#piningpoet

[thepiningpoet]

S P R E A D Y O U R W I N G S . . .

Because it's never too late to soar.

[littleouphecreations]

We are very proud to announce “The Pining Poet” e-journal publication: The first ever digest dedicated to all things pertaining to Dark Academia. For writing/fashion/art submissions, please write us at info@ponseries.com.

For more please check out The Pining Poet blog here: https://thepiningpoet.tumblr.com/ejournal

[thepiningpoet]

There's just this: I've grown to love you. That's all. There's nothing more to say. I tried to pull the earliest saplings by their roots, kill it at its earliest sprouts, but it's no use anymore. It's grown into an evergreen that I can't be rid of. So have me, or don't. But if you shan't have me, then take your axe without hesitancy, as I have not the strength to bear it, and cut all down that lay before us, or what little remains. And please, don't hack at it steadily, taking your leisurely time in the matter. Strike true, swiftly as a guillotine and let me not feel it again. Make me loathe you from the surface of my skin, to the marrow of my bones, so I won't mourn the loss. That's how a love dies. It never passes gracefully, unnoticeably, by God's natural means. No. It's smothered in its own bed and takes its last breaths slowly. We, my dear, are the murderers.

- K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

https://thepiningpoet.tumblr.com

We are very proud to announce “The Pining Poet” e-journal publication: The first-ever digest dedicated to all things pertaining to Dark Academia. For writing/fashion/art submissions, please write to us at info@ponseries.com.

Question for the next issue: What does Dark Academia mean to you?

Note: All submissions must be original content from you.

Writing Submissions:

Please state full name (that you wish to be shown in the publication) - Author's bio (a short 3-4 sentences, no more.)

File types should be in Rich Text Format or PDF

Please check your file for grammatical errors/typos BEFORE sending it

Art Submissions:

Please state full name (that you wish to be shown in the publication)

Art should be a high-resolution scan if possible. If not, a well-lit and clear picture of high quality. Low-res pictures of grainy or unclear quality will be immediately rejected.

Fashion/Style Submissions:

Please state full name (that you wish to be shown in the publication) and country of residence

Pictures should be well-lit, clear, and of high quality. Photos that don't fit this standard will be rejected

If professionally photographed, the name of the photographer must be provided

Submissions close by mid-January. Thank you!

[thepiningpoet]

You're like the sun: after staring at you a little while, when I close my eyes I can still see you. The image of you is burned into my mind. You are inerasable.

-K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

Entry 426:

Your name and address are missing from the envelope, like all the ones before. I'm afraid I've lost count of how many. At this point, my own cowardice has embittered me.

When people refer to haunting, they often think of death. But those that mistake it as such, dare say, have never truly felt this word in all its authenticity, as it lives and breathes. Haunting isn't death. It's life. People haunt you, things haunt you because they're still very much alive somewhere...deep inside, a light refusing to be snuffed out, spilling their lasting poison around the ridges and valleys of your brain and refusing to let up. People don't often refer to love and obsession in this way. And yet they should be. Hardly anything is more haunting than the idea of love or the illusion it gives.

I remember the last words my father spoke to me more than I do the decomposing corpse I stumbled across in the woods years later that committed suicide. Whether it be the idea of love or love lost, these are the things that haunt us. And so your eyes have with me. They've haunted me this year and two months, but God...I've felt every second of those four hundred twenty-six days. The days we spoke, passed like minutes. The days without a word dispersed, elapsed like years. And you keep me hanging on this precarious tightrope with no glimpse of a net beneath me, with some days me simply wishing the wind would have its way or that I would let my footing slip. But then I would always wonder if you were waiting for me at the end of the rope all this time, with a hand extended. The image of you waiting there is what haunts me...an image that has never happened and may never be, but God, I wish it to.

When people say you can't want or give what you've never been shown, it's the cruellest of lies. I have this idea of love, that I've never experienced, but I know what it shall be, how it shall look like, what it should feel like. I haven't felt it, but I'm determined I will, just as I am determined to smell you, touch you, breathe you in and shiver and tremble at the idea of all these wonderful fantasies coming true at some unprecedented point in time. You can kill a person but you can't kill a dream. They live on somewhere. That is exactly what haunting is, I suppose. It's either a dream or a nightmare that passes telepathically from one individual to the next and never truly leaves.

You just keep giving me reasons to look back. You're a dream I can't quite get my hands around but one that always gives me just enough hope to make me think that maybe one day I can. Maybe you won't leave me fully because I've done the same to you somehow unknowingly, that I've instilled your visions in those quiet, wretched hours of dusk and dawn. And the night sweeps over your eyelashes like an intoxicating dream; my frame, ghostlike, my eyes somehow sorrowful yet whimsical at the idea of that one thing which I've never received and always given. Has this haunted you as your gaze has me? If this be true, let our fates be the same.

- K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

The Rook

"Your eyes, a hypnotic green. Like malachite, you're beautiful, entrancing, but to have an encounter with you is to risk death. To handle you requires protection. To inhale you is to become delirious. To taste you is to choke on my own blood due to the sweet toxicity. You know you toy with me. Love is a game to you, or the illusion of it anyway. Every passing year, I believe it more: love is an illusion. We never truly see it in its authenticity. We, in our rudimentary understanding of it are only capable of displaying shards but never in full. You only confirm this ideology. You solidify it in my mind as you weave aimlessly in and out of my life. I sent you a poem, which again, you lead me to think your heart has been moved. I have given you the address and key but still, you wait outside my door watching, never entering, like a passing illusion far too beautiful to be real.

Or are you simply waiting, waiting for me to make the first move? I move my Bishop, purpose-driven, spiritual in pursuit as if called by fate. You move the Rook, once with gates open, now reserved, apprehensively approaching, guarding yourself with precipitous walls of stone, your crenellations lined with knights wielding crossbows at the closest intruder. You know what it is I have come to steal. Something sacred to you. Something you wish to keep sealed away but I won't let it. Something that used to be open. I persist as a lighthouse persists against the rough seas that greet it...because you, despite being armed, haven't fired yet. Not a single shot echoes in the landscape as I approach steadily. I wait and still, my ears are met with only silence. I advance. I scale the coarse exterior of your doubts. I dismantle and lay to ruin your barricades which tell a sorrowful history of abuse, neglect. I scale your ivy, not minding the mild irritation. I've grown immune. My sword sinks into the gaps of the top of your stonework. I crumble to one knee in both exhaustion and elation. There you are, silent as stone, as regal as a king in the distance. The wind blisters with a wave of untamed emotions. Your hair, unkept; your expression, unreadable.

Checkmate.

I approach you, unarmed. I take the strong shape of your neck within my hands tenderly. And I, having withheld it for years, kiss you. You accept it. In other dimensions, I have waited a lifetime, perhaps. I kiss you but not as Judas did Jesus. My touch is not of the enemy, not of a friend but of the lover who has admired from afar long enough. And I, having gained what it was I had sought after, haven't done what you presumed I would. I don't mount my horse. I shan’t lay siege to your castle nor cast out your family to the wilderness. I shan’t pillage your ancient chapel, selling your precious gold, silver, or bronze. I shan’t vandalize your beams of marble. I wish to restore you. I wish only to stay and so I shall remain until you have dismissed me."

- K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

ENTRY 079: I simply wanted to know what it would be like to graze my hand across the otherworldly softness of your cheek and by it, not to have felt the winters of my life anymore. That’s all. But even having prayed to God for this is too much. To ask to swim in the spiral galaxies and drink the stars would be more easily achievable than what I have asked. I have sworn to forget you and yet I find the threads of your words, of our sacred conversations, interwoven in the tapestry of my writings, of my art, of everything. By the time I’ve removed every aspect of you from me, my life is not a patchwork of dreams anymore; it’s nothing more than threadbare rags from your extraction. There’s nothing left anymore. The hopelessness is insurmountable. I tell you in all earnestness, I have never felt as alone in the world as I feel now. My sorrow twists around me as tightly as a noose. I have nowhere to turn anymore but to my own forlornness and greet it with all open-armed familiarity as I would an old companion. Come, my old cimmerian friend, I too am a creature of the night, as the last light in my hands has shunned me and is mine no more. Come into me and let us become one. Let me forsake this too infrequently incandescent world and have no remembrance of it. Yet still, as I step into the darkness and let the caliginous surroundings consume me, I see you. I see you in all clarity within my mind’s eye. You’re like the sun: after staring at you a little while, when I close my eyes I can still see you. The image of you is burned into my mind. You are inerasable.

K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

Donning the Mask

There's something about you that always appealed to me. But then again, I always had expensive taste. I always gravitated towards things I couldn't afford...things just out of reach. Even in people; people with greater spirits than my own, people with braver souls, people who always saw the good in everyone and everything despite the flowers around us withering, the world moaning in death. But when I see you, it's like it's always Spring where you tread lightly, like frost never touches you, or at least, you never show it. Perhaps under your gloves, there's frostbite. If it's a mask you wear, you wear it impeccably well. Teach me not to suffer anymore. Teach me how to wear it as you do.

-K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

I think sometimes people are afraid of the ugly I'm capable of creating, and in truth, I love to create it just as much as I love to create what is beautiful. They're not so different really, that's what makes both so captivating for me. Both are uncommon, both demand attention. Both are capable of instilling fear in one's heart. They can make you afraid to speak clearly, they can make you afraid to breathe, they can make you afraid to look...but you're compelled to look anyway. They are the world's great truth-sayers, for they need no introduction, no fanfare, and how we respond to each is a reflection of our own souls. And that's what is marvelous about the beauty and the beast; they're two separate sides of the same moon. One bathed in light, the other immersed in shadow. Does not the detectable edge of the moon's darkness against the night sky ensnare your attention just as much as the side that beams the sun's glory? Yes, they both demand our attention just the same.

-K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

Besides, a glance, a faint look

Gone in an instant, it was.

It's the premise of art,

Yet it remains artless, in its truest form.

It flickers past pupils, dances between fingers

Caresses over words, so lightly.

Instills one's actions.

A conquer of death,

The provocation of courage and shall, upon the person be,

the birth and vanquish of fear.

It quickens one's breath, or labors it.

The essence of life, the vindication of wrong,

the lapse of right, the shadow of reality,

the reflection of disillusionment.

The fabric of all that be, and all that "never was".

For many who possess it, it never satisfies.

For those who don't, it's all you need.

It is free, yet your life inscribes the price tag.

It was "never present", yet was always there.

Limitless, obscure,

Versatile, exposed.

It is meaningless.

It was crucial.

Why then, was it never mine?

I always gave, yet never received.

- "Impermissus: The Trials of a Guardian Angel" by Kamille Alexandra

[thepiningpoet]

Kindness. Kindness has been the death of me. Kind lips, and kind eyes, warm hands and open arms. You will never know how deprived I've been of it. I've been naïve, foolhardy, seeping my thoughts and emotions like a vase with a leak; slowly the flowers inside wither. I was needy for your affectionate words, for your conversations as flora contorts itself to the extremity just to reach the sun's light...yellow, gold as your hair.

Why do you suddenly ignore me? Do I bore you now? Was I nothing more than a trivial, fleeting fancy to pass vacant hours? If so, you're cruel, a cruel beast to have toyed with your prey before killing it. When I saw your appearance, I was wary, assuming you to be like most with a pretty façade: cold, superficial, self-absorbed. You couldn't have been more different. Our conversations led way for me to discover a man of sensitivity, of modest heart, of caring disposition. I began to see you with open eyes so I thought. What I perceived to be a benevolent soul made my pupils widen, my heart tender like a dove. I no longer saw this face of yours as a mask, but a transparent glass, showing the beauty within. I began to see all of you and like a sweeping poison sweet to the taste, I gave in. I went through my days with a certain ease now and eagerness, looking forward to your next message. Was I a fool? Yes. When those sumptuous glances fell on me did I not feel a tinge of gratitude at your attentions? Your words so succulent to the ear. Did I not feel the slightest growth of my self-esteem, sensing that maybe, just perhaps I might be worthwhile? Perhaps you were truly well-intentioned, and you couldn't have known how these things would effect me. How could you? And yet how could you not know I am human, that I'd bend? Yet still I have not the willpower to hate you.

Tell me you're happy in her company with sincerity in your gaze and you won't hear of it again from me. Tell me and you won't hear another word. But I must know. I must know it's not as I suspect, that there's not a hallowness in your heart that eats away at your being like rot in wood as it does me...that there's not a fear in we both that we've made a mistake, that we've somehow turned left instead of right at a turbulent crossroads in our lives. Tell me that I've been mistaken. Tell me you've been content this whole time and I'll be the happier for it. That's all I've ever wanted for you. You, with eyes like precious jewels, with skin like ivory in winter, with a voice like honey and hair like gold silk. I knew right then I couldn't afford you from the moment you first spoke. I knew from the moment I saw tenderness in your heart, that I wasn't enough. Perhaps in a former life, in my virgin youth, when my eyes glowed and sparkled and my character soft, pianissimo, fragile. Maybe then you would've had me. Maybe then? But we shall never know, will we?

-K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

I see you in everything: in the shifting colors of windswept whey, in the sun's rays spilling across a body of water, the gold in Gustav Klimt's paint. Everything. Everything is a shade of blond now, everything is a strand of your hair being woven steadily into my reality. Every man I draw resembles you now. When will you give me my eyes again? When will they be free of this madness? I can't clear my mind of you. I want to confess, I want to disclose my sins that I've kept away under lock and key, that I've buried under layers of self-denial and hesitation. My tongue lays heavier in my mouth than the weight and burden of my secrets. Please, it's too heavy for me now. The yoke is too much for me. Shall I confess? Shall I beg your forgiveness? I've envisioned kissing your mouth more than I've prayed in three years.

When we spoke together until midnight it wasn't a simple conversation we were having, it was a psychological undressing. Will you permit me to undress the rest? Forgive my brashness, won't you? You've bewitched me in every sense. I'm malleable like clay in your warm hands. Be gentle with me, but only with my heart. With my vessel, you can do whatever you wish, my love: polish it, place flowers delicately inside, break it on a night's errand, if you will. Förstör det. I am yours mind, body and soul. What have you done with me? I'm not myself anymore and yet I'm gladdened by it, surprised. Depression had me in its grips with no hopes of release. I had forgotten what it was like to be happy. Then you wrote to me, and the image of your face sparked a certain joy, a fire in me, starting like a candle: innocent, pure, a bright light in the dimness . How it has changed. How can something so innocent evolve so quickly? The small light of the wick has morphed into devastating flames that will devour all that fall in its path, attempting to chastise it. Don't you see? Det kan inte längre kontrolleras. It's too overpowering. In the end, I'm only a coward with a brave face. I only write you the words I could never bring myself to say. So here I am, begging you, imploring you...end this. Put me out of my misery. Tell me you love me, or you don't. But nothing in between. Säg mig att du älskar mig eller inte. Men inget mellan.

-K.A.H.

[thepiningpoet]

[thepiningpoet]

I can hear her. I can hear her inhale like a phantom in my mind, taking in the scent of you wantonly. But just as I can hear her, I can also hear you. I swear I hear the scrapes and bangs of objects being thrown without care, whisked off tables, shoved off counters. I hear a sort of long, rough rapping against a solid surface. Hard, solid as stone. A part of me aches, in the deepest hollow of my being. The desperation of your moans torment me. When I turn off the light the image of you leaves but the sounds of your pleasure remains, and the image of you is ressurrected from the darkest depths in my mind's eye yet again. Your gossamer skin glistening with the sheen of your sweat, your back contorting to the point every muscle is convexed. I can hear and even feel the rhythmic clacking as the ceiling tremors no differently than my own cold, dank body as I lay surrounded by frigid, coarse, unfeeling sheets.

I imagine the skin of your arm lined in the finest hairs like velvet rests against me. I would cry if tears would but have me. Instead, I lay awake envisioning what it must be like to be as she, to have you in this way, to have been the one to inspire your open-mouthed expressions as the sound of erupting ecstacy seeps from your lips. You gasp, heaving uncontrollably as a man in need of water, and she the well. You don't stop until the liquid drips across the full of your rose-tinted lips and courses down your chiseled jaw and chin. You don't cease until you've had your fill of her, until your thirst has been sedated. Surely, even I detected the generous sensual appetite concealed in you and craved to appease it. And still I can picture you now, gracing down those spiral steps with a suppressed smile tracing your lips, and your eyes sparkling. Nervously, you try to fix your disheveled hair. The flush of your cheeks gives you away and yet still, you are made all the more beautiful by it. I can only smile weakly at you yet now I understand why some passionate soul had it inscribed on the blade of a pocket knife, "May all your wounds be mortal." You have killed me beyond the physical body. You've stabbed my soul and worse yet, you've watched it bleed dry on the teal colored floor.

- K. A. H.

[thepiningpoet]

Kind Lips & Kind Eyes

Kindness. Kindness has been the death of me. Kind lips, and kind eyes, warm hands and open arms. You will never know how deprived I’ve been of it. I’ve been naïve, foolhardy, seeping my thoughts and emotions like a vase with a leak; slowly the flowers inside wither. I was needy for your affectionate words, for your conversations as flora contorts itself to the extremity just to reach the sun’s light…yellow, gold as your hair.

  Why do you suddenly ignore me? Do I bore you now? Was I nothing more than a trivial, fleeting fancy to pass vacant hours? If so, you’re cruel, a cruel beast to have toyed with your prey before killing it. When I saw your appearance, I was wary, assuming you to be like most with a pretty façade: cold, superficial, self-absorbed. You couldn’t have been more different. Our conversations led way for me to discover a man of sensitivity, of modest heart, of caring disposition. I began to see you with open eyes so I thought. What I perceived to be a benevolent soul made my pupils widen, my heart tender like a dove. I no longer saw this face of yours as a mask, but a transparent glass, showing the beauty within. I began to see all of you and like a sweeping poison sweet to the taste, I gave in. I went through my days with a certain ease now and eagerness, looking forward to your next message. Was I a fool? Yes. When those sumptuous glances fell on me did I not feel a tinge of gratitude at your attentions? Your words so succulent to the ear. Did I not feel the slightest growth of my self-esteem, sensing that maybe, just perhaps I might be worthwhile? Perhaps you were truly well-intentioned, and you couldn’t have known how these things would affect me. How could you? And yet how could you not know I am human, that I’d bend? Yet still I have not the willpower to hate you.

  Tell me you’re happy in her company with sincerity in your gaze and you won’t hear of it again from me. Tell me and you won’t hear another word. But I must know. I must know it’s not as I suspect, that there’s not a hollowness in your heart that eats away at your being like rot in wood as it does me…that there’s not a fear in we both that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve somehow turned left instead of right at a turbulent crossroads in our lives. Tell me that I’ve been mistaken. Tell me you’ve been content this whole time and I’ll be the happier for it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. You, with eyes like precious jewels, with skin like ivory in winter, with a voice like honey and hair like gold silk. I knew right then I couldn’t afford you from the moment you first spoke. I knew from the moment I saw tenderness in your heart, that I wasn’t enough. Perhaps in a former life, in my virgin youth, when my eyes glowed and sparkled and my character soft, pianissimo, fragile. Maybe then you would’ve had me. Maybe then? But we shall never know, will we?