Ashe Vernon's Blog, page 144
September 28, 2015
"TO THE FRAT GUY AT THE POETRY READING
(This one’s for you.)
After about the fourth drop of the word..."
TO THE FRAT GUY AT THE POETRY READING
(This one’s for you.)
After about the fourth drop of the word “ballsack”
I’m starting to wonder if you’re really
writing about sex, or if this was just some
thinly veiled attempt to make yourself seem—
Edgy.
I mean, I’m all about sexy poetry. And,
to be fair, there aren’t a lot of sexy words
for scrotums. (There aren’t any, actually.)
But, halfway through and it feels less
like you’re trying to involve us in something
steamy and forbidden, and more like
you’re scanning the crowd to see who flinches.
Alright. You got me.
I just wasn’t that into your colorful synonyms
for assholes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shy about sex.
But there’s something unappealing about watching
a mop of dishwater blond steamroll his way
through a list of laughably bad euphemisms.
You win.
You made me uncomfortable.
You took a captive audience and dragged us,
kicking and screaming, through something
too sexually unappetizing to put
in a dime store novel. Damn, dude.
We get it.
You’re so progressive.
Talk about sex like you broke it and bought it—
god, I hope you don’t use any
of those words in bed: snuffling about
“love caves” to your poor, poor girlfriend.
Color me not impressed.
See, the difference between you and me
is I’m not trying to prove anything—
been writing porn since I was fourteen.
Congratulations, you’re late to the party.
Let me help you out a little:
The word you’re looking for is “cock”
and I’m going to stop you now, because
there is no such thing as a good metaphor
for a vaginal canal. And there are at least
a dozen body parts with no sexy synonyms, so
sometimes specificity is not your friend.
Just sayin’.
I don’t know who told you otherwise, but
your willingness to use the word “pussy”
in front of a deep east Texas audience
makes you neither trend-setter nor revolutionary.
You haven’t done anything that
cat-callers on the street didn’t do before you.
You just put it to a microphone.
The difference between me and you is
I don’t spit abuse and call it poetry.
I actually know how to talk to girls
without making meals out of them.
You know what, This poem could steal your girlfriend—
I’m sure she’s sick of listening to you, in bed.
More than that, I’m sure she’s sick of sinking
into her seat every time you take the stage:
ashamed to know you, completely humiliated.
The difference between you and me is
I don’t use the word “fuck” for shock value.
I don’t write just to see how many people
I can hurricane into.
If you’re gonna write porn
at least write good porn, dude.
Here.
I’ve got a list of better synonyms for you.
- TO THE FRAT GUY by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
i would absolutely be ok with kissing you. jsyk.
Yes, perfect, come here, kiss me
convolutedmetaphors:
latenightcornerstore:
I want to kiss every poet!!!
update on this post:...
I want to kiss every poet!!!
update on this post: we’re gonna kiss each other on wednesday
I want to kiss every poet!!!
I want to kiss every poet!!!
September 27, 2015
"I don’t write poems about him.
He loved me. That isn’t always a good thing.
The road to hell is..."
He loved me. That isn’t always a good thing.
The road to hell is paved with
hard opinions, sleight-of-hand manipulation,
and phone call, after phone call, after phone call,
after phone call. It wasn’t right–
being loved with a leash and a shock collar.
But not every sand trap looks like one, and some
people don’t know they’re bottomless pits,
and he had the kind of hands Rome was built on,
so I didn’t notice.
Because they weren’t throwing hits.
But he spun poison so thick
you’d swear it was honey. I found
a boy like a bad high; I lost days to that one.
Whole years of my life I still define
by the sound of his voice. So he loved me.
And some days that word still looks like
blackmail dressed up pretty.
Never trust the boy who says he’ll
kill himself when you leave him.
There aren’t bruises for that kind of violence–
no way to take pictures, to say
This is what he did to me.
There was a forest fire in his chest that I
would never have the water to put out.
So I held his hand and I burned with him.
I thought that’s what lovers were supposed to do.
Last year, I kissed a boy with the same name
and it felt like returning to the scene of a crime:
I was afraid to leave fingerprints. I was afraid
that he would find me–
jump from the throat of a boy whose hands
were nothing like his and demand to know
how I could ever be so heartless as
to abandon him.
He loved me.
That isn’t always a good thing.
I don’t write poems about him.”
-
BRUISES by Ashe Vernon
(via latenightcornerstore)
September 26, 2015
"Do you remember what it was like
to be sixteen years of unattended campfires?
Back when the heat..."
to be sixteen years of unattended campfires?
Back when the heat that poured from his mouth
felt like enough to keep the fire burning–
when you turned your throat into a chimney,
blew smoke into the mouths of
anyone willing to kiss you,
do you remember being a housefire?
Do you remember–
my god, do you remember
the days we stayed up till sunrise
like the moon couldn’t touch us
if we just turned our backs on it?
Or chasing the stars in your old pickup truck,
headed west?
You were married
before I understood
what all those nights
spent next to you
actually meant.”
- “BEST FRIENDS” DON’T WANT TO KISS EACH OTHER LIKE THIS by Ashe Vernon
(via latenightcornerstore)
"TO THE BOYS AFRAID OF DYING
I.
They said you had no right
to the softer parts inside your..."
I.
They said you had no right
to the softer parts inside your chest.
They said
you were better off without them.
They said
it made you weak.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
II.
Your papa taught you
pain
looks better in a clenched fist and
she comes at your body like a feast.
She picks you clean, then wants to know
why you are so empty.
She leaves.
She leaves.
III.
I cannot be the place you go to bury her.
IV
You will have to learn to be alone.
This is strength, but not in the way
your father taught it to you. No—
you have to learn and relearn softness
without hands smaller than your own
carrying it for you.
You will have to be brave.
Gentle
is nothing less
than revolutionary.
V.
You are more than the heartbreak
you didn’t know what to do with.
When you reach the cliff’s edge,
you will feel like jumping.
Remember:
it is courage,
not fear,
that makes you step back.”
- TO THE BOYS AFRAID OF DYING by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
September 25, 2015
"The sadness starts in my stomach—
too familiar to be nausea. No,
it feels like slow poison,..."
The sadness starts in my stomach—
too familiar to be nausea. No,
it feels like slow poison, like
decades of swallowing depression.
I know better than anyone else,
I have always been toxic to myself.
The apathy waterfalls down from my back,
into my legs, gets heavier and heavier,
until my feet are blocks of concrete and I
am settling into the brick and mortar:
a front row seat to my home’s foundations.
With a spot like this,
why would I ever want to leave?
Anxiety is an IV drip, too thick to go easy
into my veins. It’s always just
under the skin. It’s always
the worst kind of electricity.
But the love—
the love I have always carried in my teeth.
They say you have to love yourself
before you can love anyone else.
It’s not because you won’t know how to.
Or because you don’t deserve to.
It’s because love is not enough to un-hate yourself,
and no matter how much they feed you,
it will taste like a lie you force down with sugar.
You will look for the day it sours.
You will leave it in the heat and
curdle it yourself.
And you will blame them.
Depression is not the Big Bad Wolf.
He doesn’t knock at the door,
blow the house down.
The monsters under the bed aren’t half as scary
as the gaping nothing that opened
like a sinkhole just under my chest.
Depression has always been
the stomach ache that never quits,
the uninvited guest in my body.
Depression is like the feeling when
someone talks shit about your best friend,
but you’re too much of a coward
to defend them.
It’s like that.
Over and over again.
Some days are just bad days.
I don’t always do right
by the people around me.
I can’t even do right by myself, yet.
- ANATOMY OF A RELAPSE by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
"My sexuality comes with a label
that at least one of you
has never even heard.
It comes with shitty..."
My sexuality comes with a label
that at least one of you
has never even heard.
It comes with shitty Peter Pan jokes
and uncomfortable misunderstandings.
My sexuality comes with a helping
of skepticism I never asked for but
I would take all of that
over the way people
from my own community
treat it like a
trap.
There was a girl I used to kiss who
would to get drunk and
try to convince me
I was a lesbian.
She would ask pointed questions
about the men I’ve loved and
the men I’ve hated.
When I let slip that
the first time I slept with a woman
was something on the verge
of religious, she treated it
as evidence
in the case she was building against me.
Like I had to be proven wrong
in order to be deemed worthy.
On a first date, I have watched women
treat old lovers like horror stories, like
being left for a man was somehow so much worse
than being left for a woman. Like
infidelity wore a name tag and
only came in the shape of the ones
who “couldn’t pick a side.”
They all looked at me with these crooked grins.
They had no idea who they were talking to.
In a club, over the boom of the music,
she asks, "you’re a lesbian, right?“
and all I say is yes.
Because I want to dance with a beautiful girl,
because I don’t want to have to shout to explain,
because I don’t want the truth to be the wrong answer.
When she presses me against the brick and
kisses me senseless, I wonder
if she’d call me a liar
if we met in the light of day.
He says, “I don’t have a problem with gay people,
but bisexuals are just greedy.”
He says, “I don’t think bisexuality
really exists.” He says,
“You made out with a girl once, right?
Did you like it?”
She says, “I only date Gold Star Lesbians.
I don’t want to be anywhere a penis
has touched.”
She doesn’t seem to care how
fucking transphobic she sounds
or that this makes her no better
than the straight men who talk about women
in terms of “going where someone else has been”
like we are used strips of tarmac.
My sexuality gets talked about like it’s
a gateway drug you grow out of
on your way to being declared 100% Gay
or a calling card of the wayward little
straight girl looking for attention. Listen.
I have never kissed a woman for any other reason
than because I desperately wanted to
and if men looked at us
that was their business
not mine.
I am not here to be the butt of your punchline,
your queer college girlfriend, your science experiment,
the one you “turned gay” or “turned straight”–
my sexuality has nothing to do with you.
It is one of the few things I have
that truly belongs to me
and it’s disgusting that the people
who should know better
still treat it like a novelty.
- “PANSEXUALS” AND OTHER CREATURES OF QUEER MYTHOLOGY by Ashe Vernon
(via latenightcornerstore)
September 24, 2015
"It’s amazing the things we’ll do to a woman,
to sell a product.
We whittle women down
to fit on the..."
It’s amazing the things we’ll do to a woman,
to sell a product.
We whittle women down
to fit on the covers of magazines.
We lighten their skin and plump their lips,
Piece women together like mosaics and call it art.
If I learned anything from the media,
it’s that my body is wrong
and I’m probably not pleasing the man in my life.
I learned two wrongs don’t make a right,
but, apparently, three nos make a yes.
That it’s sweet and romantic to pester a girl
until she agrees to go out with you.
It’s no wonder so many boys view rejection
as negotiation,
when we teach them the key to true love
is bargaining past lack of consent
and kissing girls who do not want to be kissed—
So when boys turn touch into weapons,
girls are taught to expect it.
No, if I learned anything from the media,
it’s that my sexuality only exists on a man’s terms:
that I can be sexy on the covers of magazines,
but only if I’m ashamed of it.
Because everything always boils down to either
too much or not enough.
I must be available:
Shameful and repentant.
Because we seem to think that once a woman opens her legs,
she doesn’t get to close them.
Because if a woman likes sex
then she’ll like it with YOU.
And if she doesn’t,
she’s a whore, a bitch, and a liar:
All the things the television has been saying
since long before you ever touched her.
What I learned,
being a woman,
is that I made to be touched,
just not by myself.
Is that I am meant to be virginal,
but know how to get a guy off.
That if I am not absolutely perfect,
then I am not worthy of love,
and should be content for scraps
from love’s table.
What I learned, being a woman,
is that inevitably, the men in my life are going
to say
Something.
They will have all the right intentions.
They will have no idea what they’ve done.
And it will feel like true betrayal.
Because the stranger on the street
can scream as much filth at me as he wants,
and it will never hurt as bad
as the casual rape joke.
As the unthinking sexist pun
from the mouth of someone who I thought
knew better.
From the mouth of someone I love.
What I learned from the media
is there is no such thing as good enough.
That the wacky, loveable side-kick
always gets the beautiful girl, but
girls who look like me
don’t get anyone.
We are killing ourselves
over the photoshopped lies
they sell us in Cosmo.
I’m not even angry, anymore.
I’m exhausted.
Because they went and put a price tag
on all things beautiful, and now
they’re trying to sell us back
ourselves.
And the joke?
Is that they don’t even think we’re worth
the price of the ink it takes
to remake us.
And they’re not even subtle about it.
- WHAT MEDIA MAKES US by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
