A book of poetry by Mike Posner.
Copyright 2017.
Youniverse Publishing.
Read by me, Mike Posner.
Sonic landscaping and music also by me.
Trumpets by Matthew Schulman
and production of “The Truth” and “A Song with Pitbull” by OC and Kevin Figs, in conjunction with me.
Dr. Wayne Dyer appears courtesy of God.
Cool.
in a bedroom
in a house
that I bought three years ago.
The house is in the Hollywood Hills.
My mother is in the living room speaking with my assistant softly…
soft enough that her words are blending with the other background noises…
like birds,
fans,
and the high G sharp ringing in my mind.
The time is 3:23 PM.
The date is February 12th, 2016.
I’m 28 years old. (But I won’t be long.)
My name is Michael Robert Henrion Posner.
Five days ago I took a lot of Psilocybin.
I was alone.
I experienced timelessness and I felt that my life was a lie.
I was scared.
I spoke to my friend Mikki yesterday about it
and by the end of the conversation
I felt happy.
Right now I feel blank.
I don’t mean that in a negative way.
I mean I feel neutral:
not happy,
and not sad
…blank.
I like blank.
Who believes in God after they’ve seen war?
Who believes in war after they’ve seen God?
A song I wrote is the #1 song in all of the UK.
People tell me “Congrats.”
Meanwhile, in L.A., Matt is going back to the hospital.
In his words, he needs “a doctor who specializes in rockstars whose organs are failing.”
He drank too many drinks
Snorted too many drugs
Swallowed too many pills.
He has a room at the Roosevelt.
He’s alone.
I’m sitting in First Class on a Virgin flight back to America.
My song is the #1 song in all of the UK.
And I don’t give a fuck.
I will fast today to cleanse.
I read that.
Went to Mod Sun’s warehouse and fell asleep
With Bukowski in my hands.
The Stones played Wild Horses,
I woke up and wrote this.
Is it a he, or a she, or a feeling, or love?
Does she personally ordain every occurrence in every moment or
Did she set the Universe in motion and then move on…to try and top her achievement?
Maybe this Universe wasn’t an achievement at all.
Maybe
our lives,
our wars,
our fuck-ups,
our diseases,
our love,
our humanity,
our passion,
our paintings,
our holocausts…
are all just a rehearsal before the show…a sketch before the mural…
a stretch before the jump.
Does she love me?
Does God know I’m here?
I’m thinking about God.
I’m thinking about sex.
I’ve been holy all day and acted in ways that deserve adjectives like
honorable,
good,
and straight.
But it’s after 10 PM now and I’m bored.
I watched a movie on the internet alone and now it’s over.
I pick up my phone and text every female I know within a 15-mile radius.
It’s a terrible thing that deserves adjectives like
chauvinistic,
objectifying,
and “assholish.”
I made that up just for myself.
“Hey Nicole”
“Oh hey, what’s up, Mike? I’m about to get in bed, you?”
“I’m chillin’, I just been thinking about you… winky face”
“Haha really random, I haven’t seen you in so long. What made you think about me?”
“Well, to be honest, I was watching a movie on the internet and it’s over now. I’m bored and I’m thinking about sex.”
I’m thinking about horses.
They’re so goddamn regal.
Their muscles ripple through their skin like waves in a little ocean
…magnificent beasts.
But why the fuck do they listen to us?
They’re so much bigger.
They’re so much stronger than they know but they trade freedom for a dependable meal.
They let people get on top of them and tell them where to go.
But how can I judge?
Is that not exactly what I do?
Is that not exactly what we all do?
I’m thinking about horses.
I’m thinking about Dad.
He’s 70 and he’s just starting to get old.
Things are gonna change soon.
I don’t feel ready for the change that’s coming soon.
I am standing on the beach, watching the tsunami grow
from a minuscule rise in the horizon
to a monstrous tidal wave.
I am not moving, I am not scared.
I am not scared, I am not wearing swimwear.
I am standing on the beach, waiting for the tsunami.
And Dad taught me about love and sacrifice.
But that’s sort of like a book that you read and forgot about.
Because I don’t love, and I don’t sacrifice.
And youth was my excuse for that but that excuse is getting old.
Maybe I’m gay.
I’m thinking about Dad.
I’m thinking about Ronnie.
His stepmom kicked him out because he wasn’t hers
So he moved to the ‘hood with his mom and 8 half brothers.
I stopped hanging out with him then when he needed my friendship the most.
It was 9 years ago.
His mom’s sick now so he takes care of her and the rest of the family.
He’s the oldest.
He lives with them in a little house on Schaffer in Detroit.
I live with no one in a million dollar house in Los Angeles.
I’m thinking about Ronnie.
I’m thinking about death.
What if this plane goes down?
That would be okay.
I had a good run.
I wonder if a lot of people would come to my funeral.
Maybe my fans would do something special.
Maybe they’d cry and maybe it’d be in the newspaper.
Yeah, I think I’d get on the Detroit News.
Probably not the New York Times.
You people will probably like my music more when I’m dead.
Because they’ll know no more is coming.
You see people love stories with endings.
Right now I’m just a story that’s sorta dragging on slowly,
page by page, year by year.
But people want an ending, they want a crash,
they want an ear in the fucking mail.
I don’t have one,
All I have is another lousy poem and the knowledge that I’ll probably die somewhere, confused and decrepit in a nursing home.
But I don’t think this plane’s gonna crash.
I’m thinking about Otis,
I’m thinking about Kurt,
I’m thinking about Dilla,
I’m thinking about death.
He’s way better than me at music.
He’s way better than me at everything.
That used to bother me.
But then I realized,
He’s better than you too.
I love you.
When did you begin to seriously dedicate yourself to being an artist?
I love you.
What was it like managing your music at the same time as your studies at Duke?
I love you.
What was it like writing songs for Justin Bieber?
I love you.
What was it like writing songs for Maroon 5?
I love you.
What music did you grow up with that influences you now?
I love you.
I don’t need to know your name.
I love you. I am IN LOVE with you.
I don’t need to take you on a first date to a restaurant expensive enough to impress you but cheap enough that I don’t feel like I’m showing off.
I don’t.
I don’t need to wait three dates before I touch your breasts.
I don’t need you to move in after four months.
I don’t need to meet your mother and get in an argument with you because I got forgot our six month anniversary.
I don’t need to be on my best behavior when I’m around you to UNDO all the terrible things men from your past have done.
I don’t need to break up with you because it’s all too much and I’m tired of calling you from the road.
I don’t.
I don’t need to pretend I don’t care about our breakup, dye my hair blonde, and write an album about you.
Nope.
I can just tell you right now:
Dreadlocked goddess across the way in an L.A. house party. Hello.
I love you. I am IN LOVE with you.
Let’s leave it at that.
I barely had sex two times before I got rich.
After I got rich, I had sex lots of times to cover up the fact that I suck at girls.
My friends back home in Detroit always ask me
“Which famous girls have you slept with?”
They look so disappointed when I say, “none.”
Can’t they remember high school?
Nothing has changed.
I still suck at girls.
on the edge of a cliff.
People tell me to come down,
I say it’s worth the risk.
I wrote a poem on the wall,
it simply read “your name.”
And if the ink starts to run,
It will be my favorite stain.
Under those three words, I wrote 10 thousand more in my mind. You never took the time to read those pages. They weren’t as easy to understand and were much less quotable. No. Those pages lie pristine and pure, smudged by no one’s fingerprints but mine.
What you would’ve seen were sentences like “Jimi Hendrix solos swimming through summer nights.”
You would’ve read writing like “A gold medalist spiraling off the high dive with no splash, perfect 10.”
If you would’ve taken the time you would’ve read: “Let’s leave here, right fuckin’ now. Without a breath or a call home.”
But all you heard was “I Love You”…a joke of a sentence. A sentence that men who pretended to know you whispered to you during sex because it seemed appropriate for the situation.
It played out that way in a movie they’d seen so they recycled the line.
No novel laid under their “I Love Yous”…so you never read mine.
I keep my 10 thousand words to myself, while you label me with ones like “weird” and “aloof.”
Words have never been friends with The Truth.
It’s from a record label A&R
They want me to do a song with Pitbull.
My part is already written.
They are sure it will be a big hit.
Who makes art this way?
I want to move to the mountains.
I want to throw frisbees in places I haven’t been yet.
I want to have sex with men and women I haven’t met yet.
I want to skydive.
I want to sing.
I want to hurt people.
I want to get hurt by those same people
And pretend like it all matters before I die.
But they want me to do a song with Pitbull.
Fuck you.
When we kiss I can taste the bong rips and the red wine she drank before she came over.
I can taste the hope and excitement she has mistakenly put on me.
I can taste the scars from the men who hurt her.
I can taste it all.
My girl and I don’t chew gum.
When we kiss she can taste the protein powder and the black beans cuz I’m tryna get jacked.
Silly me.
She can taste the groupies I made love to on the road before we met.
She can taste the lack of scars because I never let anyone close enough.
She can taste it all.
My girl and I…we don’t chew gum.
* is in the thief.
* is in the penthouse.
* is in the streets.
* is in the rose petals.
* is in the dew.
* is in December.
* is in June.
* is in the CO2 that’s filling up the air.
* is in your enemy to whom you wish to despair.
* is in the 808s.
* is in the flute.
and if * is really *, then * is in you.
It’s 3:25 AM.
I can’t sleep.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about myself in interviews
Over
And
Over
Again.
Meanwhile, The Silence waits patiently
For me to get over myself.
after the money, cars and shows
and the worst part is
I know that she knows
In Detroit there’s gunplay, in Finland there’s not.
Our whole lives have been here, so most of us forgot,
If you look from the moon, we’re just a little blue dot.
We fight over money and women and land.
We fight over ideas that we don’t understand.
We say that we’re things we know that we’re not.
All part of the play, on this little blue dot.
He fumbles in the cup holder for his chapstick
He puts his chapstick on his lips
He opens up his phone
He picks up his coconut water, unscrews the top and drinks it
He screws the top on and puts it down
He swallows his saliva again
He opens up his phone
He picks up his coconut water, unscrews the top and drinks it
Screws the top on and puts it down
He swallows his saliva again
He is doing many many many things in hopes that he will stumble upon the magic combination
A certain ordering of: chapstick, coconut water, saliva and saliva swallowing that will crack the code of his unhappiness and make him feel better
Meanwhile, I sit in meditation behind him, waiting for him to finish
Rest in Peace.
If I told you I believe in more than I can see,
Would you call me crazy?
If I said I could do anything I wanted to,
Would you say it’s gone to my head?
If I told you I believed that you and I,
We are more than bundles of hearts and organs,
We are notes from an organ with more keys than we can imagine,
Strands in a spider web spinning through infinity…
What would you think of me then?
Because I do.
And sometimes they try to change me to somebody new,
To which I say, don’t ask the Sun to shine more like the Moon.
A boat of hope floating on an ocean of fear.
Rumi said that.
“I went from negative to positive.”
Biggie said that.
I don’t know why God whispers these melodies in my ears.
But of course, I repeat them to you.
It has become my job to tiptoe as close as I can to that line, without crossing.
It’s a game you love watching me play.
But you’d never admit it.
And he told me, “You ain’t shit.”
But it wasn’t until I heard that, that I quit,
bought that Motif…
made them dope beats…
turned that old car to this window seat…
Where it all makes sense.
Now God gives me hits every time I burn incense.
Don’t that make you so incensed, Mr. Z?!?!?!
Wooh! I blew up and ain’t visit your class since.
But wait, I didn’t write this to say I told you so.
Because without you I never would’ve sold out shows.
I thought that was worth a page or two.
Dear Mr. Z, this is dedicated to you.
Gratitude: Thank you.
Dad called when Uncle Fred died.
I didn’t want my Mom to see me cry.
So I got ’em all out on the flight back.
People lookin’ at me funny, but it’s like that.
See Uncle Fred, he was a good guy.
He was proud when I started to win.
My Aunt told me that he loved me and I swear to God she gave me one of his pens.
I mean the same pen that I wrote this song with.
The same pen that I’m about to put the team on with.
Because he keeps giving me dope shit.
And people keep on telling me, “Mike, you’re so sick.”
I hope that’s enough to change your mood,
Transform a Michigan sky from grey to blue.
I thought that was worth a page or two.
Dear Uncle Fred, this is dedicated to you.
Gratitude: Thank you.
Now, this verse could never pay you back.
Shit. Most of my friends never had no dads.
And before we knew I had a sick style.
You used to drive me to the studio to rap on Six Mile.
You showed me that a real man ain’t afraid because he hugs, kisses, and cries.
April to April, stays faithful, loves, listens and tries.
So when I do find Mrs. Right, you best believe that my game gonna be zipper tight.
Like you’re still making mom breakfast every morning.
You start her car up in the winter when it’s snowing.
Remember when you broke it down in New Orleans?
I didn’t tell you I had my phone recording:
I said “Why’d you marry Mom?” and you said,
“It was a really hard decision, um, and then it was.” – Dad
“So, why did you make that decision?” – Mike
“Well, cause I obviously, intuitively, Michael, I knew I loved mom.” – Dad
“Your instincts. Show her your heart and this is the right thing to do.” – Mike
“My heart must have known. This was playing games. Clearly.” – Dad
“Would you say your hearts more important in life?” – Mike
“Well you’re 25, you’ll have to make that decision someday, I don’t know.” – Dad
Now that is some G shit.
When my son’s 25 I’ll show him this poem, he’s gonna need this.
I thought that was worth a page or two.
Dear Dad, this is dedicated to you.
Gratitude: Thank you.
Bearded men with shaved throats,
I walk around with the same hope that my mother does.
She gave it to me.
Nose rings and old things,
My uncle Joe sat in the cold and slowly sold things.
One by one.
The sun isn’t welcome here.
At least it seems that way.
Or perhaps an old transgression made by this part of the Earth
Made the Sun uninterested in spending much time here,
Shining only enough each year to remind us what we’re missing.
You can’t eat a poem.
And Dharma can make for a marvelous excuse.
Here I am again.
Alone in the city.
He comes up with nothing, and starts all over again.
Pete searches for meaning in every right and every wrong
He forgets to look inside of himself, where it’s been hiding all along.
Perhaps I lost my way.
Strangers call me lifted, my mother says I’m gifted,
Who am I to say?
I called my old phone number.
Mom says the sky’s still grey.
And she wants to know when I’m coming home,
Who am I to say?
People love to ask me questions.
Like, what am I up to these days?
Will I make more songs? What’s taking so long?
Who am I to say?
“Anyone else wish Mike Posner would just fuck off?”
From M.T.
“Wait, Mike Posner has fans?”
From Ryan Shepherd
“That Mike Posner song is possibly the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life.”
From Lindsey Polk
“Mike Posner is such a sellout.”
From Tonya Glann
“Mike Posner writes the stupidest songs.”
From Chloe Kerr
“Mike Posner, give up already.”
From Dalton
“Why the fuck do I have ‘Please Don’t Go – Mike Posner’ flowing through my head? Like, fuck off already.”
From Zara Larsson
“I took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii I was cool? Hahaha that line is so motherfucking dark and lame.”
From Ron Button
“Mike Posner’s new song is terrible. I definitely think I’m cooler than him now.”
From Dylan Oregui
“OK Mike Posner DIE.”
From Riley Battaglini
“Congrats Mike Posner. You might’ve put out one of the worst song EVER.”
From Mr. Ramirez
“Mike Posner ain’t no damn celebrity. That was just some college nigga with a little buzz.”
From Ryan Michelson
“Took a Pill in Ibiza is a horrible song. Yes it is.”
From Jessi Martin
“Mike Posner is sleazy… But I like his music and I’m glad he’s back. I mean… I used to listen to his MySpace on repeat in the dorm.”
From Ju
“Remember Mike Posner? Me neither.”
From Lufy
“Mike Posner sounds like Justin Timberlake swallowed a trumpet.”
From Haleey Young
“Mike Posner used to be Bae AF, now he’s sooo ugly.”
Felt out of place, inadequate, out of place and unloved
So I wore a mask
Walked the red carpet six years ago
I felt out of place, inadequate, out of place and unloved
So I wore a mask
It looked like this, mmm
Water is dripping from my body like one of those corny glamour shots of a model getting out of a pool.
Only it is not a corny glamour shot of a model getting out of a pool,
It is real and it is me, flying straight up.
When you’re this high, the constellations of city lights are clearly pockmarks on God’s cheeks…
That much is obvious to you.
Why hadn’t you seen it before?
Too close?
Not close enough?
The plane lands and a man waits for you at baggage claim
with your middle name on a sign.
Your assistant has advised the driver to put your middle name on the sign instead of “Posner.”
This way fans won’t suspect you are coming, congregate, and ask for pictures and autographs upon your arrival.
This is not an actual problem in your life.
Fans almost never wait for you at airport baggage claims.
This is a system you put in place for a problem you wished you had.
The driver takes you to your parents’ house in the suburbs.
Your mother answers the door. Your father is in the hospital.
He has a tumor the size of a tangerine lodged in his forehead.
They’re gonna cut his head open today and take the tumor out.
Here you are again: alone in the city.
There were buses, strollers, and horns bleeding out of cars like notes from organs in conflicting keys.
Cars wrapped around people like unopened Christmas gifts that nobody wanted.
Nobody but me.
I laid a blanket of silence over the noise
And suddenly it was all beautiful.
It was all perfect.
It was all exactly what it was:
a curtain in front of the stage, pretending to be the show.
I land in New Orleans and eat a Po’ Boy or two.
I am not the person people expect me to be.
I am not warm, I am not over and I am not in between.
I’m living in my car now, I sold all my stuff.
Not because I needed money, because I had too much.
I’m writing this in a notebook, that no one will ever read.
So why am I still pretending I’m who they’d think I’d be?
I am in between the margins, these words are just my clothes.
That I wear to cover up what I want no one to know.
Jungle Green, Magenta, and Underwater Blue.
I love every single color, tear drops and balloons.