Tag Archives: lonely

I Am In A Room

8 Feb

I Am In A Room

I sit in a room that is silent.

Yes, there are cringes and twinges of floorboards

and pipe songs and even the echo of someone upstairs,

but the cosmos is always ringing a little.

It is silent.

…

My mind makes its war in the room –

plastering memories along the molding of the floor

and hanging dead hopes from the high ceilings

and using the walls to buttress itself as it catapolts

its knives and leers and cocky little smiles,

knowing that I on the couch could have done better.

There is no noise in the room;

I am breaking.

…

The ground is a minefield.

I cannot move from this spot for fear I shall explode

one of its tricky little pitfalls,

and trip the explosion it’s loaded in my brain

with the fire of one toe placed wrongly.

It’s not a dance.

It’s not a limp.

I do not move.

I am silent.

…

I breathe.

The one defiance against death,

this slow, meaningless rise and fall

that is the only assertion that I still am

within this tired, still un-noise.

I make no sounds.

But I make change with the room.

A dollar-fifty oxygen,

a 23-year exhale.

Or something like that.

The math’s never really made sense

and I am too quiet to ask.

Maybe I am being shortchanged.

I really don’t know.

…

I am in a room.

And the room and I are silent.

The cosmos is ringing.

But this room has no door.

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Magic at the Edges

25 Jan

Originally deposited this on my crazy ramblings tumblr, but decided to include it here too. It’s a pretty good narrative of what’s been a large lump of my current frustration.

I wait up for people I shouldn’t.

I flock to artists,

people who breathe stories

and know how to put the

soul back in your eyes.

People with hands and mouths and voices

that mean something.

I like brushing fingers with those.

There’s magic at the edges.

…

But ours is too pragmatic a world

if you cannot always live at the seams

and I befriend too a more practical sort

with data and trends and facts

and a reality that will crush any of the hope you had

because there is no god anymore.

Not these days.

But I glory in the realness of what they hold,

the light in their hands so tangible

and undyingly right to believe in.

Here is a world of truth, they say.

The magic is in finding it.

…

Art and reality make such beautiful children.

I wish I weren’t just harboring nightmares.

Monsters, distortions, twisted fact flinging fate

at you like you were dead to begin with.

Even darkness can have opaque eyes.

I wish that I could see again.

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Loneliness Hits

30 Sep

Loneliness is a rough sort of rolled-up burning-down summary of life to take a hit of. It’s the kind of hit that leaves you not just coughing so badly you wind up in tears, but somehow proves a bruise-leaver too, on more than just your throat. Loneliness hits that way.

Loneliness is the worst of drags that I cannot seem to ever figure out how to choke down and tolerate. I guess my ears get a little weird, when I’ve sucked down loneliness. I go deaf for a bit, so I can’t even hear the noises of the ones around me. All I can hear is the inside of my brain, and that’s only filled with the noises of people who aren’t any longer here.

It’s a bad trip, loneliness.

The psychiatrists and psychologists, they say it will pass. That we’ll find me an antidote, and I will stop choking on the very air around me as this unending ember of a stick of loneliness dangles from my fingers, unable to be removed. This next set of pills, they say. This next glass of water. This next deep breath.

I’ve taken many a deep breath in my life; loneliness is an insidious pollution, and the smog count grows ever higher. That’s the rub – you breathe in to breathe out what you breathed in, but if there’s no change in air quality, your red blood cells only learn all the more to consent to carry what your heady environment has stuck upon life’s circulation.

Even tears can’t flush it out.

Maybe one day a little white circle will clear all this away.

Maybe one day a fire will burn hot enough to immolate this slow-killing haze.

Maybe one day I will have exchanged all my oxygen for this grey composition, and then I will no longer notice any discrepancy in hue, and I will not remember what it was like before, and I will no longer fight to hold off this desperate coloration, because at least now, in this grey prison, I have something with which to be one.

Or maybe these are all just ramblings, too long a drag off the loneliness stick. I’m starting not to remember much. Oh look, bruises…

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Slumber

17 May

A poem from the memory of grade school birthday parties,

and a current sleep pattern that’s never quite matched up with the other twentysomethings’.

 

Slumber

I am always the one in silence.
I am the first one asleep,
and the first one awake.
I sit in empty rooms with sleeping bodies
while the morning breathes quietly.
Hugging my knees,
perhaps reading a book,
and waiting for the life around me
to remember that it exists.
That I exist, too.
Slumber parties
were always a particular kind
of torture chamber.

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Work-From-Home

18 Apr

Oh dear Poe and Dickinson, I don’t know how you did it.

Work-From-Home

I am going crazy
sitting inside this house.
They call it freelance
but I call it shut-in,
this endless typing of nonsense
onto a dead screen like it’s a friend
because it’s the only thing I’ve got
to talk to,
all day,
all the time.
I will tell you my stories,
dear static of electrons and gigabytes.
I will tell you all these things
inside my head,
poured endlessly
into the wasteland of a blank word document.
That’s all you are, after all –
a parched desert that we try to fill
with the thirst of our souls for someone else,
anyone else.
And so we write stories.
The only breathing
is the rustle of the blinds in a breeze
because I left the window open again,
a forgetful reminder that there’s a world outside.
But I can’t write out there.
Too much glare across the screen
and my fingers lost the quickness of pen
in favor of jabbing at keys in frustration.
Quick, spiteful precise stabs,
anything to flood my message across that empty line.
Lines and lines and lines,
meaningless lines we try to make say something
about our loneliness
but not about our loneliness,
about something else that would be greater
than just telling the world the story
of sitting for the slow-drip torture of seconds
as our life wastes away
down the drain,
a straight shot from the faucet
because all we have are the too-hard chairs
that become our companions
and remind us constantly of the discomfort we sit with.
There’s too much bitterness on my tongue
for me to keep drinking coffee.
We try to say something other
than the sounds of a silent house and road work outside,
because that’s not a good enough story
for a mind crazed by sitting endlessly on the inside,
calling it freelance
but dying from shut-in.

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Talk

21 Jan

isolation

Talk

I want someone to talk to me.

I rant and rave, tweet and type

and make all the noises I can think to

in this world of ours.

I even say some words out loud.

But usually,

my only responder is silence.

I am tired of having conversations

with shrugged shoulders as my partner.

I wish that you would make some noises too.

At least then while we are lovemaking,

I will feel like it matters that I am there with you, a person.

Instead of just my shadow in the dark.

Or, at least in the afternoon,

you could say hello when I walk into the room,

or tell you something.

But there is no one to talk to me.

My words only sit across from silence still.

And so I will fill this table with my laptop screen,

and seek to douse this loneliness in the chatter

of a world out there having its own conversation.

I go online to have the world talk at me,

so that maybe all the buzz will help me feel okay.

I wish someone would talk to me.

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