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If we will ever come to a point where goodbye is inevitable, I will not ask you to teach me how to forget. Instead, I will ask you to show me how to remember. We made so many beautiful memories together, it's a shame to erase them all just because we have to part, and can no longer go back to the beginning to fall in love again. No, no matter how much it will hurt, I won't ask you to teach me how to forget. I will walk all the paths we've trodden and remember how your laughter sounded, how your fingers curled around mine, how your hair smelled under the sun, how your lips tasted. I will remember every bit of you, so when I am finally ready to let go, I can let all of you go the way I've let all the kites fly away when I was young and life was innocent and gentle and kind.

-let go,

katie, 17:30

Stood By The Window

She stood by the window

Breeze swaying the blinds to a rhythm

Waiting for an escape that never came

The labyrinth enervating her passion and light

The dull January evening that filtered everything to dreariness

She stood by the window, her life felt frozen in time

Stuck on a rock that wouldn’t let her move on

Weathered though she may be

She knew the rock couldn’t forever stay forever inviolable

For the thunder crashes the rock and wind blows the arenaceous grime away

Today marks a year since I've started this blog. I'm thrilled to express my appreciation to all the wonderful people I've met here.

Last Feb 1st, I had little idea where this poetry writing pursuit would lead to but then that's art. We do it because we love it, no matter where it leads us.

Over the year, so much has changed yet some things stayed the same like they always do. Through it all, there has been so much support from the community of poets, writers and artists. I hope we keep supporting each other this way.

This blog is open to prompts, collaborations and is a safe space ♡

Love,

The Creaky Writer

Run Down The Hill

Sweet tinge of petrichor from the freshly mown grass

Our shoes squelching the wet mud as we run

We run down the hill, not a care in the world

Wind whipping the face, a fresh cut feeling

Your laughter and my cloistered joy heavy in the air

In the moment, we get lost, lost like lights in the starry sky

We run down the hill, not a care in the world

Hearts beating fast like the beat to our music

Hyaline handcuffs melting away in the bright sun

Days spent like they’re halcyon in ages to come

We run down the hill, not a care in the world

Dreaming the wildest dreams, looking at the sky for limit

whisper

Stolen flowers from the cemetery

answer sorrow’s questions

as the thin plumage of reality wearies.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

bullet eclipse

an asylum for doubt

a saturated drought 

where your eyes spiral down

my arteries

unspoken words amble upon a shard 

of reason

of treason 

inoculation

against melancholia

palpitations

holding hands with dementia

I can now hear 

the moans of hysteria

 © Margaux Emmanuel

bittersweet

Swirling in the ashes of honey, I awake crying under a bridge. A blur of roses forcefully blooms in my lips letting faraway delusions plague me in the twilight. When the crepuscule flees while passionately kissing the horizon, when there is nothing to write, nothing right and nothing to feel, where do the lonely petals of sentiment go? The scream of silence reigns, misunderstood. My reflection in a tearful cup of tea has suddenly dulled reality.

© Margaux Emmanuel

fountain pen leaks

The moon unsheathes its sword, binding our sins and swears to the interlacement of the railroad’s bones. Meanwhile, I am in a train where a furtive moonbeam has dangled off the blade to caress the half of my smile facing the window. The fugitive landscapes that have fallen into time and motion’s arms ask me to look away. I plead them to bring me to the coastal town of last night’s dream where I can inhale air unfamiliar with the term pain, where I can hear the moan of the tide telling me that I am indeed sane.

© Margaux Emmanuel

In the remainder of the tepid alcohol languishing in the flask of your eyes, we drink to the lost silhouette of love, burn our photographs wedged into the yellowed corners of our thoughts. We settle for cemented happiness, contemplating life through its glass corridors where mold is hidden, where I can feel the cracks of our suffering, where I can sense our hands dismembering our own poetry. When empty phrases harrow insomnia, I tape blossoms, breaths of life, to the pages of our unfinished chapters. But the trees’ barks where our initials dangle, imprisoned by a blistering heart, are peeling. I have just realized that flowers wither.

to slip on drunken petals 

© Margaux Emmanuel

The way your eyes speak, hidden under those sunglasses in the ink-seeped night, where I can see the reflection of our nightmares’ neon headlights, where I can see a hanged man, life tugging at his throat, his foggy, unstringed eyes peering at the existential questions left at the gallows’ steps. Astray in the poetry of half-alighted movie theater marquees and of weeping red diner booths paralyzed under the sterilized silence of the blinding white lights interrogating and polishing the checkered floor tile, time stops. With blood-stained eyes and a delirious steering wheel, quarantine my heart and let me sleep.

roadside mirages | © Margaux Emmanuel

You ran away when you were seventeen sleeping weeping in blurry cars and in eerie inns with no address no name trapped in time bordering the highway where you wrote to me poems in Latin stamped from the basement of my mind inspired by a denuded flower whimpering in a glass bottle of Coca-Cola beside a clumsy kitchen sink. You’re a vagabond tragedy a vagabond prodigy dipped in the paint of a raw sorrow quoting Virgil sitting in a bumper car sleepily howling Roman odes at a hollow night sky with swollen knuckles swollen eyes from trying to twist a drain of logic a faucet of amnesia only to find a leak of pain. I see you lying on the thirsty sand your eyes closed your lips apart morose saliva trickling out onto your chin a ripple of water comes to stroke your feet telling you to wake up but you don’t. A broken vinyl scratched from loving too hard.

headache | © Margaux Emmanuel

A damp seaside cottage bathed in a picturesque pastel yellow paint peeling off the walls cracked windows shattered bottles screaming on the floor a story that you’ll never hear a silent porch bearing a lonesome rocking chair where tears used to stain her floral dress a sore giggling wind brings along an exiled melancholia unloaded memorabilia and then there’s you, collapsed on the dangling shingles tumbledown eyes peaking out of streaks of wet hair humming an outdated tune from the pit of a golden lacquered heart sluggishly tracing the words your mind’s waves cry. Sometimes you sink into their foam with your lavender socks and then the bitter water licks your neck and you forget the punctuation of the days that strut by and on that rooftop overlooking your splinters you shrug starved by the discolored key waiting under the doormat by the flower petals lingering around the gutter maybe it’s okay to die a little younger.

golden lacquered heart | © Margaux Emmanuel

painkiller

You drink pain from the bottle. The shower-head cries, and I sink into the half-hearted water while sinking into the wine-stained corners of your lips, and I wonder if falling out of love is not remembering the way your pale, wet, eyes would pronounce my name, not remembering the way the water rings of your bedside table would yawn for help. Sunken blister packs with your name stuck in the cardboard package bleed through heavy nights, the ink sifting into the floorboards gasping for air. In the wrinkles of the wood, I tried to paint the bullets of the human heart, but that candlelit smirk cannot be trapped in acrylic. You are an opaque sensation, a splintered heart.

© Margaux Emmanuel

Empty paving stones, tinted by loose white lace bras’ humid shadows hanging on clothesline twine, run through melancholy second hand bookshops speckled with second hand souls, mostly unshaved musicians trying to find somebody else’s life to live. A bike, chips of fern-green paint flaking off its neck, rust engulfing the bent basket at its head, makes its way through timid rays of sunlight. Adorned with a pilling yellow beanie bordering his eyebrows and an upturned leather jacket tickling his cheekbones, he somehow still feels the aching bed slats pressing into his shoulder blades, still feels the tear-coated steering wheel pressing into his arms at the grocery store parking lot.   His hollow, blistered eyes sown into a purple-skinned mysterious past would make teenage girls silently turn around with throbbing hearts in their muddy stan smiths when he biked by. He would continue to snake through the maroon bricks, not noticing, not wanting to notice. He could vaguely make out, collapsed from the lethargy of our times on a coffee shop terrace, youngsters with thick white socks hiding their calves, sipping paper cup unsugared coffee.  And he would wonder how they could be so happy, or whatever it was they were. He would slow down his pace to take a paracetamol from his pocket. He would let it sit in his mouth. He wouldn’t swallow it. It would just sit, patiently. As he would. He wanted to forget the smell of her letters. He wanted to forget his brother who died at war dishonored. He wanted to close his eyelids, sink into the deep furrows of his forehead. He wanted to feel the shotgun’s barrel pressing against his tongue. He wanted to feel a new color scheme. Until then, he would continue to bike, perhaps forever.

second-hand soul | © Margaux Emmanuel

The champagne lingering in the driveway of his eyelids ransacks the minibar of his depressive tendencies. A suffering insufferable dandy with a corduroy smile spills the cough syrup on the window sill and walks through a non-smoking floor with an unlit cigarette giggling in between his teeth. The stained carpet mutters that he’s a homeless homesick and the tears sticking to the glass table know it already. So he sits back on a fatigued settee and pours himself a dubious drink with a parking lot view. So he sits back uncomfortably with his heart a little tight and he tells himself that it’s just another sick day.

sick days | © Margaux Emmanuel

bath drain

Nine o’clock bath

and I run

my fingers

on the steam’s

ashes

on the mirror

revealing

your

unvaccinated

velvet

daydreams.

My knees

glance out at

unsigned checks

stolen aspirin

spoiled milk

her lipstick’s shards

in your cheeks.

My skin skims

unsent postcards

one-way tickets

to the depths

of your mind

but I missed the flight

every time

I will continue to stare

at the sad

air vents

the antiseptic.

I will continue

to cut my hair

until I won’t feel

your fingertips

knocking

at the auburn 

curls

at the door

of the past

so

do your

lips 

do receipts?

© Margaux Emmanuel

clumsy town boy

Your heart

is stuck

in a long

car ride

edging

an endless

desert

empty

road

in 1973

sitting in

the backseat

reading Kerouac

butter-colored

baseball cap

no watch

timeless

wrist

high school

bomber jacket

covering a

white shirt

a chagrined

blue bra

his

aviator

Ray Bans

sliding down

the bridge

of its nose

listening

to the cassette

of a shattered

existence.

Two years

thousands of miles

away

he’s still

the one

appearing

in the

highway landscapes

ghostlike

you can almost

smell

his cologne

you thought

that you had

written

the last act

of that

tragedy

licked the seal

of that envelope.

But the trunk

is still

full of his

letters

the cursive ink

bruises you

at night

oh

the clumsy

town

boys

they really

mess you up.

© Margaux Emmanuel

'You defined me with borrowed words and I let you'

Somewhere I knew that despite my fear of never becoming like my father I turned out to be very similar to him, not in looks but in actions. The only thing we knew was how to surrender, how to surrender our entire belonging, how to not form an opinion based on our beliefs, and how to live into the oblivion of our worthlessness. We thought we were a burden on everything and probably on everyone, we were undeserving, and we weren't meant to be given a life that ultimately fell in our laps. It's cathartic and pitiful now that I come to think of it.

Hate your love

when you said you liked my curls,

i spent hours

straightening them out.

you complimented

the calm blue of my nails,

so i painted them a fiery red.

then the skirts left my knees bare,

unlike the denim that kept them warm

before you said i looked good in jeans.

and the day your fingers tied

the laces of my high tops,

i replaced them with stilettos,

the heels as sharp as my tongue

slipping poison onto yours.

i didn't mind when your hands

grazed the flesh of my cheek;

after all, i craved it.

i wanted your lips chasing mine,

needing to stain them

the shade of my new lipstick,

wanted the pads of your fingers leaving icy trails

down the heat of my skin.

i craved your touch,

but i resented your affection.

with every change i made,

i swore to never be

what you wanted me to.

entangled in my fabrications,

deceived by a false sense of control,

little did i know,

that you had me

exactly where you wanted me.

i couldn't recognize myself anymore

and you loved every part of me.