cool

I think I've figured it out.
A person sees a cool person and wants to be friends. In anticipation of needing cool conversation topics, they go do cool stuff. Then they successfully make the cool friend, who would have been their friend before but is especially excited to be their friend now, because in the process of doing cool things, that previously less cool person got just a little cooler. It usually works both ways.  The cycle goes on, because the more you know people the more you understand just how cool they really are. That is how we inspire each other to awesome.

-Citron 

BOMBASTIC

BOMBASTIC IS SUCH A GOOD WORD
LIKE THE PARADE DRUMS THAT FORCE YOUR HEART TO THUMP
AND MARCH

LIKE TRUMPETS YELLING YELLING
SO BRAVE AND PUBLIC THAT YOUR STOMACH
PULLS YOU OUT TOO

LIKE STANDING IN FRONT OF THE AMPS
AND JUMPING JUMPING

A GRAND EXPLOSION
GRAND
SO GRAND YOU HAVE TO SHOUT OVER

-Citron

Happy Birthday to Susanna

Susanna it's your birthday, and I know it's getting late
So I have to sing this song pretty fast, if you missed it today
I would hate that.
Happy birthday to Susanna,
You know I think that you're the man, let's
Go make some adventure plans
Susanna.
Susanna happy birthday
Did you realize how tres
difficile it is to rhyme your name
without sounding cliche?
Susanna.
I'm planning to write people songs
going on near Christmas time
so I'll save my better thoughts
for that occasion
But I figure I would send you a little
birthday card in rhyme,
Who's you're favorite booth, you're mine
Glad you're not named Ruth, but fine
Even if you were named Ruth
I would think you're pretty cool
We would still hang out at school
except possibly if that triggered a giant shift in how history turned out like in that movie about butterflies eating bananas,
Happy birthday to Susanna.


-Citron

Seventeen

I can do a lot of things in the next year. 
I can run away from home,
I can eat someone else's ice cream
I can, theoretically,
be arrested or sue someone for child abuse,
I could be called a child. 
You see, I am seventeen,
so I can be called a child. 
I can end my sentences with prepositions
or write ones like the following.
But.
I don't think I will.  I like a home, and a half-full ice cream box,
I like my skin and my poems and
being seventeen.


-Citron

not a stone unturned

if we were playing a game
under the umbrella of the fall equinox.
and you supposedly hid little notes for me,
written in devilish calligraphy, under certain rocks.
in my little english garden.

and if i were to try and find them.

and i picked up every piece of earth bone fragment i could find.
and i toiled for demi-hours trying to find these  messages.
turning the little garden into a trashed mound of earth.

would you not then


Reasonably


say that i had not left a stone unturned?
it would be no cliche.

in a perfect world, it would be merely an astute observation.
but in our verily imperfect bubble. it rolls off the tongue
with overused blandness.

-Pamplemousse

"choking murmur"

Hadn't slept, figured telling you "choking" was a Germanic adjective would be enough.
Didn't save the thought.  Figured I could get the little things right
but nothing worked, my essay didn't convey my ideas
about what this tea party means in context of the
Great Gatsby as a whole work
and next Monday at noon
I find out I failed. 
Great.


-Citron

A dreamer

What is wrong with you all! 
Come up with another way to say things! 
Find your own!
I don't want to be judged for using the word dream
if it it the right word! 
You screwed it up for me. 
Now I need to find my own,
and that's not how I want life to work.


-Citron

mirror images

backwards, times are happier,
in reverse, the past is aglow
with rosy cherries,
and chandeliers of bronzed glass.
the inverse of the present
is an enticing green valley
where i can be happy
among the thistles.
not knowing they will sting
my naive armor of skin.

turn your face
so that i can see my upside down
reflection in your earring.
i look more exotic.
more interesting
upside-down.
that everyone could perceive me
through your cheap and common
mirroring ear-ring.

things are better anyway except this way.
-Pamplemousse

murmur

there is an underlying noise.
a strange whispering.
i hear it at times.  when all is quiet.
is it the murmur of the blood?
pumping mechanically through the roots of trees?
or of the swish of the nerves.
the nerves of all humanity.
blowing out the fuse of the brain.
is it the creaking of the heart?
we have stopped using our hearts.
they are worn and rusty in that forgotten closet behind the kitchen.
in that old shed in the woods.
where we used to pretend there were spirits.

i hear these sounds, voices of inanimate objects.
at strange times within the screenplay of my existence.
walking away from a friend, after a fight.
angrily hurt. wishing i had not poured out my innermost emotions with such trust.
shown them my internal pages.
i stab the ground with my strides of sharpened pencils.
and instead of heavy footfall on the linoleum.
i hear the creamy swirl of vibrations.
my ear reacts to these disturbances as sound.
i never really stop to think about them for too long.
i stand, frozen, in the pit of a black charcoal maelstrom.
i look up to the light, hear the songs the light sings to me.

and then i am swept away again.

maybe one time, i can ponder the luz for long enough.
to hear what it is saying to me.

-Pamplemousse

Sorrow thoughts

I flipped through a quote book my grandparents gave me and saw a quotation about complaining.  About sorrow, really, but mostly about how if someone complains about something then they must think that their something is, on some level, a little OK.  We only talk in a big mess about what is not actually bothering us. 

I imagined telling you this quote or maybe just paraphrasing and you're upset because you think I am accusing you of being a bad friend.  Really I want you to ask me what I'm hiding even though there's no way I could tell you about why I am and always will be sad. 

Why am I not accusing you of hiding a sorrow?  You wouldn't tell me about it obviously.  Do you know how huge people are?  Vats of urine.  You took Calculus, I remember helping you after school and bonding like molecules do.  There's the opinion that people's nuclei can fuse but you know what?  Our electrons got into a working orbit or something.  I think if anyone knew anyone else really then there would be some wort of explosion.  Maybe that's what the soulmate love thing is.  You become some synthetic monster molecule or something. 

Anyway, you took Calculus, right?  Do you understand how huge people are?  It's almost disgusting.  We draw out of current thoughts and lives like a function of time.  And we are the area thus far under the curve.  I am an integral from today to whence I came.  I cannot concieve of myself because I am not smart enough.  None of us know ourselves, how could we possibly know each other?  And so much of each other is disgusting.  How complicated is a human.  Like a world.  Sure, there's a word for it, but it just works around it like those electrons.  The word can't connect to a thought.  You are empty, a few streaks of my integral. 

It must not mean much, this idea, because I told you about it. I thought about keeping it in my head but I think writing it down makes thinks a little OK on some level, even if it used to be too big.  Maybe that's the point of poetry. 

As sincere as I can be,


-Citron

destroyer of nature

lying on this bed of nails
she knows she has done wrong.

why does she not speak of the birds?
the storms and the blazes of the fires?
she has grown to forgive the bipolar
disorders of nature.

but, how can she forgive herself.
she can not
forgive herself

for trampling on that perfect flower.
alone and pure in the center of the field.

-Pamplemousse

the rustling of the girl with the pearl earring

in the dead of night, nearly falling off the precipice of slumber...
i start.
i hear a strange rustle.
i turn my ears,
and there, a strange wind has caused the bottom of the poster
the girl with the pearl earring to float
and she is breathing as the waves on the beach.

-Pamplemousse

electric violet

the pump, the beat
the noise.
the jungle inside of my head.

neon animals leap from branch to branch
as the harmonicas swung from the trees.

the dirt was covered in empty printer cartridges.

madness, chaos, frenzy.

call my name
for i won't hear you.

-Pamplemousse

harvest moon

peaking from behind the holograms of foliage
with gross bulbous form
and an unnaturally pallid, blossom face

the moon glared down at me.
with warmth in its cheeks
and red in its heart

isn't it pretty?
isn't it mysteriously lovely?
isn't it frighteningly bizarre?

the harvest moon is not a solid sphere.
it is a hole.
a hole bored into the sky.
the sky is merely a canvas covering the true nature of the universe.

didn't you know the universe was orange?

-Pamplemousse

Science

My family says the prayer before supper way too fast.
They can't be thinking at all, but then again
they taught me to say it at all;
I can look more carefully
and teach patience to my family
and my family doesn't have to say it fast. 


-Citron

You changed who I would have been to who I will be

My high school friends.

Weird, that they were important to the lady behind the something.
Weird, that's a thing people say. 

And I look at you and go
Yeah
No wonder!


-Citron

gee, the end of something

They think settling down sounds perfect,
and say I should carry my genes forward,
but I don't think that is my dream. 
Don't you ever want to be the end of something?
The tip of a root, the prick of a leaf,
the sentence's punctuation?


-Citron

The Postman and the Broker

The postman's wife tried her best to keep from shaking
the light plastic video camera as the postman
(through even what seemed in the video to be an earthquake)
walked his close-to-the-ground walk, stepped onto a brick stoop
and sent a tight handful of envelopes through someone's rusty mail slot. 

Did you hear, asked the broker's wife,
that the post doesn't come on Saturdays anymore? 
He barely looked up from his own face in their local Tribune
and she barely looked up from admiring
the contrast between orange juice and floral tablecloth. 
Ah, said the broker. 

The postman's wife didn't spend a second glance
on the YouTube side banner ad for a desperate

firm of some sort in New Jersey;

to budget they cancelled their newspaper subscription.  

She called her husband over;

they spent Sunday afternoon replaying "Jim's Last Saturday Delivery"

The broker's wife bought six newspapers that day.
Her name was Susan. 


-Citron

Moonbeam Tears

I am so tired of the poems I find online
Really, I can't take it anymore
The cliches are like little knives in my skin
Drawing one luscious drop of blood

With each new depressed word misplaced I read. 

I don't mind that you write poetry
I don't mind that you tell me
And the rest of the entire world
What it is that makes you sad. 
But please,
as you spiral downwards

and you cry in a corner

and the stars are as lonely
and you just

can't

take it anymore,

please don't write poetry

because it makes you cool. 

-Citron

shiver

you call me shivering
for i hear the tremors.
the rattling of your knuckles.
your moonlit town
will talk
but you see things
that give you life.
what did you see?
that makes you vibrate so.
was it the sight of the winds
blowing the water from the dim lake.
was it the smell of the the leaves
falling to the sky from their restraints.
do not be afraid.
the signs will come to nothing.
the will come to nothing.

-Pamplemousse

hospice

as the sea foam winds
swirl around my ears

and i look far into the hills
i know that this is the place.

this spot will be my hospice.
i will live among the jungle grass.
the hairy reeds and the gangly plants.
i will lie among the oaks
among the foxes and the mountain lions.
feeling my life seep into the undercurrent
of the creek.

kettering between life and death.
i will watch the blood orange
juice fall from the sunset sky.
it will fall onto my hands
and suck blood from my veins.
for that is the living ambrosia
for Ares' mantle.

but i am willing.
i have chosen this setting to breathe my last.
the pine needles will pity me here.
and the dirt on the ground will
lovingly embrace me.
and i will become the ground.
as i have always wanted.
to fall into the core of the earth.

-Pamplemousse

oh that i could...

oh that i could
write an emblem of my mind
a script from my juvenile thoughts
that i could put on print
something different.
an anti-cliche.

when i write
exactly what i think,
the words are commonplace
and they read illy.
it discourages my heart
and makes me sad.

in a reverie of extreme anguish
joy
anger.
i do not think in synonyms
i think merely in plain
letters. no complex sentence structures.

but if i blanket those words
in lavender smoke.
and i attempt to insert a copper tube
into my eye, to suck out a small amount of my emotion.
suddenly, metaphors and strange language
seep out in fragrant liquids.
i must compress my emotions
and squeeze them with my rough fingers

i must ball them up and throw them against the wall.
and then i pick up the remains.
rearrange them
and then.
only then am i satisfied.
only then do i have hope.

-Pamplemousse