Squids For Sale

There’s a particular kind of American poetry—raw, cynical, sharply funny—that emerges from wrestling with broken institutions. As someone who spent a week wrangling with a malfunctioning pharmacy line (result: a single bottle of cough syrup and a dozen bruised nerves), this poem hit close to home. It’s a frank, darkly comic letter to a doctor at the Detroit VA, exposing the absurdities and heartbreaks of seeking help in a system stretched to (and sometimes past) its limits. What follows is the poem in full, followed by an unapologetically subjective, schizoanalytic riff—because sometimes the best diagnosis is to tear up the form itself. Chaos, Absurdity, and the Broken Healthcare Machine The following poem, written as a secure message to a VA Detroit Health Care provider, captures the raw frustration and absurdity experienced by many veterans navigating the labyrinth of Veterans Affairs. The s...

There’s a stretch of time—a few years back—where waking up felt like being punched by yesterday. The mind wouldn’t quit rerunning losses, failures, the sharp betrayals. Then I read a poem that didn’t beg for neat closure or any bright moral, but instead offered a raw, pulsing memory, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it really means to carry trauma that refuses to fade. That poem is ‘The Luxury of Forgetting.’ Before picking at theory or wrapping things in academic plastic, maybe it’s better to just step into the poem, get our hands dirty with someone else’s memory, and let the themes claw at our own experience. Here’s the poem, in full, before any interpretation morphs it into something else. Presenting the Wound: The Poem’s Relentless Memory Memory is not a gentle visitor in trauma poetry—it is a relentless force, returning again and again, refusing to let the wound close. In “The Luxu...

There’s a particular kind of American poetry—raw, cynical, sharply funny—that emerges from wrestling with broken institutions. As someone who spent a week wrangling with a malfunctioning pharmacy line (result: a single bottle of cough syrup and a dozen bruised nerves), this poem hit close to home. It’s a frank, darkly comic letter to a doctor at the Detroit VA, exposing the absurdities and heartbreaks of seeking help in a system stretched to (and sometimes past) its limits. What follows is the poem in full, followed by an unapologetically subjective, schizoanalytic riff—because sometimes the best diagnosis is to tear up the form itself. Chaos, Absurdity, and the Broken Healthcare Machine The following poem, written as a secure message to a VA Detroit Health Care provider, captures the raw frustration and absurdity experienced by many veterans navigating the labyrinth of Veterans Affairs. The s...

What if, just for a second, we lit a match to all our screens, Kindles, and tabloid newsfeeds, and entertained the fantasy of deleting the internet? It’s not every day someone suggests burning our digital lifelines, but that’s exactly what this razor-edged poem does — stirring memories of rotary fans, MTV anxiety, and dot matrix printers. Before you jump to defend your favorite meme account, let’s step into the satirical melee, where cultural icons clash with philosophical heavyweights and laughter masks a glint of existential uncertainty. Time to meet the poem that throws down the gauntlet, and see what happens when we schizoanalyze its delirious terrain. Confronting the Digital Specter Contemporary poetry themes in 2025 have become inseparable from the digital world’s relentless churn. The poem below, “Delete the Internet,” launches readers straight into a landscape of digital overload, anti...

Sometimes a poem grabs you by the throat at a coffee shop (or, more precisely, while doomscrolling on your phone, mid-insomnia). That’s how "Madam Madness" first hit—a sudden, pulse-quickening swirl of rage, trauma, shame, and the sticky aftermath of resentment. This isn’t a poem to soothe the spirit; it’s one to provoke, unsettle, and leave you with more questions than answers. Let’s tumble headlong into its fire. Themes of Madness, Rage, and Symbolic Violence The poem "Madam Madness" erupts from the first line with a confession of hate that feels both alien and internal, setting the tone for a journey through themes of madness, rage, and symbolic violence. The speaker is thrust into a world where anger is not chosen but inherited, where each morning is a ritual of violence and existential exhaustion. The poem’s language is raw and direct, refusing comfort or sentimentality. Instead, it drags the reader through a lands...

Alarm clock blink—4:13 a.m. No code, just the hum. The world stirs under dreams: my pen itches. Today’s rules are a lie, scribbles on a prison wall. In the mirror, my old collage face splits into a mosaic: cartoon eyes, petals, stick-figures fly through my hair. I chase the primal scream, diarist’s howl. There are no instructions—only truths between breaths. Shatter the Syntax: The Diary Writes Back I tried to draw a tree. My hand twitched, the brush slipped, and what landed on the page was a burst—green, yellow, a wild splash, and then, the coffee cup tipped. A brown comet, accidental, crashed through the foliage. Each mark a new wordless sentence. The tree vanished, replaced by a scream of color, a memory of roots. This is how journaling techniques become sabotage, how creative journaling refuses to obey. The code itself is a lie, a prison of meaning. Encode, decode...

At 3:33 AM, the lamp flickers, and I announce to nobody: my claim on his unbound energy is absolute. Outside, even the wind dreams of becoming lightning, but my coffee turns itself into gravel instead. Isn't it always this way? Every twitch in the mental machinery brings a new, pointless prophecy. I caught myself talking to the wallpaper, which blinked and replied. In the split-second, the concepts oozed out, stubborn as brown toothpaste. Interludes with the Body Without Organs: Finding Gravel in Coffee Today, the coffee arrives not as liquid clarity, but as a cup of gravel. The mug, a vessel for failed alchemy, promises warmth and delivers only a mouthful of hard fragments—each sip a crunch, a reminder that the body without organs resists definition. I chew. I swallow. I become the machine that digests stones, not dreams. The tongue protests, but the teeth are complici...