Poetry Prompt - Tumblr Posts

And I

Let the quiet of the night devour me

Let the darkness feast upon me

(As though they crave even the crumbs

Of what remains of my existence)

And I find myself laying awake,

(Patiently)

Waiting

For them to come for me

Because it is in these moments

That I feel most desired

And even if I dissipate this way,

(Slowly consumed night after night),

Atleast I will fade

Unafraid

And

Feeling

Wanted

And there is nothing left unsaid, and yet a million things unheard. The chasm between us widening and deepening and every word tumbles down into the depths and we remain. Sore throats and hoarse voices and strained eyes trying to make out the details of your face that drift farther away with each passing eternity. And I suppose, that we could jump. But who knows what awaits us? How far we will fall. If We will hit the bottom alive. If we will drown in the accumulated sea of sentences that have amassed over the years. If we will see each other the same in the darkness. If we will ever resurface.

But I will jump first. If only to know it will be your voice that drowns me. If only to attempt to consume everything you ever tried to say before it devours me instead. If only to be suffocated by your truth. If only to be laid to rest here, amongst the sins we birthed together. Here, next to the slowly disintegrating corpse of our love. And perhaps I will never know peace. But I will have known the whole of you, And that would have been enough.

I think if I have to come undone for someone, I would rather it be you.

Which is to say, I would prefer it to be you. Which is to say, I would like to unravel, and I would like it to be at by your hand. Which is to say, I would like to earn the honour of being loved by you. That I would like to have the pleasure of loving you unconditionally.

Because I think that if I were to give you my heart, you would treat it kindly. That if I were to show you my scars, you would memorize their pattern. That if I were to bear my soul to you, you would bear yours to me. I would like to love you and be loved by you, if you think you wouldn’t mind it. 

Because I know you will always offer me the hot water for my shower first. And even if I never take you up on it, I know you will. I want that with you.

I would like cabinets over flowing with tupperware and glass jars and old ice cream containers in the fridge filled with your mint chutney. I want bookshelves crowded more with your hand bound make-shift notebooks than novels. I want to grumble about stolen covers as I wake chilled in the morning and laugh it off clinging to you for warmth instead.

I want sunlight filtering in through our curtains on Saturday morning to dust your lashes and cheeks and still being allowed to be the one to wake you. I want to watch you dance with a broom across the living room (as I wipe down the kitchen counters) singing to a song from a musical I haven’t listened to but have become familiar with through moments like these. I want you to try to teach me how to cook and not mind when I mess up the soup I attempt to make you when you fall sick. I want to be there when you are sick. 

I want to be allowed to care for you. I want to do so many loads of laundry together we forget who’s pjs belong to who. I want to stop caring about what belongs to who with you. I want to feel you slip into bed next to me at 3 am still scented with your favourite take out I left on the table for you because I knew you would be home late. I want that with you.

I want to memorize your favorite take out order and how you like your tea. I want to memorize at least 75% of your playlist. I want to be allowed to hold you when no one else is. I dont care if I’m always your plus one but I want to be the first person you call when the night is over. Your tipsy phone call filled with soft smiles and hiccups. I want to be the person you come home to. I want you to be the person I come home to.

I want to let you convince me that we should get a cat. Even though I have never owned a pet in my life. I want to realize it has grown on me as we both hold fast to your pillow in bed while you are away because it smells like you. 

I would like to be allowed to miss you, in a gentle aching kind of way. The kind tinged with the reassurance that you will be coming home to me, eventually. 

I don’t care what the books say. I want to hold your hand until the butterflies migrate out of us and we watch them flutter along the ceiling dancing with ribbons of sunlight. I want to know you until your presence evokes nothing but peace. I want to find peace with you. Which is to say, I would like to, if it is all the same to you. 

And in the end, is it not the desire for beautiful things that destroys us all?

~gold sinks easy, my poor king midas

I have this reoccuring dream

In which I am loved.

That is it.

That is the poem.

Short.

Because it never lasts

It never lasts.

Fridge light starlight. Coupled with moonshine beams sifted through apartment blinds. Bare feet, barer legs, band t-shirt ball gowns. Cool hard wood floor only staining the tips of our toes because we are mostly floating. Teetering on the cusp of forever. I promise i won't let you fall (unless you ask me to). Come a little closer, little miracle, and let me warm the tip of your nose with everything I cannot say. Butterfly kisses that leave nectar residue on your cheeks, the syrup gently trapping dreams drifting through the ether. Swaying to a melody you hum already half asleep on my shoulder. I hold a galaxy in my arms and feel both infinite and so so small.

Wishes made over milk and cookies, too many to count,  all of them tasting like childhood. Crumbs of innocence litter the tiles of the kitchen floor. Sticky fingers and bottomless appetites giving way to eternity. Giggled promises made under comforters muffled in pillowcases. They absorb our whispers into their threads, keep us warm long after the chill of silence settles us. We say little. Listen to our heartbeats. Melt into the darkness. Become constellations. Hold the universe between us in our cupped palms as we drift away. Wake to find we have suffocated it as we slept.

~There will always be more poems for you, my love ♡

If no one heard it, did it happen?

If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

(The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab)

Proof of my existence:

I am my unmade bed

My week old unfolded laundry that was Fresh once

I am the disappointment in my mothers eyes

And the scars I have left on lovers and strangers

I am my clothes I have donated

And my compilation of pintrest boards the innocent scroller will accidentally stumble across

I am the the jokes I penciled into the walls of my middle school bathroom stall

I am the dust I leave behind

Dead skin cells, reminder that they were living once

I was living once

I had once had the pleasure of laying my palm against the surface of something tangible and it felt the contact as much as I did

I am the peices of myself I have left scattered in the people I have let hold me

Long enough for parts of me to become caught under their fingernails and in their eyelashes

I am not my mistakes

But I am their consequences

I am shrapnel scars left by the promises I shattered

I am the pastries I have bought

My coin accumulating into something greater than it once was

And in that small way I make someone's dream a reality

And in that small way I am immortalized

I am the corners of novel pages I have folded

And the sentences I have left highlighted and the notes I have scrawled in its margins

I am the half finished stories I wrote in the 6th grade

I am my poetry

And the things I have discarded

I am my clouded breath dancing on the cold wind momentarily before dissipating

As it becomes one with the ether forever adrift

And in that small way I am immortalized

I am my embarrassing childhood photographs

I am the energy you spent on me and the time you wasted on us

I am the things I have created but perhaps more the absence left in the wake of the things I have destroyed

I am the stains I have left and the sins I have committed

Out of spite, out of desperation, frivolously or unwittingly.

I am the way my name burns yours tounge when your mouth tries to wrap itself around its pronunciation and the scalding memories

I am

I was

here.

S o m a t i c R i t u a l

Wait until it is raining. By raining I mean pouring. I heard once, that a sign that your repentance has been accepted is rain. A gift. So go outside and let yourself be drenched in forgiveness. Wait until the mercy seeps into your bones and into your socks. Look up and inhale the possibility of the person you could become absolved of sin. Run your fingers through your hair and savour the knots, the barriers to perfection. Exhale your guilt and run away so you do not run the risk of inhaling it again. Keep running. Down the street. Down the path that takes you anywhere but here. Anywhere but where you started. Until your fingertips are numb and your chest is warm. Run your fingers over your lips and ache as your breath heats the cold of your palms. This is about contradiction. About oxymorons. About how opposition exists in your own body.

Look up at the grey of sky and ask it if mercy is a gift if you must beg for it, make sure there is no malice in your words if you want the clouds to listen. Think about why you are sorry and repeat the words to every puddle you pass until they mean nothing. They are just words. Excuses. Say them until your voice is hoarse and you are tiered. Do not come back until you are tiered. This is important. Trudge home in your wet clothes and soaked soul. Listen to nothing but your heartbeat. Listen to your heartbeat. Listen to your heartbeat. To nothing but your heartbeat. If someone stops you or looks at you oddly or asks you what you are doing or asks you if you are okay, remember their face. Remember their words and the way their life flickers in their irises. Remember them so you can include them in your poem so they can be forgiven too.

Wring out your sleeves and heartstring at the door. Politely decline the droplets offer of redemption. It's rude to decline a gift. But is mercy a gift if you must ask for it? And what does a sinner care about being polite. Go upstairs and crawl under your covers. It is okay if your bedsheets become damp. Take this as a practice in being grateful. You can apologize to your blankets later. Thank them for their sacrifice. Take a nap and dream of your sins. And when you wake write about the promises you have broken and the mistakes you have made and all the terrible things you have ever done. On the other side of the paper, write a letter to yourself about being deserving of second chances. Change your bedsheets and strip yourself of your guilty garments. Put them in the wash. Take a shower. Let the remnants of your hate and sorrow wash down the drain. You have paid for your sins, darling.

"Just

Tell me

The truth.

I promise

I won't

get

upset."

It is a lie, of course.

But everyone wants

The truth,

Until they have it.

As it is always so much more gruesome,

Than one could have imagined.

I do not blame you

For becoming angry

For the truth is an infuriating thing.

~reflections on the gentle falsehoods that have never turned me away and the untruths that have always made room for me to believe when I had no where else to go

The idea of you spending the rest of your life with me makes me sick.

Which is to say I do not think it would be fair of me to sentence you to the rest of your time with me. What a shame it would be for your years to be wasted on us .

What a tragedy for your infinite love to be reduced to soft smiles and to drip slowly through cupped palms. Reduced to weathering skin and decomposing dreams.

I do not think I could bare, chaining you to us. When I know there is so much out there calling to be known by you.

What a sin it would be, for your infinity to be stifled by my desire for a fleeting eternity with your unfathomability. Your soul a broken record of lost potential.

I do not think either of us would be happy, for long. The endless loop of what could have been, lulling us to sleep and waking us at dawn. The winding melody threading itself between us as we hold eachother in the dark.

Your unfuillment clouding the windows. My guilt cracking the floorboards. The rements of our love sitting in a shoe box at the top of the closet. A fond memory of our youth that evokes more slammed doors than it should when we dust it off over a glass of Nostalgia. We don't know why it makes us so angry. So sad. To recall that we have become nothing of what we thought we would.

I think fate would forever resent me. For stealing you away from her. Life plotting our drifting slowly. Poking holes in our roof, flooding the kitchen sink, fiddling with the thermostat so its never quite right.

Until we find the silence (a once soft blanket we giggled under in the pillow fort we made in the living room)-- thread bare. Itchy. Fraying. Slowly unraveling. Until we find ourselves sleeping back to back. Holding hands awkwardly for photographs. Not talking until noon after 3 cups of water downed coffee. Dinners eaten at different times and tight lipped smiles with sad sighing eyes as we cross unexpectedly in the one bathroom in our appartement.

All of the kisses I brush across your cheek tasting of apology. Both of us trying to hard to let it be enough. Life, a spited lover picking us apart slowly. It would never forgive me. I would never forgive me.

I do not want that with you. I want forever with you. And I think the only way, for us to have that, is for me to let you go.

But love,

Please

Come back

And visit

I will patiently await your breif moments of return. Savor the sticky honey footprints you trek into the house. Every step dripping in hope. You-- drenched in life.

Wring out your sun soaked skin over the bath tub while you tell me tales of the way the universe has made love to you an infinite number of intricate revaltions.

Your eyes sparkling with a garden of blooming constellations that would have long ago wilted if I asked you to stay. Let the glittering of the stars in your gaze tell me I made the right choice. That it would have been selfish to keep you,  in all your miracle, to myself.

The taming of your galaxy. Until it be consumed by its own blackhole in self preservation. Making itself small enough to plaster itself across my bedroom ceiling. Call it the sacrifices you made for love.

No. I would rather miss you recklessly gentle. My longing tinged with the knowledge that you will return, to assure me that that love I refused to take from you is being spent well. That the time I refused to steal from you is being spent well.

My needing double dipped in the the belief

That

You

Will

Come

Back

To

Me

If only to rest your weary soul, a moment. My little shooting star. My little galaxy. And tell me tales of your travels, without me.

I am holding our love in my arms

She is dying

She is bleeding out

I don’t know how to save her

~

I did it

I didn’t mean to

Oh god, what have I done?

What have I done,

My love

~

She stains my hands with

Memories of us

As I try to staunch the bleeding

Exhales butterflies that die on her lips

Whispers to me

Of everything she could have become.

Says she doesn't blame me

But I do

But I do

And where were you when it happened?

The sun tosses herself into the arms of the sea

His vast embrace, the only thing she has never felt too infinite for

She takes comfort in being swallowed whole for the night 

Savours the sensation of being devoured 

~ oh celestial love, even the sun longs to be encompassed sometimes, for it is no weakness to desire to be held. you are never too much for someone who cannot get enough of you.

I wonder who I could have become if I had been loved.

I find your fingerprints littering the pages of all my poetry and I can't get them off without smudging the ink and ruining my work. I don't know why I let you touch it. But its more like it asked to touch you. And how could I say no? Have you ever tried to deny inspiration? And how could I blame my writing for wanting to hold you? How could I blame her?

I don't hate you for leaving but I despise you for making me think you might stay. Loathe you for letting me become accustomed to the comfort of your presence. The leaving always hurts more when it is unexpected. Wounds deeper when they are laid in the back. Taking longer to clot. Always scarring worse.

And now my lips are always chapped because you're not there reminding me to stop picking at them, and to lend me your honey lip balm. And I don't want to buy my own lip balm because its definitely going to remind me too much of you. But every time I am irked by flimsy peeling skin, like a scab begging to torn, a wound waiting to be reopened, that reminds me of you too. And so I heal and tear open stitches in a vicious cycle of remembering.

I just want to forget you.

I just want to forget you.

How many times can someone fall out of love?

Trick question.

No one ever really falls out of love.

Not all the way atleast.

For love is a shape shifter if I ever knew one.

.

I will die on this hill

And you will not know

Because you would have left

My heart at home.

So I become a peony.

The ground holds me kindly,

The same way she has cradled bones and buried teardrops,

Until I disintegrate into her embrace.

I will not be waiting for you when you come back for me.

.

The stars are all already ghosts.

And perhaps they are proof that there is a life after this one in which beautiful things are possible.

That we might bring someone hope in their darkest moment even if we are too far gone to be bound by the gravity of holding someone's faith in our palms.

.

I have nothing to offer you but potential.

Do with it what you will.

I hope you will find a better use for it that I have.

The most reckless thing I ever did was forgive you.

Mostly because I couldn't help it.

.

Please, stay with me until I forget.

I am frightened.

I am

Scared.

I am really

Scared.

For freedom is lonely.

And regret a vicious companion

.

~I don't know what I mean but I hope you do (02.20.21.)

♡

"Give me a smile sweetie"

And I have always been good at

Giving until I break

So I grin until my teeth crack

And I choke on the shards

Of every sharp thing

I was never taught

I did not need permission to say

♡

The sky bleeds pomegranate gin

And no one dares lay sutures

Across the cusp of her rebellion

And so we sip second chances from

The sewers and wait for the

Wound to clot with sticky fingers and

Stained lips dripping hollows

Gorging ourselves on handfuls of grief

From the gutters, carrying our mother's rage

In our bellies until next rainfall

♡

When I think of stars I think of

Music notes falling from the sky

I think of each of them hitting

The skin of the pavement in a series of

Shattered promises that echo like gasps

Accidental harmonies

I think of melodic dissonance

I think of the collective inhale of rhythm

Rewiring our heartbeats for single

Shared moment of apology

♡

When I think of clouds

I think of forgetting

Perhaps in another life

I could have told you why

But I can no longer remember

♡

Afterall what is my existence but

Circumstantial evidence

For my body aches these days

Stretched thin over the skeleton of my

Mistakes, waiting for sin to split

Skin and bloom across the surface of

My doubt

♡

synonyms for meaningless // 03.31.21

Intimacy is quiet

Is the sound of your heartbeat fluttering against the soft skin of my palm

And our breathes syncing into delicate harmonies as we lay next to each other

Is the exhale of grief when our fingers intertwine

Is the stillness of the night when we are content to hold each others bodies

And make no promises

That will shatter the silence when they break

The silence in the aftermath of an apology is a conniving thing

Greedy for forgiveness

Pulling assurances from you before you are ready to give them

They say forgiveness is a small price to pay for peace

But the question is who's?

Is my clemency enough to buy redemption for 2?

Are your sorries enough to purchase you freedom from guilt?

And if I cannot find my peace without granting you yours too

Then so be it

A lie is a small price to pay for justice

I promise myself I will unforgive you

That I will unaccept the apology somehow

That the sorries you mail in cheap white envoples will be returned to sender

That the meager words you offered me that I swallowed for the sake of hospitality will not be digested

I tell myself your suffering is worth the cost of mine

That if enough of your guilt devours you from the inside out, you may soon become emptier than I am

But we are both being eaten alive

For some things in this life are insatiable

Are merciless

For this we both know

So let it be be a waiting game

To see who holds out longest

Before mercy takes us

For herself

~ i do not care if you are sorry anymore (02.21.21)

The night is always young somewhere

The darkness

Still a child

That may yet be taught

How to hold love

In the spaces between its teeth