rococobean
new here (Earth) • poetry and art
93 posts
Latest Posts by rococobean
Happy Star Wars Day! I’ve decided to make my Skywalker comic into one easily rebloggable post.
sonnet for the uncanonical, 2025
written for two-bees escapril; the prompts are 'sonnet' (week one) and 'apocrypha' (day three). i will admit that this is probably only partially a sonnet; i've never been great with meter, but the rhyme scheme and structure is mostly there! i think. either way, i had fun challenging myself.
A man in the hospital died today
I'm in the room next door when it happens. No alarms sound his death. No one is there to scream or cry.
Just two nurses, gathered round his bed like doves in blue scrubs. I hope they thought to hold his hand.
His mottled arms are folded neatly across his chest when I arrive. I study his body, instinctively looking for the rise and fall of breath. He is, of course, perfectly still. The sensors have all been removed, he is covered in a feather-light sheet. His skin, nearly translucent, glows in the sunlight.
The older of the two nurses must see my wide eyes; she beckons me and shows me what to do.
This was a good death, she tells me.
I am not convinced. She continues as she hands me a roll of gauze.
He was comfortable.
She shows me how to moisten his eyes to protect them for donation. I touch his eyelid gingerly. The cold makes me flinch. I remind myself that bodies do that when they die.
He was clean.
I place the gauze on his lids, covering his priceless eyes. I remind myself that I cannot hurt him. I still handle him as if his skin were eggshell.
The sterile water runs out from the gauze and streams down his cheek.
He wasn't alone.
The instrumental becomes intrinsic if you let it
the world is getting so ugly and bleak and it’s hard not to feel so hopeless. but we have to remember that they want us to feel that way.
it reminds me of this quote by dan savage - “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
joy is resistance. it’s really scary times but we are all in this together.
so. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I’ll keep going with you
nvmillustration
Winterreise
etchings on zinc, 40 x 30 cm inkenstabell.com
Maybe we are not at any center of the universe but at the very bottom of it, looking up.
Praying for autumn, as we all do, we ask for mundane to hibernate a pounding heart at last . At last .
listen, the silhouette of a person is more human than AI will ever be. can you hear me? you are a body, the soul is nothing without the body, there is no consciousness without time and space, and in the computer exists neither. is this thing on?
the trees might be changing… but what about you?
Dreams to have while walking home from the library
I read of mangroves, coastal forest far away protection against monsoons, a gnarled seawall – nature standing up against its watery cousin who would sometimes threaten death when cousin cried and overflowed with tears.
But mangroves are far away, small black and white image printed on trees so far from arboreal, trunks whittled down and forced into a single, bleached dimension to serve such a purpose now as to show a photo of a mangrove.
Just as flat and white, but the moon seemed closer that night. Closer than mangroves and monsoons. Back down to this autumn scene, now the maples stand burning all crimson Maroon leaves.
Monsoon trees. There is life here and now, then there is life in pictures and words. Our minds catch both in one fell swoop and they dance together in their captive company, lightly stepping but sometimes intersecting in their closeness – the impossible twirling of stony boughs become a nest for the granite moon, immobile limbs graced with the agility of dreams. Fancy flying one thought to the other, closing the distance and realizing two worlds mingling in an elegant, chaotic embrace. Mangroves holding the harvest moon, from both the truth and I so far, but so beautiful.
feels like every few weeks I have to relearn how to exist, that I do need to sit in the sun and move my body and not drink too much coffee and dress in clothes that make me feel good and talk to my friends and journal and get off my phone sometimes and eat vegetables and drink more tea and generally reclaim the space in my life for myself ya know
I never before felt this ache in my chest
when the lover on screen was found broken and dead.
But now
it's you. And it's me
in the story.
And when looking for death, there's no need to hurry.
My heart blocks my throat
I don't know what to do
Now the survivor is me
and the dead one is you.
We are a very very dumb, stupid people
WHIMPER, CRY, YOU KNOW WE'RE SCARED
Psychedelicatessen
End of every easy street
Serotonin slicked sidewalk skating
Scar scratched snacktimes
New town home
Ammonite teddy bear touch
Old as prophet bones
Soft as a rotting embrace
Symbiosis on homesick string
Hold close to my home-heart
And whimper and mumble
Into nostalgic oblivion
