ponderingcomplications

[ponderingcomplications]

oh, silly girl lost in the wreckage of this big old world wide eyed and trembling and adrift, you were missed, you were missed, i have missed you for years you wretched, fragile thing lost in the suffering, the hurting, the forgetting that comes with the endless torment of time i forgot your face, your name the color of your hair your eyes, or if you were ever there in the first place but you must have been because deep within there was an echo that grew in your absence and i have been drowning in the silence ever since you silly girl lost from me at thirteen when i let life sink her teeth into me and take a bite from us both but you bled into me and i bled into you and disappeared into the mess we became i forgot your name because we are one and the same, aren't we? silly me, silly me, i have been lost all this time and the fault was mine, the fault was mine.

[ponderingcomplications]

i forgot to be honest when you asked me how i was i lied because i thought myself too heavy a burden for you to bear i did not dare to ask how you felt about it all because i couldn't carry the weight of your honesty and the heaviness in your eyes i am a coward but i am also a thief because happiness ran away with my grief and left me empty so i hunger and feast on any emotion you'll pour into me as if that could make a love everlasting but you try, you try and the sadness in your eyes is all consuming and the abyss in me is calling you home but you cannot go, you cannot go, so i lie to you and hide behind a smile, a clever guile just to keep you safe from these wretched hands and this hungry heart that want nothing more than to tear yours apart.

[ponderingcomplications]

and when i am rife with hurt the poetry comes so easy as if agony bleeds so sweetly into words so heavy the world seems to shake as she carries the weight of it all but when i am happy, oh, the lines no longer fall so readily onto the page, i go quiet, the world goes grey when my words are too far away for me to reach them who am i without my poems but who am i with them, too, i thought i knew myself but then i met you and now i know myself less, and my poetry even more so i dont understand a love like this where i am so full of joy and still drowning in sorrow where did i go? where did i go?

[ponderingcomplications]

did you know even animals mourn the dead, elephants will bow their heads and press their trunks to the fallen for hours, even days - they linger, they stay and return, even, to the bones that not even time could erase because their memories remain and magpies, when their loved ones lose the wind beneath their wings, they do not stay silent in their hurting they echo and scream into the skies, a funeral dirge for their beloved friends and endow the corpse with grass and twigs as if to honor their end- and me? i write, i write because if i dont how else will the world be able to endure my grief that is so heavy it breaks the ground beneath my feet it bleeds everything from me until i am naught but hollows but where else is the agony to go if not home to my heart where time and fate are set apart to rest in their finality, where grief finds relief for her suffering in the ruins of my writing like all other broken things in my writing, in my writing, there is so much grief in my writing...

[ponderingcomplications]

i admit i almost missed it, the forgetting comes so quietly these days and when apathy knocks, she comes to stay and lingers, lingers, lingers i almost missed it happiness almost slipped straight through my fingers i was open palmed and trembling i was shaking in my knees caught up in the drudgery of existing, persisting, in spite of it all in spite, in spite - spite comes to visit me, too, but he is a bitter, brutal thing and unrelenting, unyielding but he belongs, too, all of them, a seat at my table, the cacophony of noise spilled drinks, dirty dishes and all else in-between because in the midst of my suffering so too came in the beauty of belonging and though the mess is great, this wretched mess is mine and the clutter on the table just gives the sun more surfaces upon which it can sparkle and shine, and boy, does it shine - it shines.

[ponderingcomplications]

i admit i am a bit broken i dont fit quite right and i am doing my best to write but i do not belong to the poems i pen my punctuation is wrong and when i correct it, it is wronger, still. do you see?

not even that is a word but yet, i pen it as if i have permission to give letters their purpose but i'll be damned if i do not try. i love you a lot like my writing i give you everything and nothing i leave you with hollows and scream at your emptiness and drown you with an abundance of my suffering as if agony was something i had any right to share. i share it anyways, i write anyways i make messes, i make mistakes i break and i take without any consequence and when death comes to tuck me in he asks me to repent and i bare my teeth i loved you with everything i had in me unapologetically i gave to you my poetry and won't even write myself home again so to hell with my penance condemn me, condemn me, condemn me

[ponderingcomplications]

if i write it, then it exists and the reality of it all is that i long to avoid the reality of it all. so if i do not pen it, if i do not acknowledge that it occurred, then perhaps the inevitability of it all would dissipate the same way my hopes did, the same way my dreams did the moment your heart echoed against mine and resounded in emptiness. in me exists a wealth of loneliness, how cruel it was to ask me to carry yours.

[ponderingcomplications]

i write less because I have so much more to say these days, but words are too heavy and I mean it more now than I ever have before the hurt is too great a burden for even words to carry tell me, how do I bury the agony that exhumes itself?

[ponderingcomplications]

to my younger self

to call you young is a mockery of everything we intended to be yet still, we became despite the ruins, the raptures, the hollows of our name still sing out in infamy but, darling, please listen to me - you do not heal, you do not overcome, you do not recover - time just finds new wounds to uncover when all the dust settles and falls still. You do not become beautiful and we probably never will, but still, but still, but still, we were, we are, all bruises and battle scars we are alive and breathing and reaching for brighter days we do not hesitate to stay, instead we riot against the night that dares to tuck us in we are not a story about to end but rather the tale the poet cannot bear to pen because we harbor such magnitudes that they haunt us when we sleep and we are rife with all the treasures we thought we couldn't keep - us broken things find eternity in the belonging we built for ourselves. We are not the poems on our shelves but the writer and her pen, we are the hurting that dares to mend despite the futility of it all and yes, we stand, and yes, we still fall, but we stand and dare to stand again, we find the strength in our hands to hold on even when our faith is gone - and time, oh time, it continues on but so too do we, so too do we.

[ponderingcomplications]

not a poem

when they ask me i tell them i have an abundance of words but no courage to spill them, the truths i yearn to tell are too big a burden for the world to read the stories i could write would make my demons weep the tales are so heavy not even the ocean could keep and so the quiet is my penance, silence is my sentence, a lifelong punishment devoid of sentiment because anything more is suicide but i tried, i tried.

[ponderingcomplications]

I awake with an exhaustion that sits heavy in my bones, like anchors or stones that weigh every step with such limitless regret I cannot fathom how I find the strength in my knees to stand, I wonder at the marvel of my steady hands when inside me, a world is crumbling and I am struggling to keep myself together. I know that I am better than I have ever been before - there is more peace, less war in the hollows of my mind. I am more gentle, more kind than I was in my younger days, I am in less of a hurry to go, it is easier to stay. I forgave my demons, I made amends with my regret, I told them they belonged with me, that they deserved to be kept. I sat down with my depression and I told her to come home, I opened the door to my suffering and for my part in it, I atoned. I am an accumulation of broken things that never quite belonged but I am not the wreckage I made, I am not all that I've done wrong. These mornings, I am heavy, but these mornings, I am -

I am alive, I am healing, I am breathing, I am feeling, I am enough, I am whole, there is peace in my soul. These mornings, I am heavy, but these mornings, I stand. I stand.

[ponderingcomplications]

when they ask you, what will we tell them? will we speak of your achievements and accolades, or will we talk about the ruins you built yourself from? Will we talk about the battles you survived or will we talk about the fact that you fought them? When we bury you, will we rebel for the dirt we are placing over your face or will we revel in the fact that you have people to grace your grave? Ask me the peace in this war? I know you less than I did before and somehow I know you so much more as I read your eulogy the angels sing back to me and beg me to bury, to bury, to bury everything and at last, at last, know peace. But what the fuck is left of me, what is left of me?

[ponderingcomplications]

alone with my despair again what do you expect from a poet and her pen, do you expect me to save you? to lift you from your ruin? i'm not sorry for the break in the rhyme for the breaking in all the time you thought poetry belonged to - I have nothing, nothing, nothing... left for you and I can't make meaning of the nothingness. I am nothing less than my echo and when she sings, she mourns, oh, she mourns, like she was born from emptiness. She was, she was, she was, she was nothing before me and she is nothing after me and I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing. Stop looking for me. Stop looking. Stop looking. You will not find me here.

[ponderingcomplications]

when we were little we would chase butterflies and honey bees and moths that glittered gold despite their grey toned wings. We were such tiny, beautiful beings, impermanent or temporary like the dust (no the scales, those fragile things,) that would stain our fingers. Oh, the horror, the guilt, when the damaged we caused lingered. We learned so many lessons we didn't know we learned then - how to be gentle, delicate, how to cherish, how to mend - how to forgive ourselves for the damage and never do it again. I cup my hands, now, I use open palms, I do not keep things that do not belong to this heart of mine, and, in time, I hope to forgive myself for doing so, for holding on to all the things I should have long let go, for keeping my wounds open as if they were fresh battle scars instead of healing the hurt that caused them. I wish, so terribly, that my poems could soften every blow that growing old bestows upon you. And oh, how I feel that hurt, too, that old, ancient ache that precipitates all beauty. The fragility of those butterfly wings, the quiet suffering we all have called our own - the grief, the relief when they still took to the sky and the delight in the hope that fluttered by even way back then. You are still who you were, you can be that person again - lift your chin, open your hands remind yourself that you can make amends even with the stranger in the mirror. I hope, in time, you see clearer and come to love who you've become because you are that little kid, so small, so young, growing as all adults do turning black and blue but beautiful, so, so wonderful like those butterflies that flew. We, like them, are hope anew and can persist despite our endings. I hope, if you read this poem, that you start mending.

[ponderingcomplications]

I hope, in time, the habit of hurting gets easier to bear. The edges less sharp, the wounds less deep. I hope we grow with our suffering and find a way to make ourselves gentle again.

[ponderingcomplications]

It is 163 miles to get where we are going your elbow is brushing mine on the middle console and I flinch in secret. I am still uncertain how a void grows but it must be spontaneous because in the morning, you could not be closer and by now, you cannot be further away. I can't make a poem out of this, there is the agony of heartbreak and the responsibility of staving it off until we are safe - we arrive home as strangers.

[ponderingcomplications]

In a world as wretched as this, I ask of you this singular thing -

to all, may you always stay gentle for sharp surfaces mask suffering.