Empty

Empty

Egos hate emptiness, but empty is what we use. Just ask the watering can and it will tell you: “I am hollow that I may be filled. This void within me contains what nourishes life”. So I pour myself out, over and over, until the water runs clear and the flowers bloom. I am full of emptiness. I am useful.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Though this is primarily a poetry (and occasionally short fiction) blog, I am also an active composer. My music is a form of wordless poetry, swelling with emotions that carry the listener through soundscapes of mystery, love, and loss. I invite you to listen as you read and hope that you find something stirring and beautiful here. Thank you for visiting. - JM Tiffany, 7.16.2024

Our Days In A Box

You gave to me all of your time and they placed it neatly  in this ornate box. Somewhere within it  is a giggling moment  where I lay smiling beneath you. I remember your hair  falling all around me, and I can still feel your soft, pretty hands laced onto mine. We were always stitched to each other’s side and never more than the breadth of a smile away. I remember us then, walking in the secret night, clothing suddenly lost  and hearts found, nubile angels kissing sweetly  in the dark flowing waves. Our eyes were those  of children then, vacant jewels hungry for experience. We fed ours on sunsets and each other’s faces until they grew fuller, deeper, and a bit less naive. Long ago, you reached into an open wound  and emptied it of ugliness. You always filled me  with so many bright things. But now, I am older  and all has grown quiet. I can no longer hear the world above the music of your name. The wind, the waves, the gulls, the ghosts - no one speaks to me anymore. Your hand no longer links to mine and the chain of time is broken. I open your box, a gift that now takes. Takes all of my strength. Takes the color from my skin, until I am bone white  and paper thin. As the water drinks you down I do not say goodbye. I do not say anything. I cannot speak but would rather sink with your ashes. As the water turns to ink, you are written on my body and I smile through tears at a poem read only by the horizon  at dusk. It is a song of parting and of our days in a box.

© JM TIffany 2024

JM Tiffany

Our Days In a Box, by JM Tiffany

from the album The Architecture of Silence

Phantasmata

They don’t trust my glass hands and haunted brain.

The steady light in my open chest spins a wheel, but they only see the shadows it casts. Each rotation of the inward spiral presents dark mirrors and candescent forms in turn. The watchers fear the fire and distrust the gloom as I paint lovely horrors on the flesh of the night. Repulsive and alluring, they see me as some kind of strange black prism in a shuttered room. To them, I am a living phantasmagoria. Mostly feared, and sometimes desired, they all say I am mad, that I have too many faces, and my edges draw blood. Fools say many things. I tell them stories, a fiery wheel in the shadow of Death, yet never utter a word. They don't understand that I am the controlled blaze in the center, that these fearful images cut into my face reveal only themselves. I watch them shudder, but I am not afraid, for all of my demons are made of light. © JM Tiffany 2024

Love

Love is whole: It completes without possessing; It combines without coercing; It holds without grasping; It binds without restricting; It flows without straying; It heals without harming; It moves without forcing and gently endures the tempest.

Love does not put asunder.

Though Love may die  at the end of a sword,  its hands will never wield one.

It is better to bleed out and die for Love  than it is to live one moment in hate.

Love builds no cages, it knows no borders, it acknowledges only one humanity, and whatever seeks to drive us apart does evil to us all.

© JM Tiffany - 2024

Green

Your limbs were too weak to hold me when I fell. There was no malice in me for that. I was ripe and heavy with age. You were supple and green, far too delicate for one such as I. You drooped as I tugged at you. It was cruel of me to want you so. I wanted so badly for you to see what I carried within me. There was a secret promise of newness hidden in the bright flesh of that late summer. I sighed with resignation as I watched you climbing away from me. But then, I smiled, for though the fall had split me open the birds that ate my heart carried it somewhere brighter. A place as young and green as the hands that let me go.

©️ JM Tiffany 2024