Poetry And Poems - Blog Posts

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.

When pain has crossed the limit

It turns into a heavy stone

It sinks into soft skin

Continuing past flesh and bone

Until it finds it's way

To your feather light soul

And there it stays

heavy and cold

Let's be honest.

Let's be truthful.

When you meet your own eyes in the mirror

Can you recognise or a least reconsider

The apathy

That you let cling to thee

It's carefully downing you

It feels a secure embrace

But you're afloat

You've lost the boat, to passion, to joy, to meaning

It's calling out

ahoy

Where did you go

I see your eyes meet mine in the mirror

I see what once was starting to flicker

Are you but a ghost

A lost dream turning thinner.

I don't get out bed most days, I barely remember to drink water and my hyper fixations seem to be doing me more harm than good. But I go to get groceries in the late evening hours, as the birds call out to the fading sun. I can't bring myself to go regularly, but I've been in my house for weeks and the birds are singing and the streets are empty and life seems beautiful and fresh when you walk alone just breathing or singing to your self. I walk over the fly over, closer to the branches that reach up and away from here.

I sat outside on a wall across the pub. My dad was inside. I hadn't spoken to him in ten years. But I had seen him through pub windows and passed by him as he smoked in doorways more than a few times. Once I heard him sharply inhale, coughing as cigarette smoke choked him when I passed, but reached out he did not and neither did I.

It was summer, the air was warm and still, the daffodils had fully bloomed. I don't know how long I sat there, but I know it started to get dark and the streets emptied. Someone in the pub put on Sweet Caroline, everyone inside sang it with all the energy of a football chant, I hummed along to the chorus looking at the sky as it changed from blue to pink to black. I sang I'll be fine (I know now those aren't the lyrics) even though I felt so alone in that moment, I was adrift, I was waiting. And I'd waited long enough. But how could I stop. It was all I had.

I kept my eyes fixed on the door for awhile, then the stars, then back to door blinking against the tears gathering at the edges of my vision. I wanted to take off my shoes and rest my feet on the cool pavement, I wanted to feel rooted in something other than my loneliness, my sadness, but I didn't. Instead I quietly sang along to Sweet Caroline, sang about hands reaching out and felt more alone than ever, felt an ache settle deep and heavy into my bones, i suppose I was rooted by my feelings after all.

I'm not sure why I stayed there, was it in the hope that he'd spot me, rush out, hold me close and say it's going to be okay now , dads here or was it a punishment mixed with self pity. All I know is I couldn't bring myself to go inside but also didn't want to hide. The song ended and the stars above looked on in indifference.

Then a man walked passed. I got ready for a suggestive remark or something similar. there are some streets in my city as there are in most around the world, where women line dark alleyways and men in cars roll down their windows and ask how much, and if you happen to be a women walking alone in those areas you might get asked if your working tonight. So I was prepared for something along those lines, I was prepared to politely smile and get my keys ready between my knuckles if needed. He paused for a moment.

"Are you alright love?" he asked, his voice quiet and concerned.

With the relief came the overwhelming need to tell him the truth, to spill everything to this stranger, to tell him that no I wasn't alright, I was deeply not okay and the heavy feeling has been following me around for so long I dont know how to live without it, instead I indulge in it, I give it a place at the dinner table, I drink it with every meal and tuck it close to my heart every night, I use it as a substitute for a lullaby. But I couldn't , I didn't.

I flashed him a quick smile , the most hollow thing you could imagine, the only thing I could muster. it was just something I did to get him to walk away. "Yeah, I'm good thanks".

He didn't walk away, he stood there with eyes so caring I was afraid they'd make everything I was holding in unravel in a messy pile at our feet. "Are you sure, really?" he knew I wasn't, my sad shining eyes didn't help.

I shook my head slightly, another quick smile "I'm sure."

barefoot in the garden

Prickly grass under my feet,

the pale sky stretched out above my head,

As I watch small insects

carry away their dead.

The icecream man is driving down my street with the song playing loud and I'm Feeling intense nostalgia, for the childhood I still cling to. I feel it melting away, it's cool softness turning watery, slipping between my fingers.

I painted something to accompany what I wrote above Here

Hollow eyes watching the crowd

it's mid day, It's busy

People rush to stores like beds of fish

Fish with magpie eyes looking for shiny things to take back to their home

The figure watching, Is ignored

To look at those hollow eyes would mean to look at their own magpies ones

To confront the misery and their lack of it

So instead they talk louder as they walk past, they drown out a defeated "excuse m–

Or they become silent, their steps quick and their eyes down as they click and swipe

As the figure with hollow eyes watches you pretend to type.

I want to write about the pain of it all, I want to write about the people I qued with outside of food banks; there was an old man who looked like a wise wizard with his long white hair, he waited for a small portion of pasta most days and offered me advice on the best times to turn up, there was a group of polish men with cans of alcohol shared between them, who at first assumed I was polish aswell and tried to talk to me, but all I could say was Przepraszam, nie wiem Polski the old man told me to stand next to him after that, there was also a brother and sister who where both addicted to heroine, most days they seemed to be going through intense withdrawals. We would all wait in a old medieval churchyard, some sat on toppled headstones while others leaned against stone angels with their faces covered. I want to write about what complete isolation and poverty does to you, how eyes don't meet yours and voices talk over you. But when I do, the room goes quiet and people look away, suddenly i feel the need to awkwardly laugh and say so yeah anyway.

Anyone else physically recoil when thinking about how we are made of flesh and bone. I can even look at uncooked meat, if I've seen it raw I can't eat it cooked. And if it looks like a limb I'm not eating it at all. Then I think about how my body is uncooked meat and my bones possible tools and I shudder, I feel far too close to the tendons and the blood, I feel alive, so alive that the sound of my heart is a warning and a blessing, I feel so alive I'm afraid I'll die, I'm afraid of how gruesome it is.

I try to write something, anything, but the words are only clear when I feel them press against my heart and mind. They become muffled when hands reach for them, they loose their shape.

Hollow eyes watching the crowd

it's mid day, It's busy

People rush to stores like beds of fish

Fish with magpie eyes looking for shiny things to take back to their home

The figure watching, Is ignored

To look at those hollow eyes would mean to look at their own magpies ones

To confront the misery and their lack of it

So instead they talk louder as they walk past, they drown out a defeated "excuse m–

Or they become silent, their steps quick and their eyes down as they click and swipe

As the figure with hollow eyes watches you pretend to type.

There's a girl with my name, we don't look the same but we both huddle under covers when it rains. There's a girl who is almost my age, yet we have the same moon sign and we always forget the time. There's a girl reading what I write who comments every night and I can only hope that life treats you kindly, this girl will one day be in the ground and so will I, but I hope as you age you'll shed those debilitating fears that hold you back and hopefully we'll have lived a life of joy and mostly happy tears.

Hope wins every time the sun peaks over the horizon after a long dark night, it softens the day and baths the ground, it warms the air and we breath easier and maybe our souls uncurl a little from that protective crouch we've grown used to, maybe we let our limbs loosen, maybe we let hope sink into our skin, maybe we let it melt our misery from within.