#read my poetry

[loveelizabeths]

love elizabeth s.

[switchbladedreamz]

Misery comforted me

Your arms were quicksand

Embrace a lie a tangle of snakes constricting around my heart until you got what you wanted

I have everything i want and youre nowhere near

I saw you once and you sit heavy on my brain

Im purging you

Im in control now

I let my anguish pilot me accepting your scraps of love licking the plate clean

I have beauty in my life

Parts of me hope you do too

With this i release you

Im in control

No longer will i sit alone in my head with you on my screen

Bothering me

Disturbing my peace

[eroticmassacre]

and I inquire of you

I beg of thee

hit me with the hammer

break my hand and knee

[softhe4rted]

first read on @exitmusicfrafilm’s post about 2023

[taimanzano]

One of one. One, alone, one.

[trickstersaint]

i want to introduce you all to a project that is very close to my heart... or lack of one. anyway. for anyone who has ever wanted to play a poem. i'd like you to meet aromanticism

(link opens itch.io - she'll run on html in your browser! please be nice to her!)

[composeregg]

edit (10/23/2024) now that the poll is over: Original version, with 10 questions, from April 2023 here

And, given that the original is from April 2023, that means I can very easily say:

No, this was not an ISAT reference!

Just because I use parentheses and 2nd person pov and love the same concepts of what a time loop can do to a person doesn't mean it's ISAT

(Yes, I like ISAT, the original poll is why I was recommended the game! But if you look at the original, you can see all the origins of the options to choose from, including what spurred me on with the moss option from the replies)

If I were going to make something for ISAT, I would never be so vague, you can simply look at my ao3 for proof of that

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[soracities]

Dunya Mikhail, from Diary of a wave outside the sea (trans. Elizabeth Winslow and Dunya Mikhail) [ID'd]

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

hamlet (1623) - william shakespeare

"polonius, behind the arras: o i am slaying!"

[loveelizabeths]

love elizabeth s.

[deadlypoetacademia]

[sweatermuppet]

Blessed Be by Sol Rios, published in Ghost of my Ghosts

[zuzu-draws]

Just a pair of friendly sorcerers out on a stroll~

[vexheart]

call me an old soul, but I find peace in nature, nights, moon, sunsets, breezes, books, poetry, flowers, the smell of rain, and people who feel like hug

[kvothes]

louise glück was a tremendous poet in her own life and also taught, advised, and nurtured uncountable other poets. her picking richard siken’s crush for the yale younger poets prize is a well known fact, but she selected a number of other poets for publication during her tenure as the contest judge that i think are worth knowing.

peter streckfus, cuckoo (2003)

richard siken, crush (2004)

jay hopler, green squall (2005)

jessica fisher, frail-craft (2006)

fady joudah, the earth in the attic (2007)

arda collins, it is daylight (2008)

ken chen, juvenilia (2009)

katherine larson, radial symmetry (2010)

poetry is a community! read her—and also read the poets she wanted to promote.