Poems, everybody! (Or, "I expect you to quote The Wall")

So they tell me I'm a poet.

I freaking knew it. There was this dude from Nantucket, you see, and...
Well, that's a story perhaps for another time.
Right now I need to talk about the reason of rhyme.

The laddie fancies herself a poet!

I've greatly enjoyed returning to the writing community and my late-night version of poetry is finding not only a home, but also a peculiar fanbase.
I don't have the heart to tell them that I usually just get drunk and spew nonsense at my computer. I can't help that my blood-alcohol level is an emo fan. It's all a big process where I get shitfaced-wasted and then pretend I'm explaining the idea behind emotional feelings to a partially blind toddler.
I'm betting old Walt Whitman did the same thing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The freaks.

Here's a quick breakdown;
Step One: Whiskey.
Step Two: Write

That's as far as I usually get.
And then I wake up the next morning to an email that says "Thanks For The Submission" and I add a little What The Fuck Did I Submit to my coffee followed by reciting the Lord's "please don't be boob pics, please don't be boob pics" prayer.
Most of the time it's just poetry.
Thank the Blessed Saint Victoria, Protector of the Secret.
Praise be to the Draft Folder;
Keeper of Failed Uploads, Savior of the Slutty Selfie.

It's likely that the one or two boob pics that snuck through are what convinced them to encourage that I write a collection of poetry. If you think about it, asking that I send work on actual paper is a pretty ingenious way to ensure that I don't accidently send pictures of my tits.
They'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I still have a Polaroid.

Used here to document the last time I was confident wearing stripes.

There's a lot about poetry that I don't understand. Like, who reads that shit? I write a few verses every single day and I still wouldn't call myself a "reader" of poetry. I hardly even read the crap I write. Also, who in the fuck still publishes collections of poetry? I mean, really, are you going to pull up Joleen Doreen's Collection of Depressing Nonsense, Volume 2 (trademarked, title pending) on your bright and shiny eReader while you're at the beach? Going to put the nice little leather-bound black book of Poems From the Dark Side of Joleen Doreen next to the toilet for light bathroom reading? If you were browsing the bargain-bin of a used paperback store, would you throw down thirty-five cents for a dog-eared copy of Even Your Name Rhymes, Joleen Doreen? (And if it was new would you pay, like, SEVENTY-FIVE cents?)

Well, dear readers, here is your chance to answer those questions and more! (Not really more, just the one question, because I don't really give a fuck about other questions.)

customer survey

I feel like a marketing tool.

I'm an adaptive person. I know how to make what I have work for me. I've been known to eat ham with a spoon.
The new-found world of creating a shareable form of self for others to buy into is absolutely fascinating in the sense that I think you're all bat-shit crazy for supporting my writing and becoming part of that very peculiar fanbase that I love so much.

I'm learning of the necessary evils of successful endeavors. How to be an old-fashioned writer in a modern world. The new tricks of a dying trade. It's a wicked corporate world of bullshit and it will curl the most poetic mind. There are very few ways to retain your dignity while literally selling your soul.

(YOU CAN SHOW YOU AGREE BY PURCHASING MY NEW STICKER)

It feels like it might be an entertaining pursuit, writing a collection of poetry. I imagine there to be a lot of chocolate on the inevitable descent into madness. To say nothing of the booze.
Oh, the booze.

What rhymes with Liver Failure?

Chump

I've been in love before.

On purpose even. 

Feels a lot like the enveloping warmth of a well-lit fire on a cold damp night. Tastes like that sweet first bite of a fresh-baked gooey chocolate chip cookie. Intoxicates faster than all the booze in God's country. As surprising as stepping in dog shit.

Love.

No thanks.

Love is for fools, as they say. A nonsensical attachment of emotion coupled with the forging of bonds surrounded by a complete disregard for the logicality of reason and inability to make well-thought decisions. Love is an intangible irrationality with power capable of reducing a grown woman to tears. (Often repeatedly; shout out to the 2nd Floor Ladies Room where I am Belle of the Bawl.) The mingling forces of adoration, obsession, lustful longing, and sheer stupidity competing for brain space with bat-shit insanity.

Love is for chumps.

 At least the monkey on my back is adorable.

Teenage love was the best, remember that? Remember when you felt a stirring, an actual gosh-darn STIRRING, in your goodies that guided your actions and you didn't know why? Remember how it felt worth EVERYTHING to drop all the rules, symbolically running through the field of this new-found affliction? REMEMBER when you used capital letters? Remember discovering how blowjobs end? Remember when your cheeks got red? Remember writing bad poetry? Remember how you were going to be in love FOREVER?

Remember being really excited to do things you didn't quite understand, only to find yourself a lot more disappointed than you were comfortable admitting?

Maybe teenage love was prophetic, in its ability to unknowingly define married love.

We could talk about married love OR YOU COULD TAKE THE GARBAGE OUT.
Funny thing, garbage. It didn't smell that bad at first. There were just a few crappy pieces of emptiness here and there, nothing unbearable. Maybe a few empty wine bottles atop of the shrimp tails left over from the Honeymoon Stage. It festers and boils a little; life adds a few diapers. Kids grow up, more crap gets piled on top. Old poetry gets thrown away. Layers upon layers of  new garbage starts pushing down on the old garbage below until the pressure and stench starts pushing back. 

Competing with each other to mask the issue while ignoring the rot is what I call the "Fabreze Period" of married love.

Eventually someone gets dumped.

That metaphor lasted longer than some marriages.

LOVE love, though. 

AmIright?
It snuck up out of nowhere and slapped you with a metric fuckton of oblivion. Made your soul feel complete. The kind of love that made love understand that love had no idea how to love. The True love. The One love. The LOVE. The kind that could never drag me away from you. There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do..

LIKE THE LOVE I HAVE FOR TOTO.

I really need to stop drinking and writing. Or limit the 80's playlist. 

LOVE love, though. 

AmIright?
It's a bright and sunny day. Or crisp and dead of night, if that's your thing. (It's definitely mine; shout out to the third-shift cleaning lady of the second floor ladies room who calls me "Belle.") Either way, there you are, minding your very own business, when SUDDENLY, out of no where mind you, your heart rears back and kicks you in the balls. 

It assaults all of your senses; from touch to taste to feel and feel and feel. 

Your heart can hear, your mind can see. 

It's real godamn poetry.
LOVE love.

The drug of the feeling is more addictive than the feeling of any drug.

Love is the ultimate pyramid scam.
Being fed into over and over; built on nothing more than promises, empty promises. Every participant brings in another; spreading the infectious optimism what is nothing more than a scheme to help support the tumbling mountain of love. One investor of the heart falls over the side, their place in the Love Matrix snatched up by another waiting heart before the first rebound date; left abandoned and bankrupt by the side of the emotional road to recovery.

Writing fucking godamn poetry.

Love is an Evergreen Forest.
The ridge of the Appalachians churning to meet the valleys without giving pause to the obstacles daring to impose upon it. A river of emotions winding a path of its own destination; narrowly escaping the mountainous confines of stoic conformity. Love is a blinding burst of feeling, erupting from behind a wall that took centuries to create. It is the single dying branch of a small sapling pine, hanging limply in the shaded side of the valley on the ridge of Bald Eagle; desperately clinging to the slightest hint of warmth as it yearns to grow into a feeling that can stand.

This metaphor really hits home.

Love is like a poem.
Four lines; makes no sense.
Doesn't even rhyme.

Only chumps fall in love.

I love Love.

Half Genius. Half Dopey.

I saw you blush.

The red rising to your cheeks from
the abashed you were taught to feel.
I wondered if it came with
anything else that could be real.

I saw you smile.

Along came the decision I never wanted to make;
               where would this go.
               Who am I to say.

Explanations of the fall sound better in The Fall.
Rome.
Roam.

Who’s in charge here?

I saw you feel.

Just for a moment, eyes lit anew.
I saw you smile.
I saw you blush.

This line is one short of eight beats.
I can lie. You should try it too.
We both know you did up until
you didn’t think I would catch you.

I saw you blush.

I know I fucking crave your smile,
GODAMN IT, I FEEL YOU GRIN.

It is so nice to hear you laugh,

Does it feel the same when you win?

Nobody Nose

There is a scar on my nose that has no story.

It's not like the chewed-up version of a left ear that my head holds, remnants of a brother who fancied himself the next knife-throwing sensation. It's nothing as ghastly as the tattered shin of my right leg, a lasting tribute to another brother who was keen to chase me into drainage pipes in the dead of summer's night. It's not even as typical as the repeating skin-puckering of brushburns found across my forehead, a recurring love-tap of sorts from my soulmate.

Here we are in happier times.

There's an E in my "whiskey" because it's E'Merican.

Even setting 'falling out of your standard fat-nutted blue truck' aside, there are still a number of times I've landed on my face in life. Being married, for example. 

But even that didn't leave a physical mark.

And it sure doesn't explain the odd scar on my nose. It runs dead across the thick meaty center, almost a perfect semi-circle rounding from one nostril to the other. For many years I brushed it off as a strange crease mark, a true cautionary tale against the effects of turning up your nose at things. Or, more like a line of separation; the point from where the tip of my nose was just too fat for my nostrils and bursting to escape. The rebellion of a cute button nose on a damn ridiculous face.

A Cabbage Patch Kid come to life.

Upon further inspection, it turns out this mark across my nose is a scar. And now I want to know what happened. Another knifing incident with Jimmy the Great? Dog bite? Game of Got-Your-Nose gone horribly wrong? 

Why don't I remember? Is it an incident I've repressed or was I black-out drunk? When did weed start smelling like fruit? Has the scar been there the whole time? Why has nobody mentioned it? Did politeness ruin my chance of finding out the truth?

ARE THERE OTHER SCARS THAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT?

Something is rotten. I sense it with my forgetfully scarred nose. There's something going on here and I won't tell me what it is. I know something that I'm keeping myself from knowing. There's a godamn scar on my nose that I must know something about the origin of!

But, alas, I know nothing and I'm not talking.

Even my soulmate is suspiciously silent, although I suspect he holds the proof.

(Woo! High-five for the whiskey joke!)

No?
Booooo (ze).

Nonetheless, there is a scar on my nose that has no story.

 I wonder if I was a spy in a former version of self. Somewhere between wasted potential and cancer-stricken. Maybe I was trapped in the evil sub-plot of a second-act nemesis; barely discernable from every other douchebag on the daily grind save for my brief encounter with an angry lead character who takes a swipe at my nose. 

Stupid scar.

If Harry Potter was a feeling it would perfectly describe the emotion I am filled with right now.

Do YOU know why you do the things that you do?

Me fucking either.

It's like magic.