The worst kind of man because I trusted you
I sat through your lies and I gobbled them up
Like morsels of food for an endless belly
Forever lacking all restraint
You were so in love but
With limitations
Like reading between the lines
Of Blank Pages
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
Not just with my name but
With all of me
With the cracks and the faults
In my asphalt walls
A broken walkway
Impregnated
By dreams
For a while I guess
I thought you’d fix it
Fill the ***** cracked regime
Lick the wounds and bleed with paint
To fill those
Ever-aching
Seams
Now they’re flowing over, overwhelmed
Nothing more than tainted pavements
And a need to re-carve broken dreams
You filled the names in time I etched
You blurred the lines
For unsure steps
You’ve ruined all my sidewalks
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
Wish I could say you still had love
That overgrown beseeching cusp
Where darkness met and light seeped red
In cold determined breaths
Begging past all chance
Into my dark
Grab hold of light
Cup joy within white-knuckled fists
And mangle love to soundless wisps
I loved you once
Unlike your Bottle
And more I differ from that friend
For when your one sweet Bottle’s done
You pick another
One more
Again
So just the opposite
You took my love
You cupped it softly in your palms
And suffocated all my hopes
Escaping artist, gifted con
Affinity and friendship stake
A claim to dirt on roads that quake
With tempts and bribes from devil’s creed
I’ll be the **** you didn’t see
Out in the dark
Intrude your turf
Shake up your fix
It’s all
A little
Too
Bumpy
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
Guess you didn’t teach me how to lie
All you did was show me why
They say that monsters aren’t the way
You think they ought to be
All fangs and claws and feral jaws
Although you always looked a bit
Off
To me
I ran toward you screaming
Fear upon my youthful heart
Avoiding evil storybook things
The ones that lurk
Beneath the night
And in it, bump, bump,
Bump
Awake
All fright
My tortured tears
Awake
My tortured
Years
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
But all I got was lies
And now a fear so very real
Of all the monsters
What wait to hunt
When every sun is
High
For all the lies you spun
You might as well weave fabric
Save all your troubles in a hat
And sit your thoughts atop my mind
Sweet memories will fade
And time will flake away
Like words scrawled onto burning paper
For all your lies
And lack of heart
I learned the sun
Is scorching hot
And sometimes love is
Not enough
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
You took me all for shame
No more kindling for flames left to smolder
Turned out to be my sole mistake
Thought you were different
And praised your breath
Irony in how you
Manage to take
A breath
Away
Your acting is method but
Your talent has fallen short
Sentences crumbling and meanings all forgot
You’re lost in translation where
Love sounds like hate
Hate sounds like love
And sleep sounds like fate
Your cotton-candied compliments
Are bitter more than they are sweet
For words almost as lovely as
Their meanings gifted bleak
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
For hell and never took me back
You used that all against me
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
Not with my heart
But with my everything
The worst kind of man because I trusted you
Not just with me
But too with Her
Ignited the flame and fed the fire
So thank you for my lesson learned
In the words between lines
Of the blank pages
You burned
Let all know that such lessons are meant to be
Earned
No daughters
To trust
What be man
With their mother
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 1:45 PM UTC
Sometimes I wish something bad had actually happened in my past so I’d have an excuse to be so depressed. I wish the sky had stared down at me and the ground had ripped apart at my feet. I wish I had fallen into the depths of hell over something more than the crying shame my wasted strength had become. I wish I had gone flailing into the darkness instead of simply slipping through a veil of silence with careful consideration.
But no, no, no. That would be too proper.
I watched myself descend and then one day I woke up thinking I hadn’t seen it all happen. Maybe hell freezes over sometimes, but I have never known it to do anything more than burn like toast left too long. Crisp and empty. Frantic and hopeless. Every emotion and none all at once. And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
The world spins round and our tears make seas and our blood runs like leaks in old drain pipes, crusting over and weeping anew like newborn babies do. Sorrow fills souls and character is no more. And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
Chills creeping through dried up hearts, dust spewing into misused veins. Terror chugs like chaotic trains and inside your mind you twist and turn the prospect of your disillusionment. And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
Most experiences a perfect in-between, bearing no solid roots and no foreseeable future. And so it goes, a living, breathing parallel to your own metaphorical writer’s block. The sun halting in the sky, making a mere mockery of your existence. It begs for you to break away and create some sort of distance. The fires of hell burn far too long and lick away at any resolve. And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
Maybe this is crazy. Maybe we’ve riled ourselves into some sort of mess. Maybe all that is worth seeing has been discovered and unearthed. The human eye is a thing to bequeath upon the souls of the deserving. And here we lie, unsteady yet visually unswerved. Our vision of understanding – a gift, yet native in its quest. And our weeping hearts crushed simply by our vices. And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
Tears slip streams into unconscious minds and lie in wait to be discovered. And there you sit, all innocence, with nothing left uncovered. Here, heaven cracks like baked desserts and hell seeps through its pores. I never knew hell to be much more, than such sweet heaven fell asunder. Carelessly left too long, forgotten and cursed in its continuation. How dare the world forget? How dare the angels skitter past instead of stop and croon? And so we sit and suffer as the gods ask why we shed tears.
Then suddenly, questions cease swirling, a tornado slipping into a deadly calm. Your head clears and the sun shines inside your mind, and you see it. You finally understand and everything makes sense. And so you sit but the suffering numbs, and though the gods seem to quiet their curiosity, it’s almost worse that way. And as the world comes to a stop, the answers sink in. So you sit by yourself with foggy words clouding your mind, floating like boats in a sea of unconsidered thoughts. And as the question begs once more, why must you shed tears? That is when you realize…
It is because there are no gods after all.
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 1:44 PM UTC
I vaguely remember a story someone told me when I was only eight years old. It was something about the Night and the Day and a love old enough for legend. Something about the Moon and the Sun and the fate that Mother Nature and Father Time birthed into their children. It spoke of the way the Sun caressed the Earth and how the Moon kissed the Sea, affairs etched into the Universe, it spoke of how they reached to the Earth in their desperate attempt to be close to each other.
At eight years old, I thought love should be easy and there was still a bounce in my curls when I walked. I cried in my bed every time I thought I saw the Man in the Moon yawn because I didn’t want either of us to fall asleep and miss out on the dawn. I wept for every time the moon crept into the evening sky.
At eleven, baggage weighed down my curls like the backs of cars packed too full of regrets, I began noticing scary things in my reflection. I harvested fears and they bubbled in my belly, growing larger than galaxies and trying to claw their way out of my throat. I clutched my insecurities like a favourite childhood toy and they morphed into black holes in my sweaty palms, swallowing my fondest memories. When I realized my imperfections were catching the glare of the Sun, it lost its appeal for a while. And I craved people’s sympathy so it must have been something about how the Earth twirled between the Sun and the Moon that made me want to dance to any other song but my own.
By fourteen, my greatest hopes had been devoured and my hate for myself had come alive and begun to tickle its breath down my spine. Bright places made me uncomfortable for fear that someone might notice the unusual darkness of my shadow. Still, my desire to be wanted exploded like a supernova of “don’t ******* ignore me” and I thought I might be like the Moon. It was something about the Moon always loving herself more when the sea cradled her reflection, and my only feelings of self-worth budding when a man cradled my head. I thought of the Man in the Moon and something about him being the Sun portrayed in her cratered eyes and I saw him every time I closed mine so it must be the same, it made me feel special.
At sixteen, I realized that I wasn’t the Moon and that the feeling when he cradled my head stopped when he continued to cradle his manhood, and I realized that a girl cannot stare at the Sun like the Moon can or it will burn her retinas, I learned the privileged take advantage of their ability to get what they want and I realized no one gave any such privileges to me. It told of the time the Day first met the Night and how the stars had ceased in their breathing. The seeds of bedtime stories by the fire buried themselves on the tips of tongues in our ancestors in the moment of their eclipse, at the sweetness of their kiss, when the Moon first met the Sun.
To the man whose face is forever sculpted into the inside of my eyelids from pupils that are still too damaged to see clearly, whose words are forever echoing in my head at night, you are no Sun. To the man whose memory made me cry at sixteen over the realization that he was no more than a hot iron, imprinting himself into my ability to call myself worthy, your memory was burnt into me with hands that peeled the innocence from my skin with the same ease and greed you might peel the rapper off a candy bar. You proclaimed yourself a teacher and then preached intoxication from the hilltops as though it absolved you of your sins, I hope your faith is stronger than your willpower, because all you ever taught me, professor, was how to lick my wounds in silence and that time restores everything but my wasted virginity. If I ever see you in the street, I truly hope I don’t recognize you. I pray that the monster in my mind is not manifested in your smile because I don’t want to look at you and learn that I just didn’t see it there before plus I honestly don’t know if I’d hate you.
I vaguely remember a story someone told me when I was only eight years old. It was something about the Sun and the Moon and the beauty in their dilemma, and I think I’ve got the moral figured out. It was something about love, real love. A tripping over heart strings and missing a note kind of love, the kind that doesn’t make sense or follow rules or break them, but that hiccups like a young girl after drinking too much wine. The kind that giggles in the face of impolite imperfection and never says sorry. It was about that kind of love and the fact that only love and nothing else, not even hurt, lasts forever. And so I think about it and realize that years from now, when I’m old, I may see the story differently and change the way it’s told.
Jun 10, 2015
Jun 10, 2015 at 8:58 PM UTC
We’re not so different, you and I.
We carry our burdens in bicycle baskets
On the road to nowhere
And we take hope in the stars.
I think there’s something beautiful in that.
Today, you looked my way
And I thought
Maybe
This time
You would see how similar we are
Maybe this time you would see that I’m hurting too.
We were friends a long time ago but you’ve always felt so alone
I get it.
When you looked my way
Your eyes glazed over
And I thought about the time you cut your hair.
I remember I came back from camp that year
And you had shaved the last bits of it off
It was patchy
I think deep down I knew why you did it
Because you gave me that same look
Like you didn’t know where you were going
But you never talked about it
Someone told you that you looked like a stray dog
A wild animal, they said
And I remember seeing your journal open on your bed:
“Lone wolf, lone wolf, howl at the moon,
Still no one comes.”
I asked you why you brought that boy home
When you were just a sophomore
You knew you would get caught
So why?
They don’t hit
All
That
Hard
You said.
But they hit hard enough for me.
In the wintertime
Your hair was back
It was uneven and it wasn’t long
But I knew you liked it that way
I think you wanted to look as unpretty as you felt.
Now when I look at you
Now that we’re not friends anymore
I can see the things you did to push me away.
I think you thought I was happy
But I was always better at hiding things than you.
Sister
Remember I said this
And you’ll see it too
One day
We’re not so different, you and I
We carry our burdens in bicycle baskets
Too scared to go and leave them behind
Jun 10, 2015
Jun 10, 2015 at 8:35 PM UTC