Ode on Manic Pixie Dream Girls
Posted by Lauren Yates | Filed under '11 Spring: We Real Cool, Poetry, Print
I.
I’ve always had a thing for filmmakers.
From the time I was little, even my dreams had credits as long as I fell asleep “properly.”
I’d cover my eyes with one hand, and slowly turn the knob of the dimmer with the other.
My mom never understood why.
Sometimes, she’d flip the switch on the wall to “help me out.”
And I’d scream, “No, Mom! The colors!”
Orbs of glowing colors appeared on the insides of my eyelids.
I formed them into shapes. Most often, Jesus.
Like that optical illusion where you stare at the four dots, then close your eyes and stare at something bright, then Jesus’ face appears.
Also, ghosts.
I knew they were evil because they spelled out ‘Booooo’ in Comic Sans.
With Helvetica, they might’ve stood a chance.
But with this as my nightly routine, I certainly never did.
So, I’m a little strange.
I don’t like drawing attention to myself,
but don’t mind telling secrets to 600 of my closest friends.
Like how I often woke up home alone when I was little.
I feared everyone went to heaven without me.
I still fear being left behind, but I’d rather be right than happy.
II.
It is always brooding males who understand this.
Introspective loners who view life through a lens and write how things could be.
I’ve always admired the minds of men brave enough to create stories.
The type of men who only know conversation as character development.
The type of men who fall in love with Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
Manic—the A-side of self-loathing.
Pixie—delicate, yet supernatural.
Dream—Altered consciousness has never felt so real.
Girl—The only explicit thing about her.
She’ll ease your pain, tell you to be spontaneous,
to frolic through Ikea, to change your life with mediocre indie pop.
Through her quirks, you’ll become well-adjusted.
You’ll filter your troubles through her like she’s a pair of rose-colored glasses,
which makes sense because she’s always been a spectacle.
You’ll claim you can see through her, unaware that reflection is her pastime.
And past times love shifting shapes.
She’s as long as everything and as widespread as goodness,
but still there’s little depth.
She is a fantasy, who assigns herself your peace of mind,
but no one cares about her story.
She is easy to miss.
III.
I am easy to miss.
Even on Broad Street in a gold “Shakespeare is my homeboy” T-shirt
and a neon coral sweater.
I never said I was nondescript,
Just that you’ll aim for me, but never quite get me.
I am easy to miss.
Because somewhere in your mind, the idea of me will complete you.
You’ve scripted me as your foil, written me as what you’re not
instead of what I am.
I am not your Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
I have struggles of my own, and it’s not my job to charm away your fears.
It’s funny that you think of me as a character, but refuse to acknowledge my flaws.
Right now, you’re too wrapped up in your own
to see I’m queuing up the credits from the director’s chair,
and I intend to fall asleep properly.
My Pen is Full
Posted by Simone Stolzoff | Filed under '11 Spring: We Real Cool, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Imagine all your friends on the dance floor.
All your friends.
Well this was my night—
all my friends.
All my white, jewish, sweat stained,
can-barely-jump-over-a-box-of-matzah
friends on the dance floor.
I imagine our future sons bar-mitzvahs—
us trying to clap to the beat
like bad sprinters trying to anticipate the gun,
always reacting a little too late—
but we were doing our thing.
A girl comes up to my friend saying “you look like you need someone to dance with,”
and with a I just ate a half hour ago look in his eyes he smiles,
“Nah I’m just dancing with my boys.”
That night we were dancing
like there were shot clocks on our ankles
and pop rocks in our socks.
I felt the same way about my moves
as I did about my hand jobs—
no girl in the world could do them better!
And we could care less that there less girls on the dancefloor
than at a no-shave-november convention
cuz fuck girls, we just wanted to dance!
So unike most my other nights
and all my other poems
this one was for the fellas.
And to the few ladies who’ve
I’ve had the pleasure of showing
my, well yano.
You prolly wish it was longer…
but if it grows at the same rate its grown for the last 10 years
I’m gonna die with a penis at least three feet long.
Now we’re back on the dancefloor
And CeeLo Green comes on
And even the most stubborn wallflower
starts dancing cuz that piano intro is happier
than golden arches for a big mac junkie.
More middle fingers infiltrate the air than when Sarah Palin visited San Francisco.
And all us on the dancefloor could care less about
the fact the sprinkler and the shopping cart stopped being cool about 10 years ago.
Becuase for all my life,
I’ve had the same 3 man wolfpack.
This Italian Jew, a Pizza Bagel if you will,
with guy who used to have me over for thanksgiving dinner on my right
and the guy that taught me how to masturbate on my left.
We danced until the morning
and we couldn’t be happier stumbling home to our parent’s houses
cause we had reached our full bro-tencial.
So at that cheesburgers and regret point in the late evening,
we decided right then and then that when we’re older we’ll get
tattoos across our shafts that read “my penis is beautiful.”
And hopefully I’ll get it when I’m hard,
so when I’m soft it’ll read “my pen is full.”
And that’s really all I need.
Cuz with a full pen
and a full heart
the girls might come,
but even if they don’t come around any more
I still got my boys on the dance floor!
Chaos
Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under '11 Spring: We Real Cool, Poetry, Show Poems
Tonight my thoughts are begging to be spilled.
I always sit on the balcony to write,
I watch the people below,
Just far enough away for me to stay invisible;
A small metal railing the only thing separating me from a six-story drop,
It’s the only place I feel safe.
Part of me wants to blame you,
But the other part knows it’s disrespectful to keep poking through the ashes
So I watch, content to keep the people a page-length distance away.
I still identify as a people person,
Even though I don’t like people much these days.
I trace the skyline with slender fingers just to feel like I own this sprawling chaos.
I’ve always loved chaos.
I want to wake up without remembering what you looked like in the morning,
But you’ve always had a coffee ground body and a way of marking everything I do,
Tonight, the truth sounds like discord
It echoes in my ear drums, and wells up behind my eyes.
I’ve got clumsy hands and shallow tear ducts;
I try to at least keep my fingers occupied, but they only settle down when
I let them remember how they felt on your skin.
I’d lend you my perspective,
But in the end you’d still see what you wanted to see.
I would draw you a diagram, but that wouldn’t make you walk back to me,
You never followed directions.
I woke up this morning with your taste on my tongue.
You had a mouth like a cherry blossom blooming three months too late,
We kissed like the sea and the sky,
our tongues were horizon lines,
you couldn’t tell where wet ended and heaven started,
we just knew for a few blessed moments that we held both between us.
But our love was nothing more than a sunset,
A cliché in the worst sort of way,
It didn’t last so long.
Our love was the second hand on a time bomb,
We bloomed in a field already slotted to become a parking lot.
You told me I was your hero,
So I tied myself to the train track with ropes fashioned from bed sheets,
I admit, I made a lousy martyr.
Tonight I tie-up my blankets like epilogues and stretch them from the balcony,
As if they could reach six-stories,
As if they could tie up our story,
But I never troubled myself with practicalities,
And these days, you don’t seem to trouble yourself with me,
so in a way, this tableaux feels like it’s meant to be.
There are two people below me, holding hands,
And I am fighting the urge to throw something at them.
I am fighting the urge to scream, “it’s not worth it,”
To scream, “you’ll remember this moment over the glasses of wine you’ll drink alone,”
I never wanted to be the jaded one.
I want to believe that attraction
is more than throwing your lonely in the direction of the nearest empty shell,
But I was once a block of marble waiting for my personal sculptor
To chip me into something beautiful.
One night I handed you a chisel and said, “I’m scared.”
You said, “me too.”
But you turned out to be a Picasso,
you carved me into a rambling abstraction and called it
“paradox”
The critics adore it,
but I look nothing like a masterpiece.
I sit on the balcony, and wonder how often you think of me.
I look into the windows to the evenings of strangers
and imagine how lovely it might be if we all just turned our lights off for a while.
The people scatter towards nowhere in particular,
and it reminds me of how we used to run in circles at 4 am, before we collapsed.
Then you’d let your fingers run in circles on my abdomen, and we’d laugh.
Chaos, us, and everything else have a lot in common, I guess.
I have always loved chaos,
from a distance.
good morning
Posted by Tiffany Kang | Filed under '11 Spring: We Real Cool, Poetry
I stare back at the girl in the mirror, watching her eyelids droop like frowns and the bags beneath them look like they’ve been holding a gaze for far too long. Time has vandalized her face with wrinkles, so she raises a white flag and says she’s ready to grow old.
She tells me that the world has always made her sleepy, that life is just one really long struggle to stay awake. And I tell her not to let it win, but all she does in response is yawn.
She says she wants to live in a house twirling on the axis of night, spin dizzy to the rhythm of turn-table dreams, and put the soundtrack on repeat so the sun could never squeeze in enough playing time to rise and shove her back to square one again.
And so she spends hours, ruthlessly scraping at the edges of her life with sleep, as if it’s some kind of sandpaper, trying to smooth out all the corners.
The upper right hand corner, where she can’t help but feel at home in his blind spot. The upper left hand corner, where her little brother dodges blows along in the ring while she pretends that he’s a good fighter. The bottom right hand corner where she found the road to revolution, only to realize that she was chasing her tail.
And the bottom left hand corner, where God fed his rat the last crumbs of her faith.
She connects the four corners into the frame of her mattress and collapses inside, convinced that sleep will know where all the pieces go, that it will plug in the holes between her indifference and her existence. She expects that by daybreak the stars will have formed a line pointing in the direction of the nearest exit.
I read her lips in the mirror as she mouths the words: If being jaded means that I’m aging, then I’ve been well on my way to dying ever since he left.
So yes, sometimes I fall asleep to fall off the face of the earth, thinking that gravity will turn on its head and lift my soul out of the debris. I strangle my troubles in dreams, shove their necks further into the mud. But try not to think of myself as a murderer. Because I’ve found that troubles never come up for air, but don’t run out of breath either. I think they’re trying to teach me how to breathe again.
So I’m just going to trust them. I’ll scream your name into a canyon until I can’t hear it echoing anymore. Then I’ll know it’s safe to come of limbo. I’ll grow my hair out again. Place my heart next to the fire so its teeth will stop chattering. Maybe I’ll even stay up late from now on.
Because I know that the only reason night crucifies herself, is so the days may come back to life. I will come back to life.
Carve me a new heartbeat from the flesh of my pain. It’ll beat so loud you’ll think I’m knocking at the door. But I closed your door a long time ago.
And now, like a refugee, all I want is to have something to look forward to again.
Tomorrow, the sun will fall to its knees and beg me to stare it in the face. I pray that I won’t be the first to look away.
Tags: tiffany kang, we real cool 2011
