Birdhouses
Missed my chance to mean something.
Missed my chance to glean something.
Premonitions of deposition
got me sleeping with the lights on.
“Off with her head!”
Too many are predisposed to pointing fingers—
too many are desperately self-absorbed—
while at the end of the day they’ve
got enough skeletons in their closets
to fill a morgue.
Hang my head and paint.
Hang my head and pray.
Try to keep these colors from mixing
and turning gray.
My mind’s a faucet and it’s had a leak
since the day that I was born.
Thoughts fidget in my head;
fronts collide and cause a storm.
And I’m constantly torn.
But hey, haunted is the new norm.
Words trip over my lips.
Angry, in rare form.
Apologies stuck between my teeth,
enameled vises indecisive.
Tears stumble from the precipice,
my new creative license.
I’m running out of colors.
Too young to take a loss.
My echo-chamber brain is...
gold overgrown with moss.
Stipulations stir me from
hibernation; incubation of an
overactive imagination;
then insomnia pipes up
and steals the rest of
my vacation.
Sensory saturation.
Asservations, prerogatives unclear.
Thoughts medically
coiffed and curled under the
guise of motivation.
Afraid of medication.
Call me a rebel in
this Xanax generation.
Just a taste of progress
feeds my phobia of success.
So I stagnate
and create into a void—
no return address.
Heart punching in my chest,
punching tickets to worlds unseen,
as eyes wide shut I fly away on
every dream.
A civil war in Converse.
Imploding. Needly needs
threaded with routine.
Alphabet soup spilling out the seams.
Taste the words, bittersweet.
Conceived on a whisper,
but born on a scream.
Reality demeans, so I recede.
It’s nice in here, so I concede.
Phobia of progress is comfortably
killing me.
So till I can breach the slump
of “comfortably numb”
I sit and paint birdhouses.
It’s surprisingly fun.
Neat story with this one. My dad’s been making birdhouses and I’ve been painting them and it’s SO awesome. Super relaxing stress-reliever. That basically inspired this. It’s a fictional tangent from a troubled/unstable narrator who also paints birdhouses. Their fiction insecurities and struggles. Injected with a few of my nonfiction insecurities and struggles. So...a mixed bag. Also, I wrote the first draft of the poem, then saw the challenge, then was inspired to photograph the birdhouses. Dunno’ if order matters.