shore-fire

[shore-fire]

zoo by marty mcconnell

for Caroline, and for me. what’s important is to know that you will one day be happy again. happier than you were with her, happier than has ever been possible. focus on what makes you happy: a hot teacup against your belly. fresh sheets. turning up the heat in the apartment and cleaning naked as if it is August and everyone you love is coming over for breakfast. you have had love, and that means your sternum is a divining rod for both passion and grief. because the tongue is the body’s strongest muscle, make it say joy. make it say I am a factory of splendid things. make it say the octopus is the smartest animal in the animal kingdom, and I am an octopus. I am an octopus. I am happy. my survival was not an accident, or purposeless. the car that could have ended me didn’t. the lies that could have brined my insides to bitterness didn’t. word on the street is, you have muscles other than the tongue. take them for a walk in the sun. or, if it is spring in Chicago and therefore grey as your actual hair, in the rain. there are people everywhere. some of them are happy. you are one of them. I am one of them. and it’s OK. you can be happy and have a baby. you can be happy and create disconcerting images of traditional Christian figures in compromising positions using masticated fireflies as paint. someday somebody will love you for this. or in spite of it. either way, you’re an octopus. I’m an octopus. say it: we are happy. say: it’s not so bad.

[shore-fire]

bad circulation

i make a good heat sink. some combination of hypothyroidism and fear of attachment makes me cold, like left-in-the-fridge-and-forgotten cold. people with too much buzzing in their palms and throats love me. i can cool you down with a cruel comment, a cold shoulder, or a refreshing drink to the face. now i wake up without you. i had almost forgotten what it was like to scrape frost off my body every morning.

[shore-fire]

there is a bitter sweetness to beginnings for those who prepare for the end.

[shore-fire]

mascarie

I wear makeup more to look garish than to look beautiful

I want to be a nightmarish hag at least as much as I want to be desirable

if I allure it must be only as a fishhook allures

a bright showy bauble with its hard ancient hatred glinting always just under the surface.

[shore-fire]

this is a love poem.

now that i’ve lost you, imagine this:

i’ve got three knives and three plans (all personal dates-- nothing better than taking yourself out!) i’ve got three jobs and three dollars (in total!) i’ve got a heart like sandpaper so yours can always be smooth. will you still have me?

it’s like i’m wandering down a dark hallway gripping your hand so tight it tingles down a pathway i’ve been down before that just looks so different at night. now that the sun is down i see things about love i never thought possible. suddenly the thoughts are not evil or jealous, suddenly my heart bleeds so steadily like it’s no longer ashamed. i look out into the hollow night and see your face in the shadows. i look at the yawning sky and find your eyes between worlds.

i am as the leaf, which bends to your wind. smacked face first by your orbit, i’m totally in it now, suffice to say, with little chance of escape. so if i’m staying, i may as well warm up in your fire, right? i may as well have a good swim in the lake of flame. i may as well let you place mosquito bites all over my body. and all those old, false hyperboles get new homes, with windows, to let the light in.

[shore-fire]

impulse

you can hold the whole world in your arms with this simple trick: trust in something of flesh, find your heart nestled in anothers’ skin beating stubbornly and spooning theirs. welcome the chaos of non-understanding non-predictability and just fucking dive tongue-first into something that might hurt.

just maybe you’ll get a glimpse of light

before drowning in their tshirt

and gasping for air (when

you really could breathe if you wanted to)

arise out of the lava unscathed and unburnt. the trick is: you melt with it, you let the body temperature climb to a boil, and all the burning instead is simply warm, like love.

[shore-fire]

how old are you now? how old are you now?

how is it that we grow?

that we start as babes and morph at the scar of psyche, which twists us into self-serving, self-protecting self-aware-but-not-too-aware self-loving self-hating things, clay that sinks into the mold of the world.

how can one wake up panicked like caught between crocodile jaws crying like a child, and drive to work after?

how do we cope with the headlong thrust into a long and trying life?

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infatuati

open me up like something new and different: like i’m tin foil around g-d-knows-what, like whatever it is it’s rotting away, like you cant stand the way i smell but love me anyway.

a new number new to a new name next to a first date next to an embarrassed confession next to a series of them. slowly you come to understand that i am a cavern thick with CO2. the bats swarm to you, licking your sweat, they love you anyway.

nine times out of ten  you’ll find out i wasnt a mountain with a few rough faces, but a valley of death. we all want a pixie, none want the whole witch.

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timeskip

one day i want to feel like i’m free to make a mistake

one day i want to leave the house with my shoes untied and jam on my cheeks, one day i want to play with a red rubber ball and walk down the street waving at the dogs in the windows. some day soon i can blow kisses to who i want, paint with my fingers in the life-frying gaze of the sun until i’m browned on all sides.

one day i will redeem  that childhood, that one everyone says i had

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it’s never just a seder

always with the bickering, with the skimming, watching your hairy hands fumble over pages that smell a little like (sniff sniff) childhood trauma? like (sniff sniff) early morning saturday propaganda? like it’s 1960 and you are here in the diaspora, here is a building where no swastika can stain your dress shirt by surprise, and yet our dogma outnumbers our love for you. you must do the mitzvot. you must praise that who we blame for this big mess, big party, L’chaim. you owe him your life, your very existence, your blood in a big glass vial and a bris. such was the way.

you have a family now, i am your daughter. you have servants, bound to love you for life: a task large without tip, without width. we sit immersed in haggadah with the charoset and maror bearing divine witness bittersweet and zeroa, arm of the lamb, outstretched like the grace of G-d (a grace which kills). why is it that we re-enact this scene, the one where we all play along and smile until you make it weird

and so it is on this day! that you feel it is important to inform us! that logically, it was the locusts that brought the frogs. that G-d is an imaginary friend i hold at night. that it’s a mistranslation–the Red sea cannot be parted by man, simply a sea of reeds at the fracture, without so many words: that G-d has never been, that man is truly alone and any delusion is just the loneliness of existence.

maybe so, father. but i feel my roots stretch wide and deep into the earth, molecules of me which recall being the molten core, others which recall being the sky. perhaps it is not G-d. but it is a love only prayer can speak: “baruch, baruch, baruch, for the maror we’ve had to bear and the charoset we’re privileged to after.”

[shore-fire]

poem.  from salt. by nayyirah waheed.

[shore-fire]

it’s never just a seder

always with the bickering, with the skimming, watching your hairy hands fumble over pages that smell a little like (sniff sniff) childhood trauma? like (sniff sniff) early morning saturday propaganda? like it’s 1960 and you are here in the diaspora, here is a building where no swastika can stain your dress shirt by surprise, and yet our dogma outnumbers our love for you. you must do the mitzvot. you must praise that who we blame for this big mess, big party, L’chaim. you owe him your life, your very existence, your blood in a big glass vial and a bris. such was the way.

you have a family now, i am your daughter. you have servants, bound to love you for life: a task large without tip, without width. we sit immersed in haggadah with the charoset and maror bearing divine witness bittersweet and zeroa, arm of the lamb, outstretched like the grace of G-d (a grace which kills). why is it that we re-enact this scene, the one where we all play along and smile until you make it weird

and so it is on this day! that you feel it is important to inform us! that logically, it was the locusts that brought the frogs. that G-d is an imaginary friend i hold at night. that it’s a mistranslation--the Red sea cannot be parted by man, simply a sea of reeds at the fracture, without so many words: that G-d has never been, that man is truly alone and any delusion is just the loneliness of existence.

maybe so, father. but i feel my roots stretch wide and deep into the earth, molecules of me which recall being the molten core, others which recall being the sky. perhaps it is not G-d. but it is a love only prayer can speak: “baruch, baruch, baruch, for the maror we’ve had to bear and the charoset we’re privileged to after.”

[shore-fire]

content warning: (Anguished Shriek)

when i first met _____ it was saturday and many saturdays before that i mainly transported myself by cartwheeling, in the way that only athletic and confident children do. did you change me?

and when _____ spoke silk ribbons there was a tightness in my wrists. maybe parts of me felt close, for a moment. i felt perhaps we were as lovers were to be. did i hurt me?

and it wells up in geyser therapy, the way i explode at liquor store cashiers who try to banter with me at friends whose crimes are bad timing at inanimate objects simply for proximity. is that bad for me? well, what’s good for me? were you close to me? and in that closeness are there jars filled with my blood in your closet, still? (harder to get out of the carpet than a simple skeleton. i’m still here and kicking.)

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The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

Mary Oliver, from Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin, 2016)

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analysis

so i realize my poetry is confusing to some, because its filled with veiled meaning. a lot of the time only i know whats truly going on, such is the nature of poetry

so reply to this or send me an ask with the title of a poem u feel u dont understand very well, and i will post a thorough explanation/analysis of what i was trying to do/get across!

[shore-fire]

sun in pisces

i ache badly for twilight talks of dreams, of dancing in grass, of mosquito bites like endless seas of stars across our backs (bare so we can feel the wind, not to show off)

fuck, where’s the romance?  if we are starstuff why do i pay taxes and sing to the radio, why do i do all of these things people with bodies do, why does rock refuse to orbit round me no matter how hot, or gaseous i get?

*cough*

i mean,

how thoughtful, how spacious. i get. i get goosebumps just from hearing some peoples voices, i get nightmares from some cartoons, each stimulus another thin, flaky, eggy layer of hell. croissuffering.

fuck, where’s the softness? can’t i have a cashmere dream just once? i’ll imagine arms that were years ago, feel its phantoms and let a lie rock me to sleep.

[shore-fire]

i know no one likes a love poem, but i just have to. i just love a whole lot.