Ephemerenet - Tumblr Posts
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.
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.
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.
such impermanence
what hungry animal is inside you starving, for love or some other strange affection. you beat it when it asks for too much. say: that’s enough. keep it ravenous and wanting, too weak to cause trouble. strong enough it doesn’t die to rattle your self-control once a month, year, however long you can put it off. don’t acknowledge the tears inside your linings, don’t ever need anything. that startling want breaks you, makes you long for such impermanence as love. there’s a reason i write about rib cages and women: you were made from the bones of a different breed. our ribs do not belong to us, and that ache always feels foreign even after centuries. a reminder you could not be contained just within yourself. you had to be made fleeting, imprisoned fading. had to be kept hungry so you could not be anything other than a mouth with which to swallow whole. from the wild you were made to want what could only be given. always that impermanent thought, taught to hold in and not take, take, take to appease your inner self. never having enough in the bones you were given, still trying to bite more. keep the beast and throw the body to the wolves- the insides will starve itself to death anyway. we were not meant to last forever. we were not even meant to live this long.
uranus has a bad reputation
that they don’t deserve. uranus knows all the whores & fuqbois & faggots. they don’t always deserve it either. there’s a club for people like them: the membership list is written on the insides of bathroom stalls, sent in group texts, gossiped about behind a hand over a mouth familiar with the lips of someone who was in it. uranus doesn’t know why people make jokes & laugh at their expense. everybody’s talking but nobody’s telling them. (doesn’t mean they don’t hear it.) uranus knows all the secrets about drinking till you forget & having sex like it doesn’t matter & the drugs to make you feel better than high. that’s the bad part. all anyone ever says is about how to save someone from themselves. no one ever talks about what happens when they don’t need to be saved. how you can be okay & not be what’s expected. how the “whores” & “fuqbois” & “faggots” grow up to be alright. how they grow past what people think & knowing what you can do is better than not having tried at all. but it is never once easy. nobody ever notices the scars on those whores’ wrists because they’re too busy with the body. nobody looks past the face to see the mind inside. and god forbid they see the love and not the sex that everything is objectified to mean. but if they want it: own it. give them the anarchy, give them the sex, take the reputation that precedes you and walk into the room, two fingers up to yesterday saying fuck the whole universe. tear it down to make your own.
stubborn hope
the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.
we are born, and the war begins.
the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:
we are alive, and we fight on.
reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?
we die. and this is what is left:
stubborn humanity. forgetting, again and again, and thinking we can rise from this past in a different manner than before. to come from anything other than pain and leave more than just our fragile bodies, a lovely imitation of how we fell into this by giving the trembling want of life our startling consensus: if we were given more than what we asked for, cleaving a hole inside something already hollow, we think we may have been something beautiful. we think that thing that we could’ve held inside our empty hands the whole time could have been named hope.
the whole truth
i should start here.
[a FAQ list of things people have said] (no, it didn’t always hurt)
when i was born, the doctor said i was a girl. yes, i am a girl. sometimes.
i learned to love with broken bones. heal the cracks in your heart with pavement, beat a rhythm in the pattern of your soles. bloody knuckles & split lips taste like home, like a kiss, like someone else’s body on mine in a way that isn’t suffocating.
i was fingered before i was kissed, & no i didn’t want it. that wasn’t affection. it wasn’t even a semblance of love.
my first tattoo was at fourteen, illegal & the night after homecoming a little drunk on being wild, we thought we were so cool god, who hasn’t been there, when you’re young & stupid. everybody did it once. in the hours after midnight that little fragile peace gray asked if i wanted something to remember i said yes so we carved a star on my hip & a semi-colon on sky. we were always dreaming. even then we were like this. even then.
bleach tastes awful but i won’t ever really tell you that unless you ask. because no, not everyone needs to know when you’re breaking.
those scars are mine.
do i lie pathologically? probably. it’s a habit of protection i gained from being told i was a bitch, i was too smart, i was too athletic, i wasn’t funny, i wasn’t pretty- i was five foot nothing & not even 120 pounds but i was fat, i wasn’t pretty, i was too much & not enough & cut up all at once.
i’m trusting you with this now because i’m telling the truth. the whole truth.
it did hurt.
i am broken but not irrevocably. i am shaped by the experiences that made me but not defined by those same conditions. i am the knife & the body & the air rushing through this, i’m lying through my teeth to tell you that i’m fine.
there’s a hole in my head and that’s the whole of it. it never never stops for sobriety & suicide but after all this time:
i think i’ll be alright in the end, truthfully.
the right truth
in specific contexts, i am a different person now then i am then. alice: i can’t go back. yes, exactly what i mean. for every question there is a different answer depending on whether or not i trust you. or the setting of the situation. take these, examples,
SITUATION ONE. i am at a party. it’s a friend’s party. i was late. listen, i didn’t want to come. they can’t know that, so what do i tell them?
answer: make up some elaborate hilarious story about the cat and the driving and putting on clothes in the wrong order and not how you sat in the closet for two minutes rocking and how you took four pills for anxiety before coming. if they laugh, they won’t notice the way you slip your eyes closed too often to be real.
SITUATION TWO. i’m with my family and they ask me who i’ve decided to love (have i decided to love? do i know what that is?) can i tell them the truth of it or do i have to hold my hands palm in to my chest, don’t let the lines tell them what they want to know?
answer: you can say a little. tell them you’re in love but you’re not sure of it, don’t tell them who or what or how many because really would they want to think about you and love with their closed door minds? they can hardly think of you as it is.
SITUATION THREE. i’m seeing another therapist. oh god, what do i say. what do i tell them?
answer: the part of you that you can stand to bear on your mind. the truth that seems right under the circumstance.
for every question if you told me when and where and how i would have another answer because who i am depends on who i’m with. that may not be right, but it is true, and i’m never the same person twice. but is anyone? and that’s the kicker to this sad sorry punchline joke. nobody’s right. even if it’s all true.
the only truth
that matters i am still breathing no matter how. to be here is a testimony in itself. yes, i’ve answered what you asked no, i did not lie in a single word. bearing myself open, this rib cage cracked in three places and my chest pulled apart from the scrutiny, a fist sized muscle beating itself like i do. to the point where it doesn’t know anything other than to keep going, keep going, your mind gives out long before your body will ever, keep going, keep going, until it hurts more to stop than it does to keep going. once there, you know the truth. the only truth that matters: say it. in words or broken letters. pictures. paintings. fists or cracking voices. the truth is- life is a terrible, awful thing and we are all trying to find the best way to live it. stop pretending it doesn’t terrify you.
the wreck of the earth
humans are in the same category as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.
we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.
i am no exception.
and this is how we wreck what we have learned to love: by trying to save it or loving it in the first place.
coffee spoons and teaspoons
i leave a spoon in the fridge while my mother’s throwing up. eliot measured our lives in coffee spoons, teaspoons, the things we love small enough to be scooped up and held inside our mouths. a sweater unraveling to leave me cold but still thinking i am warm. still capable of holding a spoon to my mother’s mouth, feed her panic with a soft voice to keep it from rearing its head. i wrap my lips around the edges of comfort and taste the metal of our loves. a white bowl does not mask the acrid scent of something bloody falling out from her body, something too large to kept in the same hollow space as her tongue and teeth and words. lovely how we fill our life-spoons with cough-syrup, sweet or bitter kisses, things that linger in a taste and still we can manage to have our mouths open, to fit the loving in. that we can hold everything inside us: a strawberry as big as my hand that leaves a spreading stain on the skin, the vomit dripping over the tiles, eight dry heaves in as many minutes, a shivering form only now realising it is cold, my own sweater i draped over her, the unraveling hem and sleeves, the nested spoons across a counter top with one missing in the fridge, the unspooling thread of time getting tangled up in things. was this once or as many as you can remember. each day i try to form the words in my mouth and find them a little less strange than before.
speaker for the dead
i will not write your obituary.
i will not grow flowers from the mouth of someone who refused to look for what was beautiful, i will not make that beautiful.
there is no surrender, no good fight, believe me when i say that i have spoken for the dead and they say:
nothing, when you die i will say nothing because that is what is waiting, i will not write you an obituary because you will be dead. and i, the one speaking, would be putting words into the air about you, without you, and no defences against them because i will be angry. if you choose that-
i will not be a speaker for the dead to let you live in a memory.
i will hold you through this unbearable life and do what i can to make it bearable. i will not be angry if you ask me if you just ask me for anything other than an obituary. you can call me if you are lonely.
and if the world becomes too much to bear, you are not Atlas. let it fall from your shaking shoulders. and i will write the way the world ends, i will write you the way it feels to be free i will write you in another life a thousand alternate times in which you are you but not and still you this crippled fool, a light opera and i will write you anything if only you are alive to hear it.
and i ask the same of you; in the case that my mouth becomes a birthing ground for the bodies of small violence, roots to wind their way around my tongue and teeth for the trees to swallow me swallowing the empty earth whole, come no mourners and no words. let the decay speak for itself.
do not talk at my funeral. do not read these words at all.
an all-nighter with planet mercury
four planets in retrograde and we sit under the full moon to lament our crazy revolutions. mercury, the rare bastard, hides in the shadow of the light, nothing like the rest of them. a day that lasts hours and a smallness inside your bones, never knowing how to sleep because the night never seems as long. they don’t know what it means to be made of availability, the closest and the remainders of what is left. we both have hands full with drops of this monthly blood, a body’s rejected life shimmering down the side, fingers curved tenderly but still silver slips its way through the cracks. leaking out to leave empty palms and the moon shines silver too, the stars, who are we to raise our hands and say that we belong in this night with a longing buried deep to leave? too tired to think about what it means. mid-night mercury turned to say unguarded in a hollow voice: i just feel so small, in comparison. so close, and quiet, and less. i feel like i am nothing. (not nothing. never nothing.) underneath such long nights guiding us to oblivion we cannot be nothing on the horizon. i know, mercury sighs, face half-hidden in the blinding light. and still i am so much more and so much less than what i want to be. i can’t find a way to stop myself from spilling out of my hands.
& EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, nothing
a motorcycle heading west on a highway no shadows, no sounds, only bright headlights and flashing handlebars. who can look down a road & not think, some day this will all be gone? it is the night almost morning between today & tomorrow, the closest i can be to seeing the future. in the future i think i might be alright.
on an empty highway at midnight the future is spread out before us, fumbling sheet music sight-read every crack in the pavement a note, our engine hearts a heavy beat that rises through the air, i can feel it moving through this emptiness the spaces between my feet & the ground every ragged breath & i am singing at the top of my lungs
on a motorcycle heading west on an empty highway at midnight, the clock resets to 00:00 & the day is infinite, we are infinite, there is nothing left but us on a quiet road looking towards nothing and forever & the headlights will tell no one if we pull over to cry from the beauty of it glorious and merciful and bright.
this is the future where we end up alright.
foreign(or) god
god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.
DEAR MEN:
this is not a poem to say i hate men. but-
i am cat called by cars on three separate occasions on the same stretch of road while i am running just in one week and there are only so many times you can say fuck you before someone takes you up on it.
i am not flattered. i am always afraid.
because the men on motorcycles at a rest stop say hey dear in that voice, and suddenly i don’t want to stop.
because they make fun of women for going to the bathroom together when they know what happens when we go alone.
because a man buys a drink for me and it’s fruity and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a whiskey.
because i eat and i am called fat and i don’t eat and he goes babe, do you have an eating disorder or some shit? i don’t want to deal with that.
because i want to pay for my own dinner so you don’t have to deal with that.
because a man buys me a whiskey and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a sangria.
because i would like to buy my own damn drink.
because i go to work out at the gym and i can feel them looking at me, i can feel it itching over me.
because one of them slaps me on the ass and says look at that to his friends when it jiggles.
because it was like a gunshot and i am still flinching.
because it was a touch and i am still flinching.
because it was a long time ago and i am still flinching.
because every day there are these men and they don’t understand that i am a person and not a body and a human and not a body and i am a woman and not a body and this body is not your own.
dear men: you are one letter away from mean.
dear men: i don’t hate you*
*all.
dear men: sometimes i love you. too much. sometimes i need to let you go.
dear dad: i love you too. this is not a poem about you, for once. it’s about them.
dear men: THIS IS NOT YOURS. dear boys: learn from this. dear men: LISTEN TO THIS. dear women: do not take this.
the genocide of xenophilia
there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.
i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.
i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.
but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.
so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?
(please come kill this spider.)
i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.
the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.
our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.
it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.
but how could they have ever stopped it.
a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.
a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.
even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-
the silence of one body slipping away from view.
washing away the guilt of what we have done. how much guilt the world must hold.
the eat-your-feelings cafe
i eat past hungry to make up for the lonely. i eat for the empty chairs around me. this hungry swallows me whole. mouth turned inside out becomes a hole, becomes a table. table sits in front of empty chairs besides me. i am hungry. i am starving for anything more than nothing, something to feed this loneliness. empty mouth has hollow teeth. bite sharp in your own wicked. crave me to create me: inhale me whole.
bitter kisses
i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.
does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?
another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.
suck on the pulp and kiss everyone good bye. i leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. i leave a bitter sweetness on their tongue.
#prayforcharlottesville
i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.
after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?
HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?
and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.