Tal Shafik

I’m almost certain that 99% of you ask yourselves anonymous questions and post the answers. Basically, you’re talking to yourselves, much like you do with your writing. 

I followed you because I wanted to read your poems, not an endless cycle of likes and comments on anonymous questions like a massive, empty circle jerk. 

We meet in glass
and someone
screams.

A mirror says
hello and we
nod.

We hunger, appetites
aligning in two
dimensions.

We stare into each
other’s eyes. We
die.

We will stare
until I break
again.

Someone screams
h e l l o
again.

Showering in acid rain—
steel wool scrub and boiling blood.

Sinning songs of silent screaming, 
unhinged urges, desperate dreaming.

via Typed Cards.

Trust me, I’m a poet.

mouth it exists
ball
ball it exists
ball mouth
ball mouth exists
ball exists
all is ball
all
ball
ball is all
ball ball ball exists
where ball
need want ball
where ball
B A L L  E X I S T S
      run
mouth ball 
all mouth ball
      run out
out exists
A L L  I S  O U T

There is nothing worse than a forced rhyme.

Clean and shiny coffee shop
replaced Diogenes’s barrel
and The Dog himself—
replaced by devil-headed hipsters

with expensive notebooks made to
look cheap else the words contained
would somehow fall from the page
and claim their just position

among crushed butts
or up on billboards next to
huge shampoo bottles
or doe-eyed douche bags.

Speak of screams
     too sudden
to suppress.

Locked in solitary sun beam
crawling across carpet
releasing photonic tears.  

Piano plays in background,
crescendo falling, flying
fingers typing fears.

She licks her finger, flips a page and cries;
She’s tasting thunder, gagging on the lies. 
She reads the words in rasps and bursts and tries
To dry the tears that mar the perfect prize.

Hold me and whisper:
purple daisies and
yellow rosebuds
over and over—

     (I want to feel
     flowers on my face)

—until I fall asleep.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

the phone is ringing and
     (Mother)
I read the same books
watch the same movies
listen to the same songs
eat the same food
I imagined I liked at one
point or another

the couch is stained and
     (Father)
the sink has been full
for nights—I decline
nude in the living room—
living in the room 
I will die in
is simpler

Riding on bikes
with boys would
be the title of the
book she’d write.

I open doors to
the ungraspable.

Safety is muddy boot prints
on a wet gravel road.

It always rains when
I think of loving you.

The room smelled of naked
concrete and fear.
A chair, no seat, a bucket,
mattress up against the
windowless wall, no blanket,
she stares at the ceiling,
imagines the sky above
a city no longer hers.
Closes her eyes 
in reply to his breath
writing threats
on her cheek and
the back of her neck. 

One of the bedrooms upstairs—
he could have it soundproofed
and do some work on the door.
The window would have to go. 

When he is bored
he masturbates to
things like a box
of fabric softener
or a wheelbarrow
and it feels right.