Sum of your parts/words

Crying and praying

Eventually I figured out that tears can't make somebody who has died come alive again. Nor can they make somebody who doesn't love you anymore start to love you again. Praying is the same thing. People must waste so much of their lives praying to God and crying. The idea of the devil makes sense because it gives people someone to blame for their misdeeds. And the idea of God may make sense because people are afraid of these misdeeds, and if they believe in God and the devil there is this idea that both are playing a game of tug-of-war with them. They never know which side they are going to end up on, and that can explain how, even when people attempt to do something good, what they do turns out badly.

Missing

I still look for you, not as often as I used to,

but still, I do, mostly everywhere.

Don't worry, my heart only fractures -- 

   just the touch of a break -- 

half the time I cannot find you.

Once, a handful of years back now, 

I was troubled by the presence of absence.

Not only regarding the linguistic complications

dragged behind by that phrase. 

It was in the places where I could see --

  I could feel -- 

something was missing. 

Something that could exist but was not present,

an eternal secret, an unheard answer,

leaving behind a void, a pit in my stomach.

Now I feel the same blunt ache, less and less,

but time to time. I mourn her -- the girl 

I almost was. I mourn the life I could have lived 

that's nothing but nothing now.

But when it fit, it did so just right,

as if my body was built for your winters.

What good are hands if not for holding

and being there to keep us warm?

My head was pierced through, attempting

to recall the conclusion of a dream 

I almost had --

-- it's too late now. It's already tomorrow 

in all the places that count.

Scrappy words

What a strange world

The world certainly is larger than one things,
and unfailingly split into sums of parts and parts of sums.
Plurality in the psychosphere. Sometimes,
do you wonder whether you are living in a dream?

Not without trouble

Imagine: star-crossed, eyes crossed out.
That was the first time a thought came to me,
but so very short across my eyelids and while
you laugh backwards I only want to move forwards;
the poem will come but not without trouble.
I am always in trouble, Their favourite topic: my trouble.

Nightfall headfirst, wings rustling in the breeze,
feathers dripping fragrant in my hands; I begin to write.
Clipped wings, shining heroism; I continue to write.

Imagine: a girl leaving church and clicking her tongue
enticingly, telling me- bring yourself to speak and
take off on mountain climbs, feel the highest place
from where inevitably I will fall and scatter my heart,
my brain matter, having to piece matters back together.
A girl who didn’t easily take to being told what to do
by her own voice inside her head nobody else heard,
and it is asking: Why me? and Who are you?

Then, as soon as a glance, I’m a child on your knee,
freckles scattered out from underneath the floorboards,
tears dripping in ink onto the pages; I keep writing.

What I do want? A clear mind, a mighty pen, approval.
I do not want your castles unless there are flowers there
and I did not see a single petal, I had no sparkling drink
so wrote and watched the joy bubbling from your lips 
to the polished sound of a champagne flute.
What do I not want? To need as I need, to be as I am.
To know too little, to live too long. No, I don’t.

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

Memories in Motion and Finally, Meliorism

There’s a window and the night waltz comes, just a little too drunk,
so there’s nothing much to say but the words of the insomniac,
and secrets that cannot interact. The moon is quiet in the sky,
but like an egg uncracked.

Here is a story, made up inside my head.
Failure and glory, but it’s someone else instead.
Dirt under my fingers from digging in the night.
But beauty lingers, petals falling as I write.

In and out again, he floats as a cloud right by, made up of memory.
Hello stranger, may I ask why your greeting
is a just as good a goodbye? And your words of love
as concrete as the sky.

Here is another tale. I think this one may be true.
You were fractured on the inside and I took care of you.
I know those were your secrets and those I’ll always keep.
I know there will be sometime you’ll visit me in sleep.

So I’ve gathered the remnants of your stay,
thought of destroying them by May.
But no matter why you proved unkind,
you know the inside and out of my mind,
and I’d never give a moment or memory away, for I love blind.

Some time

Some hours, then, perhaps days, your bones were only my luggage.
I carried them and would have continued carrying them to the end of Forever-land.
How long would it have taken for your will to burn out, turning my truths to  lies=
Museums of tendons, ligaments, joints, bruised shoulders and a bag of fool’s gold.
We saw countless midnights but here comes another, the only one since
Before I can remember that the keyboard hasn’t been bearing it’s gap-toothed grin
In the shadows between one black hole and another. I wish now that the water
We had let take us downstream was fresh, not a wishing well of whisky.
A snow-globe storm of portals to other cyclical natures of our affections-
How we afflicted ourselves. I used to think cutting myself open to watch
Red petals bloom in the sink was my worst affliction. Or disappearing, day by day,
Suicide in slow motion. How silly to think that it was always my failure to
Accurately weighing the inequality sitting right in front of me. Once it’s too late,
Though, arguments go to dust. Internal, introverted silently bleeding,
and eventually, eventually dusting off and healing.

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.” 

No sleep, just time

I don’t have anybody to talk to about these things. Even if I did, I would never be capable of finding the words to fit the war that beats its drums out of rhythm with my own beat, beating back against myself as I push a path forward through the universe that only goes in circles anyway. It’s yet another feeling without a word. These not-yet-existent words lower and tremble with such loud violence they could bring down every library wall.  I leave notes in the condensation on taxi windows (‘I’m sorry’; not ‘am I there yet?’ But ‘will I ever make it far enough to know where that is?’). So I try to write it down, and out it comes like nonsense mumbled in sleep. When I first lived alone after so many years, I noticed that I had begin to talk to myself. It wasn’t thinking out loud or singing in the shower.  The voice was mine but not in my head like before, either. The words were spoken by me, and mostly to me, although sometimes to the absences that were bothering me, living alongside me and occasionally taking up more space in my cluttered world than that which I was in the presence of. I recovered from my preoccupation with absences several years ago. My brain was just trying to help, I suppose- the loss being not only emotional but perceptual, it could fill in some of those empty spaces. It didn’t help because I found no comfort in the hauntings, or the one-sided conversations. I’d rather go about stumbling into hollows than share my alone time with ghosts.

What is it that I can’t speak or effectively write about in this unavoidable life?  The ringing alarm and how it calls to mind histories of fire escapes. The broken door from when paramedics kicked it in. The little hours, the nights without the courage to close my eyes, the mornings coming so close, but my closeness becoming somehow a little less crippling every day. Clouds folding over, packaging up all the absolutes. The futility of some things, the sacred nature of others, like remembering to breathe, to stay in orbit, to let the anxieties bleed right through without pooling on the floor, and to let the city in and these new people in (though the city spits people out) and to let them meet the genuine person I had hated silently and fiercely for years until being left alone with her and realising that armfuls of her is not hopeless; I am at least worth something. My bus-stop mind will probably wait there indefinitely but I hope someday it will travel far enough away from the old loneliness that routinely follows me around and close to where the simplest words and the simple ways to love are enough.

The TV shows I watch are violent and strange and I like the ones without a resolution, where the questions remain unanswered and sit behind your brow as it faces the screen. Staring in when it’s over, my own face is shadowed back at me. I feel like a wide-eyed alien in a small godless world of grey and yellow, and I have no real name, just hundreds of books. My hands are unfamiliar and warm. Sometimes they touch a cheek and upon contact the light that floods into my mouth turns from lemon to something sweeter. The sky is dark as a fist whenever I manage to get out these non-specific words and jumbled reveries. Over the buildings across the street, the moon is a creamy gold and you could see all it’s contours- I would say edges, but circles and spheres don’t have them (or do they have infinite edges, or are they all just one edge?). It hums to me, I hum to myself. Sometimes I sing and look for stars that might be pricking our sky, leaving tiny wounds of white. I see them so seldom, but most frequently at bus stops.

I will dance in heavens that I've never known.
Flowers blooming in places I'll call my own.

We don't know the same song anymore

Sharp Objects

From the TV series 'Sharp Objects' and quotes from the book by the same name, Gillian Flynnn

Adoxography

Stay

The hope of what can be made real, even if it seems ridiculous ot others or highly improbable or very difficult to reach out for, let alone make steps towards- well, that's always better than the disappearing act. When you start to disappear from the world, you lose things: memories, friends, idiosyncracies, rroutines, purpose, aspiration. It might be a solution to the terror of failing and the fear your hope will never come true, but I'm leaning towards not abandoning hope, because it's it's always been hope that kept me alive. 

The apologetic verbal tic

Some seconds of song

Cluster B (PD poems continued)

(borderline)

(histrionic)

(narcissistic)

'What can I do with my brain?'- and I attempted to answer

The question of all questions- the monster inquisition that yielded pages of writing and some serious mind-mappage, which now looks like an imperceptible mess. I am not going to bore you by uploading the mountains of text that I just typed up, flying off on some kind of pursuit-of-knowledge, brain-and-behaviour-addict contact high, because I am back now and I actually managed to answer that question more than anybody on Quora could and more than I thought was possible. I'm sure there are quite a few bases I haven't covered or processes I forgot to include, but I'm going to try not to think about that on my comedown. I'd say goodnight but I am never going to sleep. I'll go to the doctor next week and get medicine. Until then, can someone whack me with a golf club and knock me out?

John Frusciante- hear him

More that I've been meaning to say