Abilienne E. Thorne
Feedback is always appreciated! đź’ś Thank you to this lovely community for all of your support!
Abilienne E. Thorne
Feedback is always appreciated! đź’ś Thank you to this lovely community for all of your support!
Feedback is always appreciated! đź’ś Thank you to this lovely community for all of your support!
Feedback is always appreciated! đź’ś Thank you to this lovely community for all of your support!
Dearer, To me, Dearest Than the pulse-deep song
Nearer Than the Nearest Pull of arms or tongue
Scraping Out of Scraps of time Little eternities
Carving Out of Carver’s wood Warmth, and eyes to see
Honey From the Sunniest Of swathes of summer green
Sunnier Than God-ish light; Not gold or gaudy in the least
My lover’s soul is Sweeter Than the sweetest songful ring
And so I simply cannot help But sing.
Have me Halve me
Take me Break me into two
If you Salve me I will speak like lovers do
If you Solve me Your embrace I will take to
You will never have to do The things you used to have to do
You will never have to choose Between two evils and a ruse
How my heart has ached for you How my heart still breaks for you
Let safety be your embrace true And I will cry for love of you.
Halve me Have me
Take me Break me, I don’t bruise
I only hurt when you I lose I only bleed much when I muse
On the distance between Our heartbeats two.
So
Halve me, but Darling, Have me, too.
—— Repost because previous posting of this piece was banned :(
This has been sitting in my drafts for months, haha. Thought I should finally just post it and stop tweaking. Feedback appreciated!
——— • ——— • ———
We were happy.
High enough to touch the clouds, fingers pulling through soft wisps, dragging through the endless swathes of pink.
You kissed a heartbeat into me. You kissed words onto my tongue.
The sun peaked overhead as your skin shone a cool, bright gold. I remember trying to find a synonym for beauty. I realized I’d used them all up.
Then I realized that nothing would be enough. There is no clever turn of phrase that describes she who glows by day and by night, the creature that laughs so swiftly and speaks so softly that it is envied by the wind.
We were there, dancing on the edge of everything, towering high enough to feel like birds.
I pried your trembling hands apart and held them to my heart.
“Don’t fall,” I cautioned. I’m sure you could feel my heart rabbiting under your fingertips.
“What happens if I do?”
My hands came to rest like warm stones behind your shoulders.
“You lose your Grace. Your… you-ness. The thing that makes you distinguishable from trees, from the sky, from me.”
“… from you?”
The clouds drew close to us, blushing shades of apricot and honeycomb, as I spoke of other things, and you answered.
——
You must have had some notion planted in you by the moon as we slept, for the following morning, you were too quiet.
“What is it?”
There was a kind of earnestness written on your brow, and near your eyes. A puzzling out, a searching, a sifting.
“Am I real?”
Reflexively, I reached out to touch your arm. The question alarmed me. It was like someone had taken the cool, eggshell sky and splattered a streak of red paint across it.
It was wrong, the way that asking the clouds why they cried was wrong. It shook the implicitly known order of things.
“My Grace. Your… Grace. Do we know if that even exists? What if it’s a lie?”
The world went a hard, bony white, like I’d taken a punch to the head.
All I remember is your sun limned hands reaching, reaching for me as I staggered as though dazzled by the presence of a god.
“You… We…” I paused to clear my throat. “You’re thinking about jumping, aren’t you?”
You smiled through parted lips, but I could tell that the expression was a lie.
“We’ve been here too long,” you whispered. “Come dance with me.”
I could not stop watching. I could not stop holding your hands as you walked backwards. I felt the wind scrape salt from my cheeks.
“Don’t you want to?” Your question dropped down my throat and into my stomach like a stone.
No, I didn’t say. No, I don’t want to fall. With or without you. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose our high, sunny slice of paradise.
“Come,” you said, tipping backwards.
I didn’t even have time or breath to call out your name. Not even one last time.
——
I watched us falling as if in fragments, a stuttering roll of film. Your aura dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. You were burning. I was burning.
The Grace was being burned out of us.
——
I didn’t register the impact.
I don’t remember the cry of anguish that must have torn itself from my chest. There you lay, broken at nearly every joint. Your skin was dull, your blood no longer silk blue but an angry red.
That was how it happened, darling.
That was how we became human.
If silence had a scent, it would smell like you.
The way my thoughts smooth over like a calming wave when you hold my hand, even this close to sleep. Even this close to sleep, you hold me– not like glass, but something like it, and your hair smells like soap and soft grass and I want to pull that into my lungs until it becomes me.
Your arm around my chest, around my shoulders– it’s like a familiar memory, a well worn path that you’ve never walked before.
I am oblivious to time.
You are silent, and your touch silences every part of me. Sleep, it asks, leave the walking world.
Even when I leave your arms, the scent of silence lingers. Comforting, your t-shirt on my shoulders. It smells like you.
If dawn never found us, I would be content to stay here.
You do not know what contentment is until you have your arms clasped around it. You have not known peace until it is in your palms. Silence is not an absence of sound, not a vision, but a scent.
Soap. Soft grass. You.
Hello Old friend It’s been awhile You’ve missed me, maybe Have you? I have not. It’s so difficult to hang out Because I always end up crying on Someone’s bathroom floor, feet braced against the door You know you hurt me, so why come back?
Maybe because, despite all my talk, I still need you.
Dream within a dream Heart within a heart All we cannot see Are things we cannot part with
Cover me in sand Lift me into sleep Once I find the lost hand I might finally keep it
Storm, small storm Under my skin Pulling me in Warm, here it’s warm As it never fully is Without you
Should my shelter Ever come to harm Would I Close my eyes Would I Now unsee What I’ve always needed What I’ve always wanted
Blind to cold Numb to sequence Past untold Past unspoken
Even havens Are a kind of daydream Even comfort Is a kind of drowning
Star, small star In my palm In this sanctum I belong Or so it would seem Yet the worst part of a dream Is the waking
The first part of moving on Is breaking
So now that my shelter Is no more I will Close my eyes As if I Could unsee What I’ve always needed What I’ve always wanted
Dream within a dream Heart within a heart Isolated, we On an island of my making
I remember you asking me, “Why do you cut yourself open like that?” I didn’t know the answer until the words came out of me; the vessel carrying contents unknown, the messenger reading lines unwritten and unread.
“Because no one else will do it for me.”
No one else will splay me wide, every expression, every sentence laid bare.
No one else will flay the truth from my bones. I, alone, can point to my chest and unravel what rustles inside. I am the only one capable of writing poetry about myself, for it is in pulling oneself apart that the self is sought, and in seeking, the self is uncovered, centimeter by centimeter.
Poetry, that sacred self-harm, that twisted act of grotesque curiosity, is the knife by which I cut. I cut a deep slash down the center of my being, pry myself open like a fisherman gutting prey (gutted, guttering, candle-quick), and unearth identity.
It is terrifying, beautiful.
The pain of carving into oneself can be bitter at times, but the love of the act gleams around it; enshrouds it, halo-like.
The love of poetry blinds me to the agony of self-dissection.
I love our silences. The unspoken Current of thought flowing, Enveloping the room. My mind drifts, alighting On various cool, smooth pebbles Like a river feeling out its edges.
I love the serenity, Sleepy and warm That comes over me. We trade our wordless sentences For an eternity.
Before we part, I cut you from myself like A flower from a stem.
Because as much as I enjoy This intricate ritual of ours,
I hate our silences, Hate that I can’t let out all the Horrible clogging things. I choke on them, I drown, Softly, In every “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you”, In every aching pause, In every word that I traded for the ones That I really wanted to say. So I mention a stupid book Or a stupid fly on the wall, And you trade emptiness with me, And I burn from the inside out With unsaid, unsaid, unsaid. I love you, and You are so beautiful, and Hold me. For the love of everything, Please, Please.
I need to know that I exist Outside of my own head. I am besieged within my own Useless propriety, my own Walls, Carefully crafted. I can’t speak to you. Can’t even do this small thing, This tiny thing— I miss you, And it’s spilling over. And I cannot stay silent, Cannot breathe.
I fold inwards, A quiet crisis, Painful but brief, As I have done a million times before. I leave feeling defeated, Like I’m Still waiting.
It’s killing me, love. Our silence is Killing me.
Perhaps I am a wretch Perhaps I am a god Perhaps I am an optimist beneath this grim facade
Or maybe my identity Lies leagues beneath the sea Amid the Stygian darkness, where sunken valleys be
Perhaps I am a songbird Perhaps I am a seed And maybe what defines me is my weakness and my need
Yet No matter who I am Thirty thousand years from here This heartbreak hurts, and I cannot contain it within any sphere.
—— A/n: This poem literally started as a shower thought. Just kinda grew from there.
Gregor Samsa looks up at the vast sea of human-sized insects, barely making out their large carapacious bodies. He lifts an arm to block out the blinding lights of the stadium. The clicking, snuffling, hissing language of the crowds is deafening.
A voice (voice?) screams shrilly over a loudspeaker. The noise from the crowds dies down. A thick scraping noise is the only sound that can be heard for a minute or so. Then the crowd erupts once again in that strange clicking and howling and spitting.
Gregor stares down at his dirtied hands, his shredded shirt. He’s shaking.
The cage door lifts.
Gregor stares dumbly at the creatures in the stadium seats, three vital pieces of information slotting into place in his head:
The sounds he heard before are being made not just by a crowd, but by an audience.
There is an armored, beetle-like creature standing (standing?) before him, beating a a stick of metal against a curved, metallic surface.
He is going to die.
He is going to die, in this strange arena, filled with strange people (people?), who sound very, very excited to watch him get torn apart.