15 16 p7 innovator paigen

Centennial.

Centennial.

Almost a Poetry book Paige Newman

Contents Preface Tuesday Sunday Wild Things San Francisco Bulk Purchase Inept Spherical Heirloom Convex Dividens

Preface I would like to thank the teachers and my classmates at freestyle for both allowing me this opportunity and giving me valuable feedback throughout the creation of this short book. My goals for these poems and this book as a whole was to create something other people could relate to while still maintaining complete creativite control and integrity, which I believe I was successful in doing. Given another chance, I hope to expand this book in the future and allow both it and my poetry to grow.

y

a d s e Tu My life

is wasting away in dark rooms hiding in pounds of covers my brain is buzzing; neon lights my face.

A man laughs, I laugh with him he does not know.

y a d un

S

Sometimes I will lie in bed and wonder If it was the fraying sheets or the hazy nights, Sticky with the smell of summer, each less distinguishable than the last, That made it all so empty.

I will stare at the grooves in the faces that stain the ceiling And ask what it was we did there

ld i W he

s g n i Th

T

Shades of green and brown blur at the edges of my brain.

I am trying to forget them, surrounding them with the grey blocks of the home that I have made.

With its tall windows and colorless lethargy, I cannot see the end of the narrow streets but I can feel them They are like tiny clots blocking my blood, strangling my thoughts in a smoggy haze.

This city is a maze and I am the only rat still trying to make its way out.

I want to be where the wild things are Alive and savage;

writhing in my youth Freed from the world itself, there is nobody left to miss me

I want to be where the wild things are, reveling in the sun, just this once

o c s i nc

a

Fr n a S

Cardboard angels sing on park benches in leftover sunlight the screeches of city drown them no ears are left for them here

Color has washed from them Dirty snow and broken bottles replace

The smell of brandy lines pink faces, Pass them blindly.

Yellowed teeth and iron suckle disillusionment plastered to brick walls scraping knees, gravel beneath

e

as h c r

u P k Bul

I am starting to think your brain is soured.

Your self of self has been subdued, sunken in sedation, suffocating in a swell of sincerity long since lost to you.

Drugged up and dulled down you are screaming, your sense of satiation spent on two dollar deals and stale insipidity.

You have stapled yourself together so many times that I have lost count.

Stability now mocks your silent sins, Our identity stolen by saccharine succulence numb

t

Inep

“You have potential� they tell me.

But what good is a mind so capable of greatness if the body cannot push it to pass beyond mediocracy? when interests wane like middle school crushes, giddy and pink until the boredom hits like a frying pan to the face and reality rears its ugly head, reminding me of my own infidelity my inability to commit to a single future.

What good is my curiosity, wide and all-encompassing, when I cannot leash it?

When it pulls me with it like a hound, jaws locked and holding fast; when dedication rails me like a steam train

Passing through balance and safety like a bullet until it wears me thin and sputters out as if it had never been there at all.

What good can come from insatiable need, this hunger that rides in the pit of my stomach, for some kind of betterment when I want the stars themselves?

What good am I?

l a c i er

Sph

Despondency blankets over the silences better than anything I could say to you and self hatred rings where I used to stand and I can’t remember what I wanted to be when I was four but it certainly wasn’t empty so how exactly did we get here?

Because I thought every time was the last time so why am I standing at the door looking at the flowers ground into the mat through puffy purple eyes like violets in the summer I guess I’ll put my brain on airplane mode And let you in But this time Is the last time

m

o o l r ei

H

I have realized I am becoming my mother Now, when I saw that I don’t mean in the good ways I mean a copy-machine error, an ink-spill on my family name

I am becoming my mother Yes, I have the same disappointed stare and a tendency to push when I don’t really want to know I have inherited the same ugly crying face And the emotions that hit like a wind storm but balance like paper boats, bound to go under as the bottom soaks through The only thing I have of my own is the sarcasm like a whip crack grown from my own disdain

I am my mother Trying so hard to be my own and failing so immensly

x e v on

C

I am standing in the mirror and pinching by some miracle, pain folds like ice cream in july staring at the body like it was a mountain something strange and entirely too large to comprehend, I wonder what I am doing here.

I am standing in the mirror watching my stomach shudder in and out and in and out, waves dancing across a swollen beach.

I wonder when the last time that I loved her was.

I am standing in the mirror at 2 in the morning, my eyes swollen shut like clams sticking themselves into my skin when I remember the first time somebody called me fat and I ran straight home and shoved a toothbrush down my throat.

I am standing in the mirror pushing and pulling and prodding at myself like I was a disease.

I am standing in the mirror looking at some poor pile of skin suffocating because it can’t quite scrub the fat away

I am standing in the mirror, pulling back my hair, and punching myself in the stomach Acid splashes peeling porcelain What am I doing here?

s n e vid

Di

I am forced to live undefined Because a constant craving for definition is the only thing that defines me In a society where definition and division is so disgustingly definite And apathy is so far ingrained into me A sort of addiction, It is automatic animation affording only a half-assed acknowledgement of an oppressive system I will say that I strive to sour

But that would require More interest than I care to impart

Because my constant concern has been met only with callous coldness A constant state of comatose care that counters any effort of clearance and clogs the arteries of the just.

Strangling out the last strands of interest and suffocating the stirring of the righteous

into a fat sedation supporting only their own supremacy and snuffing out every centimeter of sympathy in favor of stuffed salaries and secret subsidies shared in suppressed whispers at the cost of the pubescent and the poor pickled by their own people perturbed by their own parliament Butchered! $9.99 per lb.

I d o n ’ t kn ow wha t t ha t means. If yo u like, I c an searc h th e w eb . . . ?