Nonexistent Party

poor man’s wake
she’s forced to eat dirty crumbs off a
table where people have mourned
and she’ll suddenly remember what her first conversations with him were like,
and how he made a great impression,
showing off his words like toys,
smiles like remember-later momentos, the hidden interest like a skiddish moth
and how the progression of events was not
what she had hoped or thought.

the people have all already gone
their clothes strewn about like some strange
orgiastic afterthought;
only their memoried loss
nothing on the interior
the people are still dead to the grounds they are in only.

the house is empty
at this nonexistant party
your own kin
sings like him,
and looks a bit
like him.
it was long over
by the time
someone was dead.
it was long over when
you longed for somebody
that looked like him.

Copyright 2016 Golden Star Poetry 

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Falling for Voices

impassioned responses are…highly discouraged.

x x x x

1.
perhaps i miss
your voice;
so soothing,
almost feathery;
dark feathers and
the blue edge of a
quiet twilit night,
but your voice is all sadness
nothing living
your voice is the voice of the dying,
so loosly bound.

2.
i was so happy to love myself again
when you were gone
in every sense of the word (!)
and now i have the unbridled
freedom of an unbridled
horse,
coat smooth and shiny sheen
and they all ask me where you’ve been
and i just smile and preen:
these things happen.

3.
twilight, how could i see thee
how could i find the way back to my home
when you never lit your own lamp for me?

4.
(this is my dream:)
i am with myself and new father
and the fog makes me awake
and i am so warm and safe
and i say
i did wait

5.
i don’t know much about
the voice that sits like an even tempered rod
off-white yellow, tightly wound.
(he gave me a good shake up)
and i’m pretty sure
this voice
won’t be the right choice
and we will simply
split our differences;
two terribly frank kisses
and call it a week.
i pass the people in the parlour
thinking is it
too futile to even speak?

Copyright 2016 Golden Star Poetry

18 days

all that is left
are the small things in my memory:
i remember you smiling
but that is all,
and i remember you smiling
but not very much.
i said hello,
you said give me some time.

Copyright 2016 Golden Star Poetry

A Bad Sign

I’ve based this all on a shaky belief
whereamigoing whereamigoing whereamigoing
i believe i was put here for a purpose
i believe i have exploited that purpose
in an innapropriate manner.

i am nervous on all fronts
emotional,
physical,
i am standing, teetering
you who asked me to remain calm
my ocean of lovers and friends
my ocean,
i have lost you all.

i thought i was a believer of
doing the right thing
but i was just on the edge
happily unaware,
and on the edge.
now im over,
now im a different person.

i see that face of yours and its all i am;
that face with those features,
it’s all i can cling to.
but even that is elusive.
and everything means very little.

goodbye,
i shed my skin
like a snake.

hello,
in seperate, non-correlative parts
a bit myself but
mostly a shadow of my frame.
i want to cry but tears dont come out.
it isnt a pleasant sign
and i can’t enter a new domain.

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry 

I romanticize all the moments that went wrong

I’ll be getting this published in my school newspaper hopefully; the theme for submissions is “regrets”, so here you go:

1. I stood next to you, and you closed your eyes, waiting for a present. I gave you a kiss. I ran away.
2. I sat next to you, on the bus. I asked for your name. I never saw you again.
3. we all sat in a ficus tree, waiting for the outdoor play to start. then one of you let me down the tree on your back, secure. we saw the show and left our separate ways, back to our homes over the sea.
4. I rehearsed asking if I meant anything to you but you didn’t seem to understand my subtlety and said “of course”
5. I think I loved you but I never said that I loved you in the way that a lover tells a lover that she loves her.
6. I flew over your neighbors backyard and broke my ankle, I learned a lesson but became petrified of the jump.
7. when I went to the observatory, the planetarium shows flew at me, I was petrified of sudden loud noises and collosal explosions, the speed of mars hurdling into me
8. on my 14th birthday I said I was infatuated with a person that wasn’t you and when you countered that you were dating someone else it hurt.
9. when I saw you the last time I never said anything, i just stood and took your blessing and wished I could savor the feeling of your fingertips brushing my elbow, of your hair against my forehead, because reminding myself that you were going wasn’t going to help me any. I cried in the bathroom stall and came out like it was nothing at all.
10. since you were responsible for my life I wish you could have been somewhat stronger and less afraid, so I could say your name with pride; so i didn’t have to search for you in everyone.
11. I wish I had never cried at the end of the show, rushed to embrace his velvet doublet, to stain it with my saltwater, to hear him say oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god—

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

Progress/No progress

i am trying
not to empathize with
just anything
that reminds me of you
but even when the six letters
of your name
are enshrouded in metaphors
or emblazoned on tee shirts
I’m going to find my nearest bathroom stall
and cry for an hour
I’m going to sit in my room until
12 O’Clock, with my dull aching chest that
yields to crumpled and
compromised exhaling
even if it isn’t you
even if it’s only someone like you
even if it’s only the extended idea of someone like
you,
you’d best know i’m alone behind the bathroom door
listening to the neighbors screaming under the floor
wondering why this doesn’t seem to stop from
being relevant anymore

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

Precious

I’ve started watching Broadchurch. Wrote a poem about it. Took less than three minutes, no edits really.

and I came closer,

and I was reminded of myself

so many layers behind

so many thousands of years away

and there we were,

suspended.

I am loathe to speak ill

to cast you out over the sea

bread crumbs, fleshing out misdeeds

and I stayed still,

to let it wash over me.

I am young once

I am still young

I have a very small voice

and I have very small hands

it comforts me to know this

it comforts me to know I am capable of being

comforted.

come,

the sea will not hurt you or me

and neither will the touch.

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

Alternate Timeline

as i safeguarded you
i knew there would always be a tomorrow when,
lazily draped over the sun
there you would always be,
your face.

you tumbled onto a grassy shelter of concrete
your edifice
sanctuaried here, on this
lone bus stop.

i’d mourn,
but no one has been laid down
no one is dead.

if it had all been real, though
i’d mourn the thought of being squashed down
being lost somewhere in the middle;
i’d murmur in the moment i had touched the
solid gold year, the ripe fruit of the fresh year
the orange-blossom-laden year
palm to heart, pressing like a dart
pressing my torso,
rocking:

mourning for a dead moment
i stood by the stoop
mourning for the still moment
short minutes long,
that i held the crisp autumn air of ripe truth
when i held your water eyes in mine-
when i had looked into my calm, opiate future
in your pooling eyes:

i saw the book-filled apartments and the
late nights and the
long trips and the
aching shade and the
long walks down the city streets,
talking or laughing of nothing at all–
but you needn’t look to find me now,
all i ever do now is mourn.

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

Scene in a City With You in It

Childhood Expectation Versus the Real Life;

when you were still young,
you’d see a pastel forest in her,
that weak-in-the-knees beauty
or share a little smile,
a little tangible gift.

when you entered the scene
though a bit distraught,
you were caught
in a dead dream of never-tomorrow
and the smooth dark wool blanket dreams
you’d prepared for so long only to have them

smothered out by some smaller
little pet part of your heart,
bubbling slowly along with her-
you thought you could wait it out
you thought you could wait it out

you were living under a fear-cloud
singed by romantic off-yellow lights and the city around you dark
you were huddled in an
oversized dark wool coat, yours or someone else’s
because you had never tried,
even though you had.

winter-bitten, you saw the man
who should have been waiting up for you
who lacked the good mystique
who lacked everything,
who tasted of bitter mellon and
two vermilion cheeks,
and you knew it, just as you did when you
held her hand
those many years before,
that love was a long way’d around,
love was a long, long, long way’d round
and long still yet:

too late to show up, too late to care
you say, as you cradle your own arms
drink in your own breath,
sigh in your own poetry
sing your own nighttime lullaby.

(the chilly air seems cozy,
you say
it’s time at last, to rest,)
and you are a small dot on the park bench
in the snowy city, alone.

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

Gothic Midwestern Folktale

I read a scary story and now i need to get out the scary feelings so i wrote a poem and im feeling a little better now
–GSP

you’re not sure
if I’m scared
or if my hands are just shaking under the moon
are my hands shaking, under the moon?
(believe in whom,
believe in whom?)

these gazelles, for hands, will take things for you
try to run after them!
what can they consume?
do you have the room?

I am sure
that I am scared
my hands can remember shaking under the moon
are my hands shaking, under a pale blue moon?
(cry to whom,
cry to whom?)

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry