My heart bled out onto the notes that I wrote. Leaving me to cringe over my vulnerability, that appears more like naïvety to me now.

I began to feel shameful and quite foolish, as I watched the perpetual cycle I’ve been repeating pounce off of the screen and slap me in the face.

Causing my rose colored glasses to slip down the bridge of my nose and shatter upon hitting the ground.

So, here I find myself feeling unsure if I have grown wiser and stronger or just weary and defeated over the past four years.

It’s a softer light than what they say

Top heavy mountain listing off toward the compression of grief

I can fight a fury from the ground up

Stitch the rage into stomach lining

Drop my organs into the donation box

I’ll let it pass for a safety net

We all sleep on the ground sometimes

We all live in the open air sometimes

It’s only smart thinking

Call it a last will and testament

Charcoal as a beneficiary

I want to bury the inheritance

I want to cut out my own throat

Drown in the aftermath

Did you only love me

Because of close proximity?

Did you slowly hate

who I became?

A girl with dreams is beautiful

But a woman's wildfire woe

You claim the wish

that I had stayed the same

But it wasn't me who changed.

Starry eyes

You idolize

Those older boys

That sell their lies

You fell into their world

away from me

Bitter jealousy, it brews

You hate my friends

Force me to choose

I found my way without you

now I see

The problem between us

Was never me

You abandoned ship then claimed

I left you stranded in the sea

While I broke my hands on anchor chains

Trying to pull you back to me

But if you're going down

Then go down, dear.

I will not sink with you

If that's what you think I'd do

I'm sorry

Then maybe it's true

I've changed.

But I will not be chained to you.

Darling, that's the one thing I will never do.

Was I just convenient, me?

You never asked about my dreams

Knew nothing more about me

than my name

While I pinned all my hopes on you

Waking up and coming through

The only thing you left me

was the blame

All that remains

Is a sinking ship

I thought the captain goes down with

But you dove down into the depths

And left me here

Cold water rushes in

I let it cleanse you from my skin

I will never let you in again, my dear.

joy eats me up like a shark attack

it takes whole chunks under

leaving red trails like ribbons

it takes my heart in the dead of night

and smashes into me at 5pm

when i take my common route home

it takes my leg out and pauses

like a shark attacking

it realises i'm not what it usually eats

it re-evaluates

realises we weren't made for each other

it allows me to scream

it allows me to find the shore

i pull myself out coughing, choking

i kind of wish it had have killed me

because now i'll have this memory

this missing part of me

a fear of the ocean

You put the casual in casualty

While I hear the one in a one night stand

I made up my own reality

It’s not your fault. You’re just a man

With needs those needs were met

No need for me. Time to forget.

Easy comes as easy goes

A truth everyone but me knows

Love me I beg

Love me, reneged

Keep writing love songs in my head

Just a fling

No one gets hurt

But I built kingdoms

In your desert

Thought I could be your oasis

Fill up all your empty spaces

But you don’t want

Morning calls, thinking of you

Homemade lunch packed afternoons

Heart filled notes, sweet kiss delight

Dancing days or racing nights

I loved another. He left too

So I’m replacing him with you

Can’t fill the void, used like a toy

I swear to God I’m done with boys

We began just like a dance

A music swell, a soft romance

Sometimes you waltz

Across my mind

And I almost think I find

Myself again in your embrace

The only place I once felt safe

But then you left for brighter shores

Swore I would think of you no more

It killed me but I cut the chord

Severed ties that we’d spent time tying

It hurt like hell but I’m better for it

The love is dying, but I’m not dying

I closed the book on you and me

Wrote the end of the final chapter

Didn’t waste my time on dreams

On what comes after

The ever after

Swept back in my life again

Taking the form of a raging storm

Your waves still crash

Upon my shore

I’m glad you’re back

Won’t ask for more

I wrote the white knight off

Into a faded sunset glory

I thought the love was lost

Forever. End of story

That was our story

I closed the book on us back then

Wrote the end of the final chapter

Didn’t think we’d begin again

Love could come after

The ever after

You and I

A soft refrain

I’ve got stuck in my brain again

I only hope this time you stay

I only pray this time you stay

Self identifiable

Divisive undeniable

You say you are so you must be

Politics as personality

Is our newfound reality

So much for the land of the free

When I watched the movie Idiocracy

I didn’t think that it would be a prophecy

Of the world we live in

That will slowly, surely give in

Underneath the weight of all of your hypocrisy

The tolerant won’t tolerate

And peace dreamers the first to hate

Fight a war to end a war. Makes sense.

Meanwhile the youth are carried on

Without knowing what’s going on.

The hyperbolic news has made them dense.

America the beautiful

America the fruitful

America the worst place you could be

How awful you must have it

To think everything’s so bad

Here in this place where you have always been so free

To burn a flag in effigy

And yell out fuck all the police

And not get jailed or hung or stoned to death

We used to have the strong belief

That anything could be achieved

If we put our minds up to the test

Did we just get lazy

Or have morals become hazy

To the point where right and wrong just don’t exist?

Now it’s left or right

Either agree or start a fight

Our harmless words are answered with closed fists

Sticks and stones

Will break our bones

But words will start a war

Your opinion’s my opinion’s

Wrong unless its yours

We were built upon the blood

of patriots who fought through mud

so you could take a knee

oh say can you see

Every hand they lend you

Comes attached with an agenda

Those are strings, Pinocchio, watch out

Don’t trust in the media

And don’t eat what they’re feeding you

Their fruit is always grown in poisoned ground

Our house was built with solid brick

No outsider could fuck with it

Our demise would have to come within

Cherry pick the past, delete

Our history doomed to repeat

The ties that somehow bind us

Growing thin

Where do we begin?

Have you ever been embarrassed for that guy or gal on the stage singing karaoke? Have you wished there was a polite way to tell them that maybe they should just not?

Look, I get it. We all love to sing. That is so awesome! Singing is a sure sign that someone is happy and wants to please others. I too would love to make the world happy, but like me that person on stage would have a much better chance at making others happy if they handed them an ice cold Coca-Cola rather than festooning them with that off-key screech… or in the case of Prose, penning in verse. My poetry is every bit as bad as my singing... shallow, predictable, distasteful. It is best for me, and you, if I stay off of that stage.

This challenge prompted me to a post about the poetry on Prose. I have done a couple of Iamagoofball’s “Dig Site Challenges” on storyteller’s, so why not do one on poetry? Naturally, I looked up Posey’s profile. Posey is my favorite Prose poet, even though she has temporarily left us. I was disappointed to find just 30 pieces remaining there, but I read through those 30 posts, first post to last, and also through my own comments at the bottom’s of them, fascinated at the obviousness of my growing respect with every new one she wrote. Posey has left us, and has taken many of her poems with her (more is the pity). The one’s left behind are not her best, mostly word challenge responses, but they are still golden, my fellow Proser’s… pure gold. Fortunately the thirty left behind are plenty enough to remind me that her poetry is what made me stop writing it. I mean, when I read Shelley and Byron I get psyched! Inspired! Pumped! I truly believe that I can do this!

Then I go read @Posey and see the hopelessness. Or @Undermeyou… same effect. Or @SoMoSoGo… also gone. Sigh. Whatever feel they have for meter just is not in me. These poets have depth in their lines, and taste, and texture. It is like their poems are darkened rooms you may enter just long enough to taste life through another’s tongue. They drag my bleeding emotions across the page with their words. They knot my muscles, and choke my breath, and grate ever so lightly on my last nerve, similarly to how a massage therapist would work over a bone spur.

And dammit, that hurts so fuckin’ good! As soon as I’m done reading it I rush in search of new writers in the hopes of stumbling across another that might rub me that just-so pleasantly-painful way once again, but it is so hard to find, and harder to maintain poem after poem, and again. Most of us cannot. Sadly, the majority of us screech on that stage, and must be content with branch-hopping, mimicking the songs of they who can soar.

We exist under infinite skies

You and I

An ellipses that never resolved.

I've come back to this town

Still chasing you down

The star around which I revolved.

A planetary love

I've failed to think of

You looked better in the rear view

I fear

But I fall so easily in

Orbit once again

Your gravity pulling me near

For a weekend

Let's pretend

Play husband and wife

Like that's the life

we could have made

if maybe one day

i'd learn to stay

Waste today wishing on stars

That will fade

This is not who we are