The past tells me I won’t learn from it

Hooked

• We complicate
• In savage glee
• Casting many 
• Lines into 
• Lifeless waters
• Hooking each 
• Other’s hooks and
• Pulling mad to
• Never have the 
• Tension reveal itself 
• As the tangle of
• Our wild dreams
• Of darling desperation 
•  

Spilled Milk 

• I spilled milk
• just to see
• if I would cry
• but instead I
• watched childhood
• pool on the floor
• and poured a 
• stiff glass 
• of death with
• a splash of 
• sweet indifference 

Hosts

• The past tells me
• I won’t learn from it anyways.
• Bad decisions like gods
• Need vessels to share them —
• The souvenir of my 
• Favorite nightmare, 
• Our lives quick knives 
• Through thick silence.
• Oh sharp tongues carve
• Pretty language.
• Our demons toast their hosts
• Chasing the sun 
• Around the globe 
• Because we’d see too clearly
• In the dark that 
• Our bodies cast no light 

Spectrum

• we find the 
• best of ourselves
• when dealing 
• with the worst in others —
• it’s always been about balance, life
• a thought taught and come to be known — 
• humanity rocks gently along 
• the polarities of a cosmic seesaw,
• morality pinches points
• on the scale and demands 
• reflection, like the child of
• the second coming tugging at
• your pants —
• I judge only those in denial of 
•    the pendulous predications
• of a species swinging madly together —
• I hope to know you’ll need me
•    when you’re flailing
• nearly as much as I hope 
•     I can need you in
• the fog of the spectrum,
• when nothing pulls me nowhere 

Kyle Manning makes musings out of Portland, Oregon, by way of San Diego. He studied creative writing at the University of San Diego and discovered a passion for poetry a couple years after graduation. He’s been published in Thom Young’s Last Chapter Journal.