withallmylove-ab

[withallmylove-ab]

“What’s wrong? Titanic asked me this morning, when she found me lying on the ocean floor with all my suitcases strewn open.

Oh, I dunno, I moaned. I was looking through National Geographic and saw some pictures of you, and thought I might come have a chat. You looked great, by the way, in the pictures.

Me? No. Titanic smiled. If anything I seem to have become a Picasso. And I have a beard.

It was true; she looked more like a collage of a ship. Strangely two-dimensional, in a crater of her own making: French doors, boilers, railings every which way. And she did have a bit of a beard-rust icicles hanging in red strands from her iron engines.

Sitting up in my own little crater, I sort-of blushed.

To be honest, I told Titanic, My honey’s leaving town soon and I’m afraid it’s gonna wreck me, so I dove down here.

Well come on in, Titanic said, but I’m not sure I’ve got what you’re looking for.

So in I climbed, through a window between two rust stalactites, and began to pace her great promenade. (Which should have been awesome, by the way — walking by the ghosts of all those waving handkerchiefs — except that I was in that feeling-sorry-for-yourself state where every hallway is the hallway of your own wretched mind, every ghost your own ghost, so I didn’t take a good look around.)

When I got to the Turkish baths, I sat on the edge of a barnacled tub and watched weird crabs scrabble at my feet.

I was hoping you’d teach me how to sink, I said. You who have spent a century underwater with 1500 skeletons in your chest.

I don’t know, said Titanic, I’m kind of a wreck.

Exactly! I said, Me too! I’m here to apprentice myself to wreckage. I’m here to apprentice myself to you! Great bearded lady, gargantuan ark, you floating hotel. With enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone I’ve ever loved.

My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the iceberg coming?

I did, Titanic said.

And you sailed right into it?

It was love, Titanic said.

And the band just kept playing? And the captain stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel?

It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean.

She’s a straight talker, the Titanic.

Alright, I said. Now let’s talk about rust. When my love leaves, I’m planning to weep stalactites from my chin. I will wear my sadness in long strands. Like you, I will be bearded by it.

Then I made a terrible noise. Eeeeeeeeeeeerkkkkkkkkkk! I’ve been practicing the sound of wrenching metal, I told her, from when my love leaves.

But you aren’t made of metal. Titanic said to me.

I’m a writer, I said, I can be made of anything.

Well then, be a writer. She said.

Be a writer? I paused, anemones between my toes. Okay. When my love leaves. I will start with SOS. I will Morse code odes as the whole world goes vertical. I will write nosedives as my torso splits in two.

And the next day I will write the stunned headlines, and the next day I will write the obituaries, and the next day I will write furious accusations, and the next day I will write lawsuits, and the next day I will write confessions of wrongdoing, and the next day I will write pardons, but I won’t really mean it, and the next day I will write sonnets, but they won’t fit the schema, and the next day I will write pleas, please, please come back. The next day I will write epitaphs, navigation maps, warnings for future generations about the hubris of human love. I will write quotas and queries and quizzes, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense all the way down and no diving teams will find me, no robot arms will retrieve me in pieces, never will I be reassembled in plain air. No, I will remain whole, two miles down, with my suitcases strewn open, and in 100 years I will still be writing about this feeling, though my heart be a Picasso, though my heart be bearded at the bottom of the sea.

The Titanic let me cry for a while, my sobs echoing off her moldy mosaics.

Then she said: Girl, you’re too young for a beard like this. You’re never gonna get some if you rust over now.

I sniffled a little and scratched my name into the green slime of the tub.

The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable. Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

There are enough ballrooms in you.”

[withallmylove-ab]

I could be the jacket

You shrug into on

Cold spring mornings

A soft, sweatshirt love

We could watch the sky

Until the stars melt into

A sherbet shaded sunrise

Hip-to-hip, halfway to heaven

Distance would disappear

When we weave like wisteria

A thousand purple petals

Nestled close to me

[withallmylove-ab]

BLACK HONEY DRIPS FROM THE TAP AND I LET IT RUN

the first time i saw a beekeeper i thought [god, what a way to be a thing / what a way to exist with hands full of honey & fear] but the second time i saw a beekeeper i thought [i could love like that too, i could let something sting itself to death just to prove i was worthy of sweetness] and maybe the point is the aftertaste of venom. you take it in sugar cubes, mix it into your tea, let the poison be palatable. // it’s just biology, baby, just the way things are (you say) but i watch the wax build in the corners of your mouth and i think no, no, this is something else, something with wings & ruinous intention. i try to spit the honey out but my teeth are already sinking.

they’ll only die if they love you too much—as if love wasn’t just another kind of death, i’ve spent years dripping with it, sticky with the weight of hands that only ever knew how to take. and my god, haven’t i been good? haven’t i let them sink their little barbs into my skin, again and again and again, willing to be stung if it means i get to be kept? take it, take all of it. i am the softest vessel.someone once said bees remember faces, that they can hold a grudge for generations. i imagine them circling back, drawn to the same open mouth, the same hands outstretched, the same invitation to ruin. come back to me, my loves, my wicked little creatures // let the swarm take me. let them think i am worthy of keeping.

[withallmylove-ab]

just read “to be loved is to be worth the inconvenience” it blew my mind away

[withallmylove-ab]

[withallmylove-ab]

He brings me poems and cheese cake

Butterflies and a yearning so sweet

❤️/AB

[withallmylove-ab]

I fell in love with

the way it doesn’t burn

When you touch me

-doesn’t sear my skin

leave welts or wounds

Doesn’t freeze me in my tracks.

Instead you are a breeze

Brushing the hair from my eyes

and for the first time

I see what stands before me

I once mistook strangers

for the light of the sun

never realizing

how relentless exposure

could blister-

how long it takes to heal

And how some burns

never truly fade

But you—

You held me like

The sight of the moon

soft and steady,

reflecting back

The glow from with in me

I thought I had lost

A whisper carries on that same breeze

“Love you

like I love you.”

We don’t have to burn ourselves up

to keep the night alight.

We are worth more

than smoke and fumes-

Than fire-

And ash.

❤️/AB

[withallmylove-ab]

[withallmylove-ab]

Daydreaming again

and in true dream-like fashion

I materialize

suddenly and without arrival

standing at the cliff’s edge

staring down and down

into an indeterminate

And endless depth

The ground beneath kaleidoscopes

shifting in and out of focus

beyond bare feet

blue nail polish

sandstone grit

And crumbled rock—

too weathered to hold on.

I glance around,

behind,

unsure how I got here

again

Certainly no footfall

after footfall

no compass no map

just the ledge

and the fated fall

Then

just when I think I might jump

or slip

or lose myself

to the sweat and sand

sliding beneath my grip—

your hand finds mine

Steady

Certain

You catch me

anchor me

plant my heels on solid ground

You stand beside me

looking down

into breathless

depthless eyes

And surrender.

❤️/AB

[withallmylove-ab]

[withallmylove-ab]

And if this is all I have to give

Then I’ll give it

My body is just another transaction

I use to make you love me

What am I

Except

What I can give to someone else

Love

Sex

The feeling of safety

What is anyone

But what they offer

We are all just vending machines

Hoping to be filled

As

We

Empty

[withallmylove-ab]

Just… wow

[withallmylove-ab]

[withallmylove-ab]

I would have crawled in there with you

Had my bones not felt so heavy

My limbs so tired from

Carrying all that weight

of all your gone

I heard my mom sob and-

Turn from the room

At the sight of her

Unslightly daughter

Bent at the waist

Torso draped,

Arms outstretched,

Head slung over you in your funeral suit.

Begging you to come back

You left too soon

Casket edges bite into my hips

Their sharpness holding me back

But I would have

Crawled in

If they’d let me

Maybe

If your arms could have

Pulled me in

And held me too-

Maybe then.

Maybe if I wasn’t worried

About my tears staining your

Perfect

Perfect suit

It should have been me

It could have been me

But it wasn’t-

It was you

❤️/AB

[withallmylove-ab]

We speak the same language

in a room where silence

falls on deaf ears.

Not because we share the same 26 characters

or because “his love”

is the same as “my love.”

It’s something greater than that.

When my words scramble,

Stirring round the frying pan

of my brain,

he picks out the smallest pieces,

simplifies,

and nods along.

And when one says

that life cannot be reduced

to one experience—

that it is only, simply, wholly

one lasting existence—

I see it:

one piece

against the expanse of the picture.

We are two cities—

close enough to touch,

mirroring each other

in unexpected ways.

From the outside looking in,

it may seem contradictory—

but here,

there are no contradictions,

only truths,

And slight ironies.

I once believed

I could never belong—

But here, in this bed with him,

And over morning coffees—

the joy etched

Into the lines of my face

It cannot be imagined.

Nor the rapture

radiating from within his chest.

There’s only ever one thing

either of us could mean

before it is ever uttered aloud.

❤️/AB

[withallmylove-ab]

I romanticized the darkest parts of my life, painted pain into shades of poetry, and turned heartache into something beautiful.

I made my suffering feel softer, more bearable, as if giving it meaning could take away the sting.

But some nights, no amount of pretty words can disguise the darkness.

- Daria Synn

[withallmylove-ab]

At the end of the day we are Poets first. Lovers second. The poetry was here before my breath was, pushing open my veins with golden caresses. You disturb the silence and make me shimmer. But the Poet was here first; and as she gasps for breath, what is a lover but a pen which one day, goes dry. I, of all the Poets & Muses, should know.

—The Hollow Quiet