Tag Archives: hijackedamygdala

life, poetry, prosetry, Uncategorized

Exhaling grief

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

If you made a sound

This is the sound you would make

exhaling grief

Mauve in color

Straining to speak

What do you say?

Sitting at the family table

All my ghosts

In carried repose

And the new

Who replaces you

Has no power to stake

Your claim

On me

Because I am

Watered by indifference and throwaway cruelty

Fed on your critique

It is your bed – I like in to sleep

Integrating nightmares

Your brand of survival

So sore and foreign to mine

If you made a sound

Would it be a crow

Or a blackbird

At night when birds used to sleep

And now

Wary of rasping day

They call out

To their unseen maker

As I suppose

I call out to you

As I suppose

You hear and

Disregard

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Uncategorized

The purity of being adored or an ode to narcissism

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When the person you lie awake thinking about

is you

and you

are untouchable

you emanate an aura of inviolate

there is space around you in a crowd

despite your size you take up

all the oxygen in my brain

I think bad thoughts

I look at places I should not

in this I am

a typical, leering, shameful creature

you are a magnet

you repel those who don’t understand

and attract the rest of us

like mad things and late summer insects

we stick to you and you peel us off

disgusted by our lack of self-control

I wonder sometimes, what it must be like

to have that brand of intoxicate

what exactly you possess, that causes such insanity?

I try to pin it down like examining butterfly’s beneath glass

but you are immeasurable, in your strange beauty and your

angry wet licked lips

I think maybe it is not one thing

but an entirety, the perfume of you

something wordless and powerful

you scare me and nobody scares me

but I know if you wanted me to

I’d kneel

I’d bend to you

and I, am not in the habit of subjugation

or giving in without getting

when you stomp, the world quakes and we fall

it’s funny and it’s quixotic

how perhaps your greatest allurement

is that you want none of us

but the purity of being adored

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life, poetry, prosetry

Glinting yet unswept

jump

you and I

were never meant to age

or get sick

or fall apart like a moth will when you

touch its wings, rub off the magic

you and I

were supposed sway in the assurance

of that hot gaze we both had

it was as if the world were stopped

on its axil and only we two remained

entwined around the other like long grown ivy

from the first moment it was that way

affixed by some kind of telepathy where

even as the storm attempted to separate

we always came back

like magnets repelled and attracted

will find their centering

when I looked up

you were my first thought

in every aspect of life

I lived with you

to imagine this has shattered like a glass

unable to be mended, leaves behind shards of itself

glinting yet unswept

to prick the foot of unsteady walker

a reminder of what is fractured

what cannot be saved

I never thought it possible, to rinse you from my heart

or that I could truly exist without you

hinging my world

but there are some violences

there are some moments too ruined

and my shame in not knowing earlier

how long you had given me up

that undo even the strongest bond

so now, when I feel alone

I do not find myself yearning for you

when I wish to be touched

it is not you I imagine or want

when I cry over us

it is not with a full heart

or even bitterness

but something cold and twisted

that cannot quite remember feeling

it has done the unimaginable

and stopped calling out for you

(One Promise

when you had spent

eight life times and

nine nights

ten turns of moon

one promise

convincing me I was

yours

to want to throw myself

off the bridge we often walked

when your eyes told me

you had given up

was it presumptuous

when you had spent

all my life and half of yours

teaching me love

and its poetry

only to decide when something died

and kill it

headless and bleeding

there in the street

where pointing

people gaped and wondered

who is that girl

climbing the rail?

where is she going?

there she falls)

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poetry

Savage Dance

The scythe told me

Your depression is a choice and a weakness

If you are a writer there are no excuses only

Discipline

The scythe is a girl who has long been a cruel woman

She judges me worse than I judge myself

Her reason lies in anger

Not the rumpled clothes sort

The burning brand of not getting what she feels entitled to

And that is me

I have told her

But she holds me close and afar and plays me with her passive aggression

I am not able to exit the game

Though it exhausts me and is

A sharp tasting whip

Sometimes it feels like

She captains my life and I am a boat

Continually drowned by stormy seas

People would say

It’s easy … just break the chains

Walk away

Tell her to go hang

Lose my number

Go fuck yourself

But I can’t do it

I have a matchbook heart

Strike me once

And I’m in it for the long haul

The perfect patsy

A groveling bullseye

It only reinforces a sense of self hate

Which she stirs with bolognese

Sadists are usually unaware

Of how much they practice their art

In every card game

She pinches, pushes and pulls

I am a lopsided puppet

The times I tried to

Go it alone

Ended badly

Sometimes the Devil

Is the only hand in the dark

And not many of us are brave enough to release all toes

Fall away without harness

Especially when it takes most of what we possess

Just to survive

So she has my life in her rubber bands

Every day she yanks me to my knees

With the nostalgic ejubulence of a professional killer

It is I fear

A form of savage dance

And only one of us will survive

Sometimes I catch myself wishing

She’ll go first

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life, poetry, prosetry

The hands of the lost

Sometimes

You pick the sinking ship

Recognizing within

Carousel parts of

Your own visit on earth

There is much wrong

In repeating mistakes or

Returning to well worn habit

When outcomes have proven they are

Dead roads and broken boats

It is not that you are

A martyr

Or even a fool

You do not wish

To bring yourself lower

But if you imagine life

As a well worn stoop

And whom you should feel

Most comfortable sitting there with

Then you will fathom

The type who finds themselves

Supporting the broken-down and

The fractured

For the sheer honesty of their response

And that well earned familiar

That you have known over and over

In the apologetic eyes of your own

And that trembling hand teaching through time

Asking you to

Be patient with my mistakes

There is something

Comforting and real

In a flaw

When all the city lights try to attain pearly perfection

Something you’ve never related to

Another language for

Early risers without grime stains behind their ears

The kinds who are punctual and routine

And do not make shoddy excuses for

Why they cannot lift the weight of the world

From their shoulders

People who may

Go on to take office whilst you seek

To survive and advance by understanding

What keeps the world turning

Which

Can be discovered

In equal amount

From the hands of the lost

As those who are found

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life, poetry, prosetry

Your misuse

They can tell you

Because you’re not going to back down

You won’t sell your sisters for a side ways glance

You won’t burn your bra, you may need it to strangle someone

You have the same look

All of you

The ones with green hair and multiple piercings who say fuck off before you smile

The ones who rule the world behind the scenes and nod as their husbands slip inside

The ones who are glory and begotten and forgotten and eclipsed and insist

They still live

You can tell

Even as they spell it out in myriad ways

I am not your slave

You do not own me

But once I was hurt very badly

By my father, mother, brother, sister, best friend, neighbor, uncle, stranger

And I carry the brand around my throat

Once in a while when I lean over

You can see it quickening

I may stay locked at home with agoraphobia

I may dance on tables in mock euphoria

I may fuck you and your friends for a glass of red

I may be a nun or an abstinent

How I express my rage

Comes differently

But inside we’re all the same

The whores, the moms, the teachers, the tree cutters, the little and the large the quiet and the opera singer

If I open my legs it doesn’t mean I’m over it

Or caused it or needed that brand

If you repeat the violence, it may be the carousel in my head

If I close them it doesn’t mean I’m frigid or need a bit of teaching, by you

If I’m a lesbian that’s not the reason, if I’m into men, I’m not guilty of treason

Underneath we are the sisters and brothers of

Your misuse

And our pain doesn’t go away like Oprah said

Our scars aren’t magnified if we think about it thirty years to the day

We’re not stronger for forgetting, remembering, talking, staying silent

Violence, passivity, acceptance, rage

We’re not weak because at 4 am we find tears on our cheek

We’re not strong because we take it and carry it around

We survived

Just like a rock

Covered with water

Will remain whole beneath storm

But whittle down with erosion

So slow nobody can tell

We’re not your beloved or maybe we are

We’re c-sections and sterility and STDs and shame in every color

We’re nymphomaniacs and we’re disgusted, we’re relieved, we’re open, we’re closed

We’re sisters and brothers of fire and brimstone

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life, poetry, prosetry, Uncategorized

She predated the moment of her autopsy

1234908_469437609824109_1609513967_nWhat you don’t know, can’t know, won’t know

is she flushed it all

and now she’s ten pounds lighter

no womb

no baby

it’s been carefully dissected and left for students

to place in formaldehyde and trot out when exhibitions

are in town

rather like her

with her avuncular spirit that even when pissed on

from a great height

keeps joining the circus

you wouldn’t have wanted her if she was the last girl in the room

and she was and you didn’t

but fornicate you did

the way young skin seeks anything for a thrill

even the mildly disgusting

where did you get the scar? you asked without needing a response

but she told you everything, the whole dirty bag of it

because she wasn’t going to last. and you

weren’t going to listen

when they came knocking on your door

inquiring if you knew her

at first you said no, I haven’t heard that name before

but of course you hadn’t, you never asked

she didn’t volunteer much besides

the opening and closing of her legs

scissors chopping the thin thread

they showed you a photo

someone who had light in their eyes

not her with darkness on her breath

but it was

those scars

the dissected girl who was cut open

and *audience cheers*

found to be empty

of life

she predated the moment of her autopsy

with a slow smoked cigarette and some warm cum

leaking between her legs

giving her the courage to believe she’d been alive

before she fell like a weight seeking reclamation

the air rushing and pulling her down

to where she lay in an impression of sleep

I don’t know why she jumped, you said

feeling no guilt for nameless sex

it was just two consenting adults

hooking up after a night of drinking

I couldn’t even tell you anything about her

other than she didn’t say no

he closes his eyes and he feels her hands

touching his shoulders softly

pulling him inside her as if she were

hungry and full at the same time

no I didn’t sense that she was sad

or wanted to take her own life

I smelt her perfume it was

like flowers

left in water

too long

 

(photo credit: Nona Limmen)

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