Secrets remain hidden,
A story stays untold.
Walls grow taller,
And the padlock keeps it closed.
Keys are given
To all who reside within
And to the few who earn my trust.
Because what lies inside
Was meant to be hid.
The outside,
A perfect dreamhouse,
White-picket fence and all.
How ironic,
The same colour of drywall
In which I watched a crater form.
Few visitors ever see
What goes on
Behind closed doors.
Once I give them a spare key,
Nothing is hidden anymore.
The doorknob beckons for your hand
Before it’s too late.
Now you see inside the house,
And I know
What happens next.
Now you know my secrets,
My deepest, darkest fears,
And that shatters your lens,
Because I am now real.
But the windows are now smashed,
The story’s been told,
Walls are still crumbling,
And a new padlock now holds.
It starts small~
a sigh sharp enough to slice drywall,
a muttered well I never,
then a dramatic shuffle of papers
that did absolutely nothing wrong.
Then the arms cross.
The eyebrows rise.
The soul leaves the body
for a brief smoke break.
Suddenly this fully grown human~
tax-paying, grocery-shopping,
responsible-for-a-mortgage human~
is having a full-tilt hissy fit
because the Wi-Fi blinked
or someone said calm down.
There’s foot tapping.
There’s theatrical breathing.
There’s a moment where they stare
into the middle distance
like a pioneer widow
who just broke the last jar of peaches.
And you stand there thinking,
Lord help us,
the toddler has escaped
and taken over the adult body.
But eventually~
after the sighs,
the flutters,
the tragic monologue
about how no one understands
the gravity of the situation~
they return to themselves,
smooth their shirt,
clear their throat,
and say with great dignity,
“I’m fine now.”
The roller left a wet
Textured topography
On the drywall
A fresh
Continent
Of liquid chalk
Under a steady
Unblinking gaze
The gloss begins to warp
The fumes carry
A quiet hum, a frequency
That unlatches the deadbolt of the mind
My eyes
Track
A single, rebellious drip
A slow-motion comet
Cutting through
A matte sky
In the five seconds
It takes
To drop an inch
I have built
A city
In my head
Lived a lifetime
Inside a song
I forgot the title of
And wondered
If the sky
Feels this heavy right before it rains
The perimeter is curing now
Turning dull
At the edges
By the time
This surface
Loses its shine
I will have traveled
Lightyears
And forgotten my way back
I remember how their mouths nipped at
me.
Fangs of wine-dusted petals, sharp.
Their thorny digits clenching my neck.
In the white hospital room, they come.
With white gowns that swirl like mouthwash.
The gleaming teeth that adorn the
uniforms.
Here, child. The flowers want you to
take this.
And I do, with the orange-peel pill bottle.
Lithium sucks the life out of my marrow.
My family, they do not know me.
And they do not care, to know me.
I gaze into Hades' little den of comfort.
When the shadows shift and shape,
I can see the hollowness of my future,
The futility of my unripe fruit.
Rotten, some of the apples, that's what
They all say. But I see the infant green
Yet, I also know it will never do.
At the hour, and season of eighteen
I slice into the cake of chocolate drywall,
And savor the aftertaste of adolescence.
The distinguished guests
raised their crystal goblets
toast the host's lavish,
midnight banquet.
A sudden, violent chill swept
the parlor as the grandfather
clock shrieked thirteen times.
The exquisite roast on the
tarnished platters abruptly
mutated into writhing,
maggot- infested human
limbs.
Horrified screams died in
their throats as the dining
room doors slammed shut
and vanished into the drywall.
They turned to flee, only to
realize they were chewing on
their own severed tongues.
you're a grease-fire film
attached to drywall like salt
s p i I l e d
over a cracked, unwashed shoulder,
the dull toothache
throbbing
through a 3 a.m. call,
growing older, sharper, colder...
get out of my mind!
you aren't some gothic ghost
in a tragic shroud,
but a raw static hiss on busted station;
a sagging weight ,
a stationary,
stubborn-as-a-mule cloud,
a parasite
fattening on my hesitation...
get out of my mind!
like orange rust,
nibbling at a clean steel blade,
the bitter, permanent
ink-stain you've made;
no velvet darkness here,
no weeping willow,
just concrete bricks
in my chest, and grit on my pillow...
oh, xanthippe....get out of my mind!
Broken mugs
And broken promises
A broken lamp
And broken knuckles
A broken TV
And a broken stack of plates
Broken drywall
And broken glasses
Broken bottles
And a broken door
This is a broken home
And my heart cannot break anymore
Rolex
If it’s a creation,
then science and spirit should explain each other.
Not argue. Not compete.
They should echo.
Like a wave entering water—
and the water nods.
I was born into a field,
not a house.
The floor, the couch, the corners—
they didn’t creak.
They hummed.
The rooms didn’t scare me.
The electrons did.
The lies—
It came through pattern.
Through footsteps stored in drywall.
Through the breath someone forgot to exhale
Twenty years ago
My body is made of quartz that learned how to flinch.
It keeps time like a Casio—
$10 of stillness more honest than a Rolex.
Because truth doesn’t tick, nor dress up.
It vibrates.
Who said nostalgia is memory?
I know better.
Nostalgia is presence with a shadow
Eden remembered, but not currently lived in.
A waveform that still fits me
like the glow-in-the-dark stars
I stuck to my ceiling
before I knew how the sticker glowed.
Love enters and leaves no residue.
It echoes clean.
It’s a return.
A collapse in the name of peace.
A God crystal humming 32,768 times per second,
while we scroll past ourselves
looking for the next thing to react to
inside of twenty takes
dirty filled frames
no resolution
to me the family
that a ugly
call me
cat purrs on approach
welcome spat
too literal
gotta reclamation
eye's cried so much relief
brushes is dusty clean
practice strokes at the gentleman's table
romanticism, adjatate, harpsichords
classified and credentialed
white ink's a tank thinking
'I remember", "he"
distract the trap, autumns born
waves of green mustard gas
country come plains, it's not your first mistake
chains on protest for poverty effort
2am production prints
beggars, dodgers, i aint your draft calling
pre screened and bread
my land by sea
indoors, know hoe
get to work, beach gone
pushing, yeah who's double checked
out of decks, on paper
iliterations an postulates
hot boxes of brake dust
crescent shaped credit creased
basic design, irish blazee, defend
de speak
Steamy daylight seeps into
flesh, bone and drywall.
A large fly is trapped
between the curtain and a hot window.
Can’t tell if it’s angry, desperate, or confused,
the buzz is intermittent,
the pauses lulls of restoration,
or instincts in abeyance.
Maybe it just forgets to be anything.
Wondering if its purpose was decreed,
its mission,
to eat the dead things of the earth,
to bury its body in the rot,
in the waste of corruption?
Will a fly, on judgement day,
be called to confess,
and shall I, on that day of judgement,
be chemically sprayed,
to be now
my own gift of decay.
Job done.
they walk among us,
slipping through cracks in the drywall of laws,
hidden in neighborhoods where swings creak empty.
their eyes,
like needles,
threading innocence with ruin.
you see them in grocery aisles,
behind polite smiles,
a rotting core in a skin of civility.
justice comes late, or never at all.
the system's gears
grind slow,
while childhood crumbles
in a landfill of stolen nights.
the world lets them crawl on,
unnoticed,
like termites,
until the house falls apart exposing
the skeletal remains in the basement.
Echoed voices that seep
Through the cracks in the drywall
Of the room which I hide in.
Bones clatter in the closet,
The softest shadows show those faces,
Those girls,
Those girls who I loved who could care less for me,
And that faceless face I erased that held me against
The tile of that bathroom.
Haunting me, taunting me,
Whispering, lingering,
Always there
In the back of my mind.
Impossible to find relief, I decide.
Words that aren’t mine,
The violence inside that
Shows itself outside, now,
And my hurt hurts the first people to love me.
Bury myself in the closet,
With all the things I keep deep.
He's a blue-collar artist supreme.
With a medium of drywall and wet concrete.
He was laid off when Build Back Better lost its gloss.
He occasionally does side jobs... tax-free.
The beard is unkempt; he flashes a tattooed head.
He's donning a third-trimester belly.
That he calls Johnny Walker Red.
It's going to be some time until his next masterpiece.
Sappy hired a mouse to be the taste tester for her restaurant
no one said anything for a day or two, but we were not happy.
He eats drywall, dust, fabric, even insulation, said the elephant.
Hiring a mouse to be our taste tester was wrong of Sappy.
it felt like he was in her pocket.
something insignificant
but with her at all times.
i felt as though he resided in more than just her phone
in her mind
in her time
my father was a bad man and maybe i’m just scared that now every man is a bad man
he lives in her pocket
soon maybe in our home
my home
my mum left a bad man
a bad dad
maybe for an equally as bad man
she tried stripping the wallpaper
and scrubbing the floor
as if it would remove the mark of my father
i feel like the new man is trying to hammer up family photos we have yet to take
i feel like the new man is trying to slip exactly into my dads old space
just like he slipped perfectly into her pocket
he can hammer up pictures
he can live in her heart
but there’s drywall in my home
and behind the drywall is all of our secrets
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