SNWK: [Working Title]

When I greet you at the top of the stairs
with an unbuttoned button-down shirt
draped over my shoulders,
I swear
the look on your face
makes me feel like I'm wearing
a prom dress,
hair done up on top of my head
instead of tangled down my back;
makeup fresh on my face
instead of smudged under my eyes

You smile at me
like you have been
waiting for me to show up at the top
of this
staircase
for your entire life.

You smile at me
like you have spent years
just wanting to hold me tight,
checking your watch
every once in a while,
wondering
if I would ever show up.

And I did,
just a decade or two later
than expected.
I would apologize for being late,
but I know you would
slap me on the hand
if I did, say
"There's no reason to apologize."
and I wouldn't blame you.
Because although part of me
wishes I had gotten on the train
to this moment
sooner,
the rest of me knows
you would tell me
our pasts are
what brought us here, and
without them,
this moment
wouldn't have happened.

We all have our scars,
and we wouldn't be who we are now
without ours.
We wouldn't have sat in a diner
for four hours,
then moved to a coffee shop
for two more
if we didn't both love Andrea Gibson,
if we didn't both know
what it means to still be living.

You have a
labyrinth of doors
in your mind, love, and
I want to open them all
with the kind of hands
you'd use to turn the pages
of a hundred-year-old book
and tiptoe through the rooms
hidden behind your reserves
to see what's there.

I promise
I'll be careful.
You just have to trust me
not to break  you,
to take every kiss you give me
and hold it close,
and never forget
the look you gave me
that morning on the staircase.

-SNWK

Andrea Gibson: Trellis

Here's a secret guys: I wouldn't know what happy was if it walked up and slapped me on the ass. I don't even know what happy is supposed to look like, or what it makes it. I've spent 24 years seeking happy and so far, I haven't found it. I've sought it in the country, in the city, in a bed, in a kayak, in a pool, in an engine, in a blue sky, in the rain and in the bottom of a bottle. I still haven't found it, no matter where I look. I'm a believer in very few things, and one of them is that some of us can't be happy. At an early age, I developed abandonment issues because I never had a pet that stayed, because my sister was my best friend until she moved out and I never saw her again at the ripe age of 6. I spent too much time asking why; I still do. I don't understand anything, so I spend too much time thinking about things that I can't answer, ergo, I try my best not to think at all. I do my best to just duck my head and let people pretend that I'm happy, that I'm smiling for real, that there isn't a tattoo on top of the scars to remind me that we can't all be everything we're supposed to be; and then modify that to be that some of us just aren't. We all have scars, but how we cope is much different. I'm sitting at a keyboard, waiting on a call back, on a text, on anything tonight. At this point, I don't even know what it is I'm waiting for. I'm just waiting. I can't believe, if you'd have asked me in 2008, that my purpose in life would be to wake up and go to work 9 days out of 14. That I would know 6 people in a city and be alone more often than I'm with people. It feels so empty. I wish I could fill it with god, with yoga, with running, with people, with drugs or with sunshine. It isn't so. It just remains a void with no end. 

Trellis.
There is a reason my body creaks like a closing casket every time I fuck with the lights left on. It is the same reason my friend sets fire to photographs of birds and follows the smoke with pleading eyes. We've both had years when the Phoenix didn’t rise, when we slept in beds of cindered feathers and held hollow ashen beaks the way the other kids hold ice cream cones. I suck the bones of a songbird’s rotting wings and you think your pills are going to fix me, doctor? You think I’m going to chase this down with water? The shame as loud as his next girl’s nightmares. I tied my tongue like a ribbon in my baby sister’s hair, like a bow around a gift I gave to my mother and father and my silence equaled every Christmas morning we were still happy and grateful, but my silence was also his next girl’s eyes, fallen like timber when no one chose to hear her roots ripped up, her ground eroding to the din of an old man’s zipper. 20 years later I wake in damp sheets, my body trembling to the ghost of her voice cracking like a frozen lake and I don’t even know her name. I never saw her face. Only heard the rumor that he moved on to the hemorrhage of another perfect thing, And now here I sing through cinder, through microphones raised like white flags in war zones, through poems dug from my throat like fishing hooks from pier. I look back at my voice lowered to half mast, how he must have stood there with his dirty hand on his dirty heart laughing like a broken levy as his next girl woke with body bags beneath her eyes and enough shame in her gut to give the hurricane her own name. If I could see her face, if I could face the eye of her storm, how would I ever tell her that I speak for a living? Would I offer my own wounds as condolence? Would I say his claws carved me animal? Would I say at 14 years old I threw my bloody fist into my boyfriends face ‘til his eye swelled shut and his tears turned crimson and his jaw cracked, ‘til I was finally convinced his hands were not every man’s hands? Would I tell her I have stood beneath street lamps waiting for the swarming flies to identify my body as carcass, to swallow every cell of salt and leave nothing behind but the trellis of my untouched bones? I remember the fault line in the corners of his eyes, the way he shook hands with my father, the look on his face beneath the swollen sun, even his shadow looked guilty. The concrete made crime scene by his touch. Would I tell her this? Would I ask if she has ever outlined her own body in chalk? Is there yellow tape in your top dresser drawer for the night when your true love’s kiss is an anthem to a dead country, and you find yourself with rope burns around your neck, begging the bodies of stranger to not respect you in the morning? In the morning I shovel my blood from the white snow. I wipe my frantic breath from the window and I bind my breasts so that something will hold my breath so tight not even the air in my lungs could be identified as woman. Woman are you a carbon copy of myself? Is there a boy inside you painting yourself with the cells of charcoaled feathers? So you will never again glow in the dark the way girls do? Woman if I knew your name, if I could face the eye of your storm in the warning locked in my voice box that never came would I tell you all of this and after that would I find the nerve to admit that even if I could I wouldn't take my silence back? My father owned a gun. He would have blown that man apart. My mother owned a mother’s heart. Everything would have broken, everything but you.

Ra Ra Riot: Keep It Quiet (Bear)

Ra Ra Riot is an indie rock band hailing from Syracuse, New York The band, which formed in 2006, consists of Wes Miles (vocals, keyboards), Milo Bonacci (guitar), Matthieu Santos (bass), Rebecca Zeller (violin) and Gabriel Duquette (drums). The band’s original drummer, John Pike, died in Fairhaven, Massachusetts on June 3, 2007, drowning in Buzzard's Bay shortly after a show in Providence, Rhode Island. The band continued on and released their debut full length album The Rhumb Line in 2008. The band released their second full-length album, The Orchard, on August 24th, 2010. In February 2012, cellist and keyboardist Alexandra Lawn left the band.

Bear in Heaven: Dust Cloud

Bear in Heaven is a Brooklyn-based rock band formed by Mr. Jon Philpot. The sound of the band incorporates elements from psychedelic music, electronic music and krautrock, of which Jon Philpot has previously released music as part of the duo Presocratics, in collaboration with guitarist and composer Need Thomas Windham. Presocratics released two albums on the record label Table of the Elements in 2001; both were produced by Philpot. The first Bear in Heaven release (Tunes Nextdoor to Songs, Eastern Developments 2003) was an EP of solo recordings by Philpot, recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, with guest musicians performing on various instruments. Shortly after the release of Tunes Nextdoor to Songs, Philpot moved to Brooklyn, New York and joined with guitarist Adam Wills, keyboardist/guitarist Sadek Bazaraa (a graphic designer with Brooklyn design collective GH avisualagency), guitarist David Daniell (of San Agustin), and bassist James Elliott (Ateleia, School of Seven Bells). Eventually drummer Joe Stickney (drummer with Paul Duncan, Rhys Chatham’s Essentialist project, and current touring drummer with Panthers) was added to the lineup. Daniell left Bear in Heaven in 2005 to focus on his solo project. Red Bloom of the Boom, Bear in Heaven’s first full-length album with the full band, was released in 2007 by the Hometapes record label.

"I want to kiss your mouth again
and fill up everything I can
I want to blow you up and let you out
I'll show you how"

La Femme: It's Time to Wake Up

French smooth/lead/tropical/surf/cold wave band from Paris.They released an eponymous EP soon followed by the group's first album, “Psycho Tropical Berlin”, receiving raving reviews.

5 Seconds Of Summer: The Only Reason

I heard this song and thought +Hanna Demirjian would rather enjoy it, with her love for punk and search for Ocean Avenue.

 5 Seconds Of Summer are a 4-piece  band formed in 2011 in the land down under, consisting of members Luke Hemmings (lead vocals, guitar), Michael Clifford (guitar, vocals), Calum Hood (bass guitar, vocals), and Ashton Irwin (drums, vocals) Signed to Capitol Records, they were enabled to start their own sub-label ‘Hi Or Hey Records’ in 2014. Their second single, ‘She Looks So Perfect ’ was released on 23 February 2014 with an album to follow shortly after.

Ben Howard: Only Love

 I've written about Ben Howard before, and I really  like to show what people I've "discovered" have done! I heard this on the radio (gasp) one evening as I was driving from somewhere to somewhere else.

"Darling you're with me,
always around me.
Only love, only love.
Darling I feel you, under my body.
Only love, only love."