thestuffiammadeof

[thestuffiammadeof]

I once got my feelings across through acting someone else’s words out on a stage. Then, I wrote my own words down and called it poetry. Now, I watch quietly as Father of All screams through the rocks, the stars, and the setting sun dripping around me.

[thestuffiammadeof]

I wanted to change my life, and so I did.

I don’t regret it, I just don’t know where I am.

[thestuffiammadeof]

Forgive me. My mind tests and traps itself as if it has a mind of its own. Sleeping under the moonlight, I hardly sleep. The eerie feeling of resting in the woods on your own combats any relaxation it could bring. I feel that someone is always watching me. Little eyes pointing inward around my mind, keeping time with watches and time signatures scratched from another dimension. I am incredulously aware and yet unaware. There is no end to the search for peace, for it was an ill fated journey to begin with. Who can find something that is omnipresent? Certainly not me. A trick once again. Or as my brother would say, “what evil are you speaking over yourself?” As he waves his cursed arm over his head. The feeling of being tricked is tricky. It brings forgetfulness soon after. Which is another trick. Forgetfulness is the biggest rift between what we are and presence. The snake biting its tail. The season coming and going and coming again. “How could I have forgotten?” I ask myself every time I circle through the same time signature. But soon I find I haven’t heard it before. And we start again.

[thestuffiammadeof]

And in all the healing you do,

all the trying and failing and trying again,

the small steps, the big ones,

the backtracking,

and the painfully shallow forward momentum,

in all that,

there are some things that will remain forever lost.

You will never regain the hearing in your right ear.

The teeth ripped from your jaw.

Or the soft skin you once had.

The trauma will remain in parts of your body as a token of what you once were,

and who you will never be again.

Every part a thread in the tapestry of who you are,

and yet none of it could conjure an image that truly reflects the painter who once saw.

[thestuffiammadeof]

He said, “it’s just your religion.”

His hands, “no father”,

picking up the stones to throw at me,

“it is” he insists. I mourn for his loss.

To treat the earth as if she was something he could ever deeply care for.

My message will be buried under the pile of abuses that he hurls at himself and all around him. My cup would break in his hands. The cracks from childhood perfectly molded for it.

“You don’t have to stay there,” my brother says. But I don’t know how to leave. Perhaps once I wrestle myself from his grip. The feeling of rejection is bittersweet against the lip of my cup. My tears will not meet them, they just bubble in my eyes like when I was a child.

The way he uses his autism to absolve himself of everything reminds me candidly of an actress in a recent interview. How her story gripped me.

Perhaps if I relinquished myself of this cup, the skin that is bubbling, I will be free.

[thestuffiammadeof]

He wants to line the pond with concrete, layer cement blocks around the driveway, fill the earth around his home with more garbage than he found when he moved in. It goes against my very body. My bones, my blood. Am I to remain beholden to this poverty my whole life? How do I extricate myself from a cycle that I constantly fight against? “I don’t want to be a cog in a wheel,” she says, but can’t speak when her father tells her how and when to turn.

[thestuffiammadeof]

My timing is off. Love letters come first. If that’s what you would call this. Our days have become lazy. Filled with I love you’s and dancing. Today was the first time I was upset with you. I spiraled. One wrong assumption turned into three more, and I almost cried when you tapped my shoulder. You are a reflection of myself. I hadn’t looked in the mirror lately. She looks the same. But happier. Kinder. Prettier, most days. I have to remember I’m still here. And wherever I go, there I am. I almost said I was tired of the same old thing. But it’s just me. I cleaned the tub for you. I can’t run the water cause I don’t want it to be cold when you get home. I know you won’t understand me. Yet. But maybe one day there will be nothing between us but air. And we will both know everything. Forgive me. For not thinking. For overthinking. For making you feel bad. For making me feel bad. I’m still trying to figure out how I walked down this pathway. Every other step I turn around now, which almost helps things. You said I am a mystery. I don’t know what to tell you cause I know you so well. You’ve always been with me. Sometimes I feel like I know too much. I’ve seen too much. But how can I tell you that? I am a potter on a potter’s wheel. A mouse within its own trap. A grain of sand in a field of wheat. A woman within a man. And I know nothing to that which I can speak. A cog in a wheel would make more sense of things. I’m going to try something new today. Hopefully I can try it again tomorrow. I am going to say what’s on my mind. And I’m going to see it through to the end.

December 10, 2023

[thestuffiammadeof]

A wordsmith locked inside my mind could not attempt to decipher the code through which my heart speaks. I feel aged. Thousands of years of pain locked in memories that allude me. The more time that passes the less coherent I become, and truth turns to bitterness like Frankenstein’s monster. I can only speak through other things, poems, rhymes, scratches on paper that float on waves of sound. Perhaps my love for you will free me. But right now I feel choked by my own insanity.

[thestuffiammadeof]

Woefully flowering the wall, she stands.

To whom she speaks, no one knows,

but she whispers all the same.

Vibrancy and animation in every word.

It doesn’t even come close to the paintings in her mind.

And again.

To whom does she speak? To the earth?

The watcher? The pine?

We do not know the answer.

For no one ever asked.

Sit for long enough and you’ll understand.

There’s no one there to ask.

They’ve all found other flowers who are easier to pick.

Her petals are almost covered by vine, thorn, and sand.

Only the smallest amount of light peaks through

to the entrapped plant.

And this she basks in.

The rest of the world moves on, glittering, gleaming, dancing in the light.

But she has no response to this.

For what of it can she see?

Her blindness, not entirely her fault,

is a void of possibility.

Her hunger is lost on the whispers.

Their comfort is what keeps her.

[thestuffiammadeof]

Is this what love means? To not let them know that your egg is still runny and eat it anyway?

[thestuffiammadeof]

I stopped writing when I wasn’t in pain anymore. I didn’t have an itch at the back of my throat that only bleeding on paper could stop. My life seemed to flatline, no lows, but no highs. Just listening became normal. For a while I just listened to myself. I wrote what I could see, and forgot everything else. But then I stopped. Now I listen to everything else, silence least of all. The days where I stood still long enough to write my dreams down were months ago. I forgot. I am consumed and so I consume. There is no room for my own thoughts. The flatline shows no heartbeat. The buzzing noise is only heard in the silence.

[thestuffiammadeof]

I don’t feel like you’re real. You could be just an apparition before my eyes. A “blink twice and they’re gone”. A firefly in the night. I tricked myself into thinking I didn’t miss you at 8 p.m. yesterday evening, when just at 6 o’clock I had been thinking I needed you to come home every even tide. You’re an apparition in my mind. One wrong move and you could disappear forever. So fear takes over and I don’t even let you see the love in my eyes. How trite. To be myself. A pattern re-emerging from one year, six months and three days ago. A pattern I made in my childhood. “Let’s play hide and seek”. But no one ever could find me. And so I write to assuage the fear, build some resistance to my own mind, remember that I used to be aligned. And maybe this even tide I will tell you.

You’re probably,

most likely,

surely

the love of my life.

[thestuffiammadeof]

Death comes in many forms.

When the blood cools in the body

happens to me most often.

I forget what it is to live.

Each day passes without a flicker of gold or stardust.

I pretend I’m content but it’s really complacency.

Contentment wouldn’t despair of its existence every other day.

Dried blood turns the body numb,

casts a shadow over figure of speech.

What is it that resuscitated me?

I saw a flash. Before my eyes.

A future that I have no way of making mine.

A past muddled with pity, poverty, pestilence, and pleas.

A voice that I have no conscience of.

A shoulder that will never be there to cry on.

A form that does not exist without breath.

And the breath cannot breath without my blood to pump it through my lungs.

Forgive me.

For all the time I quieted your voice,

filled you up inside just to leave you void,

turned your words into spells that floated down the river of time,

toyed with your heart and wasted your life.

I am sorry.

I did not know what I did.

I had no concept of truth.

And no image to even misconstrue it.

Complacency wasted me,

left me feeble in my search.

I feel no further than a babe,

dropped off at a church.

[thestuffiammadeof]

The summer I lost my ego was an easy one.

I stood in the hot air brushing horses manes. No thought passed through my brain as the caked dirt let way to well oiled locks and a happy snicker. I couldn’t remember who I’d been before that. Couldn’t remember why I did anything. I just lived as if I never had before.

But the year crept on as I realized how unprepared I was. How much the ego does for your future. The little ambition that gripped me before disintegrated on the floor. I just don’t care for it anymore. I almost wish I had jammed my way into the doors I walked by before so that I could live comfortably as my ego death gives way to the spiritual apathy of equilibrium in the cosmos of me.

But alas,

this summer,

I plunged into financial ruin, my soul ever the happier for it.

[thestuffiammadeof]

She sat there,

hands folded across her lap,

small and hunched,

looking about at the giant pit she found herself in.

Crumbled towers of pedestals from long ago

on every side.

She finally realized she had created one for everyone

but herself.

The deepest attention seeker of all,

basking in shadows.

Misfortune was too simple a word to describe

her current situation.

Her life.

What could she do now?

Everything had culminated into this moment.

The moment where nothing was left

but herself.

She looked down.

And cried.

[thestuffiammadeof]

What do you do when your calling takes a break for the summer?

When it doesn’t pay all the bills? 

What do you do when you’re bad at it?

And then get worse?

How should you navigate how you feel?

What do you do when your calling is all that you want?

So much so that there’s not room for anything else?

What do you do when care flies out the window?

And your dogs eat better than you do?

What do you do when you have all the answers?

But they don’t fit right in your shoes?

What do you do when repetition isn’t enough?

Because you didn’t let it last long enough to pay all those bills?

What do you do when there’s only a month left?

But in that month everything falls apart?

What do you do with the answer?

That your calling requires more than just heart?

[thestuffiammadeof]

What’s changed? She asked herself.

I once sat for hours writing my pain away. Asked hard questions.

Thought about it for days.

Amassed a fury of gentility and genius.

Now, I just think about how to get out of it.

Why not to pick up the pen.

How comfortable my bed is.

Though this twisted shoulder would say different.

My poetry all sounds the same now.

I suppose because I have not continued the pursuit. I used to cling to tradition.

Now I turn my head when the sun brightens my sill too long.