Ahhh a sonnet! The theme is beautiful and consistent, and that last line at the end is the perfect small twist. I love it!
"I've got dreams like you--no really!--just much less, touchy-feeley. They mainly happen somewhere warm and sunny on an island that I own, tanned and rested and alone surrounded by enormous piles of money." -Flynn Rider, Tangled
I forgot what anxiety felt like settling in my throat, like a vicious rose in bloom, growing, thorny, choking me.
the little bubble of giddiness that rises in my chest, pop! when I skip my first assignment. (I tell myself it’s only delayed; I’m lying.)
to long for the sweet escape of sleep, so desperately, but lie abed instead, trembling with stress forcing my eyes open and doing absolutely nothing about anything.
I thought I'd left those dark days behind me, when I left home and high school alike; I guess because I’ve had to come back, my own body saw fit to teach me a lesson. again.
I rewrote this one like three times because it was really emotionally charged to the point where I couldn’t even look it in the eye. Now I can, but I’m not sure if it has the same effect? I think it deals with some of the same issues but is hopefully a little less intensely personal than the previous drafts. Just a fun fact! Thanks everyone who’s been reading my NaPo, whether you’ve been commenting or not. <33
tacenda viii
I lie here, just that, watching the past six months run through my mind on a neverending film reel.
I keep seeing us together and telling myself that I’m not her and telling myself, “That’s a bad thing.”
I call her to ease my guilty conscience; she thinks I’m trying to be a good person, but I’m not so sure I’m trying to be anything.
I must still care about your good opinion more than hers, more than my own;
else why would I have dreamed this moment and awoken in blinding terror?
she was far from home, and I was fascinated. a girl from the midwest, I’d always longed for a taste of the world. she’d had far more than a taste, and the dust of it still crusted her shoes. the memories.
a year younger than me at least, she was more woman than I.
it was hard for me to feel for those she’d left behind; for hadn’t she been living this way since she was a child? hadn’t I refused to look back on my own origins?
but I did not understand. not then.
we were the first to walk together. it was the first time I truly knew another soul.
we moved quickly past pleasantries to the deeper world beneath, discovering each other and respecting each other for what we were; no more, no less.
“home” meant little to me since I’d been fighting to leave, to make my home in the west.
now, in my house, I realized that I did it. made my home there. and only now do I feel the full force of its loss.
only now do I think of her travels, never settling, a constant cycle of loss and renewal.
she never let it harden her.
full of compassion, endeavoring, always, to understand, she is a woman created of her trials, each time stronger than before.
spring rains fall on my hands my hand on the piano keys, I play a song for you I don’t know the words words are harder and harder to find these days, go read a dictionary, maybe it can help you get cultured; know your art your art is something I always admired, I could never be good enough at it but you make me want to try.
if you’re reading this keep reading reading makes the monsters go away because in books, the monsters are imaginary; don’t think about the monsters in the real world because they’re scarier. scarier than all of this is the possibility of not-seeing-you-again even though it’s a lie, I’ve seen the house for next year next year when the rains will come again and I will be home.
sit on the back porch and swing in the hammock; remnants of summer like four-leaved clovers pressed in dictionary pages pages of my journals in my mind all I have are the memories like flowers flowers bending down beneath the spring showers, as if they hear the music music I’m playing not for them not for you but only for myself, and the rain.
inspiration is skipping stones across the deep waters of my mind, a lake so blue and clear you can see right to the bottom of it. the stones sink, ideas settling against each other, finding their resting place.
love is tossing a penny into the deep well of my heart, wishing it will bring you luck, watching it tumble, a bright copper in the vastness of my potential. gleaming in the quiet darkness.
but stones and pennies, who knows what becomes of them? not I, for each is only one among many, and I have my own to throw.
spring rains fall on my hands my hand on the piano keys, I play a song for you I don’t know the words
There's such a pleasant continuity in how the first image (rain falling on hands) shifts to the next image (hands on piano keys), ah it's lovely, there are so many ways to visualize it, to think of it. I love those lines.
i write on seas of pages, making waves of words.
These lines sound so visually rhapsodic to me. You have this sweetly strange way of beginning a poem in a simple, ordinary way but then suddenly creating powerful bursts of imagery that really stab the reader in all the right places.
You either worship something higher than yourself or end up worshiping yourself
Time heals all wounds, they say. I wonder why it took me so long to admit that I had a wound in the first place?
It’s true that I’ve been aching less, these past few days.
No one could help the feelings that took root in my heart. I guess the soil was ready for whatever would take hold in it and grow— and grow they did. (the feelings, I mean)
It’s hard to want to weed out something so beautiful, even though I’ve felt the pricks of the thistle thorns. Maybe it takes pain to be beautiful in the first place.
Still, I think it hurts less than before. I won’t know for sure until we meet again (soon). As they say, only time will tell.
collect my scattered thoughts and sew them up; tattered rags might yet make whole cloth. maybe that can stop the shreds of memory from ghosting in and out.
stitch these strands into your heart so that when things fall apart there’s something left to remember me by. for I, too, have felt the needle prick of your threads being woven between mine.
so miss me, kiss me, hold me close, circle my wrist in twine. for it only takes a pair of scissors, sharp (and a hurting heart) to cut me loose.
If this one makes you feel like one of us is going insane, then I’m setting the right tone. :]
tacenda xv
help me, please, because I don’t know how to help myself.
like a fever dream where everything is too big/too small this house is warping, changing shape and size, the four walls are breathing (i can hear them) and I’m screaming at them, pounding on them (release me!), falling to the floor in tears, disheveled. in my dreams.
my brain can scream, just like my brain can travel back to the past when things were o.k., but my body sits, slack, in front of a blue computer screen, staring at itself (doesn’t feel like myself anymore). I can’t absorb another word, don’t want to, I DON’T WANT TO, I WANT TO GO HOME. please. tell me when i can go home?
without my mountain to orient me, without my people to ground me, I’m floating away and my body is a hollow balloon, filled with hot air and memories and the last breaths I took when I was free. but now I have to force myself just to breathe, to eat, to move.
(my limbs are shaking with the tension, with the cold that comes from an absence as deep as the lake of ice in my heart) if I close my eyes hard enough I can look at the chemical structures of my soul. something acidic in there and if I didn’t have double vision, maybe I could tell what it was. if only my brain would stop its flickering in black and white.
someone help me, please. someone hold me.
Last edited by Que on Thu Apr 16, 2020 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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