wake-me-from-my-dream

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

All I can think about is how you make my hands feel magnetic. I am drawn to you in clover patches. Want to unwind under the roof of your sighs. Oh good lord I am undone and while the church says the unholy want of us is causing the criminal skies to fall - let them fall, then. I will kiss you in the ending sun and hear the hark of your hurt like a sparrowbird. I want to live in the forest of pulling you closer, of hands on your thighs, of laughter. I am looking for a bite mark and a future tense and a morning after. I want to sink into the glory of your blue eyes and sigh under your canine teeth. I want to forget how to kneel under your hands and instead just collapse. I have no more words for wanting. Just a summer of yearning, each day with no end and no bottom. How do i ask the right way to get your jaw in my palm. How do I ask the right way for us both to be home.

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely, like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

it isn’t that i ache, but the swell in my chest when i tilt up to look at the top of ferris wheels isn’t fear anymore. it isn’t that i ache but instead that while you and i were drunk on your living room rug and you said you’ll find love i didn’t tell you otherwise because i liked the way the words looked in the air between us. i feel no lacking, but the night is a blue that is knifeish, all silver keen like the imagined collar of my future. it isn’t that i want a specific thing, but i am wanting, the soft call of a horizon that peeks out sunsets too far to touch no matter how fast i run. 

where am i going. why am i not home here, where it is easy, and where i could build a life unseasonably sad but bearable. i could stop feeling stuck and instead teach myself this is what it means to be planted. i could say that the strange pull in me is only the desire of entropy, to unseam what should be held together.

it isn’t that i yearn, but i picture the blues of oceans and ask - is this the color that belongs to her? when i find her, will i be a better person? i fill my mouth with tongues and chocolate and good times but i cannot pin her down. maybe one day i will step through the mirror and she will be there, easily, hungry for her same ache and want of me.

home, i mean. home. 

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

how good and sweet a pomegranate; that persephone broke with her hands the violence of smallness. she who said: i will consume, and it will be an act of death to others, it will be a rage, it will be unheard of. to eat and be merry, to take a throne, to turn from the sun.

to satisfy, to be satisfied. i am alight in the good keenness of a ripped bedsheet. i am done telling myself shame, and sin, and sorrow. i am done with bent knees, with talking softly, with good-girl charm. i am done with all of it.

come crown me. you and i and our fingernails painted red. two queens. we will turn and crown another, and in this way, raise a royal army. i am done cutting dreams into scraps. i am done letting others take credit. i am done, and we are done, and we will live in the ichor of starlight, unapologetic. 

#inkskinned

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

“yeah i’m in love with you. my arm goes numb from time to time and i get so hopeless, so down and out, and i forget to remember that this is real. we were real.

i really once touched you and we really met each other so many years ago, and all of a sudden things changed. i’d dreamt about it but i’d never felt it.

love is cloying and ever-present, effervescent, a floating feeling.

just like zooming along the highways of hong kong and seeing the impossibly long mall creep by one mile at a time and you can’t have what’s inside it but you’ve seen all of it. the sparkling sea just through the window.

i wish i trusted determinism but i don’t think we’re that important. i wish i trusted myself but i am never certain. if i only cause pain unto others and myself then what am i doing all of this for.

the sunlight trickles through my shades and spills all over my sweater but i brush it aside, i don’t trust it. the music is far away and so is my mind, so goes my memory and the softness of what we originally were. i miss your hair, i miss you, i miss everything, and my brain is failing me.

i’m not where i want to be. these blankets are too hot. my narrative crumbles to pieces at 4 in the morning (3 hours prior, she writes), and the golden hour of redemption is so far off i wish i hadn’t made any promises i wish i hadn’t. why does the metal hide me from the skylight? why can’t my arms hold the world? metaphysically they ought to.

metaphysically i belong to myself and i belong to you. you, you stretch across millions of miles of space, your arms around me in that tight hug that blows my breath to the wind, i trust in you. you are the promise i keep and the memory i retain, you are more than anything, you are everything. and i will see you soon.”

- ixx. “i can’t believe this is what love feels like” j.w. (2019)

#aprilwrites #prose #writing #spilled ink #writerscreed #literature #prose poetry #stream of consciousness #inkskinned #love #late night

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

“i can tell without doubt you don’t think i’m half bad i can’t tell you with certainty why. i’ve been wandering around from steel town to steel town just searching for guys who want to rise above their station and girls with a fire in their eyes though that they would ever want to save a wretch like me is beyond what i can surmise. i don’t know what chord you struck to get me stuck like this— fuck the buildup of this bullshit in my system since forever— this insistence on high stakes never dwindles unlike my state of mind, constantly undulating like the i will not dignify that thought because i don’t care about it right now. i can tell you what’s real and raw and can be proven without intervention by my shrink— you held my hand when we drove past the cafe where i almost went on a date the week i got dumped for the first time you rubbed my back when i was coughing up cannabis on graham’s couch as if it was cause for concern for you you spoke consonants and confidence and consonance into my vulnerable voice and when i wavered at the precipice you held me steady and i don’t think you know how much it means— to a boy who breathes light into everything he touches, instills it into stillness and fills up every corner it’s just another day being alive but to a kid who’s un-living with an incoherent heart, to a mourner who’s dumb enough to spend her youth lamenting lost love— it’s all i ever missed, you pyramid scheme, you sun lamp. you golden retriever you intricately painted russian doll you purple skittle, pink starburst, perfect person— leave some for the rest of us and leave my heart some room to melt you chocolate strawberry diamond studded stained glass angel, i pine after you like christmas when it’s gone but when winter comes i always want to die, maybe that’s why i have butterflies in my chest this january. oh well, if my heart stops the day i turn 19 i will have lived knowing that i”

— “big crush” c.b. (2019)

#beautiful

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

larissa pham

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

i’ve been thinking of that video, you know, the one where she burns her face for the sake of a contour. i watched it at 2 AM after having nightmares about churches. i thought i was still dreaming. she put chemicals on her body and fries in them. undoes in them. what a perfect metaphor for beauty worship.

is this girlhood?

oh we wanted to laugh. dumb bitch! in the comments. but i went back to sleep and i dreamed, not nightmare but not comfortable, of the cakes i will not let myself eat because of the cost of their calories. i started crying, woke up drenched in sweat, worried i’d somehow transported to the kitchen, worried i’d fucked up and actually done it. god, how terrifying. i remember the wave of gratefulness - no, no, this belly is empty, and it is good to be empty, like this.

how is it different. i’m not a dumb bitch; i’m a refined and self-controlled bitch, up on her shit. it is not dumb-bitch to starve yourself. to restrict. it is a respectable lady thing.

i think of her skin, swollen in the first week, while i go to work in heels and a jacket. my male coworker wears jeans. i think of her, waving at her face, while my hair goes up into professional-bun, stays there long after the headache. i think of her, watery-eyed and turning, bird-like, to look upon the damage she’d done - and i think of me, of my sunday-night facemask that “burns, but like, it works.” 

razors and waxing and eyebrow tweezers and picking at skin and sucking in and sitting properly and suffocating and curling smaller and self-denying and eyelash extensions and taping the second toe to the third so you can’t feel your shoes anymore and destroying, destroying, destroying

2 AM heard the first words i said that morning, softly.

“that’s self-harm”.

or it’s just girlhood. or it’s just beauty.

#inkskinned

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

on a scale of one to ten how sad are you.

you almost say seven but the answer floats in your lungs like rising mud. you shift your shoulders. some part of you is already forming an excuse. that it’s not that bad sometimes. one, two, three on a day that the clouds are out. you’re just complaining about stuff. yesterday you laughed past a brick of a four, does that make the brick come down to a two-point-five.  the solid seven panic attack of last tuesday feels somehow like a little thorn, just a regular day full of a gentle three-point-nine earthquake rocking after yesterday’s close-to-an-eight. see but if tomorrow you have a real bad day, it will make today look simple.

and what if. what if tomorrow it’s a big old red eight-point-nine. like one of those days where sirens are going off in every part of you but you’re stuck behind a glass window watching it all burn down. like one of those days that your skin against the air feels foreign. like too much of everything. like sitting-in-the-shower, like can’t-eat, like the tide isn’t just coming in, it came while you were sleeping and now you’ve gotta learn how to swim. like bounce me against a bullet hole kind of day.

you keep numbers like nine and ten way out of reach. those are for the people who really are suffering. you’ve got no excuse. nine and ten are funeral numbers, for real problems, not yours, no. and sometimes you’re fine. and you’re kind of used to it. and it’s not sad, it’s just numb like a television caught on static. numb like i can’t remember if i care about this. numb like nothing works but i can’t be bothered to fix it. that’s not sad that’s every day stuff. everybody feels like this, right? feels like they’ve been shut off. right.  

maybe five. right in the middle. like not gonna shoot myself but i’m not wasting your time. a nonanswer. like could be worse could be better. like i need help but i don’t want you to worry even though i need someone to worry about me because i can’t worry about myself. maybe five. but what if five is too small. what if five is too big. what if -

“on a scale of one to ten,” he repeats into your silence, and then pauses. “and please be honest about this.”

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

Dwelling into poetry and trying to write ecological poetry, the problem appears clear to me: We do not have the language to talk of anything but ourselves, our conditions and how other things affect us, or come under our domination. It is an insurmountably difficult process to give agency, to give any semblance of agency to other beings through our language. What is not us, what is not a subject, lies passive until it comes to be occupied and investigated by the subject, brought into subjectivity.

#this was really interesting #art #definition

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

Any advice to other writers?

yes. it is this: stop listening to advice.

in 2nd grade my advice was stop writing. i’m an adhd cuban kid writing bad poetry, trembling when i raise my hand in public. i get my first (and only) award at this age, when my colorblind self sees a picture incorrectly and writes a poem about the muddiness a toad sits in, where everyone else sees colors, blossoming.at 15 you will not win awards. nor at 16, or 20, or 23. 

but if this is your heart and soul, you will keep writing. because it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter if 215,000 people read your writing, or just 3. what matters is that you write, in margins of papers you lose, in the edges of moleskins you burn, on your exposed skin. you write and write and write until you are drained of it. but you are never, not really, drained of it. in the meantime, i learned grammar so specifically i could teach it, so teach it i did, in a better way than i ever learned it. i explained: there, their, and they’re are easy to remember. there has “here” in it, which makes it regarding times or places. their has a little person in the form of “i” in it. that’s about you or other people. “they’re” is the easiest because the apostrophe means “they are”. and that’s the end of things. “breath” and “breathe” are different but related things, when you take a breath, you swallow the “e”, to breathe means you rEleasE the ending. 

and then i crushed it under a boot. a lot of people asked me: how come. but the how is easy. the lower case and all my lack of punctuation and things. i knew the rules and broke them because it was the thing to do. bc it felt weird to talk in a fake way, u know? like i was lying.

so i told the truth. while i talked about superpowers or magic or anything fake. i told the truth. and that’s what makes it real, isn’t it. that we look for the honesty of a moment. nobody says “hey how are you doing?” “oh, i’m fine, how about you?” unless they’re being fake. two friends say “what’s up?” the other says “i’m dead inside fuck you.” 

and you watch. i watch with big eyes. i observe. i know how people talk to each other, how they move in the world. so when she glides through the doors, people turn and look at her. so that blurting isn’t just blurting, it’s meant with uncertainty. so that things have meaning.

people ask me: how come your dialogue is so good? and the truth is: i cheat. i say it out loud, and think: does this flow? does it rest? does it sound like two people talking? “how is that going” “here is exposition about my being a spy i was once in the Russian army” doesn’t sound friendly. two people being like “how’s that vent crawling going?” “oh, you know, lovely, i’m belly-flat and hungry” sounds much more lovely. this is how you fit in character development. i almost never do it without spoken word. why say “she was mad about her past” when i can say “oh, you know, lovely, i’m belly-flat and hungry, but like, you know, they carved out my insides, so, like, extra room, thanks, you fuckers,” works twice as well.

and then i throw it out. people say “here’s a list of words that replace said” so i write a story where people only use said, and it works, because the narrator’s voice is strong enough it carries it on through the universe. and i throw out commas. and i throw out quotation marks. i use whatever i think the words need. and i move forwards.

i think what writers should be afraid of the most is stagnation. not agents or how the audience will take them or how the world will scoop up words or anything. just the healthy fear of constantly rewriting the same thing in different words. that’s the true fear. and this isn’t to say that you can’t write about the same emotions or people. but everything should be a new exploration into a concept. kind of a tall order. 

so i’ll say this. who gives a shit. if you spend 4 years writing a love poetry blog to your significant other, he still ends up hating your poetry. if you write to the wrong person, you feel stupid and numb, endless. in a bad way, i mean.

so write for yourself, always. who cares about notes. i write dumb shit all the time. write because it’s the only thing worth doing. write because people told you to stop.

people ask me all the time “how did you do that!” but the truth is all you need to do is look at the number of posts. at the end of six thousand, you find a way around your land. 

and you find your voice. and that’s all that matters, in the end.

#writing advice

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

there are all kinds of aware. the aware of 2 AM when you’re both half-asleep on the floor and your heart is up and the aware of 5 AM when you haven’t slept the night before and your guard is all you are. the aware of a sore tooth that makes small things on tongues feel big and the aware of first-food-since-i-forget that makes big things taste better.

aware, be/ware, the aware of halloween nights where the back of your skin crawls with again-witch, the aware of the first snowfall you watch alone, the aware of a paper cut, the aware of knowing the cat is in the room but it doesn’t like to be pet so you just have to watch it. the aware of pen lights, of fridays, of cracked ribs. the aware of i hurt you once, i won’t do it again. the aware of first time holding hands, the aware of nine hundredth circle on her spine, the aware of spotted zoo animal and the aware of an open blue sky.

“how does she make you feel?” you ask.

aware, i guess. aware so much i feel alive.

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

“I’m sorry I’ve unrolled my shoulders to let the universe come crashing down, but I am too young to be Atlas and I haven’t chosen a side in the war yet.”

— which way will the world fall? || O.L. (via poetbitesback)

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

we were outside and the street was wet and the sign was flickering. i wanted to be barefoot but knew it would be weird so instead i just sort of hovered around you while you smoked and the awnings dripped. it was dark here, the blue darkness of a night that you’re not supposed to be out in, a night that refuses you. not a warm one but our knees were uncovered.

you play with your lighter. we stand under the lamppost. in three months we’ll be going different places as fast as our legs can take us. right now, the summer is too young to have a name. so we stand there. i’m in love with you and i have been since middle school math class.

“doesn’t it bother you,” you ask, and the neon sign flickers, “that your dad says shit like that?”

i put my back against the wet lamppost. you play with your lighter. “does anybody feel good about their dad?” i ask.

you snort. then we’re silent. 

once when i was twelve my father threw a plate on the ground and later when he retold the story, he said that i had done it. or that i’d made him. i don’t remember exactly how he lied about it, only that he did, and that it was the moment i’d sort of recognized that he was 50 percent of me as a person and that was fucking terrifying.

the neon sign flickers. you play with the lighter and pass it over your fingertips. and then you say, “there’s a thin layer of molecules that stops me from being burned by this.”

okay. i watch you do it, even though i know i should be stopping you about it. it’s not the kind of night for stopping things. it’s the kind of night when we’re both the bad kind of quiet.

you unfold your free palm and hold it inches above the flame. “the further i get, the less it hurts,” you say. 

you don’t look up. you put your lighter in your pocket. we walk in the mist which is the resting state of rain. i feel like we’re too close to an emotion to speak of it, but i know what you’re saying. 

“don’t grow a molecule coat too thick you can’t feel warmth,” i say. “don’t go too far away.”  

you snort again. “too late.”

i look up. i can’t see the moon. i think of your lighter and the hand i want to hold and how both of us are running before the cement in the ground can take us. i think of how we are both playing with any lighter we find, balancing between the thin layer of dna and personality, of destiny and fate.

“it’s okay,” i say, “who needs fathers anyway.”

#inkskinned

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

so we made this promise years ago, right? great big city, london, long trench coats and steaming tea on a rainy day and a dog. or two. i do remember that. and train trips on the weekends, with a renewable ticket and a simple suitcase, a camera because tourists, we are. new accents, new hair, brand new spring and an apartment, so we can see the clock tower from the window. don’t forget late nights or early mornings. deadly insomnia. and that never bothered me, you know? it’s funny, i’m answering the question i was about to ask. i remember why london.

#aprilwrites #prose #stream of consciousness #london #wishes #dreams #friendship #sleepless #writing

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

it’s strange because you don’t realize how far you’ve come until one day while you’re laughing you realize: wait, i’m actually laughing. 

that’s hard to explain, you know. that the numbness effects your humor, too. that, sure, you’ll laugh at things, but it feels tight, tiny, like you should be happy but you’re squeezing joy through a pinhole. sometimes you look at things and think: i should like this. i should feel good when i look at this. i should find this cute or funny or heartwarming. but you feel nothing.

it’s hard to track recovery. we live by the day. measure only how well we did in 24 hours. sometimes look as far as a week. we just keep walking. the first thing i got back was crying. you wouldn’t think you’d miss crying - painful, ugly, draining, plain annoying - but i did. i missed crying. for a long while i was sort of grateful to be crying over any small thing.

but the flood is stopping. and today i caught myself actually laughing.

[wake-me-from-my-dream]

“we survive. our bodies remind us of our failures, creak angry in the rain, tell us whispers of our pasts where blades ran in our dreams and we never remembered to eat; our bodies come with dyed hair and painted fingernails and chewed cuticles, we take longer to stand up and fall asleep. but the night comes hungry and we’ve learned to rely on our heartbeat, on the solid banging of a muscle that reminds us of living, on the aches that come from holding someone tightly, on the raw feeling of first kisses, on mornings and pancakes. our mouths don’t forget cake and our eyes never get tired of sunsets. the night sky is painted with our crying and she always remembers to bring out her best stars when we need something to wish on. and we wish on, on and over, our tongues numb with the words of it or just the feeling of wanting, a prayerful silence to fill the ache we can’t quite name nor swallow nor sate; we beg the moon bring it to us but what the “it” is we haven’t learned the name of yet. we survive. we skip class for six weeks but show up the seventh even though our feet drag us through floorboards, we undo ourselves from our beds where we mummified ourselves in hatred, we finally take a shower and even manage to sing. we loop our hands around flowers and our bodies around better friends, we glorify the shape of clouds, cling to unopened presents, praise the names of new books. the ringing numb that fills us abates in tidal waves, we splash in the undertow. we know. behind us are footprints of the ugly dance, of the wretched alive-but-undying, of the hillside burial we pictured ourselves coffined in. behind us is a stark white, an unspelled poem, a sheet we noosed and untied and stepped out of. behind us belongs to us, so we keep our noses forwards into the warm black beyond which knows nothing but promise. we survive. we use bleach to clean what won’t unstain and we don’t pour ourselves shotglasses of it. we drink water until we’re belly-full and we laugh louder than the earthquakes we danced in. we hang our arms around the shoulders of lonely loves, we make friends in high places, we crawl up there with them. we learn to love soft and gentle and mouthful, we learn to love the ache for reminding us we’ll always come home, we clutch abalone necklaces and braided hair and lovely, we learn again to filter ourselves through sunlight, to breathe deep even underwater, plant roots deeper, spring heads taller, show teeth wider, be braver, be fighter. we turn ourselves whale big, fill up rooms with our funny, spill over the sides with alive-ness, alive-est, glitter up the space with good vibes and kiss our bad pasts with red gloss because it’s sad that it happened but it wasn’t our fault, we grow up, be bolder, be brighter. we survive. we become survivor.”

— r.i.d//inkskinned (via inkskinned)

#read again