White light, dawn breaking
alongside clumsy fingers
and a rising voice.
I've known this tune before in
the heart of the boy next door.
posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/945977
Girls and balconies, boys and drain pipes
Rosebud lips and red rose hips.
A finger flutters to softly tuck her hair behind her ear
He sees the cover and snorts :
“love story”
And I strangle the book as if I squeeze it hard enough
The pink and purples and hearts will drip off and leave me clean again.
Later, I can't compute a derivation of my shame.
Why was I embarrassed, why was this book any lesser?
Why does he not like love, learn love, learn life
From the same tune, different rhythm.
Hearts and love are synonymous, but aren't.
Girls and romance aren't the same, but are.
The symbols drip with shame, we soak and squeeze.
Boys and balconies, girls and drain pipes
I scale the walls and jump.
posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/923705
May 04, 2021
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half an hour, half a bite, half a life,
sometimes I feel half full of lies.
oh, i haven't told you about that before?
i guess there’s a lot of things i haven’t told you of the late.
secrets i haven’t breathed into your ever listening ears,
or exhaled into your coconut lotion hands
that always catch the words in my tears.
did you know that when I yawn I fall into the vacuum behind my ears
where magicians find their pennies, and on the good days,
quarters?
the fan is silent tonight.
it is every night.
and yet as I thrum with exhaustion,
I anticipate a reaction.
Perhaps it's the way the dark stares at me,
the way you stare me until I drip into a purple crayon again--
The moon is framed by my window tonight,
in the summer lighted on by streetlights.
Harold draws a picnic of pies, and I draw your outline right next to mine.
Everything is happening right now, nothing is happening at this moment.
I shake, eyelashes flutter, until I am soothed by the sounds of Mom's late night snack.
the breeze blows through the holes in my sweater
and I wish you were here to fill them,
scraping pots, you tell me I'd still be cold anyway.
let us live together, apart, for just a second longer
just a moment, I swear
rushing water, you drag me from my dramatic waterfalls and deposit me on the bed.
come back, stay back, stay here
clanking cupboards, you close the door and promise that I'll find you.
I cover my eyes and count to twenty, but you are still nowhere to be found.
Someday, you smile.
and then I remember you're supposed to be happier up there,
guzzling the expanse of sunlit tea that is the sky.
it must be nice wherever you are, for you to like it so much.
do you have a good book to read, while you wait for me?
I’d ask you to come out, come out,
wherever you are,
but you’d be a smart Alec and tell me you’re already here,
in some nook with a flashlight, living another life in a stack of pages.
anyway, I've got to go to bed now. I've collected far too many quarters.
I'll leave the half-eaten moon on my window for you,
and toss half a fountain of change,
light a poem on fire, let the incense rise.
and half asleep, sculpt you from the smoke,
while you, with a plastic butter knife,
split our pining 50/50.
(embarrassing 2.0): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jmV8G-qJypjfZnn5eu8oZc_JtDddnNJ7/view
April 15, 2021
No comments
I’m tired of writing poems about big things.
representative of the sand and lightning and broken window panes
on a hazy summer tinged with puffy eyes and runaways who didn’t know
quite, what’d they’d broken.
Just as eyes and a nose and a mouth that envelops
silver spoons in front of a TV and teeth and sink through
soft mango pits, savoring the sweet cold flesh.
Just broad planes and angular collarbones and shoulders
to give way to wild arms waving in the wind like those wavy people
in front of a gas station, gesticulating as if there is a fire within you burning
or a fly in the air you might like to go away, but not kill quite with grandma’s
fly swatter,
imagine the black splotch on the wall
Just sides sloping into embraceable waists and soft cotton T-shirts
and a plush belly of smooth soft skin and a belly button that smiles
in the center, warm and loud and contented, everything anyone
has ever been in our cores, but that doesn’t mean we should judge on
geometry, dear.
Just hip bones that jut out slightly, they need to be known,
and give way to thighs, pillars and soft vessels of love
and secret places -- moles and divots and leg hair
And the best parts, your knees so wrinkled and scarred
with some falls I bet you can’t even remember
You press outward fireworks into them under the table and I screech,
sporadically spilled water at Souplantation and flowers bloom up my bloodstream
But boy, did they also love being skinned on cement and thickets of jasmine bushes
If only to remind me how it felt to be hurt and feel strong
For not crying, and watching the red mingle with dirt
as it all goes down the drain
Just downward shins and quaint ankles and flat feet
Elongated over the years, but still repainted with that hideous midnight blue nail polish
I bought at the dollar store
But the bottoms of our feet, with their weathered heels
and sensitive bottoms that are so serious
That you laugh when I stroke them with my fingertips,
trying to curl away and screaming as if it hurts while
Delighting and aching at being so vulnerable, limbs lashing out
in an attempt to regain reign of your body
And these kisses pressed into our hair,
Chins and elbows resting on our heads until we grow
too tall to be comfortably called children
Now though, we can still stack our heads like Jenga blocks
Just us two, like we used to
Resting our tired heads on one another on car rides
To the mountains and the oceans
You know, the big things.
posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/921924
April 14, 2021
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For so many years, through elementary school, middle school, and even high school, we've been taught poetry as haikus and Dr. Seuss, as sonnets and Shakespeare. We are taught syllables and rhymes, metaphors and alliteration, iambic pentameter and line breaks. We have masterful poetry shoved down our throats, glimpse genius and are given a pencil, a notebook, and a packet of poetic torture devices to recreate it.
But how can we, when we've never learned what poetry is? Instead, we are only taught to hate it.
The issue stems from the fact that there isn't a concrete definition for poetry. Poetry is forgiving, and poetry is accepting. If the poet calls a piece poetry, it is poetry. Poetry in itself has no rules, but the poet has the ability to create new challenges for themself.
Thus, teachers cannot contain poetry, nor can they convey the power and possibility of poetry without becoming vague and contradictory. After all, poetry, at its core, is completely subjective.
Being lover of books, I have naturally wheedled my friends to read more in an attempt to share my overflowing adoration for novels. From these experiences, I have found that the main reason people don’t like reading isn't because they don’t like reading. It's because they are reading the wrong books.
The same goes for poetry. I've only just fallen in love with poetry, and already I've diagnosed the same problem in all of my friends. They weren't reading the poems that enraptured them, that made them look up with wide eyes, stab the page with their fingers, and say “Yes, that’s me!”.
We've been reading the wrong poems. Or perhaps we've just been reading poems.
Having been caught up in the paradox of how to teach poetry, many teachers seem to have given up, expressing that poetry is “too indefinable, and too abstract to teach”. Instead, many teachers, like Margaret B. Ackerman of the University of Tulsa, believe in “teaching poems”.
You know the like. The Road Not Taken (Robert Frost), Mother to Son (Langston Hughes), Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (Shakespeare). As one of my best friends put it, we are taught poetry as if it is “a dead art”. As a junior in high school, I can attest that I've never been given a poem by a 21st century poet. Up until last year, I didn’t know people still wrote poetry as a legitimate occupation.
The classics are beautiful; I cannot deny them that. But having only changed my opinion on poetry recently, I have to admit that I hated them before having actually tried to write a poem for the sake of writing a poem. We can be taught poems, but it cannot be all that we are taught. We need to be taught why -- not for culture, not for history. How can an elementary school student grasp that? Instead, it can be as simple as what aspiring writer Rebecca Roach proposes: “we invented language, [so] we invented something fun [and] awesome to do with it”.
That’s not to say we can’t learn from poems. As writers, we have to read them to improve. But there's simply no way to learn from or appreciate the classics if we don’t even know what we’re looking for. We need to learn to read like writers.
Lately, I've been enthusiastic to help my peers with all of their dreaded poetry assignments. However, in trying to help them through the process of writing a poem, the most common and frustrating part is that they refuse to even begin writing.
There is so much emphasis, especially in high school, on what’s right, and what’s wrong. What’s good, and what’s bad. There is so much pressure to succeed, so much shame in perceived failure. We are taught in our essays to remove every "I", every trace of our own voices. So, even when we’re older, we already have had this disgusting perception of our own ideas ingrained into us, and the idea that poetry could be subjective is too foreign, irreconcilable with our competitive worldviews.
We can’t continue on like this. By continuing to teach poetry this way, the current education system prevents the millions of students that go through it the chance to experience poetry. To gain it as a coping skill, a form of expression, and a different perspective.
So how are teachers supposed to teach poetry?
Tell us that poetry can be anything. It can be beautiful, it can be funny, it can be utterly disgusting. Tell us that poetry is the power to play with words.
Give us the chance to write. Let us pen a poem about whatever we want: how we feel about anyone, anywhere, and anything. No prompt, no rhyme, no punctuation or grammar. No rules, just emotions and opinions. Most importantly, tell us it's going to be bad.
Only afterwards can the teachers pull out the dusty classics. But, you can’t just stick to Silverstein, to Shakespeare, to rhyme and rhythm and “thou art” ‘s. Bring out some Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, and Amanda Gorman. Embolden and inspire us with student examples. Tell us with more than words that poetry is not dead, and that it doesn’t have to rhyme. Show us that it is very much alive.
This also means that teachers have to accept that there is more than one way to interpret a poem. It's okay if a student doesn’t understand a piece. There is no right or wrong on either side. There is no shame. We all write differently, and if we read like writers, this is inevitable. Embrace your students' genius, and share with us your own.
Then, let us write again. And again. And again, and again, and again.
Teach us to learn poetry. Let us love it. We, as students and as people, cannot be deprived of it any longer.
The issue stems from the fact that there isn't a concrete definition for poetry. Poetry is forgiving, and poetry is accepting. If the poet calls a piece poetry, it is poetry. Poetry in itself has no rules, but the poet has the ability to create new challenges for themself.
Thus, teachers cannot contain poetry, nor can they convey the power and possibility of poetry without becoming vague and contradictory. After all, poetry, at its core, is completely subjective.
Being lover of books, I have naturally wheedled my friends to read more in an attempt to share my overflowing adoration for novels. From these experiences, I have found that the main reason people don’t like reading isn't because they don’t like reading. It's because they are reading the wrong books.
The same goes for poetry. I've only just fallen in love with poetry, and already I've diagnosed the same problem in all of my friends. They weren't reading the poems that enraptured them, that made them look up with wide eyes, stab the page with their fingers, and say “Yes, that’s me!”.
We've been reading the wrong poems. Or perhaps we've just been reading poems.
Having been caught up in the paradox of how to teach poetry, many teachers seem to have given up, expressing that poetry is “too indefinable, and too abstract to teach”. Instead, many teachers, like Margaret B. Ackerman of the University of Tulsa, believe in “teaching poems”.
You know the like. The Road Not Taken (Robert Frost), Mother to Son (Langston Hughes), Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (Shakespeare). As one of my best friends put it, we are taught poetry as if it is “a dead art”. As a junior in high school, I can attest that I've never been given a poem by a 21st century poet. Up until last year, I didn’t know people still wrote poetry as a legitimate occupation.
The classics are beautiful; I cannot deny them that. But having only changed my opinion on poetry recently, I have to admit that I hated them before having actually tried to write a poem for the sake of writing a poem. We can be taught poems, but it cannot be all that we are taught. We need to be taught why -- not for culture, not for history. How can an elementary school student grasp that? Instead, it can be as simple as what aspiring writer Rebecca Roach proposes: “we invented language, [so] we invented something fun [and] awesome to do with it”.
That’s not to say we can’t learn from poems. As writers, we have to read them to improve. But there's simply no way to learn from or appreciate the classics if we don’t even know what we’re looking for. We need to learn to read like writers.
Lately, I've been enthusiastic to help my peers with all of their dreaded poetry assignments. However, in trying to help them through the process of writing a poem, the most common and frustrating part is that they refuse to even begin writing.
There is so much emphasis, especially in high school, on what’s right, and what’s wrong. What’s good, and what’s bad. There is so much pressure to succeed, so much shame in perceived failure. We are taught in our essays to remove every "I", every trace of our own voices. So, even when we’re older, we already have had this disgusting perception of our own ideas ingrained into us, and the idea that poetry could be subjective is too foreign, irreconcilable with our competitive worldviews.
We can’t continue on like this. By continuing to teach poetry this way, the current education system prevents the millions of students that go through it the chance to experience poetry. To gain it as a coping skill, a form of expression, and a different perspective.
So how are teachers supposed to teach poetry?
Tell us that poetry can be anything. It can be beautiful, it can be funny, it can be utterly disgusting. Tell us that poetry is the power to play with words.
Give us the chance to write. Let us pen a poem about whatever we want: how we feel about anyone, anywhere, and anything. No prompt, no rhyme, no punctuation or grammar. No rules, just emotions and opinions. Most importantly, tell us it's going to be bad.
Only afterwards can the teachers pull out the dusty classics. But, you can’t just stick to Silverstein, to Shakespeare, to rhyme and rhythm and “thou art” ‘s. Bring out some Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, and Amanda Gorman. Embolden and inspire us with student examples. Tell us with more than words that poetry is not dead, and that it doesn’t have to rhyme. Show us that it is very much alive.
This also means that teachers have to accept that there is more than one way to interpret a poem. It's okay if a student doesn’t understand a piece. There is no right or wrong on either side. There is no shame. We all write differently, and if we read like writers, this is inevitable. Embrace your students' genius, and share with us your own.
Then, let us write again. And again. And again, and again, and again.
Teach us to learn poetry. Let us love it. We, as students and as people, cannot be deprived of it any longer.
March 16, 2021
No comments
fun fact: I love drowning,
in metaphor. A metamorphosis of breath, and the air swims in water until I have none left to give. They go up, to bed, to dinner, to Sundays roasted in hellfire and Mondays saturated in sin.
because I am 70% water and if I stay I will be filled
and popped from the inside out. How to wrap myself into a sphere, tiny globes of rainbows that will make me ephemerally Earth-like? Greedy fingers always seek the heart for riches, and at last, my empty innards will be missed, desired.
like tubs of shampoo bubbles
and aluminized plastic on trees, a poetic death for the one who was afraid of leaving quietly in the night. The water refracts light into kinds of itself, bending streams into golden ribbons that weave through salt and hair and weeds who reign free.
collapsing
against the surf, and divided kernels of sand don't stand a chance. United, I am powerfully mute in the face of the moon's decree and wind's war cry. Seabreeze, I sink and sink and build shipwrecks by cramming fireworks in my mouth and wrapping my bloated body in curtains of bubble wrap, seafoam frothing as I wait for the inevitable explosion.
into a contented rage.
that is recycled. Eons and the same ions remain, remolded time after time. Evidence of a death obsessed over.
posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/757596
January 24, 2021
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I'll admit that, kneeling by the bookshelf to skim the dilapidated spines of well-loved books for compulsory SSR, I thought that "Jacob Have I Loved" was the beginning of a light-hearted, standard, YA romance. But, if the biblical reference above wasn't a good enough indicator, it's not. It is a thousand times better than one.
The voice that first pulls you in is that of Sara Louise-- or Wheeze, as she is called by the majority of the other characters. Her voice immediately bleeds through the paper, her melancholy tone inviting as she describes her plans to pick up her mother, the last of their family from her childhood home island, Rass. It quickly devolves-- or evolves, I would argue-- into a few pages worth of rich yet honest descriptions of the island as she sees it in her mind's eye.
Then, in the next page, we properly meet Sara Louise as I will always envision her: crabbing on a boat with Call (her only friend), matter-of-fact and a bit rough around the edges, the only contented glimpse of her we see before her life begins to spiral.
"Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen"
And for her, the first inkling of change begins with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The war is referred to here and there, but for the most part, it only fuels the despair she falls into at times. Her voice grows up as the book progresses, from that of a hopeless romantic to that of an angsty and stubborn teenager. This is one of the main reasons I love this book though-- the characters. Their father, their mother, their grandmother, Call, the Captain, and Caroline are all nuanced in different ways. They have their kind moments, and they have some moments where you wish Sara Louise would slap some sense into them. I could go on for days about how I simply know their dad has the kindest, crinkliest eyes, and how Caroline has the fairest skin with thin stands of golden hair like the straw Rumplestiltskin spun in that fairytale.
Onto the main character. Sara Louise is the type of person who is so far from perfect, it's hard to see her as a main character. However, she is good enough to make you passionately root for her will pom poms and glitter as you watch her life play out. She deals with these imperfections as many of us prefer to do-- to just not deal with it. She loves, she hates, she is impulsive, she is thoughtful, and she is the embodiment of a beautifully flawed character.
"Shouldn't I have been a minute's worry? Wasn't it all the months of worry that had made Caroline's life so dear to them all?"
The main source of her insecurities, though, surrounds the fact that she is the older twin to the delicate, beautiful, and musically gifted, Caroline. The depiction of this sibling relationship is the most accurate one I've found to date-- you love them, you hate them, you're proud of them, and sometimes you just really need to explode on them.
I wouldn't say this book is about how Sara Louise overcomes all of this; rather, it is how she comes to terms with it. With such a flawed character though, I understand why some people on Goodreads have given this low stars. Some of the content this book covers, while not not quite taboo, are relatively unsavory topics to discuss and admit to in public. Some of these include embarrassing crushes, shameful thoughts of pure hate, dysfunctional family dynamics, and how Christianity can be wielded to be cruel. But at the end of the day, I would say that they made the book better, because we are truly being able to see all of Sara Louise's thoughts, rather than just a censored version.
In addition, this book makes me cry every. single. time. I have waited for it's emotional hold on me to loosen up, but it never does. In that one particular scene, the climax of the novel, I am there, scrubbing already clean windows and screaming at my mother because I am so mad at the world and I don't know why.
"'I turned so that I would not see either of their faces, a sob rising from deep inside me. I pounded on the side of the house to stop the tears, smashing out each syllable. 'God in Heaven, what a stupid waste.'"
Perhaps it is because I am an oldest child. Perhaps it is because I have thoughts I'd never want anyone to see. But mostly, I think it's because I am human. A mediocre human, a normal teenager, an everyday kind of girl. Which is all Sara Louise is, really. In the end, she doesn't become Cinderella and become a princess who smiles prettily at her sisters from the castle. She doesn't turn into a frog or single-handedly kill the Huns (or in the remake, the Rourans) and save all of China.
So, if I really were to have to boil it down to a genre, "Jacob Have I Loved" is a coming of age story in realistic historical fiction. But it is a "story" in the truest sense possible-- real place, real people, real lives, even if Rass and Sara Louise and this story are but collages of islands, teenagers, and lives.
"But there were only two of us, my sister Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay."
The voice that first pulls you in is that of Sara Louise-- or Wheeze, as she is called by the majority of the other characters. Her voice immediately bleeds through the paper, her melancholy tone inviting as she describes her plans to pick up her mother, the last of their family from her childhood home island, Rass. It quickly devolves-- or evolves, I would argue-- into a few pages worth of rich yet honest descriptions of the island as she sees it in her mind's eye.
Then, in the next page, we properly meet Sara Louise as I will always envision her: crabbing on a boat with Call (her only friend), matter-of-fact and a bit rough around the edges, the only contented glimpse of her we see before her life begins to spiral.
"Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen"
And for her, the first inkling of change begins with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The war is referred to here and there, but for the most part, it only fuels the despair she falls into at times. Her voice grows up as the book progresses, from that of a hopeless romantic to that of an angsty and stubborn teenager. This is one of the main reasons I love this book though-- the characters. Their father, their mother, their grandmother, Call, the Captain, and Caroline are all nuanced in different ways. They have their kind moments, and they have some moments where you wish Sara Louise would slap some sense into them. I could go on for days about how I simply know their dad has the kindest, crinkliest eyes, and how Caroline has the fairest skin with thin stands of golden hair like the straw Rumplestiltskin spun in that fairytale.
Onto the main character. Sara Louise is the type of person who is so far from perfect, it's hard to see her as a main character. However, she is good enough to make you passionately root for her will pom poms and glitter as you watch her life play out. She deals with these imperfections as many of us prefer to do-- to just not deal with it. She loves, she hates, she is impulsive, she is thoughtful, and she is the embodiment of a beautifully flawed character.
"Shouldn't I have been a minute's worry? Wasn't it all the months of worry that had made Caroline's life so dear to them all?"
The main source of her insecurities, though, surrounds the fact that she is the older twin to the delicate, beautiful, and musically gifted, Caroline. The depiction of this sibling relationship is the most accurate one I've found to date-- you love them, you hate them, you're proud of them, and sometimes you just really need to explode on them.
I wouldn't say this book is about how Sara Louise overcomes all of this; rather, it is how she comes to terms with it. With such a flawed character though, I understand why some people on Goodreads have given this low stars. Some of the content this book covers, while not not quite taboo, are relatively unsavory topics to discuss and admit to in public. Some of these include embarrassing crushes, shameful thoughts of pure hate, dysfunctional family dynamics, and how Christianity can be wielded to be cruel. But at the end of the day, I would say that they made the book better, because we are truly being able to see all of Sara Louise's thoughts, rather than just a censored version.
In addition, this book makes me cry every. single. time. I have waited for it's emotional hold on me to loosen up, but it never does. In that one particular scene, the climax of the novel, I am there, scrubbing already clean windows and screaming at my mother because I am so mad at the world and I don't know why.
"'I turned so that I would not see either of their faces, a sob rising from deep inside me. I pounded on the side of the house to stop the tears, smashing out each syllable. 'God in Heaven, what a stupid waste.'"
Perhaps it is because I am an oldest child. Perhaps it is because I have thoughts I'd never want anyone to see. But mostly, I think it's because I am human. A mediocre human, a normal teenager, an everyday kind of girl. Which is all Sara Louise is, really. In the end, she doesn't become Cinderella and become a princess who smiles prettily at her sisters from the castle. She doesn't turn into a frog or single-handedly kill the Huns (or in the remake, the Rourans) and save all of China.
So, if I really were to have to boil it down to a genre, "Jacob Have I Loved" is a coming of age story in realistic historical fiction. But it is a "story" in the truest sense possible-- real place, real people, real lives, even if Rass and Sara Louise and this story are but collages of islands, teenagers, and lives.
"But there were only two of us, my sister Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay."
January 19, 2021
No comments
The polaroid was polarizing. It's rare something lives up to its name. As sprinklers weathered the white tulle, he listened to Mother's lecture.
"The shameless rule the world. My feathery darlings, fate floats in the wind. Only the flagrant can survive hell's star."
But as the picture wept swirling colors into the roots, he swallowed ballerina dreams. He wanted to be beautiful, yearning to flutter like blushing butterflies, exist dramatically like rouge roses.
So when the wish's kiss wafted him away, he didn't settle. He twirled, he grand-jetéd, he flew.
And falling, he wondered if all dreams lead to Icarus.
posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/742902
August 04, 2020
No comments
and as the stars welcome the illustrious dark
encroaching doubts are ushered in, their plus one
the endless drought of frustration i’ve kept at bay all day
that has left me withered and thirsty
a bottomless well of empty
reservoirs of tears dried up
until i can taste the exsiccation on my bloody chapped lips
and all I know is I think I know that
maybemaybemaybe m a y b e MAYBE M A Y B E
I am not who I think I know I think I am
that as much as my brain is structured
an empty vessel for inky words that once sloshed about
longing for raw lightning surging through bated breath
maybe the mind is is not enough to triumph over matter
that the blood in my veins and the cells of my tissues
that the very fibers of my being, rebellious monoliths of fate
are enough to uproot what so firmly is
tearing the seams of all I know I think I know
i can’t, I won’t, I shan’t can’t won’t can’tcan’tcan’t
And I think I know I think I can’t go on like this
chasing what they do until the wrinkled butterfly wings
becomes my haggard prison of ribs & scales
envy oozing out my pores, barely reaching my eyes
the pus puddling at my soles
shrouding the soul in the closet as I try
every imaginable axe to get rid of this
because all I know I think I know
is that yesterday I was intact
not split open with my own desperate claws
graphite lips talking to my blood and brain
as the pus muddles with the blood around me
and stomach acid erases all that was on my bones
and gnaws acrid new words into the stars
June 30, 2020
2
comments
hiraeth
a house that once was home
& a family that never truly was
a castle fit for the happiest people
just a facade, now reduced to
an empty wooden chest
not a soul in sight
inside, walking bodies
shattered stained glass
of a brother & father,
a mother & daughter
but a traitor's escape
locked the prison gate
and threw the key away
hopeful strings unraveled
and braided around our throats
bloody bones shattered
all that remains is dust
slipping through the cracks
but now, lying in the sunlight
with nothing left to offer
i long for the mother & best friend
who spoon fed me soupy porridge
dusted with stardust and silky dreams
taking the only home I'd ever have
"for my own good", she said when she left
how could she lie to a child who thought
she was everything?
empty promises lay broken on the carpet
speckled with sanguine rage
she made me to leave me
knowing full well it would break me
so why do I still miss her?
her wrath
hiraeth
a house that once was home
& a family that never truly was
a castle fit for the happiest people
just a facade, now reduced to
an empty wooden chest
not a soul in sight
inside, walking bodies
shattered stained glass
of a brother & father,
a mother & daughter
but a traitor's escape
locked the prison gate
and threw the key away
hopeful strings unraveled
and braided around our throats
bloody bones shattered
all that remains is dust
slipping through the cracks
but now, lying in the sunlight
with nothing left to offer
i long for the mother & best friend
who spoon fed me soupy porridge
dusted with stardust and silky dreams
taking the only home I'd ever have
"for my own good", she said when she left
how could she lie to a child who thought
she was everything?
empty promises lay broken on the carpet
speckled with sanguine rage
she made me to leave me
knowing full well it would break me
so why do I still miss her?
her wrath
hiraeth
June 29, 2020
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As white light streams through half closed shutters
and the morning silence prods me awake
far, far too early my palms tell the sky
as i reach for my brain, somewhere still in dreamland clouds
welp, my fault for allowing
the morning in before noon
the silence fills my ears, and in truth
the silence is just the type of neighborhood silence
you hear so often you become deaf to it
a lawn mower, the birds
bustling people in speeding cars
the sirens screaming for them to move aside
a buzz from my phone, and I pounce
i admit, I'm a kind of deranged animal now
when it comes to the outside world
but for my friend in Tokyo, I'm every bit civil
and when she goes off to shower
we exchange ttyl's and get on with
our own versions of living
somewhere, a tiny human is being born
into this beautifully corrupt world
and somewhere else, another is leaving
there is ebullient laughter, there is debilitating tears
just think about how insignificantly important
everyone is in the grand scheme of things
but in my tiny bubble in this little old corner
that is somewhere in the middle of nowhere
which, is technically everywhere
dancing with the winter blanket
typing on keys that never type
anything good enough
there is a girl
June 26, 2020
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my fingers shimmer with glitter / frigid moisture turns to lead / pouring out of my being onto the page / staining my fingers with what I should desire / weightless lack of substance made of heavy stones they call gems / filling the empty etched in my bones / the gaps between pale ribs / the slats of the floorboards / the cracks of the shutters / why have you let all the lovely dreams out?
my stomach growling for carnival candied apples / eyes salivating for the sight of dying suns / ravenous for material lives / the scattered pencils on dusty floors shoot me in the foot / falling deeper into the wooden abyss / a chest, or a coffin?
pricking my fingertips on their definitive edges / savor the sweet, sweet pain / sew the stars into my skin / a shard of my shattered, useless heart, a needle / slick hair drenched with blood, thread/ darling, don't be scared / I've turned myself into your goddess / gruesome, is it? / isn't this all you ever wanted?
June 25, 2020
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photo: Baker Beach, CA
seems louder in the broken silence
shifting sheets and clacking keys
I could swear their gossiping about me
although, I would say I'm going rather crazy
after all, I had an enlightening conversation
with my jeans the other day
Lying in bed rather uncomfortably
stuck between the sweaty weight
and the unforgiving headboard
thank god for ariel & strawberry shortcake
my most loyal protectors make perfect headrests
darling pillows are fabulous mediators
5 stars, and highly recommended
dark encroaching on the corners of my vision
face lighted by my true love,
a guiding star in this desolate life of mine,
my chromebook
Some may call this a toxic relationship,
after all, it does drive me crazy most days
I scream at it, it shuts down
me, begging for it's forgiveness
making up in the darkest of times
everyday, repeat!
hm, perhaps the birds are right on this one
June 24, 2020
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The shower's starting
thick globs of thin paint
crashing over one another
to douse the canvas white
scrubbing off the day
like dead skin cells down the drain
until I bleed
The shower's spraying
crimson streaks and bar soap
gulping down warm aromas
of someone's else's dinner
I've already refused to eat
freedom in the vapor
water, just another layer
for a fresh tomorrow
inevitably approaching
The shower's running
your past you know was there
turn around,
the girl is gone
smile frozen in frames fading
into rays of dust
reflection turns into mere memory
The shower's running
old birthday cards
faded by a layer of film
clutching what's gone
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BFF
scrawled on every card
but it is not my birthday
their BFF, a myth in the mist
because forever doesn't exist
The shower's running
Hesitating to wipe off today
eyes already bleeding black
years of caked on mascara
running down my face
when the colors fade to dust
despite the efforts of inky rust
The shower's running
down the drain
pelting sand slipping
constantly falling
please, stop
the liberation comes at such a cost
dormant dreams of all that's lost
The shower's dripping
peeled at the edges
there is not room for me
we are too big for this wretched body
drenched laughs turn into sobs as they drown
grabbing at breaths of air that's gone
down,
down,
down,
brief rainbows in bubbles pop
the shower's stopped
the clang of a spoon
the school bell
class over, day end dusk
in a bowl licked clean,
now empty
all white
thick globs of thin paint
crashing over one another
to douse the canvas white
scrubbing off the day
like dead skin cells down the drain
until I bleed
The shower's spraying
crimson streaks and bar soap
gulping down warm aromas
of someone's else's dinner
I've already refused to eat
freedom in the vapor
water, just another layer
for a fresh tomorrow
inevitably approaching
The shower's running
your past you know was there
turn around,
the girl is gone
smile frozen in frames fading
into rays of dust
reflection turns into mere memory
The shower's running
old birthday cards
faded by a layer of film
clutching what's gone
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BFF
scrawled on every card
but it is not my birthday
their BFF, a myth in the mist
because forever doesn't exist
The shower's running
Hesitating to wipe off today
eyes already bleeding black
years of caked on mascara
running down my face
when the colors fade to dust
despite the efforts of inky rust
The shower's running
down the drain
pelting sand slipping
constantly falling
please, stop
the liberation comes at such a cost
dormant dreams of all that's lost
The shower's dripping
peeled at the edges
there is not room for me
we are too big for this wretched body
drenched laughs turn into sobs as they drown
grabbing at breaths of air that's gone
down,
down,
down,
brief rainbows in bubbles pop
the shower's stopped
the clang of a spoon
the school bell
class over, day end dusk
in a bowl licked clean,
now empty
all white
June 23, 2020
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