. I roam around my own mind, recoiling from the taste of sickly sweet wine and crisp communion wafers. I am too loud and too proud and too alone inside my eyes. I get no answer as I scream for… …for I don’t know what. For love? For affection? These things that I seem to live for have no place in my life. I don’t know what I can live for. I think I live for this. I think I live for the soft anticipation of a first kiss. I think I live for the vapor that cleanses my sinuses of worry. I live for a hand held and a word unsaid. I try to leave most of my words unsaid, though I also never stop talking. I bury my real words in soil from my worried quarry. Inexhaustible avalanches of purchased rock pile onto my words until they cannot breathe, until they are choking on sand, until they have no chance of escape. Then, my words die. Leaving me with feelings that I can not comprehend, and endless conversation about nothing at all. A person I admire says to “say what you mean” but I only mean to warp my shallow alphabets into whatever will make people attach themselves to me. I sometimes ask God what is wrong with me. I sometimes think I might be insane. I sometimes think I might need attention like other people need oxygen. I sometimes think that God must be real because no life could ever be this desperate, or this unjustifiably sad. God is writing a rom com and I’m the manic pixie dream girl. A six foot four manic pixie dream girl. Roll the credits, I’m ready for the credits. I’m ready for the stuff that comes after all the shit blows up and the movie is over and the manic pixie dream girl is dumped or dead or living happily ever after or all three of those things. Amen.

October’s Sermon (Poem 138)

#writerscreed #poetry #poems #prose #god

i think this numbered series is reaching its end.

#blog

i told myself i’d write so I didn’t talk to you. well, I guess it just makes sense that when ink finally stopped pouring out of my mouth and when I was finally free to speak my mouth dripping with molasses said your name scattered letters, but i’m good at word jumble. you are just as useless apart as you were sewn together. your quilt swatches shower me with bland oatmeal and emotional distance. not unlike the blanket i use now. it gets frigid in my bed for one. the glaciers push through my windows and into my bones. i should probably buy a new blanket.

Cold (poem 137)

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i'm ready now. no, really. i'm all set. ive had my fun, i'm assuming you've had more than your fair share like that boy i shouldn't have gotten so jealous over i bet he was *so* fun i bet im cuter than him i bet im cuter than any person you ever touch for the rest of your life and i hope the rest of your life is filled with men that are just not-quite good enough i hope how you lost me is how every love loses you i hope you feel this way a hundred times take ninety-nine tragedies off my hands and place them in your vices. fake their collapse like you faked our foundation. i'm holding my house up all alone. so, i'm ready. i'm all set to fall back in love and out and back in and all around until you make me sick to think about until your memory doesn't sketch on my calendar until you become a pleasant sigh in the river until i hear the fear of love in another's voice i guess we just start i guess we just wait

Where there’s a will...

Poem #136

#poetry #poems #writerscreed #spilled words #spilled thoughts #tomhawkepoetry #new format

135.

I exchanged pines for palms my spine for a handle what was safe for what was destined to fail me.

I thought you were holding me back from the man I thought I was to be

I thought the best of me was lost in you

but it was right there we were the best we could ever be

#poetry #poems #writerscreed #wnq-writers #poetryriot #twcpoetry #spilled ink #spilled words #numbered series

snail (134)

i can still see that smile you know the one.

the smile with your eyes heavy with liquid sunlight

and your mouth a perfect pursed crescent chapped from an evening of adventure.

I remember when that smile became a rare sight. I hunted for it in your safari eyes but found only caves of vampires and boulders where your lips should have been

lifting them was back breaking my knees hyperextended and snapped bones crumbled under the granite pressure

i was losing my consciousness losing my reach

I stretched myself so thin thin like the ice in Gorman Park at the break of spring. thin like a girl before her junior prom thin like a string tied to dual telephone cans. If only you could hear me through them.

I held onto you like letting go meant death I haven’t died yet.

#poems #poetry #writerscreed #wnq-writers #poetryriot #poems of tumblr #spilled ink #spilled words #queer poets #queer poetry #gay poetry #gay #breakups #heartbreak

133.

This is it. You’ve won.

This is what had to happen for me to realize what a horrible person I have become. I guess you were right.

“You’re a cutie, you know that?”

Real cute how poisons morphed my tongue into foreign shapes I know it. Real cute how I couldn’t speak. Real cute how I cried for him to leave me be. How I sent an SOS to a friend that needed their own savior How I have officially been ruined

So cute.

I called him an angel after he robbed me of my harp and wings

a snake after i realized who he might have made me

#poetry #poems #rape tw #sexual assault tw #writerscreed #wnq-writers #poetryriot

A letter to my expectations (and also to a boy):

A friend turned to me the other day and said “expectation is the root of all suffering.” She claimed it was some quote from Shakespeare or Buddha or someone like that. I googled it later. It wasn’t from either of those guys.

It kind of stuck with me though. I thought about it for a long time, and I tried to apply it to my current situation. I’m twenty-something, broke, less than a week in a new city, and pretty much in a constant state of panic. All because of you guys.

to the Boy:

I’m still angry with you. Heartbroken and furious and sweating on the streets of Los Angeles. It’s so hot here. You’d love it. I don’t yet. It’s hard to, because I spend 90% of my time missing you and Brooklyn and our dog and the other 10% of the time trying not to miss you by drinking craft beer in hipster bars with people that tell me I’m doing “like, everything right.” It honestly feels like I’m making all of these changes to distract myself. I wish I had picked a city closer to my parents. Not that you really care. It feels as though you’ve already forgotten about the old me. I can hear your distain in our small talk. I feel your regret every time you pick up the phone. I really should stop calling.

to my Expectations:

Maybe cool it a little bit. I know it was a rush, to have your whole life planned down to the second. But you fucked me over. You had me saving for an engagement ring and planning a big, gay wedding in the Adirondacks. All of that for a boy that broke my heart with a text message on a Sunday morning. I know he loved me, but not as much as you said he did, and not as much as I needed him to.

No boy will ever be like he was. Stop telling me to look for what I had with him, because people in their twenties don’t fall in love like teenagers. They don’t fall in love like they’re running out of time. They fall in love only when nothing better is in their sights. Only when you’re the greenest patch of grass. Only when convenience meets sexual compatibility meets complementary aesthetics or whatever. Stop making me look for a Taylor Swift love story. Nobody wants that at this age, it’s time to grow up. Boys in their twenties fall in love with pictures and ideas. Not with people.

Also, stop calling them boys. I’m an adult now. These people breaking my heart are men. Men who are fully aware of what they’re doing. Men who are as selfish as I should start being.

So…

to the Man:

Please don’t call me. I’ll never be the greenest grass. I live in the desert now.

#poetry #prose #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #spilled words #twcpoetry #poeticstories #poetryriot #writerscreed #heartbreak #moving #los angeles #brooklyn #gay #gay poetry #love #quotes #132

The night sky is full of little light freckles that are as far away as I feel from you. It's hard to admit that although we are beneath the same sky, we are in two different worlds. I run my hands softy over my skin to remind myself that the fire between us left me with stinging burns and irreparable scars. I ache for that fire for it can warm me on the coldest of nights and caress my body with licking passion. But to you I am extinguished. You have forgotten how warm I can be. I wonder if any flames will do or if it has to be the third degree that you have given me. The stars seem to know. Their galactic fire twinkles with answers to questions I can't ask.

stars and fire

inspired by a request from @interstellarwarrior

(I am taking requests!!!!)