E Elizabeth

E Elizabeth May 2013

Someday you’ll fall in love with a broken boy
who you’ll find as golden as they come,
and in a couple years it won’t be the same, as it goes,
when you'll be jolted from sleep to bug-eyed loneliness
in the witching hour of the toughest nights,
tear-stained and screaming his name,
but you'll feel alive,
you will feel live now more than ever,
because the capacity to love stems only from loss
and the coolness of the unwrinkled sheets beside you.

sometimes you just gotta throw yourself out there because it'll be worth it, right? ...right?

E Elizabeth May 2013

Dentsity

This was inspired by dents on the pillars
Outside the porch before it began to rain
And their smoothness and dips and mountainous valleys
And inevitable destinations and their journeys
And feeling the rain before it fell, without touch,
And today will never be another tomorrow
And fleeting, transitory roughness.

This was inspired by dents on the pillars
As the foundation sank into shifting earth,
And its progressing non-smoothness
Laced cracks through the dents,
And I rumple my fingers into each notch
And feeling without touch, too,
And I remember slipping on an unsecured brick
And slamming my head against the pillar
And roughness and pain and inevitable destinations
Like hospital beds for the busted heads
And hallways for the churning stomachs.

The dents are molding from the rain
And yellowing with the oil from my fingertips
And I haven’t moved my hand in five years,
And the valleys are so deep now that I see flames dancing in the depths
But is the world so complex as that
Or is it simply same outcomes and same purposes
In an infinite score of time passing
And seven billion dents across an ornate pillar
That stands with so much pride
But feels hollow to me, is hollow.

I wish to feel each indentation
When feeling without touch won’t suffice,
But I haven’t moved my hand in 500 years
And this poem is about dents,
But it was only inspired by the honesty of them
Because it’s really about roughness and valleys
And oily finger swirls and inevitability and unsecured sameness
And the pillars keep sinking into themselves
And the dents are folding into the cracks
And I can no longer touch them with feeling.

There are smudges on your cheeks from my finger touches
And dents on your heartbeat from trying to keep mine in time to yours
And mountains in your mind that I fell for in the first place
And everything is transitory
And this poem is about the days you sought the pillars in my skull
And the night they began to sink into themselves
So that neither of us can reach them now.

There are dents on the pillars,
And it has begun to rain,
And you’ve curled miles into the folds of transitory time-passing
As if we were inspired by the dents, too.

a friend wrote a poem called "dents" and i used many of his words in shaping this one

E Elizabeth May 2013

The henchman's cry

“Yes, master.”
A shrill groan slithers
Across the gray stones
Of the tower, spiraling upward
Until it is trapped in loftier cobwebs.
“The lever is down, master,”
And the darkness is whipped by electricity.

I beat out these lines with a bare
Foot, tapping to every syllable,
As the madman donning
Green-tinted goggles and
A tumbleweed of hair curls
Closer and closer to the cluttered lab table.

“Need more light, master?
I’ll hold the lantern,”
And the light begins to praise his smooth hands,
Sloping precisely to pink fingernails
As the needle dips into his
Experiment like an eel
Flowing beneath the sea’s wake.

“Are you close, master?”
Illuminated are the gashes that mar
The ridges in my knuckles,
The calluses etched into my fingertips,
The wiry hairs that strangle
My throbbing, grey veins.
A life of delicate accomplishment,
Filled with a strictly inward turmoil;
It has never been mine to choose.

“It isn’t fair, master...”
And his lips purse in the effort
Of affording me a cursory glance.
“...That your genius go
So unrecognized,
Sir.”
Grunting satisfactorily,
He grins only toward his beloved creation
While I continue pondering
How a pencil might feel against
The paper if I knew how
To make the words.
“I want to write, master.”

“Poetry?” he mumbles to the scalpel,
and I nod my head vigorously as
His rumbling laughter becomes
Smoke that snakes leisurely toward
The skylight.

this is about the people who aren't fortunate enough to be born into the freedom of choosing

E Elizabeth May 2013

You won't feel it if you won't feel it

I won’t sink anymore

She was breathing in the drastic darkness
as it gulped us down.

I’m in a good place

Wandering the passenger seat for someone’s noisy sobs
before finding them in her own throat.

I’m so tired*

So she flicked on the lighter

No, happy

and drew it toward her eyes
until her face began to melt behind the flame’s watery haze.

Pretty tired

I turned my head and
the cigarette I had seen tottering
between her teeth had become a rolled up
page of Silverstein with Where the Sidewalk Ends
curling slowly toward her lips.

inspired by a distraught friend

— The End —