Upside Down Punch Bowls (Revised)

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     Upside down punch bowls,  shapes that dont make sense, colors that are inside out and numbers

that are constantly fighting , my head is a scary place.  When I start to try and comprehend why someone would

write a grey and orange poem I get claustrophobic. When the bass guitar is slightly louder than the

rest of the band I hyperventilate. I dont understand how to think. The most obscure thought or

emotion will take me down a bunny trail where the mad hatter will try to convince me that I am being

followed. I smell the color purple in a grocery store and lay awake at night wondering why it reminds

me of my sisters ex boyfriend. I make eye contact with someone in the street and spend the next couple

of days in the room in my head where the walls are covered with news paper clippings and red string.

News paper clippings that were yellow the day  your father handed them to you years ago, and string

as red as the music that flowed from your wrists the first time you asked me if I thought the wind was just

God trying to blow us all away, honey God blows me away every time I look at the ocean. There is an

ocean inside you, but your so busy trying to make a boat that you forgot you can swim. And I know

that sometimes you wish you had the memory span of a fish like on that night I held you as you cried

about little girls with words they dont know are knives, but I know that you buried that memory

deeper than you buried your heart the last time you saw Peter Pan. But even Peter Pan knows that the

moon was made to bleed for those who could no longer bleed for themselves, and on those days

when the moon bleeds blue the stars start crying for all of those messages in bottles that were lost at

sea because no one wants to see a broken child. I don't know where I'm going with this poem.

Just like I don't know how to explain that every time I hear the smash of a snare drum I see neon paint exploding in front of me.

I don't know how I explain that when I hear the string on a violin quiver with all the emotion of a father holding his newborn son for the first time, I can feel that rusty gold color under my skin inside of my chest.

I can't give you a logical reason for why all of my fingernails need to be a certain length or Else I'll have a panic attack. Just like how I need to run my fingers under every flat surface I see, just to keep me calm.

Sometimes I will look at my own hand and have a surreal moment of just........ being.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, I don't really think you will understand, I don't really think you'll believe me, I don't really know if I believe me. I don't really know how to end this poem.

So I will leave you with this, I don't believe that Lewis Carroll was high when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. I believe that he didn't understand what was going on in his own mind, so all he could do was get it on paper and pretend it was all just a fairytale.

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