jankywhale

[jankywhale]

March 18-

You are not around anymore and I want to die. I want to stick my hands inside the earth you aren’t buried in and resurrect the thing in me that left when you did. I miss the part of me I don’t remember anymore. I think there is only that- the way to grieve a death is through losing a part of yourself. And in that loss, the space is easier to move through. I couldn’t have stayed alive if that part of me didn’t go. Surely something bad, I tell myself, would have happened. Surely something worse. My mind spins in circles thinking about the alternative. What if I still had that part. What if the earth wasn’t taken from under my feet and I never slipped into the dark. Sometimes that’s what it is still like. I wake up and I am still peering out from the eyes of someone else.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

via weheartit

[jankywhale]

I am trying

to be steady but I keep

thinking about it-

my mind is unaware of where my body is

it lies in fields full of

everything bad-

everything is bad.

When I feel it,

I feel everything.

There is so much beauty and pain

and sadness

all of it mixed together like

a sick joke-

I feel as if everyone

around me is laughing while I stay silent.

I wonder if I am the only one who notices

the silence-

Hands tied to balloon strings they

lift me up

up, up.

There is no other guilt

like this.

Other than thinking

only I notice.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

via wehearit

[jankywhale]

Between the waves, Ivan Aivazovsky, 1898

[jankywhale]

I hold everything so hard

it crumbles in my hands like

cracked clay from

a too-hot kiln.

It is strange I have this in me

when I have always felt cold.

Everything I have done,

I learned it backwards.

The alphabet, dancing, falling,

realizing, years later, that no,

it was not love. It was, whatever love looked

like in a funhouse mirror.

We twisted and formed love to look like

something that we wanted. And it was all we knew.

I learned to kiss with my eyes open. I learned to fall-

feet first.

I am willing to break my entire body

at the chance of being seen.

I learned how to mimic the sound-

how to make glass into sand.

I still open my eyes.

I still check to see if you

are watching.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

There was only the sky, and the rain, and the feeling of longing that never left. A burning of smoke in a forest, there are footsteps here that lead to nowhere. There are stairs in every corner, doors in all of the ceilings, saying I love you, saying I am meant to love you. You don’t have to say it back. Take the rocks from the bottom of the lake and give them away. Take everything and everywhere you once knew, give it to the burning sun.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

I don’t know how to say this, but I’ve been wanting to say it for a long while. Once, when I was a kid, I walked to the park down the street during a snowstorm. Everything was white, and I didn’t wear a jacket, no one noticed that I’d left. It’s like that feeling that you get in winter, when the sky is completely gray-white, and no one is outside, and the humming of the wind is the only thing you can hear. Your hands are aching from the chill, and the air is ice to your lungs. The feeling that everything is dead, and has been, and you’re the only one seeing it. The way everyone is in their homes, windows glowing, and the world is dying and I’m sad all the time, but there’s a park down the street. The winter is just that, winter. It always felt so familiar to me, something I could sink my teeth into, it feels comfortable, and I’m the type of sad person that feels good being sad. I don’t know what would happen if I didn’t.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong #richard silken

[jankywhale]

[jankywhale]

Tell me we’ll never get old. That every time the sun rises it’s for us. That you saw me in a dream, once, before you met me. That everything bad shouldn’t happen but it’s okay because we wouldn’t know how to talk about it if it didn’t. That here is home. Tell me we deserve to be happy about things, especially when they’re small. About the time by the lake, when it was raining and we were swimming in lightning. We ran so far into the water and I swear if you look deep enough, part of me still lives there. The sky was deep gray and the clouds were low and I was so happy and sad all at once. Tell me it’s okay. That there are more days to be sad. More sunlight and fruit to pick from orange trees, more time here. My grandmother always told me that my sadness was something that wasn’t going to go away. I never knew what she meant.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

I feel happy being sad. I feel less happy not being sad. I thought that being sad made me lonely. I thought once you loved someone you loved them forever. I thought a lot of things before. Sometimes I think the sky has all of the answers. If only I could just ask you everything. I walked down the street and that was enough. I want those things to be enough. I want making dinner and listening to music to be enough. My love has grown small and iridescent. A small flower encased in a glass ceiling. It doesn’t grow anymore but it feels the same. I am growing but in a different way.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong #richard siken

[jankywhale]

The summer breaks away into small things. Every story you know the ending to. Every chance you get, you will learn to say no. This isn’t what I wanted. I hate the summer and I hate the heat it brings. I have been longing for cold weather. I have been longing since the summer started. Is there the part where we come back? Is there a story that is just that, a story? Surely there isn’t a meaning behind every door. Every closed window. Every time it rains, I swear I can feel it, the part that is leaving. I just want to let go. I am so tired, did you know that? I don’t know if I have anything left to say. It was just summer, then fall, and into winter I will ice over. The leaves, too, will come with me.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong #Richard #richard siken

[jankywhale]

everything new is another burden / i will have to choose / in this, too / i have realized nothing / not even the sun is on my side / everything new is yet another death / i see mothers and babies and i / am just reminded that it is not enough to want / not enough to wake up early and get / some sleep, baby / you need to sleep, baby / can you turn the lights off? / can you make me whole? / is this another burden i / have to choose / i choke on my words / but there is nothing left to say / is it not enough to feel the tall grass on my skin / it is not enough to want / is this another burden I will have to work for / every choice i make has another thing to carry / I cannot bear the weight of it /

everything i want i give away

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

after a while

the summer slipped away like

a forgotten childhood toy

underneath the bed in my mothers house i

never thought the feeling

of running away would taste so

bitter.

i am free, i tell myself-

this is how things are,

the winter sun nearing,

the plants too, will die.

i am so much of nothing it feels

like there is a rotting in my core.

everything i feel feels

new,

i am just reminded of

old feelings

old faces

and the burnt orange

sitting in my apartment.

across the street there is a homeless

woman asking me if i have a dollar

i give her one and she tells me

thank you, everyone else has looked away

we are different

we are so different,

i cannot tell her i do not have anything left to give

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

Summer smells of you. Feels like a long time before winter, again. Feels like cracked snow. The first time I loved someone I never stopped telling him. The first time I skinned my knees I bandaged it myself. Is that what it is to hurt? I do not tell him. I do not close my eyes. The snow falls and I fall with it.

[jankywhale]

Dear mom,

Do you remember when I was five and I skinned my knees riding a bike without training wheels for the first time? A construction team was working on the road beside our house for weeks. It was hot. It was summer. I was five years old and first grade was starting in what felt like forever. Mom, time moves a lot slower when you’re a kid. I’m not sure why. I never figured it out. It’s something that feels so far away, too far to touch, like looking out the window in the backseat trying to catch the moon. I cried for a while. Not because it hurt. I think the shock of failing, not being able to, hurt more than bleeding knee caps. Mom, I still feel like that a lot. The feeling, I have grown so comfortable with it. Sometimes when something hurts so much, after a while you don’t notice it anymore. It’s just humming in the background, a forgotten tv show left on while you drift to sleep. Summer sprinklers and cicadas, they sound the same. It feels nice. I have grown so comfortable in my hurting. But after a while it starts to gnaw at your bones. Like when your sock is falling off inside your shoe, you forget about it for a while until your ankle is raw. Mom, what I’m trying to say is my brain is always trying to find something else to hurt. Something to fix. Something to grow comfortable with. I am so used to being in pain, I feel uncomfortable with the stillness. I wish I could say I’m going to get better, that the therapy is helping, but mom I’ve been going for a while and I still never figured it out. Elizabeth tells me I might never, and sometimes I believe her.

#poetry #poetic #love poem #i miss old tumblr #words words words #stupid #button poetry #poetry on tumblr #ocean vuong

[jankywhale]

Looking inside of a snow globe

feels a lot like looking at pictures

of my life

the people who have fallen away

in the snow

inside the glass /

can stay there forever.

Whenever I cry

I imagine I am someone else /

Someone who doesn’t have the problems I do

They have problems, just different ones

Different people, different snow globes