Wild is Beautiful
a found poem
The trees are throwing snowballs.
Isn’t that wild?
That’s one way to do it.
Snowdrops swoop down
like albino hawks
as I make my way to
the warmth of my secret lair.
Something is really off.
I hate it when people bitch
about inclement weather.
Each mind perceives
a different beauty.
Have you figured out how to make
happy little bluebirds?
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Ghost's Town
It’s been pretty quiet around here these past two weeks. I like it. It’s nice to be able to walk down the street and not have people throw me dirty looks or just ignore my existence altogether. Before, this place was a real hell hole for me, but now I see it in a whole new light. The stillness, the deadness is so wonderful, it’s liberating. This is my town now. I am at peace here.
Technically, I’m not alone. Everyone is still here. They’re sitting in their living rooms, lying in their beds, sitting on the toilet, slumped over the kitchen stove, sprawled out in the shower. My bug was pretty fast-acting, I’m happy to say. People didn’t get much chance to put aside what they were doing before they died. I’m not saying it was quick. They warned on the news that the first symptoms of my plague was that you smelled something funny, a sort of acidic, decaying odor. After the smell you have about a minute before your heart stops. During those sixty seconds, your eyes start leaking blood, your body twists into inhuman angles and shapes, you collapse to the floor uttering animalistic cries of pain. The stench of fear hovers around you like an aura. And then you die.
So no, I’m not exactly alone, there are people all around me. They’re just not very lively anymore. I’ve gone into a few of the houses, mostly the places where my tormentors live, to see what they were doing before they kicked it. I loved seeing the look of pure agony on their faces. I imagine it’s something similar to how I looked when they kicked me and threw things at me and pointed and laughed at me.
It hurts, doesn’t it?
Ghost's Town
It’s been pretty quiet around here these past two weeks. I like it. It’s nice to be able to walk down the street and not have people throw me dirty looks or just ignore my existence altogether. Before, this place was a real hell hole for me, but now I see it in a whole new light. The stillness, the deadness is so wonderful, it’s liberating. This is my town now. I am at peace here.
Technically, I’m not alone. Everyone is still here. They’re sitting in their living rooms, lying in their beds, sitting on the toilet, slumped over the kitchen stove, sprawled out in the shower. My bug was pretty fast-acting, I’m happy to say. People didn’t get much chance to put aside what they were doing before they died. I’m not saying it was quick. They warned on the news that the first symptoms of my plague was that you smelled something funny, a sort of acidic, decaying odor. After the smell you have about a minute before your heart stops. During those sixty seconds, your eyes start leaking blood, your body twists into inhuman angles and shapes, you collapse to the floor uttering animalistic cries of pain. The stench of fear hovers around you like an aura. And then you die.
So no, I’m not exactly alone, there are people all around me. They’re just not very lively anymore. I’ve gone into a few of the houses, mostly the places where my tormentors live, to see what they were doing before they kicked it. I loved seeing the look of pure agony on their faces. I imagine it’s something similar to how I looked when they kicked me and threw things at me and pointed and laughed at me.
It hurts, doesn’t it?
The trees are throwing snowballs.
It was a beautiful, early summer day and the kids were allowed to eat their lunches outside, although most of them were using their lunchtime as an extra half-hour of recess. Madelyn watched them running, screaming and playing from her splintery picnic bench. She was forced to stay in the cool shadows of the trees to protect her pure white skin. She felt a pang of jealousy as Richie the ginger kid raced by with a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. His skin was sensitive too, and what’s more, every inch of him was covered in freckles. But nobody picked on him. His daddy was the richest person they knew, which wasn’t saying much in this hick town in the middle of Nowhere, USA. He wasn’t exactly rich, he just had more money than everyone else.
They didn’t pick on Fat Frank, either, because he wasn’t just fat, he was fat and he was mean. The last person to pick on him ended up in the hospital. Frank had pushed him down and then sat on him. When the principal interrogated him, Frank swore that he simply tripped and landed on Peter, but everyone saw what really happened. The whole thing had been planned, the message had spread like wildfire that Fat Frank was gonna fuck Peter up after school, only people didn’t actually say “fuck” cause the teachers would have heard.
They don’t really pick on Pancake Pete for being flattened…if you ignore the petname.
There really were so many other people that the kids could choose from, but it was the most fun to pick on Madelyn, the freak. Nothing could top an albino. They went after her like a pack of wolves going after the slowest deer and the worst part was that an adult never stepped in to save her.
On this particular day, Madelyn’s homeroom teacher was leaning against the building as he watched Fat Frank waddle up to her picnic table, holding a wiffle ball and a bat. The teacher pulled out a pack of menthols, held one between his crusty lips, lit it, and blew out a cloud of smoke as Frank grinned, tossed the wiffle ball into the air and then whacked it as hard as he could with the bat in Madelyn’s direction. It hit her in the exact middle of her forehead and then plopped onto her lap.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Frank said sweetly. “I thought ghosts were transparent.”
Isn’t that wild?
I remember that day, it was the last day of middle school and the first day everyone started calling me Ghost. I knew it was just a small taste of what the summer had in store for me if I didn’t stay in my room for the next three months. It was bad enough that my skin was so sensitive, but I also couldn’t go outside in fear of having things thrown at me. It certainly wasn’t my first shitty summer. It’s hard being an albino in a small town. There are so many overweight hillbillies with missing teeth and alcohol problems and yet I was the outcast.
Well, they don’t pick on me anymore. I made sure of it. You might think it was drastic what I did to everyone. I didn’t really mean for my bug to get out as far as it did. I really wanted to just dispose of those people who hurt me for so many years, maybe poison the water supply somehow or sneak into the supermarket and inject all the food with the virus. But somehow, it escaped from my basement laboratory. I honestly didn’t mean to kill everybody, but I certainly don’t regret it. After that hell of middle school came the hell of high school and I figured the real world after high school wasn’t going to be any more pleasant. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I did what I did anyway. People are so close-minded about things they don’t understand, even outside of Podunk little towns.
I definitely could have contacted the government or the army and given them the antidote. It’s the reason why I’m still alive. I created it before I started developing my plague. I learned from one of my favorite scientists of all time, Madame Curie, who was killed by her own discovery. How careless! I knew I needed to protect myself. Wouldn’t that have been awful if I’d made my wonderful discovery but didn’t live to see it wreak its glorious havoc?
That’s one way to do it.
Madelyn was always good at Science, she was the only girl in her class to not fail and the only person to get an A for the year, but during her freshman year of high school she discovered that she was especially good at Chemistry. She remembered her grandmother giving her a chemistry set for her tenth birthday but it was so lame, they weren’t even real chemicals. They were just plastic test tubes full of water with different food dyes mixed in. She had tossed the kit in the trash and gone to check out chemistry books from the library. She read about chemicals and molecules and atoms and all that stuff and couldn’t wait to experiment in school. But they didn’t trust the young kids with dangerous substances so unfortunately she had to wait four long years before her first Chemistry class.
There were two problems with the class, though. First, Madelyn’s lab partner was Samantha Gerber, that stupid cheerleader bitch who cheated off of her during tests and tripped her up in gym class. The second problem was that this was Mr. Hansen’s first year teaching chemistry. He had quit his job teaching younger kids and decided to try his hand with older, more mature kids. This was a problem because Madelyn knew that he would assign simple experiments that even a complete moron could do so he wouldn’t lose his job if an accident happened. Madelyn had to get rid of these problems, Chemistry was the only part of her day that she looked forward to. It had to be perfect.
On the second month of class, Mr. Hansen gave the good news that they would finally be working with actual substances. He gave out instruction sheets with safety tips and instructions on how to do the simple experiment for the day. While Sam sat at the desk and filed her pink nails and smacked her gum, Madelyn went to the back of the room where the safety equipment and chemicals were. She grabbed everything that was listed on the sheet and one thing that wasn’t, and then headed back to her workspace.
The rest of the class was uneventful, except when Samantha somehow managed to inhale a combination of ammonia and bleach. When the police investigated later, Madelyn swore that she only used the chemicals that Mr. Hansen had given them. When they asked her suspiciously why nobody else had created the toxic gas, Madelyn explained about how she heard that Sam had cornered Mr. Hansen in the teacher’s lounge a few days before and Madelyn suggested that maybe Hansen was afraid someone would find out. Maybe he wanted to shut her up.
That never happened, of course, but Samantha really was a moron and this was the perfect opportunity to pay Mr. Hansen back for letting Fat Frank beat her up with a wiffle ball.
Snowdrops swoop down like albino hawks as I make my way to the warmth of my secret lair.
I remember walking home from school one day in the middle of winter. The snow was falling so thick that I could barely see two feet in front of me. The silence of the flakes as they fell to the ground was so calming. The thickness of the storm soundproofed the world and I felt like I had been wrapped in a cocoon of cold, white peace. I was wearing a white parka and white snow pants, white gloves and white skin. I blended in with my surroundings. Nobody could see me. I really was a ghost. I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the sidewalk to avoid stares of disgust, I didn’t have to worry about standing out in a crowd. I really liked this world in which I blended in and everyone else was wrong. I didn’t go straight home that day, there was no hurry, no one to avoid. Everyone else had gotten rides from their loving parents, so the whole town was mine. It was quiet and empty and mine.
But then a snow plow came rumbling by and brought me back to reality. I was pinned under an avalanche for a good five minutes. As I dug myself out, I thought about how nice it would be to live in a town with no people. I had for just a few hours as I walked through the storm, but then the world came rushing back in a pile of dirty snow. If I could get rid of these stupid fucking people, I could have my ghost town.
But how to do it?
Something is really off.
Madelyn only realized that her plague had escaped from the lab when she came home one day and found her father lying face-forward halfway up the basement stairs. It wasn’t the first time she’d found him passed out in an awkward place and position. But this time, his arms and legs were at really strange angles and there was an over exaggerated, comical look of confusion and pain on his face. At least, she thought it was funny until she fully realized the seriousness of the situation. She stepped over her father’s body and saw the damage. He had gone down to her lab stinking drunk-- she could smell it on him, a cloud of alcohol and stale farts-- and he had stumbled around and smashed up all of Madelyn’s experiments…and let loose the plague she had created before she’d had the chance to really study the effects of it.
She was grateful that she had decided to carry around the antidote at all times. She’d seen enough horror movies to know that no matter how much you planned something out, it never turned out that way.
I hate it when people bitch about inclement weather.
I always hated how my parents complained that I was different from everyone else. It’s their fault that I exist! But they’ve never taken responsibility for anything in their lives so why should I be an exception? A mother is supposed to look at her child and tell her that she’s beautiful. My mother glanced up at me from her beauty products and warned me not to go too near the neighbor kids, they might get scared. I was never really sure if my father knew that I existed. He was always in his own fantasy world where booze and porno magazines were god. To this day, I hate the smell of alcohol, it literally makes me sick. I wish I could destroy all the alcohol in the world, but there’s no way to do that, not without burning the whole town down.
You would think that a person would get used to being scrutinized and feared, but it never got old. The worst part of all was definitely my parent’s revulsion. That’s why I’m glad they were the first to go.
Each mind perceives a different beauty
Nobody understood her. Nobody tried to understand her. And after a while, she stopped trying to understand them. The Disney movies told her that someday, her prince would come. Somebody would look at her pale skin and find it fascinating in a good way, not in a bug-under-a-microscope way. They would see that she wasn’t a cold, unfeeling person, she was just giving back what she received. She was not a murderer, she just wanted to be left alone.
Have you figured out how to make happy little bluebirds?
Of course, there are survivors. Humans are like cockroaches. No matter how many times you stamp on their heads, they still seem to get up and crawl away and make more hideous babies. But I’m not worried about the survivors. They were able to escape death, but they didn’t escape the side effects of my plague. The ones that bother to move at all have to wriggle around in the dirt on their bellies because their limbs have been rendered useless, as have their brains and their eyes. Blind, stupid, pitiful creatures. I don’t see much difference from before.
It’s only a matter of time before the whole world is mine. My bug is fast, it just needs some time to get over the ocean and travel the world.
I think I’ll do that, too. Travel. I feel that I’ve seen everything this town has to offer me. I don’t have to hang my head in shame anymore. I can finally see what has always been here, the trees, the grass, the animals, the buildings, the parks. They just never let me see it. But now I can and I will.
The world is mine.
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Vulnerable
Tell me what you know
with those perfect clear blue eyes.
You’re vulnerable.
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Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands
as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?