Violets-and-honey - Violets And Honey

The Elevator is Out of Service- Please Use the Stairs - by Katie Walters

Fibromyalgia, took my bones when I was sleeping.

Crept in while I was resting,

Breathing deep against my pillow,

Or the paper of the books I could no longer read.

It grew inside me,

Drank my mitochondria like wine,

Took an angle grinder to my spine,

And wore me away like twilight.

I, got sick at uni,

In a small room, where nobody could hear me cry,

Or permit me to.

My nervous system quit, while I was working.

In the library where my legs were burning,

Like the oven door against my forearms,

And the stovetop, where I made myself curry. For the first time.

Independence, embryonic.

I was nineteen.

November was cold that year, and

January was colder.

As fresh and new as I was, and as,

Stark and clean and painful as my fading autonomy.

I tried to crystallize it.

In an essay, or a poem, in biro ink and off-brand toothpaste.

Like if I wrote it right I could write myself well

And when the rain fell in February,

I fell,

In Tesco and at the train station and on the stairs.

Swallowed the stones in my throat, chose not to dare question why it was that I kept falling.

And got back up.

Because strong people don’t get sick,

You stick it out, you do not quit,

And when the elevator is out of service,

You use the stairs.

I never knew how high the curb was until I could not climb it.

We searched for my bones in decomposing diagnoses,

Degrading medication on my tongue,

Took blood tests of my blood lines,

And on the coastline,

Tried to calcify my insides strong again.

Put our hands in the wet sand,

To build a tibia. Shape my sternum like a castle.

Clavicle and mandible and cranium.

Starlight and seafoam and gone.

My bones, are in the Rotunda museum,

Under the skin of the Gristhorpe man,

We walk where he walked, and I walk no longer,

Pressed behind glass, my skin tight as leather.

My bones, are in the limestone cliffs edge,

Grown from sediment,

Calcium carbonate, cycling, infinite, ground down to shale,

My bones are food for minke whales.

I am lying in bed, and ugly, like a princess.

Limp, and formless, and rolled out to sea

I am blue badge on double yellows,

Pepsi Max and heavy metal,

Flat on the backseat, and staring through the windscreen, where the starlings will dance until nightfall.

My bones, are a murmur of starlings,

Dark and undulating

The shapeless, shape of nature,

Inexplicable,

Impermanent,

And strong.

And I will not be another fucking tragedy,

Another DWP dispensability,

Too many of us have already died.

We build on their bodies. Defiant.

I, am a being of duty, and fury, and I want you to know, that I am broken,

Because they could not contain me whole.

Fibromyalgia, took my bones, and they grew. Fragmented, transcendent, and new,

I am fragile. And grounded. Bound to dropped kerbs. Sick insides.

But my bones?

Oh, my bones, are the sky.

do you miss me like i miss you?

do you feel the same heartbreaking pain as i do?

or is it only me who feels this way?

Crawling out of the swamps where you buried me like the setting sun and the moon rises an enemy.

Carolina Outcrop. Never Trust a Woman Who Writes.

Henri Gervex, Rolla (detail), 1878.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.

I need to stop going to YouTube shorts or Instagram reels when I’m seeking auditory or visual stimulus. I just keep scrolling for that dopamine hit and it wastes all of my time because a lot of the content isn’t worth it. I keep telling myself to go to Spotify and listen to music instead, but I think the issue is that Spotify is just auditory and I need a visual component to go with it.

“As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

– Pablo Neruda

My jaw has unhinged itself again.

And I am shedding my skin.

It flakes off in small pieces,

revealing the delicate newness within

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

The Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, January 14, 1935

I read the flecks in your eyes

like how a girl all alone

would read poetry.

.

Your eyes tell an odyssey

of the thousand lies you've heard,

each one a dark star.

.

Somewhere within your iris

there's an epic of pain and

love in equal parts.

.

Eyes like the night sky.

I see the galaxy and

wonder where I could fit in.