[Clip 1]

[Song Verse 1]

I set my good intentions down for an impossible duration to make myself sleep sounder.

My stunned lungs lead to a silence that is such a humid burden

I strip myself naked & rough;
my frail convictions flow out the window,
scattering themselves like acid rain droplets on the sill.

[Song Verse 2 continued]

And I am not a breeze, but a sharp gust –
wind blown into an envelope like a 29-cent secret never meant to be kept caged-in

And you wore a constellation of beauty marks and curls on curls on curls
Like Spanish moss
And dizzy lipstick, the color of a sun, wordlessly godlike
Your hair looked like ground sunflower petals
Like a ritual
And you spoke like a hoarse firework working on its roar

And you were not a mistake, but destroyed yourself before
I was given the chance
to undoubtedly do the same.

You’re a dark spark
Like a fork in a socket
You look a lot like a fork in my eye socket
You’re cutlery cutting into my speech
A silent interruption over otherworldly intercoms
You enter calms raging

What does it mean to lie in someone’s wake?
To be in the ever-presence of another human,
to feel breath short and isolated against an empty chest?

You showed me patience,
but never how to recognize hopelessness
when you stretched it like a glove,
testing my hand at tolerance.

I march across Chicago from
bus stop to bus stop
attempting to prove resilience.
I am fooling no one.

I remember those blue green exhausted irises
Those clumsy incantations, you make believe, you pretend
You pre-tending to each incoming wound
You’re so wound up
Those dandelion seed eyelashes
Lip ring in my ear
Your hair looms

I wish I was colorblind
so I could experience you in black & white.
Admire your ink-stroke eyelashes like artwork,
read your cracked-skin palms as if they were poetry,

and we could hide in the gray areas together,
running from the unplanned
cowering from possibilities.

I tried to save your face by embalming progression
Like drooling matchsticks pausing a fleet of black nights
You could call it a month since we broke up, but,
I measured it in how many epiphanies I’ve skinned alive.

Sore-souls learn the slowest,
but I still let you go on time.

 

Jack is a Philadelphia native poet who has been active for 10 years and is in his early twenties.

Meghedi (muh-hed-ee) is from the ever-so allusive windy city of chicago. Muses tend to strike her at odd times during the day/night,and she tends to write about historical events more oftenthan one would assume. she has been published numeroustimes in her school’s literary magazine and mentors elementary school-age children in the craft of weaving words together.