I woke in ruins; treading through stained sheets and poisoned leaves.
Pink, orange, yellow petals once covered the ground of this place.
The soles of our bare feet were cooled by dew
Thick air filled our heads with perfumes only you and I would remember
But perfumes faded to fumes and the sun days spent sitting in trees are hazy -
Unfamiliar images of you seen though a smudged filter
You and I only exist here, reality could never hold our truths
When the bees died and bark peeled, neither could you
I prayed for rain and soft rays of Sun
They came but never touched your eyes. You began to decay and flake
Until you resembled all bits of us that no longer were.
I climbed the red tree and stayed until it turned to auburn.
Once descended I saw another ruin raised
It rained for years washing verdant greens to greys.
These years will be glamorous—all the
magazines say so. You’ll learn what not
to mix tequila with, what shoes to pair
with that dress, what your default lipstick
will be, the book and movie and song
that will save you after every failed relationship,
each summer-at-the-beach fling. You will learn
the measure of patience and most important,
how to be alone. You will collect lonely like
some people collect stamps, and you will
learn to keep the light on for it, because lonely
needs company, too. You
will learn that self-love is not
dragging a random from the bar home to
sleep in your bed, but that it
is making your bed before you leave the
house for the night.
On these nights, you’ll stumble home—drunk,
in a dress that clings to you like a second skin
and shut the bathroom door behind you,
tired heels hanging from your hand
as you get down on your knees in front
of the toilet. You’ll greet it like an old
friend or a past lover, wrap your arms
around its porcelain neck and
whisper apologies after vomiting all of
your awful down its throat.
And then there will be boys, gloriously pale
boys whose veins you can count at the
wrists and jugular, boys buying you drinks,
handing you a cigarette despite your
refusals, leading you with your hands
twined down the street in a city
whose name tastes like smoke
in your mouth. Boys with coffee eyes
asking you if that seat is taken. Boys
who look like sin as they shrug themselves
out of their leather jackets. Boys
your mother warned you about. Boys
your father keeps a knife in the drawer for.
Boys who will break your heart, leave
you for dead on the side of the street and
you, not knowing what to do or say to
keep it from happening all over again.
Soak in these years like sunlight. Re-position
the needle over the vibrancy of your youth. Get
up from the lawn, brush the grass from your
kneecaps. Hail a taxi.
Find your way home.
Kristina Hayes
"
My formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred….
It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their details; or, conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.”
"
- Frank O’Hara on poetry (via wine-words-works)
how does one write [ammateur-ly goodish] self-indulgent poetry when happy?
tonight was woah and what
tsarcasm:
Celebrate black history month by touching white people’s hair without their consent
(via abhorred-pollution)
