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.

The Galena Evening Times, Kansas, January 18, 1900

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.

One of the best shot of Total Solar Eclipse from 08-04-2024.

Via @nasa-official

Be, be as you've always been

Be like the love that discovered the sin

That freed the first man and will do so again

And, lover, be good to me

Be that hope when Eden was lost

It's been deaf to our laughter since the master was crossed

Which side of the wall really suffers that cost?

And, lover, be good to me

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be, be as you've always been

True to the time and the placе you've been given

Your heart in thе world, and a world there within

And, lover, be good to me

Be there and just as you stand

Or be like the rose that you'd hold in your hand

That grows bold in a barren and an uneasy land

And, lover, be good to me

And, be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

My jaw has unhinged itself again.

And I am shedding my skin.

It flakes off in small pieces,

revealing the delicate newness within

November Graveyard

by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it's a sin — i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb — i dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.

— "salt", salma deera

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost