I hate poems with the words 'home' and 'heartbreak'
and bland colours except when they're layered with film grain
because you can tell from the grain if it's a Japanese work
or just a fat white conservative's radical leftish twelve year old's experiment.
My bed was originally my older brother's...
then I slept on it when he left.
Then our younger brother colonised the ancient framework
until I got it back and gave him my new bed;
it's a big wonderfully painted box with wheels and a medical mattress
I couldn't actually tell why I didn't like it – it's the 7 out of the 10 I could wish for
yet it wasn't such an enticing thought to leave a bed as memorable and miserable
to the disturbing behaviour that of my brother's regardless of how completely normal he actually is compared to how my words portray him.
I've had my own issues with big words like 'home' and 'heartbreak'
because both have aligned in parallel with disconnection and perplexity since I ever started to wonder–
there's no wonder why my memories don't make sense
and sometimes don't add up;
I have built memories since I ever started drawing;
there are gaps I fill with acrylic and others I disguise
with a dry brush that creates a dark haze across peculiar details–
sometimes nobody has a face
but still I know my mother is setting the table– a table we've never had.
No one is coming
No one is someone I probably knew once
and I feed their absence as their absence grows
and all the gone things continue to go under the lights of the last largest, greatest, brightest Christmas tree we put up in 2006
where I had a blue CD player by the trunk wrapped in paper or just in its box.
It was my gift and later I lost it.
I can tell now it was dearly from my mum.
I had a dream about you when you were perched on a stretcher in an operating theatre your skin ripped easily as I cut your chest
You had no sternum and no ribs it appalled everything in the room
The big lights flickered and the electrocautery almost burned down
I slit one of your venaecavaes out and squeezed life out of it
your body wastes and carbon piled up you could've died just as peacefully as you were...
it was a waste of time watching you die.
My brother tells me he used to think of ships as part of terrain because he'd always looked at them superficially and mistaken their dark floors for asphalt. My dad once told me that if I ate watermelon seeds a large tree would grow and push its roots up through my body and out my mouth, and when I thought about it it frightened me and the chilling fear terribly bothered me I felt it melt into my bones. My brother would believe everything my mother said he actually considered giving a bucket his nose and once of his ears because it didn't have them and my mum was sad about it. I believed that the clouds floating away were actually the earth rotating. I used to think we had to warm walls and drink the wall paint in order to change it. One of my friends thought that if we warmed ink in the microwave and drank it we would sleep and skip school; her mother had tried it. The Iron Giant's intro made my brother scream when he was a baby. I don't know why it scared him. He doesn't remember it now. I told a classmate once that I had to use the toilet urgently because I had diabetes. I still worry if karma will ever get back at me for lying. I once brought into my house a bunch of strangers and told my neighbours to get out of my place in front of them. I don't remember why I did it, but I wonder if that was a manifestation of bigger problems that have been coming up over time. I've killed my parents more than I can tell in my mind and lost myself in the streets crying over them multiple times. When my brother hit his head and went to A&E I wished he'd needed admission to hospital or had died so I had something to write songs about. My brother from another dad doesn't ask about me anymore, I wonder if it's because people change when they grow much older. I can't remember where I heard Jackson 5's I Want You Now for the first time. My mind won't add things to each other like it used to. What if I never learn the piano? Am I too old? What if I can't write anymore because I've run out of creative energy? I've never finished anything though...
I had a dream about you when I cracked your skull open and saw your mind
stretched out on the beach with a brunette angel dreaming of bigger apricots and archangels
I forked out a slice from your frontal cortex and put it somewhere else
that the climate changed and the ocean caught flames
and the angel was just a manipulative demon
who crucified you against a shark littered with needles that grazed your back and cut through your body...
as you bled and bled and the fire fed on you...
then I took a spoonful of the back of your mind
and scattered it within the margins of your sanity
like an awful lot to take in that almost didn't drive you crazy
the flames whipped around you
your skin chafed and lashed down
your eyeballs hung from your face enough you could neither see your angel faced demon nor persevere living.
I took back all of our memories and canned them with your laughter
bottled my tears and wrapped them with sorrow and threw all of that in the sea.
When I woke up, I didn't remember anything.
I just thought about killing you.
