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[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

matrimony

I dreamt of a Catholic wedding.

false spring, and though the flowers did not smell of decay like they did the week before, they bore no beauty in their barren slouch.

I was, not of my own volition, paraded into the chapel foyer in a white dress, an expanse of expensive fabric for which I would spend the next twenty years in debt.

the aisle was too long for me to suspend my disbelief, and the drafty church was unnaturally warm from the crowd of people who love me filling the room with their hot breath and expressions of congratulations and sweat from the previous night’s overindulgence.

I walked

and walked

and walked,

pausing to hear the crackle of wooden pews as everyone rose to their feet ceremoniously.

a bouquet of handcuffs I clutched tightly in anticipation, a prisoner uninformed of their fate and led to the gallows.

I narrowed my eyes into a wrinkled squint, my waking self spectating and finding humor in discovering the identity of the person waiting for me.

one step: a black suit and tie with freshly shined shoes.

another step: a matching flower pinned to the lapel of their jacket, wild hyacinth or possibly an iris.

another: dark hair gelled into a neat, formal style.

another: a man, a good man, with tears flowing like his eventual holy promises and vows of devotion.

I couldn’t stop my heart from falling six feet under.

the pageantry did not ease the sting of the sight, nor could it will my feet to move. to find him, or any man, waiting for me felt like the boards of the execution platform falling beneath me.

disappointment rang like the vibrating sound waves from church bells within my ears and the altar trembled within my watery gaze; I was an actor unfit for the job I never applied to.

I felt my would-be mother-in-law’s serpentine hiss down my spine as she shoved me forward.

“there is no more room for runaway brides down below. find some conviction and a better excuse to burn when we bury you.”

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

the crossroads

CW: SA

vigilance is the family heirloom she did not inherit before you met her at the crossroads. too young to know to regard a man like a loaded gun but old enough to know not to wander after dark.

overripe fruit plated on finery, corpse cold to the touch, a feast just for you behind the door of your parent’s bedroom. her friends were busy getting sick in the bathroom and the living room sang the ballad of cheap Russian vodka and teenage madness. she felt your appetite fill the room before you entered, the hallway outside stole the air to create more space for your desires.

your hungry hands ran over the flag you planted months before as a landmark of your New World discovery. you had the decency to apologize but not enough to look her in her vacant eyes when you pulled her unmentionables off, immoderate fingers searching for the thrill of a cliff you could jump from. she slept at the foot of the bed like a dog on a January night, but she was still the bullet riddled soup cans you shot in the backyard and the fruit that stained the white button down of your Sunday best; anything tragically inanimate, anything without a say.

you can find her at the railroad tracks across town, always fidgeting with her hereditary curse and never dressed for the weather. reader, leave the sign of peace your neighbor gave you under the mattress before venturing off into the night, there are thieves about and their scorned women offer nothing but commiseration. avenge me by packing a pistol in your garter belt. if you spill blood in self-defense, I will mimic your prayers for absolution long beyond my dying breath.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

the Otherworld

CW: DISCUSSION OF THE DAMAGE OF LATE STAGE CAPITALISM

there once was a castle that bore my family name before wars manufactured by greed made the whole world bleed.

the covetous hearts and violent hands that have infiltrated every inch of this planet have convinced their descendants to write textbooks that absolve them of their transgressions.

too many of our family trees have stories, oozing from axe marks like sap, of displacement and attempted cultural murder; ancestors who were taken by force or who fled to save their skin. ashes to ashes, dust to golden ages and triumph, the only thrones left intact are the ones made of bones. the poverty line is tunneling through the lobbies of luxury apartment buildings in the "respectable" part of the city, and those who share lineage with pharaohs dream of a life made of more than survival, are sleeping on infrastructure constructed in hostility. I offer nothing but burial rites for the legacies stolen from us, the pages omitted from history books.

to those who came before me, thank you for the scrappy resilience that gave me this lifetime. thank you for the words like prophecies. thank you for the humor, the folklore, the recipes, the magic you passed on by mouth to your children’s children’s children. thank you for your loving protection spell that you have cast from the ether, the celestial safety you provide because you were not granted that luxury. I feel your ancient hunger pains, and I ask for your grace if I cannot satiate them before I meet you in the Otherworld.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

tombstone

through insomniac tears, I see a face in the distant constellations; wide, winged, frozen eyes, peony lips and a laugh that rattled the trees. 

blonde hair taken by the breeze as we smoked atop your picnic table. between quotes by dead philosophers, I said I would have married you to keep us on the same side of the shore. how could I have known the water and miles and silence you would put between us? no closure, no postmortem, no repass with an open bar to indulge my melancholy. 

what words can I etch into stone to dress the wound that looks like you?

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

stranger danger

CW: IMPLIED SEXUAL ABUSE

I felt the alarm bells ringing in my pulse points for the past couple of days. left the Prozac on the shelf, buried my head in tornados of cycling thoughts that occupy my inner monologue. now, with clammy palms, I give myself a most unholy baptism of cheap fermented garbage. it is cruel of the universe to have me come under your gaze again, feeling you subliminally undressing my mind and soul until you have examined and cataloged all of the layers. 

I manually brightened my eyes and lifted the melody of my voice after failing to avoid your detection; sometimes I can be quite the natural performer, especially when I cannot hide behind the black velvet curtains. every response felt like a squeeze around my throat, too violent and sadistic in technique to be enjoyable. my ego screamed over losing the power struggle, the dangerous staring contest. I realized that I am still as helpless as I was at eighteen. twenty-one and filled to the brim of misplaced self-assuredness, oh how the poor thing comes crashing down so gracefully, a controlled demolition. what a pitiful creature, drunk on lies she tells herself and wasted potential. 

the stranger says “you’re just like me, my dear. have a seat, you’re making me nervous!”

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

Me whilst writing: This is a masterpiece…I am a literary genius

Me whilst editing my writing: I am an abomination to the writing community

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

the death of summer

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the cold is coming back. you can feel it in the nightly absence of the infernal assault from the sky, when the world is adorned with unsustainable light and lips misplace their discretion. I will admit that it is a homecoming I have been pining for; ice and simple landscapes. the death before rebirth, the self-assured surrender to the inevitable. summer tends to overstay its welcome and I have grown weary of sweat, of heat, of shaky hands and of how temporary the warmth seems to be. 

the seasons are changing with every solar revolution and the unpredictability is terrifying, for lack of a poetic turn of phrase. endless summer seems to only be a fantasy people stick to the rear of their car, an advertisement of their eventual disappointment in the turning of the earth. there is a type of stagnancy that falls softly from the winter gray clouds, something comforting about the whispered howling of the Earth. I dream of frostbite and traversing a hibernating landscape, head in the clouds while basking in the light of the sun and the moon. it is quite piscean to fantasize and ignore the hurricane that has been brewing undetected. 

shelter in place little fish, be witness to nature’s retaliation. The Morrígan has long since decreed the eruption of a great reckoning, so offer your pound of flesh or have it taken from you. give your spare coins to the goddess of the hearth, may she nurture the fire you build once the cold permeates your bones, after stormy fury washes your neighbors away and before the flares claim our lives and legacies. there is a stillness, a gentleness of snowfall that grants me a false sense of security, the skies don’t express much rage. but the snowflakes bring a warning, a reminder that the star we miss will, one day, be our murderer.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

idolatry

home of wayward children and the ones who grow up in need of a savior. the godly reverence never lasts for long, devotees see the cracks and warps in the wooden altar and excommunicate themselves from the church. pitiful deity, forgotten by time and has learned to enjoy the taste of dust. mortal love is so conditional and their resolve is so brittle that they should have just been designed without spines.

*“man hands on misery to man", those who fall into the earth from raging storm clouds will alchemize their own and darken someone else’s sky. all the pantheons join together in a somber chorus and weep at the cruelty, adding to the deluge that will cleanse our planet of blood and bruise, and of us. do not worship flesh and flaws; one day you will violently yank your object of idolatry off their pedestal and cast them into the cemetery in your mind. being unexalted feels better than a prison of dirt and lost faith that was misplaced to begin with.

*The imbedded quote is an interpolation from the third and final stanza of Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse. All credit for this inclusion is due to the author and/or the estate of the late poet. This reference, with consideration and context of the source, does not reflect the views or opinions of Siobhan Clover, eclectic elegies: poetry and prose, and/or any collaborators, nor should this interpolation be equated to endorsement of the beliefs of the quoted author.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

chiron in sagittarius

what an exhausting dance routine I have choreographed, spinning on the balls of my blistered feet between two equally skilled partners; one the embodiment of sunshine and salvation that Jesus himself would smile upon and the other dripping in damnation. I have developed quite the chemistry with the latter, an intuitive melding of mind and body that helps me to forget about the ones I inhabit. she does not chastise my stumbles or my inconsistent performances, there is twine binding us like the electrical wires on the street that I have walked at many heights. I whisper in her direction and a sonically impossible reverb sends my words back to me, an echo-chamber of my own ideas that sound sweeter in its return.

I have always been committed to perfection and existing in the liminal space of contradictions. all of the faces I have had in my possession love the simple pleasure of standing unadorned while chaos falls from the skies. Lucifer cried, drunk on his own exile, but when he recovered from his violent descent, he smiled with bloody teeth when he was crowned the king of fire. much to my mother’s chagrin, sacrilege is second nature to someone who has spent years waltzing with the fallen angel’s brethren.

I am learn’d in being in two places at once, my mind above the sky, not quite a heavenly elevation all the while my body is frozen in glaciers older than my elderly soul. I am too flighty of an individual to marry the dark or the light. my curse can be found in my metaphysical wound, shaped like an armed centaur that runs from philosophy to philosophy, always shapeshifting for better or worse. I am trying to discern if this behavior is related to finally starting to understand nuance in existence or mere indecisiveness of my convictions. but does the motive matter when the performance earns applause?

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

resurfacing

CW: GRAPHIC IMAGERY AND ALCOHOL ABUSE

when the fermented ambrosia hit my tongue, the sting of liquid fire reminded me of the many times when I could not stomach it. the camera lenses of my eyes have watercolor nightmares superimposed right on the glass; visions of men sent from hell, a hodgepodge collective of traitors come to drag the king’s corpse off his gilded throne, the destruction cast by way too many hands that come home to a body called by one name.

where can I go to scrub my skin raw enough to let the crosses I have bore crash into the bloody waters? are my hands dexterous enough to construct a fort of a home to take shelter in, skilled enough to build it with structural integrity but penetrable by those with good intentions? will i have to lay down my arms and kiss my chemical dependences goodbye, long and sweet and reluctant?

I try and try and try and try and try, repeat my affirmations and dump ashes into the moon drunk sky. why have I come so far but not have gone forward at all? in too many lifetimes, I have always been left kneeling on driftwood in hurricane seasoned waters by people who could not swim well enough to take us both to shore. but I am no saint, so far removed from God’s merciful touch and I have spat bitter wine indiscriminately on plenty who have crossed my path. my karmic fall from grace, I was born onto divinely crafted grass and fated to fall into the flames crackling and lurking below.

hero and villain, victim and perpetrator, tired dynamics that do not encapsulate the complexity of navigating these waking night terrors. is it the human condition or our own stubbornness that keeps us running in place; never covering much ground while condemning all elevations of our topography and our neighbors for why we cannot move? the martyrs have all found more lucrative lines of work, but I have never been driven by profit. i want to scream at the sky and at my transgressors until my vocal chords shred and I paint the green beneath me with bloodied vomit.

where is the bottom of me? what if I wade in the salty seas for time immemorial and find that my feet never find the sandy depths? I have been tempted by the most bewitching of sirens, appealing words encased in alluring choirs of voices that extract worship out of this weary sinner. lamb for the slaughter, I reveled in the gentle caress of being prepared for such an intoxicating murder.

someday soon, I will package my inherited curses and my griefs into an ornate, delicately detailed trunk and leave it behind in my weathered childhood home for the next owners to quench their exploitative morbid curiosity. the day is not today, but each time the sun dances on frigid spring mornings, I commit myself to building that forever home, a place that I have not memorized the creaky floorboards in and a space to gather my earthly guides who have not painted war behind my eyelids. I am not a holy woman and I may have been born onto the earth soaked in blood and generations of tears, but I will be absolved. I will stand in the sun and admire my work, no longer plagued by human incarnations of lessons that I, finally, have learned, and no longer shackled by rusty chains that kept me thrashing in the violent blue. there are prettier pictures that I can paint.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

your cardigan

I wore one of your cardigans today. it certainly is not cashmere, you were always a frugal woman. but it is soft and warm enough so that I do not shiver in the face of Mother Nature’s spring-flavored unpredictability. the rain returned and so did the water in my eyes. I was told that you gave me your optimism, I just hope it was not mistakenly placed in the bag we gave to the thrift store.

I wore your cardigan today. it is less of a depressing eyesore than my mourning clothes but it serves the same purpose. I have perfected the artful body language of grief like I have been walking in my own personal procession for weeks, but the change from black to gray assuages my mother’s anxieties about me, even if they are warranted.

I wore your cardigan tonight. I pulled it close when the briny bay breeze shook the entire biome of unripe greenery in the path of my evening stroll. the moon looked about half-empty, which is the same way I tend to view the proverbial cup. I am still trying to find the positivity you supposedly left me.

I wore your cardigan today. I bargained that I could get away with it and claim that I tossed it in the wash, even though I have not attempted that in weeks. in fact, this is probably the only article of clothing I will not include in that first load of laundry when I bring myself to do it. maybe I will never clean it out of the fear that the essence of you will be stripped from the fibers. this is my delusional way of keeping you around.

I wore your cardigan today. I experienced flashbacks in a sickeningly quick sequence, resembling strobe lights or a frantically paced nightmare.

I should’ve held your hand.

I should’ve held your hand.

I should’ve held your hand.

I wore your cardigan today. to be fair, I woke with it clutched in my fists, wrinkled by corpse-colored knuckles and covered in invisible stains of salt water. my muscle memory serves me well but I anticipate poor reviews for the performance I have delivered. the facial muscles of my audience members twitch in pity as I fumble my lines and I feel like the spotlight might give me a heat stroke. acting has never been a strong suit of mine anyway.

I wore your cardigan today. I did not have the energy to lie to myself, I just really fucking missed you. I watch incoming calls come and go, the feel of familiar fabric around my torso and the acidic aftertaste of the consequences of daytime drinking keeping me grounded in this heavy reality. can I package myself into a crisp envelope and send my soul to you without being returned to the sender? can the higher power show mercy and let me hold your hand?

I chose not to wear your cardigan today. instead, I sat at the foot of your freshly dug bed of dirt next to the love that left you years before you left me. I do not think the grief will ever truly cease, but I will will myself into embodying the ivy and find every place where I can grow around it.

there might be some optimism in that.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

premature eulogy

it is Demeter’s last icy breath for this year that made my body as cold as the dead between the stone chapel and the hospital. the Sun paid me a golden orange visit, showing me the beauty of the town I will leave behind one day, the same town that will leave you behind. oh, can I play cards with you one more time? can I stand shorter and be chastised by you once more? let me go back and take your words for granted again. I want to craft an eternal bed for two, your frail hand between my splintered palms forevermore.

a wave; here for a moment in all its fleeting glory, gone the next. I would sooner cast the world in a cloud of napalm than let you return to the nebulous ether. the West has abducted the Sun by now, I see the lingering screams of peach and lavender left in his wake. he will be back tomorrow, one of these days the flowers will come back home too and I will bring them to you, a fresh bouquet, a silent show of the love that will outlive the Earth. Find me when I light candles for you, I will have Irish coffee for two.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

missing person

CW: IMPLIED ALCOHOL ABUSE

the girl you held in your arms in front of the reflecting pool was reported missing years ago. I have not told the authorities, but sometimes she calls me late at night and asks about you.

I like to think I have made peace with her disappearance, went through the stages of grief in every imaginable order and grew my hair past my waist so the mirror would not remind me of the teenager whose hair barely grazed her shoulders, who learned to don the unapproachable stare from the faces of strangers her brain would never encode in her memory. I fell in and out of love, different beds, friendships, and drunken comas but I cannot ever find it in myself to lock the front door in case she decides to come home.

I remember taking the bottle of red from your hands and pushing down memories of communion wine, trying to chase an intoxication that would never come; no, not that night. sleeping on the floor on opposite sides of the room, praying the callous flash of television lights would not give me away as I inched to your side, even when your sleeping mind wanted to cast me out into the night to my own bed.

I keep the sweater I lived in those last couple of days in a designated place separate from my other clothes, hoping the smell of your inherited cologne will return after these long years. sometimes I hope you miss the feeling of my tears on your skin and a sick part of you wants to trigger them to fall on you once more. for your information, I do have plenty of water to spare; come quench your twisted thirst.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

exit stage left

CW: BRIEF VIOLENT IMAGERY

if I knew that that kiss was our final one, I would have held you hostage with your lip between my teeth. I would have put up a fight and taken home a souvenir of your skin and blood.

I cursed you my dear. I know you hear the timbre of my voice in the echo of the ear-splitting bass sounding in that bar you always talked about. I know you see my face for a moment in those beautiful women you will never pursue, the glint of my chains in every flash of the light.

you haunt me too. I will never forget the image of you swimming in my hoodie and the cold air we suffered on your balcony so I could fill my lungs with poisonous heat.

you desired someone else though, a shapeshifter who could contort into your perfect girl. and you have to admit that I was good at playing the part even on the verge of collapse. I fit so well beside the contour of your body that I entertained the delusion that I could stay there until the earth swallowed us whole.

the naiveté of my first love was my drug of choice and sometimes it feels like I will never be clean, that I will never stop seeing you behind my eyelids and in the astral plane. I cannot even stand in the rain and visualize you washing away because it always rained when I made the drive to see you.

I want to keep you in the tiniest ways I can, I want to clap with misty eyes when you make that lifelong commitment to the better casting choice. I want to hear the happiness in your voice when your life aligns with your purpose and hear the disappointment that I'm not a part of it in what will forever be left unsaid.

but as you know, performers crave the spotlight and I have been prolonging my exit from the theatre. you have long since finished your closing monologue and I have been improvising ever since the script ran out of pages. I am sick of putting on a show-stopping smile and donning my character’s clothes when you text me. I need to relearn who I am beyond the stage of what we had, and I cannot do that when I am still acting as though seeing your name does not send me back into the climax of our story.

I am sorry. I am sorry for the things I did and did not do. one day, the love will take its bow and its leave and I will not be so sorry anymore.

exit stage left.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

kiss me in our garden

is there a timeline in our ever dividing landscape of alternate universes where fate could be kind to us? I will not entertain thoughts of love, but you feel like a shimmering, fluttering wind dancing between my ribs and under my skin. you radiate with the warmth of crackling embers, but for some reason, I do not expect that you will burn my fingertips.

somehow, you found a way to settle the swirling madness in my brain to a faint breeze that emits from my lungs as a childlike giggle. you meet me where I am and your eyes do not make me flinch, even when they talk to me instead of your lips. in plain tongue, you are remarkable and part of me wants to cling to this moment until the dusk of our lives so I can paint your likeness in words and sounds.

but I have been in this place too many times to be naïve. my mind creates detailed storyboards of imaginative love, entire lives lived through a fleeting moment when I thought someone would stick around. you could just be a fascinating maybe, a shiny new toy that eventually is lost or forgotten on a shelf, coated with dust and the remnants of my regrets.

yet, my heart yearns to savor this beautiful limbo of not knowing the future; your hair that begs for my unwavering touch, your smile that could dazzle me for centuries, the devilish twinkle in your paradoxically kind eyes, the melodic cadence in the voice that you hate, but the same which could guide my drift to dreams every night if we became each other’s home.

I see more thorn in myself than flower, but you give me hope that maybe the beauty of the flower within me is worth the blood you might shed in handling me.

I want to tend to this garden sanctuary we have cultivated, so I pray to the universe with melting red candle wax that the time we give to each other has lasting value. life has led us to the wrong destinations before, but I wish to cherish the four-leaf clover I found sprouting from the salted ground at the end of the path that chose me.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

i fell for a poet, my mistake: a five point narrative

CW: THEMES OF VIOLENCE, SUICIDE, AND ILLICIT DRUG USE

This is my account of my last teenaged heartbreak; a story arc of unrequited love and, naturally, all the clichés and angst of adolescence. These are five poems that I've left (mostly) untouched, as I want to preserve the rough edges of these works and meaningfully document my journey as an artist and human being. Please enjoy the final breaths of my unadulterated youth.

unholy sacrifices

“i’m going to write so many poems about this,” you said, your words falling into the open air and carried away by the unforgiving wind. i had to chuckle because you are so predictable yet impossible to read.

i wanted to throw myself into the fire behind your eyes, a sacrificial offering to a god who had taken everything from me.

i bowed before your altar, singing silent hymns because you dared me not to speak.

but your cathedral was built on shaky ground, posing a threat for all who dare visit.

still, i took each strike against my cheek as a soft caress that felt loving because loving always felt like pain.

i wanted you to hold me, but i settled for having the air taken out of my lungs, an embrace around my throat.

the universe, a sadist, had me swallow your communion wine; intoxicating and tinged with the taste of the blood i drew from your lips.

i yearn for anyone to get a taste of me without wanting to leave. i send these empty prayers to an indifferent god that maybe, one day, i will be worth staying around for.

a tab of acid at 3pm (p. I)

there are fleeting moments of euphoria, passing like streetlights streaming through a car window, fading in and out of visibility.

the truth is, you can stay in that beauty for as long as you wish. you are allowed to remain bathing in white hot serenity, and you can let yourself fall into the pieces of fragmented light.

here, i realize feeling is not as bad as i feared. it is a comfort to be okay with you shining your light within me. as i offer my lantern to you while we walk in the darkest shadows of your soul, you can bring your lighter to my lips, light what is in between my teeth, and i will let you enter my lungs and fill my mind. i will let you connect the firing synapses in my brain into a pattern that will make delight dance in the sparkle of your eyes.

maybe i am ready to stand in prismatic light, joined with a soul craving illumination with the same ferocity as me. too long have i resigned myself to a life of avoiding light due to my fear of losing it.

it is okay to want, and it is okay to want more than a gray-scale world cast in a cloud of fog. there is beauty and familiarity in the dark passages of those streets, but there is so much more to see. there are painted sunsets and quivering trees of green, and there is light.

and there is you.

the comedown (p. II)

i hate that you are made of stones: impenetrable, impossible, impatient in all the wrong ways.

i hate that i am made of bones, with a skeleton that wounds dictate will never heal in the way it used to be.

i wish your walls had ears that could hear my fondness for you, which could let you give into the inevitable decomposition that nature purports as law. i wish there was some other way to get through to you than to break you down.

i itch again for your skin on mine, i want to feel holy rivers come from your eyes and observe its glisten on the valley of my chest. i want to envelop you in the warmth of my arms, and i want to shape your plaster into the mold of the person that i know you are, but that you cannot seem to see.

i want you to want me to help you see the beauty in letting your defenses cease.

persephone’s annual gift

i long for the elusive winds of perfumed Spring air. the cold permeates my aching soul, leaves me numb, and my tears fall as frozen fractals, crystallized with the shielding strength i wish i could use to protect my heart.

lover, you feel like ice but i am colder when you leave. i am filled to the brim of you when we share toxic smoke, but you leave me writhing in withdrawal because i can never seem to get enough.

but Spring is coming, and the sparse patches of soil on these soul-sucking streets will give way to color-saturated blossoms. Persephone always comes home to induce the labor of her mother’s creations.

maybe you can learn to love me when your jaded heart thaws, or maybe you already do and the fates have maliciously kept us apart for reasons we are not privy to. you are right here, but god damn it, so far away.

maybe, one day, you will see my hair as beautiful daisy chains that enchant you. maybe, one day, you will see delicate blooms in my eyes and be eternally hypnotized. maybe, one day, you will see my limbs as roots that you can ground yourself with. maybe, one day, you will see that i can breathe life back into you.

maybe, maybe not.

i am not a girl of glass

time and time again, in a deceitful cycle that spins me, I have proven to be stupid in yearning and have broken my own heart once more.

it is better this way, taking the dagger into your own hands and plunging it deep within, casting waves of pain which dissipate from the wound’s epicenter.

it is better to die than to be known, because when people leave, it will not be because they saw the real you; a dripping wax candle eaten away by flame and insidiously combustible.

i want someone to love me, but not in the way that one would admire a sculpture of glass, beautiful in how she catches the light but too fragile to touch. i want ugly, unapologetic, unrelenting love that does not see me to be a celestial, ethereal entity that cannot be loved because the observer believes that they are a threat to the castle of her mind.

but look where we are now, tears flowing around the castle like a moat which, with enough water, will serve as a defense against anyone with the tenacity to try and infiltrate this fortress. i am not made of glass but of stone, and you will need more than sweet verses to maintain that bridge you have attempted to build. the anger within my heart will have to do with keeping my bed warm in the reclusive hours of the night.

[eclectic-elegies-poetry]

to anyone who happens comes across this post:

hello! my name is siobhan clover (she/her) and I am an aspiring writer of poetry and prose.

i am not a stranger to this wonderful hellsite but i haven’t posted here for the better part of a decade, so please pardon any faux paus.

i look forward to connecting with writers and artists of all walks and niches! i hope you find something to take with you; a touchstone you keep in your pocket that reminds you of me.

instagram: @/eclectic_elegies

website: https://eclectic-elegies-poetry.com/