Month: August 2023

Lilac love poem: Noise (across the room)

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Lilac love poem: Noise (across the room)

I can’t fall in love with you if you’re across the room from me

But I can’t change you
Been so endlessly patient with you
Waiting for the thunderstorm to clear, yet a new one comes in hot
Shows me my fears
Pours hot coffee all over me
Covered

I bit my inner lip
Overflowing with an unwelcoming anxiety
Until both the insides of the top and bottom started to bleed
& as the blood poured in
Filling the tiny spaces between my teeth
I could taste the iron &
I felt closer to myself
Than I did
Looking in your bathroom mirror
Wondering why the tiles on the floor have to be so nice
The bathtub so luxurious, so unused
A pitfall of possibilities & potential
Thought I was steering towards irrationality
But all it was
Was hope
& isn’t that familiar
Isn’t that something I could dissolve deeply into

I realized, there was nothing to save
If I could just have that museum day
Back & I’d be on time & you’d see that I’ve been waiting what feels like my whole life
To look into somebody’s eyes & feel safe

But this empty space –
This is not the place
These are the alleyways your parents warned you about
The Instagram posts about what red flags to look for
Suddenly you’re driving and cannot stop thinking
About how someone doesn’t have to necessarily be a bad person to still be unfulfilling to you
I swallowed that truth
It’s all a girl like me can do –
One who dreams in pink
Prays every second she blinks
Doesn’t ever let spiders go down the sink

Unless they want to
Unless they beg me to
Then, what am I to do?

This
Is me
Letting go
Of you

It’s all
A girl
Like me
Can do

I can’t fall in love with you if you won’t walk across the room towards me

I can’t
Take the noise
Out of your head

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Poem: Polite (alone)

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Poem: Polite (alone)

Be gentle with yourself
Your graceful little steps
Lavender ribbons in your hair
Pulling a drive-by at the car wash
Infuriating all of your closest friends
Tugging on the rips in your jeans, hoping that when the fabric bursts at the seams
You will pave the way for new daydreams
& life will be plentiful
Once upon a time

Like lock and key,
I thought you were made for me
But I was made for more
Than what this world has to offer

Inside we are all vulnerable
Deserving of kindness
But God isn’t always so polite.
A penchant for
Throwing stones at your door
My fingers appear as though they have suffered frostbite

Chewing on a plastic straw
I thought that I had gone too far
But then I noticed –
I had not moved at all
Weaving a new daydream
Absorbing my most fragile insecurities
And thinking they might be the reasons someone wonderful will fall in love with me

What would that be like?
I thought I had it in another life
When our spines reached the corners of the bedroom
That we had painted the most ethereal blue
I had ever intoxicated myself with, out of sheer hospitality
For the fiber network of my musculoskeletal orchestration
A girl in a sundress
The middle of winter
Taking my gloves off to text him back
Frostbite
Frostbite

Needless to say
I buy one pack of Parliaments per day
Just to never
Just to never
Just to never run out
Because what if I
Because what if I
What if I were to run out
Find you in the middle of the intersection
Screaming for help on a bookshelf
That you built yourself

Then, what would I do?
Coat you in ethereal blue?
I’d display all the facts that I contain in my porcelain doll frame, regarding the closest moon

Or find myself at home
With nobody on the phone
The concrete entering my residence like it’s testing my weightlessness

Paint me diamonds, buy me charcoal
Unravel me on purpose
With potential
To be
In a picture frame with me

This is
How
I remain
Alone

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Love poem: Lily pad

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Love poem: Lily pad

I don’t want to put my cards all over the table
Though I’m dying to show you what’s true
How real this significance is
My significant other

Sitting on my lily pad
You know I’m the only one that can get you to relax
Move in slow motion
I’m heavenly reserved
& I know you don’t do these things on purpose
But the caffeine in this Earl Grey tea
It’s making me nervous
I know you don’t do it on purpose

Swaying with myself in my bedroom
I can be violent if you turn the heat up
No longer desperate to be enough
I’ve got a sweetness concave within me
A fruit I only bear to those that can hold it
Tight

Pushing all my buttons
Convincing myself I kind of love it
Have I shown you what’s at the bottom of the sea?
Underneath all the make-believe

I don’t want to have to ask if you missed me!
I’m getting run over by the same train over and over again
My eyes close when I drive & I don’t even mind
Collect my cigarettes in an empty coke can
Police on a motorcycle
Firearms in my trunk
No longer desperate to be enough
I keep trying to make it to the bottom of the sea
But something pulls me back above
I want you to drown with me
If you do
Make sure I drown too

Don’t read into my words
Don’t touch me softly, then make it hurt
A one-way ticket to my favourite Chicago Transit Authority stop
Where I am free to walk around
I don’t need bells and whistles
I need the fogginess to stop

A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
When I sleep
A rose that blooms
On repeat

I want you to drown with me
When I get off my
Lily pad

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Poem: Breathing room

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Poem: Breathing room

Allow yourself to be bored
Brush your teeth while they’re on the floor
Infertile like a flower
My higher power
Acrimony is not something I’d like to be familiar with

Let’s get faded in our raincoats
Consider myself blessed,
To be rolling around in the dirt, this mess
Is contagious, I am contagious
Don’t go down with me
I can see how your eyes roll
As they’re crawling closer to me

A poem by a young author about returning to stability.

My dandelion, my little candied nectar
Impatient with my relapse
Looking for the right hands
Your little typewriter bat wings

A man walking home carrying Trader Joe’s bags
They sell the most beautiful flowers
(I could photograph them for hours)
I came outside to smoke, but I’ll just sit in the sunshine
These days I have a final answer, and then another
Save it in a drawer for when the moment comes up
Forget it soon after because the violence in your eyes sustains me
Like the ocean is breathing and I have mid 16th century gills
I find more things stunning about myself than I have ever before felt
I’m in love with the hazel of the night
Amber and baby blue lights
Dinner of frostbite

I used to be so full of words
What happened to me?
I wake up early and all I want to do is to go to sleep
Then my cat shows me her claws
& I grab her toy string
We spend the rest of the morning doing ballroom dances around the living room
Like little kids
On amphetamines
Laughing until the walls collapse
I drive myself to the coffee shop
Watch a young child open the door for his mother

And it settles in that this life is on purpose
My bad habits shouldn’t make me nervous

They should make me find myself more stunning than I have ever before felt
Fabric stitched together
Needles in pockets
Dust in my lungs because my oxygen reserves are just fine

I came outside to smoke, but I’ll just sit in the sunshine
Baskets of florals
Life full of purpose

Tomorrow is Thursday and I’ll wake up early
To play with my cat in the living room

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Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

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Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

Suddenly
The impetus is on me
To be perfect, so perfect, for you again
Satin & lavender bedsheets
Fresh clothes from the dryer
Neurons that synapse when the clock resets

But I can’t
Withstand
Dissonance
I can’t
Bear to
Live with regret
I can’t
Break free from
This tangled fishnet
The wire digging its claws directly into my spine

Disengagement when separated
Disregarded how you said maybe
Perhaps it’s my own agenda that
I failed to write out in black ink
My own handwriting looks foreign to me
The flowers in my apartment have finished dying
I closed the curtains, but someone is waiting
To see me burn out like I’ve been on fire this whole time

Carving my name into my solitude
Changing the location of a confined venue
I don’t like this dress
Don’t like how I look in it
Want you to tell me I inspire you to stop playing make-believe
Wish you would bring me roses & be gentle with me
Not let me lose any more sleep

I’m not really writing
I’m scared of defining
How lazy I’ve gotten at building my self-esteem
The ships are all sinking
The pilot keeps blinking
& the leftovers have spoiled because real things are only real in real time

So I hit “unsend”
Spend the afternoon in my garden
Playing with my own hair, saying your name to myself

I can’t even ask you
What you meant when you said nothing
Because I know myself to get in the way of what could be

I’ll trace my ashes
In long cylinder glasses
Faking a proof-of-concept of a girl who takes pride in the way she carries herself

Now I’m scared of writing
Because I don’t like what I see
And that holds far too much meaning to me

I’m sick of trying
To act like I haven’t been
Crying myself to sleep

Tell me I’m perfect
Say that you missed me
Step into my four-chambered studio where the pianos lack keys
& the guitars have no strings
We can dissolve into anything we want life to be

Tell me you missed me
Without lying to me
Tell me I’m perfect
Because you can see how I dream
Tell me you loved how
I didn’t seem desperate
To find in my own self what you’ve found in yours

I’ll rearrange my bedroom
Work on shifting my patterns
So that the stillness in your settings can bleed into me

Tell me I’m perfect
Without lying to me
Reach for me when I’m drowning
In my make-believe sea
Allow me to realize there’s more to let go of
More in life to make sense of
More in this life to see

When you’ve regained stability
Found blue-green lakes filled with clarity
Then, you can come back to me

I’ll be in my garden
Telling myself
That I don’t have to be perfect to be something real

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