Love poem: Someone new (pastel pink blush)

Love poem: Someone new (pastel pink blush)

You were a one-man show
Hardly feeding off the audience
And I was so afraid of ever letting you down
But when I think of last winter
I lose my train of thought
Like my body’s trying to tell me
Not to go back there
Not to stay aware
Not to send you a letter to let you know I’d be there

I don’t have
Any photographs
Because I thought I wasn’t the type to document things
And when you’d leave the table
To take a call
I’d find comfort in sitting alone at the bar
Like I showed up on my own
With nobody to remind me
The emptiness of staring in the corners of the eyes of my boy as he’s gazing away
Not taking notice of the blush on my cheeks
That I re-applied several thousand times
To paint myself as
A happy girl
A happy girl
The corner of your deep brown, vacant eyes

I stayed awake, most nights
Couldn’t bear to turn off the lights
Had stunning pink visuals running through my neural fiber sheath
Racing our cars against each other
Through the wind and never without
Asking about your day because that, to me, was the most important part of mine
How I grew so tired sometimes
Wondering if I had
Mistakenly locked myself up in a basement surrounded by mirrors
I could never bring myself to look in because
I knew
The light pastel pink blush on my cheeks
Wasn’t quite right
Wasn’t quite right

Sometimes I hear a song
That I think you might like
I guess I’m still wondering how to make you feel better
It wears me out
I turn off the sound
Because of this, it just doesn’t feel right
It just doesn’t feel right
That it’s a Saturday and I’m alone tonight

But it’s like I’ve arrived at my desk so that I could sit with the silence
Wondering the count of the distance between us in miles
Ripping the Christmas card I bought for you into small pieces
That was old news, old news, old news
Maybe next December
I’ll have gotten over you

And that could feel
Quite right
And I could turn off
The light
And I could get my blush
Just right

By being with someone new

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Soundcloud poetry: 2 new soundcloud entries

Soundcloud poetry: 2 new entries, listen here

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.

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Love poem: As vacant (mine)

Love poem: As vacant (mine)

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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Free verse poem: The evening spent waking up (Chicago)

Free verse poem: The evening spent waking up (Chicago)

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

Love poem: Drawing in a coffee shop

Love poem: Drawing in a coffee shop

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

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