two fragments re: poetry & adjacent wounded

october 28th, 2019(?)

you weren’t expecting to survive / the nighttime tv pandemonium / always behind the time / blue as a bird, centered in magic / outside your window, the night / it snowed

//// // may 5th, 2021 

and you declare, right now and then, with clear eyes and patient timing, the pain you can’t regret without paying for it ---- red lips like the kissing never stopped at all, not for one iota of a minute ---- eyes all blue and you reach for the endless, holy, wonderful dirt before, reversed, returned, remade, inverted, recuperated, lost, (and finally) given

-

i was a worm, i was a creature

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. - Charles Bukowski, from "So You Want To Be A Writer"

Meditative Week of Poetry: Stephanie Cawley

The ghosts didn’t sleep, in the garden,

where a woman taught me about tomatoes.

I used to hate them. Something unsettling about

their flesh. The goopy innards,

wet seeds, a color that looked sick. Last summer,

I learned about sungolds. Bright, sweet

orange globes, a little bigger than grapes.

Last summer, I dedicated myself to pleasure. I drove

down the highway, walled in by green.

There is happiness, and there is feeling good

inside a body. Both, now, a ghostlike quality.

First, I learned the rocks in the Wissahickon

glittered in the dirt, and then I learned

their name: schist. First, I named what moved

inside me animal, and then I opened its cage.

As though committed to proving myself

wrong, I lay in the sun and watched sweat gather

in the crooks of my elbows. I could sleep

in another bed, all night long, and call it

pleasure. What, in the end, does one do

with what one proves. The ghost

in the house was me. She gathered tomatoes

in the garden. When the tomatoes are in bloom

the plants are coated in sticky, yellow pollen.

It gets on everything. A flower becomes,

and this, perhaps, is obvious, a fruit. The tall

stalks of garlic become a fragrant field,

hiding the back of the garden from the road.

It felt good to feel pleasure, almost free,

in sunlight, the white flowers becoming

strawberries, pale green, the size of thumbs.

You can eat the flowers, but you shouldn’t.

They are on their way to becoming

something else. My neighbor, on Saturdays,

gives out boxes of produce for free. I don’t

know her, but she hollers at me, from my porch

across the street where I pretend to read,

listen as the neighbors discuss beetles

that have eaten all their flowers. I don’t have to be

what ghosts me. I invite sadness, who blossoms,

blooms, and fruits in one sweet season.

The gold light settles on the beach, where I don’t

go, the bay spitting up an iridescent fish

on the shore where I don’t come to its rescue.

The fish is not a ghost. The past is not what

haunts, but the future, rippling out

like water, briny and dark green. My friends,

unsleeping, in a distant city. It is called a pool,

when one collects resources with others, when water

gathers in a place. To practice pleasure,

I practice opening my palms, a gesture of

willingness to receive. It is hard, for me, to accept

the bundles of lettuce I feel I haven’t earned.

It is hard to unspool what it means to earn

anything: sunlight, water, sand, schist,

tomato, garlic, green. A lagoon

is water that has been enclosed by land.

A lacuna is a gap in text, or a cavity or depression

in bone, from the same root as lagoon:

lake, or pool. I don’t know why

I am telling you what you can

already know, just from imagining, here,

a body of water, and here, a text

orbiting a hole. I speak of summer

as though it were a lagoon, and me

a hole. The garden, across the city, blooms

without me. I am trying not to become

its ghost.

Shaken Again

Shaken Again, the worst news of my life, and it sounds dramatic, but I’m all fear right now.

A simple Thursday, one like any other. Yet today was completely different, set my world on fire. This week has been chaotic, full of concern and worry. But today made everything minuscule, smaller than an ant on the ground. It’s as though I’m having an out of body experience, looking down at myself. COVID-19 has taken the world by storm, but it hadn’t touched mine. Not until today. It’s…

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/ untitled / drastic / fever / worry / swept away /

being ignored in smoke / parks and recreational dangers / bags for every ailment underneath / laying down

soaking up  a vengeful sun / grieving a lover he’s still writing to / letters sent across the glazed hazy marble-top counter of the kitchen they’ve been calling “cosmos” for a couple hundred generations

maybe more, i’m not sure. i’m not sure of anything. except when i am and i get scared.

i’m teary-eyed and vacant. nothing else is new. just the old stuff. feeling really spectral, but not in any fun adventurous way. in the lonely way. footsteps creating their own wars outside the door. can’t we all just sit down and breathe ?

the dance hall is a memory for songs and lovers to fight about  /   it’s the scope of the wound that still haunts me the most.

Loving you was like loving the dead

You’re a rose, be with someone who isn’t afraid of your thorns.

R.h. Sin

don’t use your illusions

the only thing i can do  for any of these words to mean a  fucking thing is to simply give you  all the truth that lies inside of me

while the narrator wishes he was this debonair mother fucker with an eight inch cock that always worked

the transparent truth is i’m an aging drunk with unrealistic dreams whose six inch cock suffers from whiskey dick on most nights

not only do i suffer from depression and anxiety,  paranoia is an ingredient found in my dna - oh, and i have crippling stomach issues

all my demons are self induced, because i’m a selfish prick ... well,  i used to be

today i’m a recluse, which has been made easier by the pandemic, i haven’t been out of the house in probably three months and honestly, i’m okay with that.

somehow the pussy gods drop pussy down from the heavens every so often with house visits that remind me how empty it feels to come in a condom but safety first, fuckers

all this to say, perfection is a fallacy that i can’t ride - i know each one of us is damaged in disguise - show me the real you, show me your scars

i’ve shown you mine.

no title. (from october 2019)

i wrote up a story about the weight you can buy at the corner of every violent exile since nebraska. from hospital to cradle to america to labor camp.

i’m at the end of every line of string i ever had or was allowed to borrow from the general store (at the end of town / across the limitless canadian deserts / dead bees on the mountains of jupiter)

There was a show when a muslim guy says "You should believe in something more powerful than you". And I can't get it out of my head cuz it's true. I just can't believe in something I'm not sure exists.

I believe in art. I believe I would die without it. I know how pathetic it sounds and I hate pathetic but it is the only thing that stays with me. Im sorry guys. But it is the only thing. And sometimes I hate you for it. But I'm glad that at least there is something...

I'm standing on the outside of the circle of life, watching the world spin while I am at a standstill.

i was scrolling on francis’s blog and just...missing the entire aesthetic, character, plots. and my heartstrings kinda went ‘should i move back to the other blogs?’ and i just...i don’t think it’s sustainable for me to do so. things are more managable in one place.  there’s just a whole lot of love, especially on that blog. and i miss my golden summer sweetheart boy with the kindest heart. i felt more myself when i was tied up writing with francis...hm.

frozen skies won't show us the sun that we remember

snowfall snuffing out already dying embers

flesh bombarded by weapons of december

daggers of frost penetrate our defenses

everlasting cold numbing our senses

desperately searching for the warmth of some familiar something

we all die feeling nothing

If one could ascertain whether the chicken or the egg came first, that moment of relief would be overcome immediately by where the chicken or the egg originated

if it matters, i made this 🤍

take a min, make omelette