Category: Blues

Free-verse poem: Simon & Garfunkel, truly terrifying (New York)

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Free-verse poem: Simon & Garfunkel, truly terrifying (New York)

My baby didn’t even have time to pack his suitcase
Left his things sprawled all over the floor
He told me he wanted to go to the city
Find the things he didn’t know he was looking for
He wanted more, he wanted more
He wanted more
Jars of honey, sweet fiber network
He wanted more
And I knew, across moments in space and time
That I had done my good deeds
And I could get my coat off the rack
He’s looking for more
In black tar and spiderwebs
He’ll find a new job in New York
A city that has too many important people in it for anyone to ask about

Gentle as the sea
Unbecoming as you dissolved directly into me

I cast the glow that tried to diminish my solitude
Playing Simon & Garfunkel deep into the night
To surround me in playful melody, and memories of nights in hotels
Where I didn’t know anybody
& nobody knew of me
& the thick, ivory, vintage & carefully sewn cloth that lay on the table where I had a drink (a mix of elderberry for immunity, and something with zinc)
I squeezed a lemon into my eye
(Just to try)
(Just to try it once)
I became like the night

Smooth in rapture
Rough like the ocean waves
Not asking anyone to hold me, because I wasn’t in the best company
Never understood why people use other people when they feel lonely
I find no solace in that regard
That kind of domination, to utilize temptation
What good would it do for me- my little, fawn frame?
My agony and stillness, harshly disillusioned
A maiden’s last words
A goodbye in a picture frame
Held up by safety pins for decoration of the living room, my sweet residence
Very far from New York

They read my poems and think they’re separate, short ones instead of long form stories
But at least they’re reading
It’s good for the brain
It’s almost a necessity to understand someone else’s pain
In my bedroom, I have roses on the left side of the bed
Audrey Hepburn on the wall
Reading a book, casually, a photograph taken & never explained
Who will ever take photographs of me?
Will anybody capture me in my own reserved solitude?
Press a camera shutter when my face looks nice from the angle the lens hits me from,
In the right light?
With a nice mannerism?
How cruel it is to live years without memories
Nothing to think about with morning coffee
Nobody to dream of when I’m feeling despondent

It’s not that I try not to, but I can’t stop writing
It’s like the medication hasn’t yet absorbed
You tell people you’re a writer and they nod their head
In agreement, almost
I think it’s an act of disregard
Find me a publisher!
Buy my book, whenever it comes out!
Support my dreams!
No, no
Nods his head
It’s an act of disregard
A repetition in disguised portrayal of an affirmation
Fleeting hopelessness mixing in jars of honey that fade to silk and an ambience destroyed by lightning in the dark
Making way for the gloomy inhabitants of New York’s city streets
As he neglects to pack his bags

He retracts
Shoulders back
Panic attack
Upright and tall, a self-preserved, startling enchantment
Eyes so sharp and clear but in my nonchalant mind I’ll still remember them as filled with fog
Some people- you can ask them a million different questions, yet fail to receive a hospitable response
A succession of worries
“What if the plane catches on fire, what will you do then?”
“Will you call me when you land? Should I stay awake?”
Fog, nothing but fog
Dove tails & tales of romance, swept like ashes falling from a neighbor’s cigar
An afternoon sky of abysmal disobedience

When we were young
We were gentle like the sea
And I was becoming something great, something to be remembered
But his benzodiazepines have no regard for memory preservation
So with every step he takes, every fragment of clothing he doesn’t arrange
He dissolves directly into me

I hear ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ repeating softly in my mind
Holding on to the melody in a way that
Truly terrifies me
As I dissolve
Repeatedly

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Love poem in blue: Four hours (franklin avenue)

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Love poem in blue: Four hours (franklin avenue)

If you’re new to my collection of poetry, love poems are typically in pink, but this one seemed to fit a blue backdrop better than pink.

I’m alright with being an ordinary girl
Not very many followers, not very many friends
My circle is too small to heal me
So I paint circles with the ink that bleeds off of a page when water washes away all of the bittersweet words
Your old Cambridge literary journals
If I ever loved you, it wasn’t on purpose

I clean up nice
Baby doll dresses
I-, I-, I always wanted to be famous
Just to one person
Just to be his world
His source of power
But I burnt out so, so young
I can taste the bitter tar endings on my tongue
The combustion of whatever you and me ever were to be

One word replies
You think you’re so wise!
You use black curtains to hide from the sun
The only thing hotter than your large caliber gun
A soundproof room
A baby blooms
Angel bed where there lives the city of sin
Insensitive, discerning, you’re impervious to loss
I wanted you badly
But at what cost?

Franklin avenue where my bike crashed into your lawn
And I fell down underneath the hot summer sun
Absorbed it like water on sheets
We laughed and had blisters on our feet
You told me you’d never leave

You frustrate me when you don’t hit me up first
Totaled your Panamera, you forgave me, cos I love you the most
Laughed about it on an Instagram post

In your sleep you have the wildest dreams
Most consist of you marrying me
You’re more romantic than you make things seem
Probably because you don’t know what’s beneath
Your skin is so soft, so soft
Grey fuzzy blanket for movie night in the loft
With you all I ever want to do is get lost
And all I think about
Is me plus you, in any place

In any place
In any place
Let our sour love surface
In any place
In any place

Tell me you love looking in my direction
Make me bleed out my inner infection
Start a bone marrow collection

I close my eyes and picture the garden of Eden
But you’re not there
Well then
The devil in the details is trying to tell me
That this is what I need

A peacefulness cradles me in comatose, amber silk
You’re hopeless and breathless
I’ve loved you for hours
Your despondent wake
Your ivory powder

And I’ve loved you and
loved you
For hours
Four hours
I’ve loved you
For four hours
And hours

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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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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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Free verse poem: Things I’ve found out (the right season)

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Things I’ve found out (the right season)

a free verse poem about finding stability & self-acceptance

I know
That things won’t work out as planned
I know that
Because my mother taught me how to be a man
But there are
Parts of me that won’t let someone hold my hand
Because I
Because I
Find graveyards appealing
Harsh winter thunderstorms healing
And the chaos within you is quite often revealing
Of the doom and dismay your surroundings convey
The filth
The agony
The dreams others built for you become destroyed
I’m my own person

But when I drive home at night
I don’t feel alone
I just know I am

It was cold in Chicago
And I wanted to lay down
In the snow
My frail body
Seldom appears melancholy
Singing you songs, breathlessly, to you in your sleep
Though my voice is never the right pitch
Maybe that’s why I wait
Until you hit your steady dream state
An abyss of perpetual ignorance to moral obligations

The impatience
Is testing me
Like a ticking clock
Telling me
I
Haven’t painted
The sky quite right
Haven’t gotten the stars
To my audience’s delight
And I think
I might combust
From the tainted, porcelain figure I often wish to set on fire
Because what burns
Feels so warm
In winter

It’s almost
February
The anniversary of
A thousand slumbers
A rainfall that struck me like
Lightning on the fast lane on the highway
Swerving between cars with my eyes closed
Thinking I’m oh – I’m just so composed
But me, parchment paper thick, practically comatose
Wouldn’t keep anyone up at night
When you haven’t
Made a name
For yourself
And nobody
Gets the intonation
In your full name quite right
Maybe it’s not
The right time
To say

That what burns feels so warm
In winter
My god
The shades of blue
How I’d devour the skyline
Like an arsonist,
I fade to grey
Along with the trembling cityscape

I encapsulate all the seasons & am easily forgotten

I only hope to properly portray
The vacancy light in this hotel I occupy

Me,
Against the wall
Cold, doll-like, confused
Fingertips
Painted the lightest shade of pink that the nail salon could offer me
If only,
I could be elegant
I could like parts of myself that others don’t
I could live my life like
My father envisioned

When he said to me

That I was born
In the perfect season
For a girl who prolongs
Finding a reason
To burn this place down to the ground

Hollow
Cave
Where my old journals remain
Where ex-boyfriends mispronounce my last name
They never remember the best parts of you
They never really knew
How to get through
How your eyes turn dark green when your favourite song comes on
Or when the colour temperature is five thousand Kelvin and
I feel ashamed
That I woke up to find
Myself
Not in embers
But filling a body
With wholeness that only

Real self-acceptance could develop and create

Something permanent
Is never
Found

I’m no good with directions but I don’t believe I’m lost
I’m exactly
On my own two feet
Waiting
To leave a message after the beep

But I hang up, because I remember
They can’t pronounce my last name
The intonation
Is weak
And I
Am so
Much farther than I thought I would be
At this time of my life
Are you, at all, surprised?

When I look
At the cars
Passing me by
On the highway,
I wonder
If they’re going
Somewhere warm and inviting

I don’t know why
That
To me
Feels so terribly frightening

Like a cradle filled with endless lightning

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