The Poetry Marathon

I buried his head beside

the cat’s grave in my neighbor’s yard

She’s too busy mourning abortions to notice the freshness of the soul…

She prays to her dead pets and pastors that the world will be a better place

She doesn’t know that her son…

He is a sinner.

He was unclean and I had to bathe him in the holiest of all water.

He liked to scrape the innocence out of little girls who live on our street

But he couldn’t swoon me

He couldn’t swoon me

While his mother prays to God for her perfect son’s safe return,

I slaughtered relief into his victims.

He is free from the weight of his crimes. Now, he is perfected .

@angel rosen

I am still writing…

My story here…

So despite my scars and the memories of blood, 

My broken parts don’t leak into my definition

@ Angel Rosen (half assed poem)

I was told by the fire mage,

Maniac messiah that I’m

Some internal arsonist

A relief to know that when the darkness surrounds me,

I

Have accelerant

I have a match and gasoline… This

Is poetry

Even in cobalt blackness,

I can write light

@ angel rosen

I guess I memorized the feeling of loss…
I guess I look for it everywhere
Sometimes I throw away something previously precious just to have a reason to be sad.
I guess, I know before everything, the feeling of losing.
The death grip of life as it takes something that was yours and plucks out it’s soul or simply puts her in someone else’s arms.

The feeling of loss makes my stomach rumble.
My anxiety triples, spews discomfort up my throat.
But I feel this in everything…
I can’t convince myself that anyone knows how to stay put

@ angel rosen

The atrocity of being shut out

feels like the burning wind in my asthma lungs.

When I’m playing tag in the third grade and the bully boy asks me if asthma is contagious

That’s what it feels like to be shut out

That my nature is inconvenient and

My peers have fear of catching me

(although I’m doing the chasing)

In either place, I won’t open my mouth

Even if it’s the only way I can breathe

@ angel rosen

This sober life is my Albatross,

heavy as a cross,

Bending my neck into knots.

Around me, I smell the nauseating scent of

alcohol and  weed…

I am too pure to be here

Trapped in this addiction prison

The walls all tallied with excuses like their arms with track marks and razor scars

It’s not always so bad

There are the innocent drunks

Who frequent a Saturday party. But still…

I am unfair here.

The scales never tipping in my favor

If this is not sickness

What the hell is it?

I hear the high flies buzzing on their potential corpses

I rot slower

because I rot sober …

Inside my inescapable  cell

Of everyone else’s escapes

@ angel rosen

my mother- her face ages

from cigarettes and smiles

middle-life women call them laugh lines

in bitter humor

on their eleventh anniversary of their twenty-ninth birthday

and with age, comes tears

a sort of sopping heaviness,

leaking out like a dirty mop over the edges of youth

filling the cracks that the smiles made-

ruining the edges of the pictures

each year, another pound for the heart to carry

in a life anchor

no wonder she looks so tired.

she’s tied like a ship by the years,

slowly sinking,

bated her breaths

My very teeth – all sweet
relinquish morals to the craving
to bring spring
to know seasons
to hoist my weather-mouth
high above her,
perched perfect as a statue,
she is.

I am such an ardent gardener
I make the flowers bloom in winter,
and the curve of her smile to follow,
the woman adores the orchids
she wears on her body,
and daisies in her hair,
and roses on the countertop.

the petals fall and collect,
every daisy, rose… her orchids
I bloom them,
they blossom for me only- like I am
a ready bee
dancing pollen off my feet for her.

Surviving the April showers,
to grow flowers in December,
each petal curved like
the smile on her face.

@ angel rosen

I spent decades in a cage –

acrimonious
a basket case full of making assumptions
I am locked and loaded at the very least
A prisoner made of bullets —
my ribs lined with triggers
Waiting for the key to turn
and for my mouth to shoot.

@ angel rosen

I found hope in a heartbeat

It hid from me for the longest time,

Just as a watched pot never boils,

is sought hope ever found?

I left it behind, declaring myself-by name,  hopeless

Until a sleepy night where the moon intoxicated me- I shut my eyes, my head on her chest,

Her eager loving heart pumping beneath me

and by morning, my head throbbed with the newness

The surprise

Of the hope that welled as water in the dry places of my aching body

@ angel rosen