#wlwocpoetrynet
do the things you have in mind. especially if you have been thinking about it for a long time. we spend too much time waiting, but what are we really waiting for? waiting till you have a backup plan? waiting for someone to do it with? just simply waiting to see how it goes? or have you been waiting for so long that you forgot what you were waiting for? you don’t have to do it all at once. take baby steps. but don’t forget to do the things you have in mind. don’t end up waiting in vain.
1. it’s okay to lose people you don’t fit with. people come and go.
2. it’s okay if your path is different from your friend’s. you don’t want the same things they do
3. it’s okay if you tried something and it didn’t work out. you have unlimited amount of tries, try again.
What’s the biggest freedom in this world? When you don’t have to share every single moment of your life on social media. When you have visited beautiful place and nobody knows about it. When you fall in love with someone and nobody knows about it. When you just won your life and nobody has to know about it. This is freedom for me.
In this world, full of illusions, moments are rare.
there are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
a year ago, i would have died for certain people.. a year later, most of them are dead to me.
Are you living or are you just jumping from one obsession to the other to run away from yourself?
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
sometimes suffering is just suffering. it doesn’t make you stronger. it doesn’t build character. it only hurts.
being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.
you must learn her. you must know the reason why she is silent. you must trace her weakest spots. you must write to her. you must remind her that you are there. you must know how long it takes for her to give up. you must be there to hold her when she is about to.
you must love her because many have tried and failed. and she wants to know that she is worthy to be loved, that she is worthy to be kept. and, this is how you keep her.
anyone else feel like they’re at the point where they don’t even know what to say or do anymore? like there’s so much going on in my head and i’ve just lost control to pretty much everything. tired of love, tired of hate, tired of life. i just don’t see a point anymore. someone once told me “the meaning of life is what you make it” but idk what to make of it anymore. it feels like an endless cycle of pain and heartache and constant restlessness. can’t sleep anymore. i feel like i’m at this constant war with myself and i’m stuck in a changing mental maze. if anyone reads this, just know if you feel the same, i care about you. idgaf who you are, i love you because i know what it feels like to feel constantly isolated from reality, like the elephant in the room.
look, love is not something we wind up, something we set or control. love is just like art: a force that comes into our lives without any rules, expectations or limitations. love like art, must always be free.
there are two ways to tell this story:
perhaps her grief is echoed by your anger
or her anger now haunts your grief. either way
they come from worlds never made, the ones
that extinguished under their own weight
before ever understanding light. pin every loss
like a white flag around your still-breathing body
as if this will keep old language from spilling out,
as if this will keep your voice from turning to
a resonance as blurred as your face in the mirror
these days. if recognition comes from creation
you’ll always be a minute or a generation behind
and it won’t make a difference. slip sideways into
another body in the crowd, another ghost to wear
like a memory that never happened and never will.
if you call this mourning, it’s a kind that comes
six feet to the left instead of underground. still
found wanting against the weight of all that came
before, but now you can lie your way out of here,
truth turned frail as spidersilk in your throat.
this light illuminates all the stories she told,
forever looking on in silence.
—q.l. | for day #17 of @avolitorial’snapowrimo prompts
—q.l. | for day #16 of thesetwo prompt lists | transcript below
you swallow night-dark berries by the fence at the end of the field. i say if you die, tell god i said hello, and you remind me you don’t believe in anything after this, only emptiness. we’re still young enough that i try to forget this misalignment. not quite old enough that i can reshape myself for it. just give me time. for now, both of us know what it means to want some part of this skin gone, but i had my smile fitted for a blade long ago, so you sheathe your thorns under your tongue instead. i try sneaking them into your ribcage while you aren’t looking, and shame stains my hands for my trouble, all poison-heat halogen light. somewhere down the sidewalk dark wings are rustling. sweetness is always out of season. when the next dawn comes, dew will paint the fruit with a sheen so pretty no one will notice any sign of rot or toxin until they bite down.
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they’ll call you the wrong kind of romantic,
the wrong shade of red printed on sale-flyers,
mouth coming away darkened by cheap ink.
some contracts taste better at the swallowing
than the signing, your jaw snake-soft around
the paper cuts. if anyone asks, the price of life
is pocket change; you’ve traded souls for those
who only wanted something sweet, glutted
by goldflow, mired in sunlight-syrup. fold paper
dolls out of dollar bills and old checkbooks,
their skirts painted null and void-black with
clearance nail polish. go on and call it a waste
but the sky still won’t change from that plastic
white. the convenience store down the street
carries both candy hearts and heartstoppers;
be careful not to mix them up.
—q.l. | for day #14 of @ragewrites’ napowrimo prompts
your hair is riverstone-smooth in my hands,
every braid i put in slipping out as easy
as my secrets do around you. do you remember
telling me you wanted to hinge your ribcage
open, just to check if the bones are hollow? wait
another season, at least. i filled them with seeds
that’ll only grow when no one’s looking. i know
patience won’t save us, but we were always good
at being quiet, and that’s almost the same,
our silence bright as the sun slipping underwater,
soft as the touch of moonlight on concrete,
promise-heavy as the storm-clouds gathering
overhead. so it goes. so you keep tending
the pearl-pale fire of the smile floating faceless
in the night-forest dark over your left shoulder.
there’s some strange desolation in knowing
our child-selves won’t recognize us when we
meet them again. but if you turn into flood
i’ll be the moon and say i led you there, say
i played puppetmaster with all your sightless
tides, so you can blame me if that’ll leave you
untouched by the weight of this world’s ending
and i’ll seal the sky closed with the last of the light.
—q.l. | for day #12 of @avolitorial’s napowrimo prompts
—q.l. | for day #7 of @babymoonpoet’snapowrimo prompts | transcript below
feels like summer again, spending half a red pen writing bad poetry about arson again, trying to persuade yourself not to burn it up in the kitchen sink again. it just always seems so easy, you know? you used up all the black ink by the end of high school & the blue a year later & little fires spit from the faucet’s mouth if you turn the handle just right. like any other cold-blooded creature, you know how to adore anything that grants a moment of warmth without ever trusting it to last, faithless & frozen in the calling light. but it feels like summer already, summer meaning stranded in amber-caught silences, every breath pulled from the echoing depths of wells long thought dry. feels like summer again, too-warm hands steering you inside the bathroom where the window blinds are lit into thin strips of blood again, someone saying if you catch fire i want to see it happen—
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in a city named after obedience, peace is growing
at ground level. history pulls a white-petaled bloom
from the tired dirt, blows it clean and offers it to you
in wordless ritual. take it with both hands. ghosts
will spill out like pale coins, faces worn featureless
in the red light of sunrise. green loops of yarn
twist into hairpin flowers without your touch, soft
premonitions of burial. how many generations back
can you spin this story before you run out of names
to call? say it’s ancestral, and everyone will think
they understand, that all the tales have been shared,
that all the dead must be sleeping soundly. by late
evening, if your pulse stops threatening to outgrow
this body, press it into the hollow wrist of one of
the phantoms that haunt the top of the staircase
and you’ll turn their blood a little warmer, their voice
a little louder, hone the sharp-boned restlessness
they house: the same one sitting behind the mirror,
the same one smiling with your mouth.
—q.l. | for day #3 of @avolitorial’snapowrimo prompts
OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS OF LOVE
twelve alarms set in five-minute intervals
because you might not have an early start
next morning, but you know i do. i keep a list
of all your favourite things, reread it until
i almost trust memorization again. sometimes
i stay up all night watching candles burn down
in case of something i don’t know how to name
without making it dissipate at the sound, but
all the pictures hung on the walls are crooked,
because it mattered more to measure the time
we were spending. listen, when i call winter
the warmest season, i mean i still remember
how many times we brushed the settled snow
from each other’s shoulders, even knowing
they’d be coated again in a matter of moments.
everything and anything to bring a bit more
comfort to this corner of the world, meaning
every extra cushion, every blanket pulled
straight from the dryer. every time you shift
to make more space without waiting for me
to ask for it. if happiness is a heart kept open,
i know this door is always unlocked. the green
onions perched along the kitchen windowsill
are growing a little taller every day. i want
to share them with you.
so: another portal-fantasy. another / anywhere-but-here, tripping over nothing / in the doorway. balance regained / only to look up in universes / tilted ninety degrees to the side, / the kind where the skies are made / of white jaws sheared wide, teeth planted / tight in the dirt. every skeleton / grown from monster to mansion. say / you want to stay here, / and it’ll mean you can’t. / but if you look a little closer / at the mirror before you / maybe the painted ocean at the back of the room / will spill from its frame, sea-glass / staining the floorboards, / the seafoam-blood of little lost merfolk / tugging you away again. or: if you / touch it just right, / a crack in a wall / can draw you in, mistlike. miss / the bottom step on the staircase / and you’ll land no time later / in some time unknown, on the mushroom-bed / of a faery underland. tell me / the story again. i promise / i remember / how to listen. there’s a reason why / our version of i love you / always sounded more / like run away with me.
—q.l.
