Some Things You Don't Come Back From.

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Heather Rosario Sievert, from These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women; "Transmutation"

[Text ID: "To love you / I have detached the world from my shoulders, / and have remained desert in sea and star, / simple / like the light."]

And when the night falls, and darkness lays beside me, I don't want to fall in love, I want to be in your arms and forgotten as the mist touches the hills...................

everytimeyousaygoodbye ©

I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.

Warsan Shire, from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head; “Home”

Fill me with desire, I've been parched these last hundred years, died too young, left my heart out on a bookcase then forgotten, I forgot to want myself and everything I grew into.

I forgot to write and love it.

I forgot to love the darkness inside of me, the shadows that held my jaw and pulled me into you.

I forgot that you held everything I ever wanted and feared, that I traded love for fear.

My desire has not completely left, I still want everything that I lost and will feel again.

I still want you.

I am more a fool for thinking, wiser for feeling, as if my head had ever the chance of hiding this from me 

You storm away without a backward glance

only troubled minds seek paradise

an escape to a better world 

far from circumstance

you whisper to yourself at night

clearing tear-tracked eyes, a haunted sight

I see you now through the mirror glass

cursing what blocks your well-trodden path

You hurt me with your fragile words;

lonely is the new day's speech

and the quiet beholds a solemn time

filled with empty promises, I hear you speak

of nothing more than darkness folding

consuming all to sit and see

a new day filled with quietly spoken

words now absent

of your cruel mind and damning speech

Midsummer

I feel laden with unsaid dreams

spilling over my hair, my feet

walking through a daylit night

full of sparkling stars and troubled sleep

Friday, 23rd July 2021

The moon was swallowed in a throbbing light

As the thunder began its climbing flight

And in the dawn of a swelling tide

She saw inside the world dressed in spite

I know I'm turning ugly

A turpentine tree trunk

Twisted as the shadows

Lengthen and silhouettes

Soften, someone show me

How to make anything but

A fist— I bruise, I burn, I

Hold on to everything

That wants to let me go

I am growing stunted with

The skillet slant of the sun

Playing hide-and-seek

I have lost or I am losing

And the ink in my veins

Falls in splotches insensible

In this eternal, internal rain

I have a mouth made for

Despair, I have learned to

Chew the air before my

Weary lungs can swallow