Poem: Polite (alone)

Poem: Polite (alone)

Be gentle with yourself
Your graceful little steps
Lavender ribbons in your hair
Pulling a drive-by at the car wash
Infuriating all of your closest friends
Tugging on the rips in your jeans, hoping that when the fabric bursts at the seams
You will pave the way for new daydreams
& life will be plentiful
Once upon a time

Like lock and key,
I thought you were made for me
But I was made for more
Than what this world has to offer

Inside we are all vulnerable
Deserving of kindness
But God isn’t always so polite.
A penchant for
Throwing stones at your door
My fingers appear as though they have suffered frostbite

Chewing on a plastic straw
I thought that I had gone too far
But then I noticed –
I had not moved at all
Weaving a new daydream
Absorbing my most fragile insecurities
And thinking they might be the reasons someone wonderful will fall in love with me

What would that be like?
I thought I had it in another life
When our spines reached the corners of the bedroom
That we had painted the most ethereal blue
I had ever intoxicated myself with, out of sheer hospitality
For the fiber network of my musculoskeletal orchestration
A girl in a sundress
The middle of winter
Taking my gloves off to text him back
Frostbite
Frostbite

Needless to say
I buy one pack of Parliaments per day
Just to never
Just to never
Just to never run out
Because what if I
Because what if I
What if I were to run out
Find you in the middle of the intersection
Screaming for help on a bookshelf
That you built yourself

Then, what would I do?
Coat you in ethereal blue?
I’d display all the facts that I contain in my porcelain doll frame, regarding the closest moon

Or find myself at home
With nobody on the phone
The concrete entering my residence like it’s testing my weightlessness

Paint me diamonds, buy me charcoal
Unravel me on purpose
With potential
To be
In a picture frame with me

This is
How
I remain
Alone

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Love poem: Lily pad

Love poem: Lily pad

I don’t want to put my cards all over the table
Though I’m dying to show you what’s true
How real this significance is
My significant other

Sitting on my lily pad
You know I’m the only one that can get you to relax
Move in slow motion
I’m heavenly reserved
& I know you don’t do these things on purpose
But the caffeine in this Earl Grey tea
It’s making me nervous
I know you don’t do it on purpose

Swaying with myself in my bedroom
I can be violent if you turn the heat up
No longer desperate to be enough
I’ve got a sweetness concave within me
A fruit I only bear to those that can hold it
Tight

Pushing all my buttons
Convincing myself I kind of love it
Have I shown you what’s at the bottom of the sea?
Underneath all the make-believe

I don’t want to have to ask if you missed me!
I’m getting run over by the same train over and over again
My eyes close when I drive & I don’t even mind
Collect my cigarettes in an empty coke can
Police on a motorcycle
Firearms in my trunk
No longer desperate to be enough
I keep trying to make it to the bottom of the sea
But something pulls me back above
I want you to drown with me
If you do
Make sure I drown too

Don’t read into my words
Don’t touch me softly, then make it hurt
A one-way ticket to my favourite Chicago Transit Authority stop
Where I am free to walk around
I don’t need bells and whistles
I need the fogginess to stop

A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
When I sleep
A rose that blooms
On repeat

I want you to drown with me
When I get off my
Lily pad

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Love poem for him: earthquake

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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Free verse poem: Belongings

Free verse poem: Belongings

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

Portrait of Princess Tatyana Yusupova (1850) by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, oil on canvas

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

Sans Titre (Untitled) 115 by Eliane L. Guerin, oil on canvas

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

The Bath (1874) by Alfred Emile Leopold Stevens, oil on canvas

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

Mending the Gown (early 20th century) by Adolphe Borie (1877-1934), oil on canvas, figurative artwork

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

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Open-Air-Interior-barcelona-1892-Ramon-Casas-i-Carbo.jpg
Open Air Interior Barcelona (1892) by Ramon Casos i Carbo, oil on canvas

Worn desperation
Mixing in fevers of separation

But I thought I
Belonged

Thank you for reading, & be sure to visit paypal.me/LilacDoveCA to buy me a coffee for my birthday on September 14, 2022.

Thank you for your support – currently working on the cocktail party poetry collection.

xoxo

Poem: How little I meant

Poem: How little I meant

Live in modest obscurity
Classic California beach living
Sunglasses, shades, Maseratis, fast cars, soda pop
A life that has been glamorized
Or so I had hypothesized
He wouldn’t even be reading in between my lines
Too busy thinking about himself all the time

Perhaps a few motels overlooking the coast
Empty parking lots
Paint a vision for yourself
Soft ice cream in all good health
Said you were sober, had liquor on the top shelf
Honey, I thought you loved yourself

Ladies, you know me for my diamonds
I’ll show you everything sparkly that’s designer
That girl you once knew, you’re right behind her
To enjoy the high life without mascara on
To come to rise with the evening sun
To know how to really know someone
Stay omnipresent – hot, wild, and young
Like every morning, a new life has just begun
Dark spaces for dark traces of ice-cold skeletons
Bones only fit like fragments
Do what you’re told
Let your dream love life in front of you start to unfold

Everything in the right order
Everything in the right order
Everything all the same
Everything all the same

Lying between last quarter and new moon
I figured when we’d talk, we would be with each other soon
There are words on my body, on yours – video game cartoons
You never meant to express how little I meant to you

I started noticing in conversation
When the focus was on us, you lacked elation
I quit my work for you, I gave up waiting
I became so exhausted not living, but waiting
I tried to show you I was patient
You hate yourself like you’re tainted
Letting of go of the dream that one day you and I would make it

Now I’m in the doorway, sort of half-naked
I’m alone, but I’m tranquil, and nothing you do will change it

I’m alone but I’m tranquil
Nothing you do will change it