Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Ashley Black Feb 2020
She gave me a necklace, and in my hand I held more love then I had ever touched with bare skin. I wore it like chains, and every second was wretched.

Her love pressed into the skin of my neck and I couldn't speak until I had ripped it off with my bare hands bleeding and torn. When she saw the shattered silver she asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.

She fixed the necklace and my fingernails turned to dust on its chain, and each time she asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.

Over time the necklace rusted and I rusted too. Links became skin, and lockets turned bone, and she didn't need to fix the necklace. She still asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.
  
Three years later, when a stranger cut the sickened metal from my neck, I asked him how love could be so choking.

He held my hand, and while we walked away he told me, with a smile full of scars, that the necklace wasn't love.
Ashley Black Jan 2019
I seem to have convinced myself,
that if understand my fear I can save myself from it.
What a foolish notion.
My naivety has led me for too long,
and I have forgotten what cruelty gave me breath.

Yet so is the nature of this world.
Cloaked in our pride we gaze out with hopeful eyes,
but only the hopeful become the ******
in a place like ours.
And ****** shall I be,
****** to believe hell could be any worse
then the hell we're living.
Yes, I have forgotten the cruelty.

As my lungs inflate I remember,
just for a moment,
how it felt to breathe without pain.
I may have forgotten the cruelty,
but I remember life without end and a stretching sky.
A place where God was real,
and angels were just people.

Our sun is too bright,
it hides the hell from our eyes.
For is our stretching sky truly blue
or is there fire just beyond the reach of our sight?

Yes we have forgotten the cruelty.
After all,
we call sunsets beautiful.
Ashley Black Nov 2017
Oh how terrible is she,
who strums eternity's strings.

Painful and stuck she gazes up with eyes like immortality.

She goes by many names,
God, Fate, Luck.
but she is a stranger to any who call her such.

Burdened with wisdom,
she weaves chorus and verse.

A lullaby.

Sung to the unborn universe swimming in her gut.

Understanding every life is just a war that hasn’t been fought yet.

And every death,
is peace.

Oh how terrible is she,
who strums eternity's strings.
  Sep 2017 Ashley Black
Tyler Matthew
Why trespass so long in a body?
Is the soul so vain that it
needs to fill a space,
never moving to be free
both in dreams and in joys,
hinged to this heart
like the shadow to my heels?
        Like the shadow to my heels,
why a spirit bound to anything,
not chasing distant stars,
not moving in eternity,
not looking for a vacant space
to spread itself unbound?
The first line is taken from Christine Gosnay's poem, "Desire."
Ashley Black Sep 2017
The moment that changed everything was, at best,
unremarkable.
It was empty and plain,
pale when set beside life's great saturation.
However, within this subtle shift,
something important happened.
Now, important things happen all the time,
but this one was different.
This one meant something.
Because I saw it.
Unremarkable, empty, plain, pale, and subtle,
but still there.
A weak force.
Gravity, in modern physics,
is a weak force.
Likewise this moment was weak,
but it was gravity.
It tore my life from its standing
and all at once I was new.
For a fleeting moment I was a witness.
A witness to who I could be,
who we all could be.
Then the path before me opened,
and I saw the world
for the first time.
Opportunities I thought were gone were not,
places I thought I could not go I did.
And now I understand.
I understand,
that moments do not have to be remarkable,
to change everything.
Next page