Buddy Wakefield- Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars
-it’s just that I could have swore you had sung me a love song back there
and that you meant it
but I guess sometimes people just chew with their mouths open.
And again. Sorry for all the cover spam…but not really.
Like any normal person, I’m making lullaby-ish covers on a Friday night since I cannot sleep…
…and posting it all over every social media site.
We Were Emergencies
“A poet
can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.
But tonight let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight, Poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts
and repeat after me with your heart:
I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hate myself.
Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping.
I have realized the moon did not have to be full for us to love it.
We are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it.
If my heart really broke every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now
but hearts don’t break, y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.”
-Buddy Wakefield
Stale
I need a break from the stale sadness that’s buried deep in the caverns of my belly. It’s a secret sadness; not the kind you wake up with or the kind that shocks your breathing and knocks you to your knees, but the kind that creeps up on you, the kind that just rots inside of you and never goes away completely.
Sure, my eyes are the most stunning shade of green when my sclera is painted a raw and bright red, but the rest of me looks hollowed out from all the worry lines that have carved tributaries across my once young and vibrant skin.
I am exhausted by worry, stunted by doubt, and crippled by insecurity.
It’s not that I’m unhappy, I am merely afraid that the happiness can only last so long. The melancholy is my security, the bitterness I leave wrapped up in my pocket in case it all starts to taste too sweet.
And days like today, I want to spit it all out, rinse my mouth, climb into bed and hope that tomorrow is honey-glazed.
sometimes i sing things.
"I just think it’s really dangerous to look at other people in the context of what and who they are to you. True compassion, true love, true humanity, requires a paradigm shift. Start looking at other people, not by how they frame your life, but by the fact that they are their own bundle of skin and bone, of mangled and matted hair, broken and bruised hearts, and realize that they have their own story to tell."
SEPARATION
You are gone. I stand outside, beer in hand,
fearing that if I go back in, you’ll come
whistling by and I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you.
The way you’d not know what was going on,
the way you’d fall off your bike, call for me,
watch me run to you—as if you’d planned it—
and catch me in your eyes. Rinse and repeat.
I’ve got that scar from when we collided
on our bikes. I rub it every morning,
as if the gray memory might summon
its absent creator—but you are gone.
Every kiss, bicycle crash, and shudder
becomes a memory I can’t let go,
a dead dream stitched into my lonely soul.
I breathe you these days; I hate you for this.
-Stefan Yambao
Cause Of Death:
You were never a muse or a poem or a song; in fact, there was nothing musical about you, but you cured my loneliness for a time.
You were anesthesia for a sickness I’d caught from someone else and you put me under thinking one day I’d wake up and want to give you all my healed up parts.
I did wake up, but I wasn’t fixed at all, just numb from all the “remedies” you had given me:
Two apologies force-fed twice daily, 1 teaspoon of guilt taken on a stomach so empty you will wake up each morning and vomit uncontrollably.
All the hurt that you prescribed and all the love you tried to smother me with were never enough to make me bleed out on paper and even though there are still marks all over me from where you did your autopsy, trying to figure out what killed my heart,
what killed your heart,
what killed us,
when I poke at the incisions it doesn’t even hurt in the slightest.
And if it’s cold to say I never loved you, then put on your wooliest socks and cover yourself in someone else’s uncertainty because, baby, it’s freezing in here.
Freezing like the morgue that houses your memory.
Cause of death: I never loved you.
I’m sorry.
