firmament
iophilia:
i.
you remember dying in kensington gardens. you remember the slow beginning rush, the pull it takes for you to see how to die. how to die completely. you remember dying in kensington gardens but you haven’t died completely. the pull wasn’t enough. nothing ever was.
all their promises are just circles.
the fountain they deemed sacred. water so murky you forgot what the sky looked like. cobblestone. cobblestone pavements. the blues. the reds. the violets. statues they used to call angels. children. their bicycles with the pretty flower baskets in front. hands entwined. gold maple leaves. dying maples. his promise. nothing.
nothing. all just circles.
ii.
you tell him you feel holy; he rolls you onto your back and says you must only think happy thoughts if you want to taste the clouds.
iii.
he blows lilies down your jaw to the crook of your neck, draws more down your collarbones. from here, his lips leave a trail of fairydust on their way to your arms. he whimpers lullabies to both your wrists and asks you to forget about autumn.
but you can’t. you never tell him this.
you just let him kiss you like maple leaves don’t ever wilt.
iv.
he pretends to know his way, clipping the weatherworn map in his left hand and waving hello to the mermaids with his right. the hurricanes he leaves destroy not much else but himself and yet, all this destruction is so easily forgotten. (to be immortal is to forget.)
the Jolly Roger dotes upon him as he dotes upon you but the look on his eyes is one you know so, so well. those sapphires are as familiar as the sirens’ cries but you never tell him this.
hands so little, so brittle, eyes so rotten and lips exhausted, the boys have long ago stopped trying. you know he hasn’t. he pretends to know his way but he’s just as lost as they are; the only difference is that the seas still welcome him home.
you know he doesn’t know what that word means too. you just want to let him lean his head on your shoulder to tell him your definition of it but you’re scared you’ll be the next one to lose yourself.
v.
there are days he asks you to cover your ears and try not to breathe too much. these are the days when the mermaids would sing of mangled fairy wings and vanished fairy dust; fairy bones that have been offered fatedly to cobwebs.
some days he asks you to sing for him yourself. these are the days when he would pierce the thought of growing up with a thousand poisoned Indian arrows.
you sing to him with the sirens’ cries in mind (again). the lagoon adapts a different shade of black, and yet the stars still shine blacker.
vi.
you remember dying in kensington gardens but you forget what dying feels like. you forget paradise.
his kisses make you wonder if the flick of his hook across your throat would feel just as lovely.
vii.
fall returns and you think you want to grow up. he touches you goodbye. you let him kiss you while all the leaves wither with the wind. hush, he smiles. hush, darling. fall returns and you want to grow up but you stay. you stay in the ill interim of his touch and your tattered grace, of his warm immortality and your mortal warmth, of the lost boys’ delusions and the mermaids’ saccharine treachery.
you dance in your nightgown and dream of bleeding to desiccation in a fairytale graveyard.
viii.
“to die will be an awfully big adventure.”
he strokes your cheek and you think he promises to take you to never—
he never really promises.
ix.
to be immortal is to forget.
but nothing is ever completely forgotten.
(you’re eighty-nine and in your deathbed and he’s in another faraway land with another wide-eyed girl but he’s still lost and dying.)
Yasmin’s note: This is fucking incredible.
30
memoratora:
for the sake of my mind, i ripped out my eyes, purged my soul of impurities & darkness, & now — i am blind. though, no longer arrested by the sights i beheld upon my palms in thirst for the saturation of the world’s essence embers. i can feel the earth caress mine feet with her dust & speak in thousands of whispers — the drums of root & fawn & star — sounds devoured by mine thirsted ears & newly empty corridors, as the inhabitants within, dark & bright, have settled into refrain too; to hear their own cacophonies & summon silence within them, a mirror of their master mother whom kisses them sweet & lovingly, her eyes aglisten sadness.
i cannot tell you how long this silence shall remain, how long it will cultivate till it becomes pallid, wilting to its final end; but the fragrance of its war will remain to say, to be reborn again upon the eden of this horizon. & it will unite the universe again, this beloved silence & the stars will climb upon my spine with their fingers of light & fill the concaves of me & paint the seas of my blood divine — & there shall be no void, then. albeit — the remembrance of love shall always remain the untouchable invictus flower that hovers heart within my ribcage, etern scarlet red.
odyssey & his vessel harbor the titans beneath mine seas quietly, tongueless & tearful, all-knowing of soulverse. they too, are inglorious. too beautiful — too beautiful, the conjurers of me.
perhaps i cannot handle, not just yet. not just yet — this they know.
(Source: voidargot)
57
Rosed
crisppenmanship:
the roses I sent you months ago have withered away…the red is barely visible…you changed the water until forgetting until it became a habit…the vase collected dust…but you never moved the arrangement…the card I wrote in still sits in its holder…it says…”to you…and your face…I miss it…I can’t wait to see you again…even though I saw you last night…”
it’s been months since I’ve seen you…hearts could grow fonder in situations like this…but the longer you’re away…I tend to not long for it all…and that binds my conscious into twine…and I’ve been strapped to these absent minded day dreams for weeks…so time and distance isn’t what’s best for us…trips back and forth won’t make up for time lost…but its better that we lose time then lose each other…
7
girlbrokendown:
You held me as though my bones were yours and my spine sang for you in shivers, even now my fingers, my toes and elbows budge without reason as I feel the ghosts of your lips on wrists when my hands curl into the shape of yours, wondering how my fists clench so tightly that my nails leave moon creases in orbits on the insides of my palms but you were always stars, strewn amongst letters as between us secrets that fall on my back when my neck drops to check for you when my knees rattle with the words that you said without knowing that they would still move everything from underneath my skin.
(via fossilheart-deactivated20130414)
36
10.28am
captain-im-fine:
White subtle Sunday morning spread across the vast open sky. Hints of last nights conversations in the air sprawled across my skin and bones. The past few weeks and the next few weeks hang so heavy in my lungs. I just wanted one night to forget the responsibility I carry on cracked shoulder blades. A season to sleep away the memories that still hang around in some ghost town of a love I accidentally stumbled across and evicted as soon as chasing cars were done. Endings are bitter sweet and they taste like the loneliest days and the longest nights. Never ending sunrises and sets put the world into perspective, the horizon beautifully sculpted for another morning.
If I keep waking up it’s all going to fall into place.
7
oceanuse:
when it was a monday and i tucked my arm under my head and closed my eyes in language arts, my teacher ran over and patted my elbow, rapidly whispering to others.
“natalie! is she asleep?”
“allie, do you know what happened?”
“if you’re awake, you can tell me whatever is wrong, okay?”
“if you’re just tired, make sure you finished all your work, dear.”
—
on the saturday before, leanne & i sat on a bench at the side of a bridge on the sidewalk. we were watching cars pass by, looking at the drivers, wondering what their time in highschool was like, looking at the kids, wondering who they will love and what their favorite books will be. her messy black braid was twisted up into a bun, and her bangs kept on blowing across her eyes. her arms were wrapped around her knees, and she was smoking a cigarette. she doesn’t smoke. leanne never smokes.
her eyes watered when she first sucked in, and she started choking and cussing, telling me to hold her lighter. my fingers were shaking when i grabbed it. hers didn’t, the entire time her breathing slowed and got used to it.
“i’m cold.”
“i know you are,” she sighed. leanne was so pretty. in ninth grade, she told me she hated self-pity. in eleventh grade, she told me she was a waste. a beautiful disaster, right? i was a cold bundle of ripped skin & inarticulate words. leanne was an alluring misread pregnancy test.
“it’s winter and it’s thirty two degrees, and it’s not snowing. our bones will not be preserved, and our words never mattered, anyway. i hate smoking.”
after ten minutes, she tossed it on the ground and smashed it with her foot. “you should really start spending time with everyone you love so much more. i don’t know when they’ll lose me or when i’ll lose them.” my chucks were dangling a centimeter above the ground. she picked up her smashed cigarette, walking away, and threw it in the trash.
—
at ten, she called me. leanne never calls. leanne never does this, leanne never does that. i was curled up on the couch with my mom, dad, and sister, watching charlie brown.
“yes?”
“can you please come over, please?”
you should really start spending time with everyone you love so much more.
“um, i’m busy. sorry. talk to you after school tomorrow, okay? bye, leanne.” i hung up quickly, tasting a bitter laugh growing in my mouth.
—
at eleven, right as i walked into my bedroom, she texted me. i’m sorry for not being able to see you, too. p.s.: cigarettes are terrible. i wanted to be as beautiful as a poet for one day.
on sunday, i quietly walked into the bathroom and closed the door. i didn’t lock. parents gone. sister gone. leanne— gone. i slid into the bathtub, feeling the cold and the chill from the open window whistle themselves up my pores and into my veins.
the water was warm, silently rising up my toes, my ankles, my calves, my knees. i scratched my arms. “there are black holes hidden under your skin,” she told me in tenth grade.
i tried to stick my head under, leave my eyelids shut, and breathe in, but i couldn’t. you just can’t do some things. leanne wanted to die & she got to die, and i wanted to but i can’t, because living hurt so much for me, it forced me to exist.
i can’t die because leanne did, because so many other teenagers did, because i had to spend time with family and friends more, because my parents cared about me, because my sister loved me, because the people at grocery stores & pta meetings would whisper, they had a teenage suicide; those poor, poor parents; and they say their child committed suicide because a best friend died, because they would force me to live, me trying to prove things and why i wasn’t dying over this, over that,because i’d be a misunderstood enigma, losing her life because someone else did
- stick your head under &
- breathe in & try
- to not think.
yasmin’s note: really stunning imagery- and by stunning, i mean it literally shocked me, startled me, stunned me. gorgeous piece.
(via oceanuse-deactivated20130409)
11
Places a GPS won’t go
eliswill:
I think we end up dating our friends because we just get tired of drawing out road maps for strangers. Sketching out the terrain of ourselves for everyone new. You can get stuck so thoughtlessly in the worst relationships like this too, frightened that no one else could ever navigate you the same way again. And sometimes being single is made of that same fearful love.
Every holiday, no matter how insignificant, hurts these days. Holidays I never cared about before. Waking late on labor day in a shadowless room, the lights coated everything evenly in an early afternoon glow. I again wake alone, trying to remember to forget she’s not in the kitchen anymore, reading and brewing coffee for when I finally awake. Because when you own someones map, you study it while they sleep. To find the truest ways to care for them. To know the exact time it takes before you can speak in more than just hugs. But I make the coffee for myself these days. Even on Christmas, like it’s just any other day, and I get to wondering why I even bother to put up the tree each year. And we fall for our friends because at least someone cares to call on Christmas Eve. Knowing we’re drinking alone and needing a voice to distract us from counting the days between a withering mistletoe and it’s last kiss.
Walking to the park yesterday, I found myself getting more and more frightened of strangers. Scared of all the beautiful faces I might cross on the way. I give in to easily to a glance and the futures I see in them. We can ruin ourselves taking promises from people they never intended to give. Staring at their hands and wondering how well they would fit, cupped into ours. Weeding out the prospects by how softly they might hold our heart. And for some reason, the one pair of hands we never took the time to see were the hands of the friend we should have taken seriously long ago.
Because they’ve seen you fall apart over all the miles you’ve given away. They’ve seen you consumed by one holiday after another. The whole calendar of you. And it’s not cheap to run to them, and it’s not a misfire or last resort. We run to our friends when we finally can admit that there is a reason they have been around the whole time. That they haven’t yet walked away like all the others that they convinced you weren’t worthy of your love. Because you found one person in this entire world who never asked you to draw out a map for them. They’ve been sketching you secretly for years. And you’d be blind to not notice all the ways they’ve loved you as you’ve been looking for love. Maybe it’s time we all stop trying so hard. Maybe it’s time to tell them how you like your coffee in the morning, and exactly what time it’s okay for more than just hugs.
158
theredsun:
I watched the breakers disperse and old, salted wedding rings follow the pull of the tide. The bridges were foggy as the rain came in, slipping metal beams in and out of the muddy sky. And I was falling out of love with you.
The cream colored houses and bricks stacked up like shrines. A New York winter song. My car running coarsely along a broken highway. There are so many ways to tell you I was wrong. So many openings in conversation. I am quiet, though.
And all our friends are leaving here. Struck by general stores and the magnetic force of a small town lull. We watch them leave, help them move. Lean out the windows and remember how November stirred our tea. It’s always a long goodbye. The Throgs Neck in the rear view now.
It’s always one hundred miles between you and I.
12
I’ve got you trapped in a corner
gretas-notebook:
I’ve got you trapped in a corner, and all I can think about is dust, about tear gas and split skin and moving across oceans. There was never any grit between our teeth when we kissed, no substance to the bruises you left running down my neck like a purple archipelago. I keep holding onto the syntax of your eyelids, how your hair looked beneath the soft cafe lights. Did you know I’d write poems about you? You must have; I was candle wax in your hands, one inch away from flight. In the pocket dictionary of places I have been that I keep with me in my spine, underneath the word home is only a description of your arms. I still have you trapped in a corner. I still can’t let go. There’s a shrine in my bedroom for every poem that has ever made me ache, and you are folded between pages like a razorblade.
I’ve got you trapped in a corner, and all I can think about is mushroom clouds, is bone fractures and roadkill and chapped lips. Your mouth is the place I want to go to when I die.
10
Born to the Night
withoriginalenergy:
I’m going to tell you a story. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it. It won’t be earthshattering or dazzlingly beautiful and there probably won’t be a happy ending. But I hope in the end you’ll see a little grain of truth.
i. Most of the world is born to the sun. Bright and glowing warmth overflowing. They live for the day and dream in the fields of daisies. She was different. She was born to the dark side of the moon and her days were spent wandering through dried up riverbeds gathering the remnants of lives gone by.
ii. She rarely laughed. But when she did it was loud and splitting. The sound shook birds from the trees.
iii. She liked the night. Every job she ever had she worked the night shift standing in conveniences stores as zombie like people filed in for coffee and granola bars. Thus it goes without question that her greatest love in life would be the stars.
iv. She wanted to study astronomy. She made it through two years of university until reality took its toll and she dropped out. Maybe it was lack of funds, draining ambition, or lack of motivation. I do not know. That detail is not key to this story I give you.
v. I do know she picked up one day and left. No one heard from her again. After a while she stopped getting talked about at parties or mentioned by friends. Long enough had passed and finally no one knew who that girl in the photographs was. Dark eyed, raven haired looking long past with a stormy stare.
vi. Some say she went to the stormiest sea. Where the only thing there is black glass ocean and frightened feelings. Others say she took to eternal sleep in a riverbed. I figure she went to the place where she belonged. To a world of night where the stars and the dark side of the moon were one.
(Source: with-original-energy)
16
my baby shoots her mouth off
delendas:
i wore my dark purple lipstick today as war paint and protest that fingering them would make you wither and die midas touch without the glamour or gold and off kilter or sinister as it may seem i felt damn good better than i have in months kicking and screaming all the way to past lovers graves
6
Island
allenated:
“What can I get you?”
“A life?” I said. “Another kind of life.”
The bartender shrugged.
“No? Okay. Tequila, then. I want four shots in front of me, lined up like a death row.”
The bartender served them. I downed everything, sans the salt. I have been taught well. A few minutes later, I ordered a beer to chase away the bite that lingered.
“Is ‘life’ getting to you yet?” the bartender asked.
“Just about,” I told him.
My phone blinked.
“See that?”
He stared.
“That’s how irrelevant I am.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s everyone’s facebook. Everyone’s tweets.”
“Ah.”
“Every online update is an insult to me.”
The bartender scratched his beard.
“They do that everyday. Do you know how many of these fuckers and fuckettes have returned a message from me? None.”
“Ah.”
“The last one I got was a month ago. I was tagged in an invitation to a christening, which I can’t go to anyway because the christening happens in another continent. I think my friend thought it would be cute. It’s cute, all right. It’s as humorous as his baby’s face, I can tell you that.”
The bartender nodded sympathetically.
I shook my phone in the air.“This is a reminder, if anything.”
“Of what?” The bartender asked.
“I think I need another shot of tequila.”
He moved.
“Make that a couple.”
He did. I was done with the beer, too.
“When was the last time you met your best friend?” I asked the bartender.
“Oh, I don’t know. His son was 8. The boy’s in university now.”
“Wow,” I smiled. “I guess I am not alone in as much as I am alone.”
“You can’t hold on to anyone forever.”
I snorted. “I had refused to believe that. So strongly, I tried to argue against it. But now it seems like sage advice.”
“Bars are for comfort.”
I laughed. “No they’re not. Bars are for numbing yourself. Walking home drunk in the middle of the night is wishing you don’t make it home alive.”
“That’s morbid.”
“Yeah?” I swilled the last of the beer. “At least it’s not a crime. Not exactly.” I stood.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving. You’re going to refuse me any more shots, anyway. There are other bars I can hit.”
The bartender shrugged. “Take care.”
“You betcha,” I said. I wondered how many liars there were in the world, if everyone was just self-involved by nature and I shouldn’t take it personally.
I wish I were in an alternate universe, where all bartenders were sympathetic and tequila had no limits. Where, yes, you couldn’t hold on to anyone forever, but you would never wish you could. Only because you didn’t need anyone. A universe where it was perfectly and genuinely fine to live out your life alone and die the same way.
(Source: colvinwilt)
29
6
risiblerapscallion:
do you ever wonder which side of the avocado will hold onto the seed when you cut it in half?
or if a bird notices when it drops a feather?
do you ever think about what crying in alone in a cave would be like,
or why the moon seemed so angry the other night, glaring down at the earth?
have you ever asked an orange permission to take off its peel?
or begged an onion not to make you cry?
have you ever screamed into the wind, just to see if it might scream back?
i have.
and it doesn’t change a single thing.
until of course,
it changes everything.
Michelle’s Note: I find the insight to be fascinating.
11
your lips, they stay perfectly still—1
wordswecaptured:
he doesn’t write anymore.
he used to. his words used to be his way of knowing where he was in the universe and he used to sit down every night and pick up his favorite black pen and crack the spine on his buttery leather journal and write.
now he will sit down, sometimes. he will feel the creaky wooden chair beneath him and he will move his hips around a bit as if he is testing the weight of his own bones. he’ll sigh, maybe. his lungs fit perfectly into sad exhalations like pleas into empty space. he’ll reach for his pen but his hand will hesitate and instead he aimlessly sifts through the creamy pages from before.
june 20
i think i’d like to give myself to you instead of just flowers this time.
Read More
Yasmin’s note: Definitely worth the read. This is brilliant. ‘August 15’ was my favorite.
19
