Garth is a musician, a poet, a writer, and a loser. He is currently in his senior year of High School, and will go on to study Neuro and Cognitive Sciences at The University of Arizona. He has been writing poetry for the last year, and is also heavily involved with playing, writing and performing music.

The Life Store

So, I was walking down to the life store,
Musta been, what, 3 or 4 years ago,
Dejected, my head was down in the dirt,
In my arms was a box full of me.
Of hopes and lies and fears and dreams;
I grabbed everything I could get my hands on,
Stuffed it in, Taped it shut,
Slapped down a sticker with “This side up” on top,
And kicked it down the stairs.
Clunk.         Clunk.         Clunk.
As it hit the steps,
It pulled the ripcord on my heart,
And with a yawn, it came on,
A sputtering two-stroke motor,
Stuck in first. Hate.
Hate you, Hate her, Hate this, Hate that,
The government, The world, The pope, Myself.
Hatred.

When the box hit the ground,
I slid down the banisters,
And, right before I got to the end,
I jumped, wanting to fly,
But instead I hit the ground and cried.

After an hour or two,
Maybe a week,
I got up, weak to the knees,
And bleeding and shaken and god please,
I needed something to work out for once.
So I picked up the box,
And went to the store.

When I walked in, a little bell on the door went,
“ting-a-ling”
I frowned and looked around,
Afraid that someone I knew would see me there.
I placed the box on the counter,
Looked at the clerk and said:
“Gimme everything you got.”
He opened the box, Looked inside,
His eyes went wide and he leaned back and sighed and said:
“You got it all already here.
A brain, bleeding fear,
A heart, torn a part,
A pair of kidneys, screaming for love.”
I shrugged.
“Then build me a castle.”
And he did.

It touched the sky, with towers and steeples,
Teeming with dancers and artists and peoples,
Flags fluttering facetiously,
Freaks performing freakishly,
They came from miles away,
To see the gory success story,
Of my former glory, stacked up in
17 stories and an aviary.

But, yesterday, it collapsed,
The walls came down,
The bricks and the building littered the ground,
And all around were little bits of my broken heart.
Now, in pieces, finally freed,
My heart gave a start and upshifted,
Into second.
And all of the hate and the fear disappeared.
And I turned to love instead.
I love the dirt,
I love the pieces of my castle,
I love the pain and the people I hurt,
But most of all,
I love you.

So I picked up the box,
From so many years ago,
And walked down to the life store.
The bell on the door went “ting-a-ling”
When I walked in,
But I didn’t give a damn
What anyone else thought anymore.

I slammed the box on the counter,
Stared the clerk right in the eye,
And said,
“Gimme all you got.”
He opened the box, his eyes got wide,
He leaned back and sighed and said:
“This is an empty box.”
And I laughed and said:
“Now that’s more like it”

 

Aphasia

I have a love-hate relationship with words.
They sometimes flow off the roof of my mouth,
A loquacious process of verbal synthesis,
Strong, proud, loud, above the crowd,
Motivating, Scintillating, Awe-creating.
But oftener, they trip and stumble,
Syllables set to tumble-dry,
I mumble and lose my head.

I want to tell you how radiantly
The sun shines out of your eyes,
How incredibly beautiful you are.
I want to sing you the songs
Of ten thousand generations,
A veneration of you,
A mitigation of all they told you was true
About how much better you should be.
But you’re already perfect to me.

Instead, my letters change places,
I somehow say faces instead of spaces,
I pause when I think,
And I think a lot,
But all the things I’m thinking can’t quite seem
To come out right.
So I’m left with dust.
It clogs up my gums, sticks to its guns,
And rusts my ironclad thoughts.

The words get stuck on the tip of my tongue,
So I cut it off for you, and turn it into
A pen.
And all of the things that I couldn’t say
Flow freely from the ink of the point of my
Trusty Montblanc Tongue.
I slice my arms open, and let them
Bleed into the inkwell, in hopes that
My blood will leave a better impression of my feelings
Than my words can even dream of.
I dip my hands in ink
And smear them across the page,
And I pray that maybe somehow
I can leave my inky little fingerprints
Somewhere on your heart.

So when I say “I love you”
Know that it is all I have,
That I will scream it until it
Rings in your ears, Off the walls, and
Back into your soul,
But I mean so much more than that.
The very words that won your love
Can’t adequately express how much I love you back.

I have a love-hate relationship with words.
We usually get along just fine,
But sometimes I have to sleep on the couch.
I need them more than anything though,
Because without them, I wouldn’t have you.
So when I say that you life up my light,
You know what I really mean.