rose, fox, serpent, stars

what is there to say this time that wasn't said ten times before?

repeated shock at my body's stubborn resilience rage at its inability to gracefully exit... to throw my soul a goddamned bone and let me get the fuck out of here.

what point is there in speaking of how the closest I've been to the ocean in five years is the saltwater rolling down my face?

(I shouldn't be ungrateful, then. I see the sea every day.)

what end will come of saying that a caged animal will bite? that a caged bird will stop singing? because will they, really? or will they be condemned — damned — to writing shitty poetry about their selfish pain?

my world is on an angle that worsens with every rain, and it's monsoon season. the eternal summer head radiates through the holes in the lid of my coffin. despite the season, there is no fire or warmth my water runs cold. my lifeblood is being drained twice over but only enough to tire, not kill. on the horizon is an echoing psalm, played by the orchestra of the past, but I have no new song to sing.

I do not wish to meet it. I do not want them to win. I do not want to sing any longer, my friend.

upon my own flesh, the brachium adorned with evidence that the thousand cuts occurred, but death never seemed to follow.

my body is the final marble column, cursed by the moon that refuses to bow wholly to the ravages of the ages my mind is the temple that was drowned, twenty seven centuries ago.

let me go, oh goddess, I beg you, let me go— let me enter the white river I've heard tell of (the magician of dreams called it a sea) have mercy; let me leave this place.

let me go to where there is no fear, no golden knights with whom I can never measure up, no thin ice to tread upon unknowingly, no explosions to tiptoe around flinchingly, no aching boredom in a room that suffocates, no lying awake in a cacophony when it rains, no pain born simply of trying to sleep, no more, no more, no more, oh no—

I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm so fucking tired, goddess, please will you not let me go?

if things will never change, can I not go? if nothing can be healed, why can't I leave? what can be gained by anyone from my staying: stultified, agonised beyond recognition, red-eyed and dead-souled?

what did I do to deserve eternal life?

to misquote Saint Frida, Our Lady of Pain Transmuted: I hoped the end was peaceful, and I hoped to never return.

I suppose I returned. eleven times returned.

love is not enough. I learned that the hard way. neither life nor death love me enough to embrace me.

whatever I did in the past damned me here to moth-eaten eternity.

darling, darling, if only you knew how your shadow dogs my heels even as I chase after joy with a ferocity of a slavering hound the intensity of the seeking fox the hunger of the starved wolves in the timber made monstrous and greedy by imagined need

if only I could shake you off like an unseen gossamer strand walked into by sheer accident caught by the impish wind and taken to elsewheres wild, free in lusty green springtime ripe to burst with laughter and love

oh, my darling even now, my only my if only

he waves a slender finger — back and forth, zig and zag, swing and sway — in front of my face, carefully and perilously guileless “think of that moment,” he purrs professionally

no parts of me do, not willingly when the memories come they appear like vomited blood a blister beneath skin so opaque that no veins show his swinging finger turns to a fish-hook and embeds itself into the memories, and I shatter like a fist-kissed mirror—

like a crack on the river-ice frozen too thin— someone else smiles, nods, professes relief someone else walks out of the clinic, head high but someone else yet runs to the public toilets locks herself inside a fetid stall and sobs heedlessly until she throws up.

the incident is not single.

Love your country, fear your government. Dig your hands into the soil and spit at your television.

Langston, dear heart, I need you to know: I would wield that knife with the precision of a surgeon the skill of an architect the grace of a dancer the love of a new mother. but no matter how often I excise those worms from the tender flesh of the world beneath (waiting, ripe to be cherished waiting, like us) they return, and return, and return.

but I will sharpen the knife and I will not stop. I will wield it again, and again, and again with the determination of a poet.

Stay no longer by strands clouded with somnolence, Turn your eyes and your wild soul where the tide roars, The waves, calling echoes, will haul our silver galleons, Gloriously wailing with the gale-might of a stormy sea.

Will you not heed the summons of rising waters? Will you not seek the white sails of great ships awaiting? Does your heart not yearn still for the murmuring depths, For the towering waves where all distance is conquered?

waiting for a word for over an hour spitting out apologies lost in a mist of misunderstanding the songs that shaped a tender soul like bruise on repeat the final love letter written to the blue-eyed boy who vanished like a heartbeat waiting for the 560 to do something, anything — nothing

waking up with “Snowing in Sapporo” playing in your head

nothing

they always say that someone else says that nothing lasts forever. I suppose they're right. even the eternal stars aren't all that eternal in the face of the heat death of the universe.

this is my way of cushioning my soul against the fact that I know we're over. maybe we were just a star that burned out.

but the universe still hums around us. I still inhabit the body of the girl you called your best friend.

maybe we never had eternity. maybe we just had now. maybe now is over.

but if I step outside, I can still see stars. maybe somewhere in the wreckage of us, a flame still burns.

but all I am seems to be a wave of seawater. I crash in, then pull away. I douse the flame with my very nature.

nothing lasts forever, except maybes.

maybe, one day, you'll forgive me.

the memories creep up from where I hid them sticky vine fingers sliding upwards into consciousness venomous flowers bursting into bloom with curious schadenfreude at their own existence and I breathe their noxious perfume in then fall.

I will never know if the choice I made while balancing on the edge of a white powdered razorblade a pinpoint heel-turn that changed the whole world that shattered every last idle dream left and made the stars leave any possible sky was right.

the memories play back in watercolour. and I suppose, once, they were beautiful.

the quietness of 'after' the liquid stillness and maybeness of what's to come next after the four hundred settles there will be a headache a dream-strangled sleep what else? what other pains? any joy? any lifting off the plain of existence fuelled by daily despair? they'd ask me why. I couldn't blame them but they'd not like the answers because heading downwards, cocooned in an air chrysalis waiting for a sunset or a sunrise, you don't get that picky, really— is better than standing naked in their icestorm reality pretending, pretending, failing to pretend that you are a superheroine who swallows lightning who wears springtime's vernal defiance in her eyes who stares knowingly and loving into a future unseen. the silence of 'after': the silence of “oh, she did it again”. I hope this silence will envelope those who create it, and buffer them from the Finality, creeping over a bleeding horizon crawling on skinned knees, pulling itself up with mangled fingers, caught in the machinery of life. when you step into the 'after', whether alive or dead you know of its savagery, first hand you would not wish it on the worst of humanity.