you say you know pain
i have never known before
what do you know about it?
i tell you what i know
about my own pain
when it is sitting with us
between the spaces of our fingers
between where you stand and i
shift
between my mattress and my bed
my pillow and my head
between the flickers of the light bulb
and the flick of a switch
the spaces you start to think you are better off filling
because at least you'll know what you're filling it with
instead of this enemy you cannot declare persona non grata
to ban it you have to know it
and to know it would be even more pain
like those viruses that trick your immunity
over and over again
you take a shot, you try to help your body recognize it, you get a response
you think you've had its disguise all figured out
until they shape shift again
so you say i know shape shifting pain
so i'm sure you know a pain that cannot hold still
that cannot get its fill
that gnaws and claws
subtly enough that
no one believes you even have pain
you say you know pain
but you don't know a pain that does not qualify, justify, speak for itself
you know a pain with a name you can grab off the shelf
you know pain that society boxes as a grievance, or a loss,
or a disability, an inability, or just don't come to work the next day!
i'll call and i'll get your tone.
but i think you'll find
my pain is the kind of pain that i cannot say over the phone.
Jun 4, 2023
Jun 4, 2023 at 1:12 AM UTC
you can't speak because all the worries would come spilling out.
overflowing nightmare realities borne of anxiety-fuelled doubt.
and every time you look at me
i get an urge to shout.
but i can't, so i don't, because i don't want all the worries
to come roaring out.
but if i could
oh, i would
tell you with a glance
instead of having my eyes do that familiar yet uncontrollable dance
because i admit to myself (admit to you)
that this is all a little too much
i'd say a little too much more than that, too
and when you're me, and you're like this,
you can't really smile.
because stress pins your lips
into a single file.
(all the worry going: hack - hack - hack)
you submit to it, like we do in the city
when tasked with its defeaning
construction sounds.
opening the blinds, thinking: urbane visionary pretty
and here labor and its fruits align.
the beauty. the skyline.
that withstanding pain
allowed you to feel
and here you know it's real.
the work on the skyscraper is part of the landscape.
the scraping at my nerves: this is part of my landscape.
the worries that sit inside, that dance outside,
that pinch themselves in between.
the roaring, the dancing, the hacking. telling me
always what i'm lacking.
having me wish i could get packing, abandon myself, leave myself, teach myself, show myself, throw myself,
all this makes up the architecture of my mind.
our gray and white matter contents.
because i chose today to define and anchor this existence
as much in its function as it is by construction.
i choose to be a work in progress
over self destruction
Nov 16, 2022
Nov 16, 2022 at 12:54 AM UTC
i stand around like freedom in the doorway
lending a sense of urgency to the air
if you take me now, you will find out sooner
the paths you could take, if you dare
but i don't hang around the doorway long enough for you to take me
because to be taken at my challenge would have given me a scare
and i know the next time i look to find you
you and i won't truly be there
Sep 12, 2022
Sep 12, 2022 at 5:53 PM UTC
it followed me around
like a rumor
until one day, lost its wings
fell into a ditch
and i looked down upon it
eye-to-eye, with its lifeless face
and i could not face it with the same bitterness i had for it
this whole time
i picked up some dirt
and rubbed it on my hands
and let traces of me mixed into the dirt fall onto it
in a way i could not let it go,
at my wit's end, or a dead-end
and even i could see that there was no use pretending we were not intertwined, from life to death
Jul 22, 2022
Jul 22, 2022 at 12:55 PM UTC
Years ago l swore off writing because it was getting in the way of my story. Some sort of observer's paradox where the perception broke into a dam of longer restrained introspection, and as we all know spelt a recipe for interception. When things were bad, this effect, though consciously not intended, was a welcome source of scarcely-had agency. It was a veil from reality despite its best attempts to portray simultaneous events and tame them all the same. To begin to tell the story was a matter of literary teething, foretelling a survival and endurance of the narrator that carries beyond the events themselves. However sharp those teeth, the experience came with soreness. I longed to write like a teething infant longs to chew, an instinct, a balm to the pain that is so tangible viscerally. And yet I felt stabbed by my own unsheathed pen: first when I touched my own emotional bruises with it, and then when it began to carve marks into the story itself. When writing, it felt as though I had been deployed as a spy: using all of what I know and witnessed, against myself.
May 28, 2022
May 28, 2022 at 2:59 AM UTC
i run to you
finding you fallen like a feather
lost from my softest pillow
an object of comfort, when i most needed most to have my arms around something
around anything, to hold me still, to anchor me to this sea of an earth, this oxymoronic existence filled with nothingness and everything all the same.
when my arms sunk into it i felt a connectedness that kept me from floating away
i say this to try and get at what you used to provide me with
it was no easy feat, grounding someone who had their hands perpetually in the sky, always grasping for something beyond and out of reach
but now that i look down, i see you are a fragment of your old self
barely a full sentence, physically but a feather, light enough you could float on air, light enough you could be here and barely be there, light enough that
i can barely see you! barely feel you!
when you are your most bare self you are barely even there.
it makes me wonder how many layers you wore. if being you without the role of comforting me rendered you imperceptible.
i used to love you when you were tangible
but i lost because you are frangible... diffrangible...
diffracted into so many waves
i could find you. i could see you. as one ocean. but you need to have got yourself together. otherwise you are fractions of yourself
and as a rule, i refuse to love a wave.
Feb 20, 2022
Feb 20, 2022 at 9:16 PM UTC
it was just like him to slip into her dream
to not quite meet her gaze, and begin to apologize
not because he was sorry, but because he had felt he had suffered enough time
without her forgiveness
he asked her if she was done being angry
and she asked him if he was done being blind
he turned away from her and opened a window she was startled to see. when he was in her dreams it was often tunnel vision.
but today there were details blooming in the peripheries. she felt herself expand from within as the exit naturally showed itself, like a thief of air showing itself out.
he jumped out
and she woke before the thud
Jan 1, 2022
Jan 1, 2022 at 1:54 PM UTC
like i know a blind spot,
like i know it's there,
like i know it's real
but i can't see it to believe it
that's how i know you
when the pain catches us
at the foot of the year
i start to believe
in a feeling
and let it grow inside me
when we realize what happened
that we can really see each other now
we are startled,
And let go.
And start to begin,
and end all the same.
Nov 21, 2021
Nov 21, 2021 at 10:29 PM UTC
i began to lose myself very much like a thunderstorm
that wasn't in the forecast
that came unannounced
but in hindsight, all the people around it would say
"we were due one anyway"
i saw myself in the sudden downpour, in the grayness that
so quickly consumed the atmosphere
i saw myself in the headaches that came as the pressure dropped
in the ache of pre-emptively, and unconsciously adjusting to imminent change, even in the moments before it seems to show up
when the wind of change reaches us, it is how we brace ourselves before we even feel it, that knocks us down first
i saw myself in weary window watching. i saw myself in changes of plans. i saw myself in interrupted growth, in uprootedness, in the disheveled and crooked sprouts that i call attempts for stability.
i saw myself in the rush of people scrambling for shelter
trying to get out of the misery of having their clothes wet
mostly, i saw myself in the panic with which they scatter, in all directions
and i see myself, too, in the people who couldn't get out in time
nowadays, i resign myself as a passive recipient to the storm before it begins. i will likely get caught in it, and i accept that fate for myself now
when i found myself one morning gazing upon the city, noting
the lack of gray clouds, thinking i had found myself a respite in the
middle of the rainiest season i'd ever had
i would feel a sense of longing, for days when i could enjoy them for the fact that they are so beautiful, rather than the fact that they represent a brief culmination to the most recent torrent of storms.
when the leaves started to lose their colour
this year
i felt a sense of softness for them. because they seem to hang on so much better through so many kinds of weather. and they turn all the same.
perhaps i believed my resistance and my surrendering could never go hand in hand. but i see myself when i see change now
and i am turning all the same.
Oct 12, 2021
Oct 12, 2021 at 8:22 PM UTC
nowadays
it is like trying to breathe air
from the same room
you've been in for months.
it is like needing something
to stop the feeling
of lightness in your hands
and lightness in your step
and heaviness in your head.
but finding every breath
even less satisfying than the one before it
when every breath, no matter how wanted,
feels laboured
and void of relief
as i try and shrug off
the way this hill of
unsatisfying breaths
has rolled far too long along this coastline
that we call a timeline
but time hasn't moved in a line for me in months.
when it feels like walking in molasses
when it feels like someone has been pulling threads out of your head.
when you can't place a memory to a place, or tie together details anymore. when the names of objects you use daily just seem to escape you.
when you talk to your grandma and you complain of the same ailments. when you talk to a cancer survivor and you feel heard. when you hurt, and you hurt, and you hurt.
these days i find myself nursing myself.
and i am trying to be the most patient patient.
but the words to soothe myself escape me. the actions to self-care exhaust me. getting up to feed myself is fatiguing. picking up the phone to call a friend is suffocating.
when you become your own sanctuary, because you feel sicker trying to keep up with the world around you.
when you try and forget even breathing reminds you of what has changed. people offer distractions as though your body will let you escape.
nowadays, in these hardest days,
i am both hurting and healing
Oct 10, 2021
Oct 10, 2021 at 12:54 AM UTC