The things I see, the things I love
Listen to “Belongings (how I want you to leave)” which you can find at: https://lilacdove.com/blog/free-verse-poem-belongings/
The second is titled “This time (Freshwater Lilies)” and has never been posted.
Support my work here: https://paypal.me/LilacDoveCA
I told him he could have
Any part of me that he wanted
All the marble he envisioned
Chilled and defeatist, but forever unmoving
Sparkles that shape the tide of your marked ingenuity
Cold heaven, sacred
Worn out walls of fibers and satin sheath
At sundown, we rest and reprieve
Find solace in the mistakes that counted against us
One by one
Rosemary falls beneath you like evangelical riverbeds
Rainfall on a crisp white, bestowed meadow
Damsel in distress, sitting at Cape Cod
Breathing in the marine layer
Decadent, but desolate perchance
A personal favor for nobody
In particular
If you have a minute
Cos you always have a minute
For me
Save me some time
Buy mine sharply, but not robustly
Golden edges
Soft-lit amber haze that spins like a year of soft rock (lamenting, slowly)
Lightning
Moons that belong to seasons and
Seasons that belong to no one
In particular
If ownership is inconsequential of time
And we all have time
For other people
Do we, do we?
What is it that we desire?
If only
If only
I could have made my mark by now
I lapsed into a momentum where I could not shift my gaze correctly at the afterthought of
How I made sense to nobody
And nobody made love to me
Why would they?
Would they, even?
Would I let anyone see me in that still?
When my hazel eyes bend like the seas
How could I summon anything more glamorous than how the evening resides in a French solitude that complements my need for quality alone time
When I am not made of silk or marble but
Fragments of broken chamber orchestras
That cascade like I’m running away from forever
A soft drink on a Wednesday, in gloomy July
A honeymoon for your favourite runaway bride
On the flight, they asked if I wanted alcohol
And I erupted in a laughter that was
Seemingly inappropriate
For the vague informality of the occasion.
In rapture
I used to be unable to feel thrills because my being did not accept them as kind
One amongst the wolves
Rambunctious and heroic in nature, but a hero to no one
Don’t get me confused
I do find it amusing
How the symphony plays all of their longest songs just for me
And how nobody ever really takes hold of your name
Or your posture
When you’ve
Spent your life
Awake by pretense
An effort to be
In combat, like a dove,
A soft sparrow, seemingly longing for an ending to the illusion
With whom?
With whom do I share my fears!
What cave do I run to when I’m cold, covered in mud
Shivering and despondent
They know my face but haven’t counted the dots on my cheeks
They don’t know what I look like when I cry
Or why I do
If I ever
Decide to break the stillness of my figure
That makes me heavenly in God’s eyes
There is no reason to run
I say, I say to myself; I say it often.
Settle here forever in the dawn of the styrofoam melted cacophony where
I and you melt in two interchangeable pastel colours
Decide to go on a journey because we are
Bored
And so tired of being chained to our demonic vanity mirrors
Alone
But in plenty
Of patient, never-forgetting ambitions & daydreams
I lost the ending to our story
I just
Let it slip
Away from where I sleep at night
I let the silence consume my boredom
© Elle Silvestrov
It scared me so
I knew
We were going down
I knew
You would not turn around
And still
Like a beat
I’m made of memories
Crystal castles
Made of ashes
My forgetful apprentice
With wrath like a vengeance
Misinterpreted my withdrawn
Glances at the sharp, flawlessly glamorized corners of the living room
(Mine)
Velveteen heart-shaped sunglasses
When I’m asleep, you know it plays
Again on repeat
The things
You said
When my hands were in my lap
I can’t
Even sleep
I can’t
Even sleep
I can’t
Even sleep
I can’t
Find a song
That makes you make sense to me
More than
The last
Few words you sent
And how
Fast I sank
My teeth
Into my hand
To keep
From setting my bedroom on fire
All the wires
All the while –
They surrounded me like filth
Carcasses of your hypnotic, granite, carbon imagination
An avalanche of insecurities, I thought I had
Swallowed
In a strawberry, lime, and gin cocktail
Held fragile
An escape would be too good to be true
Though it wouldn’t make me think less about you
Soft skin
In collapsing horizons
Pitfalls
Two doves on a swing
I’ll give you my everything
Every last piece of marble and copper
In the mornings, we eat vegan butter on toast
And our evenings of suffering remake every inhospitable, tarnished spider web
That fills us with a skepticism
Too delicate to absolve
(Mine)
In waves, so transient
A hospital bed
With white flowers for
For me, for me, for me
For me, for me, for me
For me
And I deleted my profile because
I can’t handle falling in love again
I can’t help
I can’t handle
I can’t handle falling in love again
I can’t help
I can’t handle
I can’t handle falling in love again
I can’t help
I can’t hang
I can’t feel
Anything that could get me close
Anything that could get me close
We were so close
I can’t help
I can’t help
Thinking we were so close,
Like an inopportune sky
Just there
Us two
Probably as vacant as each other
© Elle Silvestrov
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Tell me a fable
A pretty one
Lie if you can make it half-decent
It’s as if embers from my rotten tomb have come back to life as
Soft pink edges
Anatolic, seemingly vacant rings of fire
Undertones of bluish-grey with a violence that
Covers me in indifference
But I want it to be rapture, in evocative coincidence
A tint of reimagined tendencies
My scattered disarray of silenced opinions
And violet ultramarine hesitation
I try to be gentle
But I step on leaves that crack
Crossing my fingers, there wasn’t a snail
Underneath
Behind my trepidation
There is a vicinity with a lakeside residential view
I couldn’t breathe when you were holding me
I felt like I was becoming discolored
Wondered what part of that I devised
A satin grey globe where we
Envisioned our honeymoon
Picked out places, names that seemed familiar
A euphoric but decidedly shapeless language
A foreign body
Like tectonic plates
Smooth, but not comatose
On close on purpose
A bittersweet taste
A light that turns on when you want it to be dark
A fire alarm
That burns
A missed left turn
Turn the page, crash, and burn
And still I stand at the cashier, holding dollar bills that are paper thin
Like the epitome of a half-circle
Like the cigarette, you don’t put out
Because you let the street take care of it
Cherish it
Marinate it in the heat of October in Los Angeles
A vehemence down beneath that which can’t be seen
And is never spoken aloud
Imbued by a cityscape, I miss more than you can possibly imagine
The twinkling city lights
A cacophony of everything that was so right for me
Felt so good to me
And the plasm lost its charge, and the dewdrops disappeared
I never quite got over it
Chicago
I miss you
The way you held me close to you at night
Nobody ever did it better
Than you
I’m finding it hard to
Be like a daisy
In the breeze, that moves my hair
To the other side
I hold my head in my hands
I feel like
Coming apart tonight
To tell you the truth
Endless interlaced reflection symmetry to tell me I am not what someone wants to find
Not what anybody would look for
Unless they were as disillusioned as my perception of self
Though it seems that tonight is the night
I warned you
I told you
I’m coming apart just right
Nobody ever held me like you, forgetful city
This is a love poem, and I wish it wasn’t.
I just want
To cascade over you like smooth waterfalls
Barely a blink
Come up for air
In the clandestine, vogue-painted closet tone-deaf chambers
Where satin and silk are interchangeable,
Even though the mechanisms stretch far past
What the modern seamstress can manage
Irreversible damage
To my hippocampus, and I think it’s making the horizon easier to navigate
Isn’t that a lovely thought?
Jolly ranchers for two, I’ll split one with you
I’ll split you in two
The grave filth that the manager keeps echoing in his 9-story apartment building
The couple on the seventh floor doesn’t know their floor has a leak
And I feel like I haven’t been asleep for weeks
For a prime suspect, I make a good candidate
And I make my bed
Before sunrise, or in the afternoon
I knew it was too soon to move in
And a panic started beckoning within
But if steel fences were like a goldfish that looks at you with a sideway’s glance when you’re paying attention to both his soft edges and the horror of your depleted reflection upon the opaque glass water chamber
I’d be able to dissolve my fears ambiguously
And not hold a ceremony
Because I don’t like being on stage
Nor holding a payphone
Nor sitting in an airplane aisle seat because I think that’s too far away that I am from blue
I don’t regret letting myself want you
For now, the trail has narrowed, and I’m even more sure of the concepts that my timid nature thought I knew from before
But hadn’t yet fully absorbed
Even though my nerves
Stood still with dawn’s headlights shining their vinyl arterial lining luminescence forward
Softly but forever remarkable
Diverging a separate path for a quiet evening amongst the vivid skyscrapers,
That spill vacantly flowing and simultaneously churning blood all over the paved city streets and their locked corridors
A lost art, I’m sure
I try not to step too close
I love my lavender bedrooms wall the most
I might as well write a poem about how they surround me, like silk cotton webs that disappear when touched
A new collection of elegant charcoal grey fine-point pens
With ink that covers the palm of my hand
A grocery shopping list
Paid my bills on the fifth
And ever since we split
I’ve been wondering if nostalgia feels different to different people
Or if there’s a place where one can collectively mourn
To feel part of a generational gap that
Splits into definitives
Like a blueberry raspberry sorbet cut into two separate wholes,
Both of which are for me
I turn the pages; I adjust my glasses
I picture my cat telling me she didn’t like you
And I almost laugh at myself, but then I think that would be strange
I didn’t like the way you tried to pull her off the bed
But it said so much
I was probably too hungover to think very much of it at the time, that very second in your transparent presence that awakens me now
But now, with my caramel espresso and my obsolete, filed manuscripts
I venerate how smooth of a current I created
Like the gentlest riverbed
That you could fall off your yacht into
And it would absorb you without agony
Without desperation or offbeat candor
A modern-day orchestration of a segment of contribution
You – to the waves
The waves to the mariner’s life
The ships to the tide pools,
The time I couldn’t find, the time to divide
If something bigger than you consumes you,
Without delineating a debt,
Without drawing a line
How close is too close before it becomes just fine
How fast do we absorb each other’s embers before we collapse in time
I still think of how I looked at you while you were drawing in the coffee shop