Tag: depression

Love poem: Skin to teeth, nineteen times

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Love poem: Skin to teeth, nineteen times

Like picked out of a hornet’s nest,
I painted the walls an ivory-white mixed with peach-pink.
You don’t even drive a truck, so why am I so in love
With you
It must be your character
Your calm personality, too
I can’t do my own laundry without thinking of how you told me,
You would move to Chicago if that was where I was meant to be
We planned our future alongside each other
With short attention span like honeybees.

Like picked straight out of a hornet’s nest
You melted and hardened me like the sap on Sycamore trees.
You kept your cards so close
Like a wild Siamese
A cat scratch disease

Love poem: Skin to teeth, nineteen times (continued)

You’re the kind of guy that –
If you hit someone with your car
They’ll say it really wasn’t your fault at all
I’m the kind of girl
That knows to carefully watch the things I may say
Even though it all
Gets skewed anyway

You can see why I thought we’d be perfect.
You can understand why I wanted to work through it
I nicked my finger trying to open
An Amazon package
Got blood stains on my t-shirt and had to change immediately
Obviously, you know what they would have to say
Sometimes I feel jealous that your life is so black-and-white
Because I feel like the clothing one doesn’t want to put away
And I have no right to complain
My life just turned out this way

When we sat on your couch, and you paused the film
To tell me all about work and all the things that you feel,
I think I fell in love with you for the seventeenth time
And I knew I’d be in love with you for the rest of my life.

Love poem: Skin to teeth, nineteen times (continued)

Because if I accidentally looked down, and hit someone with my car
they would probably say that I had planned this all along
I don’t wanna sound like a victim, but am I truly wrong?
If you were to do quite the same
Regardless of which neurotransmitters were on fire in your brain
They’d forgive you before you even had the option to apologize
Exactly how I did so, so, so many times

Because when I think of that one night,
Our entire future flashes right before my eyes
You and me and Chicago, the city of my dreams
Yet God has other plans
He knows what’s right, it seems
And so did I because when came the sinking feeling
I had the strength to come up for air
Am I self-absorbed to say it?
Am I no longer a casualty if I own it?

Now I’m driving on the motorway, passing by your place
I think I would collapse if I were to see your face.
But if you saw mine,
You may not even recognize
I walk a fine line between being everybody and nobody at the same time

Love poem: Skin to teeth, nineteen times (continued)

I still have visions of us going out
I still have thoughts of us dancing together
I still have visions of us going out
I still have daydreams of us dancing in poor weather

If we were next to each other in the car
And if you were to make a mistake,
No uncertainty I’d take the blame immediately
Because it’s ingrained so deeply within me
Written on the inner walls of my veins
I’d take the blame

A martyr for nothing
A martyr for you and me
And now I’m changing course
I’m thinking things through a little bit more definitively

I’m on the motorway passing by your place
and if I were to see your face
I would hopelessly fall in love for the eighteenth time

“Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.”
He died for our sins
So that I can make peace with mine,
For the nineteenth time

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Poem: Ant colony (birthday balloons)

distantcaveLeave a comment

Poem: Ant colony (birthday balloons)

Nuclear envelopes
A testable hypothesis
Will you still love me if I –
Will you drown me out
Like the noise in a soundproof room
He always said he’d like to go to solitary confinement just to get away
For a honeymoon

Light leaks
Asparagine and leucine
Convoluted sighs and my pink floor-length satin dress
Eating three times on Mondays,
Eating four times, the day after
Consuming enough carbohydrates to be like a plant
A prisoner in your gardener
A wide-awake blooming orchid
Couch that fell from a truck bed onto the motorway
We could just make it ours
Watch the fires and fireflies swarm in the distance
Devouring apricots
A routine for my bedtime

Poem: Ant colony (birthday balloons) [continued]

Letting go of lethargic tendencies
But I don’t have the energy
I’m miserable, with or without you
Have to be the writer of my own memoir, the heroine in my own maladaptive daydreams
That serve me quite well
Like soft serve by the beach
Made from plant-based oat milk & Oreos
I’ll let the sea and the sun and the sky devour me, so I can merge with the ants and
Worry only about my colony
What a dream it’s becoming

Empty head
Empty thoughts
Your Percocet
My writer’s block
I’ve been too, afraid, to put this down on paper
A typewriter with no keys
Hands that swell
Knees that bleed
I know perfectly well
That I’m who you need
Will you be there for me, in the daylight and the evenings?
My handsome prince
Tread carefully
I’m exactly who I aspire to be

Poem: Ant colony (birthday balloons) [continued]

I believe in myself, most of all
Though, the cognitive dissonance gets swept like ashes
At a fireplace
Melting, blurring a reality that you swore was three-dimensional
You vase of a porcelain starlit galaxy
You atmospheric void, claustrophobic from your own apprehension
I’m so in love with every part of you
Especially the pieces you really disdain

I’ll take them in my hands
Like the softest of sand

Poem: Ant colony (birthday balloons) [continued]

I don’t know what to do with all these birthday balloons
The vinyl you bought me, thank you, by the way
You precious thing.
And the things I have to move on from
Tangled in grief-ridden spiderwebs
Merging through lanes with my blinker forever on
I follow all the laws
When the crows are watching, carefully

I’ll let the sea and the sun and the sky devour me, so I can merge with the ants and
Worry only about my colony
What a dream it’s becoming

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Love poem: Sensitive girl

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Love poem: Sensitive girl

My father taught me how to shoot
Oh, he sure did, he taught me real well
But I’m a very sensitive girl
What would I really do if I was in front of you?
I don’t think I’d pull the trigger

I would most likely let you.

Love poem: Asleep (daylight)

distantcaveLeave a comment

Love poem: Asleep (daylight)

We were watching King of the Hill
And oh my God, I miss your laugh
The gleam in your off-shadow hazel eyes
I want it to come right back
I wish we could go back in time to having everything
That was really all I wanted
You- I will never know, the records you don’t share with company
The places you go when you fall sleep

I wanted, to lay down my study materials
On your teenage-flannel-style twin bed
My God, I miss the whiteboard on your wall
Reading all the strange things you write in your childlike handwriting
I felt reserved over a handful minus one of four nights
Held them damn near so close I would get tongue-tied, just trying to make conversation with a cashier at the grocery store

Behind my eyes, blinking – in time-lapse frames
Your smile like a diamond without that discomforting glare
You were my centrepiece, and I was quiet as a soft stone, and I liked that
Not yet realizing how far-fetched it was of a thought that I could keep you
Where you are
And be there, too
(Just a thought)

Love poem: Asleep (daylight) [continued]

Oh my God, you swallowed me whole
I looked forward to the weekend like I never had in my teenage years
All I ever did back then, was dance around my living room like I had friends
You widened my gaze and we created our own place
Where teenage-flannel for a thirty-something was awfully inviting and I
Never cared or considered that you weren’t romantic
My God, I loved being with you
Like I was of no importance
You took centre stage and you painted me a grave
It looked just like it does in the magazines

You went down, so far down
There was no way to follow you
I would have, if I could have
Was not under the impression that a few bad days would turn into half a decade
Panic attacks because I couldn’t reach down and grab you
Shake you, wake you
Get you out of this rancid, deeply isolating dream
Say something like, hey,
(maybe this is really nothing)

It wouldn’t have helped
Because my wishes were far-fetched

Love poem: Asleep (daylight) [continued]

But to this day, I don’t know if you’ll make it
To be like what you created
When you first said hello to me,
“So, um, who are you?”
So, so, so, so, so in love with you
(Are you kidding me?)

Fresh piece of pastel paint
It’s archaic – the cinema is
I remember, we were watching a movie
I got so scared
You made fun of me with distant disposition and cruelty
In that split second, I developed this pit in my stomach
That you no longer were capable of comforting me
Whatever pulled me towards you in the beginning, was not based on effort
The film was playing, and I felt like crying
Crawled to the kitchen and wanted to crawl out of the window
So terrified of what had become of a bruised reality

Image generated for me using DALL-E by Erik Huerta (@Erikismissing on Instagram)

Love poem: Asleep (daylight) [continued]

Can never get right, on paper
The hypnotic daze that expands in my most cherished memories
“So, um, who are you?”
So attached to that phrase
Teenage-minded girl
Hopeful in a self-defeating mannerism
It leads me to wonder
It keeps me awake

What if it was a dream?
What if it was all fake?
Best Cabernet Sauvignon I’ve ever had in my life
I could have slept for days

We were watching our favourite show
And oh my God, I miss your laugh
Waking up to you, hiding from daylight
Should have ripped off the curtains and made you face it

Love poem: Asleep (daylight) [continued]

Please
Come back
To this life

There is
A girl
Who cares

But I can’t come down
That far
To meet you
Where you sleep

In shallow pools, I still grieve
There is nobody to wake me

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Not a love poem: Swan lake memories

distantcaveLeave a comment

Not a love poem: Swan lake memories

Butterflies flying into me, crashing lightly
You told me my skin was soft, and though I knew it to be true,
I felt in part indebted to you.
Like I couldn’t carve out a space
Large enough to climb into
Show you why your dreams are just make-believe

Not my responsibility to teach anybody anything
Because who do I think I am
Easily tan, have Swan Lake memorized & I do pirouettes in my dining room
I still remember the dress I planned to wear
Continues to hang on the shelf
I don’t look in that specific direction

A poem that is not a love poem because it doesn't have a happy ending, or an ending at all.

Not a love poem: Swan lake memories (continued)

Exhausted from doing nothing at all
About how your bad habits look even worse when I look into a microscope
Focusing on school
Highlighting my study materials
No, not you – there, waiting for me,
Opening the door
Letting me cry
Telling me you liked how I felt safe.

I want to hate the trees you like, but there are so many in every place I’ve visited in the last year, and I feel weak when I want to photograph them because they’re so beautiful, and memory plays in time-lapse frames to make me feel sick and dismal with its reminders.

I feel weak anyway
I know the neuroscience of loss, but who I wanted to be I forgot
You make me weak, you made me vulnerable
I loved it and I hated it
I retained it
Delicate like a fine-point pen drawing insects on your arm that isn’t covered in tattoos
I wish I could hate you

Not a love poem: Swan lake memories (continued)

I’ll move like a moth, I think you forgot
The area code that leads to a postcode
That leads to a telephone wire on an absolutely fragrant fire
In the middle of the city, and the chaos causes lawsuits
We like it because we’re in trouble
Playing tag in the backyard of your grandparents’ house
I miss the smell of hydrangeas
That changed colours
When they felt like it, like I do

I feel weak in places I didn’t know were part of me
When I see a tree
That makes me think, he must be there
Sitting pleasantly
Wasting his life without me

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