Month: February 2023

Free verse poetry: Dream garden (dust)

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Free verse poetry: Dream garden (dust)

Avalanche
Dream garden
February twenty-nine

Too beautiful to me, it is
The way the truth falls but doesn’t diminish its overwhelming servitude
Grief like hollow images and stills
To be flawed and fawned with grey embers & soft wax
Rolled on Ireland’s greenest pastures
My dream garden
My avalanche

I wake up endlessly absolving my sins, unraveling for you
Tell me what it is you want me to do
I’m so aware of what I can and cannot be
And I think it’s best you not be there for me
I tire in my own sleep

Morning cereal
For four in the afternoon
You wash over me like an
Avalanche
Like my dream garden
White roses and picket fences, freshly painted
Soft tuberose fragrance
Dismantling me from within
Fabricated and built in great jeopardy
Soft and of the finest fabric

I think of you in waterfalls, that I’ve never seen before
I ask you to close the door
I’m impatient in the mornings but by evening so wrapped up in comatose fiber sheath
Toying with my own nerves
On purpose
Like a fever dream
Like ants unscrambled
Running out of fear, hiding beneath dust
Moving pollen and feathers to their corporate offices

When I pass by you on the street
With my kitten heels and utmost softness
Try not to
Try not to

Go back to your dream garden
Your avalanche
Beneath dust

Connected by the sheer composition that melts in broad daylight
Collectively held at
A disadvantage
Brought together in the Spring when the ambiance paints a different mood
For the dust underneath the conjoining ether
Without reserve
Still and unenthusiastic
Hopeful, yet without meaning

Find me in my personal dream garden
When the smoke clears

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Love poem for him: earthquake

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Love poem for him: earthquake

You know I stopped myself before I could love you
But
We broke apart
And I can’t help but stare
At your blank, sad face
And the only thing sad about it
Is that you’re not afraid to let me go
You’re not afraid to let

I tried to wake up
But I’m always on the wrong side of the bed
We never got to have that night in the hotel
We never got to have that heavenly first dance
The first and the last pages don’t make me too sad
It’s the way the world turns
Your fingers latched on
Not very tight
Like a blouse that’s unloosened
A foggy memory that never becomes clear

I’m trying to relive the skyscrapers and unraveling chaos
Though all that comes to mind in abstract vision and delusion,
Is you screaming in my direction
Telling me to stop
Telling me to stop
Telling me to stop

What makes you so afraid
To show love to an unloved person
The way you play guitar
It makes me so sad
It makes me so sad
Not for anything do you feel bad
Like grey, fallen embers on a cold winter night
Even though you’d say you’d never
Be there for me
Your sovereignty
Your power

And I remember you
Telling me to stop
Telling me to stop
Telling me to
Telling me to stop

Feeling the things that only I do
The distance that separates me from jagged, carbon you
In ocean waves, we grasp at what feels familiar
What’s underneath us will quench our thirst
Yours, preferably
Mine, isn’t regarded
Unless it’s four in the afternoon & the sun is piercing your nerves
Telling you that these antics are your last fatal curse
I’m far removed
To tell you the truth
I do only the things the boldest among us do

I don’t wait until there’s nothing left to take
In the distance between your brown eyes
And these soft, fallen embers of Victorian blue
Crawl back
Crawl back
Panic attack
Mesh and in pieces
Forgive me for grieving

All ends in love, and love has its reasons
Come find me
Come find me
Come find me
Come find me

It’s so unnerving
Like an earthquake on purpose
It’s so delectable
Like you’ve lost your ability to reason

I’m always portrayed as the one who leaves the throne
Gown is disheveled, porcelain skin intact
Like an earthquake on purpose
Telling me to stop

Feeling the things that only I do
What has become of rage has given its way to you

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Poem: Love it any less

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Poem: Love it any less

He tells me
Not to get too excited
As we sit alongside the deep-blue riverbed
But me – I’ve been counting down the days
I saw my chamomile flowers bloom, then close, and fall apart in the duration of one week
As I hadn’t changed the water
I was distracted by the sparkle
Of the morning’s horizon
As it painted me in shades of pink I couldn’t quite capture on film

California outlawed flavoured vape products
I know, I’m mourning it heavily
Now I find myself smoking non-menthol cigarettes in my parking lot
Like my father did, in his
Amber tones of his skin shining like
Diamonds you pick back up from the jewelry store
That line your blue-tinted watch with a brand painted in cursive ink
Like your mother’s Russian handwriting
Soft in all of the
Roughest places

My afternoon gaze is
Thick with gloom and hope, both at the same time
I’m wrapped in my navy ‘Windy City’ sweater that I bought at a Walgreens
Where it took four cashiers to properly ring up my alcoholic drink, too
Because the cashiers were mostly underage
But we were on the same page
Laughing about how liquor makes the turbulent flight go smoothly
And how I’ll wrap myself in bridal magazines and read the new Forbes “thirty under thirty” list
Knowing I won’t make it on there in less than three years
Cutoffs are so harsh, isn’t it maddening
Life is so funny sometimes, at the right times
I’ll fade to November grey like a collapsing sky
I’ll lay my head down and never, ever wonder why
I’ll endure the gradual passage of time

He adjusted his collar
And we laughed about who is taller
Because me, my small frame, I take up so little of space
Though I feel like if I spread my fingertips, they’ll reach the mountains
Surrounded by cherry stems and cascading fountains
Waterfalls along the trail where my senior terrier walks on her own self-created path
My glimmer of hope in this brittle, dark night
Made for a hollow tin of little coloured cards stolen from the paint store
Where we wrote our biggest dreams on
Gathering the courage to set them on fire
And not intending to burn down the park grounds down with our miniature vision boards

I found a poem I published for a boy three years ago
On his birthday
It was called ‘I wrote you a poem’
My mother laughed at how cute that was
I did too
I think back to those years and how he never came through
And somehow that didn’t make me love him any less
Probably even more so

I have to get better with taking derivatives
Along with the vitamins in my medicine cabinet
I finally bought a parking permit for university so I could stop
Getting tickets
Even though the traffic cop is such a sweetheart
He asks about my navy ‘Windy City’ sweater
Things like “so when are you going to finally end up there?”

The piece of rose-tinted, painted card-stock
That I’d never set on flames
I keep it in my wallet
To know that
I’ll get there

I’ll get there
Until I’m at the drugstore again with the cashiers
That are of-age, by that time
And I’m buying wine

And Chicago will treat me like it’s been mine this whole time
And I won’t love it any less
Probably even more so

© Elle Silvestrov

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Love poem: I melt (just right)

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Love poem: I melt (just right)

I am a lavender riverbed
Milky and calm, docile and proud
Warm in the daylight
Looking for you, in the crowd
Foreign faces that look so withdrawn from me
My small network of webs and dandelions
Like tulips that fade to faint, but realized, shades of deep pink & lavish gold
Rising with the sun
Feeling down on my drive home
A mainstay of sleep-away camps and forgotten flowers
Collapsing in the evening
On my lush bedspread because I’m tired, so tired
Of living without you

To write
My digits
Down on a scratch sheet of paper
A ripped-to-pieces piece of art
Silence heard through a megaphone
I used to adore that store, the one named Michael’s
The one that sold craft supplies, stamps and postage, stickers that sparkled
In the right light
Ribbons and yarn, solid charcoal-black projectors
Fine point pens –
Thin, less than a third of a millimeter, dark black and anachronistic ink

(Sink your teeth in)
I swept through pages for ages, dancing on melatonin fiber sheath
Metallic highlighters to turn my pathophysiology notebook into sheer pink that gleams
With bright, sky, abstract blues
Colours I’ve never lost touch with, clearly
My eternity, my world
Proof I exist

Vivid, soft, enchanting, nice
A sense of completeness
Something to admire
In the evenings
When I’m at my desk
Working like a husband who’s ignoring his wife
But I’d never ignore you
I’d let you
Enter my world
“Come as you are”
Leave, never
Hold on, tightly
Feel at peace

Absorb my warmth
Don’t hide from me
Come alive with me

I’m starting to
Hesitate
But I do exist boldly, fiercely
Not looming in melancholia, but observing you working on your gadgets
With your five-thousand-Kelvin bright, white light
Attached to your forehead
That doesn’t correctly present your age in years
My time spent here
Is nice when in
The presence of your softly arranged cable-knit sweaters
That you look like an angel in

I am
Starting to lose my vision
Or reminded of the vision that I have already lost
I need
To know nothing
But be admired
For existing
If that can come true?
Of course

I am
Starting to lose my vision
Or reminded of the vision that I have already lost
I need
To know nothing
But be admired
For existing
If that can come true?
Of course

What God has created will see God when creation ends

Of course I can’t argue with the possibility that,
I am deserving
Of love that knows no bounds
Scream so loud we escape the surround sound
Because we’re terrified of gravity’s inner turmoil and how houses suddenly catch on fire
How teenagers stay up for hours not knowing they need sleep to grow and
Won’t you silence my inner critic
That tells me I’m not
Pretty in this bright, white light

It’s only when you
Turn to me
That I am concave and ice
And like ice, that dissolves
I melt like chamber orchestras

Falling deeper into the web of eternity’s vision statement
My residence in this world
Is only complete, if you’ll put the down payment down
And we’ll elope to the moon

How’s that sound?
How do I look in this light?

I want to
I want to
I want to look just right

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