#Poetic prose

[mythoughttherapy]

“More love is found in grief than in love itself.”

—Lang Leav, September Love

[iambrillyant]

“walking down your authentic path can be one of the loneliest roads to travel on because the longer you’re on it, the more you realize that only a select few will be compatible with who you are with no mask on.”

— billy chapata

[merakiione]

soap scum

(ione meraki 2024)

[deanepoetry]

You helped me understand.

[umabokil]

There is a rotten feeling of melancholy and loneliness on some nights which you can’t quite explain. You suddenly want to be buried—whether under the ground, under a comforter, or in a hug that’s here to stay, you don’t yet know—but you suddenly feel like mould and dust and the colour of a funeral on a dull day; you suddenly want to sit in the middle of a puddle of gloom and stare off at the white wall till daybreak peeks through the window crack. You want away; you want the ocean bed; you want stillness; you want nothingness. Because you feel like nothingness.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Part of why I love nurse logs and nurse stumps so very much is because they are a perfect example of the life-death-life cycle in nature. Tiny bits of us begin dying--skin cells, epithelial sheddings, hair--from the moment we are born, and in a living ecosystem they are immediately scooped up by some other being who uses them to fuel another day of life. This conifer tree was feeding tiny detritivores and decomposers with flakes of dead bark and shed needles in its very first year, and at the same time drawing carbon from a million different deaths into itself from the air, storing more and more as it grew.

And now it passes that bounty directly on to more living green things and fungi and microbes. The nurse log may be the symbol of death renewed into life on the forest floor, but the tree was already within that reciprocal system from germination forward. So we too are dying every moment of our lives but also capturing the deaths of others to keep the flames within burning day after day. The apple that I eat is from a tree that wrapped itself around the mortality of countless corpses in the soil, recycled the carbon from a million places into vessels that hold the incomparable energy of the sun.

Once you look closely enough at them, life and death are not separate; they simply balance and rebalance throughout the existence of one being, until its story has ended while sparking the stories of so, so many others. The nurse log is becoming ferns and fungi, while the ferns and fungi will be forever inseparable from the ancient tree that gave them their start in life. The decaying wood we see here will eventually become imperceptible to our eyes, but it will persist through these and many, many other lives of the forest.

[dreamgirljune]

i think i am so enamored with devotion as violence, because i want someone to love me even when i am covered in blood. most days, i am more teeth than lips. more claws than hands. more desperation than gentleness. if i am to love, i want it to consume me as surely as a forest fire. when the smoke has cleared, trees will grow stronger than before. i will only let my wounds be tended to by someone unafraid of gore, and i fear softness hurts more than any double edged sword. if i am to be loved, let it be in a slaughterhouse we might make into a home. then the heartache will be holy. and i will be whole.

[heartofmuse]

Let me tell  you over and over again how much you mean to me, how much I need you though I will not always tell you in words that come from my lips.  You are the breath of my happiness, and in this life there is nothing I yearn for more, nothing more necessary to the well being of my soul  than your presence. Minutes only feel lived when filled with you. Oh, come and know my heart for it is wide open for you. Dispel all doubt as you peek inside and see yourself entwined in every fiber, your name singing in every beat. And as you recognize yourself  and the weight of everything you are in my heart let your soul be affirmed and believe and trust once more. 

e.v.e.

[sylfhia]

—Until our souls meet again...

"Under a sky that seemed to bleed along the horizon, two souls met in an endless meadow of red flowers. She, with her dark dress billowing like an omen, and he, with a smile that concealed the weight of destiny, looked at each other as if the universe had paused in a single breath. Each petal seemed to burn with the intensity of their love, fleeting and perfect. But the wind, a cruel messenger, carried with it the murmur of inevitable separation, and the flowers, silent accomplices, began to wither beneath their feet. They embraced with the desperation of those who know that time does not belong to them, leaving in that field their final breath, an eternal memory etched in crimson."

[sunflorall]

Oh to be loved in a way you understand

[heart-of-poetry]

No, I don’t care that you’re messy and loud and sometimes annoying. I love you anyhow. Come over tonight. I will cook for you in the kitchen—it’s green tiles and the sun that peaks in through the windows. Come as you are. Leave your hair messy and your skin blank and your body cloaked in plain clothing. I find you most beautiful in that state—natural, beating, tender, alive. I will make us soup in my cleanest pot. It will be steaming and hot, but not too hot that it burns. I will love you enough for it to always keep you warm, but never in such a way that it hurts.

[beforeyearning]

january snow.

And in the midst of January snow, the type that sticks to the ground

& your ribs—your desire to seek warmth reaches a fever pitch.

You have an excuse to abandon your shame at the door, and open

your mouth and say ‘I want. I want. I want’, and if you’re lucky you’ll

hear ‘I’ll give. I’ll give. I’ll give’, but you’re foreordained to hear firsthand

the yearning echo throughout an empty house. But you’ll put on some

coffee and cozy up in bed, shifting aimlessly through doomscrolling,

sleeping, and sipping on black coffee that spills out the big gaping

wound in the middle of your chest. You blot it & change your shirt

for the comfiest hoodie you have. You’re secretly terrified that there’s

a big tattoo on the middle of your forehead that gives you away to everyone,

but you’re more scared of the mirror and the wasted potential in the reflection

to go check on it. So, you make yourself as little possible with the heaviest heart,

it’s a wonder you aren’t pinned to the ground from all your wants. Lost in the blur

of whitish gray world outside your window, you watch the dance of the snowflakes

and find a smidgen of peace. You’re an excellent overthinker, you make something

from nothing—so you’ll carry this peace for days. Maybe even through the month.

[iambrillyant]

“your new era begins when you choose yourself unapologetically and release the weight of who you were yesterday, it begins when you decide that you’re deserving of a life better than the one you’re leaving behind, it begins when you start to believe in your own worthiness.”

— billy chapata

[weaponizedtit]

I’m attracted to safety. Coming home to the most beautiful person you've ever seen and you know however bad everything outside maybe, your person will be there to support you, no matter what. You know your feelings are safe as you lay your head on her lap. She listens to your vents and your sighs, all the while holding you gently in her soft, warm arms, stroking your hair. And you get to protect her just the same. There is no judgement, there is no danger, there is only love. Safety. That’s all I want. The romance of safety in my lover's arms.

[rzmusings]

my heart is stuffed with words I'll never get to say to you. i wish i could pluck it out, wring it with steady hands and pour all it holds for you into a cup. i wish i could make you taste the bitterness of these words, have them burning your way down your throat so horribly that you choke.

— maybe then you could digest what you’ve done.

[amoxicillin-tangent]

i am given birth to by my mother. i am brought home to a falling-apart trailer. i am fed and i am not fed enough. i am aged into a small being with opinions and some semblance of autonomy; my childhood is a video game and i am given three objectives: sit down, stay quiet, and cease to exist. i am made good at the last part; it is a god-like sort of art, and so i do. silence is suited for me as well as i am suited for silence. 

i am told, gently, by my third-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. the noun of the sentence should be the actor, the doer, the taker. i am not a taker. never the actor of my own consciousness, of my own unconsciousness, remember, now, i am ceasing to exist. 

i am uprooted like a wilting plant, no sunlight, chipped terracotta pot, placed, never planted. grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters, and i deny its case. i am made a masochist at all of eight-years-old, i am made for withering away. i am made mother, made martyr, made clever, made more, made machine. 

i am placed in a foster home and told the new rules. i will sleep at 2130 and wake at 0600. i will eat blueberries and coconut yogurt and i will make good grades. i will behave. i will sit down, i will stay quiet, and i will cease to exist. 

i am told, gently, by my ninth-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. like this, you are the subject of the sentence. i am brought home; i am subjected to my sentence. i am taught, i am created, i am embittered, i am disillusioned, i am ceasing. it is all i know how to do.

blurring letters litter the pages before me. maya angelou, oh pray my wings are gonna fit me well. oh, tell the hell-child to return to her cell. mangled beast, worthless mongrel, ceasing. perfect child, perfect victim, passive. the sentences are diagrammed by my expert hand and i am diagrammed as well, pages in a folder, problem child, trouble-maker, mentally unstable. infinitive, preposition, page-break. 

my eleventh-grade teacher is asked why was it okay for maya angelou to write in passive voice? she responds, because to write in active voice would take the focus from the corpse to the crew. i like that. i understand it. the pages aren’t so blurry anymore. i trace them with my fingertips, letter-by-letter. her bones were found//round thirty years later//when they razed//her building to//put up a parking lot. 

i am no longer still, silent, ceasing. i am no longer wilting, and no longer made, i am maker. 

grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters. i am neither the corpse nor the crew. i reach forward with trembling hands,

and i pull the cord, and the light floods through.