Original Poems - Tumblr Posts

Vampires

Light as windborne leaves, you were soft and pale as down, your cornsilk mane a midday fire that framed haunted wells of profound blue. You were prettier than anything I could have hoped for and crueler than anyone I’d ever known We had both been torn from the bellies of our worlds and met at the bottom, on the cutting room floor, with scalpels in our hands. Pain filled our cups and told us stories of happier days as we drank each other like vampires in the dark rooms of our hearts. It was no secret that I was a mad dog, a stoned stray, feral and desperate, and you howled with me in the canyons of my wounds. I clawed at your back as you drove a stake through my plans and I paid you, happily, for the pleasure of losing my mind. I carved your name in my chest. Parts of you were stitched into the closing gaps, like buckshot buried in the scabbed-over graves of a few brilliant moments. Hot breath and cold kisses. Love-drunk and wine-stupid. Children making children in the shadows of oblivion. © JM Tiffany

Box of Charms

A pale shadow in gossamer draped, old wings tattered and fluttering. A fay ghost trembling, she whispers that I am not I, just a box of charms: old brass and polished stones, all witch bones and memories tethered to feathers.

Her fluttering dreams batter my heart, this ardent jewel of glowing art.

Resplendent she sits, a caged bird singing songs about love, her aching breaths all sweet odes to pain.

I write her name in notes that dance along resonant strings, and spell my own in blood.

She carves strange runes into living bones, her wispy fingers tracing the pink of my lips.

We lock velvet arms in delicate arcs as we frame our presence with spidery limbs and weave these dreams that we become.

© JM Tiffany

Thunder

I lived in the thunder of white cracks in a broken sky. Its shattering gray and violent breath strained my wings, streaking my soul with bitter rain, until I saw through the eye of the storm a heart that could not love me.

©️ JM Tiffany

Chrysalis

Gasping for air in chrysalitic translucence, I am the liquous anticipation of transformation and the lucent opalescence of nascent life.

I am a new heart pupating at the edge of death.

See me as I hang, swaying from the Tree of All Worlds?

My markings shift like turbulent, melting tattoos, all dreams and memories of flesh mixing like blood in water.

My iridescent sarcophagus cracks and oozes: metabolic scars, glistening, drip the clear fluids of birth. As the luminous crystal membranes of new wings unfold, I am joyous in my terror and shudder with the paroxysms of my becoming.

As my bright wings spread in the darkness I am made again of living fire.

© JM Tiffany

Red Bones

In my vision I flew as I fell and rode a great gray wolf through a vortex of smoldering antlers. My beast steered my thoughts until, like water in milk, we merged and became a singular ghost rushing like wind through the dreaming wilds. I was drawn to a sullen sound and at once saw a young boy’s skull hanging from ghastly strings. There was a mournful chanting nearby, a soft feminine voice that sang wordlessly in the night. I found its source: a young girl who was rinsing her ruddy hands in a starlit pool. She was bare, save for a wooden mask, its brow carved with a pale moon. Nearby, amid the vines and briarwood, a black bear lurked, but the girl showed no signs of concern. I saw then eight arrows of yew, each with a glinting green obsidian point, arranged like the spokes of a wheel on the ground. I looked again at the boy’s skull and saw that it hung amidst his red, excarnated bones. A gentle breeze rocked his remains in the gnarled tree, each bloody bit bound there by his own sinews to its misshapen branches. It seemed to me that he sprouted like macabre fruits from the sleeping, twisted limbs. His luminous flesh caught the light of the full moon and glowed dully in the darkness as the masked girl began toiling to stretch it tightly over a simple wooden rack. With her hands, she caressed his lovely ruin, and smeared the taught flesh with the boy’s own brains. This she did to tan and preserve his hide, but also to work his memories into the skin. “I will wear you in the Spring,” she lamented, “and you will rise again as the Sun.” I think that she wept beneath her mask, though its rough wooden visage was unchanging and stern. When she resumed her singing, I heard the rough sound of ursine breath behind me. As snow began to fall, I opened my eyes. © JM Tiffany 1.2.2024

Ninety Seconds to Midnight

They displayed her to us, a sweet, battered doll. Coy and precarious, they called her uncertainty a victory. She was small and quiet. As I looked at the savaged girl, I watched her wringing her hands. A tired young woman, shifting and slightly broken, she was like a pink petal tugged and battered by the swift dark undertow of privilege. They promised us that she would return to the world what was stolen from her, and the absurdity of it curled my lips into a snarl. The stupidity of the insult drove a stake into my chest. but the subtle cruelty of the display was lost like the years trailing raggedly behind her. If they saw my tears, I do not know, but they bled like acid and burned as I swallowed each one.

I marked the time: it was ninety seconds to midnight.

© JM Tiffany, 3.16.2024

Disremembered

I lay with the lights off and whisper to the Night. “I feel sympathy for monsters,” I say to Her, “Because I know what has made them.” My wounds are invisible in Her darkness, but the cuts and contusions are everywhere. Little valleys and hills, amid coarse patches of lethargy. “Must those broken continue to break?" I cry. She is quiet. The Night is a good listener, yet she never offers me any advice. I bind the cracks with chemicals and sink away, slipping into Her belly to be disremembered until dawn. © JM Tiffany 3.18.2024

Branches 

I remember feeling you  as you drew closer.

You hung above me like a shadow  over the face of the deep.

I could feel your breath  in the valleys of my neck.

What did I smell like? You were like rain.

I remember the moon. It was so bright that I closed my eyes.

I could still see you  with them shut, but memory or silhouette, I did not know.

Kissing you, I pulled you into my wound and like a seed, you grew there until crooked roots and twisted branches  pierced me from within. You wore me like ghastly ribbons, horrible and beautiful, and utterly beyond repair. I clung to you then as I cling to you now, wispy remnants frayed by the wind, a ghost in the forest of your heart.

©️ JM Tiffany 3.18.2024

Unsolvable

Long ago, possibly in the late 70s, someone replaced a single piece of this bucolic jigsaw puzzle with one from another box.

This single piece is neither the right size nor the right shape.

Its colors are brighter, and it clearly belongs somewhere else.

The mocking lacuna reminds me suddenly that there are two puzzles that will never be solved.

Each is forever incomplete.

Each puzzle is missing a critical piece belonging to the other, and each piece is somewhere surrounded by others, yet utterly alone.

But then I consider that perhaps these puzzles willingly exchanged parts of themselves.

Conceivably there was an oath, and maybe they were in love.

I ponder how many pieces of myself I have given away and wonder if I, too, am unsolvable.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Curious Things

In this spiral of endings and beginnings all things are changed.

Cut and stitched, the patterns alter.

Pulling the thread she ties a knot and seals the stars on strands through time.

Binding and weaving blood and light, she artfully crafts such curious things.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Red Kisses & White Bones

All we are we are together, falling forever in delicate dissaray.

Sun and moon, separate but not severed, we encircle the sky.

Red kisses and white bones.

The wolf and deer exchanging skins.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Isolated Incident

Always I am a stranger. Always an isolated incident. I am invisible, even when seen. I am the unlikely truth and the unfathomed consequence. I bear the ugly imprints of god and man in the scorched earth of my femininity. I am a sign, like a fallen feather or a burning bush. I am the warm pink omen of the world's inadequacy. A reminder that their God makes (beautiful) mistakes. © JM Tiffany 2024

Slanted Light

People are like tides, they come, and they go. Like seasons or songs, we change, and we end. My memories of this life are like the kisses that marked the way to the door of your heart.

You stood in mine, a silhouette in the slanted light, and at first, I mistook you for a shadow. But you warmed me like the sun and, for a time, we were complete.

The way seems empty now, a lonely arch in the pale glow of a distant star.

But you were here once, and still, I feel you. Soft and sharp at the same time, you are tucked in these incisions and, bleeding honey, I fall like rain into the sea.

I wish you would walk through that door again, if only to say goodbye, if only to speak with me one last time before the night comes.

Will you hold me when it does? I see now that the moon is rising. Please, don’t let me travel alone.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Thunder-Black Heart

Pliant and luminous as the melancholy of roses is the softness of my thunder-black heart. Cold, wet, dark, and feminine, I am gentle as nymphs and brutal as angels.

I am beautiful with kindness and mad as truth. My lips part like the wisest of flowers. I am holy and ruinous as the newness of youth, and sadistic as God’s alchemical dreams.

I am a black maze of tunneling light. I take the silent roads of fallen gods and walk trembling in the healing night, for I hold in my chest the deepest of poisons.

I am drunk and swimming with teeming sorrows but the water is warm and the rain is loving. To know myself I sacrifice tomorrows on the altar of today and kiss the mouth that drinks me.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Drug

If I was a drug, I would be the kind that kills you slowly, the kind that licks the color from your skin as it drinks the time from your veins. If I was a drug, I would be the kind that gives you visions, the kind that flows a river of pleasures into the sensual terrors of sleepless, fevered dreams. If I was a drug, I would be the kind that loves you with hooks and chains, the kind that runs down your chin until the pain fades like flowers in Autumn. If I was a drug, I would be the kind you take to face the livid light of day, a quick shameful hit followed by a deep onyx dive into shuddering depths. I would suck you greedily into my ravenous mouth, and sinking red nails into your sighing flesh, you would beg me for release. I would comfort you like a lover and, when you would part from me, I would drive a great black train down dark tracks through the canyon of your heart. I would call your name in the hoarse tongue of ravens and you would answer with fear and longing. I would cling to you like smoke and follow you like anxious thoughts. As you suckled at my venomous breasts in the shadow of my black wings, I would open for you like a noctiflorous bloom, and swallow you whole.

© JM Tiffany 2024

The Raging Spiral of Life

The stars ran from me and the void lengthened as Fate's feeble strands stretched and broke on the howling breath of ghosts.

Like a kite in a gale, I was pulled away, grasping hands clawing air, my fingers tangled in the hair of the Night.

The storm tore me away until its eye became my heart, and what it saw was the blind vacuum of eternities without touch.

I let hopes fall away like bloody gauze, and bared my burdens, one wound at a time, until I emerged from a maze of scars.

You were waiting for me there, a silent answer to unvoiced prayers and, wrapt in billowing sails, we were carried away into the raging spiral of life.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Between The Nights

Please remember me tomorrow and hold my light, as soft as kisses, between the nights, Dear, for I have gone to dwell within your chest

There let me serenely reside, beyond the pains of gods and hells, that I may drink from that well and find rest.

Do not let my presence disturb you, Dear, but let me play in the sweetest memories of our brightest days to wait for you there, smiling, until the close of time.

©️ JM Tiffany 2024

The Knife That Sets Us Free

Madness chops everything into quivering bits, placing them neatly into little boxes. Carved into clever cubes, we are numbered and named, then hidden away or punitively displayed by fools afraid of animals. Our strata laid bare and sliced by the ugly language of fear, we wince and withdraw while grasping the edge that wounds us. Spontaneity is sacrificed with the knife of reason as our flesh is mutilated by moral delusions, forcing straight lines like arrows through hearts, all driven with the fatalism of one-way streets. Meanwhile, Joy bleeds to death on the corner, dying in the wan belief that life is somehow… evil. We are maimed by this stupid cruelty, pierced by its dissonant spears, and crucified to that Holy Assumption. But God doesn’t make mistakes, God is a mistake. The heavens are feral, and Eden lay all around us. We have been dissected by the clumsy, brutal hands of priests and kings, and all that has died was placed into boxes, our eyes trapped in gleaming hexahedrons of waking death. Life’s naked wonder, neatly destroyed, the roses yet bloom and trees will bear their crimson fruit. So run, my Dear, run while there is yet red on your lips, and diamonds in the sky. Tigers still prowl the night. They are searching with hunger and bitten by need. Let us capture them, and kiss them, and make love like beasts. For even now, in the shadow of the blackest cube, bright things may grow. Some flowers bloom the better for having been cut, and sometimes it is the knife that sets us free. © JM Tiffany 2024

Black Holes

Hearts are like black holes: what goes into them rarely comes out. Whether bullets or beauty, the heart retains what It receives; sunsets, kittens, and a mother’s kisses spread across the event horizon, luminous as halos, while time slows, stretched thin until crushed in an infinite embrace. Thread-like, its gravity pulls us through time, freezing the moments like retinal burns in the dark. Why should the heart be so black? It is not so much dark as it is unseen. After all, it is distance that hides the greatest of holes, the breadth of this universe hung like a veil over a monstrous hoarder of light, and everything drawn to it eventually falls in.

©️ JM Tiffany 2024

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