Poetry Submission #4

Dreaming awake
Awaking to dream
Falling foward faster
Flying further fearing
Nothing in this place
This face a memory of
Someone I once was
Standing lonely, stranded as
Corpses of former selves
Dancing in the past land
A wasteland of history
Telling nothing, only
All that matters at all:
The now that will be
And the been that was now.
Is life what we have
Is sleeping through the dreaming
The endless colorless void
We waste, yet want
We need, yet taunt
Familiar others who form ourselves
Dreaming awake
Awaking to dream

Poetry Submission #3

Hold my hand
Just this one time so
I can feel the roughness of
Your fingertips and
The soft, fleshy center of
The inside of your palm.

Hold my hand
For this moment so
I can feel the heat, the wetness,
The energy in that space between
Flesh and flesh
Not quite touching
But somehow closer than that.

The spaces in between
The anticipation of intimacy
The quiet, timeless tension
Frozen, burned, carved into memory

Hold my hand
Just once more as
I surrender to the rising chemistry
Floating in those beautiful,
Dangerous spaces in between.

Poetry Submission #2

I don't need this job.
I don't need this aching,
This trapped feeling screaming,
Echoing cries of empty frustration
Pumping, racing through my veins.

I don't need this job.
These happy faces hiding
Soulless zombie robots infecting
The very air I breathe is contaminated
By the ever-growing presence of slow, quiet death.

I don't need this job.
The bathroom breaks just to try escaping
The pain of the open, gaping wound
My heart, my essence, my life has become
Nothing more than an automated recording
Repeating endless lies to satisfy no higher purpose.

I. Don't. Need. This. Job.
This job needs me, only surviving,
Perpetually thriving from the life I breathe into it
The bonds of self-imposed slavery
Society (?) refuses to free me from.

I don't need this job.
This job needs me.

Poetry Submission #1

Diary in Pieces: October 1996
A Poem By: Amy Alls

I fell in love this morning
On the cool, dewy concrete steps
In front of his apartment building
Painting his fingernails black
After he fumbled with the bottle and,
Frustrated, nearly gave up.

Not much talking the morning after
There was drinking at the party last night and
Our heads were still spinning from
The cider and the conversations
Deeply empty drunken musings over
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

His eyes were glazed over, but his words
So clever and eloquent and maybe it was because
I was drunk that I didn't hear one slur and
I can't remember them exactly, but they
Shape him forever in my eyes as
The hopeless romantic without any regret.

The moment this morning seemed so much longer
Than the short time it actually was
As if everything is burned into my memory
And will linger, but I've never been in love
Nor do I know if this is what love is,
But if it is love, I cherish it and will always.

I sleep now after a long night and morning
Of dreaming awake and living this life
Of a thousand hopes and a thousand goals
Never needing to know what is coming next
Never caring so much of the consequences of
This freedom of youth and belief in love.

This is the beginning of my past.