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
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Misinterpreted my withdrawn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
This is a free verse poem about attachment and detachment – defeat on behalf of simplicity’s sake.
I didn’t expect myself to still feel like this
And my mother laughs because it’s only been a few days
But I feel like it’s dragging on
It’s dragging on
And we didn’t even come to the conclusion of what would become our song
So what am I here to do
Sitting in the corner of the modern, moss-green, vibrantly street-lit café,
A damsel in despondency,
A variation of your favourite four-course strings
A broken-down parlor path with a shiny diamond entryway and glass slippers lining the blizzard-sinking ships,
That match my cruelty
My taste for rabid tongue
The whispers I wouldn’t let you utter
And the hesitation you’d be lucky to never have suffered
A chance for melancholia to clash with the force of nature
To detract from a foreign film
A lost, aching still
An avalanche of surprise
Beguiled by sheer imagination and phosphorescent icing
That smothers a kingdom like the holiest ghost
Always bittersweet to the liking
Made for sharp, pristine vengeance
In my own reserved portrait of solitude
Gazing vibrantly at the majestic cars that drive by
The classics, the tragic
The ancient and recumbent
Reoccurring in stunning ways I could not even think to properly illuminate in due time
Typing
Silently
Wishing you were next to me
Smiling
The way you do
The way you do
So magnificent
Eyes glimmering in concave and crimson, blue
God, I was this close to being obsessed with you
I feel like
A teenager
An angry one
A bitter fool
Mad at myself because I brushed away the
The fleeting thoughts of nah, he won’t like me if I say that
Nah, he won’t like me if I wear that
Nah
I’m moving in circles because I forgot how to dance
I forgot how to feel alive
I trip over my own words
Everything is in disarray
I thought you were going
I thought you were going
I thought you were going to make it work
I thought you were
I thought you were
I thought you were going to make it work with me
I thought you were
I so thought you would have
Made it work with me
And that would be
Meaningful
Hopeful
Spontaneously planned
Crimson and clover all over
Soft rubber bands
Now you’ve got me in a pit and you
Hung up on me
I threw my cellular device on the street
I don’t want to talk to anybody
Anybody at all
Anybody at all
Anybody at all
Anybody at all
I’m not writing another poem about a boy that doesn’t have the strength to come
Tell me it’s not working
Stand there in your clandestine flesh
Stand there, giving me a real piece of yourself
Look at me with dandelions in my hair
Don’t say I’m too charming for you
Tell me I’m too alarming for you
Tell me I scare the living daylights out of you
And you’ve got other girls calling you
Answer the phone in front of me
Take the flowers out of my hair
Push me down on the tar-stained sidewalk
Bully me like you do on your bad days
Get your way
That’s how I want you to leave me
Not like
Not like
Not like
Not like
Not like
Not like
Not like
Not like
Worn desperation
Mixing in fevers of separation
But I thought I
Belonged