teenknifecrime

[teenknifecrime]

sunweed

this is a new head sown to some old tail— a brand new graft grown off a salvaged tendril and this mutant refuses to get fed eating up the sun through rails on a balcony.

me and all my friends are plants and we get bored of the reward without the risk, get fed up taking root in the rug, ruts in rows through kitchen tiles. so we go out in the night— suck life from city.

we stay electro turning greenhouse fear to joy— turn the glow of crosswalks into fuel for our moves. we turn the lust we feel for our sparks, captive and coming from behind the draw of so, so many blinds, into light.  

#plants #poetry #poem #poets on tumblr #quarentine #lockdown #free #spilled ink

[teenknifecrime]

well known cruise

I will forget your face, so I have to blow it up. pocket a memento from a frame and study what you look like on my hike home— try and recall what I couldn’t memorize from a glancing lip across a brow, the palm of a cheek, our mindless graze for hours.

you’re already such a blank that, soon as possible, I paint a picture of your picture and hope reproduction spackles the hole— already deep and upset, so empty and threatening to suck up more important memories. hoping above hope to take some space.

in some years I’ll stand next to that portrait smirking from the pile and I will long, I think, but won’t remember why.

#chuck close #painting #ekphrasis #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #well known cruise

[teenknifecrime]

a victim of the faucet

I can be tempted into retreat, but a tempt is never enough. so, I give in to a metaphor— dedicate my life to it. gather my bright dead things, all my pretty ones, and we crow. we see a wolf and we call it a wolf. we have some horses.

why not do the same? attack out from a center fold and grow big enough to finger slow lightning along the wounds of night sky. shrink back down and crawl unaccompanied across a foreign desert eating up a field guide’s worth of landscape: goldenrod and rhododendron.

suck mad honey from the comb until you appreciate the wild beauty in ordinary beasts. realize people are all trees making up the same grove together, the same chimera: desolate us.

fear can tempt if you’re still desperate from the lack of plague years, still wary and cautious with the owl’s insomnia. don’t feel fear walking up the oracle of Hollywood Blvd. show her who’s boss.

#poem #book titles #samplling #cut up #poets on tumblr #spilled ink

[teenknifecrime]

que celebrar

(for Madeline Johnston)

the quiet used to be damp and slow— a crawl from an always open window, across rooms always too dim lit and I would sit, always at the other end. back like usual to the unlocked door— daring the world.

I would be still and quiet would slink right up to my feet— break, roll, churn back against the pitch of my blood.

then I’m not sure when— quiet stopped being a guest, became a host— tame sheets and so giant. like the strumming of a midwife at an uneasy spray of fresh feathers— eager for this world to appreciate the offspring.

#midwife #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #celebration #quiet #happy new year

[teenknifecrime]

alix lacloche and a semester abroad

somebody died today and they were remembered. maybe they sang a song and strangers heard it and fell in love— sang along and felt love. maybe they were in a movie once and those gray eyes across a crowd through slated light pierce the silver and exist in countless fantasies for all time. or maybe they did nothing— took the bus or took unflattering pictures of the moon when it moved them and were adored.

somebody died today and they closed their eyes and slipped away while a son’s eyes followed them out through the full rooms of a house to an open front door. maybe they just never came home and were held so close and so gone it got tough to hold hope, too. and after not long enough a wait they were let go— let but never abandoned. they died today and you remembered—

you said their name hard into a void that would never recognize it and you stared new creases into a photo that, even after so much time, will be less familiar than your memory. you’ll look through their clothes, pick up a broken pot still vibrating their touch through space and when you do it’s like they’re still alive. like time hasn’t chipped the paint from the memory— ruining details, but leaving the portrait, for now.

it’ll be like that for years and years from now. but, today someone died and in France the sun is coming up.

#brand new #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #alix lacloche #spilled ink #death #elegy

[teenknifecrime]

First pub of the year.

#honey literary #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink

[teenknifecrime]

nothing for you

(for Ernest Hemingway) I can feel the gore of the horn down the length of a thigh or partway through a kidney, even though I’ve never grabbed a bull.

or feel the sharp ring of recoil as it leaves a bullet, leaves the barrel, up the musket to contuse the tendon of a shoulder even though I’ve never hunted for sport.

I can even feel the rattle of a car wreck— numb, singing, flashing from the busted window of a pile up.

but those are sensations and I feel them in my hands and the always stop, like the stampede of a white elephant, when I close the book.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #hemingway #spilled ink #National Poetry Month #april 28th #30 Poems in 30 Days

[teenknifecrime]

wrong muscles

some times I flex and its weird— not the kind I like, but the rip still comes, the tear, the heal of mass, maybe weight. strong rubber wraps in ropes around weak points, the gaps of every thing I am not.

soon I’ve grown and when I manage to make it to a mirror, I see the faces of every hand that’s ever held a knife to my throat— I feel every slice they left go dim, submit to scar tissue and drown in a hard pile of contempt. buried under the wrong kind of muscle.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #muscle #weakness #national poetry month #april 27th #30 Poems in 30 Days #xiu xiu #spilled ink

[teenknifecrime]

holorama

we’re back on the dawn of another cicada summer another proof of the travel through time. our breathing out has a frequency and it adds to the noise of the universe as it expands. so your pitch went into all those insect young as they slept— they went in the ground just weeks before you did.

now to those million bugs you’re still here, still vibrating in their bellies as they go on to glut countless predators who will die and feed countless trees with their bodies— will your sound live on in those predator bones in that wood?

in seventeen years will the stump ask about you to the ax?

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #hologram #National Poetry Month #april 26th #30 Poems in 30 Days #cicadas #elegy

[teenknifecrime]

do you think the car will start?

what if the force we need isn’t the brutality of strength? we’ve been trying to explode our way with tons and tons of pressure to another plane when the spread of that beating is a waste of our energy.

what if force is just an exertion of purpose? of the move away from the float and flow of moments— of being taken by a current.

what if we get off our backs off the cool stream of time’s surface and plant soles in those shallows? let’s break on through with our movements, not hope to blast doors open with our actions.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #National Poetry Month #april 25th #30 Poems in 30 Days #philosophy #manifestation

[teenknifecrime]

hell efficient

maybe in some old world some young braided viking crosses cobblestones barefoot. past the ruins of a longhouse and through a thick and empty field to a real life glacier and screams a real warning into the ice and you’ll write a book about her courage.

I’m a new world rough and in California our ruins are made of red wood. I can walk through my apartment to a refrigerator and yell at water in a plastic tray— hope that when those cubes break open behind the glass of a museum years from now, the future will feel my breath.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #hell #efficient #spilled ink #National Poetry Month #30 Poems in 30 Days #april 24th #california #climate change

[teenknifecrime]

blew with envy

this is how you know where to cut— when I haven’t mentioned a minefield in months.

no matter the number of revisions of that same night I’m forced to live— or maybe numbed reckless by the repetition— I don’t feel the threat anymore.

no longer have the drive to fear the dark— the hungry and predator fangs multiplying there. I don’t watch where I step anymore and any chance I get, stop in my tracks hoping to hear the sound of ticking and some wires I can walk towards.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #envy #National Poetry Month #april 23rd #30 Poems in 30 Days #risk

[teenknifecrime]

boss of the horns

by the time I walked into that ghost room, to my bed all the glass had depleted so much from my body my skin was thin.

a dirty look or passing glance could draw blood if I wasn’t careful, but so could the saw teeth of a knife.

despite the dimming of the human from my features in all the mirrors, I was delicate. that dawn I got home, already a block of ice in my sweater—

I felt every look from each ghost eye cut at me so bad, all I could do was aim for my bed and dive— hide until the sun was high and the house empty—

until the ghosts had grown bored of the wreckage.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #national poetry month #drug poem #ghosts #april 22nd #30 Poems in 30 Days #boss #horns

[teenknifecrime]

black cat vs. the flamingo

cats can smell and for months this stray finds every last trace scent of our old dog. sprays and rips at rooms until we know the cat knows— he wasn’t here first. makes us pay for the deception.

two apartments later when the smell of the old boy finally stops offending the cat, we settle— become a family with a pet for good.

until one day months after the move, kitty claws— tears to shreds at innocent wallpaper. over and over guts birds on that print and we all stop— not so scared at cat outrage, than paused at the amount of blood coming from inside a house.

#poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #National Poetry Month #spilled ink #black cat #flamingo #pets #30 Poems in 30 Days #april 21st

[teenknifecrime]

pearl doing alms

today’s rush job is a prayer so I lay my offering down— hope wood chips pass for gold or at least burn wet like incense. hope the vapors waft and reach up branches to my ancestors elders and family stacked atop each other for all spirit-time. hope the burning birch means something to these ghosts.

I sit, and against every tree of my nature, sit still— try to quiet the noise I didn’t even realize emits from my body every time I think. some call it meditation, but I call it pointless when I’m alone. call it enlightenment at a party. then I wait.

hope a twelve-eyed snake will bring me the perfect metaphor on a platter like the head of a duped saint— like a steak.

#rib eye #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #pearl #alms #National Poetry Month #30 Poems in 30 Days #april 20th #metaphor

[teenknifecrime]

rancid lessons

the washing machine is empty now the rest of you started wearing clothes again. I hear the cringe of fear come from the underdressed, but never stop adjusting my shirt collar.  

I’ve been champing for this for endless summers and you can call it prowl if you lack imagination, call it crawling at night. but everywhere you go in your disguise and still six feet away from desire— I’ll be making an entrance wearing light and blinding boredom out of every stranger I meet for years.

I’m no aloha, but I do enjoy fresh blood.

#rancid #lessons #quarentine #poem #poetry #poets on tumblr #National Poetry Month #30 Poems in 30 Days #spilled ink #april 19th

[teenknifecrime]

see-thru song

she’s fifty feet tall, so most people listen when she teaches them to always add more words, to thank her later when the warm volume fills the gapping mouth of the reader—  but mouths stay hungry.

readers are lucky I have no built in memory, that every time I want to remember some actually occurring event I have to sort through my blood for the details, through that warm recall all over my fingers and on the page— not at how it actually happened but, how time described the moment to my body, how space dimmed the action without the help of repetition.

others might be glad to gag memories from their throats with their thumbs forever. most of the audience is more than happy to help you wallow. if you need me

I’ll be perched on a cactus, ripping into a snake with my beak.

#see-through #song #dorothy chan #poetry #poets on tumblr #poem #spilled ink #National Poetry Month #30 Poems in 30 Days #april 18th