[Poem]A Thought Process at 1 AM Saturday, Jun 6 2009 

I’m not trying to pretend

Stick it through

See the end

Of this line, finish out this life

Kill the struggles and the strife

Messages of eternal life

Stray from that hate of mine

Threatening to enclose my heart

Keep those apart

Know where to end and where to start

I don’t flaunt a crazy style I don’t have

Don’t talk in rhymes, faking attitude – “I’m so bad”

I can only be myself

Be influenced but not helped

Along this path of discovery

Recovery, In front of me

I see a journey to a destination

of answers and revelations

obtained only through dedication, education

I know where I am, know where I stand

And sense enough to know to change

But strong enough to stay my hand

[Poem]What? Thursday, Mar 19 2009 

I have no idea what I am about to write

Is this a story or a poem?

Or is this the story of a poem?

I could write about an emotion

Rant and rave until I’m blue in the face

Experiences and memories and philosophies

But what point am I trying to get across in the end?

In one moment I am completely content

And in the back of my mind I feel that sense of unease

The natural ebbs and flows of life

I feel the ebb is coming

The most I can do is live

Breathe in and out

Oxygen to Carbon dioxide and out

Feel my own brain deteriorate naturally

Feel myself grasping at straws as I race the clock

Yet where is the race?

The clock moves methodically

Equal increments of time between each little line

It wins and it loses

So where is the race?

And one day the gears will stop

And I feel myself getting inspiration

I think I’ll go start another story now.

Waiting to Exhale Sunday, Mar 15 2009 

What is this feeling? The world around me spins as the whiteboard marker I was holding falls to the ground. Cotton muffles my ears and I don’t hear the gasps from my classmates and the carpet rushes up to meet me. The definite integral on the board lays unsolved and we’ll never know the total distance the martian spaceship traveled towards the sun.

Sleep. It’s eluded me for days. I feel each of the muscles in my body relax as I sink into the inner parts of my mind. Grayscale images of my hopes and fears flash as the wrong audio tracks do a horrible job of dubbing the video that plays over and over again…

***

I’m thrown back in time. In the basement of a building I’ve never been in before, it’s the basement of a shady diner in the 1920’s. Revealed by dim lights, the simple and well-kept furniture is draped with the bodies of people dressed lavishly enough to be regulars at the Ritz. And here I am, in my brother’s pants and vest and shirtsleeves. My hair is slicked back, the only thing giving away my true gender being the rather large bun on the back of my head. But otherwise, no one would ever know.

“Caroliena, do you want to sit in the front seat?”

What?

Someone sidles up to me, dressed to the nines. “He’s a manwhore!” the person says as they look me straight in the eye.

I’m sorry?

Someone sits at a piano, the wrong lyrics matching up with the wrong melody.

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