juniperfrancislee2

[juniperfrancislee2]

I know where my heart should be, when I close my eyes and slow the world around me to a near stop, I can feel where the phantom of it once resided, but it’s hollow as of late…as of years. I should say it with honesty and without reservation…the years have been hurtful and angry, but my pride wants me to regenerate in the scorched earth that trails behind, never to give another thought to it…to him. The cavity of my chest is just that, hollow, yet weighted…a god awful weight that consumes the space like an infection and swings like a pendulum. I had a heart once. It swelled with love and beat such an honest rhythm…and I want to curse it a foolhardy imbecile, but I can’t find fault with reveling in love. I can’t lay blame for wanting to love and be loved. I am consumed by my inability to reanimate my heart and by my curiosity of fashioning a Dr. Frankenstein creation to fill the void. I want to pack the void with healing herbs and salves, to nurture myself through nature’s healing, to call upon my craft, but there is no easy remedy…and time knows nightmares have their own rules. I wanted to leave, but there was no escape route…so I’ve just existed in halves. I sometimes wonder if I’m mourning the loss of my heart more than the loss of love. It was a good heart…trustworthy and reliable. I seek it in the secreted places of my daily life, but at an inkling of recognition, I fade and fall away. The damage is so storied and I just won’t allow myself the raw, skinned flesh pain of being vulnerable to surface, to sting when the air touches it, to scab, and scar…I hurt as I am. I’d hurt if I allowed. And the first step towards my healing is to let it hurt like hell. To give the hurt permission and to let myself feel…to feel what having a heart and living is like…when I acknowledge that wanting to love and be loved in return isn’t an unforgivable ask…

Juniper Francis Lee. 12/03/2023

#juniperfrancislee #poetry #inked thoughts #writings

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#Spotify

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Emma. (2020), dir. Autumn de Wilde

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By Shaun Friend

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Elsa Lanchester as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) - dir. James Whale

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The Hour is Devoted to Revenge (1999)

© Louise Bourgeois

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“Never trust the living”

Grave of Antoine Michel Wemaer,  Assebroek Cemetery, Assebroek, Arrondissement Brugge, West Flanders, Belgium,

A merchant-turned-pirate who died in 1837.

[juniperfrancislee2]

I think the irreparable has altered my form…I move oddly through the world around me…hips, knees, shoulders…ill fitted ratios that throw my balance off kilter and angles that figure nonsensical…lands I traversed for thousands of days don’t recognize me…an alien amongst commonplace…I refuse to pathologically fit the remaining pieces of my heart into a shape unrecognizable…the aftermath of a biohazardous love that draws applause in a world that diminishes self-value…hollering and howling…I choose to acknowledge…I decide to own…that I’ve worth and I’m worthy…my define is in the familiarity of the unfamiliar…so I keep the holes that pock my heart…the pelting pain of nature’s disaster…lunar craters I infuse with elementals…who safeguard and sublime…my great love…

#juniperfrancislee #poetry #inked thoughts #writings #witchywriters

[juniperfrancislee2]

This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil.

Mary MacLane, from 'I Await the Devil's Coming'

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instagram | kawowekadry

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I am a moth, that just wants to share your light.

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Michał Mroczka (b.1984) - Pillow for the Sleeper. 2022. Acrylic on canvas.

[juniperfrancislee2]

At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Werewolf’

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Annie Spratt

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#Spotify

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“As a frontman, I move around a lot on stage, I can’t help it, it is a habitual nervous thing, a kind of neurotic compensation for a voice I have never felt that comfortable with. But watch Mark [Lanegan], watch how he walks onto the stage, plants himself at the mic stand, one tattooed fist halfway down the stand, the other resting on top of the mic, immobile, massive, male. When the time comes to sing, he simply opens his mouth and releases a blues, a blues lived deeply and utterly earned, and that voice tears right through you, his sheer force on stage absolutely humbling.”

— Nick Cave, paying tribute to Mark Lanegan, The Red Hand Files (no. 185, February 2022)