Paperweight Poetry

Charmless boys get nowhere They say Flirtless girls get nowhere They say Charming boys get nowhere They say Flirting girls get nowhere  They say Than what is there left to be A loose confederation of hopes and dreams? A pink paper doll tearing at the seams? No, you want some mass of muscles and skin Flopping about unopinionated and numb  You don't like us fish out of water Questioning your frilly expectations Because we are too slippery to grasp Bouncing about not easy to catch You think we just want to rebel, but we just want to breathe Not in the water, not in the air because nothing is ever clean  So give me your one way mirror rules and rules  And I will saturate them in your own filth, unreadably wet And in that moment with the disintegration of words I will not be charmless or charming, flirtless or flirting  I will be a girl or I will be a boy Finally breathing in the space between the funeral of rules. ...

These people they mark their skin  With permanent ink in an impermanent life Perhaps so their willful scars will outnumber the unwillful ones And they will feel somehow stationary, unbudging In a much so budging world  Where we are as fleeting as pinstripes in the thirties As ephemeral as the loose change given to the unwanted man  So yes, screw it, we will always be cursory  But let's mark our cheeks with freckles from kisses from the sun  Let's tattoo our passports with foreign cities  And scar our hearts with neophytic loves  Because no one wants to see the word love carved into your skin They want to see it carved into your heart.  -anna sluder

We're all just children, There is no such thing as growing into women and men, No matter how old we get we will always be boys and girls Playing tag on the playground of this world, Because fighting over crayons turns into fighting over borders And we'll get six digit checks instead of chores for quarters  We all just want to be comforted and told it'll be alright, Like a child sung to sleep under the canopy of the night, So perhaps that's why at twenty one you can drink up all of the lies  For alcohol is just the adult's version of a lullaby.  -anna sluder

You know that dream where you wake up  Lying against the gravelly tears of a broken boulevard on your back And the grit digs into your palms like sweet torture  As your feet slip and grind against the gurgling wet ground as you rise Wailing "what is this?" "where am I?" As the dark streets close in like tunnels that echo your screams Until they melt into a silence that loudens as a reminder of your sole existence Bearing no one to answer back let alone listen to the questions And the world spins like a top whizzing across a coffee table  Until it tumbles over the edge and you are on your knees once again And you wonder why it is only you and there is no one else here For aren't dreams the crack between reality where the impossible can happen? But I guess even in fantasies I only get one soul and that is my own And when it comes down to the end of my life where I am standing on night's winding road  Even then I will be utterly alon...

Dear parents, you cringe at my generation hovering loudly over our shoulders  But don't you think I think it's sad too that nowadays and everyday We drink the soup of our salty tears And choke down anxiety pills like lumps in your throat you can't swallow The words you only wish but never can spit out  Naming every fear of ours a mental illness so we can get some sort of pill to fix us  That never can really do more than etherize, anesticize us  And we stifle the single human quality we have left: hunger So that we can saw off, chip, and chisel away our bodies Like that one art project in class you could never get right but the more you worked at it and repainted it the worse it looked Because you were wrong practice doesn't always make perfect at least when it comes to purging  Or we stifle it with the gluttony of eating ourselves alive  Until we drown in the quicksand of our fat rolls  Fingers curling over the mountains of o...

Love has a sick bastard named Hate  That comes to the family reunion anyways  Even though he spits in the food, knocks over the kids with a shove Unburies the past and sets the house ablaze All he secretly wants is to be loved.  -anna sluder

When the fools wail over knowing love Naming it tragic to have desire All I can think is I wouldn't mind being burned in a fire For if love is tragic baby give me tragedy.  -anna sluder