Scars

In your face, the scars of men reside
Souls are bartered for and hearts shoplifted,
 a tiny green chunk of malachite
took its place, a tinge of hope
in the polish that reflects white streaks
like memories, like tiny piercing darts
Of light, what brought it on that frigid night?

The weight you carried became too much
I was the song you’d never hear again
the one you’d heard too much,
the reliable breakdown
which soon led to ours,
you need novel melodies and new bars,
to scratch the itch you can't find.


And now your face pivots,
I see the scars of women,
Makeup covering the blush
Of their cheeks, their scent a vicious trap
That slays the weak beneath their feet
 They take their father’s knife
silently in their back. It makes
them sorry for holding the clock’s hand still.

The Solution

this isnt really poetry, I started trying to write it in that form but it took on its own. This came pouring out of me today all in one sitting, I edited VERY little. I am taking three upper level math courses this semester, can you tell? This idea came to me in my Discrete math class monday, the analogy of moments to points on a graph and I ran with it from there. 




My life is a math equation I haven’t found a solution for
I plot points, high school graduation, plotted
First major heartbreak, plotted, disillusionment
With the standard order of things, plotted
But like the graph of any function, even a simple line
The number of points becomes limitless, reaching off into infinity
And only by the proximity of those points does the graph begin
To appear, and only when enough are plotted.

So I have all these points, sex in Amanda’s room, but not with Amanda,
Being run over by my brother in our go-kart, and shot in the arm with a bb gun,
Driving a go-kart through a barb wire fence and coming out unscathed,
And then there is this point here, sitting in the reading room at UHD,
Curled up with my netbook, trying to convey some information to you.

But the key, and the hardest part, is synthesizing these points into some
Form of equivalent of a graph, a visual representation, that gives a consistent form
To the seemingly inconsistent randomness that is my existence.
Of course graphing my life isn’t the only way to solve it, just the first you learn.

There is also the method of recombining terms and manipulation them into a form that
We are familiar with. This is like having a role model or an archetype of which you are a variation, a manipulation. But this isn’t satisfying. It’s not objective enough, and I love objectivity.

And on the subject of objectivity let me subjectively say that objectively I don’t matter.
I know this, but I cannot stop acting as if I do. What is interesting though, is that objectively, there are a multitude of subjectivities, that is us, all simultaneously striving
To find the solution at the bottom of the page upon which we have done our work so far….what does it all add up to? Where are we going? Where did we come from? Why?

So it goes that at birth we are a point, solitary, connected to nothing really. Then when we first crawl we grow to a slightly bigger point in space. We are no longer confined to a single location.

Then when we learn to walk we become a line, simple still but able to reach out in front and behind to the ends of the earth.

Then somewhere along the way, we become capable of metacognition, and know what we know and what we don’t, this signifies the line being extended in a third direction, and consequently becoming a plane.

The next phase is one I think I am on the brink of, and it scares me at the same time that it thrills me. The phase consists of a plane being extended in a fourth direction, becoming a cubic space, but extending into infinity in all four directions. This phase is objectivity.

It Burns

Boldness burns like molten metal
against the sides of timid souls.
If I dare say that there is no sure thing,
I'll be damned by all I know.
Still, I proclaim the truths I've shed blood for.

A crimson phoenix with feathers aflame
circles above those who speak of
ecstasy springing from agony,
and it protects them from blindness,
and it protects them from defeat.

But for those who pretend
that only ecstasy is needed,
the blackest of birds awaits,
and they find feces in their
eyes, and their lies don't stop
the agony from coming.

Know that they'll throw stones and try to tarnish
Your name, hang you, give you hemlock,
 they'll break bones for your trouble, and
when you die, they’ll garnish your face with lye
 to hurry  you off into anonymity.

But give them all the poison from your lips first,
make them look, hold their eyes open till they bleed
as the world collapses in on itself, as we stain
The fabric of this world with our hate,
Manufacturing consent, killing in the name
Of freedom, funding wars with our children’s future,
Children are abandoned to television, familes
don’t know how to love, people without a chance
All hurtling toward some distant nothingness
a planet of people who are destroying
The womb from which they came,
we rape our world out of greed, and we make
Excuses for it all, saying, “It’s the way it’s always been,
And it’s the way it will always be.”

If only they could hear us crying
If only they’d see, if only they could.