atlan @atlantius - Tumblr Blog

13 years in church will never ever beat the experience of a concert.

“winter’s gonna come; i’m gonna clean these veins again. so close to dying i finally can start living.”

i will scream these lyrics so loudly as if i am finding god in the lyrics themself.

sometimes i have to remind myself i’ve changed.

that even if i try harder, harder, harder, and i am this new version of myself.

i. will. slip. up.

i will never be perfect. i will fall back on vices. i will be cruel. i will have days without an ounce of love in my vein and a hunger for isolation. i will be mean. oh, how i will be mean.

but i will still have my days where i love life. i will be able to be happy. and i may be mean but i am mean and happy. i am mean and loving. i am mean on an off day. i am mean when i am reminded of those in the past. i am mean towards those in my past. i am filled with so much anger some days it shakes me to my core.

but i am happy, and i have changed. and i will try my best to be nice, and i will be nice.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

i will ~ mitski // demi moore ~ phoebe bridgers

#rock #mitski #indie #indie rock #phoebe bridgers #stranger in the alps #demi moore #bury me at makeout creek

sometimes god splendors me in good things

like cool water waiting on my bedside table when i wake up parched, or poems chocked full of religious metaphors, or friends i hold so close to my heart i get worried i’ll squeeze them to death

and sometimes god plagues me with bad things

like when he inches the key to my closet a little closer, just close enough a skeleton can poke its wan finger through, and they are all out in the light, and i have to shoo them back comically with a broomstick

sometimes he fills my head so full of life i can barely take it, and all of a sudden i am drowning like i’m 17 again.

sometimes he makes it so impossibly impossible to live.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

my anger sits like sweat between the back of my thighs, as i am left scrambling trying to defend the ghost of a person i am no longer.

my disgust sits like a parrot perched, cawing and mimicking words over and over until i am forced to put a blanket over its cage

my guilt hangs low, a dogs belly brushing the ground as it lays down in shame, ears flat against its head.

#original poem #prose poetry #poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

i hope he hates things that remind him of me the way i hate things that remind me of him.

i hope he hates leos and phoebe bridgers and lucy dacus and marvel movies and dogs and the florida project and chai and evil eyes and crystals,

in the same exact way i now hate aries and nirvana and the beach boys and wes anderson movies and cats and fantastic mr fox and iced coffee and tarot and incense.

i hope all his memories of us he can’t look back on without a sick feeling in his stomach, like prom or the car seat headrest concert or going to cleveland or anything, really, anything from the two years of our friendship that blossomed into a goodbye without a word.

i hope he feels the same way i do, but i wouldn’t know, would i?

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

late night in the heat of july, still simmering from may, my tiny body fills up with rage.

i am angry at myself, at him, at the outcome, at the alternatives.

i am angry at myself for letting myself be like this for so long, drowning in the validation of others, paddling to a shore i know will hold no relief.

i remain angry at him for not throwing me the preserver, for letting my lungs fill up with water for as long as they did, for standing and watching as long as he did. either help or go, he should’ve known this.

i am angry at the outcome. i live. i sit on the shore and cough up water and shake and shake and shake and then breathe in fresh air. i’ve been drowning for so long i forget how clean it feels against my throat. a relief to my senses.

i’m angry at the alternatives. i should’ve worn a life jacket. i should’ve protected myself, been smart. i should’ve drowned, the weight of the water moving itself into me until i rest on the seabed.

i am angry.

i am angry just for this night, until someone switches the invisible reset button on my back like i am a child’s toy and i will rise in the morning and breathe in fresh air and i will be alright.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

my whiteboard calendar remains on february.

i dont have the heart to erase it.

i think of me, four months ago, so excited for the upcoming months, the summer, my friends.

i am no longer able to look at things the way i four months ago could.

i feel like erasing it erases the possibility of anything good.

it remains february.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

redrola

Côte d’Azur France

i wish i could romanticize every aspect of my life.

i try my best to.

i lay out my clothes the night before, pick the right song on the walk to my bus stop so in the morning i feel like i’m in the opening of a movie.

i curate the feed of every fucking social media i own so some person i don’t even know can look at it and think i’m put together and alright.

i purchase copies of emerson’s work i don’t have the time to read but i do really like the idea of “self-reliance” so it sits pretty on my shelves along with my dad’s old stephen king novels i told him i would read but haven’t yet.

i want my life to be pretty, yet it feels haphazardly stitched together, seams never quite even.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #original content #mental health poetry #original writing #poems on mental health #poetry writing #writing

anchorite (love you very much) ~ car seat headrest // working for the knife ~ mitski

#car seat headrest #indie rock #indie #laurel hell #mitski #will toledo #rock

i will stare right into the consequences of my actions.

and i will meet my own cold gaze.

and i will know i cannot change what has been written. what has taken place.

i will glance away and away and away and nothing will change. i will always look back and stare at my own eyes.

and nothing will change this.

i can boil my blood with my own anger until nothing remains but hollow bones and carcass and nothing will change.

i can drown myself in my pity tears until my skin wrinkles with guilt and fish eat away my flesh and nothing will change.

nothing. will. change.

#original poem #poetry #prose poetry #poem #poems #mental health poem #mental health poetry #original content #original writing #poems on mental health #writing #poetry writing

carseatheadrest

I went to see a performance of the Nutcracker on Dec 24th, and this has got me thinking about the style that I write in. MADLO was the first album where I was really consciously trying to fit lyrics into the phrases of the song, so something like da DAH, dah DAH, dah dadada dah dah dah, just slowly whittling it into words: “I crawl, I crawl, an animal to ya…” When I was younger, this would have either been a total gibberish phrase, or I would have abandoned the melody for a lyric written just as text. With MADLO I wanted a certain incantatory quality to it, where I didn’t have to give up a certain melody for something that scanned logically, but the words still pointing towards a meaning, not just being placeholder or roundabout expressions. So this was a major challenge of the record, filling in these lines word by word, waiting for the right word that sharpened the meaning without derailing the melodic line of thought.

But now as I get more into writing for a new album, I’m realizing that to the extent that I have any sort of natural style, a large part of that is having lyrical phrases that don’t fit into the melodic momentum, that jut out oddly into the room. This is why when I was finishing the MADLO songs, I felt they were in some sense folk songs, because a folk song needs to adhere to that tight rhythm and meter, so it can be retained and passed along from one singer to another easily. It’s much easier to remember a repeating melody than it is to remember a string of words - not only easier to remember but to participate in, to have the song be a group activity. The farther it deviates from these standard, simple rhythms, the more it turns into a sort of solo display, away from folk dances and towards a practiced, virtuoso display of emotion, like the dancers in a ballet or singers in an opera. Instead of equal participation we get observation, reflection, meditation; instead of the thrill of the dance we get a richer and more nuanced taste of a particular emotion.

I’m excited now to use what I learned in writing MADLO - having clear melodic lines as anchor points, perceiving those lines clearly and developing the song from them - and start to stray from that towards my natural tendency to complicate and obscure simple shapes into something more gnarled. What I am always most opposed to is straying into territory that feels random, arbitrary, lacking any connective tissue that makes it feel like art. What is laid out in the track should always feel like the tip of the iceberg, not a scattering of flakes melting in a glass. The structure of a song should feel ordained by ghosts, not produced by the composer’s whims but bowing to unseen, ancient guideposts. If we could not see the trees but we could see the wind, then the wind would tell the story of the trees. That’s what a song should be, a wind that lets you see those invisible branches of life; so a writer has to sense what those trees are like, and they have to understand how wind works. The former is done by living, meditating, experiencing, developing your connection with the unseen; the latter is done by study, by pulling apart songs like a mechanic pulls apart cars. The last few years I feel I have really learned a lot, learning how to put a song together so it does what I want it to do rather than fighting against it, like a pilot fighting against a poorly-constructed airplane. Now I perhaps know at least the basics of flying, and I can have some clarity when I’m circling around these big subjects, hoping to return with a little piece of it in song form.