The seven deadly sins of man
have just slaughtered a
mocking bird.

The sound of willow drums
                     & laughter at 1 a.m.

The Lion's sin of Pride
                   "Hail the poet within you."
The Dragon's sin of Wrath
                   "Your words forge death on the page."
The Snake's sin of Envy
                   "The clock counts more words than time does."
The Fox's sin of Greed
                   * "Crave the words as if they disgusted God."
The *Grizzly's sin of Sloth
                     *"Immortality flocks to your pen and paper."
The *Goat's sin of Lust
                     "Dress like a daydream or a nightmare to write with blood."
The Boar's sin of Gluttony
                      "Don't be afraid to **** to suffice your poems."

Oh poets,
for those of you who've figured
it's also a sin
to ****
a
mocking bird.

The secret is in the eighth deadly sin of poetry,
                                  Don't.
              ­                    Tell.
                                   Poets.
                                    What.
                ­                    To.
                                    ­Do.
.

once when i was 11 i read somewhere that you could fall in love with someone just by holding eye contact with them for a number of seconds. i cannot tell you how many hours i would spend in front of mirrors, staring down my reflection hoping to feel something other than my breath on cold glass.

you know the craziest thing to me when i was 12 was that i had never seen my face in person. i mean i'd seen myself in photographs, and i'd obviously saw myself in standing water, or mirrors, or when passing store windows but i had never looked myself in the face for real so maybe that was the problem.

when i was 13 i was in the eigth grade and some boy told me my kiss didnt taste sweet like it was supposed to so i stayed up all night perfecting the combination of chap-stick and lip gloss, and i made smudges all over my mother's make-up mirror in her bathroom, but it still wasnt enough so i left it shattered on the floor and never told her what happened

ages 14-18 i lived my life through glasses and tried so hard to be someone else that i lost sight of who i really was. because people dont want to hear about how you have daily staring contests with yourself, or how you always blink first. people dont want to watch the happiness disappear from your eyes, or see how your reality comes crawling up your throat and sits on your tongue waiting for it's chance to scream help, while your depression runs ramped, changing all of your picture captions to "ugly"

when i turned 19 broken glass and razors became my best friends, and lungs filled with smoke were like breaths of fresh air and i've never told anyone, but there were nights when i didnt come home because i couldnt remember where home was. they tell you that home is supposed to be this safe place where comfort can be found in your own skin, but i wasnt told that home is mirrors covered by sheets, and covering your eyes to anything that showed a reflection because i never quite figured out the trick of falling in love with myself the way everyone else apparently had

i hope that 20 is the year that something amazing finally happens in my chest when i look down at puddles and see myself staring back. i hope when i'm 20 that i'll be able to go through old pictures and not want to cry. i hope that 20 is the year that tolerating myself magically turns into loving myself. that i wont have to constantly replace shattered mirrors or picture frames. i hope the 20 year old version of me will finally be able to look herself in eyes and see more than what's missing. i hope when im 20 this poem wont hold relevancy and that my scars will be faded and the only thing left of this will be a success story

Electric despair
Just a fraction
A hit of desire

Supply and demand
Trading peace for the land
Starting fires

It's nothing of news
It rots and pollutes
It mocks what you do
It's ready to shoot
Doesn't care who was there
Media covered the truth

No mans land
*******

Snuffing the come up
I live for the underhand jobs
I'm a mob boss
I need a cough drop
Choking on the reasons
History repeating stand down

The stench of division
Clouding my vision
So loud indecision
Surrounds my conviction
Rendering me as a corpse
Send all my hobbies up north
Where it's going down
So poised
With a corpse to throw
Self love
Plus more room to grow
Oh so bold
Must be snorting that pale moon glow
Must be chugging that everclear
Must be clutching that heart so dear
What a life
Yet I'm gonna get it right
Peers

Oh god
Can you hear me out
Question
From whom did you learn all your lessons
Tested I figured you ad libbed the message
I'm out to find what the silence is betting

So petty
So don't test me
War ready
With the goal on flexing
I run the patience of clocks
Outliving haters a personal hobby
Spited to death
**** cam is lit fam
Ex lady thinking
***** I don't really give a ****
Never made a baby
Always played the run around

Heh

Sorry about that
But what am I to do
When that *** so fat
Got me hella in the mood
When you let me see it clap

I got an eigth of shrooms
I'm tryna make it bloom
A blunt to match
Some room to move
Stratosphere blazing as we cloud the room
Last year faded off the ought to do
While I sit here waiting for my star to shoot

Topsy turvy
Match the gloom
In a vile plume as I engage the noose
Hopeful boy taking polaroids
Everlasting days
Never lasting joys

Come on

Just blast away
Growing pains from my defeat
Burned at stakes from past mistakes
Ambition bathed in flames

Ascension know my name
Lotus petals
Unshackled
I craft on broken glass
This ******* built to last

Sitting in the drivers seat
Laughing at my lack of drive
The taste of irony
Hinting at my suicide
This right here is do or die
Scared of heights
Grit teeth and fly
Copped me some stolen wings
Deceit no thang to me
Yet I still can't sleep
Relax my mind
Third eye still crooked why
Bad batch of LSD
What the hell you want from me

Lamentations of the soul
Cascading broken notes
Wretched lessons I provoke
The wailings of a lonely ghost

Praying karma takes me home
Been wayward from the start
        Been wayward from the start
Chasing shadows thinking stars were mine to handle
Dismantled
I've learn reality's a gale of sin
And I'm the candle
Now watch as I unravel

Beautiful,
Just like a
Young male teenager experiencing
The state of euphoria,
Just like a
Hopless romantic that finally
Found her love.

The meanings,
So
Bitter sweet
Just
So nice and
Pleasant to read.

The sky is falling down
So hard,
Circles made of
Pure heaven,
Just like a
Gold girl.

But also,

From the eigth circle of hell
From the most darkest spots of the nest
The birds strangled,
Wanting to be free
But sadly,
Freedom doesn't exist.

But that's just how I
Interpret things that are called
Poems.

First five minutes
Red flicks and burns my eyes
Mute but loud with color
Spirit travels down eigth ave
Recollection of life during transit
Rain check on the hospital bill
Life uninsured
Death assured
Silent ambulance

He had fallen in love when he had first seen her, her dark black hair and green eyes had been what had attracted him.

Yes he knew the danger but he had smuggled her out, taken her to his home and he had not told a soul what he had done.

She was nineteen and he was fourtythree, he did not see the age difference and only saw her beauty, if anyone found out he was hiding her then he knew they would be both killed.

She had lived with him for eight days, in that time he had never tried to ****** her or make any advance towards her, he clothed her and provided food and any comfort that she required.

On the eigth night she came to his room, she was naked when she slipped into his bed and they made love all the way until the dawn, it would be their last night together.

They came the next morning, he knew he had to shoot her, the Luger given to him by his father two years ago was the weapon he had to use.

She wept silent tears for she knew what must be done, he put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

He put the gun to his own head as he heard them break down the door, he knew they would have both been punished to death and this was the only way.

They were too late to stop him and he pulled the trigger with the gun at his head and his body fell to lay with the dead body of the woman he had loved.

It was not supposed to had happened, a German guard falling in love with a Jewish girl condemned to have been gassed to death at the camp.

I knew him. He transferred into my eigth grade class somewhere past half way into the year. A friend raved about how the new kid was so quick to lend her a pencil. I didn't care.

He was in my PE class and even though he looked so athletic, he could never catch a ball. He was always a good sport about it, even as the other kids started to make fun of him behind his back. He talked differently, using big words, often incorrectly, and with a surprisingly hopeful inflection. He was loud. Not only did I not care, I contributed to his ridicule. It seemed good natured and I just wanted to fit in.

We all just wanted to fit in.

Coincidentally, we transferred together to a different highschool; we both didn't fit in, but for different reasons. He was in my home room. He was friendly and outgoing and always did what he could to try and make other students laugh. I couldn't tell if he knew they were laughing at him. I didn't care.

At first when he ran into me in the hallways, he would smile and try to talk to me. Mine a more familiar face to a boy stranded in a sea of strangers. I would only talk briefly and displayed no emotion, save impatientness. I didn't care.

He eventually caught on to my apathy, and left me alone. He preferred the company of those who laughed. At least an insult was a response.

We were all skippers, but he had been condemned to sail alone.

He twerked in a dance off at a school pep rally. He did his best to get in front of a camera when the broadcast kids came around. He was always extremely polite to our homeroom teacher. He talked a lot in home room. I sat in the corner and pretended no one existed. Before he would try and make everyone laugh, he would still say hi to me. I didn't care.

I joined the chess club for a while. At maybe my third meeting he came in and began to ask the teacher about something. I think it was the death penalty. I didn't care, so I didn't remember. At the end of the chat, he thanked the teacher for his weekly moral lesson. I never thought about it.

He said his morals were different from the rest of the world. I hear he shot himself. He said not to mourn his death but to celebrate his life.

I never did that. I never cared.

Even now, his life is catalogued in my brain as part of an awkward eighth grade year for me, part of home rooms I hated going to, part of a school that made me vaguely uncomfortable. Caring now is a lie, a lie to say I did all I could for a broken soul, that I am only an innocent bystander. I never cared, so I can't pretend that I did now.

I'm not guilty of his death. No one is guilty of his death. The blood is mixed with the dirt as his ashes will soon be. The blood is on the dirt, not our hands. But we walk on this dirt, we till this soil, we plant our futures here in this ground. It's time we all started taking better care of it.

I talk at the speed of trees
that pass you
on a train journey.
Hundreds of thoughts
planted
tall,
loud,
incessant.
 I don't expect you listen to me,
I don't expect you to notice,
but then you pick out
one leaf
from the twenty-eigth branch
of the twelfth tree
 and ask me why
it's painted a deep scarlet.
And there's n o t h i n g
that stops me from turning that hue too.


*"To Stop Train, Pull Chain"

With every new love we find
We find an example from the past
How even the age of reason
Couldn't find a way to last
For every Henry the eigth
There is a Queen Elizabeth
For every war on earth
There was a war in heaven

And I want my history to be
The pax romana
But my boundaries will cease to grow
And I know
If I want to be who I'm meant to be
I'll have to fight some more
I'll send my mental legions
To the fore

Because try as we might
In different lives
We've all been here before
It was always a lesson learned

once you tried to tell me what a great feeling it was to dance with someone
to press your body against a girls and sway to your favorite song
staring into her eyes (which looked like the stars apparently)
but then you asked me what it felt like to dance with a boy, in a girl's mind.
and I laughed at you. I laughed because you assumed that I had danced with
a boy. You didn't understand that
(why didn't you understand that? with the combination of my face and
my heart it's given that I had never even been noticed)
so you vowed to change that
now I was the one that didn't understand that.
I assumed you would get one of your obnoxious guy friends to ask me to dance,
just so I could feel good about myself (that wouldn't have helped, because
they would've laughed the whole time)

you took my hands and pulled me onto the floor
(it was tile or something, I didn't know exactly, but I did know
the exact patterns that were under us because I spent
most of my time staring down while we danced)
I asked you why you were dancing with
a rain cloud, and you said you wanted to be my sunshine,
and together we would make a rainbow
and I think the song said something like 'it never rains when I'm
in your arms', and the two of us laughed so loud
the whole school (or at least those of us who danced)
looked at us, and I saw jealous girls pointing and staring,
and to make it even better, you lowered your lips to mine,
not kissing me, but they didn't know that, you said
'I would kiss you, but I don't want to rush things'
and I said nothing, and the song was over, and I went back to my friends

at the next song I caught you staring at me
and my friends pointed to you but I shoved their hands away
and my skin turned as red as the rose you threw at me
when our seventh grade play was over, and we
stood side by side playing the duet, playing the happy couple holding hands
except then it was called "play" for a reason
it was pretend, and it didn't mean anything when our lips almost touched
and now it meant more than anything.
(it meant more than that time in eigth grade when you handed me a valentine,
and laughed, so I thought it was a joke)
perhaps a boy really did like me, just this once, and perhaps,
(based on the way you gently held me over the tiled floor and danced with
me like you cared)
perhaps that boy was you.

My mind is filled with fantasies
Maybe just Escape

Can't forget those clouds
Never tried to vape

My fears befuddle me
O me of little faith

When i disappear
2 outs in the eigth

         October.