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.

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.

drift

13. 04. 19 (really didn’t have the time today – just threw this together tbh – some of the slant rhymes make me physically cringe)

the speed of light is not fast enough for me to forget
the last time you pulled me in, now again
it doesn’t recede quick enough,
the pain-

you say you love me;
you say you care,
but I don’t want to be
just another dare

or kiss of chance
while bottles spin
and pixies dance
in the dead drunkenness
of the night;

the speed of light is too fast–
the sight of you is flung
past my face in ships bound for a place
beyond my love and in disgrace

I ask if you love me;
I ask if you care,
even though I know what you say
(though you swear)

is just a convenient truce
so you can text me
one more night,
make me your vent
for one more fight you have
with the woman you’re supposedly in love with;

so let me drift away;
no speed can be too quick
and yet any path that leads
us apart will seem too swift
so honey, just let me drift.

million mile cells

27.06.18 (very impromptu and emotionally charged)

shadows fleet across train tracks
diving down into the deep
paint splatters across broken walls
bleeding through her skin
the walls are the grey of prison rooms
metal rods running up and down
the sides of her cage, she screams-
the stars absorb the sounds
her voice travels light years away,
still darkness is the only sight
that she sees for the millions of miles
of emptiness within confines.

leaving

23.04.18 (the official day 23 post!)

the last last day of school before school summer break
of my whole entire life-
endings feel like dives into black holes,
like the discomfort of changing heat packs
when you are ridden by insistent cramps,
jumping of a ledge when it is so easy
to stay,
forcing yourself to walk away
from what feels like the only thing you’ve ever loved-

endings suck – but something I wrote about to comfort myself on the seeming abundance of endings a couple of years ago still rings as true today; so here it is, re framed and poetry-fied:

as one wonders why endings such abound,
we forget of the beginnings to be found,
for sure if logic guides our thought,
for each nostalgic end, there really ought
to be a start of something new
to become of importance enough in due
someday to be missed with one’s full heart
when from that piece of them they depart.

frozen yogurt caves

17.04.18 (short and kind of rushed – but for the sake of a poem a day, it’s up here)

when will peace come to greet me
like an old friend you sometimes reminisce over
on dusky Friday nights?

when will my eyes coalesce
into the dense dark
of nothingness?

when will the heat retreat 
into caves of frozen yogurt 
from down the street?

when will I finally feel free?

lonely

04.04.18

lonely is a withering weed fluttering on a fence
of barbed knotted wire cutting into it’s skin
a wave crashing upon the indifferent pale sand
a hundred thousand times in the glaring moonlight
wind whistling at Jessica, pulling me close
and sighing, heat flooding to my face and him withdrawing
to another part of the island afloat in the middle of the Mediterranean
no sight but the rolled out carpet of the sea
a blanket, shielding the Earth from vacancy
the bare emptiness of vacuum cold on my bare skin
a hurricane voyaging across the aquamarine
swallowing itself, round rings of dust
tire marks on a heat scorched road in Indiana
that sees a pickup truck rush past and shake the ashes
of leaking diesel from the back of a van
carrying a dead man across the terrain in the search
of water that is a mirage in the distance
of this desert lane,

lonely is a withering weed bending over to kiss the turf
to be roasted into a summer steak burnt round the edges a little too much