1. |
Intro
00:21
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2. |
Hardcore
02:13
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I used to be hardcore.
Dressed in all black
and wore chains on my clothes
(not for fighting, mind you,
but for fashion).
I listened to a bunch of angry bands from Scandinavia
and I thought I was the shit.
At least,
that's what I told people.
But really
I was hardcore
because I held a butcher knife up to the middle of my chest
and I thought about taking one last dive
for my life.
Then I started reading the bible
and telling everyone else they were going to hell
because I was already in hell
and it was not fire and brimstone
(don't let anybody tell you any different)
but staying up late
wondering if your parents would have stayed together
if you'd just let the cancer kill you.
It took me seventeen years of life to get that off my chest
and when I found God,
she was smoking her cigarettes in the middle of a rainstorm
and talking to me about her third abortion.
So if you've never stared down a half-full bottle of codeine
at three o'clock in the morning
don't tell me how you can save my soul.
The only prayer I ever meant had to do with death.
Thinking about the image of my two dead friends:
one from brain cancer
and one from some boyfriend with a belt.
Have you ever lingered too long in front of the bus?
Don't tell me that the road to recovery is a straight shot
because I will show you the scars from the wrong turns
and the potholes
and the "sure thing" twelve-step programs.
This poem is to anyone who ever said that they would kill themselves
if the grocery store didn't have their favorite candy.
I'm three therapists deep
and they still don't know if I can swim.
I meet a new me every day because the chemicals in my brain are off.
But when I look in the mirror,
I still see that kid in all black
and the knife on my chest
and God
smoking her menthol cigarettes.
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3. |
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I affection you.
Baby, I compassion the shit out of you.
I wrote you a letter for our anniversary and I signed it,
"with all the desire in my heart."
P.S. I like fucking you.
I when-you-kiss-me-I-get-butterflies you.
I want you.
I want you to hold me.
I want you to tell me I'm beautiful.
I don't want to sleep alone.
I really really wish that you'd say what you feel.
Four letter words don't mean as much when they apply to both pizza and you.
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4. |
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A tormented artist meets another tormented artist
and they have (very passionate) but tormented sex.
This leads them to have conflicting,
but still very tormented,
feelings about one another
because she cannot read the words he does not write
and he cannot see the movements she does not make.
He is left to read between the lines,
while she sees the moving picture of forever.
Sometimes I, I mean "he",
forgets you, I mean "she",
cannot see the brilliant pictures painted through the scars
tattooed on his brain.
Maybe if we were both young and alive
and not so caught up in Holocaust films
and reading about people who do drugs, respectively,
we would be able to admit that waking up next to each other some days
was not easier.
We would say that sometimes it scares us
to know that someone somewhere (no right here!)
knows the pattern of our scars
and feels free enough to trace them.
Connecting the dots.
Reminding us that the sidewalk never ended
and we never gave up our search for the man under the bed,
but we did try love once.
We also tried to cut ourselves open
to get a hole wide enough to peek inside.
We knew that our blood was red,
but we wanted to see what existed within us
beyond primary colors.
What we found was a holy sweater.
Not something blessed by some deity,
but full of holes
(so reminiscent of our tormented artist).
As the blood spilled from my body,
I put it on carefully and crawled inside myself.
Though shaking,
I was not yet cold.
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5. |
Family Values
02:01
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Family is abortion,
moving through divorces
and pulling up in Porsches.
Family is a screaming match.
Don't scream
but catch your mama on the backlash.
Family is a smash hit
the movie that never went off
even though it had Bogart.
Family?
Family is a new black dress
and low access to sex ed.
Family is a car crash.
A giant gash in the side
and the side effects of a giant rash
decision.
Family is 2.4 kids
with no lids on their mouths
but no smiles in their eyes.
Family is dying
and getting so choked up at your sister's funeral
because you knew she was only nineteen.
Family?
Family is when you get this
and Christmas is not another long gift list
but triplets
and treasured times
and prying minds.
No desire dies
and nobody cries.
Family is a shallow grave
and leaving your bag at the door because you're lazy.
It's growing up with no dad
but two bats and a roomful of hats
with hats off to my gramps and his fly pants.
Family is a brave struggle.
A bad getaway.
An escape van with no gas.
A spoon in the road
and a rainy day.
I'm no Robert Frost,
but I know the cost of broken armor.
Or was it an armoire?
I'm not trying to harm you,
but it's funny:
my mom's never had any money
and I never had a little pet bunny.
But my life still had sunny moments.
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6. |
Judas
03:58
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People say that you are your own worst enemy
and in my case that is literally true
because I had cancer at the age of two
and no one really knows what causes cancer
but they do know that it lives in you.
So I'm twenty-two years old and I have osteoporosis.
And it's all because of the drugs that they had to give me
in order to keep me from dying from cancer
at the age of two.
Every two years my body betrays me in a new way.
Yet, I still have to live with it
because our divorce is not yet finalized
and I really want to keep the house.
People say that beauty is not skin deep
but I cannot stand to look at myself
and that is without even imagining what's going on inside.
Sometimes all I do is cry
because of really irrational things
and the doctors tell me this is because I have a thing called depression
and this thing called depression has been with me since I was fourteen
and that's because at 14 I first thought about killing myself
because no fourteen year old
should have to tell himself that he didn’t end his parent’s marriage
and that's because nobody’s parents should divorce two years after their child gets off of treatment for cancer
because the child will try to tell himself that it was the cancer,
will try to comfort himself,
but a person can only lie for so long.
When I look into the mirror,
I stare at the scars of cancer.
When I hear myself babble on and on to my therapist,
I listen to the scars of cancer.
When I try to get out of bed in the morning
and it takes me a little longer because of the osteoporosis in my spine,
I feel all the scars of cancer.
And when I taste a kiss from someone else’s lips
and know that this means I am alive,
I taste the scars of cancer.
And when my father calls his new wife “beautiful”
I hear the scars of cancer
(Even though it’s been ten years).
When I try to love someone
and end up running away
because I remember how much I thought my parents loved each other
and I see what that did to their kids
and I don’t want to do that to my kids.
And I don’t even want to have kids sometimes
because I know that with some cancers the father carries the genes
and I would be the father
and the kid would have my genes
and the kid may not be able to get out of bed as fast in the morning at twenty-two
because that kid may have osteoporosis
and that kid may have had cancer
and even though it may have survived the cancer
it might still be dealing with the scars
and who would want to do that to a kid?
Then I remember that my body is Judas Iscariot
and that my spirit is not as resilient as Jesus’ spirit
and even if it was he had to die in order to overcome Judas’ kiss
and maybe I don’t want to die
because I’m scared of death.
Because a friend of mine who was perfectly fine one day
dropped dead four years later
because sometimes cancer gets in your brain
and sometimes people don’t know this until you get into a car accident
and sometimes even if you get lucky as hell to get hit by a drunk driver
so that the doctors discover that you have cancer in your brain,
you still die from it.
And that seems really unfair.
So maybe I am afraid of death
and maybe I have a right to be.
But, sometimes, the nights are lonely when all you have to share them with are scars.
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7. |
My Heart is an ICU
02:08
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The saddest thing my mother ever told me
was that the last time she saw the man she loved
was the night before her wedding.
He died six months later.
The ceremony went on without a hitch.
This is a lesson for anyone who thinks
that, as soon as you make a decision,
someone somewhere
is pouring concrete
into a mold that cannot be broken
no matter how hard he punches.
As for my father,
he's always been a second choice,
which is why he's the first to leave.
He once left a woman
because her daughter died of cancer.
He said that she looked different.
It might have been the alcohol.
It might have been her daughter.
It might have been him.
Sometimes, we forget to fix our hair in the morning.
I once left a girl because I got too sad.
Thought about killing myself again and
I didn’t want anyone to have to bury me.
She asked me if it was something she did.
I laughed.
Sometimes, I’m an asshole.
Sometimes, we forget to start acting in the morning.
My best friend forgets to sleep sometimes,
says that the best things in life happen between cigarette breaks
and break ups,
late papers and hangovers.
She asks me if love is alive
and I tell her,
sometimes the stars forget to wake up at night
because they are hiding behind the clouds.
And sometimes people get married because it is convenient
and they really need a second income
to make a downpayment on their dream home.
Sometimes people fall in love in cardboard boxes
or one bedroom apartments
with just enough room for their shoes
and, though they die of frostbite in the next winter,
they die in love.
So, yes, love is still alive, but,
sometimes, we forget to fix our hair in the morning.
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8. |
To My Dead Pet Rock
02:43
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For this one we're gonna go back a little ways...
When I was a kid,
my favorite outfit was a vomit green shirt
with matching shorts.
It had the Tasmanian Devil on it
and I wore it everywhere.
When I got a little older,
I used to make up stories
like I could do a backflip on my bike...
or I invented Pepsi Blue
in a laboratory underneath my dad’s garage
using a well orchestrated army of lab rats.
I had an active imagination.
I started swearing at age 11
and, when my stepmom found out,
I got a lecture from my dad.
He told me, “cut that shit out”.
I had an active imagination.
When I got to middle school,
the teachers kept trying to tell me to skip a grade.
They told my mom that the reason
I hated school was because I was bored,
when really it was that my dad owed me $300
because I’d had straight As since 4th grade math
and he made a really stupid bet.
When I was in high school,
I got stood up by the same girl eight times.
I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.
When I was a freshman in college,
I went to lunch with a girl and her boyfriend
because I was too nice to say no
and she was too nice to tell me she had one the night before.
I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.
When I was a sophomore,
I met this girl who I thought I’d marry.
I’m not married.
You see,
back when I loved that matching outfit,
it was captured in the last picture of a friend before she died of cancer.
I still have that picture.
I survived cancer.
And back when I made up stories,
my dad married his best friend’s ex-wife.
And back when I started swearing,
I first thought about killing myself.
And back when I made all those As,
my first kiss moved to Tampa.
and I haven’t seen her since.
And back when I was in high school,
I first went to therapy.
And back when I was a freshman in college,
I found out that God might not have cured my depression.
And then I went back to therapy.
And now…
I’m violently way too high
strung
and sometimes I can’t sleep
because I think back to that time I invented Pepsi Blue
and the woman I thought I’d marry
and that puke green pair of shorts.
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9. |
Colors
06:37
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This last one goes out to anyone who has ever been called a terrorist.
I always wanted to be the black Power Ranger,
but I was told that was racist.
To be honest though, I really wanted to be the yellow Power Ranger.
But she is a girl
and I am not.
They always ask me “what are you?”
Who are you?
Are you one of us?
What is one of us?
Am I one of us?
If us is the human race than I am,
but if us is white or black or brown or yellow or orange
(or whatever colors humans come in these days)
than I am not.
My mother always told me to answer them,
"I am a human being".
And I guess… that is what I am.
I am a human being.
I am a human being.
But human beings tend to do things like
commit genocides and start wars based on religion
or because your women are put lower than our women
or because we think they are
or because we know they are
or because some politician told us they were.
I don’t want to be a human being if that’s to be a human being.
I want to be a fish.
Because fish seem to me like they have not a care in the world.
They just swim around in their oceans
and they look at the pretty colors on the other fish,
but they don’t judge the other fish on their colors.
I always see blue fish playing with red fish
and silver fish playing with black fish
and all the fish are just swimming around aimlessly
and eating food.
But then one of the fish gets caught by a hook
and gets slowly drug up to the surface
and I always imagine that the other fish were swimming around
and trying to process what is happening to their fish friend
who they haven’t been judging.
Then that fish gets taken out of the water and they don’t see him again.
And that fish is taken out of the water by a human being.
And that human being might be a racist.
Probably is a racist
because I think we all are a little racist.
(Some of us are a lot racist.)
What are you?
Well I’m not black.
And I’m not white.
And, no, I’m not a Mexican.
I’m not Hispanic.
I’m not Cuban.
I’m not Puerto Rican.
I’m not a terrorist.
I wasn’t aware all terrorists looked the same.
I wasn’t aware that it was an appropriate question
to ask another human being what are you?
It’s pretty obvious to me.
I’m not a lion or a chimpanzee.
I’m not a fish (even though I might want to be).
I’m not some sort of blimp.
I’m not a car.
I’m not a house.
I’m not some sort of brick lying on the side of the road.
I’m not a rock and roll star.
I’m not a preacher.
I’m me.
And I think that’s all I really ever needed to be.
So be careful before you go throwing around a dictionary
and trying to define every single person based on one term
or based on one idea that you think you might have of them.
Saying he’s black or she’s white
or she’s American or he’s a terrorist.
Don’t throw these things around mindlessly
like a tornado in a room full of blank sheets of paper.
Maybe... that black man over there is a professional concert pianist.
Or maybe that “terrorist” is a CEO.
So much like that game of shapes and pegs and holes
that we use to teach toddlers what a triangle is,
you’ll come to find out that the more you try to fit something into one of these holes.
The more you need a bigger hole...
or perhaps an ocean.
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Pat and His Whiny Bullshit Gainesville, Florida
I'm Pat. I write poems. Currently a member of Signs of Life (a hip-hop theatre troupe in Gainesville).
Website header photograph credit: Phaedra Brady
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