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Suzanne S Sep 2017
We are lying together in a white room
Six arms, six legs, three hearts -all broken
And a magpie sits on the window ledge and screams
To the darkening sky,
We lie there together and listen as the world crumbles,
the sobbing not quite muffled by the walls
And know that this is the sound of a family shattering,
And your tears flow sticky and hot across your face
But this is sanctuary;
The only mountains our knees jutting up beneath the duvet
And we can wear the silence like armour, because what is anyone supposed to say,
In this bed you do not have to face the wall
Or think of what lies in wait outside the door
Or the sorrow of the magpie that calls it’s agony for you:
There is only us, and for a while that is enough.
To Cillian, a light extinguished.
Suzanne S Dec 2017
It is the midnight
of another year
That stole so much
from so many
And tore like rabid dogs
At our skin
And will leave us bleeding
On the asphalt
As the earth completes its race
Around the sun,
But this year I learned
What it means to be a fighter
Sweat dribbling in my eyes
Muscles screaming from the effort
Even when I have fallen to my knees
I am still here
I am a fighter because of this year
A warrior
And as the sun rises on the first dawn
Of the new year
I will raise my fists and widen my stance
I am ready.
Suzanne S Jan 2017
All's quiet on the western front but in the East
the pyre's still burning,
On streets of dust and rubble and blood
Where little hands are as likely found
In pockets
as on the pavement
in brutal bursts of red or rust.

Shells of buildings crumple into the skyline;
Gravestones lamenting the death of a nation,
Of a boy not yet old enough
to run,
Of a girl left at home
when the walls came down,
A parody of a crippled city still standing.

There is wailing;
Of sirens and prayer and grief,
As white helmets pull white cloth parcels from concrete tombs,
And another line is lost,
Lists of forgotten names becoming sand,
Trickling back to the earth in streams and storms at golden gates.

Watch this history of the future unfold,
Safely from a screen, safer still in that certainty,
There may be something yet
Left for the generations that come
After,
The victors' history in the victor's hand,
As eons of war are written away, the lives lost,
buried,
6 ft deep.
Suzanne S Dec 2017
I will give myself to the sea
To the sunset
To the stars
I want to be unraveled by something greater than two hands

Cracked apart at the ribs
In feast
A hollow empire no longer
Filled with cloudless sky
Venom dripping from my ears

“Eat” he hisses holding
A ventricle to my lips
****** and raw
My own; still warm
Pouring rain

He takes a bite
Tearing chunks with glittering pillars of jagged salt licks
This is how it is done
How you get a dying bird to eat
Or freeze in the night

Ribs a ladder exposed that my body
Might cower beneath
Leaking blue blue sky
Mouth agape
Puffing clouds into the darkness for him to drink

The bird with no wings
Choking on aorta

A sacrifice to the stars.
Suzanne S Oct 2017
It is October and I miss myself,
Traffic light leaves don’t stop their changes at red,
Wringing days from the calendar and hoarding them viciously as a dragon’s gold,
Every morning spent stumbling through fog in crackling dark,
Oh I am changed,
Changing even now with mist seeping between my teeth,
Feet tramping through my own reflection until I am unrecognizable
Inhuman:
I am Autumn embodied
The world spinning me out of my skin
And into the dark so I can breathe
Forget flowers and sand filled daydreams and
Embrace gale force winds and the crunch of the world beneath my feet
I am changed;
Will never return to that wonderland you remember
The one that you loved so vibrantly-
Everything will be different,
I don’t prepare you for the switch I only pull the lever and let us plummet,
It’s all I that I know to do and winter is colder than ever before
Spring all rain and heavy truths,
Your summer girl is somewhere out there, a memory,
But it won’t be the same next year, the haze two shades too light, the berries a sugary wasteland that you do not recognize,
I am Autumn,
And you have asthma.
Suzanne S Nov 2017
Tear it all down
It is built on rot,
The sickly sweet cologne of wonderland decay,
And we are starving
But watch it wither ,
Feral smiles painted ****** across our cheeks,
Prodding at the scars with witches nails,
Hunters in the fray;
Spitting poison and daggers and shards of glass,
Leaving small disasters in our wake,
Too many to fathom
Still we are starving,
Tearing the world apart at the seams
From within,
Demanding:
You peel back the curtain
and you will witness the ruins
Filled with our skeletons picked clean,
But the flood water is rising,
And we have been so hungry...
Peel back the curtain.
We are done waiting.
Suzanne S Sep 2017
Put your life in my hands
Every cracked blister and every white knuckle grasping at the straws of your hair
Is my best ever good enough
To bring you back from the brink?
Who can tell me where the right stop is, I am a train speeding off the tracks so
When is giving up an option?
I can't decide for the both of us - but your heart beats sluggish , a trail of slime in my cupped hands,
This is my choice, not yours,
You are blue lipped bulging eyes and I am awake finally but I wish we were reversed,
The world spinning inward, you and I drifting across the table,
Wine stained lips and empty plates,
And I can sleep again maybe,
Dream that I am someone else without dead weight on their shoulders,
I can't carry anything else with
Your life in my hands
And I am weaker now than I've ever been, Atlas long since withered away,
But put your life in my hands anyway;
No one will cradle it the way I do.
Suzanne S Feb 2017
I've got no plans
You're all I want to do today,
and my calendar
is just your name scratched
over every date
like time changed nothing
but the distance
between your skin and mine.
Somehow these days,
6 feet doesn't seem quite so deep.
Suzanne S Jan 2018
Two of my baby sisters get their period on the same day,
And I did not think
I could be so proud
Of two bodies for learning to perform a task they were bound to perform,
Nor so scared of what it meant for
The worry in my heart
Every time they walked out the door.
I did not think it was possible
To be so in love with a person -
to feel their fear and shame so keenly as if it were my own
In that moment of contrite confidence:
I need your help.
Is this how it feels to be a mother?
Mariana’s trench gaping with feeling so explosive it could topple buildings?
The instinct to protect and shield and teach,
To share the knowledge of a sisterhood that binds,
while praying that this would be the worst of their pain,
To see stretched out interminably before you their growing and leaving?
But above all the love that demands to make itself known,
That rails against the stall door and crashes feral onto the stage,
Heaving through your skin in a thousand pin ***** moments
That just about stop the tears from welling too noticeably,
As you take their hands and lead them to the bathroom door.
Suzanne S Jan 2018
Can you breathe yet?
Swallowing shards of glass like they will give you clarity
Or closure
a screen door that slams on their way out of your heart

Here it is
Splayed out between your fingers
Nails filled with packed earth
Stained lime green and screaming
From the graveyard that is your home
This is who you are

But can you breathe yet?
Watching as the bars of your gilded cage
Melt together in the burning heat
And inside you a skeleton dances
In the same ocean that will drown your heart

The end of watch is nigh and you have nothing to show
For the quest to find yourself
The one that pulled the world apart
But you
And all the scars that entails

So can you breathe yet?
You have made it to journey’s end and still your lungs can’t accept the air
So sure that there was to be something more
Another monster to run from
or a *** of gold
Or a princess in a tower

I have been the monster and the princess and the grass stained hand
I have found that all those rainbows and all the thorns
I spent years trying to unwind
Always end in my own arms
And it is you who will hold yourself in your own muddied hands
And allow your lungs to breathe again.
Suzanne S Jul 2017
The milk spills
and spills
and spills,
The table still set in neat little rows -
too long for the runner -
Dripping onto chairs and floor in swathes of ivory,
But the milk is always spilling in this house
Running from eyes and mouths and ears -
This is what it means to grow up,
Crying years of spilled milk
Like they'll help fill the seats with warm bodies
Or light the candles's stumpy wicks,
Where you sleep just to keep the weeping at bay,
in the hopes that somehow,
it's all just a dream,
But you wake up every morning at 7 on the dot
with milk crusted in each eye and bottles surrounding the bed,
milk teeth standing guard beneath the pillows,
Like maybe you were a mother,
once,
or a child,
Like you still are.
Suzanne S Jan 2017
When you're ready,
and not a moment before
Set your bones down in the
Water of my love
And Drown in the succour
Flowing there
Til your lungs are heavy
With the weight of a heart
And the currents that jolt through
your skin
Are a reminder of the concert it beat
for you

There, we will let the dead things go,
To be washed away by the tide
of our two streams colliding
In a flurry of consciousness and
ecstasy;
Like the moment of revelation
Like a thousand deaths
and Rebirths

And we will breathe
At last,
with sopping lungs and dripping bones,
Raw and aching and utterly
Filled to the brim with each other,
Overflowing with electricity and
thunder
But
Only when you are ready
To shed the armour of your skin
And drown.
Suzanne S Aug 2017
The woman lives
When the shadow of the moon
Falls ebony on the earth
And the trees of her forest
Are like burnt matchsticks
on scorched field
She lingers then -
like smoke in the dark,
Until we meet
In the appointed place,
Two black holes in the abyss of the cosmos and
She opens
A nightmare mouth,
words slithering forth
-the tip of the tongue the teeth and the lips-
dripping from her chin
in jet black ink
"Are you ready?" she screeches
A crow
A banshee in the graveyard
I cannot speak, cannot see anything but the ink that rolls like a wave from her lips
Dark and terrible
A blood moon
"I See you" she calls with open arms
A lover's embrace
An eternal escape
But the shadow is receding
Drawing you to the heart of the forest
And she reaches for you once more
Your hand twitches
The path is tangled
Brambles whip and thorns claw
and you both understand
Time is up
"Never again." She croaks splayed against a treetrunk "Never again"
The woman fades with the last of the shadow
She cannot return
And you are alone again
Hands shaking in the sun
Lips covered in ink
Era
Suzanne S Nov 2017
Era
There is a spider on the clock face
And I cannot look away,
Staring at its journey across the hands
Horror legs scuttling through time,
Silken strands entombing the gears
Like it is a gift,
But the clock is wrong,
The calendar too young,
There is a voice in the stars telling me to come home:
I have never been so early for a reunion
That I will miss it entirely,
And the spider dangles precariously
from the corner of the five;
A pendulum swinging me farther from the stars.
Suzanne S Feb 2018
It’s been three years
But your birthday is still programmed into my calendar
And even now I have to fight back the urge
To text you and say
Happy Birthday
and
I hope you’ve been doing good
and
How are your family?
It’s been a while, are you still you?
- I wonder why you’ve been avoiding me for so long -
If there is a crime I could have committed that I forgot but you never will,
And I don’t want to be friends again:
We are both too far adrift from the familiar shore that had bonded us in the first place,
But it goes against my nature to leave this stone unturned,
and I have seen you turn your nose up, turn tail on sight of me,
Like I am a disease you could catch just by saying hello,
As if you have never been part of my life before,
And I am baffled every time just the same as I was the first day you decided we were both finished with the other,
But somehow,
through it all I have kept a reminder of you in my calendar,
Three years later, worlds apart,
Even now I type out the message,
Imagine pressing send,
Knowing full well that you wouldn’t respond - if you read it in the first place,
So I don’t.
I delete every word and send them out into the universe;
Tonight, this one is for you.
Happy Birthday, G, and many happy returns.
Suzanne S Feb 2018
The Devil has loved Eve since before she was formed
Drawn to Eden like a magnet
By the pull of her stardust
He speaks her name on the breeze
Planting a seed to see the harvest bloom
And Adam is haunted by his whisper
Until his father weaves a tapestry to life in his hands
And Then

Eve;

As radiant as hell’s deepest fires and thrice as lovely
Wandering through Eden growing flowers in her wake
Smiled down upon by a Heavenly Father
But the Devil loves her
The curiosity of her mouth and the strength in her limbs
How can he have dreamt of something so beautiful
And still burn within?
Forever

Eve;

The Devil cannot touch Eden
Only send his will outward
Could never hold Eve in his arms
without condemning her to his fate
And he burns as Adam explores
an eternal utopia with her by his side
Honey sweet
Until the Devil sends a messenger
And his will
Into the garden
A magnet pulled to stardust
growing fruit that dangles from the tree like jewels
One touch of her mouth to the skin
Just one bite seared into his soul like her lips had met his
There is no smiling from that father now
And she is banished to where he might find her in the dark

Eve Eve Eve Eve

Eve
Made of stardust and desire
Steel and sunlight
Mouth that tastes like the dripping vine
The Devil has loved you since before you were formed
A breath on the wind that took shape in electric colour
Loves you still with fruit punch lips
And the curse of mortality
he calls to you in the night
And presents you with flowers of his own in the day
Blood red roses wreathed in thorns
And you adorn your hair with the blooms
For Eve is already ******
And this is the first
you have loved
of harvest.
Suzanne S Dec 2017
You ask me what my diet is
and I am reminded that for three years of my life
All I had in my lunchbox
were jam sandwiches
Single slices of own brand bread
with scrapings of red in the center
If there was anything there
at all
And I tell you that I've never had a problem
with portion control

You ask me again how I stay so skinny
and I think of all the days I spent
rummaging through bare cupboards
Looking for something I could have
for dinner
As I tell you that I have always
been like this

You wrap ******* around my
wrist and joke that a breeze would ******* away
and I can see myself now
11 years old and 5 foot nothing
Pushing my sister in her pram
up a hill on the way home from
school
Straining under the weight
And I tell you that my body had
never failed me when it wasn't windy out

You demand to know why nothing I eat sticks to me
But I can't tell you how my frame
hasn't yet gotten used to being full
of something other than rage
And I don't think I would recognize
the girl who wasn't starving
and stuffing her face
So I tell you that I just don't know

You can't help but ask why I didn't just buy myself something extra
And I smile when I think of the small
amount that I had to spend
and the fiver worth of sweets it went on
that I handed to my baby siblings as I shut the door
to their room
On the worst day I can remember
Because they didn't have to be hungry too
So I didn't eat a single one

But I tell you that skinny is just a memory I didn't get to give back.
Suzanne S Mar 2018
My mum tells me to be careful as I close the front door
Every footstep the tick of a bomb about to go off
And I know that she will worry until she hears me return
That maybe this time I wasn’t careful enough
But I know Careful
Careful is a woman who walks in our skin when the door shuts behind us
Faceless and watchful
With keys jammed between each finger
And her honey voice is flowing through a perpetual conversation with the home screen of her phone
Her gait wide and her hood up,
hair down but tucked away
She never looks up
only shifts her eyes from left to right on a pendulum trajectory determined to read the cadence of the shadows
Like they are palms or tea leaves or a CCTV in operation sign on the front of a shop window
On the walk home
She is always moving
A waterfall rushing down the steepest drop to get back home with all her foundations in tact
Careful is always waiting for the other shoe to fall
She is texting texting texting details of her plans
Where she has been
where she is going
what is the license of the taxi she is in
Are the doors locked as soon as she shuts them?
How salty is too salty for a margarita or a tequila or a glass of water
Can anyone vouch for the milliseconds that her drink was out of her sight?
She has a  pair of earphones attached to nothing jutting from her ears
and her key clawed hands wrapped tightly around a can of pepper spray
And her car is parked right outside the building
Careful is always a woman living in a war zone
where the enemies can be the ones that she has trusted most
Or strangers that cast long shadows
She is a landmine that is always in danger of being stepped on
She is made into a three star salad that the jury reject because she was underdressed
Overexposed like the photos that Careful should never have sent
Because even she knows that she cannot exist
A woman is always careful
But never careful enough.
Suzanne S Aug 2017
I dream about cracking ice in Siberia
I think we left a man to drown
Dark chasm swallowing pale hands last
Not drowned but
Devoured by the sea
Absorbed in liquid night
I think we could have saved him
I think we didn't want to,

I dream we are still
Standing on the edge of new jagged cliffs
And the wind is a hail of bullets
Demanding entry to our bones
But we cannot move
I think we needed to watch him sink
Just another ripple in the wasteland,

I dream we are dark smudges on a plain of snow
No footsteps in the drifts
Nothing left behind
A sheet of glass between his hands and our feet
Does it matter that we are murderers if no one heard a sound?
I think quietly that it might.
Suzanne S Mar 2018
What is the name for the feeling
Of being swept out to sea,
clinging to a jagged piece of your old self?
Migration always brings things back-
In time...
-full circle
A shadowy maw spits
Unfinished creatures squalling
to life from my chest
only to freeze and shatter in the morning sun
Burning is just like heartbreak - hurting until it doesn’t anymore -
But fish don’t cry;
They can’t,
Already choking salt water through camellia wounds gaping,
Swords rusting on a lake bed
Where they fell
Trampled through the forest of you-
Making room for rows and rows of boxes
All empty -
You needed the space to grow into something useful -
Pushing yourself out of the way,
A door cloven into a thousand dull fragments by an axe
Shining,
And swept out to sea to watch the
Walls, constructed, take shape-
Fish can’t cry even when they are burning in the lake
Blowing empty bubbles at an orange sword -
Pulled to the gaping mouth and deposited at the shore,
And chains of empty spaces take their home,
A conquest from within -
What is the name of this feeling?
Of being thrown overboard by your own hand,
Clinging to the last remaining piece of your old self,
Waiting for the gaps you left
to be filled?
Suzanne S Jun 2018
I never say sorry when I mean it
Just vomiting it out into the clean ceramic
After a binge
Of misunderstanding and bone shaking rage
My stomach drops sorry into the moments where I need the screaming to stop
Sorry is a pacifier
A ramp onto the high road
anything I can say to be left alone
Conflict running like tracks leaving bruises over my body
Familiar as the desire to hide and never be found
Yet I am always the one who spills sorry
A snake handler under the bed again
Yesterday I was not sorry
and my sorry could not stop the water from sluicing down the drain to leave me shaken and shaking
in the bath
But your sorry, hours later, after the trees felled have sent the electricity wires writhing within me
After you have manned the tank and rolled over me only to reverse and do the same again
After I have prostrated myself for your flagellation that continues through the night
your sorry means This is over.
Your sorry is a demand for a sweeping brush and a rug, for untempered forgiveness.
And I am not sorry
That my answer is no.
Suzanne S Nov 2017
The first words I learn in every language I know
Are ones of politesse
Danke-s, arigato-s, and go raibh maith agat-s dancing across my lips
“It is important” My teachers say
To be able to show gratitude for the helpful stranger that shows you the way to your room and opens
their culture to you
It is important to be able to say please,
Even if the rest of the sentence is broken beyond recognition
A por favor will set you up for some understanding beyond words,
It is important that you can say yes, a diminutive oui
so even if you have nothing else to say, they know the explained menu has gotten through somehow and da, you would like the pasta,
It is important
that you can say
no
Nein niet non nee níl nem nei não
Even if they don’t want to hear it,
No
Even if it could mean your life,
No
Is the only word that I never forget to pack in my suitcase.
Suzanne S Sep 2017
Memory steeps to forgetting like
a teabag
left to grow cold
in the mug,
And there are my eyes,
floating
in the currents that I stir into being,
Just out of reach,
The tea tastes like honey and something else
I can never quite place,
a flavour that tugs
at familiar divots in my tongue
But never gives up a name,
Another ghost in
this empty house.
Suzanne S Oct 2017
Maybe someday
Eons from now
They’ll look back
On all these
Open secrets with regret.
Suzanne S Oct 2020
Growing up is becoming a haunted house on legs,
full of ghosts,
wisps of memory fading in murky bogland,  secrets spoken under cover of darkness and sheets -
It is learning to live in the creaking halls,
to unpack the boxes you can and occasionally, dust the remainder,
unraveling the dialects of the wailing in the knowledge that not every ghost you harbor can be understood,
you are the first and the last - each unearthly door to nowhere that trails through your rickety frame
a mirror constructed in your image -
All my love to the ghosts who have taught me everything I know,
Like just how heavy the light can be.
Suzanne S Oct 2017
Ophelia roars her drowning words
bruises blooming violet beneath her eyes unseeing,
Oh This way
madness lies -
A skeleton shriveling to ivory dust,
Time cracks like kindling underfoot,
Icarus wings melting in the heat of the flare,
Wax blistering on golden skin,
last prayers falling from peeling lips,
Always
Too close to the sun
Or too close to the riverbed -
A shroud of lightning
A storm in the blood,
Scream, Ophelia,
Open your hurricane mouth and bellow,
The Gods have yet to hear your lullaby.
Hurricane Ophelia coming in with the inspiration
Suzanne S Feb 2017
You don’t get scars when they cut out your tongue;
It just makes it harder to breathe for a minute
Or two.

It was longer,
the first time they told you to quiet down,
When your thoughts didn’t matter because they weren’t
Sugar sweet and
syrup to swallow,
You felt it then,

The marrow scraping knowledge that this was what it meant
to be a woman,
And you were fully grown
before your 14th birthday,
In a classroom,
because you were angry.

Ignorant words had slashed your heart and you were
angry,
but you were a volcano under water,
Ready to meet the tide
and create new ground with your voice.
Girls don’t get to be angry unless there’s blood
and they tell you as much.

It is the first time your mind
Had been so thoroughly dismissed, the first time they told you
that you needed permission to be,
like you were nothing
but a slave
to a biological side-effect,
That gave them the right to take your tongue.

Laugh at your knowledge,
Taunt your vision,
Disparage your ambition,
Patronize your every decision,
You are a woman now and your tongue has one purpose
that the choking
Helps.

You have felt the cold sting of words made of steel,
and the warm slap of vanilla entitlement,
from strangers and friends alike.
The acid burn of the slow reveal
and the Atlantic shock of instant surgery,
They have cut out your tongue all your life.

But

It grows back.
You pick up the pieces of yourself that the world
is determined to dissolve, and you glue them back on,
with grit, and fire, and blood.
It is hard to breathe, for a minute, or two, but you don’t need permission to rage and question and cry out.

They did not ask for permission to take your tongue, your voice, you,
But they will receive what they did not ask for, newly formed and forge fresh,
White hot as you sear your words into their bones.
You are a woman.

And you have learned that
You don’t get scars when they cut out your tongue;

They do.
Suzanne S Sep 2017
The day is fragile
A strand of hair stretched taut between scissor blades
There is rebellion in the air

They sing of it in the streets
And in the bars
Chant rebel marches at their parties
With a fire, a passion
voices raised as one
These people will lead the rebellion

They must

It is plastered across the TV
The bough is about to break
Always on the brink
And the singing grows louder with the telling

But the rebels never come
Their songs peter out like a waif
Leaving only rags and dreams behind
And drifts away with the changing winds
Suzanne S Oct 2017
You come home from the war
At least a third emptier than you were,
Like all the words were scooped from your head
With the **** of a rifle
That you constructed with your own hands
And demolished too,
Leaving so much of yourself in the barrel.

The teeth in your gums white crosses and country lines,
None of them belonging to you anymore,
Rattle like augury bones in your sleep
Because in the night you are some twisted, ugly thing
Like a trout gasping for breath
on the floor of a fishing boat,
Running from the yawning mouth at your heart
To get away from what remains here :
A battlefield.

You come home from the war and leave your love behind
In the hands of a poet,
A soldier whose eyes stare out at you in each nightmare
The claiming mark of his blood splattered across your face and emblazoned on your soul,
His smile tinged mustard yellow in your memory
But his hands so vivid;
Pencil, pages, and the pistol,
Flickering
Callouses against your cheek
Trampled into the mud
Sonnets painted into your skin
Frozen in his favourite shade of indigo.

You are dreaming of the hospital that had become,
By virtue of his presence,
Your home -
And here is the battlefield stretched out again before you
But you are tired of fighting without him,
Waiting for one more cloudless day in August,
50 years away he is a bruise in khaki pyjamas,

And you come home from the war,
finally,
into his arms.
A meditation on Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Sun
Suzanne S Apr 2017
Sun
I have never felt
more beautiful
than when the sun
has her hands
wrapped around my
throat,
a necklace of golden light,
dribbled like honey
across the ocean of my veins,
her hands tear
at the night,
always reaching for the moon
but never finding her,
doomed to fall
as another 24 carat ribbon
until the curtains are shut
Suzanne S Feb 2017
I found a heart on my doorstep
And rushed to bring it inside
To put it in a new ***,
With good soil from the nice patch of grass,
And fresh water from the tap,

Wondering

who could ever have thought
That I was responsible enough
To care for something like this
When they could see all the planters by my door
Have withered away to dust?
Suzanne S Dec 2017
My Granny is 87
And has a new carer every week
Today’s woman is slight
But smiling
A South American beauty
Granny sits and explains
How the potato peeler works
And she beams
A bare spud in her fist
That this is something she has never used
That this is something she will bring home to her mother
That with this she could peel the world
And I believe her.
Suzanne S Sep 2017
The earth is steaming
Boiling from within
Pustules forming in oily breaches at the surface
and below,
All the skeletons flouresce -
Do you not remember how we scorched every star into being
And breathed shards of silver moonlight into the sky?
Before we knew how to build invisible cages,
when all we had ever known
was the light?
I miss the tingle of stardust on my skin most
While scrubbing at dank layers of smog beneath each half moon nail
The ash of a day in this city making itself at home -
Have you dreamed of it lately, that glorious inferno? Dying a thousand little deaths while we baked
in fields of swaying corn
How lumious we seemed
bathed in liquid gold,
When all we had ever known was the light.
If you could breathe I would take you there again,
Will us both back to the safety of that life,
The great wide anywhere with the infinite violet sky,
And foaming waves slipping up the dunes-
Could you imagine our place, frozen out of time, where we could watch every planet turn and every leaf fall? I remember each constellation you called to light the way home, and how the earth trembled beneath our feet,
how we loved like we couldn't help ourselves
when all we had ever known was the light.
Suzanne S Aug 2017
The silence tingles -
Hair raising-
As we process into the temple,
Silent in a way that children never are -
Here is the place where reverence feels infinitely natural
The stories of generations falling as rain on uncovered heads;
Soaking to the skin
Merging the celestial and the body,
We stretch for knowledge to be handed gently down to us
Every plant and potion at our fingertips,
And a spell is cast in the turning of pages,
Every brick infused with magic,
Given away freely to every person that steps through the door
Of the library
Tomorrow is the day that Harry Potter ends for good, 19 years later, and this poem is inspired by the magic I found in the reading
Suzanne S Sep 2017
Eventually this is going to **** you:
I will drop through the cracks in your limestone heart
Filling the spaces that you never knew existed
Until finally, without warning,
The stalagmites rupture your lungs and every breath is agony,
Calcified rock growing drip by devastating drip -
I wish you would have fallen away instead of in love;
There is no manual that could have warned you
That you have to move,
Do something
Anything at all before I bleed all the happiness from your mouth or see
If I could kiss you like an animal
All claws and snarling rage,
Screaming and burning,
A supernova in your arms,
But I am already in your heart and I know I will hurt you without any of that
So I lie with you, and listen to the stalagmites growing deep within, and wonder if you knew that I
was going to hurt.
Suzanne S Mar 2017
Nakedness is  wearing your skin like a ghost
and haunting all those quiet places
that you used to hide in
before you knew
the beauty of
the light
Suzanne S Apr 2018
We were one man
Or woman
Or something -
Whatever it was?
We were one of those-
Small pockets of dust and skin and old receipts that linger behind the bookcase
All the pockmarks on the face of the teenage universe
Still learning how to drive
with shaky hands
A face breaking through the taut plastic shield of the lake surface
to gulp down air
An old house creaking in the wind
Singing its occupants to sleep
We were all of them
One man
Or woman
Or something else entirely
We were us and more
Suzanne S Oct 2017
We didn't start the fire
we children of the sun that did not
last the night,
But in the end it burned us all
And it has been a month
since we stood
Around a hole in the ground
And watched them drip tears and roses
on your body
Like you weren't just a year older than us
A child of the sun and the moon
and the forest
Who died on a mountain 7000 kilometers
from home
But the grass was just as green
And the sunrise over the peak just as beautiful
In the last wild place that you loved
No, we didn't start the fire,
We children of the sun that did not last the night
But in the end it burned us all.
Suzanne S Jul 2017
I

Polaris we called it,
The guiding star
That enticed us to map the world;
Not a face, but a fire that launched
a thousand ships.

What wings we built we used at will
To launch higher than any bird
could dream of
And go higher still with eyes that orbit the edge of imagining.

Thousands of years spent in rocky dark with fear and spear alike
Transformed, unrecognizable,
the clock ticks our years away with the mechanical hands we gave it.

Time stretched transparent over us,
Knowing we would die tearing at death himself with metal teeth and ambrosia
for the sake of just one minute more:
And we were Gods;
Ancient and savage,
Invincible maybe.

II

Invincibility cannot last,
a lesson learned by frozen wonders, cracking into crystal shards that drift and drift and disappear.

Plumes of smoke rise where forests once thrived,
Armies felled in an instant to ash, and before the dust has settled
Tiny skulls are trampled underfoot by Big Plans.

White reefs lay as echo chambers,
Acres of empty homes and bursting graves,
A reminder of our power to give and take and take and take
Even colour itself is not safe.

How can we be Gods, if we were Gods at all?
Which have we discovered already within, and worshipped;
were we
Ares or Ouranous?
Dionysus drunk on wine laced with power,
we are titans,
With no prison left to put us in but the one we are creating for ourselves.

III

"Oh we were Gods" they'll cry "we were good"
But all kingdoms are built on bones, and ours will make a new foundation of wasted marrow and dust

Gods are made to be consumed,
Spat out half chewed and desperate,  Cringing in the face of some new burning vision
"Good" we croak "we were good" choking at our cremation, bleeding out the ashes

To Ashes, we are always falling
back to the ground
And I have been waiting millenia for my place in the dirt,
The God and the Fly and the wanton Boy;
The unholy triptych that once resided beneath the lacewing of my skin
loosed at last on the world,

The rough beast slogged out of Bethlehem
In ink that lit fires and crumbled civilizations,
"Son of God" we called him, and made mother's of ourselves,
Wailing and shaken in the lonely stable, forgetting what it means to be savage,
What it means to be gods of nothing at all.

IV

Savagery takes courage,
That inconceivable fearlessness of generations gone by,
A will to live that seems just out of our reach,
Fluttering like pages in the breeze  before the window closes,

And yet here we kneel,
In pools of blood deep enough to set ourselves adrift and never find the bottom,
nor resurface,
Acts of savagery pouring from our veins, the red mist of morning
on the eternal front,

Savages were chattel for the slaughter,
And we the pale faced executioner
In white hoods,
Spent years grinding savage away to something manageable and easily understood-
Even God's must make mistakes,

Yes we were ancient and savage,
On streets that used to know peace and nothing else,
Flaying them raw and asking why they dared scream
Fearing every tongue and every beat and every shadow,
Desperate to prove just how savage we could be.

V

They will find us some day,
In tombs long since forgotten by the world,
Concrete cracked and ivy winding across the words that have faded into dust,
And be revolted by the barbarism of our beliefs

They will tell of how we destroyed ourselves,
Ripping each other apart in the name of some imagined thing,
And they will wonder how we could do it,
Like it was nothing, like it was easy

We will be remembered as an example
Of the heinous past of a sparkling future;
While flowers will grow in no man's land
And our lives become artefacts of a bygone age

Still they will clear the rubble and start anew,
As all those who have come before have done,
And hope to do better than we did
When we were Gods;
Ancient and savage,

Invincible, maybe.
Suzanne S Mar 2017
You are the sun,
Calling lowly to the galaxy,
Tragic and celestial,
40 billion light years from the closest star,
And the moon rings like a bell;
Earthquake vibrations across the vacuum of space,
Echoes roll over your skin, just whispers of what once was,
Like a house that has already been burned down,
Alarm still shrieking into the shell
That this is danger,
This is living,
But the moon is too far to hear a warning over
the bell tolls,
An angelus to Sirius and Orion and
Pyxis,
And the sun is farther still, drowning in a sea of silent stars,
Baying softly of loneliness and terror to the empty night,
I am the moon,
You, the sun.
In the end, we are all just houses,
Waiting to be burned down.

— The End —