unending-everchanging-thoughts

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

Black Box Dye

Oh, how I’ve missed the cold embarrass of box dye—

Acts of rebellion

splashed in the bluish stains, smears

streaking white tile.

I'll tell you “its natural,”

say the color is the same as your deep roops.

But you are afraid of the dark,

using walls made of hatred to howl up behind

I cower on the bathroom floor,

Screaming along to love songs

While freedom and ammonia assault me—

teenage mistakes,

and the rage that my mother won’t release

Chemicals crawl between the space

underneath hopeless,

just above what's meant to be home.

You threaten my safety over self-expression,

spewing slurs in the form of kindnesses.

Eventually, your cruel laughter

turns to loud banging on the counter,

insisting i’m missing fundamental understanding

My wrists hurt

from shaking “no.”

Mixing up vengeance

in the form of poor impulse control—

skipping instructions,

setting timers—

even gloves evade my minor brain,

Leaving bruises of hair dye

Where your verbal beating should be.

Your lines about girls

with broken minds,

warning me of how easy it is

to wreck my womanhood,

destroy my decency.

It’s a messy experience

Breaking your picture of me—

Blue-eyed

verging on blonde.

That's what you see, right?

Verging on ideal?

Except when I have the ideas.

Forehead smears,

back-of-the-neck streaks—

the steel tub will never be the same.

I choke

on the way a new smell becomes a familiar one.

It’s a blue-edged embrace,

brings out the lines in my face,

pulls the color of clouds

to the forefront of my eyes.

I flush out my loose ends

under a cold blooded shower-head of self-loathing.

I reach for rebirth

from below black rivulates,

chanting the same humiliating plea—

That a man in the sky might love me.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

"I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool" - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m going to need this quote in an IV. I am revitalized by the way they encapsulate the issue with being a woman. Wanting to be valued but knowing the way to gain the most acceptance is through mental atrophy and long eyelashes.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I hate that I am only poetic behind a screen. If I am not given ample time and control over my language I come off as confused, stumbling over my adjectives, and scrambling to get to the point at the end of my sentence.

I wish I sounded the same when I speak. Not to say my vocabulary isn’t adequate or that my thoughts are not cohesive. It’s simply that I don’t use alliteration, polysyndeton, or personification when I am simply speaking. In fact I “but” “um” “like” my way through thoughts.

It frustrates me that my writing voice only exists at the tip of the fingers or under the point of my pen.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

Something in spring reminds me of what it felt like to fall for you. Not fully, but in gesture— you are there. The wind moves through leaves and I become undone, unraveled by the memory of your hand threaded through my hair. It’s a half-remembered thing. The echo of an act. One of those memories that comes back in goose bumps and slight surges of passion.

A Motorcycle snarls by my open car window, it wills me to turn. I open my mouth to speak to an empty passenger seat. I would've said something small— just a shared commented, a small moment between us. But of course, you aren’t there. Still, I catch myself reaching in the direction of my phone, tempted to text you about the book I saw someone reading that you might have loved, or an overheard comment you might have laughed at. Sometimes I speak out loud or silently form the words with my lips, half-hoping you'll look up from wherever you are, and just know. That somehow the thought will work its way to you. The joke might travel the miles and make you smile. 

I think, really it’s the sun itself that reminds me of you. The burning eye nestled in the sky, rising every day without being asked. It never asks for love or exepts gratitude for its brilliance. It simply exists— and dares the world not to be moved by its presence. You are like that. Never asking to be seen or praised, yet rooms brighten when you enter them. Spaces feel different when you inhabit them. Warmer, maybe.. Safer. Just overall better. 

But more than anything, what ties you to the spring season is the way that you came into my life. Like light slipping under a long-locked door. A quiet but steady kind of caring. Enveloping arms that slowly overtook me. Even the smallest part of you was enough to disappear all the darkness I had harbored. I turned toward you in the way all green things turn toward light and warmth—not by choice, but because it was written within some natural rule book. 

There are days I swear your name rides on the wind, even though I know better. Still, I turn, just in care. There are times I look up in the sky, hoping to find the shade of your eyes. It’s a silly game, I know. But I can’t help looking for you in flowers, in laughter, in the soft folds of my day. Looking for anything that matches you. 

But I suppose that’s the lunacy of love, isn’t it? To be ever reminded. To look at the world and see you in every piece of it. Part of me aches at the thought that one day I will hear jazz floating out of some speaker and not immediately think of the way you sway to rhythm, eyes closed lost in your own world. 

But for now, I do, every time. For now you are in everything. 

And I am so grateful.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I worry that art comes from the inability to stay calm. The thing that makes me creative is the same entity that traps me in a closet hyper ventilating while others lay still under covers of safety. Writing has replaced my therapy, it holds me down to floors allowing the fire above me to go out without any flesh to burn. But would life be easier if I didn’t need a pen to breathe? If I instead of crying when I see Jackson Pollock paintings I simply wonder why it is worthy of hanging in a museum. Then would I be a more friendly, more social, simply an easier person to be around?

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.” The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V.E Schwab

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I wrote another poem. I’m trying to add more rhyme and rhythm.

Back pressed to plastic

Legs draped in falling fabric

Scratching sliding metal

Accidental stammering

Finger snapping

A perfect line

Of white shine

Bronze shadows

Bulging over elbow

A curving body

Ending in bold bell

Sounds slip from frantic fingers

Bouncing behind

Notes intertwined

Complex cords

Played out on keys and strings

Slight sway of neck

Or tapping or toe

Strapped to seat edge

Leading to listen

Sipping notes

Down my throat

Storing sound inside skin

Memorizing miniature movements

Becoming hypnotized by stage lights

Intoxicated by interpretation

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

This is my first real poem! Please enjoy!

Crucified

Broken

Born of blood

“blessed” by water

Desperate to evolve

they fall

stricken with strife

Implored to build altar

Faces turned up to the father

Pisouse people kneel

on bruised knees

waiting for the reckoning

Mothers pin promises to children

telling them of a life worth living

a kingdom worth suffering for

But words never enter awaiting ears

fluid decompresses the drums

clogging body with cleanliness

Cries and red cheeks act as weak warriors

Unable to ward off the well wishes

Placated by parents

the fight fades from young eyes

Chubby child legs swing over the flames

Men in white robes

preaching of perdition

ears again accosted

Grabbed by “guiding” hands

maneuvered through trees

Faced with fresh fruit

they are petted for never looking

promised prizes for never partaking

Yet up in the tree

blown by the breeze

the fruit

falls

At the feet of the frightened

it begs to be bitten

Bending knee to gentle dirt

eyes focused on option

brushing barley bruised skin

fingers pry open the flesh

Sweet juices meeting puckered lips

Gentle love bits

dribbling sticky

trails down exposed necks

Sugar stained lips

give away love

Yanked from the moment

replacing soft touches with battering blows

the guardians gasp at the falter

Love is confined

Scold the sanctimonious

They cleanse the broken with whips and words

Expecting that shame will shape

but brimming hearts eventually burst

opening body

flooding the floor with tears and tension

Blood begins filling the font

replacing the water with something far darker

syrup slips from faithful fingers as they slid

from forehead to shoulder

Horror fills the eyes of the beholders

Palms find prayer

Plees ricochet through colored windows

Wishing away the folly of the damned

Hail Marys no longer seeming necessary apologies

A tragedy hanging from the steeples

A crucified sinner

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I hope this finds someone who will enjoy it. This is the first time I’m sharing my work. It’s a personal essay about a friends suicide attempt so go in eyes open. But please enjoy!! (1,164 words)

September, 1st 2022. 12:00 Pm

The wind blows lazily through the leaves. The side door of my highschool opens, I turn and there walking out the outside stairs is a ghost. Short, scrawny, and almost blending in with the backdrop. There is no real indication that he is dead—no floating feet, no translucent skin, not even a cold draft. Even without all the tell tale signs, I’m sure that this is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. But the image didn’t change, his form didn’t flicker. Everything seemingly stopped, stuttering like a scratched CD. Caught in a moment of madness, I found myself (possessed by sheer shock) running toward him in elation. I threw my arms around him, holding him closely, hoping he wouldn’t in fact slip through the cracks in the concrete. My arms made contact! The ghost was real and he was here! I must have manifested his life back into reality.

Truthfully, there was no magic needed to teether his soul back to the soil. He had never been dead. But to me he must have crawled from the ground to come here. I clutched his corpse, crouched at the side of his casket, cried over his freshly covered grave all within the tangled confines of my frantic imagination. My mind witnessed all of this, but on the outside his departure was nothing more than an ambulance ride to a nearby hospital.

At the time, turning him over to the proper authorities seemed a logical solution to him popping so many pills that his pupils disappeared. If only I had known that the moment he slid into the back of the red shiny van I would become captivated by nightmares of corpses, haunted by his ghost. No deity warned me of the inevitable months of missing him that would be brought on by my juvenile attempts at making him more than a martyr. No release form to inform me that emotional trauma would be brought on by my choices. I had no idea that I would spend years gripped by the grief. What are you supposed to do when your friend attempts suicide? When your world stops turning? When phones go silent? When voices are quieter than the screaming in your mind? Do you let your friend die alone on the bathroom floor? Crush their dreams into white powder and pour it down the drain? Do you follow the proper procedure and call the police? How do you handle the choice between saving a life or letting them die with dignity? Allowing a friend to pass on or risking the rage when they awaken?

6Am September, 1st 2022.

The sheets of my bed have become rotten after weeks of decomposing within them. Bread crumbs have built up like sand castles and water cups create wells filling my shelves. Tears have become my cheeks’ constant companions. Bags have taken up residence under my eyes. Clothes have become crumpled at the bottom of mountains. My mirror which usually lays compliments onto my skin has begun to strip off layers of my self esteem.

Mornings are no longer markers of new adventure. My school uniform sits on me like a straight jacket, my book bag leaves a rope burn on my shoulders, toast is stopped by clots of despair that fill up my throat. School which once seemed like a sanctuary now suffocates me. The English teacher asks for assignments now weeks overdue, my math teacher mumble about my general disinterest, and people seem to leer at me from the hallways of their happy lives.

I had seen the effects of untimely deaths. Posts on instagram have fluided my for you page proclaiming remorse for a life half lived. I had heard my mothers cries when her friend decided to die. Seen flowers fluiding over the side of bridges. I had heard how hard it is people when someone they love attempts suicide. However, I never felt the full, undiluted magnitude of that sentiment until I found myself perched on the edge of a desk, staring at a suicide hotline number written by a teacher, wondering if maybe 988 on a white board would have saved him. I now walk through life like a phantom drifting between memory and moment. Wandering the rooms of my school like a spirit frantically searching for something, someone, anything.

I wish to wallow in the space where I still had him, where he wasn’t gone. I see him in lockers and staircases. I constantly picture his face in the math room, where I had taken his portrait. I glimpse him in conversations, knowing what he would say or in the way that he would raise his hand. I spot him in the chemistry classroom glaring at me after a long forgotten argument, in the walls he once leaned against, in the place he first broke my heart. My highschool, my mind, my life are all haunted by the spirit of someone who didn’t die. An experience of grief without the marker of a tombstone introduced me to this limbo state, a space between grief and gratitude. All I have as a reminder are a few fragile memories. There was no indication that this day would be more than a continuation of my misery. But today, the memory decided to materialize right in front of me. He came back. but not to me.

Almost a month and a half after my best friend had been carried off the face of the earth in a whirl of red and white lights, I saw him. On the grass I hunched, shrinking myself to fit into the cohort I was seemingly a part of. Their conversations rang dull in my ears as my mind was on something more meaningful. Even once I caught sight of him descending the stairs, the sun forming a glorious halo over his head, I was unable to pull myself out of the grief that had grown within his absence. When I wrapped my arms around him, the embrace felt empty. The apparition was real but I was unable to make contact. He was there but I was not. Even as I pulled out my phone to capture the moment I was unable to place myself back in his presence. I reached for his hand, holding it gingerly, hoping that gesture would weigh me down. He smiled at me but depression trapped in a locket wrapped with a noose around my neck stopped me from smiling back. The once pupiless eyes looked at me sadly, seeing the pain that I didn’t deserve to designate with words. Upon my silence the ghost turned to the girl seated next to me. She dropped her eyes to him seeing the face of a beautiful boy, but not one brought back from the dead. To her, his homecoming was a plot point and not a whole novel. She made connections with the living while I was stuck sitting with the dead.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how they came to hold whatever opinion one holds.”

-Virginia Woolf

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I’m reading this book for the first time and it is immaculate

— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

Whenever talking about Jane Austin people will take any opportunity to push her down. They don’t get the importance of what she was saying. It’s a cometary on upper class society at the time. Stop calling her a romance author.

I really don't get why the Brontës get put in competition with Jane Austen so much. They weren't contemporaries. They didn't even write the same genre. This is the definition of pitting women against each other.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

Today my dad purposed that people are who they are from birth. The classic nature versus nurture debate. It’s such a complex argument and possibly a pointless one.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

A little Midsummer Night’s humor for your dash.

[unending-everchanging-thoughts]

I think we should encourage people to read books slowly. Take a long walk with the characters. Explore the themes and let them change you. Reading a book in a day is great but it’s more important to understand the book than to read it quickly.