#spilledprose
oh, what would i not give for you to gut open the poems — gut them out of me. what softness would i not stain? which bones would i not break? i look at my outstretched limbs — look for the parts i wouldn't hurt, but their silence has always been ominous. foreboding. anticipating. like wary, unmoving leaves. like quiet crows. like haunted dusks.
i spin among formless silhouettes. what would i taint?
what would i not?
Aug 23, 2021
Aug 23, 2021 at 4:26 AM UTC
maybe some types of chaos do not have to make sense or unveil some semblance of an epiphany. some types of chaos, you just have to feel. some types of chaos, you just have to lie through.
Mar 20, 2021
Mar 20, 2021 at 9:54 AM UTC
no i am not kind, i will pull your heart out of your chest — stain it with fleeting moments of softness before running it over with my train-wreck hands. i will pick you wild roses — they all die in my palms; maybe so will this love. i will kiss you and hold you, as we slow-dance our way to disaster; all we can do is sigh and crumble like greek ruins dying in a modern city. is it so bad, then, loving you with the kind of love that breaks and terrifies, and leaves you hurting and burning and wanting more? is this so bad, then, when it's the only way i've ever loved, and the only way i've ever known?
Feb 15, 2021
Feb 15, 2021 at 10:25 PM UTC
i need a safe place to take off my skin and scoop out all the sorrows it carries. it peels. it burns, like a banished soul. but i have stopped saying my prayers — they just crumble into a ghostly sigh. i need a safe place — to take a peek at my demons without looking like one of them: a hurtful father. a forsaken son. a snake that sheds its memories and sins. i need a safe place to still my breathing — without my fingers pressed on a bruise and without my hands around neck. i need a safe place — a place away from all these thoughts, away from all these hurting. away from all of me.
Feb 12, 2021
Feb 12, 2021 at 9:41 PM UTC
The ocean is always deeper than what we can see. Maybe to hold a place for sorrows. No matter, bind me. Hold me down with a stone carved with the words to a funeral song. Sink me into the water until my skin resembles it — a deep, dark place for sorrows. A deep, dark place for a grave.
The ocean is always deeper than what naked eyes can see.
Jan 30, 2021
Jan 30, 2021 at 11:40 PM UTC
In all ways, I have lined up my scars and written them insincere apologies; each word — a mockery and a transgression carelessly thrown in the night. I have allowed dread to settle deeply between my collar bones: an arrow buried between antlers until it unsettles and chokes. I have sewn sadness into my skin, like a dainty, silk sundress; worn it to church and to the funeral mass of a little girl I had to **** She'll never know how much I mourned her, how on some nights, I still do. In all ways, I have looked at my skin, my fingers, and calves, and tailbone and saw a body that's never known gentleness or summertime souls or the gentle falling of the rain.
So after all of that, how, then, can I hold my heart now, without ever breaking it?
Tell me — how long can I hold my heart without ever breaking it?
Jan 26, 2021
Jan 26, 2021 at 10:35 PM UTC
maybe if you skin me alive, we’ll both know, finally, that this rotting chest is no place for you to leave love songs lying around. you see, my heart is both a soft and cruel place; each beat, a subtle atrocity to spilling outbreaths — a sheath for keeping your hunting knife. if you skin me alive, you’ll see the ghost towns after a new year’s eve. the slow dancing of grief before it screams its way out. the stab wounds, quiet and unhealing between cotton rows. the afterglow, graying at human touch.
if you skin me alive, you’ll see that there is no place for you here. you’ll see trembling. you’ll see staying still. you’ll see running away and never looking back. both wonder, and a conundrum — maybe more of one than the other.
these days, i am no longer sure if i am writing you love letters or writing you all my goodbyes.
maybe it’s more of one than the other —
maybe it always was.
Jan 14, 2021
Jan 14, 2021 at 12:04 AM UTC
How many more girls should die in my poems just so I don't become one of them? How many more girls should die by their hands each time I felt like dying by mine?
Nights now belong to January, and I have started losing count.
Jan 3, 2021
Jan 3, 2021 at 8:35 AM UTC
Today,
I am the emptiest space
and in the center is a black hole.
The sun, dethroned;
the planets have seen it all
and they can only witness so much.
Then again,
what happens in space is unseen by the naked eye.
Jan 13, 2020
Jan 13, 2020 at 6:38 AM UTC
hey.. i'm sorry i didn't call. i actually wanted to, but, well, you know me.
you remember that first time we stayed up until five in the morning? i told you that i only know the kind of love that slowly rips your heart. maybe it's because all i've ever known about love was from the kind that came from ****** up people — my mom, my estranged dad, charles bukowski. her. there'll be always be something in me that will crave the recklessness, the emotional distances, running red lights and messing around. you see, to me love was walking straight into greek fire, but you make me feel like it's divine — just staying put and watching the flames with your head laid on my chest.
so it's not that i don't want this. maybe i do, with a newfound intensity that terrifies me. there, i said it.. and it's unsettling, you see. cause i don't know how to love you with the kind of love that doesn't involve destruction. i don't know how i can love you without greek fires burning us — sinking us. so it's easier this way. telling you that this is going nowhere and that i can't love you. i can't love you. ********* i can't love you.
please. forget i ever said anything.
Jan 13, 2020
Jan 13, 2020 at 6:37 AM UTC
and i love you like this:
in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.
Dec 30, 2019
Dec 30, 2019 at 9:20 AM UTC
Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.
Dec 8, 2019
Dec 8, 2019 at 7:24 AM UTC
so i will lay on your feet a heap of the nightfalls we mangled. i will pick you a handful of hibiscus and cigarette butts left rotting in hotel beds. i will brew and end storms until your eyes are all that's left. i will leave the loneliest love notes and patched up apologies on every curve, every arch of your spine, until you become a book of the musings i cannot hope write. i will cut my chest open and unbridle the black holes i have tamed — darling, i will let them devour all the galaxies but us, until you become the very sun and i, the dull glow of the moon's unlit side.
and you'll know that the vile truth is, i don't know how to love you without getting my heart broken.
Dec 8, 2019
Dec 8, 2019 at 4:12 AM UTC