anarch0comm1e

[anarch0comm1e]

eyes on me.

— megumi

[anarch0comm1e]

how do you do justice to poetry when poetry is simply missing parts of me

how do i explain what i don’t have, because it is only what you don’t have that’s worth writing about. suffering summer blazes through my days i sit with my lungs on fire i am simply not what i wish i was. or maybe i am, i don’t know.

i find myself repeating lines i’ve said before. lines i’ve written before. the uncertainty of denying something and then wondering if that’s actually true.

i don’t write much these days. or maybe i do, i don’t know. you see what i mean? you do, don’t you?

where are you now? i can picture you sitting on a balcony sipping something warm, you’re all alone and there’s a blanket around you and i think you’re happy. i know i’m happy, so i think you must be too.

if i want you, it’s only to fill my cup with broken emptiness. i don’t want to want you like i want alcohol and cigarettes. so i don’t want you and i’m sitting here alone and free and content.

but i miss it, the ability to Love.

the rotten maggoty corpses of ourselves we shred and leave behind sometimes take the best of us with them. i’m writing about you and you don’t even know i am. and it’s so vague, and all over the place, and it’s not even Love, and it’s so utterly ambivalent that all of my past can come find these words and see themselves in them.

but i don’t write about any of you. i’m writing about someone that doesn’t exist because nobody can make me feel anything anymore. i sound like an emo child. i cringe at myself, it’s almost become the only thing i know to do.

the depression is oppressive in a systematic way. there is no way out, and i stumble through this darkness abandoning the one thing i never thought i would.

fuck all of you for trying. fuck you for trying when you know it isn’t worth it.

i will destroy myself and you can be witness.

save me, if you’d like. i’m right here. i’m right here listening to death grips, shredding my eardrums apart and hoping i had someone to run away with.

but i don’t, and i will smile and throw my life away.

i will jump off the roof instead of climbing down a stairway. catch me?

[anarch0comm1e]

i don’t read i hoard

i don’t read i hoard

with whatever money creeps into

my fingers i clutch

them strong and hard

and before i blow them on booze i

squander them at bookstores

the socialist and idealist in me

want to read

and i soothe their longing by throwing

money at

publishers who will publish almost anything

because people like me will throw money

the irony is that

i don’t read i hoard

and zlib doesn’t work anymore

and

i can speak as if i have read

a lot

and there is a lot that i

know

and there is, a lot that i know

from wikipedia pages and plot

summaries

or movies made about books

that i discredit, echoing the line about

how

“the book is better”

when i’ve only watched the movies myself

i don’t read i hoard

at least i don’t lie anymore

consumed by insecurity for which

i shall spend my fair share of time in hell

i have pretended to know things

because i found them impossible to get through

like yes i have read oliver twist

is what i would say but

i’ve only read an abridged children’s version

because charles dickens is a moron

who does not know how to keep me reading

don’t get me wrong it’s probably my fault

but i think if you want me to read something

it’s your responsibility to keep me reading

selfish and shallow, i don’t read

i hoard

i don’t read i hoard

and

i don’t lie anymore, instead,

i suffer in silence, i

embolden with honour

that “i’ve heard the book is better,

“i haven’t read it yet”

i can speak to you

and i can convince you

of things as if

i were convincing myself

that i am smarter than everybody

else in the room

and

i can see the world

i do, i think

i can spot a flaw from a mile away

because i’ve read enough to see

but i dont read i hoard

and so,

confidence fails me

and i don’t do anything more than

just talk

because what is the point of reading

if i can’t do anything

the idealism is simple enough to understand

and i fail to see why i must know more

than just believe

why do you complicate everything

when it’s black and white

why do you lie to yourself that it’s grey

when you’re only justifying yourself

in the dark?

i only hoard, i don’t read

i only steal, i don’t see

more than i have to

i don’t read i hoard

i am disgusting and cheap

insecure and pretentious and

there is no hope for me and for you

and for all of us who live with

so much that we hold sacred and defend

knowing the foundations they are built on

are not just weak

they do not even exist

i cannot believe in anything

because the more i read the more

i realise that

i can never know everything

there is nothing to believe in

and if i really did know everything

i’d become dangerous to the world

because i’d know then that

there is really

nothing to believe in

and it’s not just me assuming that

to be true

i don’t read i hoard

and when i actually read everything i’ve stolen away

i’ll conquer the world

#books & libraries #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writing community #creativity #poetry #writing #bookstagram #poets of tumblr

[anarch0comm1e]

i've been reading circe

i've been sitting at home alone and lost.

i don't think the pandemic was ever harsh on me, because of a couple of reasons - firstly, i wasn't alone, because my parents didn't have to go to work anymore. i could talk to them as i never had for a very many years. at the time, i had also been in a Loving long-distance relationship, so those needs were also fulfilled. i obviously concede my privilege of being in a place where i was secure, safe and well off. i could afford to sit at home and be at peace - there was this weird sense of warmth, knowing the apocalypse was upon us and that at least we had each other.

i constantly deal with the pressure of - in social circles, saying yes to plans people make. obviously i want to travel places with people i Love, and of all these people, the most important ones are my friends. in the pandemic, there were no plans. as a result, there was no pressure.

the course of events generally follows a group of friends planning an outing. there's usually an occasion attached - that the exams are ended, or that there's someone's birthday, or something else to celebrate.

and i always steel myself for the eventual parental hand of god that would inevitably tell me i mustn't go (for so-and-so reason). and it is exhausting to have to say no, to have to drop a pin in plans and listen to instinctive groaning from the people that want me in those plans.

it's oddly comforting that these people Love me enough to want me around, but it hurts like a bitch when i'm always the only one saying no.

nevertheless, i have an internship break at the moment. but i've chosen to do nothing and stay at home, i.e. i'd rather get my shit together than make my emotions distant and forgotten, looking instead at a future that seems blurred. i don't want to do something i won't eventually do forever. but all of that is besides the point.

it has been worser than the lockdown was.

i am alone this time, and everyone is preoccupied. and so my mind travels to darkness, and i must let it stay in the light.

the solitude i feel, alone at home - everyone else is either outside the house, or occupied with work - has also been oddly comforting. i feel like a recluse, and indeed, i am. sitting in my tiny corner of the house, i have been writing profusely, watching film for inspiration, listening to music, and hoping, praying, finding.

i am alone this time, and everyone is preoccupied. and so my mind travels to darkness, and i must let it stay

and with every day that has passed, i have only been losing myself even more. there is a lot i can do, and that makes the choices worse. where do i abandon idealism and choose for myself a life where i can have everything i want? it always feels like everyone is so ahead of me. i don't know how to go where i want to go. i see the end of the tunnel, but i don't know how to get there. life seems to move on for everyone around me as if i wasn't there. i am stagnant, but this time, i am the only one that is.

but that is besides the point as well.

the more i hear of people having their futures in their control, the more i feel pressurised to make an effort to do the same thing.

this post is a book review of sorts where i rant about the comfort i found reading circe. it's been a hard couple of days, and the book has borne me through it so far, leaving me with hope at the end of it. the story is about a woman condemned to an island she cannot leave - where she embraces loneliness, suffers the desire to escape and is also, weirdly enough, happy in that state.

at the root of everything i was feeling was this lingering uncertainty of passing all of my days in utter confusion. the protagonist of the book is a goddess, who tries as hard as she can to understand her purpose and her divinity, only to reject it in the end. it is a story of what it means to be human, and more importantly, what it means to be a woman.

set in an unrelatable past, it allows confusion to blossom. it allows uncertainty to flutter. it allows anger to grow, in a healthy way. in a way that does not enable the sorrow of others.

i found the book when i felt like i needed it most. so many times i am faced with anxious situations, and i find it easy to use logic as justification to not do what i clearly need to. and the story's protagonist uses her exile, her chains, her bindings to not do what everyone can see she clearly wants to. but it grows. her independence and clarity convert her necessity to do things to a ferocity that causes her to act upon those things irrespective of whether they will actually happen.

it is not an angry screaming fall from grace. it is a graceful fluttering butterfly that flaps its wings to flood the ocean on another side of the world.

locked up in my state, sitting in my comfort zone, it takes the carrying of a mountain to stand up for myself when anxious situations present themselves before me. in a line from the book, she says, "I had kept away from him for so many reasons…But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I had never been a coward." so, when one such situation slammed into me last week, my initial action had been to deny, abandon hope, and prepare myself for my suffering.

it is so much easier to know you are going to be denied, and then not fight for it. it is so easy to abandon hope and melt into the embrace of melancholy and sadness and the feeling of "this is all there ever will be for me."

but i stood up for myself.

and i think i will stand up for myself now.

battling my queerness is always about denying my masculinity. it is about forgiving myself and flushing down the drain all of the conditioning that can hurt someone else. and i seep into my vulnerability, because i am disgusted by the screamfest. hurting someone else is an inherently masculine act. forgiveness is the opposite.

i only use these words for the lack of better ones.

femininity is anti-war. it is vulnerability.

violence as a response. to stand up when you are attacked. it is the only way.

my vulnerability is so easily mistaken for weakness. it is so easily a refuge. it is so easily abandoned to stockpile nukes out of fear of destruction.

fear is at the root of everything.

I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

i can be so much, and at the same time, i don't have to be. i am OK where i am right now.

i can live an eternity, and give myself time, and in that time i have found some clarity, like a growing spidery web it envelops me in a hug, and i know i have found myself, and reading has helped. circe has helped.

at the end of the day, i realise the book is a meditation on what it is like to live in a world where everything seems to be out of your control, only to realise that it has always been you that's been in charge of what you choose to perceive and respond to.

so you continue to stand up for yourself and see yourself the way you want to; you take tiny actions to make the world seem like yours. you lay claim to your space, and you stand up for yourself. even if you know you cannot control the rest of the world; even if you know you are always alone - you know you have yourself, and your state of mind.

you always speak your truth, and you stick to it, especially when it doesn't go your way.

i am searching better everyday. someday i will have found myself.

#bookstagram #books & libraries #poets of tumblr #writing community #writers on tumblr #creative writing #circe book #circe by madeline miller #solitude

[anarch0comm1e]

a Love poem

i stay, i leave, i stay, i leave

i flitter / i fly / i stand still

one leg out the door, but an entire body curled up in bed with you

indecisive, i choose you because i can’t say no

i would not want you

but you don’t make it easy

what can i say, i flitter, i fly,

i stay,

i stand still / i storm

into you

i flicker before i go out

but i flickered for you

fireflies flutter for fear

of death

maybe i will never Love again

so i say yes to your heart

only because you want it so bad

but i don’t, i can’t

i can never be over how

i trusted her perfect little heart that

shattered mine

her perfect little heart that was

so wound up in herself that

maybe she could simply lie

to herself and hate me

for it / or Love me

i will never know

but you, i can’t trust

if you want to Love me, take me

for yourself

but i will never give myself to you

because i can’t want you for more than just as

someone to fuck

i wrote this on 29.09.2022 after i listened to a lot of leonard cohen

#books & libraries #creative writing #poetry #writing #writers on tumblr #writing community #creativity

[anarch0comm1e]

i will actively rage

i am filled with indignant hatred, and i know not where to direct it

where to channel it, where to let it burst

because it needs bursting

it needs conversion, hatred, into Love, it must, explode

my hatred is Loving

it is angrier than my anger ever can be

to you, i search, i find,

your heart, in mine

i want to carry your pain, is that too much

is there more, i can do

more is too less,

let me do everything

when i heard of it

of your hurt, of you, being hurt,

it tore me open, my heart,

endeavoured to

instinctively, almost drop, everything i was doing;

i almost made my way to you, instantly

protective, maternal, i want to hold your heart

is that too much, do i overstep, i know it isn't easy

to be vulnerable, i know, and if i ask

for you, do you fear it?

i will stay quiet, i will not ask of it, if that is what you would intend

i am here, i will stay

i will do, what must be done, but if your heart, suffers

and i cannot do something about it

my heart tears at my soul

i am okay, are you?

if you are okay, i will be too.

i wish i could carry the world over,

shouting a war cry

carry my heart, bursting with colour,

break down the door and

shatter the fascist

shatter the abuser

shatter the narcissist

bloody their essence with the colour of my hatred/Love

i am a machine and i am destroying everything that cannot be

Love

let me in

i will hold you, when they didn't

i will respond, i will look, i will see, i will raise my voice in protest,

even if i am the only one doing it

when the world is a passive onlooker

i will actively rage,

for you, this is the bare minimum.

#poetry #poetscommunity #poets of tumblr #creativity #writing #writers on tumblr #love poem

[anarch0comm1e]

crimson

i can never read books of poetry

trust me, i try, i have tried, i will try, again

i can never read books of poetry

this is not an act of looking

for clarity

this is not me making a statement to say-

“tell me what to read, enthral me,”

enthral me, i don’t say,

don’t tell me, what to read

this is not about poetry

this is not about the poet

i cannot begin to explain myself

i can never read books of poetry, even if i

tried

i can never read

books

without longing for my words to spill out of me

i have asked, i have, scoured the

lifeless wastelands of bookstores

i have searched hither and thither

i cannot read books of poetry, especially when it is glorious

because the better the poetry

the harder it is for me to sit still

with ferocity they beckon, they call,

they scream at me,

come to my bookshelves and see

come to me and see for yourself

it is not like i have not tried

i have tried to read books of poetry

and i have failed

miserably

i hoard what i do not know to finish

i throttle, i scuttle, i shuffle my feet

with anxious breath,

i shudder and scream, i

push and pull, i push

and pull

i row, my self

across the broken, shattering,

sheltering

i pour myself into books of people

people i do not let stay

i am not a flowing river

when i am trying to write

because if i were a flowing river

i wouldn’t need to write

i can never read people of poetry

because seldom do people stay

because seldom do people make it

feel like it’s worth it for me to stay

i flutter like a will-‘o-the-wisp

i cease to exist

i hoard what i cannot finish

i keep people stored away

“i will never fall in Love unless it’s you i’m falling to,”

i fall in Love a million times a day

i promise you that i

did not google will-‘o-the-wisp

before i wrote it down

words come to me like that,

they are whispers that linger from

books i put down to pick up

again someday

do not judge a book of poems

by whether you can finish it

judge it instead by whether you go back to it

i can never read books of poetry

i can never read poetry of people

i can never read the poetry of books

because the longer i linger

the worser the poet

i am reading

if you write well enough

to make me want to write

in your stead

make me want to write better

than you have

then you are a poet worth remembering

i have never finished a book of poetry in my life

trust me i have tried

but the shorter my eyes fall

on your words

the faster i run to write sermons such as these

the clearer it then seems that

this is a poet worth remembering

maybe i romanticise what you romanticise

maybe when you say nothing else is real

it makes me see the words more closely

maybe i could Love rupi kaur if you did Love her too

you are a book i just might put down

but i will pick you back up

to look for you again

and i will put you down

and look you up

and look you down to

lift you up

to lift your heart against my own

to finish your book before i’m gone

before these words come to a close

this poem must breathe its last

#poetry #bookstagram #books & libraries #reading #creative writing #writing community #inspired #artistic expression #wordsnquotes #esoteric

[anarch0comm1e]

An essay on coming back to myself.

This post begins with an acknowledgement of the laptop / phone / big-ass desktop (?) screen that you have chosen for your perusal of my content. This is not content, but what it is, is a soul dump, and there is something wildly invasive in knowing that once this goes out, it exists somewhere indefinitely.

This is not a letter I am delivering to a singular person. This is an essay on mediums. So bear with me while I explain myself better.

I have been struggling, for the past year or so, to write. Writing, for me, has become performative. I write a lot, in general (and overuse the comma). I used to write on a wordpress blog for the longest time, but somewhere along the way, the traffic on the site became abysmal. I could not engage with that platform the same way I could on any another social media site. And every time I wrote something, it required me having to market it myself, on my Instagram, for instance, and then track the viewership. Somewhere along the way, I abandoned the entire project. I started to write poetry on my own personal Instagram. The issue with Instagram was limit. I could not write long form.

To be very honest, I think I was afraid that if I were to write long posts that nobody would read (or so I thought / so I still think), I wouldn't be able to affect people.

The standard response to something like that is - no one really cares anyway, so go write what you want bestie, who is going to stop you??? But that wasn't the answer to my problems.

When I became good at writing, good enough for someone to pay me to do it - I stopped writing. Because nobody seemed to be reading what I had to say. So I had to write on demand? I don't know.

How do you deal with the fact that you need to invest time, effort, to appeal to some crowd of people to really be heard? Another example for this is when I started a tinyletter email chain. I think I wrote a couple of emails, and these were long form, and beautiful - except, they ended up in people's spams. How do you text thirty people individually every time you post, and ask them to unspam a post, without it being a) effort and b) kind of clingy and annoying (?)? So I stopped writing on that email chain.

I stopped "writing" for a long time. And I forced myself to deal with my demons - without my words to help. And I wonder why I allowed myself to do that, to myself.

At some point, I started engaging with different mediums of expression. That's when I would write poetry on Instagram (with lots of fun design stuff) on nighthawk (to be very honest I had a major personal crisis in my life at that time, so it was an I absolutely had to write or I would have died kind of situation and that's why I started it). I thought, sure, I'd write all of my fiction and dump it there, and then I'd be fine.

I kept trying new things - I made film, I tried to write music, I tried to do anything I could that would make people listen. But writing is what I do best, and unfortunately I simply stopped doing it. Nothing else I did ever felt the same as "the written word."

And that sucked. It sucked to have to do that, and it sucked having to confront the fact that it actually mattered to me how many people read what I wrote.

I wrote longer stuff very rarely, and very sparsely, and this was made up mostly of unfinished documents that I never went back to, or pieces for specific people that I then would send to.

This was around the time the lockdowns were lifted - and when college became an actual tangible thing I had to participate in.

I am a law student. My course requires me to engage with incredibly heavy literature. And perhaps contribute to it. But I cannot, for the life of me, write research papers that have my heart in them. I have written a few, and the process is seldom complicated. They are easy to put together, in fact, but I don't think, in all that tussle, I ever felt like my words were capable of changing the world.

I don't want a bunch of kids in elite academic institutions to read something I wrote and talk about how the world can be a better place. I want the everyday person to read what I have to say, and make the world a better place as a result of what they read.

I will write, only if I can change the world. That's a tall order. I sound pretentious, ambitious, and full of myself. And I know this to be true. But I also know that I have to have that ambition, and it is the only way I can write academic text in, well, poetry.

After a bit of time, I would perform at open mic events. I wrote longer stuff again for these things. And while these were challenging, interesting, and incredibly validating, I could not write something that I would want people to read, and I don't think I've written something (in at least five years) longer than five hundred words that I really wanted everyone I know to read. So here's my attempt at changing that (something I've been putting off for too long).

I write long form in this space, and I can't know if tumblr is also going to make me cringe and stop. I don't know how the platform works, but maybe things will be better now.

And if they aren't, nothing is going to stop me from walking back into my corner of the world, where I will go sit and read my books and not write anything useful again for a very long time and everything will go back to the way it was before I hit the post now button on this post.

Writing for me has become performative. But everything we do everyday is performative anyway. Even if we don't perform existence for other people, we perform it for ourselves, and to ourselves.

The difference is whether you're actually trying to add something new to the world. Art does that, and I know I need people to engage with it. And maybe this is where that finally happens, a space where I can take academic text and an almost-fiction-informal(ism) and dump them together in expressions that are, well, long form.

I am writing this "letter," if you will, as an address to the internet. And while there is something scary about that, it is also something new.

So here goes, to new beginnings, hopefully a beginning of something that actually lasts.

#writing #books & libraries #art #aesthetic #writing community #creativity #blog post #long form #academia #chaotic academia #law student #artists on tumblr #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #creative writing #tumblr writers #female writers