question mark?

17.06.19 (edited an older piece)

heartbreak is a familiar hand slapping me across the face
I have been hit so many times, I do not feel each sting
but an ever-present pain.

I prefer this sociable sea to the white of
blank canvases they sell off as art. Unfiltered light
traversing my eyes is much worse than any kind of dark,

The only way to lend colour to grayscale wonder
is to survey through rose-coloured glasses-

so what if sometimes they simmer a broken blue or the striking green
of wanting somebody to want to talk to you?

I do not care if red makes my blue a burgundy,
dried blood is more vivid than no colour at all.

I have bled because of some specific incisions so deep,
that now I only see
the lids of my eyes (as life’s fluids drain by)
flutter, the untrained wings of newborn butterflies.

This is a game of lost and found where I know what it’s like to be lost
and to keep wanting to be found,

we play hide and seek,
only you stay hidden behind sheets that I seek
to unwind, and at the end there is never any prize,
only price for letting myself think
“just friends” could be your lie,
just like mine:

acting like I’m really fine when all that tumbles
in my mind is the lingering trace of hope,

maybe “coffee” means a date and maybe “my place” means more?

the nature of love

15. 05. 19

I’ve been wondering for a while what sets love apart – what makes it so much more than just another emotion. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

Pretty much every other emotion that humans are capable of feeling, humans are also capable of engineering. You want two people to hate each other? Tell one that the other messed with the first one’s wife. You want to make somebody sad? Kill their best friend. You aim to excite? Tell them the love of their life is ringing the doorbell at this very time.

Love can let you manipulate the human mind into feeling pretty much any other conceivable emotion. It is, in some way or the other, the source of every feature we use to distinguish ourselves from the all-encompassing category of “animals”. Passion, war, invention, and despair are all consequences of the overwhelming presence and absence of love that we all walk around with. How unfortunate it is then, that love itself cannot be fashioned from any combination of events, traits, or emotions. It isn’t something you feel in reaction to a certain set of actions or appearances.

It isn’t something you feel.

Love happens.

That’s why you often don’t notice love grow until it’s going to overflow. You feel only its side effects until almost the very end. It is a dream you need to wake from to be able to recall rationally.

You sit up and find yourself finally able to attribute all the cranky episodes and highs of the last few days, months, years, to Love, which presents itself all at once. The mechanisms of this revelation can be many. Maybe you call somebody up and realize you want to do that every day for the rest of your life. You see them ask another girl out and feel yourself die. You get caught up in conversation. You lose track of time. You find yourself unable to stop thinking of the exact color of their eyes. You replay not the kiss, but the moment right before, when hope of something more lies suspended like a fog of confetti. You feel like the world and its words can never be enough. Love threatens to overflow.

And overflow it does. It is the leaking bits of love that form the foundation for all the other stuff mentioned earlier on – sadness and hope and anger. It is love that is always at its full effect. This isn’t to say that the quantity of love itself is always enough, but that no matter how much of it you may have, that amount exerts profound effects. An intense love, receding love, a kinda-too-comfortable-mediocre love, the lack of love, each though varying in quantity and quality, are equally full when it comes to influencing the moods and ways of humanity. And since, as has already been established, we cannot seem to fabricate love,

we drift through life waiting for love
to happen, for when it arrives
it brings with it the tides
of every other vivid aspect
of life.

hindsight

29. 04. 19 (prompt: meditate on a past emotional event)

In hindsight, I loved you.

In hindsight, every time I looked away from work towards a screen that gleamed your name at me,
I became an iron man athlete drenching herself to wash the day’s sweat away.

Every time we wrote words we wish we could speak talking ’bout acts we said we’d get to when we’d meet,
I felt myself rise into the sky and onto a ship on board of which resided just yourself and mine.

We wrote. That was the problematic start of it all; we wrote.

When you tell a writer that she needs to spread a quilt upon the heart of somebody
she tells herself she is in love with,

the words become impersonal; the words are what she thinks the words would be if characters she makes up left crumbs within the woods to lead each other piece by piece unto happily ever after.

The words are not mine anymore. The words belong to Sam or Ann or whomever I’ve made up.

I’ve made somebody up because I cannot keep telling myself I love you any more. I’ve made somebody up to now project what I should feel and how I wish that were enough.

I’ve made somebody up because I could.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty on a test that carries forty marks. You only let yourself remember the easy parts. When nights feel like lengths of highway I want to speed upon, I tell myself you were the ride I could not make things work with.

When guilt comes crawling into stones that want to crack I tell myself we’re better off alone.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. We split the past into two tales; we tell the one when scenes recall, with half the clarity, for twenty on the other side serves a different mistress.

In hindsight, I loved you.

In hindsight, I did not.

The sight that seems to make most sense when both views collide inside my mind is flashing signs that do declare, “not enough information available.”

Like a trick math question on some test, our love did not carry the rest of all the details we needed to know. Words and photographs can only tell the truth when those that write and click want them to.

You and I?

You and I only wanted love. We did not want the truth.

In hindsight, I loved you.

spontaneous disintegration

28. 04. 19 (yes I wrote this a while ago, but it’s too beautiful to not share)

Tears are just a symptom
Of an inner agony
Of an emptiness that threatens to fill the days and spill over into the night
Of a vacuum that makes balloons explode and hearts collapse and talks in code
Of photons that transfer nothing and everything
There is so much light around me yet it feels like nothing matters and I am on an infinitely fast moving journey at a stagnant pace
Time doesn’t exist,
I only measure my life by the number of people that have thrown me to the curb trying to pretend they care

They see me a beggar on the streets, meant to pity from afar but not to love
Lest the act harm both the actor and the audience,
All the world is a stage
I stand a straying tree,
Blending into the background
Of monotony,
No character chooses to talk
To me,
No body really wants to get to
Know me,
No one to care or give or take from –
I am a constant and when you differentiate me you get nothing-
The lack of any change in my state vaporises my entire being spontaneously,
I decay
Exponentially, and though reduce fast,
Never quite disappear into the void of non existence,
I am forced to die on amongst the living.

objective listing: a poetic endeavour

25. 04. 19 (in response to a previous prompt related to lists or something)

objects that annoy me:

blank white walls. books on my shelf that I haven’t read and don’t want to read. pages that I cannot remember why I ripped out of notebooks I threw away because I no longer want to remember. polaroids. tickets from an Ed Sheeran concert. the smell of sweat and sound of music. earphones that are only partially functional. pens that leak but not so much that I can trash them with a clear conscience. a broken sharpener. the dirty dust left behind once you sweep pencil shavings into a box you tell yourself you might want while working on some art project. more photographs. ink stains. a sponge you use once in a while to remove the dust that collects because of your own negligence. a device. a breakup text. a memory of a friend telling you she lied when she said she was telling you the truth. pencils wound down to stubs. paperwork. smudges of beauty products you have wiped off your contorted face over the ages. old calendars you cannot bring yourself to discard.

objects that prevent your tears from raining down upon trees and washing all the grime of the past off the backs of leaves-

you think you want a clean slate;

I think I want to begin again,

but it is always just too goddamn late.

man vs wild (alternatively: the sun is also a star)

23. 04. 19 (the next few days are going to be super busy! I’ll still try to churn out a poem a day, but it may be low effort 😦 anyway, prompt for today: something related to animals)

do I love you?
can I love you?

there’s those that would say
the attraction in my brain
is just a ticket for the day
to ride the living train;

they’d bravely proclaim
I could not and did not
feel, that I forgot
after I healed,
and that my family
was a social construct
designed to keep all of us alive;

they restrict the program
of humanity to the human,
a creature of the sea
like my own and even me
is as useless as a distant star
while they photograph the sun;

I say:
the sun is also a star;

those that hold their own above
are no different than those
they bury; their love
is no less convenient,
their emotions, no less driven
by the need of nature
and of the living to hold hands
while we fight off in bands
those that do not shine
like the sun or the stars,
those that aren’t a subtle part
of the peoples (how brave are I
to include myself in this heart)
that have been forced to try
to love, and must fight
their selfish innards
every night;

yet in consideration
of an exclusive group
I hypocritically do accuse
of the very same crime
I commit, so I might
doubt my own
and of those around

what kind of groups
are mechanisms
to harsh out the storm

and when do they earn the right
to be called
a home?

do I love you?
can I love you?

full stop.

18. 04. 19 (prompt:  write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail)

The floor. The first full stop is always the floor. Voices spin in the distance asking if you’re fine yet they only serve to send your mind into a state of complete lock down. The sights and smells that dance around the edges of your awareness fade away and the steady, silent square of kitchen marble or cobblestone directly in front of your feet centres your emotional weight. You proceed to shift around – wave an arm, blink an eye – any external movement is preferred to the shifting of wrenches inside your heart. The other tries to do her part by pulling you into an embrace but you think you just need some space. You tell yourself that vastness around will forget the empty area abound inside due to news broken with the force of dynamite.

The fire inside forms walls that circle your soul so you crawl into yourself wishing they’d just go. You walk into another room and find documents spread across the bed. Documents. A certificate that qualifies the facts you just heard. An invite calling you to an event meant to mourn on this recent result. A text from somebody third making sure you know. You can no longer escape the woe that settles like dust upon the still life that you now try to make sure you don’t forget. You read all his texts. You cry into a cushion while reminding yourself of how he’d bring you home from the bus stop. You write a letter. You bury the letter. You take a photograph and throw the letter into a stream hoping you will never have to see evidence of your acceptance of this sad dream ever again.

You think you’ve come to terms with who has passed but you avoid hallways where somebody less gentle and certainly less close may bring up in elaborate prose that they have sympathy for those left behind. There is no meaning you can find. You digest the truth but only as an abstract concept. You don’t stomach that you won’t ever ask them what time they’re free for a phone call again. Won’t praise their ability to let you forget about time. Won’t play a game of Connect 4 or cards. You don’t, until the day you do. The day of arrives. Strangers pour into a room where his essence supposedly resides. You watch them walk around with mascara running down. They show some sign of grief but not that of somebody that couldn’t bring themselves to even hold the brush steady. The only black ink beneath your eyes is that of dark rings formed staying up at night.

You somehow keep yourself intact through the day. Who am I kidding. You cry. After days of pretending this is going to go away, you finally cry. You let yourself believe. You don’t care if they see. You maybe even speak. And then you drift away, maybe a little less numb, but certainly not dumb enough to think the worst has passed. The worst haunts you even when you sprint fast away from its source. There is no force that can whisk away the grief of memory. Through the days that blend into grey, from time to time, you chance upon a sign of the stolen life that stuffs a sob up your throat. You read a piece you know they’ll love and copy the link until you wander into your contacts and recent memory breaks down that door. You think of something they’d say. You want their advice. You want to play just one more game. There’s a slice of your day nobody else will understand.

For weeks that lie ahead
this part of you
lives under the bed;
you feel guilty to replace
your confidant
with any other face,
till the sun begins to set
and you know the only way
to wake up the next day
is to look ahead.