Kilmer '08 Featured in Poetry Foundation Podcast

Who'd've thought? Bad poetry, it turns out, is also a concern to the proponents of serious poetry. The Poetry Foundation's most recent podcast has a segment on our very own Kilmer, with a reading by Fred Sasaki, an editor of Poetry Magazine. It starts six minutes in.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=1900

Wheeze

(With no apologies whatsoever to Alfred Joyce Kilmer.)

I think that I shall never see

A beast so ruthless as a tree;

Whose majestic blooming buds

Have filled my sinuses with crud.

A cheery harbinger of spring,

Oblivious to my suffering;

A tree who pollinates all day,

Plotting 'gainst my nasal spray.

Whose blossoms blow their gentle sighs

Directly in my swollen eyes.

A nest of tissues in my pocket rests

(An extra tucked between my breasts);

Seasons announce themselves with roses

My fanfare comes in blowing noses.

My head fees like a sewer drain,

Who intimately lives with pain.

Anyone can plant a tree,

But only God would do this to me.

The Tale of Tight-Roping Bill

As delivered to the AJU Underground last week. Though each line has 10 syllables, I made no attempt at iambic pentameter...

The Tale of Tight-Roping Bill
by Matt Rutta

Under the big top, where the lions roar,
Where tumblers tumble, trapeze artists soar,
Where three giant rings span expansive floor,
Fan expectation of so much in store.

Clowns a’plenty emerge from their auto.
From whence do they come? Where is their grotto?
The kids have balloons, parents are blotto.
All hush up as revealed is the motto:

“The greatest show on earth”, it has been billed.
They’re performing stunts that can get them killed.
Beyond capacity the tent is filled,
Sitting on bleachers where beer has been spilled.

The jugglers juggle torches of flame,
But for the patrons it’s more of the same,
For only one man has truly earned fame:
They want tight-roping Bill, that is his name!

For they all come to see the tightrope walker,
Famous, legendary, badass rocker,
Puts on quite a show for every gawker;
None of them know they’re in for a shocker…

From up high on the wire King Bill does reign,
Over the red tent which is his domain.
Going way up there is clearly insane,
But none of them know how suffers he pain.

He shows off, betwixt his teeth clenched a knife.
Recently found out, unfaithful his wife.
Rather than live with this tension and strife,
Tight-roping Bill has despaired of his life.

He couldn’t exist, seeing her with him,
Wife, bearded lady, with Cannonball Jim.
Oh, how could she do this and be so dim‽
Could she see the outcome would be so grim‽

Quite a surprise that this short man in tights
Who conquered rafters, who basks in spotlights
Defied gravity to many delights
Was deathly, mortally, afraid of heights.

Ascending the ladder, climbs resolute,
He conquered his fear, he gave it the boot.
The only thing on his mind is acute:
The time has arrived to settle dispute.

Then Bill takes on his nefarious role,
To accomplish now his sinister goal.
He must pull it off, no matter the toll:
The adulterer shall pay with his soul!

Early that day, rigs with no abandon,
Calibrates human cannonball’s cannon,
Directed toward the lion’s den, slammin’;
The giant cat will eat Jim like salmon!

The scum of the earth and the tasteless swill,
All stand in awe of our villain named Bill.
Unbeknownst to them, oh, indeed he will
Be on the verge of dramatic self-kill.

He leapt from his platform to the trapeze.
He kicked the acrobat right in the knees.
Hijacking the bar, the criminal flees,
Swooping downward with the greatest of ease.

Removes knife from his mouth, he cuts the string
Causing elements of his trap to spring,
Releasing the lock of the caged being,
The cannon’s fuse pulled, toward jungle’s king.

All could be said, he descended with grace.
No look of horror emoted his face.
Frozen in time, he transcends time and space
By scarring the lives of all in this place.

Intentionally, he misses the mat.
Tightrope Bill hits the floor with a loud splat.
Cannonball Jim is launched in seconds flat
And proceeds to be devoured by the big cat.

As Hobo Murray gets hit with a pie,
His painted-on clown smile seems quite awry
For he needs to wipe off each tear-filled eye
As, watching dumbfounded, his best friends die.

It’s far bigger than the bloodiest mess,
Mem’ry of this psychological stress
Of hubby and paramour deaths transgress
On Mrs. Bill, Bearded Lady’s distress.

Even years later, it makes us fall ill,
Those present that night still feel quite a chill
But never forget, for there is a thrill
Telling the tale of tight-roping Bill.

new poem!

I can out Kissinger Kissinger!
Yes - I can only speak in secret rumblings,
an esoteric mystical code understood by
the monastic brotherhood of Realpolitik.
My brows are furrowed always,
even in sex, even in the act
of making fierce love while
screaming “do me do me do me fuck my face and eyes
with your hands and desperate need to feel my hands ravage your skin
raze your arm hair and freckles to the ground!”
My glasses can only be thick, and I mean both lenses
and frames, all to keep out your searching eyes.
And when I think of nations, people, persons,
children running wild-eyed, their expressions
reminding me of water boiling over, ovens left on,
bread left in toasters… Yes, when I think of bombing nations,
I can only dream of secret missiles falling - my fingers
steepled as the planes make their soundless runs.
(How can somethings so silent; somethings so unobtrusive,
be so lacking in tenderness?)
Cambodia, a mass imagination ruined in silence.
And:
Somethings that happen to somebodies, becoming nobodies.

Kissinger, with his scheming, was above it all: the only
one not bound up in the unfortunate shambles of Watergate.
But I can only stand next to Richard Nixon,
feeling most comfortable smelling his morning breath
of bad coffee and a bowl of cheerios.
His cool flop sweat soothes my nervous eyebrows.
I feel most at home beside liars,
for I know them better than I have loved tellers of truth.
His fingers are flung into the air, splaying like legs mid-coitus,
and his peace is one I can believe in.
I too believe “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Nothing makes me sexier than the fact
that I meet regularly with Mao Zedong. His face
is on posters and t-shirts, but I sit shrouded in mystery.
We walk through doors and enter back rooms together,
and no one may know I was there.
I can slip in and out of your world, and
you won’t know, but I can change it forever.
I stand over you and hold you on the bed,
muffling your mouth with my comforter; I
think of faraway lands and smile.

~jss, 2/28/08
*Thanks go out to Adam Katz, Samantha Kuperberg and Jeana Poindexter.

(x/p to cellular theology)

another for ariela

spectres of love past...

“the day begins at nightfall”

do You remember how I looked at dawn?
You thought I was young and beautiful
but i lay weary in my bed.
You looked at my face like a child gazing into windows
i just stared into the new sun and smiled to be near You.
So
You dodged in between the spots in my eyes
and You kissed me
You wrapped me up in dawn.
and You loved like i was young,
moving to the beating of my nervous heart,
a terrified tattoo while my eyes tracked
the swaying of Your hips.
the brush of Your hand and hair.
You thought me to be young
but i am already old.
how could You see me at dawn
when the day begins at nightfall?
the sun, like a teardrop, fell.
i dreamed a softer dream that night . . .
A softer dream
that night.

~jss

oh the valentines!

i wrote this a million years ago, for this kid in high school. oh high school.

xo/cb

--------

texas, hold me.

the cards are all down

the bets have been collected

and i am off the table.

i'd be hard pressed to say

just when my fate was in the river

and all the cards that were showing

it seemed i would be won

by someone just completely wrong.

but those hidden hearts

the royal flush - that won me.

the sly way you showed your hand

and swept me off the table.

that was from me

I was counting the cards all along.

one of my favorite love poems

perhaps a less conventional love poem than most...

"Marginalia"

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

~Billy Collins

a call for love poetry

in honor of pagan festival hallmark-a-thon day, a love poem from when i was a better person.

for ariela

Each morning has within
a region nestled between evening and day,
between dream and wake
and each morning, I awake,
trembling with the sole intention of meeting you there.
To see your face clear as the day about to come,
to sense your pulse through your skin.

In dreams, my intentions are laid bare,
and they burn with a fire found
when my thoughts are turned to you.


My Only Desire is to Awake in You Desire.
perhaps
To feel reciprocation flow through your body
like breath,
and follow its path from deep within you
out to me.
For love to stem from your fingertips and
trace secret messages, in dream speak,
on my skin.
In dreams, our hands join to become
something greater that flies
away with the dawn.

And

Each morning I will find you again
in dreams, in love,
I will find you in the inbetweens.

Homework Assignment #1

Write a poem according to the following specifications:

10 lines long
the following 8 words must appear in the poem (noun, verb, whatever, however--just put them there):

lifetime
wolf
cloudbank
spare
whisper
damage
wrap
risk

Only one of the above 8 words can appear in a given line, and then only once.
That means: at least EIGHT of the lines will have exactly ONE of the words (either of the other two may have up to 1 each).

and...GO!

The Mission

Part I: Why I Write
a. Young lust

True poetry can be found on this earth.
I lusted for her once.
She . . .
had eyes, deep and dark,
as the space between stars,
as the eternity ‘tween thoughts.

She . . .
was wild and of the earth.
Feral and magical, she hummed with the ground.
Poetry beaded off her skin, tellurian:
like the dusky dawn chanting of Shamans.

A pure tincture of poetry and passion charged
through her veins,
illuminating her skin.

She saw visions
and through her
I did as well . . .

This is not why I write.

b. Then and Now

Then:
Meaning was wrung from life
and left to dry on the rack.
Then:
The juice of poetry dribbled
down
our
chins and only the pit remained.
I did not stop to enjoy the fruit.
So heady was the Quest for Truth and Beauty
that I took to interrogating her with harsh light and demanding tones.
Her wondering moans of pity and fear still haunt me in the darker
tender times of night.

Now:
I am of a softer disposition.
Beauty must be encountered like a deer in the field,
taken for the wonder it is
and stalked delicately for every additional moment
one has in its company.
Truth must be recognized in the crowd,
like a long lost friend one has not met before.

c. Command

Poetry must not be written
not be created.
Breathe poetry. Drink poetry.
love poetry. FUCK poetry.
Worship poetry, then whisper sublime wonders in her ear.
Smoke a cigarette with poetry in bed.
Warm yourself with hot chocolate and poetry.
Run to poetry’s house in the rain.
Scream and don’t stop screaming til she comes out.
Kiss poetry with the kisses of your mouth.
Promise poetry you’ll never leave her.
Love poetry.

Part II: Why I Fight
a. Preamble

I’ve been writing ever since I could remember.
In fact
my life can only be proven through creation.
By all accounts
my life began when I put words on paper
into the souls of the world.

To live well,
what one creates must be beauty.

I stand here
knowing my life is no longer mine alone.

Tremble.

b. Reminisces

Once she kissed me and her lips felt like the shed scales of a snake.
I wanted to draw back in fear
in revulsion
but I dove deeper hoping to make soft whatever appeared rough.
To find beauty hidden among the discarded skins and lies.
Her eyes were like the soft mud of the earth
as was her hair, and her beauty was something I created.
I did not want her for her body.

c. Present Time

One day I will look back on my time here,
and I will see only words,
echoing in the hearts
of friends and former lovers.
Each one chosen carefully to
elevate the potential inherent in mundanity.
Poetry is raising the sparks.

d. Reminisces II.

Once -
Her back up against the glass of a bus stop -
I -
her nose with a single blemish and our bodies pressed together
at awkward positions -
told -
even while in embrace, my mouth moved against hers
with its own purposes
her -
all my eyes could see were her, her face, her lips, her eyes,
the poetry beneath the vision of her skin, the faint hum of her breath
that –
every inch of her was beautiful.

For a while
we both believed it.
We used to listen for each others’ heartbeats, gasping like fish out of their bowls.

I did not want her for her heart.

e. The Mission

I walk with my neck at odd angles.
I listen for the poetry of the world.
It is found in disparate places:

the squawking of geese
the insistence of car horns
the percolating pot of coffee
the bird calls of early morning
or late afternoon
the last school bell
the music of Spanish Harlem
the beat box on the street
the lilting dialogue of Black women.

I search frantically, wildly, desperate for beauty.
Smells are beautiful. Touch is beautiful.
She tasted beautiful; the poetry I found in her was of lilacs and vanilla,
brown sugar and cinnamon, jasmine and chamomile.

I did not come here for pleasant faces and witty exchange,
for the haughty aloofness of youth in art.
I do not care for your hearts or your minds,
your opinions, your politics, your affectations!
(“The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is indifference”)
But I did not come for your love,
I came for your souls!

Beloved:
I came for your soul.


~jss
12/03

un cancion del corazón

i swear to goodness gracious that for spanish ap in sophomore year, i wrote a latin jazz song and performed it on guitar for my final project.
because i love and trust you all, here it is:

I. Llevo las estrellas de
arriba como una falda
y las cometas bailan
en el cielo.
(Toda la belleza) x2
me da esperanza. . .

Bridge: Un concurso en los cielos
Un choque de los titanos
Una guerra de divinos
La llama de mi amor
Es más que el sol. . .

II. Las chispas que
Emanan de su amor.
Encienden un fuego
En mi alma, mi amor.
Seré campéon
de su corazón, su conquistador. . .


i think i may have forgotten what it means ;-)
creative translations are welcome in the comments.

A Poem

As found in notebook from 2003, with a drawing of a one armed robot.


i buried a treasure in my backyard.
i dug it up and found an arm.
it happened to belong to me.
somehow i didn't realise it was missing.


Yeah, I don't know the context either.

natural beauty

Natural Beauty


Walking by, I slid my gaze up, up, up
and there you were,
crouching in the arms of a tree.
Your fingers splayed out on the bark;
your feet were unshod, one in a birds nest,
lazily crushing the shells,
the albumen oozing between your toes.

I looked up, and the sun was glaring, angry,
and you waved to my face, your hands playing
signs with the shadows.
Your smile complemented the hue of midday light;
I could never stay mad at you,
and I hated you for it.

It’s funny how, as the day cooled,
the bluebirds came
and whirled away to the whine of your cell-phone.
You grinned at the beauty,
never realizing it was your fault.

I looked up, and as you
shifted your position,
bits of bark drifted down the breeze
and into my eye. good; I was afraid
that when I ripped off my shoes
and dug my toes into the trunk,
flew my fingers up that tree to meet you
face to face,
to look in your eyes,
all I would see: a blank white orb
that sets off the highlights in your hair.

~jss, 3/07


(x/p to cellular theology)

A sub-par analysis of Shakespeare's Twentieth Sonnet

I dug this nugget up from three computers ago. I hope I didn't get a good grade on this assignment. I totally didn't get The Bard back then.

Sonnet #20
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted 1
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; 2
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted 3
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion; 4
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, 5
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; 6
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling, 7
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. 8
And for a woman wert thou first created; 9
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, 10
And by addition me of thee defeated, 11
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. 12
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure, 13
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure. 14

Paraphrase:

Lines 1-2: You have a cute face like a woman.
Lines 3-4: You are kindhearted like a woman, but you do not have mood swings.
Lines 5-6: I can see your sincerity in your beautiful eyes.
Lines 7-8: It is hard not to look at a woman.
Lines 9-10: The creation of woman was an accident.
Lines 11-12: You have defeated me.
Lines 13-14: Nature decided that it is natural for a man and woman to be intimate, so I will love you but not have sex with you.

Although I love you, I will still sleep with women because it is natural.

Yeah, I totally missed the point

-R' Rutta

another poem from high school

although, it's possible that this is from middle school.
i have edited it somewhat, though, since then.

lost generation

We are no lost generation
rambling back home to wife or kids or bottle or job
with barbed wire lining our brains
and national anthems resounding in our heads
images of disintegration and madness do not
replay ad infinitum in our young and tender minds
images of friends ripped from this world like vacuums and abortions
or cut in half by machine gun fire
or mashed into the groung in a tire tread pattern
do not haunt our memories or dreams
We are not the Lost Generation

We are no Lost Generation
We have no Hemingway to expose and die for our sins
no one with the courage to plead utter confusion and desperation
to a world wanting answers
No one who can say little and do much.
...
Who feels the shock now of his shotgunned brains in the woods?
We have no Fitzgerald
to help us laugh at where we have gone
terribly
terribly wrong. He sees our empires built on wealth, constructed on sand,
and F. Scott rolls his eyes and hisses through his teeth
like the opening of missile silos.
We have no Ezra Pound to write about the mystery
We are not the lost generation

We are no Lost Generation
We have been breathing war’s odors since we were young
and we have not been betrayed by a world we never had
we are not staring at walls forever at walls forever
staring at walls
We know the intimacy, when screaming ends and waking begins

Death lines our coffee cups and cigarettes
our paints and our automobiles
our sports and entertainment
our dreams
our despairs
Death waits in every corner
and in every doorway . Death thrives in between
here
and
There
Death does not wait for us overseas
Death has encountered us, acculturated and docile
Death has played with our childhood friends
Death hums the same songs on the radio
Death watches our TV
Death enjoys our company. Death works for our boss.
Death would live among us:
His Found Generation.

~jss

the first in a series of meditative poems about skin

rubbing

while the gray wind swept by your sandy hair,
on the boardwalk, a man with a shabby cap
shaded you into my life.

it's incredible how life moves by in gradations
shades
are the darker bits of your face older? wiser?
your eyes searched me out from the surface of the page
and i don't remember if i liked your nose better
or if it was rounder or sharper
if your nostrils were wide or also sharp.

on the beach, the sea rubs away at the coast.
the memory of you becomes less distinct
but pervades

i was in the process of walking by,
it was a process finely tuned to process through,
when the hairs on the backs of my arms noticed
how the ley lines of the air, they bunched and jostled,
breathed in by you.
the man with the shabby hat smudged
your face into being.

when i reached out my finger and brushed your cheek,
it returned to my eye similarly smudged.
i left our fingerprint on every surface i could find.

1/4/08

more from the vault of josh's maddeningly prolific literary past

Pulse

Now
in the forever
Now
spiking crystal spires
tearing armageddon holes in the sky
then
and Now
I press my
fingers to the flesh of my forearm.

Pulse.

dew drops of imagination
fusing in the ionosphere and
when they fall
they shatter just
like dreams, frozen.

Now and Then
I wonder, steal
glimpses of a future forbidden
I ponder stealing
and other glamorous sins
written in the stars.

Pulse.

in the
forever. Now
arrogant towers of purity
and Truth tear apocalypse holes
punching wide and raggedly rending dreams.
Then
and Now.

I gently ponder loving
in the dark.
No one can see me.
I hope
You understand?
I am not a disembodied heartbeat
nor an eidolon, phantom-like ideal
I am pulsating memory & purpose tentatively approaching infinity
forever eternal Now.

~josh schwartz
4/23/02

Hey everybody. I hope you enjoy this poem from my sophomore year in high school.
On the upside, it was one i read on NPR!

Meditations on a Dying Woman

The streets are overcrowded with salable goods
and people too sick to move
and people too sick to live - without someone else
telling them how ...
In the midst of all the refuse, rotting fruits and animals,
struggling workers tearing at their bonds that they’ve been told
bind them.
Walking along on the street of metaphors,
between the beggars painted gold, dancing away their lives, for a buck
and all the almost corporeal odors, that have been here so long
they pay rent ... a woman dies.
On the corner of Society Avenue and Universe Drive,
In Symbolism, Illinois, someone falls and can’t get up.
A scream wriggles free from the claustrophobic crush
of the Communists and heterosexuals. Shop owners sweep their brooms.
Kids just out of school stand atop boxes preaching
to their congregation of the unfeeling masses about a Utopia.
And a cancer patient, female, age 32, slips on the sweetly disguised black ice,
feels her feet slide out from under her
feels gravity and other natural laws betray her and laugh cruelly.
Her head strikes the corner of a box containing oranges all the way from Flahrida.
Suddenly there is enough room for her to die.
Meanwhile, prophets preach, children complain, and children’s programming plays on.
A man who had been playing guitar and singing about freedom with responsibility
puts down his yogurt and rushes to the poor woman.
“Those poor people” grumble the suits as they step over around her and move on.
The guitar playing man lifts her head off the cold inhospitable sidewalk.
Her blood bids her body goodnight and abandons ship
her red blood pumps from the heart to the outside world
and her benefactor realizes he has her life in his hands
he resists the urge to rinse them off
but the blood won’t stop
bleeding unclotted and he’s scared
and prophets without a god preach about a perfect world
and a woman dies
and good Americans stand proudly with their country
and a woman lies bleeding on the unsympathetic concrete path.
Her life is in his hands and he can’t afford to wash it off.
He wants to comfort her and her breath comes belabored now.
He begins to sing softly to her
he’ll meet her in heaven, he swears up and down,
he’ll see her through thick and thin
this is nothing, he’ll see her next week right here, same time, same place
and she can help him sing of a world where
a man can find space to live without having to die.
She can help him, he promises, and she begins to relax ...
Slowly. Gently. Softly. Like satin sheets sliding off a pre-made bed.
She dies.
He wipes the tears from his eyes
and her life onto his denim pants. One more stain ...
And suddenly, he knows he will sing again
sing to all the self styled prophets, saviors, rioters, and protestors,
who didn’t know a woman can die.
He sings; and he accompanies himself with his old guitar.
And the body is beautiful and serene and is swept away into the sea of metaphors
and the shop owner comes out from his store
and wonders how those oranges will ever sell now
with the blood stains and all ...


by Joshua Schwartz,
2003

what do we gain by blinking?

Here is a poem i wrote on a facebook wall, recently.

i heard you dripping out the corner of my eye

but didnt sound like tears

you ran down my cheek skipping and jumping

and singing and yelling

and no one but the cows heard

you

pushed aside the whiskers on my face

like so many sheaves of wheat or other tall grasses

ducking down it is so easy to lose yourself

amidst strange textures and windful tremors

the breeze brushed about

you

ruffling your hair like your father

moistening your eyes like your

mother and you

and i

and eye

~jss 11/29/07

~ Converge! ~

To me my holy men!

Let us smear our souls messily

across the sky.

Dip in fingers and wipe

on tunics, modestly cut, revealing

only our crafty beauty.

We be not famous. We

slip unseen back to anonymous realms

like dolphins from their arcs of motion.

And yet We will live

forever & more for Death can not

silence the echoes of unknown caverns.

We burn, propulsory jets in

the stratosphere. We disappear.

We are never done.

We scamper down busy

streets. Desperation clinging to

every step. Raindrop eyes glance

off teflon men, and We go through

life unknown.

We yearn for contact,

the beauty of an earnest

embrace, or a deeply planted,

"fuck you."

We will travel to the end of time

and record every name.

We will never be remembered.

You will never be forgot.

~jss, 2/11/05