"hamartia" poems
I hadn't cried in years.
I was always taught that strength
was not having the courage to let yourself feel but
******* it up, holding it in.
I am sick of "You're going soft on us, honey"
Today I came to understand that
you are completely okay with writing the same poem
over and over again.
This is a metaphor for the way you ****** her in my bed.
This is a metaphor for the night you copy and pasted love letters.
This is a metaphor for what really happened-
I never fall in the same place twice.
Except when I do.
I think the critical difference between the two of us,
critical because there are many differences
but- I think our hamartia, our fatal flaw,
our end scene is this:
if people didn't like my poetry, if nobody listened,
if I walked out on stage and nobody snapped their
fingers, I would still write for just your eyes.
I would still cramp my crooked, birth defect,
quadruple jointed fingers writing to you about the nights
you loved me back,
for a minute there you loved me back.
And you loved 20,000 other people back.
And you loved small towns back and big cities back and the entire west coast
back when you drove through, making temporary homes out of people
who should have been permanent
and I loved you.
And I hadn't cried in years.
Not because I wasn't sad, but because I was taught that showing emotion
was weakness.
So if my father made me memorize the How To's of strength,
if I were going by the book, today I'd be so fragile
you could say hello and I'd shatter so suddenly you'd
forget you were the one that let go.
Sep 18, 2014
Sep 18, 2014 at 9:56 PM UTC
The exploration of womanhood,
viewed by a child, who had failed to birth an heir
and was auctioned amidst a war,
to lay beside the man who Lyrnessus heard before it saw,
and felt, before they felt nothing at all.
Plucked from childhood to motherhood,
failed motherhood, into obedience and slavery,
despised by her husband's mother for the absence of life she yearned to grow.
Then veiled in a soft pearlescent,
that blurred, but did not hide, the reason she survived,
and her brothers and husband did not.
Her barren belly proved a blessing when the girls in tents sprouted kleos from their swollen stomachs,
to carry the son of foreigners, bloodthirsty for their native home.
These girls, they are just girls, brainwashed by glory and trauma,
carry children that will slaughter their brothers of blood,
in the name of a woman seen only as a measurement of egotistic revenge.
And what of Briseis?
Aristos Achaion, they cried.
To them, he will always be: the best of the Greeks,
even after Apollo favours the hand of Paris and forges fate to impale the accidental hamartia.
What is her legacy?
Aristos Achaion, they cry.
As the boy who carries his blood rises from the fire and carries forward after his father's body hit the ground.
Nov 28, 2018
Nov 28, 2018 at 4:01 PM UTC
She spits fire
Stands strong
Feet planted:
No mercy
Unyielding
She is belladonna
She is the femme fatale
She is unattainable
And she revels it that.
Solitude lends itself to sweet dreams and optimism
Without the threat of slowing down
Without the weight of children's bodies
Without the teeth and claws of responsibility
Sinking soul-shudderingly deep
Into her body
Or so she tells herself
When faced with her
Swarms of unhappy thoughts
Gnat-like they flutter
Around her head
But she will not let them in
Because that is vulnerability
That is admitting weakness
That is being human
And she will never admit her hamartia
Aug 27, 2014
Aug 27, 2014 at 3:13 PM UTC
You are God sent
You are a walking church bell and every time you take a step you ring, and I swear even atheists stop what they're doing just to praise you
I look into your eyes and watch as the lamp of your body illuminates your soul and understand what Matthew meant when he said you were full of light
You speak the language of angels and the vibrations of your voice cause me to go so deep into meditation that it causes an imbalance in all 114 of my chakras, and you always wonder why I only speak to you telepathically
Every time our lips meet I go 6,000 years back in time and relive the moment Adam and Eve took a bite out of the forbidden fruit and the taboo taste never fails to be worth it
I know that you're God sent
because you have God's Scent
I know that you're God sent
because you ascend into the sky with wings as strong as Samson
before he was tricked and deceived by Delilah
I know that you're God sent
because you're bound to betray just how they all betrayed our Messiah
Sep 16, 2015
Sep 16, 2015 at 8:41 PM UTC
We are born not of flesh
carved from the visage of mother and father,
We are born of nebulae,
of a symphony in the snow and
the seeking of knowledge we never acquire.
We are birthed for
good.
We are grown in
evil.
Our lives nothing more
than the squealing of wheels
as they spin in our
sempiternal filth,
a footprint in the dust since God said
"Let there be fear and malice".
Faces of dead, liquored men,
shovels in our piracy
digging for hidden treasure in the graveyard.
So we crawl in the holes and
cover each other up.
Insulting the demons who pull us through,
blessing them
with good tidings.
We go at our passing, to face the Devil.
God as our jury,
your hamartia plays witness.
I am driven only by my fantasy of tomorrow.
What a way to live.
What a way to die.
Oct 29, 2013
Oct 29, 2013 at 5:11 PM UTC
I am most frightened of those
who do not wear
their flaws on their sleeves
but,
around their necks.
They remind me too much
of myself.
Apr 14, 2015
Apr 14, 2015 at 5:13 PM UTC
Life is glorious
With a taste of gore,
But it seems
That glory has no value
And gore shall prevail
Forevermore.
Hand in hand
Go glory and gore,
For, rainbows are not found
Without a sunny downpour.
Magnifying trouble
Doubling the rubble,
A flaw engraved-
Incorrigible.
Harder and hardest
We name them apart,
But truth lies in neither
For, it's only hard.
Choking and bleeding
To death and beyond,
Send us to our eternal home,
To the grave we belong.
We need not love
To live a life
Without burns
Within the soul.
We need not heartache
To maximise gore,
But only the need
For sympathy and pity.
Although some of us
Need not any pity,
Only a helping hand
To change the future.
Past is past
Untouchable,
We have no time turner
To change what's over.
But gore maximisation
Is what is shameful,
Exaggerating
Pretentious nightmares.
Stories of blood
Stories of tears,
They may be true
But only what
It means to you.
Keep the rubble
They way it is,
Don't falsely increase
The heavy burden.
Yes we cry,
But not die.
Death comes once
And takes us away,
Completely disconnected
And entirely stray.
We sink to the bottom
But we don't drown,
Breathless and shivering
But still alive.
Going over these lines
I only see
A blank page
Staring back at me.
*Oh you hypocrite
Don't tell these lies,
You know you double
The rubble and the cries.*
I despise this poem
But still, I write
For, I need to be loyal
To the growing demons.
Paradoxes contaminate
Words of wisdom,
Scattering constellations
Back into stars alone.
I question myself
What is it I want,
I realise that the answer
Only lies in a web;
The web of life.
Live life to the fullest,
Don't live in a dream world,
This is reality
There is gravity.
***But, to hell with life
That's what I say,
Live your dream
Make it your way.***
Be considerate
To what others want,
But never bow down
To unreasonable taunt.
Look at good
Look at evil,
Choose your path
Let it prove
Not fatal.
*A cursed hamartia
Ruins many a life,
A flaw so fatal
A remorseful light.*
Ending this vague haze,
Of many a peculiar phrase,
I cannot comprehend myself,
For, I am caught
In the inevitable daze.
Jul 22, 2014
Jul 22, 2014 at 11:07 AM UTC
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
Recollecting endeavours drives her to a dry pain
Throbbing, throbbing
Hamlet's hamartia discards her to the lowest of the dead
His vanity requires no response;
Her life on the line and he's got nothing to lose.
So much more the eye can see
Caressing, caressing
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;
Leave me, carbuncle:
Words she has never been able to utter . . .
Loudly, she thinks it
It doesn't translate
Shivering, quivering
Brittle monster bestows one final patronising kiss
I must exercise some form of self control
Hardly aware of her departed lover,
She lays in a yellow blanket;
Phosphenes in the emerging light of day.
Apr 22, 2015
Apr 22, 2015 at 2:10 PM UTC
I think of you on days the odor of water makes me dry-heave.
Our photographs still throw me, offguard, into flashbulb memories. Every detail etched into my brain with a hot scalpel.
This isn’t an apology, this is a confession. I am not guilty in my eyes.
That was my hollow lava, this is what it crystallized into. Look at it, laugh at it, break it, keep it. My words were only meant to be beautiful in someone else’s eyes. In your eyes.
Drown my breath in a tub of sand, tell me everything that isn’t alright.
You can weave our veins into a dystopian novel, stamp it with 'fiction' and we can pretend it never happened.
The ordinary incinerated in your palms and I’m reeling from this hamartia.
Paint your carcinogens on my skin, carve them into my bones, punch them onto my eyes. Hold these hands one more time and feed me a blatant lie.
Feed me anything that’ll help me swallow these choked up cries.
I’ve wondered how the others were, how you were.
Was it art when you wrapped blindfolds around their necks?
What was it to them? How were they dying?
How am I dying?
Because I wake up in the odd hours, my chest feeling like it’s soaked in salt water,
and you’re standing at the edge of my bed,
with a mug of poison,
smiling,
telling me *it’s okay,
it’s just a bad dream,
here, I made some coffee.*
And I believe you.
Sep 13, 2015
Sep 13, 2015 at 9:22 AM UTC
I’m from rearranged furniture
I’m from “asleep in the bathtub”
I’m from biting hands over
store-bought candy.
I’m from vinyl-white-siding,
No better at keeping in heat
Than keeping out punks,
Four guinea pigs named
“Gamber,”
And a spotted rabbit.
From searching for answers
At the bottom of a bottle,
And not stopping, to think “maybe,”
When the answers aren’t there.
I’m from thrown phones, and
Broken Home,
And diseases they have
Yet to cure.
From layoffs, to layovers, to
A car, that careened
Down the street that I lay in,
And broke the door off its frame,
Leaving an impression on
Unshakable wood.
A Golden Orb-Weaver
On a storm-door handle,
Painted purple and black,
And a blood-curdling scream.
From a run to the backyard
And irrational fears
And the accidental rhyme
Of your mask-haunted dreams
I’m from people who loved me,
Without knowing how,
And people who couldn’t,
Without saying why.
I’m from loving her, a
Little too hard, that when we finally
Broke, We both emerged.
Scarred, and scared.
Groundhogs, and rabbits, and
Cats that weren’t mine.
Being told, at times,
Simultaneous, that I’m
Less than, yet
“Above grade level.”
*I’m from baring the blunt-force,
To numbing it all out.
I’m from jazz, chess, and
Tonic water. I’m from
The Wolftones classy sound.
I’m from turning up the
Music so loud, that when
The world covered its ears,
I tried my best
To listen*
.
I’m deciding to recreate the world
As I see fit.
I’m going to do something important,
special,
Before I die.
I want to invent. An
Existence I feel more content, in.
There’s no wagon to fall off.
Just looming things,
And avoidance.
I’m deserving of the option to keep
Calling it as I see it.
Advocating character development,
And suppressing my own hamartia.
Experimenting with sobriety,
And the ending of days.
Fighting off the Great Greyness, unstoppable,
Laying down land-mines, and
Bear-traps, on the
Terrain of Winter.
*I’m going to turn the music up
Louder still,
Until protest, drowned out,
Is inseparable, from
Cheering.*
Jul 13, 2015
Jul 13, 2015 at 7:29 PM UTC
I want to give up...
my problems are
way scarier than others,
I am everything, the center,
unfavorable situations
find me like a childhood friend,
Trouble trouble everywhere
No time to live,
If I live for some days
double trouble pursue me
to outlive,
I'm Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear
Shakespeare wrote my predicaments
six centuries earlier,
My birth was a tragedy,
I'm armored in 'hamartia', 'anagnorisis'
'peripeteia', and what not
searching my doom to
entertain few who paid to see me,
I have none neither unity of time,
or place or action,
I don't deserve this,
But
What should I do?
I have no means and measures or methods,
to raise my hand and say,
"Sir, this disgusts me, living like this doing
same task same time all day"
Count me absent since today,
I'm going never to come,
What a sick time this is,
everyone is hating everyone,
I hate everyone too,
why shouldn't I?
I'd one demand,
I want to study, but no one had money
to pay, neither family, nor state, or center,
I saw them investing in bricks and stones
I saw them collecting taxes,
But no one came,
I wanted to work no had work to offer.
So I am writing, venting off my anguish,
Okay so if you are here, I call you my confidant,
keep it a secret,
You know I am alone now
But I wasn't before, a girl I love but never
told her my feeling, why????
Yes, she is employed, she earns I do not,
I fear this, I search for work, not that
I need one, I crash on the footpath,
live on the discarded crumbs out
the big restaurant in my city,
I'm not invoking pity in you--
Argumentum ad Misericordiam--
stating just the fact sir,
I believe in "Less is MOre"
and indeed I have less and I am happy
but what troubles me is her,
Ah! it's not that easy, I've heard
they don't take seriously unemployed guys,
Yes, sir, I may be wrong, but I don't want to
take any chance,
Life is not a life sir without her,
You can judge this in the tone
after I started tak]lking about her.
I love her dearly,
But who doesn't sir?
when they are young,
Jun 29, 2022
Jun 29, 2022 at 5:34 PM UTC
if one day i decide to walk away please dont ask me to stay.
Dont tell me everythings going to be ok,
dont tell me you love me,
dont tell me im crazy.
Dont be sad, just look away.
dont pray, just let the memory of me fade away.
please just move on,
dont listen to our song.
dont ever for once blame yourself,
I am a grenade.
just let my essense fade,
im long gone.
I was never yours to keep,
a wise man once said you know its yours when you lose it and it comes back.
but im not coming back,
i lack the strength,
to own up to my mistakes.
I cant even stand to look at your face,
even though in the end of this hamartia we call love,
I will always adore you..
the only thing left to say is,
im sorry for leaving you in such dismay,
but youll be ok.
lesson learned,
this is why you never fall sad writers like me,
we always walk away leaving you in pain,
then end up writing about the shame
-psm
Dec 21, 2013
Dec 21, 2013 at 1:49 PM UTC
You're all the company I would keep,
If choosing were a choice.
If oceans were dams, and miles were feet,
and I could hear your voice.
Our fatal flaw will always be
In my loneliest moments -
You are asleep.
Sep 24, 2014
Sep 24, 2014 at 4:26 PM UTC
pull the plug on me before
i switch off the breaker.
perturbed you glance as
condolences roll off my lips
and fine sherry slips past them.
nothing was meant to be rosy and
in the black of our feelings,
the devil moves in me
as you are meant to.
the circuit in my halo
is calling ********
and bast is laughing,
coughing ugly colours from her lungs.
puce must be our hamartia
and when it dribbles down my face
i make leaf piles out of
the skin cells and ugly rivers,
and you take breathing for granted.
but you don't give up that easily,
and when i'm filling my bathtub with wine
you're there to lap it up.
Jul 15, 2014
Jul 15, 2014 at 1:27 AM UTC
it's undeniably pathetic
how i think there's this
miniscular chance and that
imagination and dreams
are both hamartias
c.r
Aug 28, 2013
Aug 28, 2013 at 10:28 PM UTC
My smile is too big,
My nose is crooked,
My feet point slightly inwards when I walk,
My teeth are gappy,
My laugh is too loud,
but then again..
in my eyes these things are hamartias,
but in someone elses eyes they may be the definition of beautiful,
and anyway,
it's rare to find someone completely happy with themselves,
So we should forget these "flaws",
and learn to love the skin we're in,
for we will be wearing it for a long time.
Aug 27, 2013
Aug 27, 2013 at 3:27 PM UTC
*if you asked me to write about something -
the stars, sadness, darkness, death.
i could. and i would.
i would give it to you, clad in astroids for armor,
star-spangled, criss-crossing in between sunbeams and rainbows.
i would give it to you as a wilted flower on a plate,
colorless save for the red of the rotting apple -
the surrealist dream, the existentialist crisis
of oblivion and everything in between.
ask me to write about what i'm feeling now,
ask me to write about my emotions, my thoughts.
i can't.
for i know my thoughts are as different from yours
as a solar eclipse in the andromeda galaxy,
as hope in my vacuum heart.
and that's just the thing.
my "red" will never be the same as your "red",
my "night never the same as your "night".
and my words, are far from adequate
in telling you what i think
of me,
of you,
of us,
of the world.
it is a fundamentalist problem,
a human flaw,
an error in communication,
an inherent imperfection,
a fatalistic trait,
a damning hamartia
that we as humans
will never overcome.
words are powerful,
pictures are more so,
touch just can't be surpassed.
but none will never be enough
to address everything that is as it is,
everything in our heads,
everything.
we are all alone in this world.*
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 10:27 AM UTC
Hey dear stranger
I'm sorry
I'm too harsh
You professed your love
I dissed you
Hey dear stranger
I'm too proud
I deemed you unworthy
It's my hamartia
Hey dear stranger
I hope you find her
Someone who's not me
Someone who adores you too
May 7, 2014
May 7, 2014 at 9:58 AM UTC
Dear sweet reader
Do you wish to know my hamartia?
Better question
Do you know your hamartia?
Better question still
Do you know what a hamartia is?
Dear sweet reader
I'm not questioning your intelligence
I would never do such a thing
I am only asking
Because it is a new word
At least to me
Maybe to you as well
Dear sweet reader
Shall I tell you?
Tell you what a hamartia is
And of my hamartia
The answer is yes
A hamartia is a fatal flaw
Almost everyone has one
I do
You might
Do you have one?
Do you know what it is?
I have one
I know what it is
My hamartia, dear sweet reader,
Is that I fall in love to easy
And much to hard
So my dear sweet reader,
Care to share your hamartia?
Jun 20, 2016
Jun 20, 2016 at 3:20 PM UTC
your words are my undoing
save me please
i'm falling
Jun 16, 2016
Jun 16, 2016 at 10:55 PM UTC
I loved you
That was my Hamartia,
You lost me.
and that is yours.
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 18, 2014 at 12:46 PM UTC
You said you had a hamartia
but I did not believe you.
You said your hamartia would only hurt me, but I still loved you.
You said your hamartia would scare me away
But the truth is I loved you more because of this fatal flaw.
Your inability to love me as I loved you wasn't a hamartia
It was simply you being honest, that's all I could have asked for
You closed yourself off from love, I knew that. I still loved you though.
I don't regret loving you because after all your hamartia was a perfect imperfection to me
Jul 25, 2015
Jul 25, 2015 at 12:04 PM UTC
Why do I write?
It’s quite simple really.
My Words are pieces of my Soul
They breathe
They live
They grow
and mature
Just as I do.
They are from another dimension of
Myself.
A dimension that only They reveal.
I am my Words.
Each and every syllable kisses my Spirit
as They escape the tips of My fingers to paper.
I am in love with my Words
as a Lover adores her beloved.
I fear my Words
as a child fears the dark
while she clutches to her stuffed Pooh bear
and whimpers in the middle of the night.
They touch a part of myself that remains hidden.
They reveal my Angels
and my Daemons.
They show my Strength
and my Hamartia.
My Words have the power to shatter Me.
Ma perché scrivo?
È l’unico conforto.
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 8:26 AM UTC
Her long legs walk-
In - out In - out
Of the shadows.
Hips swinging like pendulums-
Left - right left - right,
Creating echoes.
Her cigarette smoke dances around the pyre:
Puff - puff, cough - cough.
And the tongue slithers like a reptile
Hiss - hiss.
She's lost in the city of Dreams.
She's an L.A woman, L.A woman.
Yet she's a dancing drunk
Sip, sip, sip,
Breaking the seams.
Oh, she's dangerous. Intoxicating.
Yeah, yeah.
She's a disciple of Venus
Going to work-
To the brothel she goes.
She wonders what it's like to be virtuous
Pray - pray!
But a full stomach relies on the next customer.
Kiss - kiss.
'Time for bed, I guess' she wipes off the façade.
And she slips back into the shadows.
With her gold dust, whiskey and...
She's a living hamartia. She's proud.
But her words fail to be spoken out loud.
P a r t i a l
P r o m i s c u o u s
P e n u m b r a l
Jun 14, 2017
Jun 14, 2017 at 8:45 AM UTC
‘I figured out the hamartia,’
I tell you breathlessly.
You were still clutching
Your shirt for breath
(And your cheeks are pink
From the cold)
‘My heart is thumping like crazy,’
‘I know. Mine is, too.’ I grin, for you.
‘That was one hell of a ride’ you wheeze
‘I should puke but I won’t,’
I laugh at the incredulousness
Of your little anxieties
And how you strain them in.
I patted your back as
We took a seat on a bench
And you took your breath
‘You okay?’
You nod. *‘You were saying
About the hamartia?’*
I love that you keep
Track of what I’m saying
Even if we wander far away.
‘Right. It’s cotton candy.’
You laugh. ‘Really now?’
‘Sugar just sometimes solves it all,’
You pinched my cheeks
And pulled on it
Playfully
*‘Sugar ****** you teased,
I think you just
Caught me off guard
And I think that
I like it.
*‘But tell you what, I know something
Better than stuffing sugar,’*
You always seem to be so
Enthusiastic, don’t you?
‘Surprise me,’
I say because
This time
I wouldn’t want
To anticipate.
Dec 3, 2013
Dec 3, 2013 at 9:55 AM UTC