love is patient,love is kind,love makes you lose your goddamn mind,
one moment at each others throats and using all your words to coax
 the anger out like toothpaste. 
but once it's said and done,you can't go back,a huge waste. 
love is waiting for a call,love is staring at the wall,
pacing,heart racing,you get too nervous,you can't face him.
love is overlooking big things and picking fights over the small things until they manifest,
you're bawling cause he didn't call you darling.
you don't want to deal with everything that love entails, it guts you, cuts you, rips out your entrails and forces them back down your throat.
but there's hardly any space when you've been choking here for days
on those three words that cause such grief,to swallow them would be relief but that would mean that you're alone again. 
staring at that same goddamn phone again.
rip the cord out the wall and thank god if I fall and it breaks and I swear its an accident. 
analyzing the lies in the lines of the text you sent.
 I don't know where we went but we said we would wed and we laid together in bed
 and dreamt,
and your eyes are the same
 but your smiles kinda twisted 
and my smiles kinda pained 
and my lights kinda missing
 and I'm glad that at this point you've become nothing but memory,
an ephemeral gem of a boy lost inside his inclemency,
if I wait to see who you'll turn out to be 
ill forget to develop my own entity so I'll leave you behind,
I can't see,
I can't find 
a reason to stay
 one
 more
 fucking 
 day.

revantalism, part one

if I look like her,can I be yours,would you write about me a little bit more? 
I can't stand to look at her name in your notebook,I can't let you be another thing of mine she took,
can't explain how I feel without getting all shook up,can't control the urge I have to rip the fucking book up,
can't save the jealousy I have until I find the things that matter,it's a pretty shade of red,but on me it doesn't flatter,
I get madder 
and I think that you'll see everything that you don't like
 and I'll be left here loving you and it won't be a pretty sight,
I start the fights and I apologize for all the troubled nights
 where you consoled my weeping body
 and you turned off the lights
 and you held me as I laid there feeling worthless and unable
insecure and lonely,melancholy and unstable. 
I just wish that maybe someday ill be the girl that you deserve,
before you find someone without so many life lessons to learn.

 but it's late now,
it's at stake now,
and I'm sorry that I'm blowing up your phone,
but I will never love another,

I would rather be alone.

carmine

i'm feverishly in love and it's hard when you're not here
i'm trying to stay above my normal levels of doubt and fear
melancholic alcoholic,in the reflection you appear
of my still glass of vodka as the end of the night nears
your love was solid and was sure of tomorrow
the weight of your words enough to help me not feel hollow
but my brain is creating frequencies to replicate your voice
and the frequencies are telling me this wasn't your choice
and it's your face in the glass and my hands on the wheel
that pushes insanity, confuses what's real
and i'm driven to join you, wherever you are
and so i lose control of my tears, lose control of the car

getz

there are times when it's you and me,
perfectly,we agree,
we fit like that analogy about the pods and the peas and we 
smoke
 float 
soaked 
in the sun-bleached grass,taking hits off of our cigarettes and watching the storm pass.
there are days when I ask if you know my name,when you say it,I replay it,it don't sound the same.

do you believe in the thing about 4 seasons of grief,where you have to go a year before attaining relief, can't turn a new leaf,
 you can't sleep, you can't eat,
there's weights on chains and they're connected to your feet?
but my baggage isn't heavy like all the cliches we've ever heard,
 it's light and takes me to a place where my thoughts aren't so absurd.
 I think of places where the ones you love don't up and walk away, and you wish that they'd come back but cant think of reasons they should stay. 
where you sleep because you're tired not because it feels like death and
 god forbid you never did anything to stop your breath. 


 but these places don't exist and so I'm trying to subsist
 on mediocrity in men and in the words borne from my pen.

murray lake miserable

when i think of you positively
i say things like genius
and she had an illness
it wasn't your fault
though we slept in the cold.

when i think that i hate you
i say things like drunkard
and you left me to fend for myself at seven years old

when i thought of you then
i didnt know your birthday
i hated you i hated you i hated you
so much.

when i think of you now
i do know your birthday
i miss you i miss you i miss you
so much.

k(dear mom)

i have an uncanny knack for knowing whats right
and a pugnacious nature that wants me to fight
i have an unfair advantage of knowing whats wrong
and a head full of your words and lyrics to songs
i have a premeditated response for when things dont go as planned
and an unapologetic view of who i am
i have nine notebooks full of lyrics i dont want you to read
and a power-hungry brain ive been meaning to feed.
ive got some suitors to choose from, yes this is true
but the one that i want i cant have
and thats you.

what do i have?(2010)

fifth of november

white walls, white sheets
i feel so dirty, make me clean
ugly, broken, and obscene

white purity i cant obtain
ive tried so hard, just cant be changed
ive scrubbed so hard, the skin is raw
dirty in your eyes

tried to clean the mirror 
thinking that would make it better
it showcased all my scars and scrapes
i broke the mirror, drew the drapes

im filthy and im sickly
i cant look you in the eyes
why do i try so hard?

itchy and disgusting
ive tried showering it away
but clings to me
it colors everything i see
i cant breathe

dont touch me
dont touch me
you might get it too

dont touch me 
dont touch me
you might get it too

im filthy and im sickly
i cant look you in the eyes
why do i try so hard?


filth

we used to climb trees together
and run through woods
at seven
we claimed territory in forests-
“home” was a word we read in books.
we practiced war faces. we
packed suitcases.
i saw your face over the bonfire
laughing, often in the summer while
we read and played with cats.

we made jokes to the flight attendant
the entire way to tucson and when
we landed they made fun of our boots.

our shadows have stretched
further than those trees we climbed.
no longer can we dream
of arizona, or sault ste. marie
it’s been awhile since i’ve seen you
or your face over a bonfire
it’s been longer since i’ve
seen you laugh.
we still pack suitcases, though
our war faces replaced with poker
and i know our boots
have only gotten heavier.
and though we both claim separate territories
in different places
now

i implore you not
to forget about the days
we used to climb trees together

mirror image me

Danielle Starkey
Mixed Twin Primer

You’re never you. Sometimes you’re the other twin, sometimes they call you a mashing – up of both of your names, sometimes they call you mocha. You don’t always like it when they call you mocha, save for certain people, but you make jokes of it often- growing up here, you learn to make the jokes first- and everyone will laugh and you will feel funny and content, because that’s what you have always wanted. You straighten your hair in the morning and are thankful that it is not kinkier, less manageable, although it does still always prove to be kinky and unmanageable in its own right. You wish for long straight hair. You wish for front bangs.
When you were young you had a bob cut. You would visit your dad and his friends would say, “You look so white,” and wrinkle their noses, sitting on black leather couches, drinks in manicured hand (this was when your dad was doing well, and had friends that could afford black leather couches and drinks and manicures). You felt thankful for these friends of your dad’s, the ones with money, the ones you could point to in order to contradict the stereotypes you heard in your all-white school. These friends would dress you and put beads in your hair. You felt very black with beads in your hair but you didn’t say anything to offend anybody. When you return home you are embarrassed because everyone knows that white people don’t wear FUBU and so you and your sister ditch all of the clothes, even the cheesy shirts that your dad had you and your sister’s nicknames printed on the backs of. You sometimes sleep in the shirt but would never wear it in public because the kids at school would dislike you. They would always dislike you, even after middle school, and half would never learn to distinguish you from your twin, but you didn’t know that then. So you keep persevering and you wear the right clothes. They make fun of the puffiness of your hair and you pull it back in tight, tight buns that are painful but to you anything is better than hair that looks like a triangle. 
As you grow older you resent the fact that the white side of your family is considerably better off than the black, and you resent reflecting a stereotype. You move school districts and then switch back because your landlord refuses to “rent his land to a nigger”. You listen to white music and wear white clothes but every once in awhile a KC & JoJo song will come onto the radio and you remember dancing in your living room singing that you were going crazy, crazy, crazy, just a-thinking about you, baby. There are maybe three other black people in your school that you know of and you don’t feel like one of them, because you aren’t. You have spent your entire life cultivating an image that is strengthened when people see you as white (and you are pleased) and even when they see you as something else because it only strengthens your resolve to assimilate. And then your dad leaves for ten years and becomes another stereotype and another reason to distance yourself from what seems like the darkest and most shameful part of yourself. You don’t see that this isn’t an ingredient of yourself, and that this isn’t an ingredient of what it means to be black, but that it is an ingredient of being a bad parent. You don’t see this. How could you see this?
You grow. You enter high school and your skin tone is still the invitation for jokes. The comparisons between you and your twin become overwhelmingly frequent. When you tell people this they never ever believe you, but they sit in your classes when people say “nigga” and ask who is smarter and state who is hotter and ask what you are. You run track and play basketball and feel like you are feeding into a stereotype and so when you recite your activities to someone you break them up and put white activities like theatre and orchestra in between the sports. One day you beat a girl in a race and she spits at you and calls you a mutt. You will never know how to feel about this. You continue to dress whitely and straighten your hair everyday even though it takes hours and ruins the texture. It does not occur to you that you do not have to do this. 
Sometime along the way the comments take a new tone. Your skin tone becomes coveted by some, a question spat by a white lady wondering where you vacation, a . You are given any number of edible comparisons to your skin tone and at some moments you feel like the most expensive and luxurious Ghirardelli caramel truffle but sometimes when they talk you feel like the coin chocolate at the bottom of the Easter basket: cheap and novelized and phased-out. When you are a junior in high school you learn what white privilege is and realize that you have used your mixed status to conceal your black identity. You also realize that because of your constant rejection of everything that wasn’t white and the lack of exposure to everyone who is not white, you no longer have a black identity. You are white, at least to you. And you suffer a loss that you feel is self-inflicted, and you don’t see how the society you live in has shaped your thoughts about your identity. You don’t see how you have been made to feel ashamed of your identities and how they intersect. You don’t see the strengths of black culture. You don’t see anything.
And then you graduate high school and go to a predominantly white university and you learn about the U.S prison system and institutionalized racism and you feel ashamed of being black but now also of being white. You speak out against what you see and you are told to be quiet. And you are overwhelmed by the magnitude of repression and you wonder how anyone can live without the constant burden of this knowledge and you don’t know what to feel and so you weep. You just weep. They’ll say you care too much. They would never like you. You never seemed to get this.


yunglady

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