writingfromruins

[writingfromruins]

dead electric morning, every nerve standing on end because i woke up yesterday + stayed woken up alltheway until this morning and there is terror in me, terror in every single cell and i am afraid and afraid and i cannot sleep for it. i want to put my fear entire in my mouth where it is safe, where i can bite down on it at any moment, where i can swallow it down over and over again until it digests but my fear lives in my lungs instead + because it lives in my lungs it lives in my blood and my heart and my whole entire body shaking shaking with it- a convulsion half like a death rattle cough + half like a laugh + the laugh scares me more and whatever the part of me that isn’t me or the fear says

“You have to laugh at it. You have to laugh at the way you stand outside a door and pantomime knocking without ever making contact because otherwise you would scream or cry and that would be worse to explain then the laughing or the knocking you’re not doing. Sometimes you stand there hand raised and stop yourself before you can kick or collapse against or headbutt the door, anything to tell someone to open it, and you have to laugh because your laugh is silent anyways when you laugh like this. You have to laugh because you scream silent too and when you drive yourself to tears to knock on the door even then the knock is only the first step and every cell of you is still being circulated full of fear from your lungs. But the laughing keeps it all from shutting down before you knock.”

dead electric night and it is quiet in the winter as the clock ambles towards dawn and i am still all alight. Still too much in a body, too much to breathe right + laughing laughing laughing silently because there’s nothing else to do and it really does seem funny when i can’t sleep from it. Might have to shut myself down the hard way. Might have to cover the eyes and the mouth until breath hisses against the suction against the palm and my eyes seal shut. if i can make myself small and quiet and hold my breath until the ribs are tight around it the fear goes away before i can. and when the fear is gone i can breathe in and out and in and out and the only thing that pours through me is pure elation + when i laugh there is no scream i am trying to avoid just an absence of fear unfamiliar + when i am done laughing now i can finally sleep.

OH HYSTERIA // PD

[writingfromruins]

Little gods of un-nothing all up and down your sides prickling like rats who today tangle their tails in your tale and eat you whole so today you are alive on sugar, the rage you’ve kept low banked, and something roiling with tiny feet and many mouths you do not recognize but is, itself, also rage, this time unbanked, and keeping the three separate is why you are so tired these days.

You are knee deep in purple, all up and down your shins in messy little nebulas, and you open your mouth to swallow a rat whole to eat yourself from the inside out in hedonistic hunger. No half measures. No way to touch a world that doesn’t bruise you back. You walk into anything hip height or below with the grace and confidence and speed of a meteorite and let the lit up pain receptors tell you where the lines are. Where the rules are. Where the world is. You have little gods in your mouth and you can feel their little feet down your throat.

It is good to be unmade, sometimes. It is good to be devoured. You have spent most of your life not knowing what pain is when you feel it, not being able to put a name to acrid rage, a life spent raising little gods like rat kings with their tails all tangled in each other, going nowhere, starved rat corpse tied to live rat starving. You’ve been the dead rat before. You’ve been the hungry little god. A body is a body is a body is food. Your little gods of chew-through-the-wall love you like they love the promise of a way out, even when it hurts. You hold them in your mouth and your stomach and your hands and you let yourself in the spin and the hole-in-the-world get angry.

The rat you swallowed chews through some of your more essential lines, the central nervous chord ringing down your spine gets severed in the bloodrush and you go cheerfully limp and dizzydizzy from the backlash. Good little gods that keep you all giddy awake and incoherent when they struggle in the cramped dark of your stomach. The noise you make these days when you feel the ache come through the acid is more delight than damaged. You are so tired these days. When you do not stop despite this it is sometimes because you could not stop without a catastrophe.

A SOUL THE SHAPE OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE // PD

[writingfromruins]

1.

Mouth full of noise

Mouth full of other sharp things

Mouth gaping around a shattersound.

Mouth full of-

—

(Sorry)

—

The mouth is a vacant, violent thing.

The act of chewing your mouth back shut

draws blood like wick from a candle

2.

The sense of burning isn’t fire its just

the way your body isn’t built to tear at itself

from within because of the way your body

is built like this anyways,

anyways when the lungs cant hold air

anymore you get all your ribcage

lit up in neon in your torso.

Even with your eyes closed,

Pain makes you luminescent

3.

Over the years it has become more

and more of a conversation with yourself

that you’ve learned to decipher and this year

you spat the first sentence into existence

and responded with the grinding sound of

gravel pouring from your throat on

public transportation, on the damn train,

sitting cross legged on the floor during a delay,

cutting yourself off at the air supply.

Then apologizing with the same air

and throat and tongue convulsing as before

What else could it be but language?

4.

Mouth’s full of wet sound.

Nothing else you can do with it

but keep your air as still as suffocation.

Shallow grave breathing, dirt in the back

of your throat and you cough

and you cough

(Sorry)

and you cough

and all it does is lodge more and more grit

In your system

Your lungs are full too.

Thick wet mud comes coughing up tasting

like mucus and medicine. Like winter

coming back. Like it never left at all.

-

four meditations on a chronic condition // PD

[writingfromruins]

I am teaching myself to love myself the long way around. Like how i love the stubborn sidewalk weeds, the way my cat pours himself onto the windowsill, the joyful sound of my neighbors windchime in a downpour. That is to say, i love the little things enough to love the entirety. The way i stretch up all the way to my tiptoes after sitting down for too long, the way mornings feel, all dazed by dawn’s softness, the way i rock on my heels while i wait for the kettle. Someday i think i will be nothing except the little things i love, a mosaic of green things growing despite everything and soft gold pink morning glow and the grey of my cat and kettle, both chirping for my attention.

i’ll live to see the big picture remade // PD

[writingfromruins]

You fell like a skipping stone cast too far out and sunk to the middle of the nowhere on a lucky bounce. The air down here is so heavy even near the sun its like your lungs are trying to hold the ocean, trying to fill themselves with sand, and you’ve never known the kind of holy fire meant to make you the righteous kind of right so the rapture must have missed you cause you’re still here and drowning. You’re still here all awful with the right questions and a mouth full of the moon calling its tide out and out and you cant stop drowning when you breathe in.

The worst part is its a bearable type of tragedy, theatre candy sour-sweet burning the taste of hymns off your tongue, splitting it open until your mouth tastes copper and the air still swims heavy and electric around you, and in front of you the projector throws together rays of burning color and you want that fucking fire to sweep you through to your bones but instead you bite your tongue and taste the copper-color of your blood. Fork your tongue until you’re the snake with the wrong answers but the right fucking questions.

If the garden is underwater and the flood never stopped and you’re never going back up into the atmosphere where you can at least breathe easy you’re gonna drag the entire kingdom come down into a retelling of Atlantis, heaven on earth made literal, heaven on earth in the back row of a movie theatre, heaven brought down to earth so fast it lights itself in atmosphere and that righteous holy city goes down in green fire, blood-copper in your mouth an accelerant, and they all said you’d burn yourself out and you guess they were right.

faith like a scream in a city-wide blackout

[writingfromruins]

You cough, and you cough, and you keep coughing and it deprives you of air, of dignity, of pride just gasping for that next inhale to grate against your sternum. You cough and halfway through the fit your mind loses touch with itself and- and when you wrap your hands around it again it is trying to understand the racking sounds your body is making as language. There is nothing to be learned here, you want to tell yourself, nothing I have not already learned, there is no language here but still you think of it, think of your mind caught blank and helpless reaching for what it knows best in your absence, like poetry could be a seance to bring you back, like you just needed to know what your body is saying when it struggles to breathe and it would be solved. You wonder about it, shallow breaths as you recover on your knees in the hallway, and your hand snakes its way up to ring your throat in the horrible habit you’ve developed lately. You look like you’re strangling yourself as you feel for the air under your skin, press your palm tighter against the line of your neck as if you could find the problem under your skin, follow it home, learn its language. You peel your hand away, and use the wall to lever yourself standing again. You cough. Once you identified it as a monster that lived in your lungs. You wonder whether its progress to think the monster might write poetry too.

Cohabitation with something you cannot yet claim // PD

[writingfromruins]

You tear the temple down. You kill the god. You are yourself and yourself and yourself and you are the acolyte pushed too far. There is no sunrise you can see from within the rubble. No afterlife. Just you who is the temple which is the god who is the rot in the corners. You are your own unwilling apocalypse. Its never been this good before. Its never been this bad either. The crops keep failing. You’re no harvest god, you’re just standing stones that can barely keep themselves clean. You are the temple and the god and the acolyte pushed too far. You are only yourself, terrified in the face of your singularity. Terrified in the face of the truth that you are still the temple and the god and yourself and the acolyte and even the rot and dust and stress fractures. The temple still has walls and windowsills to clean. The god still can’t understand what’s wanted of it. You still exist.

You are still tired and exhaustion-sore and all cried out and it doesn’t make any difference. Your body has survived the shaking. Your mind has survived the fear. You - something ephemeral in between - still have things to do in the morning. Still have miracles to work. The things that drag at you, that hinder you, that drive you to that faraway place where you can only beg your mind and body to breathe, over and over, breathe, just keep the air moving, just keep the breaths steady, just get through one minute, one more after that, one more after that, just ride it out, those wretched things, they’re still you, still inherently, terrifyingly, ultimately you.

The temple has survived worse- it still stands. The god has survived worse- it still lives. You, the acolyte, yourself and yourself and yourself, face the sunrise from the front steps. There is still a day to be lived through. One more after that. One more after that. One more after that. Its never been this bad before. Its never been this good either. You are only yourself. You are the god who is learning. You are the temple that will not yet crumble. You are the acolyte, loyal to both. You have no obligation to love your work, but you do. You have no obligation to love every piece of yourself, but you’re trying.

recovery is recursive too // PD

[writingfromruins]

Your body is a temple and your mind is its god and you are the loyal acolyte, keeping the place as clean as you can against the entropy of existence. Your tasks are never done. You always have something to hand- a cloth that needs patching. Stairs to be scrubbed. Windows to clean until they let the light in, bright against the decay in the corners that must be swept aside. You are alone because you are the temple and you are the god and you are the acolyte of both so your work can never be done.

Time brings its blessings and trials upon the temple and the god does not speak the language of its worshipers so you sit on the altar and translate, bucket of soapy water at your feet, and listen as the god protests the things being asked of it. Its worshipers don’t speak its language, and so they ask for miracles outside its power and will not leave empty handed. You take it upon yourself to fulfill them, but its okay. Keeping this body alive means you‘ve been in the miracle business for a very long time.

Somedays when the tasks begin to wear at you you neglect to fill the offering baskets, and the whole place crumbles faster, but at least you got some sleep in the shadow of the god that is the temple that is you, scrubbing the windowsills clean. More doors here are locked than unlocked and so you pull the hinge-pins out. Spilt the doors and use them to keep the holy fires burning. You are the god and you are the acolyte and you are the temple and so once the doors are gone you stop hiding from yourself. You’ve been going hungry less. You keep the offering baskets full.

You are the sole acolyte and the temple in its entirety and a god that never knows how to keep people happy but you keep the place clean. You keep your hair washed and cut. Glasses clean, clothes warm against the chill, enough sleep to keep your hands from shaking. You’ve been going hungry less. You scrub the callouses off your feet and walk silently through the hallways of yourself which is the temple which is the god and you know you’re getting better when you don’t find any rot.

devotion is a recursive concept // PD

[writingfromruins]

Woke up one day with my teeth all settled into my mouth and got scared. Got hungry. Felt them both so much i thought it was one thing and called it being a girl and got rid of it. My body understood and carried me to the other side of the river and i said no. I said no i’d rather be the river. I said no i want to be something that does not bleed, just smooths the jagged things down. My body (a jagged hurting thing) said it understood and became both riverbanks, and i became the river. Woke up one day and realized I’d still have the same set of teeth if i’d called my fear and hunger being a boy. Woke up one day and wondered if i was the middle of a venn diagram with broken walls. I shape my body like water carves a canyon and i say okay. i am the river and i am neither shore and i can hold that between my teeth. I wake up and call myself my name.

I make my new body out of clay // PD

[writingfromruins]

You are a poet. You sit in a car and think about how not all poetry needs to be meaningful. Think about tying things onto yourself. The city over the highway is faded with mountain wildfire smoke. Your eyes haven’t stopped stinging since three days ago, when you looked at the sun and it was red-yellow and broken like an egg yolk across a gray sky. The sky today is faded plastic blue and the sun is setting somewhere behind you on your left hand side.

You are a poet. You tried to write a poem about yourself and end up writing another love poem which feels like a betrayal and a comedy all at once. You try to write a poem about the inverse of a love poem and it turns into a vocabulary lesson. You’ve been trying to unlearn the idea that every poem you write needs to be meaningful but you still put yourself into every poem and you still write them bloody and saccharine. You tie another knot in a friendship bracelet and get angry that this isn’t enough, even though it is.

You are a poet. The sun is an orange that belongs in a fire pit, angry and blurred and it has dyed the whole horizon the same. It is in front of you now, and it makes your eyes water. Wreathed in smoke like it is today you can look at it closer. It looks like a love poem. It looks like the inverse of a poem about yourself. At home you have threads that could match its burning color, catch this sunset as a gift. You twist the bracelet you’ve tied around your own ankle and you watch the sky go dark.

aromantic: having little or no romantic feeling toward others; experiencing little or no romantic desire or attraction // PD

[writingfromruins]

you cup your hands and the water doesn’t trickle out of them, thankfully. you need this, you think. no, you know. you must need this. you pour the water from your steady hands- look how steady your hands are- into to the mirrored basin, handful by handful submerging it. The water level rises, until you can look down and see your reflection in the water’s surface and in the mirror at the bottom of the pool and you look down and at the bottom of the pool and on the surface of the water is the oracle.

the oracle looks up at you, looks straight through you, looks right at you from the mirror and the water and starts to laugh like you’re telling him a joke except you never even said a thing and he is looking at you even as he laughs and he is looking through you even as you shake and you are looking right back at him, and then you are mirror-eyed and flayed wide open and you can see yourself as the oracle sees you a wretched retching wreckage of a person.

“I need this,” you say or scream or beg and the oracle asks you if you even know what you’re asking for. “I need to look into a mirror and have it not be me anymore. I need at least that much. I need remaking.” The oracle keeps laughing. Your hands dont shake as you lunge for his neck.

You drown in the basin and are gone before you reach-

Narcissus tries catoptromancy // PD

[writingfromruins]

You are naked, for the first time

in years for no other reason than to strip

down and see the way the skin moves

over bone, you can see the shape

of the ribcage, pelvis, and they

twist, underneath the muscle and clean

expanse of skin, you hate it

so much, this display of a body that

never was tailored to you and cannot

be changed to fit no matter what you try

it is a bad day, for bodies

looking at this, the body that is whole

but incomplete, or completed wrong

gets you to thinking about frankenstein,

not the creature, but the man so caught

in the science of how bodies work he

never learned he had a son until the son

was able to name himself, until the son

named himself adam, and asked his

father for the creation or proof of anyone

like him, asked to be not alone. it was a

bad day for bodies then too.

I don’t have any scars or seams or

stitches on my skin. I don’t have any sign

of my creation gone wrong but i too am

asking for proof that this loneliness is not

forever. My father also didn’t know who i

was until i was able to name myself and

introduce myself by name. If i press my

fingers to the thin skin i can feel the knots

of my spine, the jaw hinging underneath

my cheek. i knew i was not alone when i

peeled the old name away and started

stitching a new one in place but I have not

seen a good day for bodies ever since.

sometimes things break inside the kiln // PD

[writingfromruins]

It was like magic. It was the only magic I had left in me. I had to watch my family eat it, to make sure all the goodness I had poured into it would warm them from the inside out. To make sure I hadn’t made it rotten. There’s ways to nourish people that have nothing to do with food. There’s ways for yourself to starve even when there’s no shortage.

There’s bread.

There’s the way it feels sticky between your fingers as you mix it and the way it feels when you knead it, smooth and soft and elastic, the way yeast smells as it gorges on sweetness. There’s the rises. There’s the way it rises and you have to wait for it. The way it makes you wait for it. Patience is a kind of magic too. It’s one you cannot teach entirely alone: you have to have something to wait for.

It was some of the worst few months of my life. They were also the easiest. For all it claws at you, being terrified is the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is endure it. All I could do was endure it.

I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want. I didn’t.

I made bread. I waited. Eventually, I rose.

Breadmaker // PD

[writingfromruins]

The people have spoken (and I finally have the time/energy) so I’ll try to start bringing some of the back catalogue onto your dashes again. I think I will go for a separate day, just to keep things organized, so keep an eye out on Wednesdays.

I’ve been waffling on this a while as this blog sees less and less activity the more I work on personal projects and school, so I figured I’d see if anyone has strong opinions about this.

[writingfromruins]

Hot summer evening and you fit into yourself like a storm fits into a lightning rod. You feel like fire under foundations, something crackling behind your ears. You try and find the words for it. Your body is a temple. Your body is a ship replacing itself. Your body is burning. Your body is a place of worship whose altar you cannot yet bear. You slash your own sails and sit dead in the water without a way to catch the wind. You catch fire instead. You see the bones of a house when it burns, you can see your ribcage through your skin when you breathe, spit oxygen out unused as fuel. Suffocate in the church-silence as flickering light through stained-glass casts bruises on your skin, on you. You are just a rock thrown through a window. A body that is all scabs and healing blisters. It doesn’t matter how new the rope is so long as it does it’s job. You pull apart at the seams and count out three separate masks from one face and each one is the original, made from identical parts. Each one perfect kindling. You fit your body like thunder fits a lightning rod. When the storm comes the air is still so hot and holy the fire doesn’t go out from the rain. It festers. Miles from shore you begin to drown.

Body of Work // PD

[writingfromruins]

I’ve been waffling on this a while as this blog sees less and less activity the more I work on personal projects and school, so I figured I’d see if anyone has strong opinions about this.

[writingfromruins]

Have you heard the story? The story goes:

Everything is hunger to you. Down to your bones, everything is hunger. Your husband starved you in every other way he could, but he left you in the kitchen to make dinner. You don’t know how to stop the rumbling in your soul but your body, at the least, is sated. Your husband likes lamb. He wants it for dinner tonight. You press the weight of your thumb into the most recent bruise and wait for it to stop hurting.

Once there was a man and there was a wife and there was a kitchen.

Lamb for dinner tonight, he says. So small and trusting. Fed well, sheltered. Stress is bad for the meat: when you taste it you can taste fear. So the lamb does not question when the butcher comes. Why would you raise something just to kill it so young? The butcher sells you a leg of lamb, frozen. It is heavy in your arms, so so heavy. You press your thumb into the most recent bruise and it still hurts. Why would you care for something just to kill it? You were devoted and you were devoured for it. Lamb to the slaughter. When your husband presses bruises to your skin they are too familiar to be fearful. When you raise your knife in the kitchen to make dinner, there is no love in the motion of it.

Once there was murderer and a murder weapon and a corpse.

Damn if you’re not hungry though. The only want you can satisfy in great and flavorful abundance. The kitchen is yours, and under your hands meat has fallen away from bone, bone boiled into stock, and years pass as your knife taps against the cutting boards impatiently. Nothing is alive under your knives. You are hungry, so, so hungry. A creature of stomach and teeth. Devout to the only thing that he wont take, devouring , empty and hollow except for your belly, hot with good food and fine wine and bile— he calls to you from the living room for a drink and you pull the lamb out from the freezer and go give him the cold shoulder.

This is how the story goes:

You kill him. You kill him and then you season the leg of lamb with salt, pepper, fresh rosemary cutting slits in the meat so that the garlic seeps in. You arrange the lamb on a tray in the middle of peeled potatoes, so they’ll benefit from the cooking meat, and put them in the oven, with plans to make gravy from the fat drippings. Your husband, cooling in the living room, says nothing. You leave to get the fresh veggies to pair with the meal. How silly to forget them. You take your time. When you bring the men to see the corpse the lamb is done, and you serve it out- it cannot go to waste. Such a good meal, they tell you, bellies full with a transgression, not for the first time. Recognizing something in it, even if they don’t quite place what. You eat too, and are not hungry. No part of you is hungry any more. Down to your bones, you are sated.

playground myths and other formative lies // PD