My poetry!

[Cekaig]

I love writing but I hardly ever show it to anyone. I thought I would post some writing here!

I decided to make my own thread for it because it's actually, I guess, poetic prose- and it tends to be long.

Warning: there are mentions of death, decay, heartbreak, sexual assault, dysphoria, and self-harm. If you're having a real bad day and semi sad stuff gets to you, maybe read this another time!

I am open to constructive criticism :>

A lot of this is highly personal and symbolic so I don't know how accessible it really is...

I'll start with two more traditional poems.

1.

Hesitant root systems,
God’s aching palate;
Dense tissues
Bloated with rain.

I remember cupping worms in my hands
and moving them away from the road.

I remember a darkened church,
Blood in my underwear;
At fifteen I see this and cry,
at nineteen I see this and laugh.

A single swinging lightbulb,
A dusty freezer,
A crawlspace,
Pie crust and wine-

Being forced to hug every family member
at Thanksgiving.
The question locked around my trachea:

Is my rapist sitting at the table?

Time bobs back and forth.
A swinging lightbulb.
My mother telling me
That as a child I was too trusting and
“You would go home with anyone.”

The pendulum swings
The filaments realign,
And in a foreign SUV, mid-fuck,
I tell myself the same thing.

Somewhere I get lost.
At the skating rink, 1997,
In C building, 2009.
My teacher tells me
“No one cries like this
unless there’s something else going on.”

My father tells me to apologize for the puckered sore his cigarette made.

I am nine and he tells me we are the same.
I am six and I don’t know who he is.
I am 32 and I have made him proud,
I hope.

Bright colored blocks,
W-2s,
This feeling
That everyone I’ve ever loved
was built with backwards feet
to make walking away from me
that much easier.

Web searches I found
on her computer:
pink engagement ring
anorexia
clusters of holes

When she dumps me, there are questions
locked around my wrists:
How do I know if a photo of both of us
belongs to me or her?

How can you pack
Something
You
Can’t
Even
Touch?

That fucking light swings.

I am afraid
Of three inches of water
But when I was a child
I always dreamed
I had gills.

My voicemail recording
Is a crystal ball shattering.



2.

the palm reader investigated
my supine offering
clasped tight
under her beaded fingers.

“Ah,” she said,
“You have water hands.”

i pulled them away
quickly.
“Sorry,” i replied,
“I’m just nervous.”

her laugh
creaked and rolled
like a drawbridge
lowering.
“Do you find that you have
an affinity for the ocean?”

“I can’t really swim.”

she moved
towards a jar
of a hundred tiny vertebrae
and said,
“That’s not what I asked
at all.”

[Cekaig]

And here's two longer pieces, which is how I usually write.


3.

Frothy salt spitup covers the picked-at ocean rocks. They are the minimalist castles and make-believe islands of the children of tourists; organisms of the smaller and smallest kinds are pushed onto shore and pulled right back in by commitment-fearing tides.

I wonder if their fathers laid, slack and prescription stoned, in bed for the third day in a row, while they painted on their bedroom walls and racked up absent marks at school.
The organisms, not the children.
I have already found the child who grew from that pool. Have already studied the thriving environment of whirling self-containment and whorling distrust.

I never felt full emotions from you, only tension. You often felt to me like an empty room thick with echoes of a fight that ended just before I walked in.

You stood on a pedestal of shells and sun-bleached bones, with sand in your sockets, short toes digging into thousands of shark teeth as if you were trying to grip desperately to the sharpness of the world without having anyone notice the struggle.

When I looked at our lives from that cold weekday beach, I saw commas and semicolons and intermissions and I know now that you saw credits and eulogies and a final note trembling in the darkness of a theater at the end of a very long, very sad song.

But maybe you just fell in love.

Maybe, upon entering the House of Our Promises, you realized what it was like to swear. And maybe it had nothing to do with me.

I used to dream of you in your sterile clothes, a bouquet of secrets and avoidance covered in lipstick and wrapped in a suit, black hair pulled into a bun. I used to think of you leaning over a metal bed and pulling the sheets down to reveal my face, pale and puppet-like, transfixed on yours. Cadaver exploring cadaver. I remembered your hands precise and strong, skilled in painting and signing and lancing fluid-filled bruises.

Fix me, I’d beg, make me look alive.
Make me look like something my parents won’t hate seeing.
And you did, for so long.
You found purpose in the art.

But after a while you started to doubt your place in the funeral industry, and maybe it was at that same time when you started to doubt your place beside me. Maybe you were done tending to those who could never return the favor.

After it was over but before you asked for the key back, when the memory of that beach still held an arrhythmic quality that robbed me of a consistent appetite, I told you my greatest fear of our separation:
There was no one now I could trust to wait for me at the massive, complex train terminals of the possible afterlife.
How was I going to figure it all out alone? Who would halt their own crossing to reach out a hand and wait for me now?

I made the mistake of thinking I would always be alone.

I also made the mistake of thinking there was ever someone present who could leave in the first place.




4.

every world born through a new myth:

on the backs of colossal turtles or in the winding guts of snakes, with the taste of red apples still soaked into your gums or while watching skeletal towers rise from the glassy surface of a sleeping pool.

unable to inhabit a space completely and unwilling to re-sculpt the dysfunctionally complex details of your existence, you decide to create a creation story of your own.

but the pen’s small plastic tank seems perpetually faulty, and it chokes on its own black blood every time you attempt to make sense of the plot.

here’s what you have so far:

fur tousled, lying on the highway, body filling with sun. it takes involved training to fly a plane and the same goes for landing; thousands of micro processes commence with the spark of life, and thousands more commence once that spark vanishes and leaves the house dark.
autolysis and the molecular surrender to gravity; protein filaments turn into the trembling freeze-frame of an old VHS tape. the body’s internal police force has disbanded in light of the recent apocalypse, leaving bacteria to multiply and run amok. ancient fauna and flora reclaiming empty structures.
vines in veins. moss in muscle.

you pull the pen from the paper like you disengage a kiss, half expecting a cord of saliva to arc between them.
is this a creation story or an epilogue?

fur tousled, lying on the highway, the roar-hum of traffic mirroring the whisper-hum of decay. the god of retroreflective paint experiences a brief spasm between the concept of shoulder blades and a metaphorical spinal column, as the body’s escaping hemoglobin makes contact with a yellow minus sign separating lanes.
the god collapses inward like a cardboard box or a music stand. its devoted familiars are roads; land that has been trampled by foot and machine in the advancement of a journey time over and time out- the majority of the planet, technically, but in every realm there exists the expectation of basic co-habiting etiquette, and this god would not willingly infringe on the ego-territory of the gods of arson victims or provocative art installations.

your wrist is full of bee stingers and it cramps and flexes into V’s both inside out and outside in.
have we forgotten? the activating neurotoxins of being in love.

the planet lets out a steely yawn. asphalt goes from baking to burning, cracking into spiderwebs and snowflakes to gaping chasms and unhealable wounds. dozens of drivers depress their horns in useless, panicked protest.
an eighteen-foot-wide gap in the earth stretches open beside the body and tilts the surrounding concrete.
the body slides, limp, into the blackened envelope, which is promptly licked and sealed by the god of retroreflective paint. a stamp is applied to the upper right corner.

you should know there is a binding chemical that happens to exist in the bodies of canines called dicarboxylic acid, which is an active ingredient in the alkyds used in the majority of traffic marking substances.

but this is not why the god took the dog.

how could you have let yourself been born into a world that is fully constructed by endings and laid on a purchased patch of the painfully linear understanding of nonlinear laws? a world purchased on a patch of nicotine and placed on the upper arm?

to live feeling like a conspiracy theory.

to live blurring lines and occupying spaces between spaces, like the gaps in the grates of the gutters, like the gaps between fingers, with fingers of your own, that are not your own, and what does that say about the fingers wrapped around yours?
and are you recalibrating their entire system just by existing? are you creating a dissonance just by having been created at all?

there’s all these words fumbling and tumbling and fucking around, and all of them just barely brush against meaning like two soft knuckles across the fly of your pants. and there’s the flush and the reaction and the illusion of touch but this language never makes you come because you’re always too busy leaving, always arranging another in-skull exodus, always filtering and dividing pieces of you between pieces of other people who remind you of the person your parents wanted you to be, who your pets trusted you to watch them, who your lover promised they could become, who your therapist told you to confront, who the sides of your wrists split to make room for, who your nightmares keep drowning over and over and over.

and yet.

here we are.

the pen runs dry.

[EchelonHunt]

I love the way you illustrate your thoughts and emotions. It's raw and thought-provoking.

I'm sorry for all you've gone through.