A Pretty Bad Poem

Violet Transgressions


While I draw within the lines in the confines of my mind, I sip from the chalice of creative malice and consider the callousness of me. I am a simpleton, a ditzy blonde with nothing left to lose, and while I consider this, I also consider you. You seem to me so full of life, insight and trite, but I know your tightly rife hindsight. You smoke with superiority and bottoms-up your individualism while I stand back and compete with witticism and petulance. I am a mood cloud and you are a false one but at least I rain creativity where you reign with insanity.

Conceivably, I pull these words from some recess left untouched, and yet somehow I make them rhyme.

Wringing forth the purple art from my gel-cap brain I stagger north in tripping arcs and leave marks on some Aurora Borealis of my transcendentalist culture. I am a beautiful butterfly that has no feel for algebra or hard work at all really and oh my, this soup's delicious. But still I tiptoe because for some reason it seems more effective. My Mona Lisa has yet to rouse herself from her hazy wonderings of republicans, democrats, and how the Lord giveth but still taketh away. I may be a sorry excuse of a poet, but at least I'm not the best. I see the rest in a soft limelight and though it makes me crave, I still smirk at your oblivious snobbery.

Conceivably, I feel unwanted and surround myself with fluttering negativities, and yet somehow I have the world thanking me for my coarse fingertips.

(Midnight was three minutes ago, but dusty twilight still stuffs my nostrils. As a recovering Ibuprofen addict, consider me relapsed.)

In the bear traps of my hometown, I start most sentences with a prepositional phrase and drive with my head out the window. To be a widow is to be severed, I think, and to be so tethered to sociocultural norms is so collectivist, don't you think? So rather than making like a tree, let's all be Socrates and shed some purple to those poor dwellers in the caves with nauseatingly fluorescent lights. Speaking of nausea, I know a little too much about internal infections and how they can kill if left untreated.

Garden of Eden

I had another strange dream.

There was a young, blonde girl there, and somehow I knew that she was Alice from Alice in Wonderland. We were in Wonderland already, and she was showing us around. Us being a young man and maybe me, if I was even there. She brought us to a closed gate that looked more like a wall.

"Do you know the password?" she asked the young man. "I think I might've forgotten."

He seemed puzzled as he scanned the blank wall with only a blue, horizontal line. "No, I don't know."

Alice looked back up to it and thought for a few moments. "Maybe it's The Green Tree, because I know there's a green tree in there somewhere." She picked up a paintbrush and painted the words 'the green tree' onto the wall with green paint that seemed to materialize from the brush itself.

"Now we have to create our own birds," she explained, moving over to the other side of the gate. The paint color in the brush changed based on what you wanted to paint, and she painted a red and orange bird with her small form atop it. "You're not going to be able to ride anything if you don't paint it on here first." With that, she handed the young man a brush. After a few moments of confusion, he too began to paint birds with little miniatures of himself riding them. They both laughed, and as they did, the gate broke apart and opened, and Alice took his hand and led him inside.

She took him to a red table and they sat across from each other. Behind Alice was a large tree. "This is the game. You have a dream of something and it comes true. For instance, I have a dream of a rain shower." Out of nowhere, rain fell onto the young man, despite his protests. "And you have to beat it," Alice continued, watching idly.

The young man looked completely confused, but then started beating away the raindrops somehow, and the rain eventually disappeared.

Alice grinned now. "Too easy. I have a dream of a place to play."

The tree all of a sudden opened up into a garden, and the two of them went inside. It right outside the tree's doorway, there was a smaller tree with bright green leaves and a red fruit hanging from one of the low branches. The two played games for a while before their time was up and they returned to the table outside of the tree.

"My turn?" the young man asked, clearly having fun with this. As she was about to warn him to be careful, he closed his eyes, leaned back, and spoke the words, "I have a dream of another dream, of another Wonderland, that's dark and mysterious."

"That's too much," Alice answered, but the tree opened up and a loud, shrieking, whirling wind came to pull them in, but before it could, I got a glimpse of the new Wonderland the boy had created. It was the same as the garden that Alice had created, but everything looked dead and sinister. The sky was dark red and the trees were black silhouettes against it. Black birds flew out of the thin branches. The small tree now had black branches with no leaves, and the red fruit still hung from a low branch, but now seemed evil rather than juicy.

But, then I woke up.