Assorted Poetry (TW: Self Harm, Eating Disorders, Ennui)

Note: No one freak out about mentions of symptom use. These are all just capturing feelings, not literal.

 

 

Last night I took a blade to my skin

Blood letting for the soul

The foul humors escape.

There is more life within me than the flimsy walls of my body can contain

Bursting and breaking through in fits

A quick slice so much easier

Draining an abscess

 

Have you ever felt a nostalgia so melancholy your breath flees?

Or fallen in love with the golden caricatures of humanity?

Do you walk the streets in the twilight, breathing in the scents of rain and promise

And wonder if you could live forever?

Have you ever run your hands over your body and wondered

How easy it would be to rip it open

off

just for the freedom?

 

Sometimes when I love too hard, I refuse food

A quiet prayer that my body disappear

To give me more space to stretch and love you more deeply.

Did you know that a body can burst if you fill it with enough loves?

 

Some girls bend their bodies into contortions, hoping to confuse the fire within

into fading out

Their skin paper thin

They glow as lanterns

Until they concoct an emptiness to kill the flames.

Their insides were yearning for people, for places

So they replaced passion with need

for size 2, for vodka, for death

And now their skin simply crinkles, hollow

 

I let the heat bleed out of me when I can’t carry the weight

But I can breathe flames on days I am strong enough to stand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A single face, glimpsed

A face that might be the face of one I once loved

is enough to leave me shaking with nostalgia

 

At night my feet know that it’s time to leave

but my mind has no destination.

My heart supplies the names of everyone I have every shown myself to

truly

and my feet anxiously trip through memory and longing

 

I can’t escape the way that feeling so much is always pain

And the flood of insecurities that returns with each face

I am sitting alone in the dark

The razor blades of my eyes cutting over each ounce of fat

And everyone I’ve ever loved is not here

Object permanence has escaped me, and they are lost

 

I am more, I am more than ennui

I could be more, and perhaps I could collect each face for good.

But I am already too much

And they cannot fit into my long list of labels.

I cannot chase lost souls.

Poems and Pieces

I’m going to do another bout of fiction/poetry. Brace yourselves:

 

This morning I woke up

Or rather my eyes opened.

I tried to leave my bed, but the world was cold

And my mind would not open

However brightly the sun shone.

I put one foot in front of the other until I reached reality

But when I stopped moving I began to drift backwards

There is nothing to hold on to here

The walls are smooth

And the sky is empty.

Backwards feels like falling

But my weight is not enough for gravity to take effect

And so I float untethered

Away from the room where I sat

Where I walked with my eyes open and my mind closed

Where I tried to remind myself that this was real

And I was alive

And I am moving

Backwards.

I hope that tonight I will reach my bed again

And tomorrow morning I will wake up

Or rather open my eyes.

 

 

Solitude:

Everyone told her that she was an introvert. She knew that being alone was a necessity. Too many people made her feel overwhelmed and frustrated and confused. Her senses began to shut down.

She had always imagined that her ideal job was one in which she didn’t have to deal with people, because people were always ruining things. Words and computers and papers didn’t make mistakes: they did as they were told. They were predictable.

But as she sat for 90^th day in a row in her small out of the way corner office, she began to hate the solitude.

Monday Morose Miscellany

It’s 11:59. There’s a ringing in her ear. Ring in the new year as they say. Or is it a new day? They’re close enough anyway, and when the minute turns over it will be an ending and she needs that ending like she needs the ringing to drown out the endless voices and start again in silence. It’s silent now, late at night, home alone. She vaguely wonders if she remembered to lock the door, but it’s loud inside, hammering painfully against her skull, making her squirm and look at the clock for the numbers to turn. To end.

 

 

 

Drums.

Arouse a building nausea.

They lost themselves in mind’s recesses and won’t stop echoing.

Sleep

It’s a dream that filters behind the eyes

Celebrated with fireworks, red and gold.

Blink

But not too much or your eyes will get stuck

And you’ll be lost inside your eyelids forever

Empty

Is a wish

For an empty mind and empty body

Filled only with drums.

 

 

 

 

Delicate white branch

Laced with the snowfall of night

Vanished in the sun

 

 

 

She begins with herself, always. In the present tense and first person, she is always the crystal to focus the light of her own mind. A turning inwards, a breath. Who am I today? She wondered, echoing the calls of a thousand young children across the globe. Why today? Came the teenage call, yearning for purpose. When can I rest? She asked, as she suddenly felt her body grow old. She begins with herself but herself is a multitude and she cannot end until she has touched them all. Her crystal has grown diffuse. She cannot see in the gloom.

 

 

 

I’m sitting in a cube

Always in cubes

Open air is foreign, and so I pack my

Spaces into boxes

Filled with boxes

To pretend I take up space.

The boxes are sharp, all straight lines and corners

So I went myself into curves

And ooze into empty places

Hoping the edges don’t cut

I don’t fill the boxes

I can’t feel the boxes alone

It’s easier to pretend I’m not here at all.

Growth: A series of Drabbles

Growth

It was a good idea to never look down and never look back. At this moment, clinging by his fingertips to an unhelpfully flat cliff, he was acutely aware of the fact that looking back at his progress was a horrible idea, and so he stared upwards, his eyes seeking out any slivers of crevice, crack or ledge that his fingers could hold to through the strength of friction and hope. Somewhere above there was a shadow, barely indicating a ledge. He tensed, let himself hang downwards before launching himself up to grab at the wall. Growing by the second.

 

 

Yesterday there had been a beard on his face. Today there was none. He looked younger without it, as though his hair were suddenly less gray and his eyes more blue. His friends remarked on hos spry he seemed, but he simply smiled enigmatically. The following month they were sure something was different.

“Are you working out?” they asked.

“Just standing straighter” he replied.

By the end of the year Art knew he had to say something. His friend’s old staff rested uselessly in the corner while the man himself nearly danced across the floor.

“Merlin, are you growing younger?”

 

 

Bright eyed and bushy tailed. Dashing over crisp leaves. Preparing.

The twitchy little squirrel carries his acorn across the ground, looking for the perfect hiding place. He can feel the fall air in his bones and is ready. The ground is right here. The nut is buried. Squirrel departs.

 

Melting snow has left the ground soggy but the searching nose of squirrel is certain it remembers where it left that nut. Aha! Here it is! Little squirrel looks up at little sapling. A pause. A deep search through memory. How many summers ago had he buried it? Grown up nut?

 

 

“Mommy, where do babies come from?”

I froze, taken aback by the sudden and unexpected question. Why was my baby asking me about babies? I was certain I had not been this little when I started asking…she couldn’t be ready yet. I wasn’t ready yet.

I pointedly looked away, turning my attention to the brief I was writing, trying to buy time. I had not prepared for this.

“Why are you asking?” I hedged.

“Sarah’s got a baby brother. How?” I sighed and turned to look at my baby girl. She hadn’t been so tall this morning. Growing so fast.

 

 

 

 

This sucker here is my first attempt at a haibun. I’m not totally happy with it, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

 

The room is always dark, the shades always closed. Not even the fresh sun or the smell of melting snow can sneak under the window sill. But despite the darkness a harsh lamp spreads tendrils of light across the floor, leaving patterns here and there. She walks in, looking for ink and parchment. Her boots drag. Clothes are shed and the pattern is from door to bed. She can see the crosshatches on the floor of shadow, light, shoe, and pen. The room is covered with lines, straight and sharp, almost as harsh as the light. Her skin turns pale in the light, blueish with veins and red with cold.

 

This will be my pen

The ink that I use is red

Drawing patterns here

More fiction! Hopefully to be a repeat feature

Drabble: Addiction

I have an addiction.

I don’t want to admit it. Addictions are shameful things. But I started going into withdrawal shock this morning and I can’t deny it anymore.

There is something in this world that I can’t live without, something that leaves me feeling calmer and higher and fuller. There is something that I rely on to pull the whirling merry-go-round of insanity from my head and make it into a roller coaster exclusively for my own use.

I have an addiction to writing. Don’t tell anyone. Addictions aren’t to be shared. Addictions are to be hidden.

Drabble: Truth

Hm. I rewrote Truth in a few different ways to explore different elements of it. I’m not quite sure which ones I like or what I like about them. Thoughts?

It starts again. She walks in to her room, casts her eyes around as if looking for something, and sits down again, her legs wobbly as usual. There was something she needed to do, but she became distracted again when she saw the bed and the window. She looks out the window, wondering yet again what could be outside. She looks around her room and glances around her mind and wonders yet again what could be there, again and again. She follows the circuit of her mind, hoping that it will narrow to the point of certainty, hoping for truth.

Sitting down again on her bed, she casts her mind here and there, tender yet desperate, probing every thought she had and every piece of evidence that might exist, touching before shying away. Whenever she is alone, she searches, and as she looks again she knows nothing is there. Yesterday she did not eat. Today she will not, because she knows. I won’t wake up tomorrow if I can’t find it! Her mind screams. She knows this is a lie. She knows she cannot help but wake again tomorrow and continue sifting through her own mind for truth. For certainty.

Sitting on her bed, she is searching. Sitting alone, she knows that something is there for her and she cannot find it. Alone, there is one thing that will befriend her and she has been seeking it for so long. There is one thing that she needs, and she will sit alone until she knows. She needs to eat. To eat. She didn’t eat yesterday. Yesterday her stomach was not empty enough and today she will ignore the pains to sit alone on her bed. Her stomach, her gut tells her that she is missing something. Missing the truth, alone.

 

I’m kinda stuck in drabble/poetry format right now because I have a short attention span and all of my longer motivation is going to work on what I HOPE will become a full length book (someday pretty please). If you have any prompts that you want to send me I would LOVE YOU FOREVER because I’m going to try to make this a somewhat regular feature.

And now for some haiku because the weather is driving me bonkers and what better way to write about the weather than with a haiku?

Water drips from eaves

Falling to the snowy ground

Where has the sun gone?

 

The branches above me

quiver gently in the wind

whispering for light

 

 

It can’t be snowing

I’m moving to Florida

Fuck Minnesota

 

I am trying to

disappear without notice

But you remain here

 

Drabble: Sharp

The lines tend to be blurred when he bothers to open his eyes. Sounds bounce off his eardrums like a kid jumping on a bed. Sights smother his face like pillows. When he bothers to remember tasting or smelling, things seep in, slowly, more texture than flavor. Through the softness, he wants something to cut. When everything bleeds together, he can’t focus and all he needs is a pinprick, a point, something of clarity. And so he quietly opens a drawer and removes a razor, pressing it against the pad of his thumb to make sure that it is sharp.