Lines I Have Taken Out of Better Poems, or, The Snark Graveyard

Because I have a terrible habit of ending first drafts with needlessly definitive or smartass couplets, I have transmuted a selection of those lines into a pastiche in the style of the early 2010s slam poetry that got me into it all.

Maybe drills don't exist.

Instead,
Time and time again,
Miss Manners tells me--
"Don't talk with your mouth full;
Always start with a thesis statement."

If you cannot make your own,
Phoning it in is fine.

I did not want
To write today
And Yet.
May be good at math,
But I've always been bad
With numbers.

There's an alchemy to wine,
An unpredictable spirit--
Two kinds, actually.
Two streams--

The correct answer
It turns out
Is yes.

Because Daniel was already taken.
Kyle still had a vacancy.
That is to say, the things a body can't absorb
Won't let me rest,
Settle into the crook of my legs,
And pretend
It will be okay.

When it finally punctures my lung
I say things that are true
And mean them kindly.

A cloacal ear canal.
Made of amber memories.
The distance of time has leeched all the color out
I imagine him,
A single raindrop tear
Falling from the headlight,
Driving himself off
Into the sunset
On the beautiful mountain roads
Between here
And Baltimore.

People ask me, sometimes,
Why I left the church.
I'm never sure how to answer.
Because it's not the question, so much--
How long can I live off of that before
I'm an empty shell that's never been touched?
The April showers end
Every year. Will they wash too much of you away
First?
Will you cry out to stop
Your own extinction?

I would like, for just once in my life,
To be merely whelmed.