The Polkadodge Organization

I found your hope floating in the waves of
the mercilessly omnipotent, caged in a
vial of ambiguous transparency, without
a label but I dared not crack it open but
let you hold it with tears in your overwhelmed
hands, the sudden warmth glazing over the
fragility of the glass cage, are you surprised?

Are you surprised to find yourself bruised,
knocked out in the bottle lacking fresh air but
full of stale sunlight? Why are you clutching
your last dose of hope like you assumed you
would never reunite with? Where have you been,
my dearest? Why have you let your world wobble
under your skin until your bones wobbled and you
had to crumble while looking into the mirror, witnessing
your downfall, wishing someone would stand with you?

Now go float away to your realm of dreamscapes;
don’t you let go of your newly found secondhand
hope given to you at birth with your name, you
deserve the hopeful even the midst of hopeless.

Jun 29, 201229 notes

#Poetry #Poems #Writing #Creative Writing #Prose #Spilled Ink

In darkest room,
your fingertips whisper
of deep, discordant,
unwanting.

A tease,
a taste,
the hem of
my dress
a-tangle in
this languor.

How you bask
like a jungle cat
on the branch of
a tree in midday,
summer’s heat.

My ruin and
undoing.

The distance of
your smile,

Jun 28, 20127 notes

Jun 28, 20126 notes

#art #artists on tumblr #etsy #photo #photography #beach #ocean #summer

Jun 28, 20125 notes

Flash

#Poetry #poem #creative writing #spilled ink #mhilbig #featured

The bank sounded its alarms
like clock radios
to murder dreams in the morning
with no warning,
a bright sunrise exploded
like a nuclear bomb
evaporating any chance of the same sun setting,
betting the future on double zero,

the hero will have to learn
what it means to be tragic,
there’s no magic left in the script
so we ripped it to shreds
and acted out an improvisational sketch,
the antithesis of rough onion cuts,
it was hard to shed tears
when the worst of our fears
were captured on camera.

Jun 28, 201252 notes

I HOPE I'M NOT DRIVING YOU AWAY WAIT A LITTLE LONGER YOU WON'T REGRET IT

zachreneau:

Your pants are off. Your pants are

always

off,

wrapped around the

clouds,

gripping your feet together like polka-dotted hands,

his hands,

uninitiated bones peeling the scars away from your ankle. You are staring at the ceiling, you’ve counted the stains, the mold,

the semen,

the way they form his face on the deadened yellow plaster that wants to spear the back of your throat with his cross until your top comes off.

This is you and you

wanted it to

be you.

Jun 28, 20123 notes

+/-

tehstillness:

Maybe the dream is only this:

get society to pay for the runoff of my subconscious.

Supplant all these bullshit memories, moonlit ads, crocodile tears, nights on the floor, fake raids, crescent epiphanies, toxic logic, sucrose saturated shit music, shit stories, shit poems and shit people I never wanted into brains I never want to meet.

Seems fair. I never really wanted any of this to begin with.

Jun 28, 20124 notes

#poem #poetry #Slaadrr #creative writing #spilled ink #nothing

six word poem (6/27/12)

America

left us

behind

long ago.

Jun 28, 201227 notes

#poem #poetry #six word poem #pretentious #personal #lit

Jun 27, 201227 notes

#poetry #poem #poems #writing #creative writing #lit #literature #prose #prose poetry #joshuarobertlong.com #joshuarobertlong #joshua robert long #the polkadodge organization #polkadodge.org #TPO

I am making poetry chapbooks.

onehundreddollars:

Ask me questions and I will write poems in response.

Jun 27, 20128 notes

Jun 27, 20123 notes

Jun 27, 20121 note

#Poetry #Poems #Writing #Creative Writing #Lit #Literature #Spilled Ink

I know me
quite well,

intimately,
in fact,

without the
superficial
sense of
volition or
tact,

ergo the
typical
suspicions

of any one
person
who claims
to take

a genuine
interest in

my misguided
company.

Jun 27, 20127 notes

#poetry #poems #writing #creative writing #lit #literature #youth #spilled ink

We are young
enough to want
to be old, and old

enough to feel
nostalgic for a
youth we are losing

by having not
lost, but telling
ourselves that, yes,

death is indeed
a romantic thing,
and, yes, when

we die, our headstones
will be decorated
with an abundance

of…

Jun 27, 20123 notes

Haunted

#poetry #poem #creative writing #spilled ink #mhilbig

It was their dream house,
the way the stucco reflected a light halo
as the sun set daily,

and the big back yard
with the canopy of old pecan trees
was perfect for both the kids’ playtime
and the wife’s desire
to bake the freshest pies.

The driveway was long and hidden
behind a majestic and Gothic cold steel gate
painted black with large sharp points
for a distinguished look
and the coziness which comes from
the illusion of security.

It felt so perfect at first,
which was why they didn’t notice
that if you looked close enough
at the flag flying off the front porch
on a windy enough day,

the colors created this optical illusion
where they’d seem to be running
especially the red
as if it were blood flowing
from a wounded knee,

and the wind blowing through the chime
played music that sounded
like the stuff of nursery rhymes
where all the women and children scream
before dying.

You see, the realtor never bothered to mention
it was constructed
on an old Indian burial ground,
there were rumors it was haunted,
and it was only a matter of time

before the walls
would run red too.

Jun 27, 201221 notes

If my end means your beginning, let me give you
my message seeping from my frail fingertips.

i. Always keep your name, even if it’s the most
overused, understated name, you make your name
you and dance your soul until its tendons rip their
own legs and arms because that shows dedication,
persistence. Equality is only equal when both sides
have been given a voice so never forget to speak,
your voice cannot be imitated and your words will
travel all around the world, doing justice to the subdued.

ii. I cannot count seconds when my heart was sane
and whole and there were minutes when I desired to
abort my memories for a day of peace in insanity but
we all raise our broken glasses and cut our contaminated
hands, call it a tragedy when only a drop of harmless
blood has been shed because that’s how we work; we are
a dramatic breed who scoff at mindless drama on television.

iii. The stages of my heartbreak have been fed alcoholic
waves with starry dust until surreal decalcomania is
produced for the timed nightly exchanges; the vows
have been written, decoded senselessly and this is my
confessing my diagnosis, cinematographic blues with
transparently ambiguous radioactive hysteria.

iv. I searched far and wide, round and round for a hole
to crawl in so I can dig a tunnel to cross over the horizon
but I found you and I found myself in him, in me, in us.

I had forseen an infection inevitable in our love but
couldn’t quite let go. If my end means your beginning,
let me heal your wary heart with my splintered soul.

Jun 26, 201269 notes

#art #sketch #illustration #ink #one-eyed man

the world

that little
girl
we’ve raped
into

a whore

Jun 26, 201212 notes

Remember me? I smiled because you couldn’t.

i. I have a severe infatuation with deterioration
because constructing in the name of decay inflates
my pitiful soul with empty pride, realizations that
everything is birthed to wither at the end of the road.

ii. Electronic sounds electrify my neurons until they
cease to think for themselves; let’s fulfill our destinies
with soulful notes and education that costs nothing but
devotion and time, what is life without accomplishments?

iii. Danger walked the innocuous home one night and
sucked his smile until his face was nothing but a pair
of starry eyes shining gloomily like the moon and tears
rained like thunderstorms, his mind was too sober for
this mental apocalypse; we all know, we just never said.

iv. Let’s celebrate birthdays twice a year, one for the
birth of your heart and another for the birth of a dead
star named after you, blow candles with hurricane
puffs and shallow drums, dearest, your brain has too
many cracks like the modern asphalt but we all run anyway,
running away from the mundane for pleasure in the mundane.

You cried because I refused to cry with you. Remember me?

Jun 26, 2012100 notes

Chapbooks, Chapbooks, Chapbooks

walleyedpress:

We’re about to drop the hammer on a select few new chapbooks.

First on the list is a little collection referred to as spilled, refilled by Sarah Lucille Marchant.

We’ll fill in the details in the very near future.

We’ll also let you know when it will become available.

It’ll all be very, very soon.

Jun 25, 20123 notes

(Stop, stop sedating, stop sedating my freedom,
it wasn’t meant for your schizophrenia
of a love, demented and tormented, stop sedating.

The face of my future suffocates in your palms, a
lake of hallucinations and a tunnel with
no beginnings nor ends, a sphere of perfect lies, lies.

Surveillance accuses paranoia for all wrongdoings,
it wasn’t my insecure confessions, I swear,
I do not belong in your glass castle, monitored, caged.

Your wickedness is painted on my unconditional love,
lake of shrewd exceptions, conditions said
on innocent horizons, respect burnt with insipid smiles.)

Vapid games checked my mate good-bye, disturbance
is flying above the clouds, under the influence of love.

Jun 25, 201242 notes

Summer School

killtheoldgods:

These days the kids pick
all the flowers they can
and leave them soaking in
plastic cups around the classroom.
I wrote on the chalkboard that
today’s lesson is owning beauty.
You hope the best bits
will float on top of tap water,
but you can never be sure
what will rise to the surface.
The kids won’t understand this
until a few mistakes are made.
It takes a long time to unlearn
twenty years of miseducation.
There is no lesson plan able
to explain the things that matter,
like how to tell when
love has reached its limit,
or what forgetting feels like.
On days like this (the
longest days of the year,
when the nights go by
faster than Sun Ra could kick
your skull in with sound)
I look to the greats
for guidance, proceeding like days
from one to the next,
seeking whatever light or sound
I can take through my roots.
Brian Wilson, the patron saint of summer,
turned seventy today. I still believe
in him, even when I don’t believe in me,
even after I came to the realization that
everyone who has ever taught,
or thought they had
something important to say,
was once as clueless as I am,
as mindless as anyone has ever been.
Brian lost his head to LSD, of course.
The kids have their flowers.
Teachers of a different sort.
Maybe becoming an adult means
growing uncertain, getting used to
feeling resigned, okay with not knowing.
A professor bought me a drink yesterday
and told me the difference between
the young and old was that
when you are young and you
tell people you don’t care
you really feel it deeply,
but when you get older
you actually stop caring.
I sipped and worried
that I aged too quickly.
I don’t want to forget
anything, ever, but
there simply isn’t enough room.
Not to mention budget cuts.
At the end of the day,
the kids forgot their flowers.
I sat in the bathroom, emptied cups,
and used my finger to push
white petals away from the drain.

- C.N. Rife

Jun 25, 201216 notes

The First Rule of Flapjacks

#poetry #poem #creative writing #spilled ink #mhilbig

You really need at least three for pancakes
so that you may take turns
getting lost
in the combination of blueberry, syrup, and cool whip
while the other two
carry on conversation

about the day ahead,
about the morning newspaper’s cover story,
about last night’s game,
about how the coffee at this shithole just isn’t strong enough.

You’ll make plans
and convince yourself to stay awake
even though your full stomachs
beckon you like lovers
back to bed,

and you’ll drink another cup
of weak drip
light brown bitter water
to wash away
the sweetness

before going separate directions and remaining one like a trinity in memory,
before your plans become procrastinated empty declarations,
before you were awake enough to remember three’s a crowd,
before work days lead to happy hours that lead to two a.m.’s,

which lead to hung over breakfasts,
which are never tolerable
as a couple.

You really need at least three for pancakes.

Jun 24, 201220 notes

Your words lost meaning while traveling
in the air, imitating the stars flung, shot,
and all this time you wonder why I never
looked into the depth of your pseudo
sweetness - irony at its easiest to comprehend.

This is all just a game to you, is that all
there is? You should know, the acid fuming
from my glares warn you to stop the buttered
lines, stop the pretending, stop the changes.

I took panoramic photographs of your soul and
fell unconditionally in love for the first few, but
why are the others so lied, so consumed with
fazed haze? Don’t you see yourself in your eyes
when you look into your morning cups of tea
and realize you can’t see the truths in you anymore?

Don’t theorize the comfort you find in me, I am not
your drunk nights: the ones that make your eyes roll
with stupid decisions, the ones you never remember
about the next morning; I run in the rain and you should
too, the harsh fire will wake realizations in your mind.

Jun 23, 201247 notes

Once Upon a Time

#poetry #poem #creative writing #spilled ink #mhilbig

The laughter sounded so much like
happily ever after
but quickly cooked to overdone
while floating on an ocean
reflecting the sun.

It used to rain down Vitamin D
like ten year olds
doing cannon balls
into community pools.
When it got to the bottom,

the shipwreck harvest looked like
slaves picking cotton,
gone but not forgotten,
it morphed into a rogue reef,
a P.O.W. camp for marines.

Life marches on to the harsh rhythm
of the gravel crunch in both
the drill sergeant’s dirty limericks
and the sound of boots like ice picks
ticking away the rocks

and gleaning the top soil.
It spoils like shredded meat
left in a refridgerator with no freon.
It’s been eons now,
and only the bacterial cells survived.

The smell was like the release
of bees from a hive.
The honey was sweet, the perfect product
of the birth of photosynthesis,
so green, it couldn’t resist

the stinging swell
of an allergy
to death.

Jun 23, 201229 notes

Lose the mind to someone from the unknown.

Permanent memories have capacity that loops
infinity out of its route but you know, you know
that the failure of retrieval is forgetting the written
and I question the exceptions of infinity, the unspoken
force that drives some memories out of their boxes.

Working memories displace themselves in the wrong
and they are forever lost to the wonderous volume
of continuum and I sit in a place unnamed, attempting
to solve the dynamics of losing the cognitive.

Love is not the answer in the formulaic ways of the
cognitive, you should know. When you lose the mind
to someone from the unknown, it is never love.

The cognitive serves under a strange dynamic, don’t
ever lose yourself in the immeasurable vastness of it all.

Leaving the cardiac unbroken, that’s the answer.

Jun 23, 201241 notes

i. The right numbers become wrong; her
telephone number becomes a symbol of
the puzzling aspects of the love, just a code
and you caress the rib cages on the decaying
body of your telephone, wondering why it’s been
starving of your affectionate phone calls with her.

ii. The planes of air become gas chambers within
the walls of your heart and she becomes the breaker,
the key holder but you shattered hers too, don’t only
count the uneven chunks of your passion, slowing down.

iii. You sold your name and your soul to the third note,
you lack the remorse in your pupils, on which street
did you vomit your conscious on your way home, that
night when she got you tipsy on her magnificent dance
moves and awkwardly cute flirty lines that she had
memorized since long-gone puberty?

iv. Waking up on the floor, you notice your bed has
never been slept in during the night and you wonder
just why the telephone numbers have been disconnected
and there’s a visible black hole in your stomach but all
you can touch with your transparent hands is emptiness
and crevices to reveries you once shared with her.

v. This particular hangover has never been so tragically
sickening, you realize with hollow eyes and no heartbeats
and all the dates, telephone numbers spell farewell.

Jun 22, 2012165 notes

#nothing #poetry #poem #creative writing #spilled ink #Slaadrr

Blossoms

tehstillness:

The Bride’shead collecting as lines jutting

Red jus petals

Just red enduring.

Soft silk demur singing:

8 years

8 years

No more

No more

Wide mouth drinking

Fluids from her floor.

Roots, mostly.

Jun 22, 20124 notes

Play

Jun 21, 20125 notes

#poetry #prose #lit #spilled ink

as the cradle of civilization modernizes

lifeencoded:

the wind is my harness, crushing my waking breath as the sun

whips my back

from the cradle of civilization

a path through the plains
a bridge across the oceans

when we try to rest, torrential rainforests fall across our parched lips

the tires on my imaginary chariot go flat
along the way

when this happens, I trace your

bones onto a light bulb filament
watching your olive skin glow pink

the wheat tickles our feet

the constant braying from donkeys of consumerism

releases a sneeze of dollar bills
green moths, fluttering

along the same constraining breeze

the color of burning clouds

across the lip of the ocean on a merciless evening beach-comb
a trail of tears

through white sands

pulling our feet into dunes

ripping us from the silhouetted palm trees

which wave goodbye
to us

to the half-open eye of the sun

as the trees become steel and the ocean waves are mercury

licking at the silicon sand
leaching iron from our bones

leaving us picked clean along the freeway,
the path between the wheat, the bridges across the ocean

the cliff fortress where we fought the tide of ones and zeros

lying in ruins above the cradle of civilization

Jun 21, 201210 notes

Civil War @ 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

it burned
hot
the house on
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

the army
couldn’t fight
the army

anger out blasted
ballistic bombs
civilians
shedding societies
skin

civil war
felt once more

no nuke to save the
souls cept maybe
the self

the jails over crowded
the hospitals fill to capacity
the schools empty

inside the bars
the old men and women
drink one last drink

while outside
the young me and women
beg for answers
food
shelter

yeah, that fucking house
burned

but nothing was learned.

Jun 21, 20124 notes

Jun 21, 20122 notes

#art #sketch #illustration #hallucinatory amazement

I mix stardust in my daily midnight drinks,
noting the aftertaste on my lips as I read
my clumsy poems aloud, the husky sound
awkwardly dancing along to jazz as sorrow
poisons my mind, an unavoidable neuropathy.

(Let’s count love until you come back to me)

You will be back to follow the trails of my missing
soul; you catch the scent of the sky morphing
into divided sections for unyielding, unique colors
and we call it a marvelous sunset because
conformity sits on thorns and spontaneity
oversees all natural phenomena, doesn’t it?
And I will be there, when the rain clouds make the
night sky crimson and the wind deliciously cool.

(Love is not abstract because heartbeats are heard)

Insanitary hospital beds are what heartbreaks must
feel like, inducing uneasiness that evolves into insecurity,
eventually into paranoia so love is just another cycle
that we wash our emotions in on full spin and I know
heartbeats exist not to measure the depth of love but
for our survival, but we are all romantics in our minds.

(Heart does nothing but keep you alive; it’s all brain and
hormones, memories and unclaimed emotions but that
sounds too logical, so I mix stardust in my drinks so that
maybe I could be someone worth being starstruck and you
could be drunk on my silly mannerisms and incoherent gestures)

Let’s count love until you come back to me, don’t let me go.

Jun 20, 2012111 notes

#Poetry #Poems #Writing #creative writing #Lit #Literature #Anarchy #Freedom #Spilled Ink

This is a draft, and is open for revisions. Trying to get a feel for how it is perceived - any comment is welcome. Thanks.

I.

In spring, the banks of Babylon
bloom, rife with the glassy affectations
of our destruction.

A single rose, in the crimson
mired, not the color of
desire, but red,…

Jun 20, 20121 note

I see the dot of a light running, running

(Do you see the beauty of the minuscule
inflating their lungs to jump into the unparalleled?)

above the eye-level, the electric current is visible
now and I cannot stop to marvel because it’s too
real, all twisted like outdated telephone cords

(I once saw the sun rise and set simultaneously
and it was the most surreal scene ever to happen
since the Big Bang but here we are, living the reality
fantasized, written in fictions and shown in motion pictures.)

and it was all decalcomania, how the clouds glistened
on forsaken asphalt with sun rays and I kept driving to
realize the mirage was just a trick of the mind, are my
tears the rain that angered the impenetrable mirror?

(I walked on the bottom curves of the Earth once and
wondered it this was really gravity or just a massive reflection
of someone walking along the top curves, viewing the universe
just the way it should be viewed; is this all decalcomania,
universe’s way of preserving its sanity?)

Is this all decalcomania,
universe’s way of preserving its omnipotent reality?

Jun 19, 201272 notes

#art #sketch #illustration #stretch your mind to reach a new high

Jun 19, 20123 notes

Late-Night Academia Blues

killtheoldgods:

For the better part of my life
I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit classrooms
in tiny rooms critiquing the hell
out of novels and poems until
the joy was fully seeped from them.
I want to be on the other side of that deal.
I’ll create characters and worlds and go on
adventures with them in my room, while
the rest of the students sit in semi-circles
and write term papers debating
what any of my nonsense means.

- C.N. Rife

Jun 19, 201216 notes

beauty of a mental confession.

(And I try sleeping wide awake sometimes, waiting
on the planes of air to unfold in the mental cage -

breathe in, in, in and then out, out, in,
the midnight rain always waits for the last train
to leave, last train of thoughts hanging over until
the biological clock strikes noon and it’s time again,

again to sleep wide awake until the stars burst into
fiery faces and morph into ashy coughs muffled into echoing

confessions of love, deceit and the rise of a third soul mate.)

Jun 18, 201254 notes