Poetic Prose - Tumblr Posts
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
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
Nectar
I am the fiction of me, a fable told in time to calm a fluttering heart. The story of my becoming is a tale of passing away. I am a myth without memory, a play of shadows and smiling masks fixed to the face of the Void. I am empty yet full of sweetness, drops of nectar in a falling jar.
© JM Tiffany 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
Bloom
Driven by the jealous, quiet yearnings of a pulsating tyrant, I am cursed with a terrible heart.
Red lips parted, it places ravenous kisses on blushing skin.
Its needful, ardent grasp rises from a dark, feminine well; a crushing, velvet embrace of murderous sweetness.
Like a flower before the sun, I open urgently: a wanton bloom hungry for light.
© JM Tiffany 2024
Lost
No one wants the broken. That which is soiled and cracked does not find a home amid the shine of new things. Whatever is ruined does not attract care. There are no ribbons for dead dolls. No lullabies for the lost. What is cast out is forgotten. What is used is disdained, and only those who have fallen will find us.
© JM Tiffany 2024
Moss
No amount of fear or desire will tilt the scales of life. All the iron nails in the temple of my heart will not outweigh the core of the earth. The winds shall howl over the song of my breath and clouds will cover my nakedness. The trees do bend, but not for me. Mine is the stillness of spreading roots, the fixed and sleepy pace of moss. I do not resent this rain upon my face, but cursed are they that long for the sun.
©️ 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
Kissed By Ghosts
Not all ghosts howl in grief. Some may linger as the shadow of a kiss or tremble on your skin like a gentle hand. Some ghosts may tell you that you are pretty, that you are enough, even now. And some ghosts, you may discover, dwell in cottages made of lovely words. They may linger in a moment near a lake at sunset, or twirl their skirts gayly in a field of wildflowers. No, not all ghosts are weepy things with dark stories and terrible ends. Besides, even happy stories have endings, dear. And one day, I may whisper like a feathered breeze against your rosy cheek, reminding you of your worth, and speaking lovingly in the silences of the beauty of your eyes.
©️ JM Tiffany 2024