we remember what it's like to be in love: 3 poems
Tyler Dempsey
i turned out alright
I most certainly am not acting out, I inform Mom via ESP, as she silently bids me to exercise her extolled virtue of impulse control. Across from us at the dinner table looms a leering lech
At first, Grandpa thought a hawk had dropped a rabbit on Dad's head.
i turned out alright
Can I sue ABC and Universal Televison for making the Hulk’s transformation overly sexual? I ask a lawyer on Main Street, but he requests that I leave, he has to get a lice treatment.
Acne in my nose
Dust on my hands
Oil on my boots
Sugar in my blood
The drive to Connecticut was easy. There were hardly any other cars on the road. It was foggy and grey and the highway seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of me. The governor had warned against
“What’s so horrible about being able to take all the emotions you don’t want to feel and just vomit them out of you, and then you’re clean, you’re done with them, you’re numbed out and high?”
“What’s so horrible about being able to get high on your own emptiness, on your strength and your willpower, on your superiority, on how you’re able to get by on so little, you may as well be made of air?”
Feels like the hour before closing at Chuck-E-Cheese.
The cowboy hat envisioned itself a stampede of one, a solo herd, a runaway bandit.
Tell me the child remembers her mother.
Love. That’s all I want. That’s all we want. These people. These dogs.
“I can’t handle Taurus moons,” she said one winter afternoon, the two of us bundled with blankets and hats.“It’s definitely the placement of it in her 9th house that’s made her so stubborn and impenetrable.
What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational?
I have never found any authors to be aspirational.
The bullies, they made him feel young, alive. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was fairly sure the other teachers, after a glass of wine or three, would concur.
I am always wearing one of Freddy’s shirts. They are worn in perfectly and covered with jazz players on the front or artists that older people always recognize—artists I don’t really know anything about.
Asking if a computer can do art or science is like asking if a submarine can swim...
Every breakfast, lunch and dinner were meticulously documented, each square captioned with the day’s creation: superfood pumpkin risotto, fatty bananas (bananas and butter), avocado tomato mash, yummy liver and beets, creamy spinach and pear, soupy rice porridge, breast milk oatmeal, silky tofu, creamy vegetable soup
“...symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself.” – VALIS
“There’s a rose that grows on no man’s land, and it’s wonderful to see” – The Rose of No
i keep love around like a shirt i hope i’ll fit into again someday
“If you want, we can try to unlock the phone using your dad’s thumb.”
"Do it," I heard myself say.
you can convince someone of
anything at all
All Rachel ever wanted to be was a reality TV star. Rachel didn’t mind which show she ended up on, as long as she became famous and had at least 3 brand deals behind her.