Well, it's a whole heaping load of bitterness lately. Perhaps it was the weather, but I'd hate to think that I was at the mercy of it that much. Anyway, we had a grey cloud cover and it made me float around campus, listen to Sigur Ros, and silently add up all of the things that I'm sad about. It was surprising, because I'm normally Johnny Optimistic. I'm drinking cold coffee and listening to loud music now, and I couldn't sleep from the hours of 2 to 6 last night. It's interesting, how certain issues will wrestle for your head and not even let you dream. However, seeing that Valentine's Day is coming up and I'm eyeing the beams in my basement to perhaps HANG MYSELF FROM, I instead have produced some polar opposite poetry. Before, it was love poems. Well, they're getting a bit tired since they have to jog quite a ways until they find a target, so I present to you: Jared's Bitter Poems, Volume I.
The background: for poetry class, people wrote a random line on a piece of paper and we put them in a hat, drawing one out and having to write a poem using that random snip of words as the first line. We had five minutes. I was in a bad mood. Hark:
Carbon
An elementary element, my dear Hydrogen
Filed next to the most flexible, ambidextrious
Mess called heartache
Which exists in solid, liquid, plasma, gas
Four functioning forms to kick your ass.
I just fucking sucked it in today like
Air, no reason, �tis the season to
Overdose or take a cozy bath
With a toaster, or maybe mostly
1 part peach juice, 13 parts bleach,
or Kellog�s Bowl Full Of Bullets,
some certain millimeter, please, Or shoulder
shrug, lug around my wailing
high school boy who beats on my back
since I broke all his toys
in turn, he forces me to write poor poetry
using similes for �rain� 3 times per verse
this perverted table of repitition, oxygen,
and now wonder I hate science,
it can�t be coincidence that I�m in physics
this semester. Half-life, half-wit, halfway home,
oh hell.
Carbon: the only kind of dating going on.
---
Carnival Ride!
Vomit slung down the side like a
Sentimental soup of sappy poetry.
Hinges rusted up, lights flickered dim,
Hydraulics missing their pnuematic hissing
Couples kissing, and my carnival game
Dart aimed too far apart from
The target, so I win nothing but the
Empty air that hides between the rides
Shut down and silent and I meant to
Confide some sort of truth to you
In-between a copper tilt-o-whirl or
The semi-circle of a railing
Tracing balancing bracing ticket-like
Troughs
But everyone�s already fallen in love
So I zip up the clown outfit and
Churn together rubbery animals, ballooned and
Blowing up too soon.
---
and the most insane opening line ever:
Force-fed spider stew
Stains spoken salience
Water, water everywhere
Salience, you fool! Of my masked
Salience will assail you! Sailing through
This herd o�verbs, my mind capsized
And trying to unpry from the frothing
Mass of girl-flavored ocean: Charybdis
Has nothing on this, I insist
That missing you is so simple, so steeped
And saturated in this place that I
Created, Captain Jared of the good ship
Freudian Slip � I said too much but
I always do when with you, hurriedly
Stuttering out a stream of adjectives for
You to lie over a puddle so you may
Balance a delicate foot on the phrase
�You have beautiful eyes�, before spryly
stepping into our cab. But the fact still stands:
and I wonder if you ever look back to a mud-caked
profession of you � �cause it�s true. You cell
phone rings, and I watch the passing of buildings
thinking of how I should have made my poem
find I home in the rad word 3 poems ago:
Gravitron 5000.
---
"If drinking coffee is your idea of Really Cool,
you can't expect that crazy chick to notice you." -Rufus Wainwright, "cigarettes and chocolate milk".
Guilty as charged, Mr. Wainwright! Oh, boy.
So you want pictures, do you? Fine! More in this INCREDIBLY LARGE UPDATE:
That was RED BARON night, when Justin and I were playing cards.
And a flyer, made by Justin, for the coolest party this Friday:
IT'S HORRIBLE! And great.
"Who doesn't want to be rocket-man?" -Justin, just now.
And boy, is that the truth. OK, here's another poem using the "random first line" bit. It's not bitter. Sorry.
Ax heads hanging off the tops of capitalized letters, like the letter �T�, for example:
Ample blades marmelading the toast of torture,
The vapid way a poem can stare
You down until your down beneath
A swirling mound of howling nouns.
�Doctor, I�ve been severed by a stray
�S�� � she said softly � so sensual,
and striped me of skin, flayed, I
lay naked and wondering why I
could be tried for the murder of one
simple sentence, so since this
new sharpness was assigned to them
letters, I shave in the morning with
a lonesome edge of an �R�, cut my
bread with the long-necked back of an �L�
and thread pasta with the tri-forked
isolated �E� � my relationship with letters
often helpful, sometimes deadly.
---
I can't think of anything else that you all could possibly want from me. So I'll end this fellow here. XOXO.
touching tiny tensions,
Jared