Stephen Meads (via mylittlebookofquotes)

Doc Luben, “Bug Versus Door”. (via nyclocale)

14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes by Doc Luben

1. Don’t freak out. 

2. We’ve both known this has been coming for a long time. 

3. I’ve been staying awake at night wondering if I should tell you.

4. I bought the kind of crackers you like to eat, they are in the hall cupboard. 

5. Now that we have watched all the episodes of ‘True Blood’ I do not know what else to do next 

6. I always imagined this would happen without warning like suddenly on a ocean cliff side, but this is the kind of thing where waiting for the time to be right would just mean waiting forever. 

7. I’ve just been too afraid for too long 

8. I came home on Tuesday and found all of the chairs that I own stacked in a tower in the center of my kitchen. I don’t know how long they have been like that, but it could only be me that did it. its the kind of thing a ghost might do to prove to the living that he is still there. I am haunting my own apartment. 

9. My grandmother was still alive when I was 5 years old, and she asked me to check and see if the iron was hot enough yet, so I pressed my hand against it and it was red and screaming for hours. 25 years later, she would still sometimes apologize. In the middle of conversations, “I feel so bad about making you touch the iron,” she’d say as though it had just happened. I can not imagine how we forgive ourselves for all the things we didn’t say until it was too late. But how else do you tell if something is hot but to touch it? 

10. I keep imagining my furniture in your apartment. 

11. I wonder how many likes this would get on Facebook. 

12. My dad always used to tell the same joke, but I can’t remember the punchline. 

13. I was 8 years old and it took 3 weeks – three 8 year old weeks, imagine – to gather everything that I would need to be Batman: Rope, boomerangs, a Mardi Gras mask with beads cut off. I couldn’t find a cave near my house so I buried them all in a bundle under the ivy. For years after, I tried to find that spot again. The ivy grew too fast, I searched in so many spots, it seemed impossible that I had missed one, but I never found it. How can something be there, and then not be there? How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become? 

14. I never had the courage to buy bright green sheets. I wanted them but thought they were too brash even with no one but me to see them. I bought a set yesterday and put them on the bed. I knew that you would like them. 

Robyn Bateman // Portland Poetry Slam // Nov 13, 2011 // film by Jill Greenseth

“An Open Letter from Kermit the Frog to Jim Henson” by Julia Gaskill

I wrote this poem earlier this year and then teamed up with pencilinkproductions producer (and good friend) @alphiriel to make it into this video. It was featured over on ToughPigs for their Jim Henson memorial week. Enjoy.

Erin Schick - “Letter From Wonder Woman to Her Creator”

Poem of the Week

Doc Luben - “Puny Human”

Last Sunday’s performance of “Interplanetary Addict.”  For more videos, poems, and daily blog posts, check out www.nikkiburian.com!

The stuttering is the most honest part of me. It is the only thing that never lies. It is how I know I still have a voice.

Video of me performing “A Sensitive Dude’s Guide To Erotic Poetry” - courtesy of @docluben .

“in which the poet tries to apologize again” by Alex Dang!

I am sorry I tried calling you that one time when I was drunk off lonely and whiskey and Four Loko.

It’s just that your hands were so good at keeping me together. My body still sometimes collapses into the shape

of your mouth. I am such a soft, malleable thing, and it has taken me too long to realize that you are also this. More important,

that you are more than my memories. That you exist free and independent of my life. That my idea of you that crosses

my empty highway mind is not you. And with this, I am so sorry for all the nights I tried to split your heart open just so

I had a place to rest. I did not understand how you were no longer me anymore, how the you I had in me was a postcard

and not the city. Forgive the fury, the angry prayers tossed towards the dark of my 3AM ceiling that were meant for your neck.

You were asleep that night where we started to break, and my skin felt taut and sunburned, so red and wanting to scream, but Cassidy

told me that it makes sense why this was so frustrating. The rusting of four years should make me mad. It meant I cared. And I still do.

And I still get the urge to hollow my arms so you can fit better, you this new person who has grown and loved and spilled over into

a newer night. I forget so often that I can’t carry you like I once did, and that you don’t know how to hold me anymore.

Even now, I’m still apologizing.

————————————–

Alex Dang! called us from Portland, OR. More about Alex.

voicemailpoems.org // 1-910-703-POEM

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Repost from @frankensteinem

Reading poems and feeling feelings at the Portland Poetry Slam (at Portland Center Stage)

Me performing my poem “Even,” about the holidays and the raw, gaping wound of transphobic family. ‘Tis the season.