poetry-between-the-lines

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I am asking you to endure it.

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it's really weird having a first dog be blind and then getting a second who can see...like how was I supposed to be prepared for this.

this creature can perceive when I put the treats up on the high shelf. or when I hide stuff behind my back. I can't fool her!! she's always watching me and she shouldn't have this much knowledge!!!

I walk around at night and I shine my flash light directly into her eyes and I'll just be standing there staring at her weird blue orbs for like 5 seconds until I realize it's probably extremely annoying to her, because she has eyes!! I'll turn on the light in the room and she gruffs and grumbles like ?? oh right!! light wakes you up!! the fuck??

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NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

–Terry Pratchett

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I was beaten with the name of a ghost / on lunatics’ mouths / and I hate you for it.

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When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?

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Everyone is nostalgic and no one is sincere. Do you get the idea

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"Did you ever have an imaginary friend?"

The beer can was thoughtfully swirled. "No," she said eventually. "I tried, though. It just - it didn't work."

The wind blew over the stoop, cool and smelling of rain.

"'Didn't work?'"

"I wanted it to work, it - I was six, and I was in my dad's truck, and we were in the Wal-Mart parking lot at night - I don't remember why - and I thought, 'I should make an imaginary friend,' so I looked through the window and-"

She frowned. "Fuck. This sounds like a joke, but I made a Vaporeon. It was just a fully formed, perfect Vaporeon in a parking lot of a Wal-Mart. And I was so happy and I opened the door to make it jump in so I could take it home with me.

"But there was something - wrong with it. I'd made it perfectly, but I forgot to make it alive. It just sat and stared and I begged it to jump in the truck with me before my dad drove off, and it sat and stared, and we drove off and I was so sad and confused and - disappointed."

She wiggled the tab of the can. "It's still there," she said quietly. "I drive past that parking lot sometimes, and that same Vaporeon is still sitting in that spot. I've seen that parking lot get full to the tits in the middle of the holidays, I have never, not even once, seen someone park in the spot it's sitting in."

A car drove by. After a moment the frogs in the ditch started to chirp again.

She tipped her head back and downed the rest of the beer. "Anyways, that's what I think god's deal is," she said.

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this poem is about being nonbinary.

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Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?

I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.

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"because your childhood was smeared with violence, and so violence now feels like a childish thing"

its something they think they grew out of <- This phrase you said about kids being hit but the parent later stops has just been rolling around of my head. Like oh thats truly how a good portion of society (myself included) just accepts happens to themselves and to others and how sometimes in tv parents go “You’re not too grown that I can’t hit you anymore” like why is this normalized

well! the short and sweet answer is that society views children not as their own persons, but as an extension of their parents, to be either coddled or abused as the parent sees fit. since the abuse stops by the time they've achieved their own personhood, it's not seen as relevant

the messier but also true answer is that children experiencing physical abuse tend to find the whole physical part of it that least upsetting bit of it. if the child doesn't care, and the parent doesn't care, then nobody else is going to care either. not to mention that time softens it even further. and by the time you've grown up enough to go "hey what the fuck was that all about" you're also so far removed from it that it feels almost childish to dig into it - because your childhood was smeared with violence, and so violence now feels like a childish thing

excepting extreme cases, the pain of abuse isn't something that lingers. bruises and bloody noses. the marks of a perfectly healthy childhood even, except yours isn't from tumbling from the jungle gym or schoolyard battles, but because an adult decided to put their hands on you, to teach a lesson that if you forgot then your skin would remember

the part that hurts is that they wanted to hurt you. the thing that lingers is the stress of not knowing the next time they'd hurt you. what gnaws at you is that you are so small and your parents are your whole world and all you want is them to love you. so you justify it. you excuse you it, you ignore it, perhaps you even start to act out, so that the next time you're bruised and bloody you at least feel like you earned it (if you earn it then it's not their fault, then it's not because there's something wrong with them - a fact that if true is terrifying because there's nothing you can do about it - but with you, the one person you can control)

the pain isn't actually the problem. often, the pain is a relief

if it's something you can grow out of, that's a good thing. because it means their disdain and lack of care and the thought that you're not being loved right is something you can outgrow, something you can leave behind in childhood, and that's what you want

but the truth of it is that if your parents don't love you properly as a child, they won't love you properly as an adult

the reason people often think of it as something that can be outgrown is that they're desperate for it to be something they can outgrow

the reason parents physically harming their child is so damaging isn't because it causes them pain, although of course that's bad. it's because it breaks their heart

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no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[poetry-between-the-lines]

Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?

I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.

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I respect poetry so much because it does what I cannot do - say so much with so little.

When I have something Much to say, it takes me just as many words to say it. I say it with words that are each of them bland and common, unimaginative by their lonesome, with the hopes that if I stack so many together and squeeze a single drop of Much from each that it might flow into something meaningful.

When I have something to say, I say it twice. I say it three times. Because the first or second may not have captured the point. Because I do not trust myself to express the full essence saying it just once. Like just now, those last two sentences. I’ll repeat myself a third time for good measure - because I do not say it right just once or twice.

Poems say things in only a half, only a quarter. They choose single words worth more than ten of mine. I want to know how their minds shop for words. I want to distill myself like poets do. I want to trade in all my too many common words for the way they use an extraordinary few.

If I keep writing this, I’ll write it forever. I’ll explain myself again, as I have already, as I’m doing now. With more and different other words, with the hope of saying myself fully, like how all the hatched and messy wanton scribbles from a pen might finally color in a page. I want to change that. I want to not rip the page I’ve oversaturated by the tip of my pen.

I’ll start tomorrow, maybe, to explain myself less.

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I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

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Frankly some of you should be hornier over weirder shit. The fear of being too genuine is the enemy of art. Be a bit of a pervert. It's good for the health. Doesn't have to be a sexual thing just own up to being a bit obsessed in some cringe shit it's fine.