I saw a man today
Clutching two little bundles in his arms
Screaming, howling,
rolling on the floor.
“Animal grief”
The world is a agape
hull blown apart
all the air rushed through—
You can't tell if
you're drowning or burning
when your lungs are on fire,
blood gurgling where your heart had been.
There is no surface
to break through, to wake up,
to stop. To die.
Agony is bestial.
you thrash in death throes
condemned to life.
"My darling, my darling, I am so sorry
I couldn't protect you
Dear God have mercy, have mercy
take me with you."
I wonder if He misses us
wherever He is.
I wonder whether Heaven
is an orphanage.
whether we are one too.
I wonder whether the world
can run out of air
if it gets blown up enough times
I wonder if we're all just
supposed to keep going,
drowning and burning
till we're all animals praying
for an end.
“maybe we’re tired of tragedy maybe the world said: welcome home, it’ll be a beautiful ride. maybe the world lied, maybe the lifelines on your palms are no more than some ancient tragedy dragging its teeth on your skin like an animal that refuses to die no matter how many times you shoot it. maybe i’m applying lipstick in the front seat of my car and the leather smells like my friend rushing out to throw up. we are all rushing out to throw up because we live in a time of cataclysm, every day might be a new catastrophe. nuclear apocalypse is the new black and we are already putting shotguns in the trunks of our cars. you blow a breath of smoke and i want to know why everyone tells me that cigarettes are bad for my health when the sky over my hometown is no longer the blue my grandmother remembers, and why you think that i am destroying myself when the world is being destroyed and you just throw the leaflets away. we are not trying to kill ourselves here, we were just born exhausted, and i don’t see people in the streets, i see moving muscles and bones. we all want enough breathing room but our lungs would break apart if we got oxygen. there are people who have never even seen the stars and now you tell me that elon musk wants to launch us into space. to do what? to destroy, which is the ancient tragedy, which is the only thing we know how to do right. i weep for the stars and for the galaxies and for some passengers two centuries into the future, the child with curly hair pressing her nose to the shuttle window as Earth burns burns burns, the only legacy we ever left.”
— Nuclear apocalypse is the new black by Lana Rafaela
I found this old livejournal entry from three years ago. Still nowhere near all right but nowhere this bad either. Frankly, I am taking a moment to be impressed with myself. I came back from THIS, bitches. Woo! :D
“It’s one of those days where you’re just hanging on by the skin of your fingertips. Where you’ve been hanging from your fingertips for days and every muscle is screaming in protest and you feel like what you want more than anything is to let go and just stop the pain…but it’s a long way down and you’ll never be able to stop falling or crashing to earth and exploding into a million pieces on the ground.
But that’s not what’s scaring you. What’s scaring you is that you might change your mind while you’re mid-fall. Think that maybe you’d hung on a milisecond longer, someone would have saved you. That you might have time to watch that last spark of hope for your life and everything it could have been, just slip from your fingers and disappear into the lost expanse forever and realize you made the wrong choice.
You’re afraid that, after the initial glorious relief from pain and the exhilaration of free fall that you’ll suddenly see the ground rushing up towards you and try futilely to slow down, to breathe one last gasp of air that’ll never feel enough, to brace yourself against a final, crushing blow that can never be anticipated and a blackness that will never ever lift.
You’re afraid of what may come after, whether there really will be a white light that will carry you upon an updraft to a heavenly judgment for your weakness, or whether you will become a spirit, an insubstantial whirl of memory and emotion imprinted permanently upon the world at the moment of your death, like a mere flash-photo capture of who you once were. You’re afraid consciousness exists trapped in your bones long after your brain has rotted into the earth and you will spend centuries staring up at the lid of your coffin feeling yourself disintegrate.
You’re afraid that you will be reborn to suffer again in a new, perhaps worse existence, doomed to obliviously repeat the same cycle of hope and fear and death until your soul-memory tires out and begs for a non-existence that will never come. You’re afraid that the dead are not reborn and you will be forced to wander the world passively forever.
You’re afraid that maybe there really is no such thing as a soul, and that the sum total of you is not a permanent imprint of merit and sin, emotion and thought but a disposable bundle of nerve-endings and neurons, chemicals and biological imperatives that is snuffed out forever like the light of a tallow candle. That nothing you did or suffered ever mattered for more than a moment.
You’re afraid that you’ll always be equally afraid of both holding on and letting go, stuck in a torturous impasse.
The fear of life and fear of death. Equal and opposite forces that stretch you taut, keeping you in an eternal yet precarious stasis that leaves everything except your mind suspended in motion, leaving it to scream unheard into the void of inertia.
And you are so. Fucking. Tired.”
I remember every single person I let down and hurt. Every relationship I broke or drifted from, every one I didn't do enough to keep. I could count them out between my fingers one by one like a rosary. Every failure, every thing I never deserved, every blessing I squandered. How can I ever be a good person when I leave this trail of damage in my wake? How do I deserve love when I have treated love so lowly? How have I grown when I still wouldn't have done it all differently? Because my own hurt is just as real now as it was then?
The overwhelming dominance of free verse poetry in English sucks actually. It’s not a bad form but it IS bad that it’s the main form of english language poetry being published
I know everyone is conditioned to think rhyme, rhythm and meter is for either maudlin, sing-songy and childish poetry or excessively formal, pretentious poetry, but these things are just what makes phrases and lines memorable and punchy.
English naturally has rhythm and all poetry uses this stuff a little bit, it’s legitimately just What Make Word Sound Good
more importantly, rhyme, rhythm and meter are very connected to memory. there’s a reason why little songs and chants are our most enduring and effective memory tools