Darkened Serenity

you, with the broken heart
who never felt whole
take my words and fill up
the gaps that seep into
your pseudo smile,
the one that cracks around
the edges
like peeling plaster.

keep your head up, lady
you can’t see the sunlight
if your eyes are dragging
across the broken earth
catching on every shadow
that weighs you down
like a fishnet..
throw all that off
and pluck out the hooks 
one by one.

you trace your scars
in careful lines
and put words in the mouths
of strangers, paint 
their tongues with judgment
their eyes with scorn
and tell yourself
no one would miss you
but lovely, i would
write this in my own blood 
if it would make you
see the truth.

this world is a big place,
a dark one, sometimes,
but i’ll share my candle
if you’ll let me stand beside you
for a little while
and i know you feel alone
with the buzz of the masses 
flooding your ears
but just listen to the sound of 
this voice.

i’ll hold you up 
until you’re strong enough
to set your spine straight
and i’ll speak until you begin 
to believe.
because i see what you don’t—
the lovely lines of your soul
that tell me
whether you believe it or not
that this dark world 
would be a little darker
without you in it.

and the words leaned to your ear
like calla lilies grandly gliding
limply pure and imperfect;
the syllables, stars, hung
in the shell of your listless lobes
and fell in languid folds,
nets of tatted lace
tying errant thoughts together.

just try and lie
and every battered truth you meant
to safeguard, every
old hurt and pricking betrayal
knotted up and buried 
in the knitted chambers 
of your heart will unravel
as if the words were
pale fingers plucking at threads. 

the more you mask
the more you reveal, like a child’s 
grubby hand held tight
against the spine, you scratch
ink on dead trees
to build bastions of meaning
in the lettered spaces,
the empty places that echo
your own hollowness.

you fill the mouth with cacophonies 
of bitter honey, crypts
unburied because the silence
is unbearable
and only the pen understands
this.

the beauty of sorrow
is a blessed plague burning
the wheat from the chaff, the thing
that hangs and twists
in the curl of the wind
like a tired flag,
timid and torn but not yet fallen,
and bolstered
by the quiet voices 
that yearn to be held 
in a bit of human warmth.

and the words swung down 
like sweetwater rain
slipping from my lips
in a subtle bloom
to fill the empty cup 
of your soul, and we both 
felt
a little less
alone.

and i can’t keep these things from spilling out like bumblebees
fresh from the lips of flowers, but be patient for this is the truth
in a love letter to myself
wrapped in chicken wire…tongues of honey wagging
silver threads of secrets falling soft as moonlight on the world’s brow
infant-insignificant
because one voice is barely enough to still a moth wing tender-beating
but still, it is my voice, and my song and my storm spinning like teacups
treacle-thick in the traitorous distance revealed between reality and reverie.

it’s become somewhat demanding to continually close this campaign
against the rituals of love written in iridescent ink in every
gesture of the past
where every expectation swung toward disappointment 
in an ongoing attempt to diminish me
(orchestrated best by my own hand, of course)
but it was in some sort of fever
that i turned with heated fervor
to the sanctuary of these sanctimonious
words and walked along these lines
limned acutely in loss and reflection
because it was something to do
and most bodies wish to feel at least 
a little less helpless.

but i have never heeded even the best advice, and long it took lingering
in every twisted shadow cast by absence and my own imagination
thoughts percolating, always circulating 
back to the beginning
stale revelations turning revolutions in my porous skull
dredging up each promise passionately 
uttered in the black of night
that turned up brittle in the searing sunlight,
hoping to cultivate a strange form of wisdom from the pain
before i realized my goal was never
that at all but merely the impossible instead
—to unbreak a heart.

so shuddering with disgust and a dismissive sort of shrug i sought 
to dissipate my delusional devotion to empty infatuation and houses built
on no foundation, but numbness 
is a barren thing, and bitterness a hungry one
and the story is the same 
as the principles of pain
it is better to feel something than nothing at all
(especially when you find yourself 
clinging tight as vines to every errant memory)
but it does not take a fool to perceive that hugging echoes is no fruitful pursuit
and i must consider fools the wisest of us all, for they keep nothing
not even thought;
but i found my fixtures firmer than one might expect and thusly 
forced my spine a little straighter
and, once, even had to be told by a stranger
to hold my head up a little higher.

but drowning your sorrows like moths to a flame will not work,
for there is no tide, not even tears, that can wash away the worst 
of what the world deals us, and  whichever method attempted to rid minds
of every sublime splendor 
and simple glory that will never again be are likely only to stain a ragged soul further,
so this is no longer a sword swung in silence
meant to sever every tender root and trailing tragedy
but a semblance meant to cement the facts lest i forget how far i’ve come
to be the person i longed to be
like a phoenix rising 
from between the splintered cracks
sky-bound like a wildflower springing from the sidewalk 
to touch the high-born heavens until i’m sure i’ve got it right.

 i am done with ancient visions and old perceptions
shifting into trusting insight and intuition
and every renounced rite will claim its tithe
but this is truth
unspoken, whispers in the dark weaving a new kind of me
one that appreciates the aptitude of turning beautiful disasters
into something solid, real
forget destiny, i am dipping down into serenity, having passed through 
every other thing already
phases turning with the moon’s many faces
there is nothing left to summon
but myself

i.
sometimes i can’t breathe because i realize
how many choices i make in a day and i become
terrified that i will never again make the right 
series of decisions to make me feel whole again


ii.
once upon a time i knew who i was but lately
it feels as if i’m a little lost; i’ve moved to new
streets and fallen asleep to a new smell but
nothing is setting my crooked pulse right


iii.
when i’m on my own i fight the urge to crawl
into a ball, close my eyes and relive the moments
i miss the most; i tell myself that when i
open them my life won’t be just in my dreams


iv.
and i’m starting to think that maybe i took too
many chances and fell too many times in my life 
but if someone knows the secret to living without
a tumble then they know the secret to not living at all


v.
maybe i could fix this if i slowed my breathing and
let you inside to tidy up and make me whole;
maybe i could fix it but this heartandsoulache is
what make me love you more 

In this forever of twelve hours we’ve created our first expanse of dead air.There are words but they fumble, intermittent and skewed.

It’s hard to remember where we started, not when I leaned across and touched your cheek,but when distance became agony and love was this pain inside my ribs whenever you left.

I have tried to see the light, but the beam fell short before you heard.

It would be nice to relive my life with you as if we’d flown somewhere among the stars dusted onto the sky (which aren’t as brilliant as your eyes) but the ultimate high would be gazing into them until the universe sunk in on itself and beyond. 

You cant put this feeling up on a shelf like an antique, it’s self renewing, always at its peak even when turmoil is brewing like a hurricane and I wont let it pull us from the cosmos.

I’m only wandering, never lost, yet you try to talk me down and walk me out but confetti doves haunt me more often now and I see you floating through a broken mirror, pictures of a being,
lost-
swallowed whole.

Like a butterfly consumed within it’s boundaries, living for the day. Yet the glass which flows like droplets of this life shatter, as does everything and I wonder how long this will last before fluttering echoes paralyze an evaporating dream

I am somehow unworthy of the words lately, what was once a flood has slowed to a mere trickle and here I am thirsty…trying to salvage a mere thimbleful of my thoughts but it seems not to be…

Moodswings are amazing; how can I laugh and write poetry, how can I be witty and starving and why do I no longer hold the same silver on paper as before? Why do the words have no weight, ready to flutter off, be blown away by the quietest syllable the softest whispers…

Why do I feel as if I have been beaten by rose petals? 

Unlike the movies say life is not clearcut and bordered cleanly, mine is sort of sharp edged and blurry so don’t ask me what I want and don’t ask me if I cry…

just assume I don’t