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Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
I had plans to see you today
But you cancelled on me
Last minute, so I changed my plans
And I decided to paint pictures
Of things that don't exist
Like the conversations we didn't have
And the plans we didn't keep.
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
Emptied pockets, not wanting.
Laid down like soft blue rabbit's ears
At the flanks of the inside-out jeans draped on the floor.
Two grey and blue socks puddle at the legs like
decayed fruits, sunken and sour smelling
and the sound of you;
Breathing deeply in your calm slumber,
reminds me of vast oceans full of gray
and warm sunlight on sandy beaches,
And it is the gray of your eyes and the sunlight of your touch.
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
The wretched sound
I mistook for tires squelching flat against pavement
Is actually the timely torrent of water
From a broken sprinkler head
Four houses down the street
First soft wet dribbles
Then increasing pressure
Until twenty or so seconds of geysering
Then nothing for ten seconds
Water pours loudly into the soaked mud
And everyone else sleeps.
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
It is sudden understanding
Which brings me back to you
Which pushes me back into your arms
And makes me swoon at your eyes
And it is always sudden despair
Which turns me away
And leads me back down a smaller path
That pretends to have never known your name.
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
The space and time between who I am and who I was
Isn't really real, says quantum theory
It's all happening at once
Just a cacophony of every everything that ever was
Exploding simultaneously into and out of existence, just
Bubbles squeezed into one another, growing larger with each input,
And our brains can only receive the signal of this three-dimensional, one-way version of things,
Can only translate it's movements into the illusion of straight time
Can only hopelessly trouble itself with relatively unimportant matters
Like the physical, emotional, ridiculous distance between myself
And you, my sweetest, loveliest darling,
Who are so perfect and so fluid
You might as well be the only matter
That ever mattered.

Except that maybe distance is what makes my heart yearn for you, maybe it's
Not some romantic magic formed in the dust of ancient stars,
Which whirled and grasped in the post-nova, until sinking this way and that, forming bonds and making plans,
Just like any other college graduate,
Never expecting to end up as part of a human being billions of years later.
But then, when do we ever live the life our educations prepared us for?
Hardly ever.
Right on down to the particulars.
Thinking about it.
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
She asked if I could I said "yes but
I won't."
She asked why not, laughing all the same,
And I said "because I
Prefer not to."
Then she got really serious,
Her eyebrows scrunched down hard toward her nose
And she said "you're on
Borrowed time."
I asked her what she expected me to do about that
And she said "live more."
Ellie Belanger Nov 2016
Origin of language
It's my dream to understand
Why and how
And I think it was
And it is
The human need for individuality
Betterness
To be at the top of the hierarchy
Which has sparked the vast expanse
Of spoken and written language,
The cheap signal communication style
So characteristic of human beings
Has everything to do with the need
To control and create
But the joke, ultimately,
May be on us
For when you create less than what you destroy,
You cease to be the creator of your own destiny,
And become instead the destroyer of your own fate.
Listen to the whispers of dead language
Which creep through your DNA
And understand.
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