Mad Times Change


Gentle axe resting on a tree branch
Sad with wisdom
A stray bird like a thrown javelin
Like sap
That vending machine sleeping
On the floor of the woods
Doesn’t think much of you
Autumn humor
I’m thinking about wet leaves
And
Lost things earning their living
Mad times change
Like

Dancing clouds
Like thin dragons wrapping up the horizon
Like bitter brakelights
The driver cussing you out

You got this

Mad Times Change

They upheld optimism
Dreams on a string you could tug on
The new and improved glass ceiling
Interactive, simple, thinner than ever

They repackaged segregation last time our kind said anything about tethered comedies

That thing you stood up too fast for
Lightheaded conviction you follow home with balled fists

Life is too wonderful to be sad, for you
But there is pain out there
The things you work hard for are made of things
Others made to make work harder for you
You are just a hero rebuffed
Flinching like prayers
Watching them
Living a flicked hanging toy planes limiting journey
You heard the cackle doctrine
The wind chiseled cars sung carols, snug praises nestled
So neatly on their blocks
They blocked you and the street you stood for
You stood on 
that sand they use instead of salt like consolidated crushed shells 

They dream up hefty weapons
Wretched blessings in argyle leaning on the steps next to you
Beaming a dry smile moving you along you never be-
On the right sections etched earth they separated for you
Long winds, prepped sentences, wry guile, 
Like refrigerated obsessions stretching after being set free
Readied behemoth policies made from words you’ve heard before
Some you’ve even said


balled fists

I grew up in group home and my real father is dying
He was abused but never had the 
Reach
-to hit me
Stammering lassos whip missed me, but reached the neighbors children
He was the drowsy fire 
Chain smoking to keep awake
My mother 
Locked him in for child support
To him, she was on the pill
To me, I wasn't his until I was five
I've got his eyes
Double jointed
Toes

I was just a reckless dart in flight
A 
Hushed industrial strength streamer on a kiddy bicycle
Trying to get anyone’s attention

The absent cherry hibernating far from the branch
Recovering from white cloud fallout
From a baby powder slap

I remember things
Watching the open mouth of the countryside
Spilling beans
Mouthing: "salvation is a luxury”

Now 
I’m an adult lip reading about decriminalized respite
In passing

I feel bad for them, aging in their own heads
Hell between their ears as employment ebbs and their lost son never calls

My parents gave me the discount 
Without telling me they shortchanged the register 

He paid my way off of sleeping on the streets once
Excessive access for others who axed opportunity 
or ability 
or talent 
or talons 
-depending on how sharp you are

But how far does forgiveness go to someone who molested kids?
Or mothering a kid just for money?

Where's the security when your kid outgrows 

you?

Reckless Dart In Flight

Who wants you out of school?

When you live in a house of
Evicted innocence and blackeye lullabies
Stained linoleum floor bedding
Chicken wire rust scaffolding
That trailer on cinderblocks
Schools with swingsets with no swings
Schools with no wings

I remember the things my mother did to me made the paint peel
And what keeps her and poverty away from me today is that I went to school

People pass me like candles on the river
Each reflection of myself more bitter than the last

I watch my heartache as a neverending pause
Scarred children never get to grow up
And education has provided a safe house for my kids, and if I adopt kids
And everyone elses kids I know because I promote education

You were determined to interject into progress with hellishly worded trajectories
I know things from you, not from looking at you
Fate is a drunk hand unsettling the water
You asked yourself what you could do to ripple my future
But kids with no future only get the chance to live in the present without education
Because there is no tomorrow and yesterday is a horror, its sorrow
Instead of fingertips pointing a stir
You were wrist deep and I am still trying to breathe from the waves
Good bye

Living apart from your family is a death not many have to watch 
But
Would you give up your child for their education
If it meant they then would understand abuse?
That they could go out and stop abuse?

Who wants you out of school?

When I was a kid it was corporations, conservatives, prisons
The things you could see through the holes in my clothes
Dried ringwormed bruised skin as thin as a white t
Lips pierced bloodied by the cold
That dry unfinished wail for help muffled by how far you were in the woods
Theres me
Hiding in halogen lit crowd of fostered kids or animals far from hominids depending on if you even look at them,
Then you get out of college and you have to hear this shit?
That all of a sudden the shit of society like yourself makes it and education is no longer worth it?

Stupid parents don’t have stupid kids but there are a lot of stupid people talking about education
Especially stupid half wits just because you have a pen doesn’t make you a poet
But I’d tell you internally I’d slap the happy grinning chin to the floor had my kid asked me rhetorically about who died for their education
And since I’m educated I can just easily explain why education matters
But suli didn’t grow up this way
Where you couldn’t switch group homes fast enough to keep your family out of your life
When waking-up-after-you-passed-out kind of hungry was a good morning
And the best part of the 80s was the 90s because you haven’t seen your parents anymore

Who wants you out of school?

This isn’t even about rap, about music or any of that
It’s about who you listen to telling you who you can be

I didn’t care about learning until someone showed me that you do use what you learn
It shouldn’t even be about that, take learning about extrasolar planets orbiting main sequence stars- who gives a shit, the people that can know about it and find it interesting enough to fall in love with it.
Don’t deny yourself of falling in love with a topic by being close minded – learn by experience not by being convinced, or listening to rich british brats rambling for youtube views.
 

Who wants you out of school?

I Will Not Let A Rich British Kid Mislead My Fate

You made yourself

Crocheted blueberries and caulked ecstasy and exits and mute moans
And mercy killings
On what was once a wet 
Bed

Your cavernous gaze carried us
From under that scruffy lambskin hoodie
Scrutiny that is mentholated sorrow
Is the austere anchor never giving way
Is as invested in me as bleach vapor
Tearing 
Tearing 
Teavana scarlet cloud
-ed thoughts
An austere pulp
Of possessed objectives

How you look right now is so demanding
So tasking
Taxing my available faculties I just
Need to inhale you
But
I’m the insolvent semi finalist finally
Trying to digest your
Coarse proverb set a
-gleam
Disillusioned like the
Clinician snuggling with their regret
A stare that curved a decade
Like peeled decal
Decay
Around my mouth an
Unworthy waterline
An(d) your clothes are just a
Woven overemphasis


11. Rivers And Roads

patch things up with flame princess

think on those who loved you.

what are you but their hopes
and their dreams?

are you living as they intended
with their love in mind?

to those without parents
or parents who didnt love them
that
bloody abscess fit for amputation 
beheaded and ruptured peppermints 
that sound, their hate
auditory wake promoters

but i forgot we don’t talk anymore

Think

In the dark rose
A nest of petals
You were born in a disciplined autumn

I know

I’ve seen the sun hide behind the thinnest tree

But you won’t find peace
Remembering the interruptions more than the story

patch things up with flame princess

You've still got me.

Are you still in love with me 
Like the way you used to be or is it changing?

To think
Here we are again
Pale and babbling like a corded sentence
Being pulled back into our mouths forfeiting forward progression
Culling blemishes
The skin on your face hissing away
Each time your hand invalidates a piece of it
I have sought you, the coarse dandelion and while decaying you have sought an end?
A means? I mean 
-you no harm

You think the sun, now darker, slouches when it greets you
You have found an unwanted happiness
Like the seed you see as a crumb to be shoveled away for disobedeince 
The wanton mallet shoeing away peace
Infiltrated and torn 
God asunder
The world is not over there is brilliance, and peace
There isn’t a ready insulin that will maintain you 
But a spring to invest in
That
May be hard to understand under all that throbbing
That manic trust
Where just once is forever
A shut door is not an impenetrable barrier
The way the world works may be working against you
It is unfair
But don’t be such a stranger to the funk
Armed
Pitted against yourself - Brad
Lest you be Bradley cooped up
Pitted against your shelves
Shattering frames the curtain the television the mini fridge
What have you
Like a feverish cottontail – directionless and fleeting
Like tying ribbons from lit wicks

You’ve still got me


You've still got me

I - Curious Wanderings (http://thecuriouswanderings.tumblr.com)

Two months is too short a time
to recover from the way someone is
scraped out of your heart like
a dull knife in
an almost empty peanut butter jar
but sixty-one days is too long a time
to do nothing but sink in misery
so I'm building
brick by aching brick
and I'm getting back on my feet
bone by throbbing bone
I'm learning not to pick up the pieces
but to wait for new ones 
I'm learning not to fill up the void
but to work my way around it
because the healing that time brings
is really only nothing
but anaesthesia, because
the pain will always be there to remind you
that once upon a time,
you loved.


II - jack

What kills me is 
My
Nervous touch while we were ice-skating something akin to
Jabbing a rake into a jar for candy
In comparison to that time you
Removed your shirt like
Clay finally resurfacing 
My touch should have been smoother
And it forces itself upon my memory as
The sea leaving
Blinking like candles over the sandbags
As 
The shy exit of mother earth due to cramps
As
The leaf
Lobbed into a shallow tailspin
Expatriated
A memory unraveled like fingers in an
Eroded clench
Like unwanted syrupy admiration
Slopped over a woolen spirit dining on dialect
Tiring as it tries to find itself underneath
I’ve tried to find you inside me
And I’ve grown tired

All that’s left are regrets


III – Meghedi (http://recklessromances.tumblr.com)

the first time a boy
smoked too many
cigarettes because
of me, he became
a man. he coughed
my blood into his
palms, tasted my
iron & grit, his tongue
finally learned the 
inside of my body. 

he clutched his chest
and felt only my heart-
beat. the pulse of a 
moving car is one akin
to racing cattle or maybe
just a fever the moment
before its break. 

i do not know what it
means to break; only
to burn out like a brilliant
star, or just another
addict’s mistake.

IV - Poetic Assasin (http://poeticassasin.com)

These hands have broken bone residue
violent stories of dripping calcium 
drunk off being sober and crazy 
such rhythm is precise 
such music is utopia to van gogh's drum 

don't play with me 
use a different tune 
another tone of voice 
for I will pick up and strum on it 

we can still make a great love song 
filled with bloody sheets

notes and letters 
goodbyes and comebacks 
red eyes and scratched backs 
long nails and short breaths 

let's finish our once forgotten language



a beat heart f/ curious wanderings, meghedi and poetic assasin

Title: Really, Really Nuts

I failed you
Test(y) eyelids beyond which I don’t see 
You
Staring at tomorrow 
Like the mountain in the distance
Fragmented, splintered cells, shards of prior selves- paused forever like 
Death
Of course today will be blurry- like the closer jasmine field
And tomorrow you won’t remember 
Me

I’d shake your hand 
But you can see my thoughts of missing you with missing skin around my fingernails
My skin becomes martyred cells
Just redeemed cuticles between my teeth
I’d shake your hand 
But I’m shaking

Who decided to make you perfect?
As the stream makes the choice to live among moss
As the northern lights choose to be the green whip striking an enslaved galaxy

When they ask you about you 
You never mention me
I helped you up when they weren’t pulling your string
Cats who stopped toying with a rope(d) echo
An abandoned strand of waterfall into a gorged eye of earth
And there you were
Perfect –
on my doorstep

I knew long before you did that I wasn’t in your poems
I touched your skin
Your frozen sun
And disentangled your solitude

You gave birth to laughter- birth to repetition

I failed you
The tender cold internal defiance of what I could have gave you
My legs give out like recess, like wings, like moisture

What I would give to have you home again

Remorse is the slow emptiness of a realized dream
And I never knew what happiness was

We
Are all we have


Really, Really Nuts

Week 4 Topic: Incomplete Echo

Title: Salted Navel

Here I sit 
With sunlight forgotten on the dresser

You wore an illusion
Walking in like water flowers
Influencing climate
You are the beginning of spring
Your skin is made of urges
Of funerals

My tongue of wood, curled like peeling bark
Unfolded like time, like a dying star
I said such silent words to you

Your first transient entrance was like you had been here before
It was such a naked return
I was
Sedated by the venom of meditation
By salted navel
By success
Like that retail job at the mall your degree earned you

You were an illusion
A wet despair, a frothy orange rust
Music hoarse enough to drive me up a wall

I'm afraid-
if you were here I would stare at you until I went blind

Salted Navel (extended version)

Summer Salt (Nomad, Nomad) (Extended Version)
More of Meghedi's work can be found here: http://www.recklessromances.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20poetry

Summer Salt (Nomad, Nomad) 

[Clip 1]

[Song]

i set my good intentions down for an impossible duration to make myself sleep sounder.

My stunned lungs lead to a silence that is such a humid burden

i strip myself naked & rough; 
my frail convictions flow out the window, 
scattering themselves like acid rain droplets on the sill.

[Song continued]

and i am not a breeze, but a sharp gust - 
wind blown into an envelope like a 29-cent secret never meant to be kept caged-in

And you wore a constellation of beauty marks and curls on curls on curls
Like Spanish moss
And dizzy lipstick, the color of a sun, wordlessly godlike
Your hair looked like ground sunflower petals
Like a ritual
And you spoke like a hoarse firework working on its roar

and you were not a mistake, but destroyed yourself before
i was given the chance
to undoubtedly do the same.

You’re a dark spark
Like a fork in a socket
You look a lot like a fork in my eye socket
You're cutlery cutting into my speech
A silent interruption over otherworldly intercoms
You enter calms raging

what does it mean to lie in someone’s wake?
to be in the ever-presence of another human,
to feel breath short and isolated against an empty chest?

you showed me patience,
but never how to recognize hopelessness
when you stretched it like a glove,
testing my hand at tolerance.

i march across Chicago from 
bus stop to bus stop  
attempting to prove resilience.
i am fooling no one.

I remember those blue green exhausted irises
Those clumsy incantations, you make believe, you pretend
You pre tending to each incoming wound
You're so wound up
Those dandelion seed eyelashes
Lip ring in my ear
Your hair looms  

i wish i was colorblind 
so i could experience you in black & white.
admire your ink-stroke eyelashes like artwork, 
read your cracked-skin palms as if they were poetry,

and we could hide in the gray areas together,
running from the unplanned
cowering from possibilities.

I tried to save your face by embalming progression
Like drooling matchsticks pausing a fleet of black nights
You could call it a month since we broke up, but, I measured it in how many epiphanies I skinned alive

sore-souls learn the slowest,
but i still let you go on time.


Summer Salt (Nomad, Nomad) W/ Meghedi (Extended Version)

A Denied Vigil

You entered like an immigrant autumn leaf

New to the forest floor

Like a nervous wet handshake or

Dead comets that fail to flicker upon entry

How foggy is the libido of dying optimism?

I see you struggling to see past those sunflower eyelashes

Unlit like stunned flint

Blushing like slapped skin

And those underfunded thoughts about

The defeated shapelessness of your new surroundings-

Or are they old surroundings?

You check your bag for an answer

Sifting spent batteries and unsteady lightbulbs

Your fingers tonguing dust

The sun looked like a pile of cleaning gloves

On your blue tile

You sat, and a certain string covered you

I petitioned a kiss with a poem of signatures

Written on your favorite sandpaper

It was about the forensics of reincarnation,

Cleansed wetlands, and

The stern bow of your legs

I held you in my mouth like a slow vitamin

Slow like compacted electrons cooling off

Your skin of embossed khaki, of expired praise.

Your eyes of accumulated wet flame

of rationalized holidays.

It is a beautiful thing to touch your skin

Some infinities are larger than 

others

a denied vigil

Title: A careless soap

I spilled the blackest coffee on what was maybe
A letter

I have nothing left and with lightheaded stances, I'm trying to just remember your name

I look and I see your weariness

I looked out across the bay glimmering as if it were picking only pieces of the sun to show me
Glimmering as if an injury as if mucus healing the dead earth- sinusoidal blemishes, a careless soap cleansing unmemorable dirt and wood
This soupy wood of my fugue 

I’m sure that the swollen kiss of a stressed river wouldn’t be able to waterboard me into remembering you

It is a bit more than not belonging
A bit more than diaspora, or awakening politics,  and renovated earth

It is 
a little less conspicuous now with you standing there
Aware as the leafless tree and it is summer
Drifting words about ineligible melanin like the fanned sparkler sending its burning seeds into the bulimic earth

It never was semantics, or ignited cemeteries
Or petroleum grins, or creationism
Or chains, or chained CPI
Or apologies crafted with glittered glue

They sure weren’t accepted

Never that


a careless soap

More of The Assasins work can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/passasin

Safer Neighborhoods
Jack
Assasin

I’m not sure this is the right way to carry ourselves
If we lived in a safer neighborhood I’d hold your hand
Your yellow skin
Dried honey casket in the sun yellow
Americana yellow
You walked the freckled gum macadam
With dried paint hardening those eyelash brushes
Under the grey water sky
I tried the immobile lingo of failed sailors and salesmen
(What smug prosody)
But you proved too beautiful to be stopped
You were the vascular honeycomb
In a city of drab totems and vestigial stalks
Their jerky ascension into the sky
Their confusing theory for hypothesis
The world can’t thank you enough for your work on
Improved waving “Hi!”(s) and obscured axions

Too beautiful to be a shopped photo 
Not for sale sign brushed against us
You plastered 
Me duck 
Tape and walkman mind set
You weren’t made for these type of explosions 
These type of writers that have fangs sharpening their endings 
We crack on each other
But still press on 
Jokes and all 
Coke bottles and Sam Cooke on i-pod 
Al Green waiting for the baton 
The crowd looks on
Your color contacts fall out 
My common sense catches on
If we lived in a safer neighborhood I’d hold your hand 
One where sirens were as common as borrowing a dollar 
Garbage on the corner 
Birds that don’t fear cars or people or death
Too quiet hear 
Too quiet to hold your hand
I want to live tonight.


Safer Neighborhoods W/ Poetic Assasin

Title: Moonbathing
Jack
Assasin
More of The Assasins work can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/passasin

Starlight stampeded towards you
Unrivaled
No cloth could keep up
You were
Blushing like slapped skin
Your meek biochemicals revealed by gravitational lensing
The sky unfurled a blanket of coagulated rivers
Adulterated estuaries, carved by childbearing talons
The night sky revealed you
You rescued (or captured?) my dried cayenne tears 
When you occulted the sun
And let out a scratchy yawn of healing earth
When the universe disagreed with us
We chewed Orbit simultaneously 
Trying to read each other’s mind 
Mindset a pair 
A shoe in for panting 
Gravity is in before curfew 
Few details have the dog chasing 
Summertime gets watched rolling down lexus windows
Let us continue 
Tubes of paste keep up with the 
Leaps of faith can happen any year 
Just so happens that we are one 
When this occurred 
Liquid courage for under rage drinkers 
This telescope for under age thinkers

Moonbathing W/ Poetic Assasin

Title: Stockpiled Misgivings
Jack
Assasin
More of The Assasins work can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/passasin

I had a pretty open childhood
It spread like an exploited grape 
Like an asteroid-fed shrub
Everyone knew things about me
The here and now grew up around foreign stones
Around jeering blueberries, repaired woes, and
Other alluvial soils
I tried fielding a bluer sky but
It looked discolored like a spent lightbulb
Like assimilated shrouds
Infected with modesty
I was walking to school when the
Decomposing implicit ground caved and answered
When your hymn went haywire under those stockpiled misgivings
When your talons fell asleep
And I escaped
To cope-
I’ve been abusing stillborn antacids ever since
Death carries an expensive and expressive tongue 
Scooping hearts – new ride
The shotgun was the dark passenger 
And inside my ribcage the club seen 
Was made for internal damage 
No monkey – the porch I sat on gorillas clashed 
Bashful in delivery but their actions were jovial squared
I feared for my spirit, my life chuckled while sipping destiny 
The best of me was blocked by my a.rrogance 
A romanced dissolved in sugar water 
Zebra stripes hold decoded messages
A product of multiple t’s it would be foul 
To run before shoot around 
Hoarse throat not stable 
I’m big on being a daddy
No half stepping where that is concerned.

Stockpiled Misgivings W/Poetic Assasin

you can use my poems for whatever reason. the pictures, the music, aren't mine but the poems are - and in any case idc what you do with them.

.jack

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