Tag: poetry

How is St. Louis? Is it St. Louis-ing? Is it Arch-ing?

Ahmo’s, 6:00PM, 2/1/2024

the metro is a closed loop, a sleeping dragon. you point out one of the buildings, veins throbbing, heavy against the rain; the train squeals against the track and you are robbed of my reply, my sympathies, as if they would do anything but raise the hairs on your arm. what happens when you let stitches sit in too long? your skin shifts, a chameleon in twilight. the sun sets, the skin darkens. the leaf-rot smell of autumn returns, and i know you will not be around to watch the flowers bloom in the spring.

What if I get lost?

You’re not going to get lost, you just need to walk in a straight line. If you get lost, that’s on you.

Markley Hall, 3:00PM, 2/8/2024

the world is full of lines, hard and soft, good and bad. sometimes the world is grayscale, allowing me to sort everything into sets, rigid containers, labeled and discarded. road lines = good. scars = bad. cracks in doorways and mirrors and cement foundations? // then the world resumes in color, and the containers begin to spill. the cracks pile up, multiplying, threatening the edges of my vision. in trying to blend the lines, you erased the figure; in trying to straighten the branches, i destroyed the roots…

Nah, I could barely see it… don’t ask any questions about that night, I don’t remember any of it!

Mosher-Jordan Dining Hall, 1:30PM, 3/3/2024

we have learned to associate lack of memory with a good time. if something went south, we would remember it, right? the brain fills slowly, in hindsight, fabricating memories, forging alliances. you call it breaking down problems with a hammer and a drink. the worst punishment of all: force-fed my own thoughts until i choked them up and spit them out. my reality lives on, isolated, trapped like chac mool: free and fictitious ocean, only real when it imprisons a snail.

I proofread as I go, so it’s fine…but I wrote it at midnight so you tell me!

Pierpont Commons Lounge, 12:00PM, 11/14/2023

there is a perverse form of art in letting go of what you have created. eradication. the disconnect between writer and editor, a nurse ripping a sick baby away from a grieving mother. fatigue brings discontent and discontent accumulates like tar in the liver. my tongue forms a sentence and dies on my lips. my breath carries the corpses, hairs against needles, nails against plastic, floating through the air. is it poetry, or is it unspoken word?

Look, you went from not knowing anything, and you tried, and now you’re killing it!

Tech Shop, 11:00AM, 1/25/2024

goals should be driven by effort. using achievement to measure success is like orienting a telescope at the glare of a mirror. there will come a time where the sun sets and you are left with the shadows of the past. you will forget the sun rises the next morning, beautiful and breathtaking, as you struggle with an eternal night. the easiest way to believe something is permanent is to neglect the future. if you sit and stare at your feet during the train ride, you will think that you have never moved…

You studied, you put in the effort! There are going to be a lot of people in that room who know less than you…

Union Basement, 11:30AM, 2/19/2024

comparison is often the thief of joy, but sometimes we are dealing with a different type of thief. a reverse robin hood, stealing from the emotionally poor and feeding into the rich. what was once seen as a burden can be molded, reversed, shaped into an instrument. an instrument of what? intoxicated by our dreams. empty or not, our emotions still take up space, like a small glass jar wedged in the side of the temporal lobe. fill it up with sunshine and don’t look back.