i am a little bit happier than you are

you said you hated me three times

you bit me a hundred and one times

you broke my nose also

you said i would’ve liked that

you drank your coffee set it down

breathed into my armpit

said i had too much hair in my armpit

why do boys have so much armpit hair you asked

then made a sound on my stomach

can we leave you said

you refused to be a sister to your cousin

i can get into serious fights with children you said

you wanted to murder me

you told me to get a life

when i asked you if i should revise my poems

you said write new ones

i almost felt like the luckiest boy in the world

i got burger king coffee because mcdonald’s was closed

you would rather die on a hill

your teeth feel violated

you want to walk and study at the same time

please be interesting you told me

when can you be less lame

i'm sorry i kicked you in the stomach

you wanted to eat me alive

you wanted to bite me

you bit me

you left my face red with marks

tao’s poems aren’t as funny without you to laugh at them

i am getting sentimental now

there are many somethings in my eyes

you said i kicked you in the head

i didn’t

i would’ve never gotten over it

 

melissa juice

someone wants to talk to me in the bad garden, but sometimes shadows vibrate so uncontrollably. and when i sit down to write, so too does the fear that i'm about to be murdered. so i pop my veins. i pick up my heart where i left it

i am sorry i didn't look at you more than i did, though we both know there’s not much i could've done about it, time being linear, free will mostly quantum

it’s pretty weird being alive, like seeing the sun when you enter a building and feeling hail when you reach the roof

you weren’t a mosquito, if anything i was, and you get to a point in your life where you don’t want to say “you get to a point in your life”

i want what goes on in my head to be as unlikely and as empty as music. i want you to think of me as something you can't be sure you’ll see again 

i am not a stable, i’m a rope tied to one of your hooves, pulling

i am suddenly realizing i am entering the stream of consciousness mode, watch me enter my own stream of consciousness, as tho i weren't always already in it

ren i am speaking to you now from the middle of this poem i love you can you believe it i’ve never said that to anyone in anything i’ve ever written before

i owe you a lifetime in pervert years

‘there is something sick inside of me but idk what’ could be a lyric & maybe is but i probably stole that

i swear to god if someone comes knocking on my door i will never give them my laptop

you’re making your money work for you

i let it hangout

no matter what falafel i am sitting before i always fold

has water ever refused to boil for you?

feeling like i wasn't awake was a weird way to live i admit

i am on the edge of something good here

i am on the edge of the bad garden

refusing to go in

you are standing in the middle wearing something that makes you look naked, or something that would make it very easy for you to become naked if you wanted to

you are not wearing lipstick

you are not playing any tricks

still i perceive you as a trick

still i cannot look you in the eye

i am going to miss this opportunity to talk to you i just know it

i am going to fuck up this chance for us to be friends

which we are i admit it

you were a friend and more than a friend but you were always a friend

friends is at the foundation of everything we were

i take the bad brain medication and it kindly suggests i take my life instead

trash cans chase me when i clock out, whatever that means, if

my greatest goal is to snap a synapse on you, to fracture some part of my mind so that i can be restrained

one trick i can no longer do is pretend like there is a future

read this and tell me now if you think i am in a place to “catch up”

the love you took away has made me a better writer

for that i thank you

and no, it hasn’t helped putting words on my brain

it has been like acid

every day i am farther

 

a bird blocks out the sun and suddenly

the base of that rained on, yanked up tree looks like a sculpture

or a mushroom. either way, i know that stump knows it won’t grow up

to be a pencil or a yacht. there is something comforting in seeing

someone who can’t stop crying, like the impulse to never wash

your sheets again, or watching the wet leaves looking like green shit.

mostly i want the days over with so I can be hungry again, or remember

songs i overplayed. i’ve been trying to figure out what to do with

pain’s itch, how soon i want it to end. depression’s optimism lies

in its removal of fear. and the thought that the love someone said

would never die is the only thing i’d like to kill. there’s not a

night i don’t feel what i won’t again. buttoning my shirt i fell

to my knees and couldn't see the point of getting up. can i start

this over with someone else’s heart.

 

sunny evil day

why do i keep talking like i’m alive? my thighs are not where i left them

ren’s cat ate my words, giving new meaning to the colloquialism about the tongue, its being caught

it was just the other day i noticed my nose for the first time. i wish i could bring you here with me

last night, you were the baby running around the park, kicking the red ball, pulling your mother into a church

so these are the ways you’ll show up in my life from now on i thought. now that you're not here, i think i’ll write a novel, or whatever theo did with trauma. i’ve never met or lived without them

“i miss the feeling of eating too much butter at the movie theater.” i wrote that in a journal i’ll never use again

the sky smells like a daycare & i feel like a balloon going thru it. every star is terrible

while sarah read her poem i thought of how you’d probably reiterate that there’s nothing to be sorry for, how i wouldn’t know how to be that

walking home i see priests humping trees & feel proud

“i am in a stranger ocean than i wished, or thought possible, or would ever cast on anyone”

i feel like walking back from the dead

 

cute beast

cardigans make me feel medicated

the aftercum looking like holy water

you taught me how it feels to undergo

another’s change of head. still i think

your uggs are pretty, your incense shit

if i tried saying what i've been up to

i'd give you the image of me pissing on a fly

had a talk with my depression and it said give up

so i gave up

i probably looked insane on the bus listening to your favorite songs, which i don't even like, which i don’t even know

one day i woke up and got used to the idea of never seeing again

but that was before

“your mind’s all you need to escape”

shut up, shut the fuck up

spent the day jerking off & reading jung

the only reader i’d have if i had a choice would be you

and do you even read these things

are you even here right now

i am going to take a modest guess & think no

that the moon might look electronic every now and then doesn’t make me worth it

and isn't it funny

how some people go away

 

poem with chair and shirt thrown over it

you really can stop lying to yourself someone else’s mouth said. my skin gets warm without me

i am convinced my therapist has the wrong keys. i should've started not leaving my room a long time ago

you throw simone at me when i don't understand, which i don't understand

you came close like a cat and like a cat you tapped me

i don’t remember the last time i washed my sheets. when my dad says prime i think meat

do you remember when we were leaving that restaurant and sophie hugged us and winked as she went into the subway? that was fucking strange, and beautiful, like i wouldn’t see her again, or like she loved us, or wanted to, but all the same was as unsubstantial as air

sometimes i want to hug myself, but i'm afraid of what won’t happen if i do

some days make me worse, especially days i write well. worse because indulgence of pain, giving it space, and so increased claim on my life. that’s the wrong way of looking at it, i know, as is “that’s the wrong way of looking at it”

you do to my mind what coffee does to my heart. evil lives in my mouth

tho probably problematic of me, i like that the names of drugs are girls. i want to be a girl crying on a first date

standing naked in my room, the air i breathe takes a minute to reach my feet. later 5g’ll burn a hole in my thigh

the other night i vocalized my desire to die and a car almost hit me. why do only the bad wishes almost come true?

every day i imagine you disguising yourself more elaborately so as to be completely unrecognizable the day i finally let you see me, the day i finally let myself see you, me thinking you have the wrong person when you come up and smile and i hold back what i didn't know i had

several days ago i read (and not in any nightmare) I came to a city that looked like the setting for a tragedy, then heard a group of girls across the restaurant say, it’s a real place

whatever way you were i didn't mind. it makes me laugh now to think of the excuses. not an artist, grad school, the pressure of love at your back. just say you were scared. i was scared too