What it is to be a fuck up.

Cunning and emotionally destructive with lies thick like honey. Too sweet to resist. We cant even restrain ourselves. But it is especially alluring to the newly made butterflies, who unlike us is not used to the flith. Whom are the easiest to corrupt. We fuck up are addictives, the glorfied heroine and drunken escapes of the gutter world.

Free Falling

Her world is a flat surface, curious feet always seem to take her to the edge. Counting each black and white tile at her zenith. Keep your sunshine she say. I want to be the rain, because while afriad of heights, i dont mind the fall just as along as I am not falling alone.

But until you come she will stand at the edge.

Union of the Tress

Before you fall in love, you see the other person as a bare branch; as you fall, you coat him or her with jeweled attractions about 80 percent of your own making.

My bare branches
enlongates towards the
sky. Praises are hidden within
my petals at the possibility
to grow. I wish to flower
your being. Grow as a
your bark
to warm
us during
the snow
storms.

A Series of Seven

Humans are so easily swayed.
Lured by gilded promises of hollow
trinkets, in exchange for
a continued existence vainglory.

Lust is the physical
manifestation of vulnerability
in the feminine divide. Worshiped
crudely he turns her vulgar and ashamed.

Pride is the self-entitlement
of the neighbors home. Tailored
fit, aloof dispositions. Stay
calm while we spit on your culture.

Wrath knows what knife will
cut deepest. What another's blood under
our fingernails, teeth grind to the
gum feels like

Sloth gives too little, to help the soul.
Glutton takes too much, to feed others.

Humans covet
the things we see around us. Envy
is the colonialism that has grown
too powerful because my pockets will
never be empty.

Burnt Out

Derek Hess

You didnt want to die,
But you didnt care to really live either.

Faces in the rain

I tell her,
I want to be like raindrops.

That I don't mind falling,
as long as I am not falling alone.

Procrastination

Oop, hello ground
it’s been a while
you look well
gritty and hard
like I remember

good old ground
we’ve always got on right?
me and you

ground I promise
I never forgot about you
it’s why I thought
we wouldn’t meet again

alas here we are
toe-to-toe
hold on a sec
my heels want to say hello

oop, alright sky
how you been?
I just saw the floor
and I’m sure he’d send
his regards

I guess you two
see each other all
the time though
I wouldn’t know

been looking at
the horizon for ages
it changes you know
but it doesn’t get
any closer

I’ll stay here a minute actually
me and you have got some
catching up to do.

-Tumblr

I climbed
A poet's
Tree last night
To wrap myself in it's
Leaves and pretended the branches
Were your arms.

I don't mind the splinters it gives
Me because unlike the ones you give me
I can
Pull them out.

And as much as I would have like to
Take a pocket knife and carve lines
Couplets, haiku's, limricks, sonnets...
lines into the brown bark and pretend it
Was your skin, or my skin.

I couldnt.

I can't do much of anything now a days
Maybe I am just a morning glory
lost withing a tangle
of vines.

I am Blue as the crying sky.

Poem written and performed by Skim Skima

I’m catching gazes that aim to catch gays.
Your eyes.
You ask me why I choose to look how I look.
My answer is the same question, back to you.
Homosexual. Put yourself in my shoes.
Gay bitch. I bet you can’t even imagine what I’ve been through.
How damaged I am, because of you.
It’s true I wanna love who I love.
And more honest I am. The more you wanna mess me up.
You said, my judgment day will come.
Well it did. Day after day. Gay.
Night after night. Dike.
You think being gay was a choice in my life?
Who would really choose to face this kind of hate?
They way they say it, you’d think I was Satan.
Don’t you see? Your hypocrisy is so blatant.
Stop complaining others are racist when you’re doing the same thing in my face.
Your eyes attack my faith. Faggot
And give me shame I can’t seem to erase
So I ask god to save a mess like me, but leave me blind
because I hate what I see.
Faggot. Silence I mask it.
Faggot. Everybody laughing.
Faggot. While I’m standing here
Disgusted that I can still feel disgusting.
No wonder I am so not trusting.
Look at me. And look at this world I am in.
And look at me again.
I know what exactly most of you see.
So let the names begin.
Cuz I guess I must trust my pain so much.
Enough to let it come inside me. Again and again.
And I must love the connection it brings from my heart to yours.
But I would never love the ways it burns.
I got a lot to learn. But some things I was born to teach.
Close your eyes and feel how deep I can reach.

Why I secretly hate mirrors

I really feel strange every time I look into a mirror. I forget that I have a form, and I get used to thinking of myself as the "thinker", and not the objectively viewed person. It's hard to get a definite view of yourself when you know everything, and know just how complex you are.

The mirror shows 'you', plain and simple, you might think of it as viewing your purest form (although that couldn't be more wrong). I am shocked at the sight of 'me' I don't recognize myself, even if I have only looked away for a second. I am staring at a stranger. I know that it is not a good representation of me, but mirrors remain a way to force your physical reality upon you.

Stream of conscienceless, the making of grief point

The Making of Grief Point


The journey starts late...
Six weeks into the making of Grief Point...
First off is May Day, the song in honor of May 1st and the workers.
Can you still be against the strike that only strikes for more pay?
By ‘you,’ in this instance, I mean ‘me.’
There is a certain kind of person to whom things come with great facility.
They say this is the noise that gets made as my life is lived.
So be it.
But don’t feel the need to record it.
For a second I thought this meant that they were not interested in history, but that’s wrong.
Wrong, wrong.
A bad reading of the situation.
The right reading is that I just don’t understand it.
At all.

Grief Point, and May Day by extension, suffers from the same old shit:
A potential complete ignorance of ambiance, real ambiance, in that
can you really construct it, every last bit of it,
and just let the listener feel its effects?
And is this the right treatment?
Always the same question.
In this case, I would maybe say yes, just because it forces form onto the thing.
"Thing" is a bunch of words to melodies, and the words sung in a handful of ways.

Between J and D, of course, the same old war rages;
one into a tight and perfect digital palace, but super true to the genre,
the other wanting to throw in actual sounds, mix it up, humanize.

It's cool how for my part, this sleight of hand,
the trick of making something confounding and great and potentially horrible, drawn up from air...
all this is no longer of any interest.
In fact, even seeing things in this light depresses me.
And so I often come home at night depressed by what we have done, what we are doing.
It's good, it means I've changed.

I have lost interest in music. It is horrible.

I should only make things I understand.
I should only make things I know how to construct, however imperfect.
It's not even like dictating to someone; it's less than that.
May Day itself is pretty cool, I have to admit.
It condemns the world at such an easy pace.
I intend to tell it to you... it’s like happy shooting rockets,
a disgusting description of anything, to be sure.
I think the world does not like me grim; it likes me melancholic but not miserable.

English on the Mediterranean, which is oddly enough, some of the worst people there is.
At some point when it is made, I will explain this record word-for-word, swear to God...
When I know if that is good or bad, I’ll know what is good and what is bad.


The answer to the making of Grief Point is picnic baskets filled with blood.

Too rich, nothing at stake.

If "blank" had to write lyrics for his songs, they would be cumbersome, pale blocks, like his riffs, but pale.
So instead, he went out and found a wailer, too stupid to commit to a single thing.

I assume not lighting up at the sight of your mother is a sign of madness in an infant.
Pattena, no name for a baby...
you were first born before they threw you from the bridge.

Wagner wrestles his dogs to the floor.
Such a beautiful scene for some.
They write plays, don't perform them.

The message from the critical reception of Dreams was quite clear:
We will not be listening to you any further.
Of course, some tension is created;
Cosmonaut in a breadline, etc.

I watched a pig devour the classics just to get to you.
The barge endlessly circling, your mind finds out.
It is done.

ArtPrize Cathedral Square Review

September 28, 2011
ArtPrize Cathedral Square Review

A community not so far away;
Cathedral Square
By: me

ArtPrize has the tendency to bring out the child in all people, whether they are an actual 8 years old or 60 doesn’t make a difference. Art for the sake of art is hard to come by and usually with an event of ArtPrize size there is no keeping out the under appreciators who cannot see the beauty in a non-traditional piece or place.

A question that comes up a lot for first time Artprize goers is, ‘Where in the world are we supposed to start?” With art to see everywhere it is easy to get sweep away in the spectacle of it all and miss the smaller more majestic places. One such place is The Roman Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids' Cathedral Square. Cathedral Square participated last year in ArtPrize but just as an outside venue, but that changed this year. Cathedral Square transformed itself into a land of art by accepting the position of being one of the seven exhibition sight center where people could go resister and vote.

But what makes Cathedral Square the best place to begin is the site being one of a few places that offers free-parking. The square itself is not easy to miss thanks to a 24ft. steel sculpture name “Whirling Dervish.”-Ruth Migdal-Brown is the artist responsible for the 7,000-pund piece and says the bright red giant monument represents movement and dance. Inside there are 24 pieces of art, in the gardens and, the Healer Plaza supplying the venue with a total of 32 pieces. However there are sums of 35 artists, for Cathedral Square features collaborative art as well. The Square is the right amount of distance away from the heart of downtown to have a calming and warming aura that escapes the other venues, but still manages to attract enough people to withhold a reassuring sense of community.

When asked to give a small statement about Cathedral Square Center and ArtPrize, the sites curator Ron Pederson, a professor of art at Aquinas College and also an ArtPrize artist himself said in a previous MLive story “We wanted work that would encourage contemplation, that would allow the viewer to understand something of the artist's spirit and something of the spirit of the community within which she or he is working.”

Dreams and Paper-cut Epiphanies

Dreams and Paper-cut Epiphanies

Ever since starting the University I keep having a reoccurring dream, where I think I am being understood by the world only to open my mouth and speak Latin. As disbelieving and contradicting as it may sound, it isn’t easy for people to see me but at the same time I catch the eyes of many. I like to be unseen and unnoticeable though. It makes getting work done easier; makes writing easier; makes living life easier and writing about life easier.

The questions that are given- What do I do in life? What kind of work do I like doing? Do I feel at home in this country? Do I feel alienated? What does literature really mean to me? What do I love to read? Why am I here? What do home me to me? Is there a single place that means the world to me? Am I satisfied?

Firstly, I am never satisfied because I was spoil as a child. When my mother was dying, the single most important place in the world to me was by her side. If I close my eyes and try really hard I can still smell the decomposing fragrance of her body under the hazy of incents and perfume of our home. Or her husband’s home I should say. I didn’t mind the stank, I never did even at the very end.

As I child I wanted to dance, to be a ballerina. Before my mother married a second time, before we had money, and before my brother and I wasn’t denied much of anything anymore, I took lessons briefly. I will never know how my mother managed to pay for it. I was 6 years old. My cousin, whom I used to think, moved as a graceless newborn kitten, was in the same class as me. I used to envy her before I even knew the meaning of the world, and a small part of me still does this day. Even though I know I am smarter, more well liked, and not a druggie. I envied her greatly, for her magical power of being able to fit in better because of her light skin. I didn’t want to be dance anymore after the other girls started calling me Blackie.

Do I feel at home in this country? I was eighteen, attending a university party of irrelevance and making polite conversation when I found the answer to that question. When my turn came to tell the room my major and passion in life, I was gift with this callous response from the host, “Oh, journalism? Just to let you know seriously that the only reason you will probably be hire in news broadcasting is because you’re black and a woman and they probably need to fill a quota.” Nobody found anything wrong with her statement. No, I do not feel very much at home in this country at all.

The loneliness of my alienation in this country is like a prison. I feel captured and want nothing but to escape pass the overbearing iron gates of my inner isolation but the exit is bolted. I miss my mother when I am awake. Melancholy consumes swiftly and sometimes thoughts of death become a weighted heaviness inside me; it feels like a gilded key resting in my palm. Even if I am too appreciative to actually do away with myself, one can still dream cant they? And if there is one thing that I have learned in twenty-one years of existing is I dream very well and that preferring the company of books over people keeps my dreams vibrant. With each novel painting an intricate mosaic across my mindscape, I find solace every time I look upon its vivid reflection.

Literature means I get to see my mother because I dream of her often. She takes the form of my villain and my heroine of the latest piece I manage to conquer. I see her and I hate her for being so beautiful and healthy and so painstakingly there. She does not smell of decay and if I dare to touch, her skin will not freeze hell over. I know this intimately because my dream tells me so, in that funny way dreams do. I often lie and like to pretend I am not the daughter of a dead mother and delude myself in thinking I am not bitter.

Sometimes, I feel like the tiny black period placed at the end of a Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVLL or a Sylvia Plath’s poem. The ones that make me cry when I have thought there was going to be nothing sad enough for me to cry over again. I love to read poetry.

At the age of twenty I stood in the poetry section of a bookshop on the corner of Lake Drive and Robinson Road with no intentions on buying anything but just to smell the old pages. I remember, as I told the clerk I was searching for a mother’s day gift and that I won’t need help finding it, trying not to feel too much satisfaction in lying, but its hard to not smile when they are so easily fooled. I didn’t even fill a twinge of emotion when she replied earnestly, “Oh, you are such a good daughter. My son barely remembers to call on my birthday.”

I randomly pulled tomes from the shelves and flipped through them, hoping to get a paper cut even though I knew most if not all the books had long since lost their crispness. I don’t recall the time of day, but I remember it was warm inside the shop and dim. I stood in front of the poetry section idly flipping through a random book when something to my left caught my attention. It was a man, a rather short and husky man standing on his toes with his arm stretched above his head trying to reach a book that was too far out of his grasp. I was about to help when a painful sting in my finger distracted me. I had gotten a paper cut. I walked out that bookshop with a newly purchased used ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’, the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein because I decided along with writing cookbooks food and music reviews I wanted to write children’s poetry and prose books.

There used to be a time when I thought home was in the arms of my mother. The one place where my dark skin was beautiful, my female body was a temple and my passions bright enough to light the world. Now I am not so sure, because ever since my mother died I keep having this reoccurring dream, where I think I am being understood by the world only to open my mouth and speak Latin.

Loneliness draft

Loneliness is like a prison. You feel captured and you want nothing but to runaway from it. Darkness consumes you and thoughts of death becomes comforting in the most relieving way. Even if you are too feeble to actually do away with yourself, one can still dream cant they?

The freedom of happiness looks like a hopeless wish. Its like looking in through a glass shield, you on one side and everyone else on the other. Every person around you seem to have joy eating them from the fucking inside out…looks painful. But no matter how painful it appears to be its nothing compared to the pain of being lonely. Who wants to be happy anyways? Its overrated and now a days its artificial anyways. But who am I fooling, I want to be happy, even if it is fake.

However, if you do ever find escape from your prison the feeling is mind boggling. Its like you’ve been born again and you have a fresh start. You have found someone or something that brings a reason for you to live again. They brought you the key of love and it is now beating through your body, but this is also something new there in place of that loneliness. Its a sensation that follows and have a tight hold on you. Its terror.

Fear that one day loneliness would come and find you again putting you back in to that dark, isolated prison. That is worst than simple loneliness itself. To have found and tasted freedom then to have it snatched away from you. It hurts like a bitch. So now not only are you back in that fucking prison there are chains holding you down to the floor.

Its subtle but when your first thrown back in to solitude you don’t realize it at first. However, slowly but surely you start falling into the alienated pattern of life you once was so accustom to. It happens and one day you find that you are now stuck in a drift of seclusion.

Once again your empty, lonely, and lost you want to die but the past wont let you. So now your back at the beginning but now the feeling is worst. For now you have the bitter sweetness of having haunting memories to keep you company, but now you have haunting memories to keep you company.

“We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.”

Orson Welles

Letter #214

YOU.

You. Yes, you. I am writing this for you.

I know you are reading this. And I want you to know I am writing this for you. No one else will understand. No one else knows. They think that this is for them. But it’s not. I am writing this for you.

I want you to know, life…it’s hard. Every day can be a challenge. It can be a challenge to get up in the morning. To get yourself out of bed. To put on that smile. But I want you to know, that smile is what keeps me going some days. You need to remember, even through the tough times, you are amazing. You really are.

You should be happy. You are gorgeous.

I know that the weather might not be perfect. You might have to turn your back to the wind or feel the cold nipping at your nose. But you know what, at least you are there to feel it. At least you can enjoy the sun’s warm rays on your face. Or that cold February wind biting at your cheeks. You know what that means?

You are alive.

Everything will be okay.

~ Letters I'll Never Send ~

Smoking moon

The man in the moon is awake
And he is tired. Taking the blame for the lonely nights. Fading, expanding. Burning in his chest wont let him sleep. Inhaling the clouds and letting the smoke carry him away.

A dark exchange.

Sunlight over me no matter what I do. My heart is being burned from Within my chest. No longer protected, no longer being held warmly in your palms and kissed softly with your poetry. Everyone holds flashlights that reveals my burnt spots. I try to block. Sunlight finds me no matter where I go.

Where ever you are, do you think of me? As I think of you. Are your hands cold and dark from where my heart once were? shadows that used to hide us from the world, are my shadows I can't seem to find. I want them back, damnit please. The sunlight hurts my eyes and burns my heart and leaves dry spots on my skin.. Give me back, give me back, give me back...my darkness.