"You" Is a Second Personal Pronoun to Distance Oneself

You fly off of the hot handle
of a brilliant red pan
where you wish your hand
would rest for
ever.
You whisper to yourself,
"God, you deserve it,"
and God doesn't respond.
You learned it in philosophy,
that some people believe in faith
in God
being the same as faith
in romantic love.
If you talk to someone who
works in mysterious ways,
why do you try to make sense
of a damn human?
You're too similar to distinguish
yourself from yourself.
You mutter your problems,
but will never move to speak
to those who try to help you.
And you feel sorry for yourself.
Damn you.
You.

Drink and Be Mary

I would take your fork
and silence your groans
through grinding teeth
with my hand.
I would guide you to my table,
if you were hungry,
to dine with me.
First with spoons,
cupped to catch the beams
from a skyscraper in the city
that moves with flecks
of inorganic dust.
We would not eat,
but we would dine happily.

We would sit
by an indigo ocean
in a rowboat beached onshore.
We would drink from oily
oyster shells and make
the water as salty
as history made our tools,

but you deserve better.
I would lead you with one
hand on the crook
of your arm or neck,
the intimate places
no one wants to think about.
Into nothing; onto nothing
in the center of everything.
The flame of the sun
slides off the moon
and bleeds yellow watercolor
into our purple sky

and onto our hands.
We would stain ourselves
with moonbeams and beams
of trees through the dirt.
We would have all of our minerals
and smile with fingernail grins.

 Based very loosely on Margaret Atwood's work. Gooooodnight. -.+

Sleep Deprivation

Strange to be the last awake.
To stare into nothing,
pretending to do
something.
To take a picture
from a frame with cracked
paint on the edges, and pull it
to our faces with our mindlessness,
with arms out to catch the rush
of cloud as it falls from our feet.
We lift a feather pillow
to suspend it on top
of the peaches
that grow
out of the living room river.
Now I step on them,
an airy, bubbling jam
or jelly—I never know.
The rug is an ill blue.
The couch retires into itself
and welcomes me
as a worn traveler named
Peregrine.
I still walk on the peaches,
my toes motionless
like the shadowy moving pictures
the painters drew on
the ceiling.
My light and dark matter
makes meaning where I find
that fruit sprouts from only
water.
That makes sense.



Seriously sleep deprived... it's 2:00 A.M.! Yeeeeaaaa! (Does it bother anyone else that "yea" is spelled like "yay" now?  Everyone thinks I'm saying "yeah", but really I'm just stubborn in changing my word choice...)  This is supposed to be based on Gary Soto's work.  Haha.  But it really seems absolutely nothing like it.  But, you know what? Whatevs.  Maybe he'd write about sleep deprivation in whatever way it came to him when he was really freaking tired too.  Kiiiiinda mainly "inspired" by "Looking Around, Believing", I guess?
Last line because... what the heck, it's 2:00 A.M., I can do whatever I want, right?  And... if we wanna get all serious, people have a lot of issues with more abstract poetry, I find, even though this isn't really abstract.  Everyone thought "Above Each Other" was really abstract and couldn't figure it out at all -- but they thought it was okay.  There was only one person who really had issues with not understanding it, and would prefer to... so, still pondering making edits on that. 
WHY AM I NOT WRITING MY LAST POEM OF THE NIGHT?? Gah. :-( I wanna sleep instead.

Cell Walls

It is cool outside, biting
without causing pain.
I'm sitting, cross-legged
because the vents are silent
for five more minutes,
and sleepy with hours
of "nothing much"
looking at photos of daffodils.

I wonder how the plants know

to spring up in the dry cold.

I wonder how they want
to come back each time
after a long, bitter winter
like the mal taste of an almond.

The heat turns on
and makes the curtains
wave to our chloroplast-
filled friends in the dark
and nubs in the dirt,
pale because their two lips
have yet to be kissed
by the fire, silent still.
The air turns on and off
again while my feet switch.
Is it warm in their toes?
They cross and bundle

dead together and alive alone.
I count the minutes until
I'll need to sleep,
weakness of a mind.
I wonder if the flowers count
the seconds between
each cycle of the sun.

This is the first draft of a poem that is loosely inspired by Gary Soto's work.  I needed some stuff to turn in tomorrow for lit mag... so here I am actually trying! :-) (I'm a procrastinator.)  However, I actually do like this "modeling after a poet" idea.  Gary Soto and Margaret Atwood are awesome.  Mostly this is based on the usual simplicity (straight-forwardness) of Soto's work and his brief story-telling qualities.  I'll revisit it soon, I think, because I feel like it lacks a lot of similarities to the best things of his work [his unexpectedly beautiful words, 

"With an eye we lift up the peach tree

And hold it up to the wind —  white blossoms

At our feet." (Gary Soto, "Looking Around, Believing"]

but that's a thing to work on when I don't have hundreds of points on the line.  

 Edits made: "while it's cold" to "in the dry cold". "silent" to "silent still". "sun" to "fire".

A bunch of crappy poems because, you know, what the heck

I Don't Want to Share My Room, No Siree, I Dislike It On Any Day I Do

I really rather dislike
this line thing down the boards
that separates our sides
because yours is a real bore.
I'd rather have a wall
to replace that pallid tape
so I would not have to look
at your mess when I wake.

It really would be nice
to not have to shut my face
because you're chatting with your friends
on that website that starts with "face"! (You see what I did there? That is a perfect rhyme.)
Imagine your joy at it!
To line the walls with black
posters of your favorite bands
and your skeleton mask, Jack.

But alas, our brother lives at home
and still, so true, do we
so when you ask to turn off the light,
NO, IT'S MY COUNTRY TOO AND I'M FREE.
Butnotreally,though.

 An Anti-Ode to Physics

So what if you're law?  Screw that.

She Could Live in the Couch if She Wanted To

One day I was sitting here,
doing what I'm doing now,
when *all of a sudden*
from the couch I heard a meow.

I turned to look at what it was,
"You say Tina fell in the well?"
But my cat just stared at me like I was dumb
And I figured it was just as well. (I'm so good at this rhyming stuff, you guys.)

I wrote a haiku.

It's deep and real meaningful.

Oh, I'm out of space.

And then all of the cheese in the world became stinky blue cheese and I was sad.

You can tell I like to write stuff because of my impeccable descriptions.
"...general blah-ness..."

Teeny Oreo

When cats just wake up
with flattened black fur
on their side and face
and yawn and stretch
to shake themselves
back into their normal state,
that's a beautiful moment,
amplified by laying again
and hiding their eyes
between their paws
and soft claws.

I seriously have the sweetest cats.  Seriously.  And I love them so much!! :)

You’re in a bed of cotton sheets.

You raise your voice, cry, and laugh.

This is where I’ve always belonged,

wrapped tight in peppermint sheets,

surrounded by my sleeping family. 

It’s a tight fit.

Again with my not knowing where something came from.  Also, I am a big fan and proponent of the Oxford comma.
Edit 3/21/12 -- Hey! I think I read Gary Soto's "A Red Palm" for the first time before I wrote this. :-)