the-lake-to

[the-lake-to]

From Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

#poetry #black out poetry #jane austen #sense and sensibility #ptsd #cptsd #family trauma

[the-lake-to]

The Man in the Blue Shirt

There's a man in a blue shirt standing in an old house, Victorian floral crawling up every wall. The dusty pink curtains hug every occupant marked with sorrow and hollow eyes. My path meanders and tangles through slow and steady marches. Yet, the man in the blue shirt watches me, silent as stone. Fixed to the ground, I pass him here and there, catching stray glances of severe eyes. But I don't know this gaze. I don't know him, so I move on. The others need my help.

Finality has arrived, a train on a side track declared "permanently out of commission". . . Liminal. . . Disconnected. . . The priest hurls holy water on an eternal flame, and only few can hear the cries of crackle and hiss. My stomach squirms, electricity fires, caught still in the cage of expectations shackled within my skin. And still, my neck creaks…creaks off balance and against the grain. To the side, the same side where hairs stand on end, the man in the blue shirt is not watching the priest.

A valve releases when the doors open, illuminating the portal back to normal life. Slow, steady paths follow the promise of temporary relief, unable to tolerate a moment more. I meander between them, with them, to herd the lost and ensure all find their ways home. But once I finally rest, the last to step back through the veil, I place an unsteady foot back on the moving train…

A man in a blue shirt stares at me, virulent and still.

#original poetry #my poetry #free form #november 2023 #11 01 23

[the-lake-to]

Nightlight

I sit here and look at your art

Left behind on our shelves:

Polka dotted coffins,

Swirls of color on canvas,

The lyrics from our favorite song

You drew out on paper for me

To give me a light in my darkest days.

And although my days are now nights,

And my nights slip into liminal dispair,

Steeped in emptiness . . .

.

.

.

Your colors are still here.

A nightlight.

#poetry #my poetry #original poetry #october 2023 #october 9 2023 #grief #death tw #loss #qpp

[the-lake-to]

The Caregiving Tree

You asked me to carry you,

When I could barely walk.

Asked for words of wisdom,

When I could hardly talk.

Begged for my attention,

Overlooked my outstretched hand in need.

"Who am I?" You sought and sought and sought out of me,

Always assuming and never asking,

If the Giving Tree was okay or happy.

"I + Them" your hands long carved,

Dried drippings into my crumbled bark.

And when my legs gave out,

Broken under our weight,

You just walked away,

Without a trace.

#my poetry #poetry #poem #cptsd #trauma #july 2022 #original poetry #finished december 2022

[the-lake-to]

Glass Houses

Four walls of

Thick, translucent glass.

On display, in my glass house,

I pace and I sleep and I dream.

Shadows crawl across fogged walls,

Lurking around every corner,

Predators or playful puppets?

I can't remember when,

A glass house became a home.

I can't remember when,

Smoke etched into glass.

I just hope,

Someone throws me a stone,

Soon.

#my poem #my poetry #original poetry #My writing #october 2021

[the-lake-to]

Love (all) Yourself(ves)

They say you should love yourself before you can love another,

That love is impossible to understand if it is not felt at your core.

What I once thought false, came into view sharply.

I had beaten ‘Her’ down, a blow with every uttered “she”,

Digging out and upheaving the beach,

Burying 'Her’.

What I saw as sand became glass in others’ eyes,

Exposing her to the world no matter how deep I dug,

While I tried to make them see the beauty of the undulating ocean waves.

'He’ was drowning in them, coming up for air often enough to stay alive,

But never to fully breathe in Life.

What was seen through sand,

Blended 'Him’ nil into the currents.

And I was there staring between both,

lost and helpless,

drowning.

#august 2019 #my poetry #just found this again finally #my poem #original poetry

[the-lake-to]

The Bends

5am words float around my head again

And I'm wondering when I'll resurface

From skimming upsidown under the water's edge

With sunlight pouring through the drifting lense

Cool film rolls over every inch of skin

It's beautiful

Inches from air, In verse, looking down.

Into the dark.

#poetry #poem #original poetry #september 2021 #my poetry #my poem

[the-lake-to]

Silence in Singularity

If there was a place,

Where the lonely could gather,

And souls suspended in singularity could sing,

If a space so existed in this ether,

Could all the broken hearts mend together,

And end all their pain and suffering?

Could all the hurt be washed away,

Or would we dig a hole in the end?

With the sum of the Weight,

Carried and bared on strong weary shoulders?

Would there, finally,

Be enough light,

For us all to simply be seen?

Or would we

O v e r

look

each other,

too?

#original poetry #poetry #my poetry #poem #my poem #march 2021 #lonley #lonliness #trauma

[the-lake-to]

The Change Paradox

A quarter was placed in my mouth,

When I was ten years old,

For all my thoughts left untold,

A time capsule stuck heavy on my tongue.

How scary could the taste of tin have been?

When I could still draw my breath,

Between metal and teeth, tongue and throat,

So long as I didn't rock the boat.

And the strained smile was Fine,

For a time...

At least from the outside, to a stranger's eyes,

My mouth was otherwise unoccupied. 

My crooked courage clock struck Right,

Once or twice in a while,

Clinking teeth, a metallic bite gone raw,

My mouth full of a bitter bile,

Lifting, 

And Shifting,

Tucking away Change to cheek.

By twisting my tongue to my lilt,

An attempted birth of my truth,

That heavy coin did slip and 

          t

         i

       l

     t

Back. 

Deep in my throat, a stabbing gasping followed,

In furious eyes, my coughs and panic reflected hollow,

Sobered in the maternal mirror I lived. 

"Mirror mirror on the wall, 

Who has fared the hardest of them all?" 

My mother raised, mouth open wide.

Inside, what would reside, 

But her own rusted, decayed coin. 

When the day came that I almost died,

Of the lead poisoning inside,

I Cried, and cried, and cried,

While that damn coin was pried out. 

And to my horror, the banker I did find,

Who long ago, in my sleep, slipped inside,

A peculiar coin of this kind.

Inscribed in sanguine ridges,

Reflected back in the echo of the family call,

"Mirror mirror on the wall,

Who has fared the hardest of them all?"

#poetry #my poetry #poem #cptsd #trauma #family trauma #trauma tw #this one has bugged me for months #finally got it down right #feburary 2020

[the-lake-to]

Fair, Well?

I hope your hubris keeps you warm, 

On cold October days,

When it happens to snow,

On the Chesapeake Bay.

I hope you stay asleep,

Swayed gently by salty ice,

When I leave off the side,

Into an opaque sheen of brine.

I hope you don't notice me, 

I hope you don't miss me,

I hope it doesn't hurt,

When we both knew,

It was inevitable,

Any way. 

#my poetry #poetry #cptsd #original poetry #poem #Fair Well #october 2020

[the-lake-to]

Immobile (a dó)

Flashing neon, crowded rooms.

Sickly, stripped smiles shining, swelling.

Music and chatter, love and laughter.

You,

They,

All,

Breathe with it, sing with it,

A melody, a cacophony of disease,

Amazing Grace or Taps?

Radio silence of whispered warnings,

Buried alongside the fallen en masse.

And all the while my heart has come to see,

And all the while my heart has come to know,

Expendable, immobile bones barred in quarantine.

Even while the world kept turning,

You still

Didn't

Care. 

[x]

#my poetry #poetry #cptsd #original poetry #immobile #poem #trauma #covid tw #death tw #just in case #immobile 2 #october 2020

[the-lake-to]

Wishing Well

Was an ounce of your pride

Worth a penny of my presence?

You cast me down the well with your whispered wish:

"In life, you have to live with the choices that you make."

Like a boy with a toy gun,

Housed with real bullets,

You shot me, and then cried wolf

When

I

didn't

resurface.

#poetry #my poetry #original poetry #cptsd #wishing well #writing

[the-lake-to]

Kindergarten Patterned Scissors

I can hack at my poetry with precocious kindergarten patterned scissors,

Cutting shapes around my language, borders or puzzle pieces:

Reordered and rearranged,

Tenses running backward and forward-

Years, months, days, hours.

Reordered and rearranged,

Righteous rhetoric for the real relationship.

To refuse is to disobey, layered and lacquered over.

Reordered and rearranged,

Time sealed tight, forever displayed. 

I can hack at my poetry with precocious kindergarten patterned scissors,

Cutting shapes from my mind, borders or puzzle pieces:

Reordered and rearranged,

Around perfectionistic self-consciousness,

A mosaic of shattered shards, loose fitting.

Reordered and rearranged,

Until the vulnerable becomes the vessel becomes the vehicle-

Fast, full, fragile, reversed.

Reordered and rearranged,

Obscurity wrapped obfuscation of the obstructions, obstinate and obvious.

I can hack at my poetry with precocious kindergarten patterned scissors,

Cutting shapes into my heart, borders or puzzle pieces:

Reordered and rearranged,

By hazed perception, a systematic jagged little pill-

Cataloged, serial.

Reordered and rearranged,

With chemical tithes to the center-

Taut, braided, and steel(ed).

Slashed and hacked,

Through time fed rust, the taste of copper, the smell of blood,

A grand marionette of highly held strings-

Haplessly, helplessly, hacked at.

With my precocious, kindergarten patterned scissors.

#poetry #my poetry #writing #my writing #original poetry #original writing #cptsd #trauma #family trauma #this is not as literal as it seems when I read it now lol #as good as its going to get #poem #started fall 2019 #finished april 2020

[the-lake-to]

Immobile

Empty streets, abandoned bags,

Fearful faint whispers under gustso winds,

Talking heads static cling through speaker dust,

i,

they,

we,

Cough from it,

Choke with it,

Hubris or coincidence,

Toxicity seeps into blood painted doorways,

And all the while my heart has come to know,

And all the while my heart has come to be,

Immobile strung above the crib,

Even when the world stopped turning,

You still

Weren't

There.

[x]

#poetry #poem #my poetry #immobile #cptsd #trauma #my poem #original poetry #original writing #writing #my writing #family trauma #march 2020

[the-lake-to]

Spilled Milk

When you spill the milk

White murk spills all over the cutting room floor

Flowing river styx in the middle of the store

And you realize youre spilling all of the filling

That you kept pulling and lulling and luring

Back into the container that housed

Two halves of jelly fat, water, and tissue

Through which we see the world askew

And you dont know how you got to spilled milk

From a conditional kind of family love

From a series of nights hiding in the dark

From a sibling who cuts and kills at will

From a decade of mistrust and lonely ghosts

From a burnt out headlight

From a cracked tooth

From a shitty job

From a broken body

From the nestles of your very own vaccuum void

But all you do know is

That spilled milk is actually pretty funny

When you stop and think about it long enough

When the river styx washes away

All of the filth, and debries, and the stones

The junk, the funk, and the bones

Until your head spills over free

And your heart falls out

And your broken husk

Houses (all) your pain

In the bottom

Of your

Toes.

#poetry #my poetry #not edited to death #like most of my poems #poem #my poem #ptsd cw #i literally cried over spilled milk and then laughed while crying when i realized it and then got inspired #december 2019

[the-lake-to]

Flooding

I put you away on my top shelf,

A space I always reserved for you.

I disturbed the dust that had gathered,

While my body matured and grew.

I learned how to strech on tip toes,

The same way I streched to fit you.

I finally broke those molds, 

and knashed them into little bits of rage. 

And when they fell away,

a mosaic of me remained,

That hung opposite my shelves.

Once in a while, my dreams rewrote,

Dust covered pages in the dark, in the day.

When my rock solid resolve fissures from the quake,

Of reverberations of space-time parting brackish Virginia bay.

It's in those silent little moments before I can breathe again,

When salt and time come rushing in,

I flood back,

I flood back,

I Flood Back,

And i'm drowning. 

#my poetry #my poem #poetry #poem #ptsd cw #flooding #meh #started late spring 2019 #finished summer 2019

[the-lake-to]

“Cold, with a looming air of stale tears That smelled of a sour bitterness, She stood before her mother. Heart twisted, a pang of worry Watching hazel eyes lidded with euphoria, Though in the iris held a vapid rage—a stranger. Chest tightened with a panicked pain As the ten year old heard mother utter “I just want to die.” Young breath hitched, a reverberation of trepidation At the realization of Mother’s intoxicant sorrow. How did she cause this? How could she stop it? She wanted to smash the bottle. But a needy sway pulled Mother to child’s breast—a gasp, a sob, Chilling, liquid warmth seeping through floral patterns. A begging of forgiveness, a proclamation of apologies, On foul breath laced with the scent of harsh poison. Lonely, with a suffocating silence so thick, Only broken by a snarl of hate from the stranger. A soft sigh, disconnected numbness permeating her tongue, She’d absently commanded that Mother eat this time. Her worn face indifferent in the heat of the intense scowl, Mother’s impassioned protests reverberating off a nil mind. One stubborn to starve, the other conditioned to provide, But the seventeen year old hears the stranger cry “Leave me alone, I just want to die!” Grown, dark eyes blink, only an echo of the old affliction From the same string of syllables bound with familiar pain. Why can’t it end? How can Mother ever recover? She wants to smash the bottle. When the rage is drained, body limply falling to knees, The stranger sobs pathetically asking for atonement. She pulls Mother to her chest, soothes with her hand, Empty sweet nothings mumbled into foul smelling hair.”

— Responsible Denial by Me. 

#my poetry #poem #poetry #alcoholism cw #my poem #circa 2012 #college