Poets And Writers - Tumblr Posts

Time

The heart goes tick-tock with the clock, and time is running out, ticking out gray strands of tangled numbers.

Time closes your eyes and wakes you with a scream, ticking on down the old man’s stream.

Time has no time to love, my dear. Time does not love you. She creases and she wrinkles. Her cold kisses put spiders in your veins.

She boxes up our memories and takes away the days, stealing away the sighs we used to breathe with ease.

She’ll drip the dreams right out of your head!

Hear me, I know! I used to be young! I wore the hats of children and played with tiny hands.

No, Time does not love you, my dear. I know time, and there’s no time like the present you give me. But Time, she will take that too.

She creeps and she crawls too slow to see, but she’s quicker than me, my love, quicker than me.

I’ve stolen from her, and she’s found me out, counting out my days in rays of gray and white.

Time takes you away and never brings you back.

The mirror tells the story. One day, the leaves will fall, and time will teach us all the secrets of the dirt.

No, time does not love you, my dear. But I do love you, in time; until the time is up; until my time is gone; until i am a picture, or a poem, or a phrase.

Though time may not remember, I was with you all those days.

©️ 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

Gravity

Sick with sadness and wretched with longing, I found you in a night of smoke and poison.

Crooked reptiles leered through alcoholic distortions and I burned myself to check the nightmare for substance.

Twin blue flames cut the haze.

Your gravity drew me closer and, like a star of grace, or a sign of calamity, you cut through the clouds and crashed straight into my heart.

© 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

Soil

What did you hope to find here? An idol to worship? A thing to covet and to keep? You had love, and it bared its teeth when I sang. Was it me you wanted or just an escape from the prison of your choices? I could hear the voices in your head, your secrets gaped like wounds in my back, and the wife of your misery sat like a stone on my heart until my insides burst forth. I told you everything, and you took me for a myth. And still, you chose to worship me. You called me your angel even as you stole fire from my sky. I gave you all the mercy and grace I could fit in my fists until I punched that hole in your chest. I poured myself into that pit and swam in the dark. You drank of me and I drown in your mouth until I was spat out like something unholy. And that was your gift. I fell away from you like rain until brighter things grew from the soil of my life. © JM Tiffany

Desert Rose

You said that you loved me but you denied me my face. You said that you loved me but you denied me my body. You said that you loved me but you denied me my clothes. You said that you loved me but you denied me my voice.

You said that you gave me the world  but it wasn’t yours to offer. nor was it mine to receive.

You said that you would give me your heart but all you handed me was an empty vessel.

I longed to drink of you, but my throat grew dry  and still I thirst.

I put my parched lips on yours and a desert spread between us.

I watched the sun go down in your eyes and bloomed alone in the dark  as I waited for the world to end.

© JM Tiffany 2023

The Egg

Single-minded, bare feet challenged by sinuous vines, his gentle hands prized one egg of three from a neatly crafted nest. Pale and blue as sky, he placed it in his mouth and gingerly descended the roughly knotted tree to squat at its base amid the tangled brush. Carefully, he dropped the turquoise ovoid from his chapped lips into his small, dirty hands. Sad furtive eyes examined the delicate shell. Turning it this way and that, he raised his treasure to a ray of sun that sliced like a white laser through the dense emerald canopy above. The backlit egg glowed, burning like an amber gem enclosed in the pale sapphire of its thin encasement. Gazing intensely, his keen eyes squinted and saw two ruddy, capillaried shadows: the silhouettes of a naked man and woman bound by threads of blood through the ovum of time.

The blue-amber light of diffused sun sparked a bright reflection in the boy’s dark eyes and he lovingly placed the egg back into his dry mouth. Within him, it hatched, and a bird took flight its broad wings, black and white, bore his sight upward in an ascending spiral. He rose above the world until he saw one great tree with two mighty roots, and a single mind that knew itself only as strangers.

He then saw himself as a fruit dangling from its burning branches where masks were hung in offering to the madness of life. When he woke in his mother's arms, he was crying. Large crystalline streams wet his cheeks as the soft lull of her voice consoled him. He saw his concerned father peering wordlessly over his mother's shoulder and the boy smiled slightly, reassured. Then, suddenly, he shuddered as a wild wind raked wooden fingers across the rain-streaked pane of his bedroom window.

The rest of that night the wind howled through the tunnels of his mind and he did not sleep, though he did dream until the sun spilled its warm yoke through the gauzy curtains of his room.

© JM Tiffany, 2.24.24

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

The Open Mouth of Time

I don’t want the ugliness of the world today. Please, don't make me. I don't want to. But it drips from everything. Crimson rivulets run into headline horrors that fall and splatter from the lips of liars. I grip the sharp end in self-defense and pull the darkness close. Please, I say, make it go away. And so I cleave until nothing is left. This is not what I wanted. I wanted softness and warmth, and held hands in a house of hearts. I wanted a kind place to grow, a place unknown to murder. But the walls here, they are red and the dead, they are with us, and tomorrow stands in the open mouth of time. The trees are on fire and more babies are lost in the rubble. I drink my coffee, shout at my cat, and spend the rest of the day with my eyes closed. © JM Tiffany 3/25/2024

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

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