Free Verse Poetry
This teenage poetry is, as most poetry is written at this age, very angst-y. I compile some here which still make me reflect.
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I wrote this poem in 2015. It’s based off 2 main true stories. One is of homelessness I’d witnessed. The second is what someone told me of her experience as a nutritional science student. She went vegetarian after having to help cut up a dead cow hung up from the ceiling, for a lab.
1. Stages of Animal Development
I thought bears were myth, until at a cranny stood a breathing one
I saw it pop open plastic take-out containers of half-eaten noodles, throw half-slurped Coke over its shoulder,
take bendy plastic forks and stab, juices rolling down its chin.
Pluck fish heads, anchored to sediment layers, out of oily seafood soup
crunch on crème brulee sugar fragments, sticky and yellow like the sheen growing over its eyes, and I thought,
it must know the likes and dislikes of the French restaurant and
people, raised on the discards of the city. It roared and slashed my pretty face open.
I recycled plastic bodies
fingertips stained with child's spit
friend offered affection I rationed
I never took money but lived on their pity.
I loved my sewn face
an artisan, part-time cartographer, had drawn a puckered fault line, shriveled eyes into
hollow sockets, thumbed in cheek depressions, cut a slit for a scaled snake mouth
twisted nascent faces, marked blank space for the silence in a Rothko museum, threw on crimson red and left it
to congeal into numb fleshy lumps, left pupil-less circles as useless as sticky eyes, screwed in four canines and eight molars.
I became a saver
penniless vagabonds crowded a table
fluorescent light illuminated lab coats
hooks hung from a freckled ceiling.
I slashed open six week calves, and saw
pink and violet ribbons snaking around plastic-cuffed kidneys and blue-stained livers
transparent hairs sprouting from veined porcelain muzzles, spindly grey intestines, both large and small,
spilling over the ribcage, expired cream cheese skin in color, smell, and consistency,
glistening with clear preservation fluid, like perspiration
as if the animals' dime-sized lumpy hearts had lub-dubbed in their wombs
and there, their soft forelimbs had curled in vain to protect what I had carved open,
then remained stiffly in place, no longer soft like rainwater softening a jut into a curve.
I became a vegetarian, then a vegan
bird bones grated against skin
my body ate itself
turning omnivore again.
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2. Me
Perhaps I am not
a ghost, but a human, and perhaps I am
more vulnerable than you believe, and maybe what I need
is a human like me
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3. You
I am the honey sinking into your wine and I am a feeling that will only intensify. You cannot help but lose yourself in this dream. I am taking you with me; if you hesitate, you will lose.
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4.
Coming as soon as I find the right flashdrive…