A passing glimpse
Before you read any further, *triggers will show up in my poetry posts*. I will clearly mark these at the top of each post. My other, general posts, I'll keep them clean. I promise. <3 This post is safe.
I couple years ago, I was involved in a terrible event. It lasted for three months, and at the end of this horrific experience, a family member died. I was right beside him the whole time. It's really hard to talk about. I actually never talk about it. I miss you Bruce. I never really talk about this experience, and I'm ok with that.
Last year, a bear came into my house and mauled my cat. She died - there's so much more to this story and I can't express it. I am so deeply upset by all these violent deaths. I don't understand life. I don't understand why I am here. I don't understand why we are given life at all.
I have tried to keep journals, but I lose them. lol I'm a disorganized person. There's a lot of things that I desperately want to say to someone, but I literally cannot speak about it. Even though I'm dying to tell someone, every time I approach that subject, the words just stop. I get very mad at myself for not being able to speak. I am not a coward - in fact I've done some very difficult and brave things. I don't understand why I have this inability to speak.
I have been successful at writing poetry. I write it all the time. Most times, even these poems dart around the actual issues, but they express things that I feel unsafe speaking outloud. I don't know if I'll ever be able to express certain things, but for now, poems are all I can lean on.
I've had a lot taken away from me, in very sudden and violent ways. To anyone who has suffered violent things, or lost something in a terrible way, I'm so so so sorry that happened to you. I hope you have a place you can feel safe, somewhere.
This post is safe
By the way, I really enjoy memorizing poetry. It's a hobby I've has since I was like, seven or something. This is a Robert Frost poem that I have hanging on my wall. Just a reminder that some thoughts are like flowers beside the train...you just have to let them pass as they go by. Good god, I sometimes get stuck on certain things. There's a beautiful peace in letting certain memories pass you over.
A Passing Glimpse - Robert Frost
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.
I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt-
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth-
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.
Just something I wrote when I couldn't sleep.
The Heaviest of Elements
I don't know what I need.
A peaceful sleep amongst gentle dreams.
A society where beauty supersedes
A languid conversation between thoughts and me
or maybe just some more weed.
I haven't found my place to go
and have simple thoughts beneath the snow
to contemplate the universe's tow
to pet cats and laugh with the comet's glow,
but that isn't a place I know.
I keep wandering through the desert.
With heat on my skin that's ever present.
That placid mirage looked far too pleasant
so I walked into hell without direction.
Now the sand's kicked up, my cut's infected
both body and mind heave, upended.
If I knew this scape I would turn
Find north by the moon, locate rivers and learn
the path that I walk. Exhale concern.
Instead, every rock looks like an urn,
Every breath is laced heartburn
I'm still searching
and squeezing
and turning
and needing
I just don't know what I need.
A golden shape for me to be
an atmosphere for me to breathe
This labored guilt
This fact untold
It's heavy enough to crush a soul
Yet down beside the water's edge
reflections wave and memories bend
and the drought helps sedimentary rock
digest cleanliness, clean my thoughts.
While all the animals begin to starve-
I am healing amongst putrid scars.
So why does paining take a toll
on undeserving, healthy souls?
We find respite in the strangest places,
hurricanes and hospice faces.
The way the mind protects itself
when living is equivalent to walking through hell.
Bleed secrets on the bathroom floor -
It can be healthy, just don't collect sores.
I thought I knew enough of hate
to banish the weight of mine own fate.
But what that is, I still don't know
because it's living that's actually creating the goal
but I'm still lost amongst the snow
and longing for an afterglow.
Experience is getting heavy
swirling waterfalls to cyclical eddies
to currents which will tend to settle
and heavy sediment will drop their metal.
That's the pattern of the human mind.
Give it time, child.
Give it time.
Trigger Warning for heavy life thoughts and suicide
I don't want to be alive. Not in a suicide kind of way
Just in a temporary blackness
that would be so kind to swallow me whole
and take me home
and quiet the tone
of anger and failure in the order I choose.
it's a genocide war - no winners come through.
I don't really want to be alive
for just this moment in time
when the winds stop blowing
when they cease for a moment
and in the same way so do I
I'd like to walk on
I'd like to feel strong
I'd like to inhale a respite
take off the coat of the desperate
and not have breath for a time
and not have to steady my spine
I'd like to be paused in existence.
I was involved in a situation where a loved one died. I made the choice that lead to her death. I thought I was helping, but I made the wrong fucking decision. I struggle a lot with life. What it means. Why I even exist at all. I have been in a lot of tough situtaions, but it always seems to be one difficult situation right after another. It never really gets better. I used to go to concerts a lot as a kid and the musicians up on stage would all say, "Hold on, life gets better. I promise." Yeah, well fuck you. I'm 26 and it's still horrific.
I just don't understand. Why is it this difficult? I keep asking for answers, and no one is there to hear my calls.
This is not really a true poem; this is a letter, I suppose. I feel awful that I existed at all.
---
Once I was fool enough to think
that god was beautiful.
That some creator was watching over me as I stumbled along the earth.
That someone was there to catch my weakness.
There was a time I was educated and pure
and as I stretched myself along some
invisible path
which I believed paved by god -
There was a time I was a dreamer.
Then the sun set
and wildfire swept over what I knew,
deflowering fields,
and drywall,
and sheetrock
and miles and miles of nature-
everything burned (but nature spared our ash tree)
and even then, I considered such miracles an act of god.
After the fire settled and we were together again,
after the emergency
after I went back along my paved path to find you
and you weren't there
Please god, if you wish me dead just kill me already.
I cannot keep watching the people around me
starve,
and cancer,
and burn,
and suffer
by my accidental hands.
If god was there, it would have addressed me already.
but instead of a voice from the void
I found nothing,
but the death of a soul I never tried to hurt.
and my own hands are weighted
and my own shoes are anchors
and everything I touch is a destructive
wind
along
some
abandoned
coast line.
Please, show me
some answer as to why.
Some reason for us
to exist at all,
because when death is accidental
not once,
but twice -
when death keeps coming like a rain
swallowing an already flooded pier -
"Why" is all I ask
as I cling to some gossamer hope:
Maybe today my creator will answer me.
Maybe today.
This post is safe. Heavy existential questions, but safe.
During an emergency I made a choice. That choice lead to the horrific death of someone I loved. I don't understand. It's really hard for me to believe in anything at all. I have so, so many questions, but there is no one there to answer any of it. Life is entropic, and I'm starting to believe that life is meaningless. If an event like this was supposed to happen - if there is some creator who is sitting back and watching this show - then I cannot keep going. I can't keep moving forward in some universe where a creator like this exists - where this event was some kind of "fate". Godforbid I hear that stupid phrase, "Everything happens for a reason" one more time. That is not true. It's not true.
This has to be because life is random and life was never intended. It was a beautiful mistake, but there is no intention. No reason. No goals. Life has to be a mistake.
I never used to be this way. I struggle so much, now.
---
Dear god,
Life is broken
Because I am hard broken
I've been hard boiled and flash frozen
Uplifted through radical motion
Rusted down and sanded off
Layers of filth perturbed by cough
Lived through fire, flood, and earthquake scars
Came out alive - but a hardened heart
Dear god,
The universe expands, but we cease to move
And grow our hearts bigger like the heavens do
We're petty
We're selfish
We're so infinitely small
Compared to a walk through Centauri's hall.
The years are long and so are our lies
Our government policies
Our wars and crimes.
Dear god
Can you relieve and revive the patterns
Breathe life into me and make these circles shatter?
If Eden was real, if a Creator exists
If we leave it up to our scientific wits
If the cosmos is spinning at thousands per second
Per prehistoric, retrofitted.
If there is meaning inside the void
And the curtain parted and employed
all the questions we've asked from the start-
all the struggles, all the aching hearts.
I doubt the existence
I question the god
I see our wholly system flawed.
Arbitrary kids with troubled expressions
perturbed homeless, vets without pensions.
And god, you took the three things I fought for most.
You gutted my innards, removed my yolk.
It didn't make me stronger nor closer to you
I doubt the existence - the holy bestrewn
I want to live, you despotic autarch
Instead, life's your patent and I'm your fucking trademark.
The universe still expands
We age some more
Unlike wine, the longer we last, the more we deplore
I'd like to be happy
I'd like to believe
I'd like to smile and forget how to grieve.
There's a truth inside every kernel of doubt
There's doubt inside every faith without
limits and bonds and safe, tranquil places.
There is no afterlife, only homeostasis.
Oh lord,
The empty space between stars is pure.
It's safe, it's quiet and long.
I'm starting to think we got heaven wrong.
Through fire
through flood
through mountain debris.
As the earth crumbles
So does all of me
More poetry. I can't stop thinking about it.
---
How carefully we must breech that gentle subject
and aborne understanding on the things we fear.
Else we drown in our own darkness,
like a human voice attempting to call over the hoof beats,
asking a herd of buffalo to stop their stampede.
Death will always be a subject worth calling out to,
but some of us will fill it with things we believe
instead of the things we see.
The way a culture views death reflects a society's morals,
and the same fashion;
the way we tell ghost stories at a campfire
reveals which amongst us is the most frightened
of their own creative, wandering mind.
I can tell the dangerous people
by the way they talk about death.
It reflects much on their life and as such,
we must be so careful when we breech this subject.
To talk about death is to examine life, and that can be more terrifying than dying itself.
I understand you because you taught me the language that is violence. I get what control is. I get why you are the way you are. You thought this was how you made another person stronger, and everything you did, you did with love. I have the ability to understand you
---
Let's make you sensitive to pain.
Let's take your mind and implement
a new autonomic system.
One where you flinch from raised hands
and one where you submit to angry voices.
We'll make you sensitive
and we'll make you dependent
and we'll bury you in the dirt until you soften up.
We'll make you into a lawn ornament
and we'll crush your hope in a garlic press
because we like our women fearful.
You'll get to play outside once your wounds heal
(we don't want the neighbors asking questions)
and we'll distract your sorrow with new scars
After skin heals it doesn't reopen
but when emotions heal the scabs are fragile
pieces of glass, torn open by yours truly
to reveal your innards-
to prove to the world that your guts are just
as delicate as your eyes.
I want to be your trigger, love, and every time
you think of me I want you to cower,
I want you silent
I want you to understand
that no matter where you go,
you are on a leash
and the electric collar I placed in your autonomic system
will never run out of power.
Anytime anyone raises their hands, even to point directions
you will flinch and your cheek will remember the sting
and you will think of me.
I am your God and even when I'm dead
my remnants will be with your forever.
It's the greatest love story ever told.
The one with raised fists and broken glass
and the inability to escape.
I made you sensitive to pain, my love,
and for that, I made you beautiful.