raw, slimy, smelly

full of life

free

pressed between these pages

we tried to hold it in
and keep it alive for our memories

the love of those moments
sometimes was better left intact
without our necromancy

only God gives life

accessories on accessory

cuffs, chains, generic, gaudy

unsized, the wearer made fit

and when it came time,

they worried:

“her hands are too strong, too worn, too real

not idle in the work of the world, not clean of its dirt”

A pity, my bones were small enough

for their grasp on my wrists

but the bands couldn’t hold, my hands wouldn’t fit

in the complicity of being people like them

they’ve made a pet out of a beast they never fully knew- and God, I’m hungry

they come back and they don’t trust eyes anymore. they don’t pretend knowledge was an individual boon. they sit in the dark and hum and trace echoes until everyone else is ready to stop trusting the shadows, accept light can be reflected, feel the sound as it bends and follow the song home, to fresh air

so- why didn’t they try

You wouldn’t feel bad to see my name there either

Because we’d both be grateful that the thing came through

I see it all as such, anyways

Curated

Cured

Incurred

Curio

Curves

Occur

Curtained

Curriculum

Recursive

Currents

Procuring

Currencies

Security

Mercurial

Currants

Obscured

Curbed

Curliness

Manicured

Curdling

The mechanisms

And the quartz

And the cogs and

The balances and

The frame and

The gears and

The hands or the

Face - to the

Tools he uses

But they will know

Everything as it

Unfolds

In time

you want what you want

you want it all how you want it

but you say it’s for me

and I’m screaming that I don’t want it

that I don’t want any of it

that what I wanted has passed and that I want not now

and you insist that you want me to want

and shouldn’t that wanting be enough for us both

but your wanting always left me wanting

so I wanted you gone and you took your wants with you

I’ll do all the work to keep it alive and I’ll pluck them all myself

you won’t ever know the dirt or even the leaves

I’ll give you my blooms

so you can let them rot on your counter

and I’ll be able to say I tried to give you beauty

even when I know you never saw it as life

and we all bleed online anyway

because what if the point of the screaming is to defy the silencing of yourself

I’d let him in

I’d make us tea and I’d warm up some leftovers

I’d pull him a chair and I’d listen to him

I’d probably hug him to me as he cried

I’d probably kiss his forehead one last time

and I would still say no

and it would be the most love I’ve ever had for him

Back then I had a photography subpage about things I found and would make fan edits graphically and of audio files… now I’m Alataria.art lol

I used to write when I had nobody else to tell and it was kinda my only respite for a while

Then boys happened

And they took so much time and energy that I started just hearing myself out loud to them

And it felt like enough but now looking back I only had half that conversation with myself and probably missed out on their halves

If everything is a dialogue w myself, am I a narcissistic individual choosing a life of extreme masochism? Should I ask God for easier lessons now? When do you stop feeling like a kid in a new school again? Or am I just caught still in the whiplash of moving so many times back then?

Do men open up to me just because they like to be seen fully by someone who isn’t scared to look? Because they’ve not yet shown it’s because they want to encourage me to share in return

I still tried though, just to be sure, and never really learned anything new about them

I struggle to get my hopes up now because it hurt so much to have them break over and over, but I realize this resigns me to a life of no hope - which is the pain I wanted to avoid. The breaking is temporary. So I try again, but it isn’t easy to lie to myself that it’ll go any differently this time

I’ve been told that I speak naturally in poem and that it is maddening but impressive all the same and I guess I had to sit with the fact that most people are not struggling to present their thoughts in the linear format the way I have to wrangle mine from shapes and sounds into translated English - some color slips through and I think it is because I can’t unlearn the shortcuts people aren’t raised with

Because in our parts of the world maybe we say things in words that take more thought but we use fewer words and the meanings are less chained to specificity

The words themselves are crafted by lips and moods that were inseparable from the speaker’s intentions and remained coded in to a people who spoke to each other a lot

And here I am filling pages with nothing. Because all the words I know fail to summarize the things I’ve seen in just my life alone, or know of the world in my limited capacity, and I have to hint or tangent on things you either know or don’t

Do you understand or not? You wouldn’t know huh?

When I started writing again, my closests asked if I had lost my mind. It is hard to explain that this is the most I have ever found of it and have been able to put down at once in one place. I doodle and sketch and scribble poems in journals that weren’t birthday gifts torn up by angry lovers but even those only loosely hold me like stitches to the fabric of time

This is like, a crochet. You can’t make a machine do this. It wouldn’t know why. I don’t either, but that never stopped a human.

Maybe that’s the spark I’m chasing- something in the instantaneous awareness of the choices each moment presents and having the ability to just DO something against any odds or conditioning once aware of them. It’s like, the purity of life. You just keep going because it’s all you are. The rest is death, and that is a separate thing that we get to when we get to, but until then… living is proving to be a constant escape act from the shackles of autopilot.

It would be easy, but then I really wouldn’t know where I’d be going.