beanboywrites

[beanboywrites]

i’m applying for a job right now but i would actually rather be dozens and dozens of glimmering white flowers blooming, scattered across a moonlit field no human has seen for many hundreds of years

[beanboywrites]

at three in the morning, you sojourn with the feedback of the universe.

[beanboywrites]

it’s so quiet i can hear my creaking knees as i readjust again and again

the air is heavy and damp. the moon reflects off of the pavement and hangs around me, and where usually it might curl around me like an old soft blanket it’s unfamiliar and cold; a glittering stranger in my outstretched hands.

i never want to go home again. whatever i owned i could lose for this. i could stand up now and disappear. could someone find me? would they? can they please 

i spend a week begging and no one says a word 

no one knows that i am being dragged into the ground. that hands are clinging to me. that the earth tethered itself to my ankles when i was born. no one knew. now i do. 

i wonder if when someone who loves me looks at me,

if they know

if they could know

about these catacombs.

it’s so quiet outside that i can hear my body keeping me alive. my palms are dry, and warm, and blue. the moon rests in my hands. 

i stand and rock between both feet, and go inside.

[beanboywrites]

i am eating an apple and it feels magical.

this apple has a beautiful hold in the hand. the honeycrisp apples sourced by harris teeter grocery company are unruly and large; i cannot hold them in one hand. they are a two-hand apple. however, this apple, from the wegman family market corporation, is of natural size and is a beautiful color.

i left this apple on the counter by accident. i am usually a fridge apple girlie, but i have found that in being room temp, it is like i just pulled it off a tree and took a bite. it smells very sweet. i can smell it from a couple feet away and it smells like martinelli’s apple juice.

and the taste.

when i was little, i used to visit my neighbor’s dog and lay in the grass with him. my neighbor would come out with apples for me that he kept in the garage, and i would eat them in the sun in the grass with his dog.

there was a year that the leaves changed color in my neighborhood, which was weird. it must have been like, cold in january for once. 

i was reminded of that kind of pseudo-autumn and my neighbor���s apples by this one.

[beanboywrites]

The sun rises, broken into squares and then into triangles by panes of glass and the open door. A few hours ago, he screamed at you from the sidewalk outside your window, and he was bathed in sodium light and the morning’s first blues, and you stared down at him, mute, feeling how you imagine it must feel to be an empty jar, freshly washed.

Instead of going to French you buy a cappuccino and walk to the park. Dew rests on the edges of leaves. Briefly, time’s arrow slows. It’s the first day of spring.

[beanboywrites]

In a parking lot in 2015 there was a dip, gradual, in the pavement, and when it rained, the center became a black lake ringed by a black shore. It threw the quivering yellow reflection of streetlights overhead onto the fronts of your calves. This was the only place left for you after the librarian told you it was really time to go. You hunched in the shadow of a rooftop overhang with overflowing gutters, a cigarette between your fingers, a book tucked under your jacket. Plants with young branches, still green, bent under the onslaught.

[beanboywrites]

Sunday morning sun fell in shards, settling, trembling, at the bottom of the baptism pool. When they dunked you under, you opened your eyes. Behind your fractured pastor, baby Jesus stared down at you in stained glass. Rain is unusual in November, but that day you had barely toweled dry when warm water ran again in rivulets down your arms and legs. As it hit the ground, it rose again, petrichor and the sharp smell of fresh tar turned to glimmering steam in the watery light of the early afternoon.

[beanboywrites]

Yellow moon low in the sky. Its edges bleed out, paint on wet paper, refracting in blooming rectangles off sheets of rain. You’re crouched in the grass under a highway overpass. The din falls onto you. Below you, the thirsty earth drinks its fill.

[beanboywrites]

I’m afraid I peaked in college. The fear follows me everywhere, I feel it running down my arms when I pick things up and when I shower, and when I stand still, which is all I seem to do nowadays.

After cutting my finger in half, it healed. But it is new, and it is different. It’s harder now to play piano, and I am still working up the courage to touch my flute again. I am so afraid that in some way I’m degrading, that I have somehow become innately less. My fiancé tells me I’m being dramatic when I wonder out loud if I’ll ever again be the person I once was, but for my whole life I have been asking myself who I am, and searching for myself in others, and trying to learn more about me from people who may never know me as well as I do.

When I pick up a glass or squeeze someone’s shoulder the ridge of my own scar reminds me of a time it wasn’t there, and I wonder if I will ever move on from longing for who I no longer am. I resemble who I was. My thumb looks somewhat like it did. But we are new, and we are different.

This stagnation is self-imposed. My fear of how I have changed, of success and of expectations, prevents me from moving on. Am I scared that I have already peaked, or that someday I will?

[beanboywrites]

found this in my drafts and i’m having creative troubles so here u go

--

when he hurt me

my body felt empty in new ways

i was homesick for the way i had been

for who i was before he was there,

inside of whoever i left behind

in that cold room, on that soft bed, in a gently rocking boat

i wish i could forget.

i am trying so hard to forgive

not because he deserves it, but because i do

and i cannot believe how difficult it is.

[beanboywrites]

summer 2012

A summer spent dissociating and watching the sun cast shadows on my rose walls.

I woke up at four to shadows and surprise and to my life leaving my hollow bird bones

Feeling dead at fifteen and pleased and also empty

In the winter I leave my windows open at night and in the mornings my window blinds dance and clatter and the sun dances in turn to the nine o’clock breeze. But in the summer my windows are shut and so are my eyes.

Things move so slowly and so quickly and I am so scared

Red lines bloomed crisscrossing the white empty land of my stomach my chest my thighs, a garden well-tended and fading fast

I bought my first pair of lace underwear and appreciated the bridge it built between my hipbones and hated my tender sprout of a body for trying to grow into the tree it was someday meant to be.

I imagined myself dying;

I hoped that I would.

My stomach growled until it could not and settled into a dull ache I believed was satisfaction

There was a time I didn’t eat for four days and drew myself a small trophy and also myself, dead of unknown cause, at age twenty three—somehow beautiful even in decay

I told a close friend that I had no future and they laughed.

[beanboywrites]

secondhand smoke nestles under my fingernails

my lungs constrict

when i am falling asleep i jump into clarity realizing i was not breathing again

rather than drifting off i am losing consciousness from lack of oxygen

my brain protests feebly to constant battering and malnutrition

i take a step and my body cannot breathe enough

i could take in all the sky and still need more

when i was born a man in white looked at my chest

its sunken he said

keep an eye on that

today the doctor says there is nothing wrong with my lungs and i insist there is something there must be, listen to me

she writes a prescription for an xray to console me and does not smile

[beanboywrites]

when he hurt me

i didn’t understand it at first

i laid on my side in bed and shivered and didn’t know why my body would not stop

i rose with the sun

being in the same room scared me

and i was alone

after breakfast, his friends left, and he napped, and i sat outside pretending to be a person and pretending that i was ok

until i got home i didn’t understand

and when i did i sat down and i held myself at the dining room table and couldn’t stop crying

i felt like dried leaves

i felt dirty and small

and my body was not my own

[beanboywrites]

there is a bump in my neck

two, actually

there are two bumps in my neck and no medical professional seems to mind because more than a patient i am an insurance policy that they do not take 

my weekend was dizzy and i drank too much milk, and i watched these bumps in my neck, growing as if they belonged there, on the right side of my neck, in the humidity of late march

i should eat better food, and more. i should sleep less erratically. i should drink more water. i should value my health. but instead i am awake and busy and worried. because i cannot afford for my grades to drop or to miss that meeting or to turn this in late. because i cannot afford anything.

my bank account is alarming. the doctor will not take me. i need to pay my bills. 

i am still busy.

and there are two bumps on my neck.

[beanboywrites]

a friend of mine

she smells like dogs and summer's smokey fires and i've loved her all my life i wish she would hold me but i touch her clothed shoulder and that's enough she says gentle yet full of hot coals and molten iron and uncertainty pressured turning into stone two faced half faced half moon hazy lace and deep cold water reflecting the space behind my fingers outspread she tells me everything she knows and is not proud she gives herself to everyone but me and that is fine i got to thinking i thought all day and there was a time i sat on a pillow and prayed and listened to her move beyond my closed curtain eyelids i thought all day and there was a time i said we are meant to be we are meant we are we are i thought all day and she said nothing

[beanboywrites]

set

there is too much happening my grandmothers pool measures twenty feet by sixty feet and has two sets of stairs one large ant struggles for survival in the middle of the deep end this is where i am as well however i anchor myself to the side, a barnacle five feet from the sea floor and breathing just fine the ant stops moving and its body dips below the surface the water is still but move it gently and it glows something magical even safe under shade trees and the honeysuckle bush and who knows why the sun is everywhere in the water look down five feet past your illuminated toes the bottom lies in wait in a dream an octopus lived there reaching out to touch the sun peaked ripples it did not know it caused in reality there is nothing at the bottom of the pool the only one reaching out is the ant, and he cannot see anymore

[beanboywrites]

on being nineteen

i lay down in the desert dawn and put dirt on

the sun rises blazing and blinding, eagerly

it felt as if i were constantly moving and never progressing every part of me sinking into the earth to conserve energy i did not resist.

quicksand seemed so imminently dangerous when i was a child and it just doesn't carry the same weight anymore it's disappointing i like the weight but quicksand is not from where i am from

i looked up and wondered if i would ever feel normal, then asked myself if i ever had if i did would i know i didn't know i was afraid of everything i was afraid that i would not die

i looked in my mirror and crammed myself over and over into things that no longer fit and did not go out i had eaten bread for a year it was as unforgiving as one may imagine

my internship winked and my gpa took a trip south and i sat in the elbow of a fruit tree, quietly imagining each fruit as my future, i sat for months and watched each fruit rot and fall to the beckoning earth and i did not move i also began to rot, i hoped i would become a flower the next time around or a cat

the good in my life made me shiver set as i was on my downward spiral i forgot that it was good to feel good and to have good offended to my core by the notion that my own health mattered i threw myself into work and fasted my hunger away and hid my eyes so i could not be seen my friends dropped like flies around me and i wondered if they had died with all of my futures i wondered if they had been friends at all i wondered how long they could feed off of me, my stomach empty and my body racing through what was left eaten from inside and out

it was strange to feel that everything was repeating and i wondered for a moment if i had been cursed i decided i had been

death is an old friend we have never met but i welcome him in and invite him to sit would you like some tea, coffee? startled, he declines and sits i tell him i am imagining with such effort these seats this home this life and it is all fake, it is not my own, it will never be always i am outside looking in on better things i need to go i am so tired i cannot hold you anymore he crosses his legs and shifts his weight on my back and sips the coffee he turned down no i close my eyes not yet