eliot-unless

[eliot-unless]

mute

i don’t even really remember the last time i wrote anything, and this is far from finished, but i have a concept and a framework that i’m liking and i just want to upload it to sort of whisper into the world “hello, do you remember me?”

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[eliot-unless]

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#under a read-more for suicide #suicide - #disordered eating - #eating disorder - #anorexia nervosa - #suicidal - #depression - #i haven't written in ages and this is what i fucking come out with #aren't you glad you all knw ome #aren't you just so glad

[eliot-unless]

My body is a temple and I am just trying not to burn it down

I find photos of myself from three years ago, Photos where I am all angles, All collar bones and elbows and protruding ribs. Where my greatest control was a meticulously calculated spiral descent, a retreat, a self-induced crumble because dammit, if I was going to fall apart it was going to be at my own hands.

I drum my fingers on the desktop for a moment Trying to turn away from these reminders That I am not that person anymore, That I have traded these patterns for new ones (that I am still not sure if the new ones suit me, trying—and failing—not to think, god, I looked so good then. as if the price of being healthy is feeling ugly, body and soul.)

I rise and pull out jeans two sizes larger, a t-shirt one size up, but barely fitting I drape my legs off the end of my bed and try to will myself into thinking this is how I want to be, this is who I want to be, thickness and body and all.

  I sign armistices with the rings of fat around my hips, Agree never to stare too long at how I fill out jeans differently now. I am not convinced I am at peace with growing sizes, with settling and resettling, less definition between waist and hips more cushion between world and bones I am grasping at love handles, trying to find a grip a way to love this new and different self.  I tell myself these hips are perfect parentheses That they hold secrets that perhaps I would not share with everyone, but with those who would take time to read the lines on my hands on my wrists, and ribs those spaces between hard places that whisper “I am, I am-- or I am trying to be.”

#poetry #poets on tumblr ? #tw: body talk #body talk #self-image #i haven't written anything in so so long #i hope this is not the only thing for a long time again #uh hello if there are people who actually still follow this bllog #hello. #possibly not finished? #eh

[eliot-unless]

horology

I could believe the watchmaker had planned it-- Putting teeth and gaps such that we could turn in tandem, Fitting us together in flitting bronze and gold.

Sometimes, it's urgent. The incessant ticking of an impatient countdown. The frantic attempts to fit as many  I, I, I love, love, love yous  (only you) into each hour marked by a grandfatherly bell. 

Other times, it's comforting. The steady background toll of a carefully wound machine-- The constant reminder in each click Each tick and tock That you love me. That another second has gone by but nothing has changed; that the gears still turn in a pattern that speaks our names.

The universe runs on this, (this and other patterns), But I could believe that those methods are secondary to the click-click-click of our fingers sliding home.

When we are together, I would swear that my life runs like so much beautiful clockwork. 

#06/06/2012 #abigail-eliot #cellecinestpasunekate #clocks #horology #poems #poetry #revelationk #time #fuck i just wish you were here

[eliot-unless]

portraits of my lover in the summer

a pair of square-rimmed glasses folded neatly on a desk  beside a wristwatch, and an iPod, cord tangled.

a leather wallet with a cracked bus pass; a backpack with an ALF button and a nalgene tumor.

neon socks, hung singly on closet door knobs; a rumpled pair of boxer-briefs on a hardwood floor.

three fingers, playing lullabies across a protruding spine; two parted lips, mid-whisper, 'gainst an ear.

a high contrast monograph of two bodies intertwined; three photographs of the spaces between breaths.

[ erm.... hi everyone. are there people who still follow this? erm. well. i have been writing! i have not posted what i have been writing online in quite some time. you may see a flurry of posts over the next few days, you may not. it'll prolly ALL be romance-related. feedback appreciated! much loves. xo ]

#30/05/12 #portraits of my lover in the summer #love #romance #poetry #photographs #photography #revelationk

[eliot-unless]

musings from a still walking shadow

(for the prompt "unwrapping")

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. -- Ecclesiastes 2:11

"Well, we can't just throw that out." It's 1:20pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and I am sitting (in the fanciest swivel chair I have ever seen) listening to my mother and my grandmother have the same conversation for the umpteenth time (except this time, it's actually valid.) "I mean, it's forty years old at least, but that's still people's information." My mother hands me the oddly shaped binder and points to the elaborate shredder on the floor beside me. "You'll have to shred it." (that's how it came into my head—the word shred on a separate line break) And so it came to pass that I spent an hour tearing out, and then tearing up hundreds of yellow sheets of paper that denoted addresses, insurance rates, income— Numeric markers of hundreds of lives, (hundreds of sales) Between 1960 and 1980. Each page had a number, a name, a value. I destroyed every one, and wondered where they (if they) were now If any were like my grandfather, just ash meted out in film canisters to the family with the rest in a box, with a detachable plastic fish on the front, in a cold hole in the ground in a plot that had been picked out for years. I wondered if any had relatives like me, sitting in the house of deceased family members with literally demented widows; relatives left behind, sitting in expensive swivel chairs and methodically sorting through decades of living (methodically bagging their existence and dragging it to the curb, week by week) And wondering if you were supposed to feel things, while you did it. And unlike peeling onions, or unwrapping Christmas gifts, unlike opening bills or cracking open the first page of a new book, the emotion didn't grow with every layer down. Every stage of my grandparents' life that we worked through (and, correspondingly, every sign of my grandmother's failing faculties that we came across) left me more stoic, more methodic, less willing to laugh at the giant box full just of toilet paper tubes for crafts half a decade after any children were young enough to want to build robots-- less upset at my grandmother's inability to remember what she had bought at the grocery store though it had only been three hours, and there was nothing in her fridge-- less engaged with my poetic side of their life-- And left to confront the blank expanse the sea of garbage bags the void of empty binders of insurance law from decades ago and wonder— Is this all that my life will be?

----

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -- Macbeth, V.v.21-30

#12/30/11 #poetry #poem #death #existential #existentialism #responses to death #grandfather #quoting the bible and shakespeare like the prick i secretly totally am

[eliot-unless]

retracing our fault lines

Write about one of your own secrets, a secret of someone you know, and a secret you don't know - perhaps feed your paranoia and contemplate what those around you could be hiding or write about something unknown to everyone. (the secret of the universe, for example).

i. He plants little kisses on the backs of my hands, the nape of my neck, the slope of my forehead; little flowers grow in my mind. He is a sun that shines on my face— I am in bloom. ii. She passes me a mug of tea in the tiny, tiled kitchen and our hands brush (mine steady, hers quaking) "I need for what I'm about to tell you to not go anywhere." she says, a nervous smile across her lips. Our words traverse the ocean; our silences trace continents and questions as we both contemplate mutiny. My forehead wrinkles. I throw her a life preserver. (We both know that with this conversation, we could both abandon ship.) "Why would you ever assume otherwise?" (the anchor is dropped.) iii. I have sneaking suspicions that our deepest and darkest secrets are not as deep or as dark as we believe: That the light of others' days (and the love of others' hearts) would cover all the times we've missed the mark.

#poetry #12/12/11 #lit-lash #prompt: secrets #secrets #prompted #love #hope #hopeful

[eliot-unless]

civil war

I spend ten minutes looking at pictures of metal buildings then another five imagining my nervous system being made of paper-thin steel looking at the little split pill on the desk and silently counting back from a hundred trying to keep my breathing under control.

I tell myself lies;

That tomorrow will be better,

That the side effects will be less, That I will get out of bed tomorrow and love the sun for shining (That I will get out of bed tomorrow, full stop) (That these little split pills will honestly, truly, make things better instead of worse.)

My hands always shake. I almost always cry. 

It is a kind of torture force-feeding myself these five-milligram doses of emotional overload. Like playing a bizarre game of Russian Roulette— Every cartridge is filled with an emotion and if you aren’t careful, they’ll all fire at once.

I swallow the pill with a torrent of water and always expect my stomach to reject it, but it never does.

The pill always tastes like iron, but I think that’s from biting my tongue.

I feel like I’ve thrown myself from an airplane in the dark No parachute, and I can’t tell which way is up.

I’ve nowhere to land.

I scream out to the night sky. I ask it if I can ever go home, (if I’ll ever make it, and where on earth it’s gone) 

A gilded book on my shelf with a leather cover whispers, “Here, Katie. Here.”

But the wind is in my ears and tears are in my eyes, and there’s half a world of headaches and nausea to traverse. There’s landmines of anxiety and trip wires of despair, There’s mustard gas in the taste of “You will never get better.”

(The hardest part is knowing that the war is with myself and at the end of the day, I've already lost.)

#10/11/11 #fuck this piece #i just need it out of me #sickness #war #metaphors #mystery fainting illness #medication #i just need this somewhere that's not in my notebook anymore it's burning holes #i don't even think this is any good

[eliot-unless]

damage control

in cold canadian winters it gets dark before night really falls. and in this in-between stage, when you turned on the headlights and the radio buttons glowed orange i fingered a loose thread in my jeans and tried to hold onto the thoughts i was having. things were breaking up; thoughts were breaking down (things were just breaking, and i didn't want to admit it.) and while you gripped the steering wheel like you thought it might fly away (like it might still have some life in it, and you had to be sure it was gone) i ran my tongue over my teeth and looked at the stereo clock and thought to myself that we had a personal best (a personal worst,) and i was regretting coming home before i'd even gotten there. my fingers had little twitches by the time we pulled into the driveway (and it wasn't the possibility of an oncoming seizure) you had pulled a kleenex to shreds between gardiner's road and development drive. my ears were still ringing with the sound of your shaky breath my shoulders were aching from the new weight of your combined problems, and I counted among my blessings that I hadn't seen you drink yet as I sat down at the table and silently ate my way through a sub. we made it maybe two hours before the first fight, and it was just over eighteen hours later when my brother stormed out no sweater, no coat, just a muscle shirt and ripped sweats because he was tired of everything being about you. and so once again, you refused to talk to my father and stormed out of the house to hear the hive mind tell you that you were right, you were always right, that it was you against the world and if my father would just man up and throw down and beat my brother's ass to kingdom come, and if you stayed angry long enough you could burn right through everyone else's line of reasoning and everything would somehow miraculously perfect (or if it wasn't, well, at least you'd be queen of it.) and i sat in the living room and did what i've always done: i tried to escape into fantasy novels, and then into the bible, and i tried to talk to the big man upstairs on all of our behalves but my voice was hoarse and my heart was broken and i didn't really believe that he'd fix it because he never had before. and though i'd sworn i wouldn't do it, though i'd talked to my reflection for hours when i was two hundred kilometres away and i'd told myself, "that's not your job, that's not your fight, that's not your responsibility, and damn it, kate, even if it was, you've never succeeded at it anyway." -- though i'd sworn, to myself and to god and to people that loved me that i wouldn't, i set out to do damage control and all i got myself was carnage the fire and flames of a plane wreck with no survivors: the crushing reminder that i hadn't fixed it, it hadn't worked-- you were still a child and i was still busted.

#23/10/11 #poetry #relationships #i hate this piece because i didn't even succeed in making something awful seem pretty #all i did was write it down #and now i'm showing the world? #i'm such a fucking narcissist

[eliot-unless]

It's always cloudy in the forecast for my mind

My body has become a stranger. Every day, I wake up and I am meeting it for the first time.

(Yesterday, I was nearly incoherent. Today, I am stronger. Tomorrow, the fainting will strike sudden, and hard like a cobra— … am i poisoning myself?)

I am a spectator to the clenching and un-clenching of my fists.

I am losing track of everything. Each time, I awake with hazy thoughts and hurting teeth and my arms feel as if they belong to someone else.

His hands brush my skin, but I don’t know where, and I don’t even really know if it’s mine.

I collapse on my bed and I close my dead eyes. My limbs sink through the sheets to the floor. When they return, the sun is no longer streaming through the window, but The Beatles are streaming out of my laptop. I can’t remember turning them on.

It’s so hard to tell if things are better or worse when you can’t figure out where you are.

#28/09/11 #mystery fainting illness #disoriented #disorientation #illness #sickness #sick #frightened #body #mind #disconnect #spectator

[eliot-unless]

adrift in an ocean of illness

I am a battered ship with no port of call. (I have begun to forget what it is like to be docked in harbour.) My limbs are too many anchors, and we are capsizing; we are rolling over in the weight of worry and doubt.

Sometime in the night, my thoughts changed from balancing ballast to another breaking point— a hole in the hull a mile wide, a breach in the shape of an ‘x,’ because it’s wrong:

everything seems wrong.

I am lost, adrift beneath the northern lights. I am taking every direction one turn of the wheel at a time, because it is all that I can do.

I am leaving an oil wake in the ocean behind me, but the tide has swept away all my map-points. You see so many stars in the arctic, but the stars can’t keep you from getting cold.

#this is the first time possibly ever that i submitted a poem to the right blog the first time #25/09/11 #illness #anxiety #metaphor #sailing #boat #ocean #arctic #cold #we still don't really know what's wrong and the only thing i didn't articulate in this poem is how much that fact just really scares me a lo #this feels unfinished but maybe that's good #maybe that leaves room for lighthouses or sudden appearing ocean towns or whatever #i take my metaphors too seriously

[eliot-unless]

revelationk:

living-saints:

Pamphleteer | The Weakerthans

The rhetoric and treason of saying that I’ll miss you. Of saying “Hey, well maybe you should stay.” Sing “Oh, what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one?” like me, remembering the way it could have been. Help me with this barricade.

I talked about praying for weeks and weeks and finally getting answers, and while it’s true that I’ve gotten my response (and true that really, I knew it all along) and I know in my head what my actions will be and trust that whatever should happen will happen, that doesn’t make feeling like this any easier and it doesn’t make feeling like this any less of, well, feeling.

Sometimes I wish I was a thinker. Life must be so much easier to figure out.

I’ve never felt a song apply as strongly to any situation in my life as this one.

So often I try to write things about you, about me, about how I feel about you, and I get lost, I get swept off in these feelings that I don’t have words for. Poetry is a weak and inexact thing, it is a crayon portrait of how things really are, it is desaturated and of poor quality and will never live up to the feelings in the moments of things as they happen.

I don’t understand how I slide so easily between these two mindsets, how I can sit at my desk some days and just know that the timing is not right. That we are friends, that we are great friends, and you shouldn’t risk it when you’re so unsure, you should never put things you value this much on the line, it is better to keep what you have than risk it for something that wouldn’t work right now. Something that could work someday, and could be something wonderful and could last and never rust, but you have to wait, you know in the marrow of your bones in the same way that you know how ocean spray feels when you reach your hands through the boat rails, that if you wait long enough the dolphins will come, but you have to wait, and if you move you’ll lose your balance, or you’ll frighten them, or mom will notice what you’re doing and call you back.

There’s something in me, somewhere, that says, not now. Maybe someday, but not now.

(there’s a part of me that gets really angry when I have thoughts like that because it’s almost as if I have no regard for what you think or what you feel.)

I’d be okay if that was how I only ever felt, just that feeling that it could be right, but it isn’t yet. It’s a nice feeling, in a bizarre way. It’s nice because I get to enjoy your company, it’s nice because I get to be your friend, it’s nice because there is comfort in no expectations, in just being friends, in having the same interests and laughing about the same things and living my life with you in and out of it. I have a lot of appreciation for all of these things.

The problem is I don’t always have that, the problem is when songs like this come onto my shuffle, the problem is when we’re talking and I look over at you and there’s something about the way you’re sitting or the gesture you’re making or the exact combination of the tilt of your eyebrow and the twist of your lips in the half-smile you make when I become self aware and get flighty. The problem is when I start to think things about how much I just wish that I could impress you, the problem is when I start to actually understand that feeling people talk about like there are butterflies inside of my chest, the problem is that warmth that sometimes washes over me when we’re together, or when we’re in different places and my mind wanders to where you are or what you’re doing, and then my phone buzzes because you’ve thought of me.

(it’s so ridiculous how excited i get over the idea that you think of me.)

There’s something about you, or something about me, there’s something about the world that we live in that tells me that there is more than what I’m seeing, that there’s a whole other world superimposed on the one that you can see, and it’s the one where dragons really do exist and there really is magic in things and in people, especially in people, and the spark that is inside of me recognizes the spark that is inside of you and says, I want that. It says, I see what I am and I see what they are and I think that if we were one thing instead of two, we would be unstoppable.

And this is how I know that I’m a feeler and not a thinker, it’s that I have thoughts that like, ridiculous thoughts about how maybe there are forevers and maybe God does sit up in space weaving tapestries and picking people and saying, “you and you, for the rest of your lives,” and not that that necessarily applies here but that it is a possibility, that there’s a reason we have myths about true love conquering everything, that there’s a reason we have all those stupid videos on youtube about elaborate and intense proposals or weddings, there’s a reason everything comes down to you against the world, and that reason is because every myth, every movie, every story comes from something true and that truth here, is that love really is something incredible and magical and life-changing.

And my thinker part of me rises up and says, “That’s stupid, the divorce rate is a two-thirds. That’s preposterous, you can’t pretend you’ll both be the same forever. You can’t honestly believe that loving someone is enough to make other things not matter.” And how I know I’m a feeler is because I have those rational thoughts like that, and then the feeling side of me tells the thinking side of me to shut the fuck up, and that I deserve everything wonderful that the world has to offer me—that even if it didn’t work, and even if it didn’t last forever, that there are sacrifices worth making and that it’s better to love and to lose than to never really love at all.

But now it’s the morning and I’m wondering when I wrote this. Now it’s the morning and I’m thinking that maybe everything I felt last night was true, but that if it is true and it could be perfect until I just waited for the time to be right, if I remembered that fools rush in and that maybe that God up there weaving tapestries has a prettier one than the one in my head, then maybe that would rein things in.

I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I agree with myself. But if there’s a chance for me to do something here (or not do something, if that’s the right thing), and to do that thing right the first time?

Well. It’s awful and it’s hard but that’s really, likely, the thing that needs to happen most.

#Left and Leaving #Pamphleteer #The Weakerthans #music #how I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you #and you don't know where you should look so you look at my hands

[eliot-unless]

a forest fortress

i want to burrow into that perfect, nameless space between your neck and your shoulder (i want to hollow it out and make it my home.) i want to lean into your sturdy, browned arms and rest there for hours (i will sit among the blood vessels and sing songs.) i want to climb up to your forest fortress and sit among your leaves (i will trace the veins of your thoughts and rustle them with my fingers.) I want to take refuge among your branches and converse with the birds up there; I want to feel the wind in my hair and not be afraid of falling.

#08/11/11 #poetry #romantic #trees #metaphor #leaves #love?

[eliot-unless]

on dusk and dying

i wanted this to be about glory. about how bright things were for you before the end about the swell of gold before the darkness came about the sheer span of your warmth. i wanted this to be a portrait that made you perfect. bright, brilliant, bold. goldleaf. the kind of likeness they hang in a museum. the kind of painting that makes things immortal. instead, i'm forced to write about the blistering swell of your agony the dark blood that spilled across our canvas sky that the warmth was actually fever, (but that you were so, so cold) that the sun disappeared behind a drug-induced fog that you were never awake and only barely remembered my name. the only consolation is that the coming darkness will obliterate everything. and while it will take you from us, it will also take you from all the pain you had to face at the end.

#08/31/2011 #dying #death #sunsets #dusk #family #loss #metaphor

[eliot-unless]

road trip ennui

bumper sticker reads, "Virginia is for lovers;" he drives on, alone.

#poetry #haiku #love #08/31/2011

[eliot-unless]

emotional cliff-diving

i am brusquely throwing myself into any- and every- thing that has a chance of my returning with a clear head and an empty (or, if necessary) hardened heart so you will not longer be even an option and i will no longer be lovesick. i dive into things. reading, driving, planning, working; i hope that when i finally resurface, my eyes will be clear. that you will seem reshaped, or i will be reformed, beaten by waves of clarity-- that this taste of salt will no longer seem worth it, that i will no longer want you in all the ways i do

#poetry #metaphor #water #ocean #love #romance #08/30/2011

[eliot-unless]

slipped slope i

You stare up at me from hundreds of photos never smiling with your mouth, but occasionally, with your eyes. like the fabled prince rilian, you are your most lucid when thought to be far away; when your pride is stripped, and you whisper, "let me go, please let me go." they are poisoning you. they are poisoning you, and your skin is like paper, they are poisoning you, and your veins are like spiderwebs. they are dark, everything inside of you is dark. like a horse beneath a yoke, you buck and scream, but your legs are faltering beneath you (to say nothing of your spirit) You stare up at me from the hospital bed, trying desperately to smile with your mouth, but your lips are chapped and your skin is cracked, and your eyes are overcast.

#death #family #poetry #grandfathers #prince rilian #the chronicles of narnia #the silver chair #obscure literary references #if t. s. eliot did it #so can i