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Eleanor Webster May 2019
I am surviving only
Through midnight dishwashing
Submerging my amygdala in soapy water
Trying to scrub it clean
Listening to los campesinos! so I don’t have to hear the water rush
Or taste the bubbles on my tongue-
My life only makes sense with a soundtrack.
But in all my favourite albums
There’s a skip on the record
I must have dropped a stitch somewhere in the fabric of my self-determination
In the dam that would have stopped this flood of bitter glitter tears
Maybe there’s something missing in the lining of my soul
Because I’m happy.
I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.
And yet there’s still the catch in my throat
The lingering sense of not seeming like myself
I’m shadowboxing my demons that are smaller than the mountains I’ve conquered
And yet
How do you **** a thing unseen?
A thing that creeps on the edges of my vision
In every blind spot
I don’t know what I’m fighting so I don’t know how to fix it.

I am surviving only
Through midnight dishwashing
And one way phone-call wishes to a god of self delusion
And doubt
Self-sabotaging from the inside out
Relying on chip shop philosophy to get from one minute to the next
And yet I don’t remember what you told me.

It occurs to me
That maybe my demons are dead
And perhaps I am fighting
Myself.
The parts that don’t live up to the lies I tell to sell my soul to every passing stranger.

You see, I know
That there’s nothing to cry about;
Or that there’s everything to cry about
But it’s not the stuff I’d write poems about
War and famine and plague oh disease
This festering something that’s inside of me.

Cut out a pound of rotting flesh to pay my debt to art
Cut out every dead piece of me, cut out my failing heart.
Recently I've been having spells of feeling slightly out of sync with the rhythm of my life- never for very long, never for more than a few hours at a time, but they're there nonetheless. I've been trying to find the source of this feeling of disconnect but I'm coming up empty- I don't have anything to be sad about, at least as far as I can tell. The title comes from the fact that I always say I have no issues then my friends always say that I do, I'm just good at putting on a brave face. I couldn't begin to explain what feels wrong about my brain, but there is just that distinct sense of melancholia that creeps up on me every so often. I wrote this to try and write my way out, and I think it worked, for now.
Eleanor Webster Mar 2019
Candy
Bubblegum girl, I think you deserve better.
You're dating a man who acts like a child,
Leaving a breadcrumb trail of missed calls until you're crying down the phone at work
Leaking candy floss tears into the carpet.
Far be it from me to impart my wisdom,
There's only a few months between us
But I've stopped pearlescent pear drops
Forming on my cheeks
Because no man is ever worth it, sugar.

Vegan
He told you drink no milk and eat no eggs
Till your blood thinned out and your body starved
Girl, you should know
A man who tries to purify your body
Is aiming to conquer holy ground
Raining redemption on the promised land
This is not the Crusades
And he has no right to a single centimetre of you
Your body is a temple of ***, drugs and rock n roll
It's a sin to cleanse it with kale.

Sky
You had a friend who painted you the colour of sunsets
Bleeding, beautiful, bright
Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?
Did it hurt when he shot you down?
Was your daddy a thief because I swear he stole stars to put in your eyes
And now that man wants them out
Stardust in his pocket
Leaving you dark and blind
How do you tame the sky?
By convincing you you're a wolf in sheeps clothing
Dressed himself up as the victim, the lamb to the lion
Ironed out the creases in his smile until he's a cloudless day
And you're the monster in the depths.

Scorpio
Five foot *******
In love with the sound of his own voice
With a flex of his pecs
He tells you he just doesn't think you 'werk'
You just don't seem to 'vibe' and with that jibe
Strips the maturity from the situation until it's exposed enough to be instagrammable.
You know what he's really like
Round family a sweetheart, an old fashioned charmer
Darling he's built himself a brand new armour
A carapace
And you may well get crabby sometimes
But he's the one with the sting.

Anxiety
He’s sweet
Really
A pure soul with no ulterior goals in mind
He likes you.
And guys too,
Which surprises you a little.
Maybe it’s his unassuming posture
The way he holds his head
And the five o’clock shadow that creeps through till it’s gone midnight
And he hasn’t messaged yet.
He likes you
Really
But doesn’t have control over his tongue
As it writhes inside the stranglehold the brain has put it under.
He came to these studios to find a voice
And found yours, lilting, Celtic with a northern twang
Like the snapped string of a guitar.
You talk to him about...everything
And he tries to muster the words to keep up with your shine
Finds solace in your bed but not your lips.
He ends it over text
With bitten nails stabbing the keys
To lock your heart anew.

New Rules
Something about the hesitation in your smile says
That you are used to living on a knife edge
A bridge edge
A cliff edge
Anywhere he could push-pull you off
Throw himself into churning depths so you'll come back to catch him
But you're the ******, naturally
Throw around the C-U-N
Tea-sipping, words slipping from your mouth as we realise
A shared history, of a sort.
We've both felt the iron tang of blood
As we bit our tongues against injustices railed against us
Words and names buried so deep
They cannot be plucked out like the splintered praise of friends.
You say You'd take him back in a heartbeat,
But all you're missing is an echo chamber
A sounding board for your own atrioventricular system
Hidden behind your lungs
Is all the love that you could give.
Share it with the world.
Share it with yourself.
And don't pick up the phone.
Eleanor Webster Sep 2018
Steel yourself for the inevitable surprise
New ties knotting round your neck till you choke
Go for broken hearted again
Go for finished unstarted again
Fall in love for the feeling of falling from infinite heights
The rush of death grabbing at your clothes like a desperate lover trying to take you in.
The air wrapping round your limbs
For a moment you are
Suspended
Frozen in a fantasy:
A collage of red eyes and tendrils of smoke, the smell of fresh rain, resonating harmonies, the fretting curl of a tongue around a barbed remark, and now this-
**** shirts and shadows
This feels like remembering a dream when you fall out of sleep
Chasing through fog
Stumbling through memories of feeling like I wasn’t worth your time
That all I could aspire to was sunflower following you
Turning east to west
But feeling rooted to the spot
All tongue and talent lost
In the shadow of your apathy.
This feels less like fate
And more like I’m butterfly-catching
Sticking pins through anything beautiful
Trying to understand what makes it soar unaided for so long
And killing it in the process.
Other times, I am the butterfly,
Catching light until I’m trapped
My affection becomes a museum for you
To bring your children into, someday.
Because nothing can stop my descent
I am not iridescent to all of you
And maybe I know that
Maybe that’s why I choose you
The safety of a glass window to hide behind
And the familiar crunch and snap of bones As I hit the rocks beneath.
This is a poem about that feeling when you meet someone and just think '...****.' because you know you're gonna fall HARD for them, and whether they reciprocate your feelings or not, it's just not gonna go anywhere. The second half of the poem in particular hearkens back to a particularly teenage feeling of idolising someone who just doesn't seem to notice your value- hence 'all tongue and talent lost'.
Eleanor Webster Apr 2018
We sit in your car
With the sun shining through
And take a moment
To just
Breathe.

Through the peach-fuzz pink
Of the interior of my eyelids
I can feel you watching me,
Your gaze as warm and lingering
As the rays of sunlight softly caressing my skin,
I imagine you tracing a pattern in your mind,
Following the gentle flutterings of my eyelids
Exploring the soft shape of my face
Watching the gentle susurration of my breath pooling from just-parted lips
Tracking the ridges of my collarbones
On marble white skin.
I can feel you watching me
And it makes me so overjoyed
Because I missed this
This thing that is not quite yet but a little akin
to love.

A moment of self doubt
Flickers in my field of vision-
What if I am wrong?
What if you do not feel this way
And I am stuck
In this idyllic peach-pink cherry-blossom fantasy of my own creation?
So I unshut my eyelids
Unstop time
And through the bluish haze
Of the suns rays
I find
Your eyes
On mine.
Eleanor Webster Feb 2018
At night,
When nothing could save me from my head,
I opened my eyes to see the night sky
Eery green glow on world weary white
Why do they always have pentagram points
Enlarged or minuscule, like prism cutouts
Windows to the world above?

If you concentrate,
You can plot the lines between them
Like the Greeks and Romans did,
Fathers and children of all mankind.
This bedroom was a blank canvas for a child's hands
To find and mark different constellations
Her own legends
Her own mythos
Monsters and fairies, princes and kings.

When she looks up at the ceiling,
She can see our myths
Etched in the spaces between the pools of light
Intangible to most, perhaps,
Felt across a breach
The dark span of country roads and motorways
Train tracks tracing patterns on skin
And sometimes on the darkest nights
I can see nothing but stars
And can't make out the shape of your face
This isn't a simple science.

Love,
Sometimes my light does not seem to bridge the gap
Sometimes yours seems faint, too,
But we both burn holes in the cracked plaster
Some days, this is the easiest thing in the world
On others, we might as well be light years apart.

That little girl still looks though
Spread eagled on a ballerina duvet, she still smiles
Watching the lights shift
Playing dot-to-dot with fate
Until she gently falls asleep
Dreaming of castles she has yet to see
And princes she has yet to meet.
A poem about long-distance and glow in the dark sticker stars.
Eleanor Webster Jan 2018
Alabaster boy
Unlearn the things they have told you
Harsh lips and uncaring smiles
The ones who hated you
And the lips
That were supposed
To love

Alabaster boy
I want to untie the stitches
Of the scars on your left arm
Those crimson red slashed grins
Taunting you
Mocking you
I cannot heal them
But I can drown out their cries

Alabaster boy
You are so beautiful
Carved from marble
Soft as snow
Warm as laughter

Alabaster boy
Let me undo the damage
From years ago
Let me kiss every inch
Of your beautiful skin
Let me heal
With kind lips
And soft eyes-

Alabaster boy
I will treat you
With the reverence you deserve
Until you can look in the mirror
And see your beauty painted whole.
An old love poem.
Eleanor Webster Jan 2018
I have a hole
Inside my chest
I slowly fill it up.
With laughter
With inside jokes
With love
With positivity posts.

Something heals.

Like puzzle pieces slotting,
I am home.
I wrote this as I was sitting in the library on a Tuesday. Someone with a stupid nickname- an inside joke- messaged my phone, and it made me smile and appreciate all the people around me who love me. A follow up from yesterday’s poem.
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