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Emma Jan 2019
Right now it is easy to love you.

You crawl into my arms, and let their strength pretend to shield you.

You let me press my lips to your temple and act as though I can comfort you,

Your head tucked against my breast.

I love you fluently,

Feeling your patterns flow over my hands, their weft and weave,

Like god in their clarity and warmth.

I cannot spin us into what we want, each of those things so opposite.

And I can buoy you now, but without you near it creeps upon me again and

I am so afraid.

I see it striding confidently forward, coming down the road to meet us,

Neither a swagger nor a barrel, but

The ineluctable approach of the pain that will crush me again.

I left you.

Couldn’t you have let me?

Because I don’t believe that you want me.

And when this passes, as it must, you will cut me to ribbons.
Emma Jan 2019
Hope is stupid but,
It pulls me inevitably onwards.
Towards you.
So I let it bloom
Emma Jan 2019
Your hair falls, like dark
feathers over your forehead,
too soft for lowly
hands. Your eyes they live beneath,
the hole you live in
reflected there. I bend and
shoulder another
of your burdens. It is all
I can do. You are
trapped, like a prince in a
dream. Or a nightmare.
In my love for you, it feels
as though tenderness
will tear a hole through my heart.
I would carry worlds.
Almost a Haiku. In alternating 5-7-5 syllables.
Emma Jan 2019
I know you.
Sometimes you say things, expecting that I won’t understand, and I think it’s strange because
I know you.
That’s what this is. I know you,
And I want you,
And I care about you
Anyway.
I want no one else.
You might not know me,
The stanchions you use to prop yourself up eating all that I have fed you,
In the darkness,
In the night,
But I know you.
And I want you anyway.
Emma Jan 2019
You’ve done more to my pride than I thought I would let anyone.
And I don’t miss you, but I miss the surety I had before you.
You made the world so much uglier and so much less kind.
I wish I could take back all the power I gave away.
I wish I hadn’t been so weak and blinded.
I wish I could punch you in the face.
Emma Jan 2019
Sick with the stars that shine in the sky
The sky you could be looking into
The stars I handed to you, fingers broken and trembling
With pain and rage and hope
Sick with the winds and the rain
Howling around me, lashing into my skin
Wind that whips long wet strands of black hair to cover my eyes and renders me as blind as I willed myself to be.
It wasn’t you who plucked out my eyes but my own treacherous fingers,
Driving into vulnerable ocular orbs, fingers cutting into the tender cells making up flesh before tearing the organs free.
Rain slicks down my skin, renders my clothes too wet to move, heavy and frozen in the night.
What is there to miss?
What is there to rage over?
What about you could have possibly left me bereft?
You are a dragon guarding the last of its hoard of treasure, nothing there but a few measly coins.
I am a traveller starving, fistfuls of air all I have won from you.
And I gave you the stars, though they burned my mortal eyes.
And I gave you the sky, though its weight cracked my shoulders.
But giving can’t be regretted without becoming a judgment on the giver.
So I gave to you and I would give again.
I suppose regret comes in around the edges of the wound —
Closing, praise to god it is closing —
And goes something like this:
“I still wish you had wanted to give to me in return”.
But life is so little about our wants.
I want you to be happy.
Emma Jan 2019
She loves you more than I will,
And Lord knows but you don’t love me.
Her circular curves –
Filled with such verve –
Blind so you can’t hardly see.
You could try to escape,
You tail-eating snake,
But your own misery
Is such better company
Than us mere mortals can provide.
You stew in your own **** unhappiness –
And I could be wrong,
To hate you for it,
But **** being right anyway.
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