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other people's heartbreakfifteen year old father,
and he can't uncrumple the dollar bills for the automatic teller machine
where the bamboo walls

girls veiled in smoke,
thin-strap tank tops
the click and hiss of a soda can

she miscarries in the basement on a hot summer night,
the dregs of her uncle's offspring draining from her in hemorrhagic spurts,
her fingers bruising on the unsheeted mattress

mom and pop wake to a phone call from the county coroner
he is blue from the lake water and green from the nausea

and grandma knits afghans, over
and over
and
over
sonnet 130truth is,
darling,
i could live without you.

i could live without your face, your hair
but lines i dragged out fingers would dry and crumble:
wires and rust-chunks;
words' depth absent.

i could sleep without you every night,
but what bare scraps of rest unfurl today would evaporate tomorrow;
Morpheus could go before you in dreams,
but every particolor swirl of breath
would lack the vividness of yours.

i could live without your thoughts, yes,
but my own would be the worse for it.

i could live without you,
love,
but i wouldn't enjoy it much.
characterisationa pinch
and snort

he's sorry he doesn't talk to you any more, that he's let the wolf in his chest stir and rise from the long winter sleep
behind everything he breathes a sense of remorse
under everything he exhales guilt--
far under.

he's little fingernails scraping up the insides of his lungs like the insides of a pumpkin on halloween
he's cigarette smoke between cracked lips

he's the coldest desert dweller you've ever seen,
the shadow of a dune,
a long-limbed, white-skinned
traveler.
it arrivedimpale yourself on your own damn words,
drive the pen like an angry lover

rub cream on your knees where the purple-blossom bruises grow
make a bet on the number of tequila shots you can down before passing out

wake with your head in the toilet,
perfectly clean

a santitized breakdown when all you wanted was some good old-fashioned alley dumpster dirt.
heading towards homeheading towards home,
away from the the sun;

the longest sunset
hemophiliac darkness growing

stretching

flecks of light in cities,
stars,
a galaxy below our feet

and i'm drawn that way,
endlessly,
through atmosphere vapor, the lavender-peach-sorb-
et
of the sky
monolithi need march and april of last year.

i need, i want
i want to words. i want flow.
i want that
cold hundred mile an hour burst of wind and
words pouring,
fingers icicle shit magic
upturning smashing,
keyboard damaging, fountains of black keys

a taste the other day,
enough for hope and small for despair and

i'd just break and flower like i used to
those practical auditory hallucinations in the forefront of my skull, that
i wish i had what i used to

there's a harvest in here somewhere, a thought worth having, a break in the lines in the ice
in the space
broken

i don't know.

there's plenty of rough material, he said, but it's u
peace.a dog-eared copy of oscar wilde's dorian grey
tea-mugs,
islands,

feeling
remote

pale-colored window light beams in my boring
morning eyes
doll-face, girl-face
pastel-green striped men's shirt size extra-large

breathe my steam on the window and wait for winter dawn to break proper.
like a man who drowns himself loves the seathe teeth of choice barely rubbed at you through your clothes,
while i was scratched and scratched and scratched deciding

and the scars grew roots in my brain, thick and keloid white,
patterns i can't erase

i loved you like a murderer, like a hurricane
i loved you like a man who drowns himself loves the sea

i loved you like the two-ton anvil of responsibility i thought you'd handed to me too young

as rough your skin,
as rough
as

i worried just as much for you as for all the little sheep i left behind.
easter sundayone rises and another falls.
one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five resurrections since the birth of christ
and self-centered anxiety in a copernican universe,
heliocentric panic disorder

& it was knuckles
and ankles
and knees

and i couldn't look you in the eye

you write a lot of letters to god for an atheist.
countingshit
shit, I

two fifths of vodka for the crowd
a pair of crystalline relationships evolving:
the one descending and the other rising

things are going to come to a head

I can't do anything for your third suicidal crisis but sit and tell you you're beautiful from far away
I can't do nothing for you

climbing my own ladder, I can't do--

shit,
shit I

those hips
tiger, tiger, burning bright!a mollusk whispers
[baited breath]
"hello, darling,
we've been waiting. we've been--"

"looking,
and looking,"
the blind cavefish says

mutter and mutter
the clumsiest-sea-waltz
bridgesmashing breakstep

--falters, and--

words gushing
tenta-flushing
hashing, gashing,
silver-flashing

tiger, tiger, burning bright
in the forests of the night!

a call? an inter
-jection?

what immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?

you fool, we're in the ocean, not in the jungle!

bashful basking shark ducks his hammer head beneath the waves, and says
"i know, my friend, i know."
love poem at 30,000 feetmy loneliness an object,
a teacup or a teakettle
you

are my lodestone,
my magnet-
ite,

my
100 meters left of true north

my

soul ecto-string spooling out behind me
30,000 feet up
and the albumin-sea-jellies dragging their way across the mashed-potato sky

cold,
i am clad but feeling
numb-brained white-noise engines
organized turbulence unchaos

you are my lodestone,
my magnetite,
and i'm making my way across the sky
fall morningscigarette in hand
he said something about October,
smoke and breath mingling with the fog,
scarf wrapped thick around his throat,
but you didn't really hear

past his cold red-tipped fingers

slick and silent secret-keepers,
leaves sheened with yesterday's rain,
wax-coated gemstones rolled out

the product of your genetic anomaly,
the gods dashing themselves against the rocks
[he still doesn't know what happened to your mother]

you were tattoos all the way up
tasteful,
vines twining around your arms like dark green barbed wire,
martyr's ink hair shirt

and your toes went numb in your too-small
fashionable boots,
laces dipped in
teenage lover's lamentI wish we were adults
so that you could come over
and sit and watch as I did boring paperwork for my boring job

So that you could microwave yourself dinner
from the leftovers in my fridge

So that we could make love without hurry
and you could spend the night.
to love meto love me, here is what
you must do.

let me make of myself a mask
with three faces.  let me speak
to you this way, a careful
toe-over-toe turning, but do not listen.
gentle me slowly, slowly, until at last
i unzipper this piston pageantry
and step outside: my body
a tender blue frothing of breathspun
metal.  let me fly to you, unborn,
unbecome, unopened. believe me only
when i am not worthy of believing.

claim me.  wrap me into your fires before
i sleep again. violence me
softly, softly: cleave my spine
under the clamoring of your need.
wear me beaten.  wear me holy.  stare
into the machine that lingers
at my throat, that
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More from ~consolecadet

i'm not going to write you a love song1.
stretch marks in your pastel-blue bathing suit and you didn't care,
god,
you didn't care and i standing knee-deep in the lake with my stupid tie-dyed white jeans couldn't possibly comprehend how
how
you didn't worry what people thought.

2.
piano over beach towels and sand still in your hair
a pale dry day like good deserts.

3.
fire
guitar
more sand,
raked the night before
v was scratchy and squeaky and fat proud of herself and we laughed when you sang because the comparison was ludicrous,
god bless america.

4.
you
letters on a screen

i,
angina.
Never who you thought it was.I was cleaning up my trash today,
my closet trash, my ugly trash,
I was cleaning up my trash today
and I came upon your name.

I was a hoarder, a child,
an ignorant
keeping memos and mementos of every passing day.

My youth is tags and shoeboxes, catalogues, business cards from every place,
a notepad with your name on it,
a computer printout with your name on it,
purple gel pens,
a photograph with your name on it,
you--

My youth is a lot of time spent wasting and waning and waxing acrobatic
to bend over backwards as a bridge for those who'd burnt their own.
seeing reasoni do not want to scare you off like some startled animal
you small, large-eyed creature

i do not want to hunt you, amanda-ken.
boy-girl,
i do not want to hurt you

you, dry,
oiled last august when the sand was right
and all i want is to smooth you over like bad carpentry fixed

all i want is a belt sander and some time with your scratches

telling you things you can't do don't work too well,
amanda-
ken,
telling you you're love and honey won't sink under your skin.
world war iin the trenches of my depression--
and they are trenches, really, because--

i'm fighting in the trenches of my depression, fighting
in the trenches
fighting--

well, see,
see,
i'm stuttering machine-gun bullet casings casino poker chips
see
i'm nurse soldier armor,
some white starch uniform spread dirty over my man-muscle thighs
i am ridiculous in my weakness lying here on the cold hard ground with you lying on top of me

in the trenches, of, see,
in the trenches of my depression

we are all foxes and they are all hounds
ugly somethingyou are meat
he is meat
she is meat

we are corpses,
corpuscles,
druplets
mechanical parts of a larger whole,
lubricated by oil spills and Astroglide

slick shick schlick
you are meat, sons
you are bacon sizzling and grease slipping down the side of the pan
to the blood on your fistthe mounting foreboding
a cliche, you know
walls forever

a maze all around and chimney-stack above,
sky straight through

what good is sickness?
what is there to gain?
what good is the medicine cabinet
if all within is pain?

there's a mirror in a mirror and a mirror over that
and a clicking shattering shuddering
to the blood on your fist.

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January 17, 2012
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[x]

ode to an imaginary friend

:iconconsolecadet:

you came like an old friend,
watching,
waiting

thought i'd forgotten you, whirlwind black-eyed lonely child
tears in your eyes music in your soul space between your
ribs

warm in mornings, soft in nights
a feather bed for your troubles
plaid sleeping bags for the nights you can't bring yourself to lie down on the couch in the stuffed-up air between my arms

long live glory, long live night,
long live popcorn and hot chocolate and blankets and radiators
and a spot in front of the fireplace when the pilot light goes out

white-twig fingers child,
breath in winters
breath in chairs

breath in hallways, under stairs

and you in the webs between the bones between the smallest rips in time

--and you came when i least expected
:iconconsolecadet:
had 850something messages tonight.
i need to log in here more often.

this is different.

my head is fuzzy.
the inside, i mean, though i guess the outside is too.

this is vaguely about an imaginary friend i used to have. vaguely.
his name was carlisle and he had dark hair and sad brown eyes and he didn't smile much, but when he did, he only smiled for me.
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:iconmakingelectricity:
~makingelectricity Jan 22, 2012
this is so lovely.

long live glory, long live night,
long live popcorn and hot chocolate and blankets and radiators
and a spot in front of the fireplace when the pilot light goes out

i just love it. :heart:
Reply
:iconpuppetspoisonink:
~PuppetsPoisonInk Jan 18, 2012  Student Writer
i'm loving the imagery here... it makes me feel nostalgic.
Reply
:iconconsolecadet:
~consolecadet Jan 18, 2012
hurray, i succeeded! that was how i felt when i was writing it :>
Reply
:iconpuppetspoisonink:
~PuppetsPoisonInk Jan 18, 2012  Student Writer
:3 yay! :D
Reply
:iconlottie-girl:
~Lottie-Girl Jan 18, 2012  Student General Artist
A lovely poem, such captivating lines 'thought i'd forgotten you, whirlwind black-eyed lonely child', 'rips in time' and I can really relate to 'long live popcorn and hot chocolate and blankets and radiators.'
Reply
:iconalapip:
*alapip Jan 18, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
i heard you read this, Rachael.
you spoke it very well...

;)pip
Reply
:iconraemanzu:
~raemanzu Jan 17, 2012  Student Traditional Artist
Imaginary friends are awesome... I really like this.
Reply
:iconghost-apple:
*Ghost-Apple Jan 17, 2012  Hobbyist Artisan Crafter
Beautiful. :)
I remember having a huge dragon imaginary friend. I would run laps with him and my others in elementary gym class. It was magical. :)
Reply
:iconchazcartier:
~chazcartier Jan 17, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
excellent.
Reply
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