tess

poetry inspired by misjudgments and missed opportunities

[12604]

im tess and i write poetry. have a couple published works but ive had this account for a while and thought id post some stuff here. this is the stuff from my notes app or random scribbles i do.

free insight into my head if you will.

im coming to terms with being mildly disabled and i smoke too much and drink too much and im messy and mildly evil probably.

enjoy my misery please.

[maybeitsmemaybeitsyou]

and what if i quit writing because things are coming out horribly and i hate everything i write down and i can’t convey anything in the ways I want to.

i want to say im angry and the idea of not being enough to make people want to endure tragedies is soul crushing. that im selfish and i want to be the thing that anchors people and holds people down but that ive never been important enough to keep them from being swept up in their own fantasies.

and that’s a horrible and impulsive and selfish idea but it’s the way things are said.

‘I can’t wait to get away from here’

‘I can’t wait to not have these burdens’

‘I can’t wait until i can finally live’

but im living fine. I’m living through it. im living for it.

I put my entire life on hold to stay with you and you want to leave?

you want to leave me here with this mess and you don’t see how that would make me angry?

how she already left and did so gladly and when she told you she found a better family, i swallowed my own bile to hold you through it?

it hurt me too. it hurts me and you want to do the same thing?

go ahead. I don’t care and I don’t want to write anything beautiful about it.

this is all you get from me.

[12604]

hoping heaven is crowded is a generous idea.

the idea in human hands cannibalizes itself. it eats itself. an endless rotation.

what comes first, the head? or the tail it eats?

push your ideology on me like push pins in drywall. hold me down and make me scream about how good god is.

is torture not a sin?

the snake eats itself and doesn’t know it’s eating itself.

make heaven crowded.

become ravenous with it. vengeful with it.

taste yourself until it stops tasting good.

until it stops feeling good.

you’re left with a mouth and nothing else and yet you keep saying to make heaven crowded.

you’re left with a mouth a nothing else and you can’t even pull a long drag from a cigarette.

you’re left with a mouth a nothing else and you can’t even suck him off until after marriage.

he kisses you still though, because what else is only a mouth good for?

make heaven crowded.

but you vomit when he tries to pry you open and up into something more than what you are.

make heaven crowded you say, but she paints you red and smiles at you with her whole body.

you’re left with a mouth and nothing else and it only curves upwards when she holds you tightly and tells you that mouths are essential and if this is all you have left then that’s enough.

mouths eat good food. drink strong drinks. kiss softly. can be painted all sorts of colors. mouths smile and they laugh and they chap in the cold.

but you feel a twist in your gut that you think is gods hand and all you have to look forward to is his dick between your lips.

after marriage of course.

make heaven crowded. you whispered it when you had nothing left to consume but yourself.

[12604]

slow burning desire is old news, love.

twist me up from the inside out and let the flames rage around me in descent.

no, not slow at all.

i want a quick death. merciless and all consuming.

eat me. pick at my bones until there’s nothing but molten want. need.

don’t let me be the one to light the matches this time please.

douse me down in kerosine and sink your teeth down into the meat of my shoulder.

don’t let me run again.

if you want me dead, do it yourself.

[12604]

but what im trying to say is there’s an ache in the stars and if I lay still enough I can hear it echo through the skies.

it vibrates through my skin and spills out of my mouth is a fit of cosmic fury compacted in dark bile.

and somewhere in between the dry heaving i can still taste your lips on mine.

[12604]

the intensity of old wounds never fails to obliterate me. the throbbing of silvery skin, scarred over with time, never truly healed though.

i toss and turn to dreams of you against golden light and soft skin. i wonder sometimes if you dream of me too.

you never asked about the state of my knuckles but i figured that you assumed violence and you would’ve been right.

there’s something aching in the stars and i can hear it echo through the skies.

what im trying to say is i died a long time ago i think. or maybe im older than i look. decades. maybe centuries even.

and i think im trying to say that i loved you as well as I knew how and that i wake up at 4:30am just in case my mom wants to call and apologize before she goes to work.

and maybe I’ll accept it and we can start over again or maybe I’ll let her say her piece and I’ll pretend i never heard it.

and maybe I’ll go sit by my grandmothers grave afterwards and wonder if she’d be disappointed in who i am today.

there are many qualities i deem to be okay about myself. im hot and funny and smart. im a scientist and a writer and i care for people.

and there are many qualities I detest. im avoidant and impulsive and violent. im moody and ill and my body doesn’t work like it should. and maybe somewhere in the cons is falling in love with a woman.

what im trying to say is that none of this is cookie cutter. that maybe I just don’t fit. and maybe it’s a new age and i still can’t look myself in the mirror too long without wanting to vomit.

maybe my highs are so incredibly high. maybe my lows are still too low. and maybe you’re still gone and my mother won’t call me.

maybe i won’t bask in the curiosity that seats itself at the headstone of my grandmothers grave and maybe I’ll finally buy some scar cream for my hands.

maybe I’ll heal and maybe I won’t.

but what im trying to say is there’s an ache in the stars and if I lay still enough I can hear it echo through the skies.

it vibrates through my skin and spills out of my mouth is a fit of cosmic fury compacted in dark bile.

and somewhere in between the dry heaving i can still taste your lips on mine.

maybe.

[12604]

and in not abandoning certain proclivities, i found myself in a long car ride to louisiana.

the heat was thick and swelling around me like cushioning wool. my hair stuck to the back of my neck in thick clumps and i had the lingering thought to chop it all off.

troubled teen.

a phrase that rattled around in my skull until blood spilled from my tear ducts. words that wrapped themselves around my throat in a lingering hold. words that lodged themselves into the base of my spine and i can still hear them whispered when I bend a certain way.

troubled teen.

was the excuse that pulled from a pastors lips after i busted my lip on a wooden shovel. overly medicated and over worked. no water until it was done.

that’s what started it.

the heavy rotation of pills, days blurring together in a solid string of horrifying madness.

-do you still think about women in the way a man would think about a woman?

-do you wish you were a man? do you feel as though god has made a mistake?

and maybe he did make a mistake.

-same-sex attraction is a heavy sin. symptoms of something corroding in your soul from letting it get in the devils hands.

and maybe it is. maybe i am corroded and dirty and wrong.

maybe the way her skin felt on mine was repulsive. maybe it was nothing. maybe it was starlight.

isn’t that a funny thought? her and i together being cosmic? other-worldly?

heavenly even.

and I won’t pray for god to fix me just as I don’t pray for him to heal my scars. I don’t pray for him to stop the pain. I don’t beg him for anything.

but maybe I did at one point. maybe I did beg god to save me. to get me out. to stop the cravings.

maybe I asked god which was worse, the women or the pills they were feeding us.

and here I am, a burnout and a cripple. here I am in all of my scars and anger and discomfort.

maggie was my bunk mate in louisiana and she died last year on a drug over dose.

stephanie was cruel when we were working in the heat. she died at the age of 19 from a drug over dose.

micah was sweet in all of his insecurity. he overdosed six months after we got out.

julia’s hands were too soft for what they were making us do and we had to help her with salve every night. she overdosed 3 months ago.

no one makes it out of the lousiana heat alive, at least not in the way you think. all the pills and the bibles and the madness.

i think im the only one left from what i know. the only one still alive. which is an odd feeling when you’re only in your twenties, to know that all of these people you spent a year with are all dead.

they’re all dead. all drugs. all hate.

no, i dont think gods gonna listen to us beg.

he doesn’t reach out to troubled teens.

[12604]

can you plz elaborate on your last poem? If you’re comfortable

art is better left up to interpretation honeybee

[12604]

god took me by the creek on a saturday afternoon.

surrounded by holy men and women in white clothes, stained with the mud of the earth.

the preacher was rattling off about purity and damnation and i caught myself staring at the blank sky in desperation.

the hollowed out feeling was creeping through my body like spiders laying eggs. i was waiting for the grotesque hatch. as though god might see me bleeding out and come help.

i was pushed down under the filthy water before i had a chance to hold my nose. the water rushed around me and into my lungs and I sputtered under the preacher’s hand.

I wrapped my scarred hands around his wrist and tried to pull myself back up, to no avail. and I thought that maybe this was another punishment for what we did.

and maybe god knew my heart wasn’t in it because when i was finally let up, i coughed loudly and gasped for breath and I didn’t feel any different.

a baptism. a cleansing of body, mind and spirit. a refresh for all of the wicked thoughts about you and that bathroom and that ruler.

my hands were almost healed at that point, but when I wiped my eyes i found you standing on the outskirts of the pulpit, gripped too tightly in your grandmothers hand with tears in your eyes.

how tragic did i look then? soaking wet to the bone, shivering, hair matted to my forehead and dirt on my skin. hands trembling, the rough and silvery scars reflecting in the sunlight.

how destroyed did i look love?

and i still found you in the crowd.

a decade later and i split a marlboro with god. we’re both older than we look, both scarred and mangled. i pulled out the cig and he offered the light.

we don’t speak at all. he knows what i would say under the low lights of the bar and the smoke and i know what he wouldn’t say.

there would be truth to both.

i close my eyes for a second and when I open them, im in the dim bar bathroom. I turn to stub the cigarette out and catch my reflection in the mirror.

and maybe this isn’t about a baptism that felt like death instead of rebirth.

maybe it’s about an understanding god and i have.

he knows what i will say and i know that he will stay quiet.

[12604]

a cold weight creeping up my spine in reverence to the snarl on your lips.

do you normally look at me with such disdain?

i suspect you might.

to tightly wound, too loose. a walking contradiction. a cacophony of old apologies and words I can’t take back.

they smear down my chin in a desperate attempt to remedy my impulsivity. nothing ever changes.

i have a sweater in the back of my closet, with holes in the front, under the chest of it, where your nails yanked the loose threads out of place.

I can’t quite remember if you were pulling me closer or trying to get away that night.

the same sweater that you wrapped yourself into on quiet mornings when the house rattled with wind and snow. when the drip of coffee was the only disturbance. before all the records scratched themselves into a soft hum.

and winter was always my favorite with you.

summer time. summer was sticky and your touch was syrupy right before you left again.

I don’t think about summer much anymore, but i always think about you in your big sweatpants and threadbare sweaters.

as though comfort was melded into the bones of your being and i was something mildly out of place.

maybe i was.

isn’t it funny how reckless i was and how caution wasn’t a semblance of need.

and isn’t it funny how fear wrecked us into a million pieces.

i often think of all of the things I’ve survived. a dense tower of accomplishment centered around things I didn’t deserve.

I didn’t survive you though huh? couldn’t bare the idea of that ruler. couldn’t stomach holding your hand in front of colleagues. couldn’t let you into that world that you so desperately wanted a taste of.

and maybe it wasn’t all fear. maybe it was selfishness. maybe it was possession.

the world never did have a solid track record of letting me keep good things.

[12604]

I like your poetry. Prose poetry is so beautiful to me. Something about the way it captures pain is unmatched and very human.

thanks sweetheart, means the world ♥️

[12604]

i threw everything away on a cold night in october out of anger. the worst thing I’ve done wasn’t in the name of love or protection.

it was retribution.

research is a lot like religion in the sense that both parties are looking to explain the same occurrences in different lights. i never found god in church.

I didn’t find him in the labs either.

but I found anger in both. i found betrayal in both. and the thing about churches and labs, is both places will steal something from you.

my hands were scarred over a church pew and my bicep scarred from a busted beaker. i couldn’t tell you which hurt worse- the one from their ignorance or the one from mine.

i held onto the church for as long as i could and I held onto the research for as long as i could.

but i burnt a wood crucifix in the church parking lot with a lit cigarette and i broke into the offices after dark and corrupted all of the data files on my work.

and the thing about my destruction is it’s born from theft. a possessive thing, my temperament, and if I can’t have it, no one else can.

so maybe im impulsive in a way that leaves you to find me with glass in my hair and blood on my shirt, but baby this isn’t violence.

this is retribution.

this is mine.

[12604]

the last time i saw you, i was being detained for aggravated assault.

and the last time we talked i said i’d do anything for you.

it’s incredible how destructive love makes you. it’s insatiable, the adrenaline of it all.

a whirlwind of hard kisses and bloody knuckles. it came and went as quick as a melting candle. except when it was lit, we couldn’t blow it out could we?

the quickest highs come from crushing and snorting. the quickest lows come from the brush of your lips against mine.

baby im open. still standing in the middle of the street with my chest heaving and my teeth stained red. im still here aren’t i?

the last time you saw me i was someone else. something else. not entirely human and not entirely there. as if pieces of me were being chipped off with every blow i was taking.

but i can take a hit sweetheart.

i can take the screaming and the name calling and the violence of it all.

you wanna give it to me baby? I’ll take it all. consume it, swallow it down to bare bones.

you didn’t know me as well as you thought you did huh love? didn’t know that i was crafted in glass shards and loud voices and strong metal.

didn’t know i lodge pain into the vertebrae of my spine, collecting it all. waiting, maybe. biding my time.

ah, but you knew better didn’t you?

was it the easiness of it all? the split second choice to throw everything away? the lack of hesitation and the amount of escalation?

or was it the way i was shaking in excitement?

[12604]

there was a moment of panic when i saw her that night under the neons.

her pretty red hair was tied into a knot and her lips were shimmering with the beer in her hand. i watched her pull a bic out of her pocket and light someone’s cigarette.

i gripped my glass a little tighter. watched her scan the room. her pretty brown eyes fell on me, and she raised an eyebrow at my drink.

a shirley temple. I’ve always had a sweet tooth.

she didn’t walk up to me that night and maybe she’ll never walk up to me again. I found her though. she appeared in the same room as me again and maybe that’s enough.

maybe that’s enough.

for her to see me, laughing and satiated. for her to see me with that stupid shirley temple. for her to see the lack of whiskey. the lack of smoke surrounding me.

i hope that she saw my hands had healed too. that I wasn’t rolling my eyes every time I had to adjust my weight on my other leg.

i just hope she saw.

maybe that’s enough.

maybe that’s nothing.

[12604]

you know better than to believe me.

im encapsulated in it baby. just another lie rolling off of my tongue.

there’s no letting you know.

im alone and i can still see you here.

you know better than to come back.

im calling you at midnight and listening to you sigh so heavily.

and then im on the phone with my dealer.

staring in a bathroom mirror, trying to keep it together.

i saw my mother the other day and she said I looked hollowed out. is that what it looks like?

im not saying its your fault. im saying it grips me at the ankles.

a cold hand, waiting to dragging me back into it. waiting to get me on the ground.

im saying i fell down the other night and it pulled me under the stair case and held me there.

you know better than to believe me.

[12604]

and maybe it’s my head that’s the issue.

low cortisol and being bored is a good mix for withdrawals.

and maybe you left at the right time. maybe I can’t get better. maybe i was always going to end up like this and you saw it before I did.

I thought i could be good. i could be the good girlfriend. the proud one. a good daughter. a giving friend. a hopeless romantic.

but maybe im just selfish. drowning in this feeling of uneasiness and im dragging everyone into the water with me.

i lay on the bathroom floor with drool spilling from my mouth. eyes heavy, body tense and tingling. and all i can see through the static is my death.

im going to die in a bottle of pills and you’re going to say you saw it coming.

but i didnt see it. don’t you get that? I thought i was good. i thought i could be good.

I didn’t know I was going to do this. I didn’t know it was going to be like this. but maybe it was inevitable.

the ache in my knee makes it hard to breathe and sometimes, when I think about everything im missing, I get really sad.

maybe you left at the right time.

I can’t get better.

[12604]

and the thing about relapse is it sneaks up on you in increments.

sobriety in itself is a finicky thing isn’t it? it feels solid at some point. as though it would take the world ending for me to pluck an orange bottle up again.

but fuck if it doesn’t sneak up on you.

a moment, you’re standing there with shaking hands, just staring at your desk. these slow moments where your mind picks up speed. as if the earth is spinning in slow motion, just enough to make you nauseous. not enough to distract you.

im sitting in my car with the a/c on and the salad on my console has gone warm in the heat. im waiting for my appetite to return and it doesn’t. I end up throwing the salad away, untouched.

my off days consist of me trying to convince myself I need to go to the restroom. i need to get up and walk to the toilet. it’s bad to hold your pee in this long. it’s bad to lay in bed this long. get up.

get up.

get up.

why can’t you just get the fuck up?

my instagram picked up. a man commented ‘barking so loud’ on four separate occasions. how fucking boring.

how fucking predictable.

my mom called me yesterday and asked me to drive to the store for her. i said I couldn’t, i was busy. how do i explain that im giving myself a kidney infection?

and if that isn’t enough, im angry again. my clients at work can’t do anything the correct way. as if everyone is walking around with privilege on their shoulders. as if their teeth are white enough, they’ll get whatever they want.

how boring.

relapse is unpredictable. or it was to me. maybe I got too bored and stopped paying attention to myself.

im laying in bed again, with a bottle of something I can’t put into words beside me. high out of my fucking mind.

not boring.