Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Hayley Neininger Dec 2011
I am sitting here
Penniless and alone.
Waiting for you
And your bended ear
And your thousand questions
And your mouth full of pennies
Asking for my thoughts.
Ah, again.
Hayley Neininger Dec 2011
I’ll rewrite my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.
Erasing periods
Commas and uncommon verbs
So my style will mimic yours.
I’ll speak my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times
In a voice in my head that mimics yours
Hoping they will sound like yours
Hoping they, like yours, will
Will sit at the foot of my bed at night
And seep into my clothes the next morning
Like yours, eddy inside my ears
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.
A horrible poem written in less than 5 minutes inspired by Marshall.
Hayley Neininger Dec 2011
I cannot breathe with these words in my mouth.
So long they have lived in my thoughts and too
Long perhaps have I ignored their cries for release,
Too long have they had nothing other to do than to multiply
To feed off one another creating sentences and paragraphs and
Books of their anguish, of their hate for their keeper,
They have swelled too big for my heavy head to hold
These words, they seek room, they seek open air, to breathe free.
They look for it everywhere.
They seep into my eyes pushing out buckets
Of water, eddying around themselves, elbowing at
Themselves for space to be spoken, and I their master
Hold tight the dam they push at.
They drip defeated down my throat as I swallow
The lump they’ve shaped
And in attempts to follow the air they yearn for
They sit at the base of my lungs.
Spawning bigger with time they push their
Way up again my throat, they spill out into
My mouth as I try to hinge shut my lips
They gag and choke my lungs wetting my eyes
Blushing my face. And with irony they fill my mouth so
Fully, I cannot release them.
These words that were so
Simple and few at first, now only spawn
my strong undying feeling of regret, the regret
Of never saying the words I’d always felt.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2011
Monsters are real, though they are not adorned with red eyes
Not seen with curled upper lips, with giant claws
They are under your mind’s cache appearing only when
Your world goes dark, when they feel safe under blanketed
Eyes and pursed lips covering and concealing
Their tainted dark intentions
They hide under your bones, they sharpen
Their teeth
And the tips of your ribs
Swapping shoulders  
You can’t tell which from which
They encase your heart, no they
Pierce through your chest
They hide in the dip of your voice
When you say things like “love” or “hate”
Dropping syllables of doubt in words
You realize are no longer your own.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2011
Still after 22 years I’m not used to the spin
I still sway with the torpid orbit of this earth
I still feel more like ripples in the ocean
Billowing out helplessly by forceful winds
Than like the fish that swim solid beneath its gale
My legs still ache to move backwards as
The ground below me charges itself
Further and further forward, still, into
It’s circular rhythm, perpetual and exhausting
What I’ve always seemed to think was
Its true underlying intentions
To drown me.
To never stop ringing around itself
To never lull in its constant wind-blown vim
Created by its imposing movements
To never let me parity my body above sea-level
Never letting me know of or be thrown off balance, me without
Any knowledge of or way to grasp a steady pole.
This swirling pool of motion with each tick and tock right,
It engulfs me with waves of pressure, its crests crashing
Heavy on my attempts to stand beneath it.
It renders me dizzy without senses.
The blood-thirsty rocking of this earth
Whips hair feverously across my eyes
Blinding me to the ground I would grasp to steady my body
If not for the winds ebbing across the planes I struggle to stand atop
Winds, rubbing my hands red and raw and unable to feel
Slashing my fingers with invisible knifes
I would catch my breath, find strength to stand, if only these winds
Would slow with the stall of the earth’s movement, if its swirl
So constant, did not weigh so heavy and hot around me
Burning with tropical heat, thickening the air, heavy as water
And me, wishing for gills.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2011
Tress grow slower than we do, she says,
They gestate longer in the soil than we do in our mothers
True, we were both at one time seeds, she says,
But trees grew out, while we grew up
By the time we learned to walk
A tree will have only fastened its branches
It will have rooted its self in a home
That, like us, was not self-elected but while
We are constantly trying to walk from our home
A tree is rooting itself in theirs.
We grow up and walk around our parent’s house
Then our neighborhood, our city, our country, our world
Glimpsing only meager morsels of other beings homes
It’s difficult to pinpoint our own, to know it wholly
But a tree, she says, a tree never walks from its home
And through this it knows it so absolutely, so entirely.
A tree grows slowly, gazing at its environment for years
Far past when our timeline has expired
It watches as its atmosphere changes, even in the slightest
It still grows higher and higher at a pace that allows
It to view every intimate detail of the world it resides in
Never failing to notice every leaf, twig, branch
We don't know our homes like that and
It’s a shame, she says,
That we grow a lot faster than trees do,
Perhaps this is why we get home-sick.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2011
My breathing is heavy.
A force straddles my body, it pushes and thrusts over my chest
It starts to apply pressure to invisible heart wounds
I would not have known were their but for
The crushing weight intended to stop their bleeding.
Now feeling dry of blood I wait for the elephantine like force
To retreat, to allow my breathe back into my chest,
But as I look down at my chest I don't see wounds
Just you. I ask please get off.
And your weight still sits unapologetic-ally over my body
My breathing has slowed now.
Your pressure reacts and heightens as it moves higher up my form
Now it is perched atop of my neck
Now I can’t speak, can’t tell you to move, can’t vocalize
How your weight aches.
How I would ask you to please get off
My breathing is undetectable.
Bricks of your flesh rest atop of my head, now you've moved higher
The weight of you ebbs into my pores
Travels through my veins and pours into my thoughts
You and your crushing pressure have been absorbed
And now weigh on my mind
And to be frank you are quite heavy
So please get off.
Still a work in progress.
Next page