Category: March 2020

By Lola Martinez

Twangy guitar breeds memories that aren’t mine
But I pretend that they are

A lonely thought
Does nothing
Until you paint it

I suppose it’s just easy to call this thought “you”
Even though it’s
Really nobody

Not even me

Level headedness forbids equivalence between thought

And feeling.

But really
What the hell is the difference?

Songwriting and poetry are my mediums toward understanding myself and the world around me. I throw up on a page and whatever I read back is what I’m meant to know, and to me, that’s magic. I have a YouTube channel (Lola Sings) that I post my original songs on, and I was really excited to bring this poem to the table because my poetry isn’t something that many see, unlike my music. This is a poem I wrote about art.

By Justin Sims

05/01/19, 12.33
i am bobo the clown.
my words are meticulously chosen,
never naturally occuring
for fear of the consequences of speaking the truth.

i am bobo the clown.
every semblance of what i am, what i have grown to be,
all stem from the deeply rooted trauma of my past.
i have been drained, my personality nothing but a happy-go-lucky facade,
tested and perfected after years and years
of preventing my deepest and darkest feelings from ever manifesting on my tongue.

i am bobo the clown.
the me that i choose to show the world
is a far cry from the me within,
the one that desperately fights for a voice,
the one that whimpers and begs to be heard;
the one that gets crushed oh so easily
by my ever present fear of being a social nuisance.

i am bobo the clown.
the phony smile, the fictitious sound of laughter,
those six words, “no, i’m okay, i’m just tired”,
decree the laws of the land
like some tyrant monarch,
while the peasants that are my true feelings
suffer the consequences of starvation,
understimulation, being forced to uphold
the will of the king.

i am bobo the clown.
my true feelings cease to retain any meaning,
for the emotions of others are held to a much higher standard than my own.
so long as they don’t see me cry,
so long as they don’t emit the dreaded, “are you okay?”,
so long as i am not pressed into confronting the true me,
i can go on living forever
as the comic relief,
the bumbling idiot,
the clown.