Paperweight Poetry

The countries lined up like beads on a necklace, spitting words out like international and order, some of them ran together; And they promised us, never again. But there is foam gurgling out of children's mouths as they writhe and convulse, their faces pulled taunt and blank, like a doll's face, eyes unflinchingly wide, pupils tight, as life is drawn out of them, like a demon leaving the exorcised. You lied, because the countries line up like beads on a necklace, spitting nothing out, just wordlessly shaking their heads at the hundreds of people already dead; And the only thing you're promising is that there will probably be more. But you said, Never. Again. You cannot politically correct and excuse yourself of the word never, or title the hope you gave, a miscommunication. You lied, and there is foam at their mouths, and if you don't climb out of your silk sheets, soon it'll be on the world's, and there will be no international or order,

The words that I waited for, were different than the words that arrived,  and there was melancholy inside of my chest, it looked like a bottle of blue paint gurgling as it spills out,  like poison that doesn’t taste like poison until you swallow it,  doom that you are unaware of until you’re on the edge of it.  I wonder if I waited for the unlikely,  yet expected the lonely, because I knew that someone that beautiful, with such a cunning taste for words, couldn’t have a mind that was anything but a terrible place, couldn’t stay with anyone that the moment you said hello, he started unpacking his suitcase. So I think you knew too,  which is why you chose blue paint  to let cataract and plunge over the wreckage, over the apocalypse in my chest,  because you knew, out of all the hellish states of mind, l oneliness would taste the best.  -anna sluder

I’m the kid who tried to find the end of the rainbow, I’m the kid who went running through sunflower fields and meadows, slipping on flowers that squelched open like bottles of paint, that bound leaves and petals together, to make you a crown, so that you could be a thing that is wild and true.  And maybe I never found the end of the rainbow and maybe the flowers dried up and fell out of the crown, but maybe I lived in a way that you never knew, For I believe that if we just love the world, it’ll love us too.  -anna sluder