you lean forward in your seat, hands flexing around the wheel (pinky tapping to the beat of boys......don't......cry......). we are traveling around the speed of light, so fast we could almost catch up with our headlights that splay out onto the asphalt before us. I guess the speedometer only reads 185 km/h but it's all the same, the way the yellow dashes down the middle of the road chase each other into a solid line. I feel so close to alive and all I can hear is the sound of the night hugging the car air slicked up against the windshield, tires spinning goodbye and maybe I won't return into the road, and all I can feel is a need to be more alive: faster, louder, harsher. as if you read my mind you roll the windows down and crank the radio. the acceleration makes my blood slush against my ears, against the sides of my veins, against the valves of my heart, against the edges of my fingernails, against the back of my eyelids. I think I will only feel alive when I catch up with my headlights, so fast that time can only try to reach me. I think I will only feel alive when all this speed makes me immortal.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
OHH loving the imagery behind your first poem!! Speed as an idea can be used in so many ways as a poetic theme, and I love the way you used it here. Some of my fav lines are "I think I will only feel alive / when I catch up with my headlights, / so fast that time can only try to reach me." The concept behind chasing headlights is so unique and paints such a vivid picture in my mind! Can't wait to read more ! <3
Fly me to the moon Let me play among the stars Let me see what spring is like on a-Jupiter and Mars
- Frank Sinatra
The universe is not gentle with astronauts like me. I came here looking for myself, or you, or anything at all in the throngs of so many star bodies - but I believe the night sky told me a falsehood.
This outer space I'm in is nothing full of lifetimes of nothing. My limbs struggle to press into anything tangible: little bits of matter are few and far between. I'm at the whim of solar winds.
I thought that surely here I could find some connection. In such an infinite expanse, I thought I must float my way into some stray particles of meaning. At very least I'd meet another astronaut like me and we could laugh and say "small world" and then pour ourselves into the same night sky - but the universe does not indulge my obsession with fate. The universe is not gentle with space tourists like us.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
@figmoon thank you!!! I find it a lot easier to create imagery when I have some real memory or scenario as a starting block to build off of, honestly, which is where that "chasing headlights" image came from! I'm glad you enjoyed the poem <3
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
i tell you i wish there was a universe in my pocket: barely more than this piece of scrunched up scrap with its blot of dr. pepper in the margin. i'd unfold the paper until it was large enough to step into. a pocket universe. listen, i know it's silly but what if we could do this little living thing without any of the consequences. imagine an existence where you don't wake up in the mornings with tears crusted onto the corners of your corneas. absurd, i know.
in a pocket universe, i'd fuck around and find out at 2 a.m. do donuts in an empty costco parking lot with the windows down and viva la vida skidding against the city soundscape. break a couple laws and be a little happy.
you ask how i can be so sure this is not my pocket universe.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
he stays up til 1 just so he can watch the sky breathe: an inhale of cut grass, an exhale of humid breeze. his camera roll is a collage of friends captured in the moments they are not trying to look pretty, screenshotted recipes he knows he will never make, the moon in all her languorous poses, and blurry scenes out of car windows (red buttons on the dash, neon signs with crooked letters, squiggles drawn on fogged glass). he slumps a little when he walks, as if he's carrying the weight of never quite enough sleep. he wears dark undereyes like he is a raccoon. a little bit lackadaisical, a little bit alluring. his shoes always seem to be coming undone and when he bends down to tie the laces, there is black nail polish trailing off the edges of his cuticles - and there is a rattling nighttime traffic that trails off the edge of his voice when he speaks. he speaks in his eyes, in his cheeks, in the angle of his nose; there is a novel to be read in the way his face moves. he has a sketchbook filled with drawings of all the people he has met, flawed and scribbled out and poorly shaded. he plays the guitar - his body forms a wide arc as he leans over it, and his waffle knit shirt makes ridges against his shoulder blades and his collar bones, pools against his sternum. he can play bohemian rhapsody, hot cross buns and the song he wrote last night instead of crying himself to sleep. he drives his friends to get bubble tea at 11 pm on a week night and sometimes he takes corners ten over. he stays up til 1 wondering about life as a faraway galaxy - whether it would be dizzying to have that much gravity. i stay up til 1 wondering about life as him. it must be dizzying.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
Every one of these is so amazing, I can feel them. I love how you're capturing that feeling of--I don't even know if it can be described except in ways like you have here, a sort of melding of and tension between exhilaration and calmness. I used to climb out my bedroom window in the middle of the night so I could stand on the top of the roof and it'd feel like that. You capture it really well, with so many amazing lines <33
she/her/they acethetic and paronoid *waves leafy fronds*
look at all these couples dancing in their matching outfits, red dress shirt against red mini dress. look at how easy and casual it is for them to touch each other - one hand on hip. thumb against palm lines. head on neck. elbow around elbow. see how they fit together like intricate little mysteries. even the way their words weave together under the blanket of stereo music is second nature - quip tucked into retort sown into little secrets. I do not know how many pieces a puzzle of that magnitude may be; perhaps three thousand, but even that feels like an underestimate. imagine the luxury of having the time to put each piece in its place, starting around the edges and working your way in until you know the way a heart beats and the way a voice folds. I can't pretend I am not mad.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
@Stringbean thank you!!! I think one of the best parts of poetry is capturing feelings that are hard (if not impossible) to describe in literal words, so I'm really glad my poems are able to do that for you :')
I do not have enough gravity to hold myself together. My moon has gone missing, drifting off to try and meet the sun (it is always a solar eclipse these days: when I try to read my mind I am met by flickering street lamps and the slightest suggestions of shadowy life). I have no ebb and flow, no tide; blood pools in all the wrong places. Perhaps I should go swimming, stare at my red reflection and practice learning not to drown.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
when i do not take care of myself, my hands are the first to know. these knuckles quickly become red ravines that break wide open if i make a fist. perhaps i am trying to warn myself that punching holes into walls has never filled any holes in a heart - we are not made of drywall or plywood.
all that is left of my white nail tips is lace. the skin of my thumb is so thoroughly picked that some of my thumbprint is missing: a document of identity rudely interrupted by an underlayer of pink flesh. but perhaps the trace of dried blood down the crease of my nail says more about who i am than any fingerprint.
all of my exhaustion collects and marinates under my nail beds; flaky skin and festering thoughts i have dug out of my scalp, blood and pus from pimples i did not have the self-control to outwit, and bits of plaque i picked from between my teeth on nights i was so aware of my gums, i could not sleep.
this morning i noticed eczema on the side of my finger. perhaps i am trying to tell myself that spring is here and this will all be over soon. only my fear of change has been enough to make me lotion my hands.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
i'd like to imagine i know you by now -- looking at you: a moony silhouette of nose sloping to forehead while you flip your head upside down over the passenger seat to talk to me. god, i'm addicted to the way you exist. you don't know how beautiful you are at all. not even in a cliche, insecure way; it's just that you can't see the poetry that's written into your eyebrows. it's all backwards in a mirror. the way you pretend to bite my finger because it's 12:30 in the morning and we're on some random highway and there are unspoken words settled into a sheet over the car seats. god, i'm addicted to the way you exist.
i'd like to imagine this is an intimate thing -- but everyone who's ever seen you has seen you as well. anyone who has heard you speak and breakdown into breathless, wordless laughter wants to wrap themselves up in your voice, in the threads of your voice cracks. i don't know how to tell you this without making it sound like i'm in love. perhaps i am, but that is not the point. you deserve to know how beautiful your existence is to me and every bystander.
When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural thing but also least interesting thing you can be is afraid.
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