Modern Poetry - Blog Posts

i love a fog. i love a woods.

If someone would ask what my biggest need is I'd say touch. By Lord, please, pplesse I need to be touched. Right now. And if they raise their eyebrows and eyes flicker to my chest I will commit arseny. I need fingers pressing against my elbow as you pass. I need a hand at my back. The quiet presence of my friend appearing behind me. I can lean back. They have me. They gave me.

I need eyes. Eyes that meet mine and mean something. I need love. And by God isn't that a way to simple word. I want my friend to watch me turn away with a small smile before they continue their conversation. I want to elicit a warm feeling in a chest. I want someone to hug me and not as a goodbye.I need care. I need sustenance. Require it. Need your hand on my arm and need you to say hey, it's okay. How about a little walk before we continue this work, hm?

I'm 19 and I stand in my room. Have you accomplished anything if you spent the year running just to end up back in the room that saw all your tears? Isn't the point of running to slow down somewhere else? But then I hear my mom chuckling at a joke I sent her through the door and remember that she didn't do that. Then

I am 18 and I am standing in my room. Sometimes I have to remind myself of how i carried so much stress in my neck then. I sat perched on my bed like a stranger too polite to mention the unusual offered seat. I had slammed a door behind me confident the next one was already open. The dread when the knob doesn't turn. I escaped through a window just to end up on this carpet again.

I am 19. I carry less stress in my neck. I devide friends into neat piles; healing and burning. Like an acid drip working unstoppably through your jeans. It doesn't actually hurt yet but god chemistry was your best subject. I see the acid on her jeans but we're adults now. Adults don't grip each others' arms until the circulation cuts off to keep from the cliff. I can make you a tea.

I make tea. I've always made tea. Perhaps that's the beauty of 19. The only novel thing in this poem, the oldest of all things. It's called an adventure at 8, a hobby at 15, a habit at 19. Hello. Would you like a tea. I was making one anyway. Really, I'm quite good at pouring it now.

sometimes you are 19 standing in the kitchen wondering how you forgot to have breakfast and lunch today, how you will exit the teenage in 47 fridays, how you used to love watermelons 4 summers ago and now you can't even stand the sight of it, how there were floors that saw you wipe them clean off your own tears once, how you changed your favourite coffee recipe last summer because your bestfriend liked it and you guys haven't talked since then, how the new book you're reading was never really your type but you love it, how you hated your hair for 9 winters, how the windows of your new house are bigger, how you feel bad for hurting them, how maybe making mistakes is okay, how maybe you don't have to not eat that cupcake when you go out today, how the wind feels too right whenever you snuggle into your bed, how you were 17 and all the winter ache wanted you to open your kitchen drawers and look for warmth. how then you didn't know someday you'll be 19 standing in the kitchen wondering if you forgot to put sugar in your coffee again.

War on humanity in an ice cream franchise shop

Cloudy day, windy

Your boss' makin a loss

But I told you I'd never eaten this kind of ice cream before

And now I'm back for a second helping

First day it was sunny and I was in a good mood

Today I got no such excuse

The word "smile" is overused by corporate and music that's gentrification misspelled

So I'll commit the greatest rebellion of the industry:

You just looked at me.

Desperate claws in a sunny smile I've trained to be a good customer to the service

I ask you if I should take a cup or cone, your opinion

Well, it's my choice

But you can give me a little more in a cup.

I laugh too loud. Answer too loud. You're making money, I'm spending money.

'i hope to see you again, miss.'

That's not part of the script.

They don't say miss here.

I saw a city die

However dramatic we make death out to be, really, a human death is quite easy. Your heart stops. Once. One kind of death for everyone.

Have you ever seen a city die? It's not one death. It's uncountable. A tree so big you can't watch its fall. Like you can't watch the sun travel. There it is. You get distracted. Something flashes on your wall. You look out. It is gone.

A city's deaths are very varied. Some are gardens dying. Some gardens don't die, but really they do. Really, they're dead.

Some are wild trees dying. The ones we watered by mistake, or by a thread of benevolence. Strung through palms and generations, maybe. A collective nurturing, and every solitary splash thought it was alone. They die, until they become the kind of sticks who's snaps are anonymous. There is nothing here.

Some are people leaving. There are a lot of those. But if you watch people leave, you notice they were the ones who came in the first place. Not the ones who already were.

The ones who already were always are. They are the city. Killing an elephant takes rounds of lead to the heart. Still it takes hours untill it falls, days until it stops breathing. It's not easy, killing a dragon. Those that are must be killed differently. They do not leave. But you can make their home hostile to them. Twist and contort it until those that are have no place to be. They find a new spot, of course. A new city. Who's life blood they aren't.

A city dies a hundred deaths. Like watching someone assemble a puzzle, it's not dramatic enough to watch the process. Like sand falling. Suddenly the glass is empty.

The problem is the body. It's our symbol, vessel and object of death. Without it we don't recognise decay.

Death of a city is the rarest thing you'll see. The bigger, the less you see it. The most imposing, the less you'll watch. The more lights, the less you notice the void.

Because it's a lie. And when you notice. Finally notice,

all you see are the whisps; floating. No sound. Unwatched. No meaning in silence. Nothing. Pathetic in the way they outline whatever isn't there anymore.

I understand people that believe in a religion. Isn't every sunset that's partially hidden by an average day's clouds proof of the devine?

I'll tell you a secret: I felt like I was better. It couldn't happen to me. I was worldly and supported and had a plan and I spoke well and in 2 languages. The world was waiting to unlock itself to my potential. Back then, I had the secret fear that the world was too small for me.

And it happened anyway. The terrible cliché I felt too good for. I got stuck in the home town. Plans didn't work, and suddenly almost a year had passed and I'd spent it in an internship that was my plan H in a place that was my plan Never. And now, with bloody fingernails, I've held on to the easiest dream I had. Not even the pretty, big ones that I thought I'd conquer for fun and joy. The easy one. And I'm sick. Two years at a minimum, first time I've been sick like this. I can do nothing.

Time is running out and university is drawing closer and I was sixteen in a school I hated and I PROMISED myself I wouldn't let it come to this. I wouldn't cave. I'd take the time I want and I'd see the world and I thought I was so prepared. I thought the world was waiting for me. I thought I was so privileged. I thought that meant everything would be butterflies.

Why can't it be butterflies.

Oh my god I'm listening to California Dreamin' with headphones and. Did you know it's one of those songs that are hardcore spliced up between headphones. Like the female and male voices are mostly coming from seperate headphones.

This makes no difference except for a cool listening experience unless. Unless you take one headphone out.

Ohhh, there's still the faintest echo of the female voices in the male voices' headphone, but half the instruments are missing. It's haunting. It's majestic. It's Denny in a old rehearsal room. It's not really a designated space, it's the backroom of their bar. They jokingly used to call it the backstage area. It's wooden panels that were never glossy. It's Michelle and Cass on old stools with cheap cider. It's Denny alone. It's Denny's guitar, with John's handwriting on its side. It's an empty room that's not used to being empty. You know when rooms sound the most loud when there's supposed to be a hundred sounds and you know every one of them? You think you can hear it out of pure fate.

He can only play as many instruments as his hands can hold. But he plays them as well as ever. There's no tremble in his fingers. He can definitely hear Cass. He can almost see John. When he closes his eyes, he can believe they're through the door, in the bar. Hearing him play. Singing back to him.

California dreaming. On such a winter's day

Blood family

I think that whoever, or whatever, created human kind

They really, really, really,

really

wanted to force the point across that we're meant to socialize on a broad scale. To interact.

And I don't mean that in an emotional, "I saw a stranger on the bus and suddenly I remembered what we're here for" way (I do those too, but not today). I mean it in the barest, most fascinatingly clinical way.

Blood family.

Blood connects you to the most ABSTRUSE kinds of people! They can be such, such fundamentally different people to who you are yourself. Would you have ANYTHING to do your uncle if he weren't blood? Your aunt? It gets real great when you get close to each other in age. Would you have anything to say to your cousin if you met them in school?

It's bizarre. It's fascinating. It's a small but ridiculous. We are born, we are forced to interact with people completely different from ourselves. You choose friends. You don't choose blood family.

It seems so... stoic. Clumsy, brutal. There is no way you can escape the horrid, lovely, interesting, deeply uncomfortable ties to society. Not your society, not the one you create for yourself with friends, but the general one. You are born forced to confront the fact that humanity is as varied as snowflakes, to use a clichéd metaphor.

Do with that what you will. It's a fact. Not a single person can escape it. You always grow up with some kind of family that you're forced to spend time with. An orphanage, a traditional family, a single parent maybe.

Connection. For better or for worse.

Yesterday was a bad day, my apartment was too quiet. Too empty. There was nothing, nothing.

Then suddenly I was turning on lights and they were the perfect shade of yellow and the music from my little speaker hit me so hard I almost cried in the kitchen and those socks I bought kept my feet warm and my warmed-up tortellini were so good with the scrapes of my mom's pesto.

I listened to Billie Eilish and Hozier and The Neighborhood and suddenly they were just people.

Sometimes I lay in bed terrified that I'll stop feeling. Yesterday was not that day.

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.

Hm, eternity

Or: gods speak

A definitive factor of being human is not seeing the big picture.

It's very defining. Humans don't see the big picture. They don't see the celestial game, they don't even know their own nature. With a garden full of secrets on their own planet they haven't even stepped foot in, how could they? They know nothing of the blazing, terrifyingly holy power of a not quite ripe apple. Although they have crafted an entire worship around that particular fruit.

No, they know nothing of true eternity. Or maybe everything. If the unripe apple is holy to them too, does it matter that it's not my kind of holy? Does it matter that it's miniscule? There is no such thing as a smaller infinity, after all.

If I love you like the feeling of atoms assembling into wind gusts and solar flares, a human will love you like the feeling of that wind on their skin.

If I love you like the prayer of a million people to the greatest being they know, a god, a human will love you like the prayer of a child to the greatest being it knows, a mother.

If I love you like two black holes caught in each other's gravity, forcing each other into an unholy dance until they collide, a human loves you like watching two coins circling in a cone. Drawing spirals and spirals until they fall, with a gentle ping, into the hole in the middle.

Humans do not see the big picture.

Perhaps they are redefining holy as we speak.

Perhaps they make their own holy, and yet it is equal to mine.

I have a beautiful friend

I have a beautiful friend. Half a year younger than me, with almond eyes and skin maybe two to three shades darker than caramel. Dusty sunset. It reminds me of spices and the billowing fumes of a barista coffee machine.

She has Columbian heritage, with glossy, thick black hair and long eye lashes. Dark eyes, bright teeth. She laughs big, smiles wide. The slight figure of a doe. She gets excited about everything. She's naive. She's adorable. She wants to explore.

She's beautiful, everyone tells her. She's terrified.

My friend sees the eyes. Of course she does. They're not admiring. They're predatory. She wears who she is on her sleeve, and she's a wondering, easily amazed person. She wants to be happy. Oh, have you ever heard of a better rape victim.

She wants to kiss someone. She wants to be in a relationship, with cuddles and pinky finger promises. She wants to be desired.

We smile. We watch her drink. We make sure she gets home afterwards.

Beauty is a lot of things. But I'd wager to say that no matter if you've carefully cultivated it yourself, were born into it, want it, use it, hate it, are aware of it

Broken down, all social veneers and descriptors stripped away,

It attracts attention.

Oh, Silvia Plath was right.

Don't make me find pleasure in the little things

Yes, I almost cried feeling cold air on my face in the morning

It made me so happy when I bought three different spices for my tea yesterday.

But please, don't make me find pleasure in the little things. I need those adventures.

I need love, and life. I need big moments with dresses on fire. I need to know that life is big magic, too. I need real tears of joy and explosions.

I know, you're talking of awe. But it feels like you're extending an aiding hand to stroke my hair.

To make a pastel colour not look so muted.

I want it all

I want the princess blue and the nutcracker red

Is that okay? I'd take both, thank you. Here's the change.

Normal is a memory

Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.

No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.

Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.

Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago

And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.

The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.

I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.

Always just a few generations out of our reach.

See, I was wrong.

We do notice.

Hope has dirt under her fingernails

Hope has dirt under her fingernails. Her broken foot trembles beneath her as she stands up, reading herself for another punch.

Faith clutches the rim of the sink, breath fogging up the mirror. Then she takes her meds and closes the door behind her.

Perseverance hands bribes to cops and takes the first cleaning job she gets, eyes averted as she gets slapped for tardiness.

Selflessness shivers on her bedroom floor, the memory of loosing a patient on the operation table replaying behind her eyelids again.

Love sits in the visitors hall of the hospital, waiting to replace the wilted flowers beside the coma patient.

Passion only leaves the house to go to therapy, the world too painful to look at for long.

Strength looks at the others and decides to make a home in their hearts.

But honey, I was born with the world crumbling around my mother's hospital bed

I grew up stepping around the shards with childish innocence

If you didn't want me to take up weapons,

you shouldn't have shattered the world with yours.

"We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try." - Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Kaltes Licht

Stimmen, die zu dir sprechen

Stimmen, die über dich sprechen

Doch wer spricht mit dir

und wer hört dein Schweigen?

Wer liest deine Sätze,

und wer zwischen den Zeilen?

Künstliche Lichtstrahlen

- Zittern in beleuchteter Dunkelheit

your love is implying that i am supposed to hate myself and yet i do. i was always one of the girls who were said as a joke during fuck marry kill. melting off, whispering your name in a silent devotion is just a way to hurt myself. in my own words first love doesn’t miss, but i do. i am almost brilliant at not being good. i flatten my back and straighten my chest in a spurt of blind hope that you will think that i am a natural. it’s impressive how many words one can say just to realize that the stain was on the other side of the cup.

Dress-code

When I was 13 my father dress-coded me for the

first time.

He told me that I’m not supposed to wear a short skirt.

Because I’m a girl,and girls have to watch what they are wearing,

Because there are a lot of big bad men who can hurt girls ,who are wearing short skirts.

My dad saw a problem in the skirt,

but I saw a problem in men.