darkanddemonic

[darkanddemonic]

the tenderness…. 

[darkanddemonic]

“Some nights, the wolf inside of me shrinks to nothing, she bares her teeth and runs away. The dragon in my chest rejects me, she’s so tired of being slain. There are nights when the lioness cowers, says she can’t fight it another day.” “What about the phoenix?” “She sits with me in the darkness. She whispers ‘we’ll rise. Just you wait.”

@srwpoetry (via always-live-in-the-sunshine)

[darkanddemonic]

[darkanddemonic]

I am dating someone new, and in the few weeks we've been together, I've watched them snatch insects from the air bare-handed, they've fallen in love with multiple trees, and their very breath becomes poetry. I'm not sure what exactly they are, or how much danger I may be in, but I still leave my salt at home when we go for walks together.

[darkanddemonic]

waterproof watches sold in bags of water, and you get to keep the water

[darkanddemonic]

gays at christmas time: *awkwardly ignores salvation army bell ringer* *awkwardly ignores salvation army bell ringer* *watches the grinch and relates to no one but the grinch himself* *awkwardly ignores salvation army bell ringer*

[darkanddemonic]

“And make death proud to take us.” - William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

[darkanddemonic]

i think some men hear “hunger” and think: the body when it is an ache, but only just-so. a hunger can be ignored. a hunger can be tricked. 

but this is not my hunger. the hunger of daughters. i inherited it from my mother’s throat, and she cut it from her mother’s ribs, and she stole it from her mother’s hipbones. this is a hunger honed properly. it is not a single empty plate. it is sixteen seasons of starving. this hunger did not erupt. it was taught to me by the sweetness of a closed fist. to be and take and have less.

the hunger is not of food, although sometimes it is of food. each taste of it comes craving up my tongue: tonight’s desire to speak up is a lime orange, frothy and hot. i savor the slime yellow of shoving anger down, of unhysteria, of learning how not-to-shrill at the snakebite. i crunch the holiday venom of slapped on the ass and click it over my teeth at trainstations. 

i am unasking of my boyfriend. i do not nag my father. i let the man talk over me. i smile daintily and laugh quietly and shove all i am into this hole in me, this sliding that never gulps enough, and i say: i will be going into the kitchen now, do you need anything?

i am always, always, always hungry. some days i think if i start to consume i will simply never stop, that i will unhinge from the back of my ears and be able to shove every snippet of sugar i denied myself, every backtalk or unladylike or starving. i will shove cakes and a whole roast beef and every man who thought he knew hunger into my bones and i will say: see! this is hungry! to not only be denied but to teach myself the art of denying, that even i refuse myself the fine things, that even i hold back and cut carbs and stay sitting. that to take feels wrong, and ugly, that to be wanting is selfish, that to desire is raw.

this is hungry: that full should be so ugly that we remove ourselves from our own lives in taxes, to be “not too much”, to be small, and quiet, and passive. this is hungry: when i go to sleep i dream of a knife and only understand it in the context of cutting. this is hungry: that even my desires disgust me.

we daughters with our sallow eyes. we understand: she was committing an act of war, the beautiful persephone.

[darkanddemonic]

In all the old links, the old movies that they’ve bothered to translate over, there’s this innocence when it comes to outer space. Those two words are always said with this odd mixture of hope and wonder and longing and people stare at the stars with this child-like look on their face and it’s the Last Frontier, the last true adventure.  All the little kids wanted to be astronauts and why not? In other times they wanted to be cowboys and sailors, why was this any different? 

We don’t call it outer space anymore. To us, a hundred years after the Gift, it’s the Void. The Endless Ocean. The Abyss. Mother Death. Our media links don’t show us what could be out there, but what is waiting on just the other side of the atmo.

You see, our ancestors, the starry eyed dreamers with all their computers and stories and loneliness, they were right. We aren’t the only ones out here. We aren’t the only ones who learned to throw stones and write poetry and wage war and love and hate and communicate and yes, build ships to launch us out of our little sphere and escape the gravity of our own mortal condition. But here’s the problem. We were just a little behind, just a little too slow. They got to us before we could get to them.

There’s this planet. Kepler-227b orbiting the star Kepler 227. It’s not big, roughly the size of Neptune and in 2019 the only artistic rendering of it we had showed it as a deep red planet. Not the color of blood, not the color of rust, but somewhere in the middle. It was on NASA’s exoplanet list and it was a possible habitable planet for if our technology won the race with how fast we were destroying this planet. One of hundreds. A million little hopes for a race of dreamers who never learned to stop hurting themselves while chasing the oblivion of the moment.

They came from the stars a hundred years ago like saviors and messiahs. They called themselves the Next. Or that’s the translation they gave us. They’d been orbiting in Jupiter’s shadow for years and their tech had listened to our media and this had taught them to speak our tongues so that there would be no mistakes when they delivered their message, the message they’d travelled the breadth of the night to deliver. The messengers, the original visitors, they each spoke ten languages at once, and everyone could understand the message they’d come so far to give. They called us their sisters, their brothers. They were beautiful in a way that was so far from human that my grandfather says they looked like gods.

Their message? The one they’d carried lightyears and miles and lifetimes and sacrificed so much to give? 

“We are conquerors,” the Next said, and we could hear the smiles in their voices even if we could not see them on their faces. “And we have come to set you free.”

I’m awoken by the light behind my eyelids, the bright blue that signals the beginning of all my days and the end of most all my nights. Eyes still closed, I open the message and flick through it, looking for the sender’s name. I don’t know why I bother. It’s Rin. It’s always Rin. Rise and shine, princess. I’m not gonna wait if you’re late. I draft a response with a few flicks of my eyes and beam it back. Yeah, yeah. I’m up, don’t get your panties in a knot. Only then do I open my eyes to confront the day I am obliged to start and expected to finish.

The ‘vant is already cleaning and beeps in protest when I swing my feet directly in the path of its vacuuming.  I roll my eyes at it and gently nudge it aside with the side of my foot, its wheels squeeling in protest against the freshly polished and, as Father likes to remind me, very rare hardwood floors. “Hush,” I mutter, blinking blearily against all stimuli. The ‘vant grumbles indignantly and putters away, off to find something it can clean in peace without my petty disturbances. Great. Now I’ll have to make my own bed because its silicon brain got offended. 

I pull a shirt that smells vaguely of cologne over my head, soft fabric sliding to cover the bare planes of my stomach, grab a pair of leggings and slide into them as I walk out onto the balcony. Mother put up a privacy holo years ago, but even if she hadn’t, I can’t find it me to care about modesty anymore. We’re all just skin, anyway. Skin and muscle. I lean against the air barrier, all hips and knees and elbows as I take inventory of my city, making sure she’s still there. 

This is New Seattle, the city of floating lights and info-streams and dreamers and buildings that defy physics. She is beautiful with her miles-high skyscrapers and air traffic and grav-nets. She is always lit and there are always safe places with soft laughter to be found. I snort, pushing off the barrier. Yeah, right. That’s the same fairytale Hali whispered in between the slats of my crib. The same fairytale the Next hiss over honey-covered teeth into my parents’ ears. The truth? New Seattle is dirty. Under her fingernails, between her teeth, dirt in every hidden crevice and every place it can hide away. This is not a utopia. This is not Eden or Shangri-La. This is the new child of this new age, with tangled hair and a wild gleam in her eyes as she runs these streets and searches for the next thing that will satisfy her ravenous hunger, that will stop the need, even for half a second. And I love her. She is mine and I am hers, and the clean parts of her are a mockery of what she really is. She is not the kind goddess of the peaceful world the Next promised. She is what the world really is: cold and callous. A mayfly, convinced it will only live for a day and desperate to really live for that day.

[darkanddemonic]

One of the contractors at work drove past my shack on a forklift yesterday, stopped, backed up to my window and said, “hey, do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?”

My knee jerk response when asked this, even if it’s by a companionable dude old enough to be my dad, is to go, “uh, nah-” and then ramble uncomfortably until someone stops me-

-which is what I started to do, only to be cut off by Contractor saying, in an embarrassed rush, “some of the guys were asking me because you and I talk sometimes, but I didn’t want them to hit on you at work, so I told them that you Worship the Devil and would Hex them if they tried. I’m sorry.”

Which leaves me wheezing helplessly, trying to get my shit together, because this is honestly one of the nicest, most hysterical things I’ve ever heard someone say to me.

Oblivious to this, Contractor then follows up with, “and they were like ‘forreal??’ so I was like, ‘yeah, she’s probably a sadist, too, you can tell by her jewelry. She’ll stab you or something.’”

And tbh I can’t even come up with anything witty to say in response, so all I manage to choke out is, “pleASE LET THEM CONTINUE TO THINK THAT, I’M BEGGING YOU.”

And Contractor just smiles and is like, “Okay! I just wanted to let you know!” before driving off with his forklift.

Like?? Thank god for Contractor tbh. He’s an angel among men, and I hope the rest of his life is filled with prosperity and happiness and like, that he finds $20 on the ground every week for the rest of his life.

[darkanddemonic]

Was anyone going to tell me that Amanda Lovelace, my favourite poet, is asexual...

Or was I supposed to find out from a post about different A-spec rep in entertainment...

[darkanddemonic]

[darkanddemonic]

god, it’s so crazy we all have bones… like, just these big hard rods holding our meat up. that’s so fucking wild, i can’t believe it

[darkanddemonic]

and the truth is i have formed a really shitty habit of hiding behind ideas to shield myself of the reality of things. things meaning love. love meaning the coffee color of your eyes, the thickness of your eyelashes, the way you’re so sure of yourself you hardly think before you speak. and the truth is you seem so dangerously easy to fall in love with. and honestly, i want to take that risk but then again i don’t. i’m afraid i won’t be enough for you, or maybe i’ll be too much, because for all of my life i have hovered between the empty, haunting space between the two. sometimes i think i’m impossible to fall in love with because no one has really tried to love me. and i don’t mean the “good morning” text type of love, or the kissing at the right time type of love, or the asking if i have a snapchat type of love. no, i mean the drunk voicemails at 3am type of love, or the trace the moles on my arm like they are constellations in a bursting sky type of love, or the pouring your heart out when the words grow too large to hold inside type of love. i’ve been trying to convince myself that type of love is only for movie scenes and book protagonists but shit, i’d be lying if i said i don’t hope that someone would prove me wrong. there has to be something more out there than predictable dates or generic “i love you” texts or the exhausting cycle of getting to know someone and then having them leave without leaving anything more than bruises and memories. i have tried to drown the romantic in myself so many times but every time i lay eyes on you, or your name pops up on my phone, or you laugh in that loud, confident way of yours, it comes back up gasping for air. it keeps on begging for someone to help keep it afloat. and the truth is i’m so fucking tired of a cycle of almosts— as in, we almost worked out, we almost made it, i almost loved them, they almost fell in love with me. i’m tired of my fantasies meeting reality half way. i’m tired of mediocre kisses and fingertips that hold no electricity or love that holds no weight. and fuck, maybe we don’t have to last forever, maybe you don’t have to be the love of my life and maybe i don’t have to be the love of yours. maybe you can just show me something. something i haven’t seen before. something large, aching, real, fuck, something worth my time and my energy and my attention. maybe that’s all i need right now. maybe that’s all i ever wanted all along. and the truth is i have formed a really shitty habit of hiding behind ideas to shield myself of the reality of things. but i’m really tired of hiding. i’m willing to take the risk if that means i’ll save myself a single more moment about wondering what the reality of love feels like.

—- ap (12.18) teach me the reality of love because i am so tired of wondering what it feels like

[darkanddemonic]

i.

we were on the rooftop of one of the most beautiful museums of the world, above everything. and yet i feel as if the stomach of the universe is crying out to me through the darkness in your gaze. i have seen so many different kinds of brown eyes. brown like the sweetness of raw cocoa beans. like the raw energy of espresso. like the welcoming warmth of damp soil. i never thought i’d only be able to describe eyes as a feeling, but yours defy all imagery. when you look at me i feel as if i’m falling and rising all at once, a deep breath suspended in mid air. limbs hovering in empty space but held by something so much larger, yet so similar to myself.

ii.

i’m starting to understand why people feel alive in the face of danger— why people seek out mountaintops higher than the eyes of the gods, or the stomach of the ocean, or rooftops that make the streets below look like paint strokes instead of concrete. at the end of the day, the mountain is just a rock, the oceans are just hydrogen and oxygen molecules stacked upon each other a million times over, and the streets are just stumbling blocks for human activity. but it’s not about what they are, right? it’s about how they speak to us. how they call to us from the void, begging to allow them to tear us apart to our bare essentials. what they make us want to do to ourselves. to chase that feeling of rising and falling all at once.

iii.

i’d never admit it to you, but i’m not afraid of you. i’m afraid of what you make me want to do. tear myself open for you, show you every part of my soul to show you how deep i really feel you. how much i really want you. to swallow your sadness so you can be on the top of the world forever without ever looking down. i never want you to look down. just keep drawing me in with those eyes like the beginning of the universe, and we won’t ever have to see how these galaxies end.

—i’m beginning why people feel alive in the face of danger (ap 4.19)

[darkanddemonic]

I am actually losing my mind over this

[darkanddemonic]

“This is for your own good!” My demon cries out, bringing his hands like stones down too fast, too hard. Pain blossoms in places easily hidden by my shirt. I weep, but with each tear he strikes again, and again, until I learn that the only way to get it to stop is to stop crying, stop feeling the pain. I drift away on island that is just me, curling around myself forever and ever, smaller and smaller until he tells me I can open my eyes. I didn’t know that this was only the first time. “I can’t handle your fucking neediness right now, Liz,” his hands fist in his own hair and his dark eyes bore into me. “You’re just too much for me sometimes. I need a break.” My heart breaks but I nod, bow my head, tell him I’ll wait for him. “Why do you make me do this?” He pleads, so strong and right and good. I learn to protect my face from him, if only to avoid his anger when marks are left that could be seen. I wear long sleeves the next day to cover up the places where his knuckles kissed me. I did this to me, he is merely trying to make me better. I will learn, and there will never be a need for him to do this ever again. I will mold myself into whatever he wants me to become and the future will be what he needs. I will become the girl he wants. “I love you,” he whispers, hand under my shirt and fingers playing in complex patterns. My thoughts are slow and golden like honey, and he is so, so warm and he feels so, so good. “I want to give you everything, all of me,” as he says this, I feel his other hand working the buttons of my jeans. I feel a flash of fear, twisting in my gut, and tell him to wait. Tell him to wait for when it’ll mean something more. His face flushes with an anger that terrifies me, it shows me how close his lust is to his rage I flinch when he talks too loud, now, or shoves me playfully, and his face crumples like he’s the one with bruises pockmarking his ribs. “I’m not a monster. I love you.” I know one of those is a lie but which one? I forgive him and spend the night curled up against him. Then morning comes and with it my harsh reality. I realize that my father does not ever strike my mother. I realize that his kisses never leave bruises on her skin. I realize that she’s not afraid to look him in the eye. I realize that this isn’t normal. But then I drown in him again and again and again, and these thoughts have no place in a head so full of him and feel an awful lot like betrayal. I leave him one night when I realize that he’s looking at another girl with that quicksilver smile on his face, when his hands flit about her waist like butterflies and she doesn’t push him away. His eyes rise to meet mine and I don’t see guilt, only anger that I caught him. For the first time, he aims for my face, and his anger drips down my cheekbone. I don’t go home that night. I end up in my room in the morning. I tell my parents that I cut myself on ice, that I tripped and fell. I tell them it was no one’s fault but my own. I don’t text him back. I don’t pick up the phone. I curl in a ball and stare at the wall. I realize how young I am, how idiotic it was to think he was the best thing in my life when life hadn’t even begun, that he was the last great thing I had to discover. I realize I don’t know who I am at all. The face in the mirror is a stranger. I don’t know her favorite color, her favorite food, what she does when she isn’t with him. I could write a book on him, but this girl….. I don’t even know how to talk to her. Tears drip down her face and we just stare at each other for hours. I realize that even though I thought I was a wild thing for loving him, that he made me free, I was really chaining myself to him tighter and tighter. I only saw him twice after that. The first was when I went to him and gave him back everything he’d given me. Except sleepless nights. Except pain. Except everything that really matters. I gave him back his T-shirts, his sweatshirts, the jewelry, the stories, the notes, everything that was even vaguely reminiscent of him. And he just stood there. Watching me. Refusing to meet my eyes, and his own were dead and dull like a shark’s. I saw him like the predator he was for the first time. I told him I wasn’t coming back this time. I told him that he’d broken me. I screamed at him, made him look at me. And then I left. It nearly broke me into smaller pieces. The second time… The second time was better, because I’d relearned how to smile and laugh and not flinch at sudden movements. I saw him at one of our old places, the dock on the quiet lake, just stretched out and staring up at the sky. And that’s when I realized that I was over him. Because I didn’t feel the urge to walk over to him, he didn’t pull on me like the earth to the moon and re-trap me in his orbit.

And I Kept Drinking The Poison