she is the precipice on which i stand by silverthorne-studios, literature
Literature
she is the precipice on which i stand
sometimes i can see the tension in her smile.
it's those long-night mornings
where she's so spent
she can't hardly walk straight
and her image of a perfect life
slips just enough that as she's tumbling into bed,
in the moment before she passes out, she looks at me.
through her exhaustion and her dazed feelings
from pulling yet another all-nighter,
she smiles.
it's her smile she says is just for me
because in that moment, in that smile,
she has let everything go.
she won't admit to it, not even to me,
but she's tired. not tired as in sleepy,
but tired as
It’s day two
& I already feel
shriveled, lungless,
overworked.
I’ve been living
out of my suitcase
since I got home,
sleeping
on the couch &
leaving my laundry
on the floor.
Everything in my refrigerator
screams 12 days too late
& rent money is due.
She’s slapping me
in the face,
you see.
Depression,
that heartless bitch
with the long
spider legs
& hot mouth-
she enjoys
throwing me
into furniture-
up against
thin walls
& having her way with me.
I've never loved so much pain,
and I'm still not sure I do,
but maybe,
just maybe,
your little outbursts
of everything unenjoyable
are what I enjoy just fine.
It seems that most of the word-fall
pouring incessantly out of your mouth
consists of a myriad of expletives,
water formed of eloquent obscenities,
and yet,
it's this water that I find
the most refreshing.
Maybe I'm insane to think that.
Maybe.
poor, lovely symphony,
you've fallen in love with a shipwreck
and are doomed to be dragged out into her sea;
you're just a boy, drowning in the saltiness
of her bitter tears - shed to stain her ink-smudged misery -
and i know you taste her pain
as if it were your own.
i.
When I was six a phoenix
tried to drown me.
Underwater I grabbed for fire.
Like Icarus, I was reaching
towards the sun.
I hope he still has
bald spots. I hope he still
cradles searing scars.
He was death,
I was the bird.
ii.
My uncle knows plastic-
wrapped soaps as well
as he knows fine wines.
If he drinks enough,
he thinks it’s love-
carved names rubbing
the silver drain smooth. Diver: 28 days
sweating, ship black against
sea. Like it had been peeled
from amber tongues.
iii.
On my fifteenth birthday, the boy
with stars on his fists and Saturn’s
rings in his eyes told me I was pretty.
It was the first time
anyone had
I have told my secrets
through loves ink -
painted them to my skin
with watercolor defiance.
& writers, we sometimes
write about our scars
in riddles, layers upon
layers of thought, -
care for them
like flowers
growing
on the warlands
of our bodies.
Worthy,
we give them faces,
we give them names,
we give them gravestones.
We kill them off
in our stories,
make them villains,
make them heroes.
I have wrists that roar,
& I will be damned
if I don’t let them
tell their stories.
You should never attack a poet, by DearPoetry, literature
Literature
You should never attack a poet,
we are the best at exploiting weakness.
the night you took a scalpel to my chest
& fed my heart to the stars,
you told me i could hate you
if i needed to.
with an exorcism
i tried to cast you out
of my body.
i was contorted limbs:
the language of tongues
trying to find myself
in the cosmos
of lit kerosene fingertips,
& the kinds of habits
that only choke me at 3am -
when my eyes aren’t yet heavy
enough for sleep;
my mind tells me to do awful things.
between fucking &
i-don’t-know-who-i-am-
anymore,
you are the calories
in the mathematical equation
scribbled &
scratched out
of me.
i think of shy moons
an