Csoip - Down The Rabbit Hole - Tumblr Blog

friday i'm in love (also i have your pants)

i text a lot of things at you without meaning because i’m meaning not to say too much. i got milk and look at this cat have you seen my eyeliner today, also i have your pants. you know the ones i borrowed and then i didn’t quite give back. i’m letting go now, i swear. we’re nothing more than friends. also i have your scarf, you left it the last time you were over because you left in a hurry. apparently you’re allergic to tulips or in some way to me because i hugged you on the way in and you turned right back out. god i hate myself more than i hate this or you. i text you still a lot, but never first; chivalrous and always after you. am i easier when you don’t have to look at me? also i like to look at you. every also i say is something i haven’t said to you. also i miss you. i can’t really miss you because i never had you. as your best friend i have to say i’m glad that you are happy. also it’s only just that i wish it were with me. also i’ll never do a thing about it. so i’ll just sit here and say also that i love you just a little and i’m not sure why. not a little. also i have your pants. also you have my heart.

post-it note poetry

leaving letters at bus stops that say ‘WE ARE FOREVER’ when i mean to say timeless because forever doesn’t exist. the difference between me & you? i understood what would happen when i left and did it anyway. you mean to say forever but say timeless because you can’t remember the symbol for infinity but want to know how being left is a metaphor for buses leaving. somewhere we are strangers together ‘WE ARE’ on a post-it note poem someone’s version of forever because they thought red lips on two girls meant roses meant timeless.

venus hates apostrophes and burning

because they’re always to the dead. the dead can’t hear you anyway, so it doesn’t matter if you shout. shout louder, even, because they’re dead. or have a conversation with the sun, shout at him instead. venus is the sun’s abusive lover, living next door. not abusive; tired. the sun still shines and venus tries to reason him away. i don’t love you anymore, venus says, and the sun gets too close still- like he doesn’t understand what this means. that venus can feel him everywhere, the atmosphere, skin blistering at a touch, his whole self burned away to leave only ash, that heat trapped inside- and venus shines brighter because of him, hopeful for something but god, doesn’t the sun know it’ll never work? a coat of armour for protection, another wasted shield and still. still, venus can’t get the light to go away and blinding is the sun’s only setting. it burns down to the truth of it, that venus only wants an apostrophe in the words “the sun’s” like a possessive and he’s tired of writing love letters to the dead or talking to the ghost of his self before the flames, venus only says those things because the sun would be better off without the second best. second closest, not even brighter than a star. the sun turns away and turns back, he always comes back, and venus wants to cry again with the heat of his gaze. no arrows, no apostrophes, no burning venus hates burning because it always means the sun, and red hands remind him of what he’s done. i’m sorry doesn’t cut it when you’ve cut too deep. he closes the door, shuts the window, turns the key and he’s still shaking, cold at the core where the light never reached. 67 million miles can’t keep out a chill. 67 million miles and venus burning still. apostrophe, from apostrophiese, to turn away. i don’t want to keep running, venus says, still half-shielding from the light. i don’t want to keep turning away.

Litte teeth, little fist by @cityskylinesofimaginaryplaces

little teeth, little fists.

i never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. little teeth, we talk in small manners. cut sharp. little fists, hold on to what you know. don’t let go. we take what we want when we want. we are wanting, hungry, all the time. little, little body, draped in ugly hauntings. bite into the flesh of our wounds, ghosts claw to let the dark come out. see scars from needle teeth and swollen hands. living in the wild is what you know, hold, what you know: how to ravage. roll the skin you wear through your fingers, trick your body into thinking you don’t know. what it means that you can feel the crescents of your nails still digging in, the shine of a tooth aching with the rest of your moon-light jaw. carve your name with a knife into the trees, talking soft when you say i’m sorry, in a sharp twist spell out what lives inside, what’s taken over those ribs, you monster, monster, monster, monster thing without a home. don’t feel sorry. never for anything. not even for the wild thing eating you whole. little teeth, little fists, wanting always to forgive. forget. you could die and still you should have never once felt sorry for your wild, awful self.

i return howling

black ringed eyes of smudged morality / questionable practises of immortality.

after ten thousand years you’d think we’d start to lose the taste / of salt and skin, lips to face.

kiss me still when i am inhuman / a beast wandering through the night.

here we are in the forest, teeth and claws and all / here we are in this dark humanity, ready to fall.

even then when i am lonely / i dream in full moons, bruised skies turned holy

i still sleep quiet underneath the night / i return, howling, home to you.

ABNEGATION MEANS REFUSAL

i write a love letter to the way you refuse to make sense, defy everything. gravity, physics, that small thing you kept warm inside your hands, fighting death when it came calling. fighting the world when it refused to get out of your way. said, you can’t. says you: watch me, & you storm the barricade like a natural disaster to break everything apart. these doors stay open because you’re afraid of the dark, folded in on the couch, & even while you sleep your hands are curled into fists around roses, ravens that claw through the night. you unravel between slotted fingers to fall petals, ghosts, a chainlink fence & a body, stand defiant again in abnegation. your shattered ribs & shoulders hold feathers, drift soundlessly out to sea. i love you again every time you say no, each time you prove them wrong. you stand, you’re breaking, you are selfless because you give to hold on. one time you brought home anything you found that looked lonely. quantified this scales to a monstrosity, an unimaginable heart to make its resting place behind your sternum, heavy in its beat, steadily giving out. you don’t know how to give it up. you don’t know how to say it hurts without pushing past the collapse. you shudder & the thing within you trembles, that smallness tucked inside those hollow bones, how no one can make you do anything but how you are trying to make up for everything. i don’t understand how all of you can be contained, why you don’t burst apart at the seams, if you are sheer will keeping yourself inside. your hands hold tender still the world, shut doors with cautious keeping, fight on in spite of bloody apparitions. you, the brave. you, the selfless. you, refuse to stop loving with every inch of your body, refuse to make sense, refuse to give up anything that makes you what you are, & i write to pay homage to that godless magic. they say: bow down, give in, cave to something greater. leave that there to die, wither away, kill the hope blossoming, fly east in the winter, say yes three times and believe it say no and don’t mean it. drop the heavy heart inside your chest, so apathy can make a home. give us everything you are. & you: refuse.

the apparition jupiter

i don’t really feel like i’m there, the ghost of jupiter says. it hovers somewhere in the middle as an unsettling voice booming from above with no body to accompany it. it’s just like i don’t exist, the planet says in a hazy shroud of mist. all the ominous portents are making their way towards jupiter in a procession. that gaseous body shifts even further from view as the spin of red-orange storms whips across beneath the surface, hurricanes and thunderstorms brewing inside with no containment. lightning will strike. but who will get struck? not jupiter, the disaster passing through like the dawn. so mighty, and reduced to so little. the planet fades to a dull sunset, an afterimage leaving this feeling that there should be something there that isn’t.

only two things make me sad: one of them is life, and the other one is trying to live it. i am always afraid of regret. always afraid of the wrong thing. too many days spent in the closet, on the floor, throwing up with my head in a toilet. hands trembling like the wind and i’m still trying to live with this. that tremor won’t ever go away. how can i tell you to live when i don’t want to? and there’s nothing i won’t do to want to. all these admissions and omissions of how much time i really spend trying to function as a human being. isn’t that what we call life? this hell we’re in when we can’t call it hell? we keep on through the precarious existence of the balance between burning fast and flickering out. when it’s beautiful, hold it close. when it’s ugly, hold it the same. if it makes you sad, cry, and i have to cry too. when i see things that make me ache, all over, and want to curl up so i don’t have to face it, i do for a little while. but i still get up when the alarm goes off in the morning saying ‘cheer up. you’re not dead yet’ and when it says ‘one more day’, when it says 'be happy’ and when it says 'ní hên píao líang you are beautiful’ i have to get up. i have to get up for all those who can’t. yes, it hurts to breathe and exist and live but isn’t that what it means to be human? breathe. stand new-made in the shivering light. 
 if you still have a day. live it while you are shaking.

REMEMBER WHY YOU BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

i. to live, we require an understanding of our our processes. 
how do we think? synapses fire. 
how do we breathe? expand and contract. 
how do we exist? i can feel it in my teeth.

ii. they ache (everything) to a point of exhaustion. i try for running, i end up exhausted. i try for exhausted, i end up running away. i open every window and leave the lights out to let the breeze crawl its way through this empty house.

iii. i’m making wine inside myself now, a heady intoxication. fermented, the warmth, it spreads through me- every step a wildfire.

iv. anaerobic /x/ adj. without oxygen, only certain things can survive. without oxygen, there is no flame. we ferment our own rejection inside us, call it acid because it burns. that sickness you feel is resentment, warming your bones. hatred. without oxygen there is nothing else and with oxygen-

v. look how brightly we can burn.

vi. to say the difference between us and stars: when stars collapse, we call it a supernova. they spread light throughout everything, permeate the dark.

we are made of stars, and our rib cages only send shrapnel in our shattering.

vii. humanity is a torch, burning through its bases with a wicked flame. at some point we stop calling this arson an accident and instead blame ourselves. we breathe in smoke but do nothing to put out the fire. stand in a burning house and watch it collapse: do nothing, and leave no one to regret how terrible it will fall.

viii. when the first versions of ourselves evolved out of the iron oceans, we call that the Great Dying because anything that could not oxidise could not remain alive. in other words, we took the air and made it poison. we burn, you burn with us.

ix. we burn to survive. a million combustions inside our bodies / raging to fight on against the darkness.

when we move, we are energy / we are wasted potential brought to light.

all that noise, all that emotion / it burns us out. in the end,

we are husks / we are ashes / we are burning and we don’t even know it.

REMEMBER WHEN YOU BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

i’m overcompensating for forgetting to breathe by writing too many words

and trying to make them sound poetic 
when really there’s no artistic way to say

i woke up one morning and drank bleach
just to see how it tasted and bled out

in a bathtub dying a thousand little 
deaths every time i breathed in

so you could imagine how it feels to be told you’re writing too many words

when all you’re trying to do is remember 
how it felt to have air in your lungs,

what it tasted like instead of the blood 
that you vomited all over the white tiles.

REMEMBER HOW TO BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

it’s my blog’s first birthday today! i wanted to do something special to celebrate all the work that’s gone into it and all the lovely people who’ve decided to follow and support my crazy mess of a self, so here we are. send me asks from the ask meme i posted please, or questions, or anything at all, really. :)

poet ask meme

a. what other poets style do you emulate the most?

b. do you write with too much imagery or too little?

c. write four poems in one day or go three weeks without writing anything?

d. do you have your poetry organized or are you more likely to write half a stanza on a one dollar bill and then spend it by accident?

e. bird imagery or ocean imagery?

f. what was the last poem that you loved?

g. do you write about people or landscapes?

h. dreams or real events?

i. who do you write for?

j. what is the worst thing about your writing? what is the best?

k. what’s the best line you’ve ever written?

l. how much do you edit a piece before you consider it complete?

m. how long does it take you to write a poem?

n. ghosts or angels?

o. god or sunlight?

p. soft or harsh?

q. safety or happiness?

r. how long have you been writing?

s. who is your favourite poet? you have to pick just one.

t. what is your favourite line of poetry?

u. would you be okay with never being well known?

v. slow or frantic?

w. what colour is your poetry?

x. who, if anyone, do you send your new poems to?

y. is your poetry light or dark?

z. write a couplet (a short poem with just two lines) about pulse points.

how awful innocence

you can take terrible things and use them to do good. yes, they are still terrible. but take that body and grow flowers from poison in the earth’s veins and you will still have a bouquet to heal and hold. seep aggression into poetry and write beautiful murder. kill every version of yourself that still holds scars and your weeping eyes will start to harden. from coal to diamond we turn combustion into love. firestarter heart that burns or tames; tempered into temperance from abuse. it used to be beautiful to be dying. we are still dying to be beautiful in a terrible, awful way. only innocence can think to turn decay into preservation, capture the spread of sickness from cell to bone and it looks like flowers blooming inside of shattered sidewalks. this thing is gonna kill you no matter what you hope and it’s gonna kill me too. crack the lightbulbs with a scream; turn the power out with heavy winds. open the window to run out. block the doors so no one can get in. you’re leaving behind something terrible and i’m trying to turn it into something good like you asked but that awful innocence of yours left no room for reality. you can be too good, too naïve. i can’t live up to these expectations. my terrible will remain terrible as i run away with anger and roaring winds to escape this good, your awful innocent and how your eyes looked at me weeping then turned to glass and hardened in your death. this thing is gonna kill you, flowers or not, and over your grave i planted marigolds: unspeakable mourning so from your sickness comes light. this body turned deathly into deathless.

for sharp-edged women, made of thorns, points and needles:

you have been broken, beaten and abused to become who you are.

your eyes are tired from always searching, never daring to stop looking for where the next attack will come from. you sleep with one eye open.

scars are your badges, medals of honour you wear to remind yourself not that you let someone do that to you but that you survived. there is no greater challenge than this-

to live in a world of softened, loving people and to be what you have made yourself. a creature of hard edges, claws, teeth biting and words cutting like knives.

you are difficult to love, and maybe, you do not want to be loved.

it is enough to stand on your own two feet in the shelter you have created, safe in the knowledge that no one and no thing can hurt you unless you let it.

and you won’t let it.

no one comes close enough to even touch your points and if they do once, they never do again. you are wild and free and self contained all in one; you are your cage, your door, and the key to open it.

if someone looked close enough they could see brambles weaving through your hair, claws like knives instead of fingernails, razors hidden behind your throat and the iron that runs through your body instead of bone.

you are fire and ice, clawing your way from underneath the dirt and falling from the skies.

everything you have, you have had to fight for, and everything you have you deserve.

you make and remake the world in your own image, shaping your daughters to be strong, hard, guarded and full of wit- something you wish someone had done for you.

no one told you that the world would break you, your heart and bones and mind, and no one ever warned you of the dangers of pretty green-eyed girls and dark haired boys who slit their wrists in the name of love. you have lost friends and love that way, and once, almost, yourself.

and you wish someone had told you that edges are not something to be scared of, that you could stand on a precipice and not fall off. brambles guard the castle holding everything you love (and when you love, you love fiercely, the sun chasing the moon and dying to give it breath) and needles are what you sew yourself back together with.

for the women who are strong- you understand.

creep

when i hear keys i start to flinch instinctively, hide my hands and whatever is in them. most often it’s nothing but heavy footsteps start me creeping towards the door and coffee smells like salt and dead earth. we buried bodies in the backyard and planted tomatoes over them, growing in red like blood. the pool floats in its own waste of chemical water and dead things. what a sore sight to see, such bruises building on a body. black-blue purple and the brown of a rotten fruit, sweet and we smash the pulp to smithereens. dig a hole with keys and scrape the ground for seeds: i hide in the leaves and bury myself among the bodies. plant this unrest or insomniac nights. i was born without a sense to feel. i can still feel you watching me.

aborted machinations

in the end i don’t regret this having such a body and these bones. 
they do me small kindnesses and in return i try to be more gentle. gentle is not easy. gentle: to hold with no intent to harm. to let go when it is needed. sometimes letting go is harder than holding on. you are brave for this. to recognise that in it all you may not be necessary. sometimes sitting down is harder than standing up, to say that you could both be wrong. sometimes we cannot truly see the right. i am trying to be more gentle but you say: what does it mean to be gentle anyway. what does it mean to be anything? i say: don’t confuse gentle with weak. this is not weakness. this is strength to say you can be happy without suffering for it. poetry does not lend itself well to happiness. a breath not caught, letting go without leaving a mark. we cannot stop clawing our way through reason in an effort for the undefinable this. every attempt is burned and we don’t know how to stop. how do you define happy? how do you know the difference between the words in cruelty and in gentle. stop everything before it’s over and abort these movements halfway through: happiness leaves everything half-done. this body deserves more than what i can give it, stopping a life unlived, unloved. this gentle that i show it; i am sorry for the motions that i put it through. for all of it in the end i don’t regret living with such kindnesses as a heart. a head. fingers that can play a piano, toes that can dance, lungs that fill unsteadily and wobble within a rib cage close to breaking. for the choice to give up gentle or to continue being draped across these bones: carry on. do not regret this, please, do not catch your breath. keep your lungs trembling in the new made light, one breath at a time. your heart will beat unbidden because of some small kindness in our making. that’s all i had to say. that’s all i ever had to say.

and yet… you loved him? -ray bradbury, “the utterly perfect murder”

even after this you loved. it took a long time. did you ever realise, in the beginning, what it meant? that no one came to your before-the-sun-rose almost morning cold glass window, painted blue with longing all alone did you know then? did you know then, maybe when you wanted to die. maybe that was a long time before you ever even thought of love. or did you know before the terrible, unutterable betrayal. did you know and so you left. and even after all this time. you held it inside of you, that inalterable past, without ever knowing why. held it in the hollow in your chest, the gap between your collarbone and the line of your ribs pressing against your skin. could you feel it when you held the edges. every morning after that you could see phantom bruises that love in the way boys love boys when they are young, you said, and evil but innocent, and evil. how did you fit such emotion inside of your mouth to swallow the pain. how did it come out in words like those. when did you stop using question marks to say why because you knew you weren’t getting an answer. did he ever call you after all those years, after all those years did you ever call him? and still you knew you loved him without ever caring when or how or why. all of that, inside of you, years and years and years- how could you stand to hold it and how, upon taking a train, bound into the past you thought could not have ever been returned to, years locked up inside your chest those bones old lives and leaving and broken windows how did you learn to let it go.

G.O.D.

the g in god isn’t an acronym but if it was we’d have to talk about the a for allah and how guns and arms are too common a theme. shoot them up and all. guns and gods and girls are all the same, sawn-off shotguns pointing in no direction. listen for the crack of the bullet- (or the empty mouth, please, screaming) don’t shoot. don’t shoot. i always come back to this. or fire into the masses. after this god won’t care.

of roses

a collection of poems featuring the pieces:

chain of gold

crown of thorns

blood of silver

silvered blood

the ending of the queen

the unquiet night

TIME IS A CONSTRUCT CONSTRUCTED BY BITTER ENDINGS AND THE SPIN OF A WORLD IN THE GAPING ABYSS THESE STARS ARE DEATHLESS AS MEMORY THEY CRUMBLE INTO DUST LIE AWAKE AND LIE TO YOURSELF THAT THIS IS NOT THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT HOW LONELY WE WILL GO.

talking down pluto

i don’t say this right, pluto says at the edge of a cliff, a solar system, a void. i miss my small belonging. i want to jump. i don’t want to. i want someone to miss me too. i think i know what you mean. it’s okay. i’m lonely too.

occupation day

a girl walks in wearing a NASA shirt and galaxy print leggings, everyone thinks oh, rockets, she’s got the glasses to be an engineer. she raises her hand to ask, is the never-ending void an acceptable job? there was a help wanted sign on the desk of the universe and i’m attempting to fill the position. a pencil two rows over gets pulled in by her gravity (purple with black and blue sparkles) and she just smiles, tosses it back out past her edges and says you’re lucky it wasn’t turned into spaghetti. the physics goes over their head. all over her paper she observes and draws particles and she knows that by doing this she changes what they are but maybe if she didn’t notice them they wouldn’t exist at all. later when the teacher calls on her she says quantum mechanics and the formula for how long it takes to reach the ground because this time an entire desk rolled over to her, the focus of the room. it’s an occupational hazard, drawing things in. red and blue logo and she thinks there’s some light inside it just can’t get out past her event horizon and she wants to know has anyone ever heard of something coming out of a black hole, or anyone coming back? her shoes have constellations like her freckles and no one noticed when they winked, twinkled, she shimmered out of existence. she was going to prove wormholes and timeless stars and maybe dead cats she was just waiting for her rocket to take off the ground. empty desk and David Bowie and the occupational hazards of being a black hole that even in your lack of existence everyone is pulled in by your void, the spaces in between stars and the letters on her t-shirt spelling out G A L A X Y where she left blank spaces for compensation. she’s somewhere out there tearing up a storm or aurora borealis, shining green-blue lights so far past herself she could never lose them. entire worlds and universes she could swallow in an instant with her big, hungry eyes. always looking up saying is there more? and knowing every star by name. a girl walks out of the room, into the office of the universe and applies for the position to fill the spaces, checks all the boxes until she’s told yes. supernova bursts forth from the room but she still says do you think anyone could ever find the edges? and runs chasing after it, laughing, crying, filling up the void.

an uneasy grace

we balance on the line of an edge running perpendicular across a point. tell me the world and its beginnings, a creation. tell me a lightbulb lightening-flash scorched earth sound. waves unfolding across a desert, land rising from an ocean. fire to water to earth to air from chaos and it burst forth: from chaos in a cacophony of light because nothing miraculous ever happened quietly, except, perhaps, that instant before the whole tangled mess broke and the inhale before a silent peace cradled down upon a body unbroken. the quiet god of a girl. is there a beauty in the quantum mechanics of things, black hole event horizons tell me how she does it. how she breaks down and gets back up again. nobody made a world in seven days, not even her, still sleeping it off like a morning hangover. tell me what god wakes up to. a graceless existence into which the descent is easy and we have fallen. sorry god. i believe in you. i just don’t believe you.