STAMPED
I suppose it isn't fair that I get accepted without any of you really knowing if I am worthy to vote on you or not. Here, then, is an "audition" of sorts. I like criticism too.
!: My name is Madison.
@: I live in the suburbs of New Jersey in Morris County in this town called Randolph on the street of Davis.
#: I'm sixteen-and-a-quarter years old
$:
MEANT TO BE READ ALOUD WITH SOUND, OFCOURSE
You know what we should be doing? Riding. Riding, riding riding. Sailing through life like a boat in water, cutting through it slick, sleek and clean. We should be, you know. And what are we doing? Nothing but crying. Crying, and crying, and dying a little bit in your arms or you in mine until the day we think we will both be saved. We aren’t saved, except saving ourselves for this grand awakening, as vulnerable and fucked as a slinky stiletto streetwalker in some dirty motel bed sheets. Baby, I’m not afraid of dying and it shouldn’t make you scared. I’m just afraid to start living in a life that can do only harm if you let it get to you. I’ve got people’s opinions creeping up on me with the stealth of a lioness and I am too afraid of the dark sometimes to fight it. And what are we doing? We are lying, keeping ourselves safe from one another with these notions and pretty words that just seem right when said. Make it up all in your head, c’mon and be clear with me, can I still be a missing puzzle piece? Let me complete you the way I’ve always wanted to be completed, think about now a little later and take some time with me. Let’s take a ride. Just talking, talking, talking. And I’ll listen, I’ll always listen. Man, I’ve got this beat just banging through my head like a jackhammer. Aren’t you incessant, aren’t you in my thoughts like this. Bang bang bang bang, inject yourself sweet as honey, smooth and thick into my insides. Feel my outsides until my skin runs raw and my heart runs rampant with this undeniable lust for something! Anything! Let’s all breathe, in and out and in and out and…God, how I miss the thought of a smile, when teeth bare themselves like bullets, one two three four these little eyeteeth glint like that faint-hearted glimmer in your eyes. Just fucking cry, take a chance and prove something, let your thoughts devour you and come out bleeding off your sleeve like the rest of the romantics do. This quixotic feeling is not dead. I refuse to be too numb to feel it. Grab me up and hold me until I stop weeping, warm me up until I dry out. Don’t let me sit and rust away, let these old ties eat at my bones. Little corrosive memories take their toll. Don’t let me devour you from the inside out. Your head spinning spinning spinning like a carousel on a playground. Let’s spin together ‘til we fall down and let our worlds revolve around us for once. And only once, because having a high exactly like that anymore than once is selfish. Get high off of the explosions that light up like a sparkler in mid-July when you feel my breath on your neck and I’ll promise never to lose grasp of the way my hand gets stuck in yours. Prying, prying, prying… nothing will happen with all of this inquiring. Just take a break and let it happen. Make a mistake and let it settle. We just can never seem to settle. Settle like the leaves on the yard we never raked up, or your arm across my back when we are too tired for talking. Talk to me drunk off of living and breathing and seeing and feeling the one person that can build you up and tear you apart. Let me be that person and feel like you can do the same to me. Then break me, break me baby and let me think that this was all a nightmare, a big mistake we can clean up tomorrow morning. Brooding and boring over trite little nothings that can never be fixed. Talking over these things only makes them more missed, and ignore the foul mood, the rank disposition that spills from my lips. I get frustrated when I can’t have you when I want. I get weak and tired from trying to fight this off alone in my head. My little world that just won’t fade away. Black out, lights out, fall down on the bed, sleeping with me. Snoring snoring Snoring worse than a hall in a retirement home. Grab my hand and feel it break under pressure. Let us crumble under pressure. You amorphous piles of melted frustration all confused within one another. Aren’t we tired of thinking yet? Baby, rape me. Take me on and throw me against a wall, dig your nails in my wrist and let yourself go. God, just feel alittle more than compliant complacent unobtrusive “love” or whatever that really means at this age. Love is fucking raw. Love is the fiercest look in your eye when I rub up against you like this and that and touch here or breathe there or feel this or taste that. Love is the goddamned sweat dripping off your forehead and down your back. Dripping dripping dripping. Let you swallow me up whole. Cover me and trap me. Fluster and abuse me. I didn’t ask for some summer-reading heartwarming romance. I asked for a turnout. Give us an audience; let’s show them what we’ve got. Have you got the time to cause a scene? We’ll stop the stairs on the account of too much traffic. Let them take their seats as we walk fucking hand and hand. Don’t be afraid to show it. Don’t be afraid to know that a train wreck might love you, I’m like a car crash, you just can’t avert your eyes from it, so let you be my photograph, my artifact keeper, my memory album of the good things we still have. Let me be your savior, your hero, for once without fighting. Let me in. Show me in. Usher me in, too hurried to take my coat or offer a spot of tea or little sandwich. Let my get down on my knees and do the dirty work, because you can’t always be my protector. Let me fend off the wolves for once or twice or thrice or fuck, let’s just be equals. Let’s be in love now. Let’s just take our time now. Take a ride with me, let it all fall to place.
______________________________________________________
DISIECTI MEMBRA POETAE
These are the limbs of a dismembered poet; cut into pieces, I am far to frail to show your toll. The scores you left to open my skin (the places you would often trace with your hand over my bare chest, or down my legs, across my back), all these trails remain branded on tissues in clandestine lines, invisible to your naked eye. And your bare hands enjoy their time charting your secret map, their stealthy assuredness a damnation to my own tegument, a taboo touch that brings a blush to my own abashed skin. And still, your hands, incessant with predestination, run over and over a body again. This is a decisive calculation, a well-thought stratagem contrived by none-other than yours (though, you were once mine) to remove me piece by piece, working the outside within. As you clasp my fingers in a feigned agony of passion, you make note of how you will free them one by one from the binding tendons to my palm. This esoteric contrivance, mastered by you in the masses you have destroyed, will leave me fractured and strewn across a confounded room from the pretense of your own sentiment. I am regimented, each organ placed and allocated especially for you to keep intact. You failed me with your undermined intentions, left me writhing (crawling!) like a crestfallen mother wailing greivances. I am torn.
_______________________________________________________
STANDING MINUTE
I took light steps out onto the concrete sidewalk blocks that were laid out before me like an endless life-size checkerboard in front of the department store entrance. It was just about dark, though the atmosphere was still playing with the last renegade rays of sunlight, fumbling them in and out of heavy-hung clouds that looked like milk swirls on black coffee. It was this kind of night in summer that the air was so stagnant and thick that you could stand up straight without much effort, the air was a gelatinous form-fitted mold for your body. And there was only enough of a breeze to keep my taffy-pulled, tired legs moving to the lamppost where the cement riverbank dropped off, and the asphalt parking lot panned out like an oil slick ocean in it’s calm, so dark and even.
I leaned up against the rigid, metal foundation of the lamppost underneath a stream of soft yellow light. It felt like I was being rained upon by photons, every gentle color of a spectrum tantalizing my skin and it’s need for light at a time when there would only be its absence for 7 more hours. I stood by quietly and watched as a diehard shopper loaded her trunk and back seat with parcels and packages, and then watched her feisty, red Jetta slink away out of the exit and onto a highway, where she no longer had a name, and she was just another two red taillights in a vast Lite-Brite world, another Pointillist stroke in the picture of traffic and commute. Another car whizzed past me, blasting music so loud the bass made my ribcage shake and my heart jump restlessly to keep it’s own rhythm. And the car left this swirling wake of music in color, like a dazzling rainbow light show of sound waves and notes swirling like the smoke from the tip of my cigarette, to it's own beat. And as its sound stretched and dissipated into soft, still air, everything went quiet again, and I felt restless.
I turned my back to the pole, pressed my bare neck up against its cold, and closed my eyes to breathe. In and out, I sipped this honey-thick, pollen air, and drank it like liqueur to calm my lungs and still my organs. I felt like a five-year-old child chugging cherry flavored syrup when pained with the ailments of a common cold. I let the air ooze down my throat and fill up each and every pocket of my lungs, coating my core with a sick, summer warm. I thought only of breathing until all the smoke, dust, and empty space I had acquired from living in coffee shops and dusty lofts was drowning in a nauseating fluid of a perfect evening.
And suddenly everything began to melt. I kept breathing just to feel my lungs finally burst with this potent, creamy goodness that I had forgotten for so long. It the summer air one forgets about when they can no longer run and hop to catch summertime fireflies, or lay with friends to pick out nighttime stars; these are childhood pastimes, these are not meant to be forgotten, but always are. The niceties of summer that had been so lost to a hardened carcass like me flooded my insides, tossing and turning in the turbulence of my stress and worriment. A living breathing ocean, each crash of a wave jostled my organs loose and fought the acid of my insides with this marmalade of thick atmosphere. Each different piece of me began to fade into the other, slowly melting like ice in my childhood lemonade stand pitchers, blurring it’s edges and fading into a warm, gooey liquid. Soon, even my hard-as-a-rock shell was succumbing to this gleeful breath of nostalgia, this joyous wave of passion I so desperately loved to drown in. My fingertips congealed and dripped onto the gravel-ridden patio, as my knees sunk into my feet, and rib-by-rib, my body mushroomed out, in a mess of melted ice creams cones, suntan lotion, and seawater. My eyes captured the glow of the stars on the velvet blue sky before they too liquefied into a messy, neon swirl of squashed lightening bug. A big puddle of heartfelt remembrance, I felt myself trickle down, off the ledge of my concrete checkerboard and into my asphalt abyss. I was a dying dream of a childhood summer, and I hadn’t felt that exhilarated in years.
%:
!: My name is Madison.
@: I live in the suburbs of New Jersey in Morris County in this town called Randolph on the street of Davis.
#: I'm sixteen-and-a-quarter years old
$:
MEANT TO BE READ ALOUD WITH SOUND, OFCOURSE
You know what we should be doing? Riding. Riding, riding riding. Sailing through life like a boat in water, cutting through it slick, sleek and clean. We should be, you know. And what are we doing? Nothing but crying. Crying, and crying, and dying a little bit in your arms or you in mine until the day we think we will both be saved. We aren’t saved, except saving ourselves for this grand awakening, as vulnerable and fucked as a slinky stiletto streetwalker in some dirty motel bed sheets. Baby, I’m not afraid of dying and it shouldn’t make you scared. I’m just afraid to start living in a life that can do only harm if you let it get to you. I’ve got people’s opinions creeping up on me with the stealth of a lioness and I am too afraid of the dark sometimes to fight it. And what are we doing? We are lying, keeping ourselves safe from one another with these notions and pretty words that just seem right when said. Make it up all in your head, c’mon and be clear with me, can I still be a missing puzzle piece? Let me complete you the way I’ve always wanted to be completed, think about now a little later and take some time with me. Let’s take a ride. Just talking, talking, talking. And I’ll listen, I’ll always listen. Man, I’ve got this beat just banging through my head like a jackhammer. Aren’t you incessant, aren’t you in my thoughts like this. Bang bang bang bang, inject yourself sweet as honey, smooth and thick into my insides. Feel my outsides until my skin runs raw and my heart runs rampant with this undeniable lust for something! Anything! Let’s all breathe, in and out and in and out and…God, how I miss the thought of a smile, when teeth bare themselves like bullets, one two three four these little eyeteeth glint like that faint-hearted glimmer in your eyes. Just fucking cry, take a chance and prove something, let your thoughts devour you and come out bleeding off your sleeve like the rest of the romantics do. This quixotic feeling is not dead. I refuse to be too numb to feel it. Grab me up and hold me until I stop weeping, warm me up until I dry out. Don’t let me sit and rust away, let these old ties eat at my bones. Little corrosive memories take their toll. Don’t let me devour you from the inside out. Your head spinning spinning spinning like a carousel on a playground. Let’s spin together ‘til we fall down and let our worlds revolve around us for once. And only once, because having a high exactly like that anymore than once is selfish. Get high off of the explosions that light up like a sparkler in mid-July when you feel my breath on your neck and I’ll promise never to lose grasp of the way my hand gets stuck in yours. Prying, prying, prying… nothing will happen with all of this inquiring. Just take a break and let it happen. Make a mistake and let it settle. We just can never seem to settle. Settle like the leaves on the yard we never raked up, or your arm across my back when we are too tired for talking. Talk to me drunk off of living and breathing and seeing and feeling the one person that can build you up and tear you apart. Let me be that person and feel like you can do the same to me. Then break me, break me baby and let me think that this was all a nightmare, a big mistake we can clean up tomorrow morning. Brooding and boring over trite little nothings that can never be fixed. Talking over these things only makes them more missed, and ignore the foul mood, the rank disposition that spills from my lips. I get frustrated when I can’t have you when I want. I get weak and tired from trying to fight this off alone in my head. My little world that just won’t fade away. Black out, lights out, fall down on the bed, sleeping with me. Snoring snoring Snoring worse than a hall in a retirement home. Grab my hand and feel it break under pressure. Let us crumble under pressure. You amorphous piles of melted frustration all confused within one another. Aren’t we tired of thinking yet? Baby, rape me. Take me on and throw me against a wall, dig your nails in my wrist and let yourself go. God, just feel alittle more than compliant complacent unobtrusive “love” or whatever that really means at this age. Love is fucking raw. Love is the fiercest look in your eye when I rub up against you like this and that and touch here or breathe there or feel this or taste that. Love is the goddamned sweat dripping off your forehead and down your back. Dripping dripping dripping. Let you swallow me up whole. Cover me and trap me. Fluster and abuse me. I didn’t ask for some summer-reading heartwarming romance. I asked for a turnout. Give us an audience; let’s show them what we’ve got. Have you got the time to cause a scene? We’ll stop the stairs on the account of too much traffic. Let them take their seats as we walk fucking hand and hand. Don’t be afraid to show it. Don’t be afraid to know that a train wreck might love you, I’m like a car crash, you just can’t avert your eyes from it, so let you be my photograph, my artifact keeper, my memory album of the good things we still have. Let me be your savior, your hero, for once without fighting. Let me in. Show me in. Usher me in, too hurried to take my coat or offer a spot of tea or little sandwich. Let my get down on my knees and do the dirty work, because you can’t always be my protector. Let me fend off the wolves for once or twice or thrice or fuck, let’s just be equals. Let’s be in love now. Let’s just take our time now. Take a ride with me, let it all fall to place.
______________________________________________________
DISIECTI MEMBRA POETAE
These are the limbs of a dismembered poet; cut into pieces, I am far to frail to show your toll. The scores you left to open my skin (the places you would often trace with your hand over my bare chest, or down my legs, across my back), all these trails remain branded on tissues in clandestine lines, invisible to your naked eye. And your bare hands enjoy their time charting your secret map, their stealthy assuredness a damnation to my own tegument, a taboo touch that brings a blush to my own abashed skin. And still, your hands, incessant with predestination, run over and over a body again. This is a decisive calculation, a well-thought stratagem contrived by none-other than yours (though, you were once mine) to remove me piece by piece, working the outside within. As you clasp my fingers in a feigned agony of passion, you make note of how you will free them one by one from the binding tendons to my palm. This esoteric contrivance, mastered by you in the masses you have destroyed, will leave me fractured and strewn across a confounded room from the pretense of your own sentiment. I am regimented, each organ placed and allocated especially for you to keep intact. You failed me with your undermined intentions, left me writhing (crawling!) like a crestfallen mother wailing greivances. I am torn.
_______________________________________________________
STANDING MINUTE
I took light steps out onto the concrete sidewalk blocks that were laid out before me like an endless life-size checkerboard in front of the department store entrance. It was just about dark, though the atmosphere was still playing with the last renegade rays of sunlight, fumbling them in and out of heavy-hung clouds that looked like milk swirls on black coffee. It was this kind of night in summer that the air was so stagnant and thick that you could stand up straight without much effort, the air was a gelatinous form-fitted mold for your body. And there was only enough of a breeze to keep my taffy-pulled, tired legs moving to the lamppost where the cement riverbank dropped off, and the asphalt parking lot panned out like an oil slick ocean in it’s calm, so dark and even.
I leaned up against the rigid, metal foundation of the lamppost underneath a stream of soft yellow light. It felt like I was being rained upon by photons, every gentle color of a spectrum tantalizing my skin and it’s need for light at a time when there would only be its absence for 7 more hours. I stood by quietly and watched as a diehard shopper loaded her trunk and back seat with parcels and packages, and then watched her feisty, red Jetta slink away out of the exit and onto a highway, where she no longer had a name, and she was just another two red taillights in a vast Lite-Brite world, another Pointillist stroke in the picture of traffic and commute. Another car whizzed past me, blasting music so loud the bass made my ribcage shake and my heart jump restlessly to keep it’s own rhythm. And the car left this swirling wake of music in color, like a dazzling rainbow light show of sound waves and notes swirling like the smoke from the tip of my cigarette, to it's own beat. And as its sound stretched and dissipated into soft, still air, everything went quiet again, and I felt restless.
I turned my back to the pole, pressed my bare neck up against its cold, and closed my eyes to breathe. In and out, I sipped this honey-thick, pollen air, and drank it like liqueur to calm my lungs and still my organs. I felt like a five-year-old child chugging cherry flavored syrup when pained with the ailments of a common cold. I let the air ooze down my throat and fill up each and every pocket of my lungs, coating my core with a sick, summer warm. I thought only of breathing until all the smoke, dust, and empty space I had acquired from living in coffee shops and dusty lofts was drowning in a nauseating fluid of a perfect evening.
And suddenly everything began to melt. I kept breathing just to feel my lungs finally burst with this potent, creamy goodness that I had forgotten for so long. It the summer air one forgets about when they can no longer run and hop to catch summertime fireflies, or lay with friends to pick out nighttime stars; these are childhood pastimes, these are not meant to be forgotten, but always are. The niceties of summer that had been so lost to a hardened carcass like me flooded my insides, tossing and turning in the turbulence of my stress and worriment. A living breathing ocean, each crash of a wave jostled my organs loose and fought the acid of my insides with this marmalade of thick atmosphere. Each different piece of me began to fade into the other, slowly melting like ice in my childhood lemonade stand pitchers, blurring it’s edges and fading into a warm, gooey liquid. Soon, even my hard-as-a-rock shell was succumbing to this gleeful breath of nostalgia, this joyous wave of passion I so desperately loved to drown in. My fingertips congealed and dripped onto the gravel-ridden patio, as my knees sunk into my feet, and rib-by-rib, my body mushroomed out, in a mess of melted ice creams cones, suntan lotion, and seawater. My eyes captured the glow of the stars on the velvet blue sky before they too liquefied into a messy, neon swirl of squashed lightening bug. A big puddle of heartfelt remembrance, I felt myself trickle down, off the ledge of my concrete checkerboard and into my asphalt abyss. I was a dying dream of a childhood summer, and I hadn’t felt that exhilarated in years.
%: