Tag Archives: sadness

A Lover’s Lament

19 Jun

A Lover’s Lament, or “I Am Confused.”

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could choose to throw me away like trash, while I am only just now beginning to slough off the skin of our life together like so many dead cells become love litter. The detritus of memories rots there on the floor, as every day I am forced to trample it underfoot as if it were nothing, and I were not worried in every moment that something will snag and I will trip. Too often, so often, I fall anyway. I am confused, dear lover.

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could not be at every moment distracted, wondering where the new rush of air through one more hole you hadn’t noticed in yourself is coming from. Does not your body ache from the pock marks of so many barbed associations? Are you not left with new emptiness and crevices as the once fertile ground of your soul dries and cracks with a terrible opening groan? Do not you feel as if there are parts of you missing? Are you not spending every waking and sleeping moment searching for where they have gone and how you could possibly, desperately, ever in your life or your death get them back again? Are you not dying from the nothing of where you used to be filled? I tremble every second, wondering if this will be the time when my increasingly paltry skeleton crumbles. Did I not make up just as much of you? I am confused, dear lover.

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could have escaped the shroud of insanity that is slowly settling over me as I see your ghost at every turn. My mind breaks just a little more every time I must exorcise your demons, finding again a phantom that must be released from a particular way of flicking my hand, or tilting my voice, or arranging my face. I do not know whether it is better to slowly tease away where you have interwoven with every fiber of my being in an attempt to salvage what is left of the original cloth, or if I should just cry to hell and remove the stuff of both you and me with a slaughter of tearing, unforgiving attrition. It’s not like I would be left any more frayed than I am becoming now. I am surprised, from the way that your fingers used to interlock with mine, that you are not finding yourself similarly ragged. I am confused, dear lover.

Oh dear lover, I am confused.

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The Crushing Inevitability of Cakes

16 Jun

The Crushing Inevitability of Cakes*

There is a crumbiness to life,

a moist, dense sadness that dries out and falls apart

if you leave it alone on the counter for too long.

The icing crusting and rusting and rotting around the edges,

making you look at the slow decay of a sugary promise.

But then you laugh,

watching the calories subside into their own frivolity,

and you decide,

perhaps, I will have a piece anyway.

 

———

* No, I also have no fucking clue why I’m writing sad nihilist poems about cake.

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Anger

2 Mar

Anger

I told you that I needed to

but could not cry,

and so the sadness

just settled there,

like murk in the deep waters.

 

And you, you just drew me

in a magic circle against the world,

an untouchable white line

of your arms around me.

The oddly comforting weight

bearing down on my shoulder blades

while you hold me to your chest.

And for a while, the world is blocked out;

can’t get past you to harm me.

And I am safe.

 

I don’t know if it’s the anger or the upset

that’s making me so touchy,

jumping at every noise

because my sensitivity’s been turned to high.

I can feel the pulse in your neck on my cheek,

and for a while, my muscle twitches

try to sync to that evenness,

the lub dub of your heart underneath.

 

The only beating I can handle,

here in my overly caffeinated jitteriness.

 

At least it stirs my consciousness enough

that the murk is disturbed, too, wells up

in the deep and churns the water so that

no particulate in particular is noticeable,

and once more emotionally homogeneously obliviated,

I can get going on my day.

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