Visual Poetry

“Emo Piece” — 2023

i’ve always adorned this adhesive knowledge that everything will work out for me, it’s always been a fact in my mind. but sometimes when i don’t feel my community as strongly, i don’t believe in that divine presence on a whim i find those pieces shatter before me and i crumble trying to pick them up, scooping glass into my hands and cutting my palms. and i’ll look around the room with tear filled eyes and wonder why nobody seems to see me cutting myself in the corner, they’re laughing, disguised and hungry for each other. eventually my energy will shift and i will accept my loneliness, my fate of nothing, my potent proximity to the things i’ve always wanted but can never reach. i’ll look to the past for answers, find more questions, call myself a nostalgic alien. look around the room at the artifacts of times that are long gone now and understand that life is simply about seeing where u go. i’ll be the philosopher in the room looking to my left and right and waiting for someone to drag the joke out of me, i am not the punch line. i’ll forget how much i usually laugh but eventually circle around to the same old feeling of life returning to me .. the good one, where i’m excited, where everything’s funny. i sit in my easter sunday dress with the hurricane that ran thru my family and study the internet for a cure, listen to 2hollis on soundcloud, endure my new morning routine of free styling to a youtube beat just to make sure the day starts freely. i’ll find new things to subscribe to and be the painkiller my friends always need me to be, all i ask is that they take me like they take the other drugs.

Compartmentalizing my reality into parts for babies and parts for adults. Topical prescriptions targeting my heart which holds a wish bone like a bouquet of flowers, waiting to see who’s gonna be the lucky one here. My heart the flower girl at my parents wedding predicting the year their photo gets taken off my grandma’s wedding wall and placed into a box I will come across years later and think “damn, they look hot.” People’s true colors bleeding into one another creating an unnatural pattern on a plastic leaf that is dropped under a tree. I find it, pick it up and put it in that same box where toxic love rests in my Grandma’s house. In the other room my grandma will hold my hand, ears open and ready to receive. We’ll gossip and laugh and I’ll know it’s possible to be happy, even at 93.

Mistakes are mistakes are lost children, are broken canals and neuropathways. Are not intended for me to analyze like a mirror, like the mirror on a bad day. Mistakes are mistakes are not always about me. Mistakes in a dying bees coat, once you know the mistake the stingers gone, can’t sting you. But does continue to buzz near your ear a moment longer.