How Could I Kill The Weeds

i relapsed.

i smoked 🍃 for the first time since november of 2024.

everything got too much; the world swallowing me whole; my gut emptying to hollow; my heart beating frantically at the trapping of a vice.

so i succumbed to the relief. erased months of perseverance, strength, growth.

at least now I’ve got more to write about.

- the dangers of romanticising pain as a poet

plopped into cool water, my manus flattens against the stone below as a bowl upturns like a dome above.

my marble eyes ring with the warning of moonlight, my skin glistens, slick with sage-

i peer at my greenhouse, pads reaching to press the convex glass, curiosity caressing my face-

but comfort follows me beneath the water, serenity tying me back to stone.

then steam clouds the cage; lids close off sight, then sound- suddenly, silenced, i muster one last croak. poetrycommunity

death by comfort // the boiling frog

Made this a while back at uni for a book project around Sylvia Plath the bell jar 🍓🫧🕸️

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat Proffessions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs where many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as i sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

to live without art is to live without breath.

I don’t want to be the next Rupi Kaur or Trista Mateer. I want to be the first Lila Kane.

Write like a song. Or write like somebody else. Write about anything so long as it’s not yourself, and don’t worry, because it’ll still be about you. It all came from you, the potter who could never completely buff away her fingerprints from the clay. Write vaguely, don’t show your hand. 

But you do not want to do anything anymore. You want to lie in bed and watch the crane spin around the skyscraper outside your apartment, until its lights turn off and it rests for the night. You wonder if you were perhaps not built for love. You joke that you’re stupid, but the joke isn’t funny anymore when you tell it to yourself ten times a day. You are no longer funny, you have become Pierrot, a foolish fool. 

You passed a man with his shoe untied walking to his car downtown. You almost told him the news about his laces, but you imagined he’d feel dismayed so you let him pass you by. You want to stick in people’s memories the way they do in yours, but you don’t know how. Maybe next time you walk down the street you’ll untie your shoe and imagine that somebody noticed.

Joy Sullivan, “Want", Instructions for Traveling West

me, the motherfucker with over 50 abandoned works in progress: i have an idea

my heart lurches into my throat and lodges at the back like a jagged-edge stone. my lungs sprout wings and fly away.

the aching of their absence in my chest is heavy, despite my rib cage housing hollow. my skin jumps and begs to rip free.

i wake, and it is not a dream. my body is running from me, yet my mind will not free itself- it delights in it's cranial prison.

i wake, and your body is still rotting 6 feet under, your heart and lungs and skin and mind no more- but i cannot gift mine.

defines you? no.

shapes you? moulds you? becomes you? yes.

our identity is malleable as fuck. our experiences warp it day in and out. the good and the bad.

and this is not to invalidate you: your traumas are real, stifling, and the consequences echo.

but never forget they’re not what’s written under “you” in the dictionary.

they’re just littered throughout your wiki.

“your trauma doesn’t define you” no actually it does. it dictates every aspect of my shitty life.