Dead Poets Society

Some people must have stayed behind at the tower of Babel after God split their tongues, after all, don’t all fathers have incoherently defiant sons?

You learn to be careful around your father when you view him through a bottle, when it distorts your vision of where he is as you try to pass him words or when he keeps placing it in between

You touch a rotten tooth one day and there’s a hole, and a canal, and rot further further down, and the rot starts being deeper down away from the tooth, deeper down within you as you realise it’s core is yours

Take a bite out of what bothers you sometimes; bite the sun if you are overwhelmingly hot and bite me if I have angered you in that heat

“Here, stand with me along this precipice’s edge, do you see the colour in my heart, do you see the built up blue that has so desperately determined to get me here”

I never settled when I entered a new home and climbed creaky stairs, I had no idea whether someone had been disturbed

Im of an older age now in any place except my home, where I am still 12, still scared, where to some I didn’t grow

Me and my sister always had a bunk bed; our retreat from when the living room sang with higher decibels than usual

I could always guess how people truly spoke to me as I had always known when my father spoke kindness or some lie

Quietness didn’t last long in my house, I was always on duty when a stair creaked differently

Do not ever move your eyes from someone’s gaze, observe, observe what’s missing from other eyes, what passions; observe who wants to live, observe who doesn’t

Some people are born aged, son, they carry their souls in a bag over a stick and wait to bury it, some bury it early and live as empty emptinesses confused by others with souls

Some people swim and forget what shore they swam from, they find safety at another before they swim again and drown towards another shore

People cry you rivers and expect you to drown in them; to forget to swim, they think you have never seen the currents of an angry body of water

“—Do not crumble at their feet in passion, like burning embers from the pillars of a home, do not catch aflame and match their rage, go gently away from raging man-things—”

A year of our life reminisced about on balconies and in sicilian streets; who else would I understand the world with, who else would accompany me to find places i want to call home

I followed her from here to there and loved her from much to most yet she twisted me from in love to bruised. She kissed my skin with her cruel-speaking lips, burned my photo of her with my matches and made me the arsonist