Silvertongue

creative writing: making a poem

[burningskylines]

moving blogs!

hi! to anyone who doesn’t know me personally, just want to let you know i’m moving blogs!! this one was actually for a university writing module. im deleting this so that i can transfer everything to my writing/book blog @inkytealeaves and/or so i can enter some of these poems in competitions

so go follow me over there! i also use the same name on instagram. i’ll be deleting this at the end of tomorrow (25th) x

[burningskylines]

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[burningskylines]

missing scenes - Thoughts

This poem comes at the end of the collection to remind the reader that this is less than one half of the story. This is a romanticised, bitter, wistful narrator who, while she does a fairly good job of admitting to her own guilt, is in no way unbiased. Now she takes a moment to acknowledge that her lover likely has an entirely different reading, and that there is much she couldn’t depict in her narrative, whilst also wishing that they had been honest with each other, admit their faults and flaws and what was truly happening with them, rather than painting over it and hoping to force everything to work.

The ‘deaths’ in the final stanza can be read as metaphorical or literal. Throughout the sequence the narrator has been trying to bleed out, and the girlfriend has been trying to drown, and in some ways they succeed - and helped each other. There is no moral judgement here, just an acknowledgement of guilt.

The body in the bathtub in [Interval] is also supposedly revealed - though as discussed, it could be either of them. Is it the narrator bleeding out, or the girlfriend drowning? Are they together, or distant?

Finally, I return to the motif of the play. A reminder that this is only one story. That, told differently, in a different order, by a different person, this could have been a simple romance. It could have been a comedy. It is the narrator who brings in these blody, violent images and presents them as love.

[burningskylines]

final collection (10)

missing scenes

our first kiss in the dark of a theatre, behind the wings. our first fight, nails drawing blood in the rain. all the paintings held only in your mind, that you should have described to me as we curled up together beside a winter’s hearth, but didn’t.

my wrists turned to the moon, leaking into the bathtub. your head below water. who died first? whose hands were stained, whose touch turned cold? i wonder, if we staged our scripts side by side, would they even be the same play?

[burningskylines]

i imagine her monologue would go something like this - Thoughts

This poem was an experiement that went far better than expected. To write a poem in another person’s point of view - the girlfriend’s - but still through the lens of the narrator’s voice. This is her romanticised, vulnerable image of the other girl. She sees her as desperate, drowning, a victim in need of a white knight. But also someone fully aware of her own wants and needs, willing to selfishly cast them off onto other people without a thought for their wellbeing. It is very possible that the narrator is projecting onto this figure, and in fact describing her own, unacknowledged subconscious.

[burningskylines]

final collection (9)

i imagine her monologue would go something like this

i wanted someone to listen to me cry, hold my tears in a bathtub before me. i wanted someone to take my heart out of my chest, so i could sleep without a drumbeat in my ears. i wanted a paper doll wrapped around my arm, i wanted someone to take every word i said and fossilise it, displayed in a museum alongside marble and gemstone and bone.

i wanted someone who said forever and meant as long as we can. i wanted someone to drown me since i am too scared to drown myself. i wanted someone to bury my heart far far away, in that land where paper dolls never grow old, or tired, or die. i wanted someone who understood that every fossil rolling off my tongue is a lie.

[burningskylines]

Prologue - Thoughts

This poem is deliberately placed after Scene One to juxtapose the tone and recontextualise the whole narrative. Inititally this poem contained the line “the best way to kill yourself is to find someone who cannot love you forever, and love them”.

Throughout the sequence I return to the water, to the cliffs. The narrator still feels high above on that cliff, distant from everything. The girlfriend never left the sea, has only been piling experiences like rocks in her pocket in the hopes eventually she will have the courage to drown. Seeking out bad experiences because they believe they deserve them. Both so distant, coming from incredibly different angles at life, and yet the same, because they are both out there at the edge of the world, alone, seeking any sort of solace. Their love is violent but powerful, and brief.

The two of them are exactly what the other wants, and exactly what is worst for them.

I used the dual line stanza both to experiment with a new technique of line break, and to reflect the peak and trough of rolling waves - wondering what comes nxt, if this is the last - and the cliff above, with its endless fall below. There is also a certain level of distance and loneliness found in these isolated lines, in their sparsity and use of blank space on the page, especially compared to the dense verse that many of the other poems use. This is a poem in retrospect, an epilogue set in the chronological prologue.

[burningskylines]

final collection (8)

[Prologue]

that night we were looking for ways to kill ourselves. hidden under a lover’s moon

i stood at the cliff’s edge and waited for gravity to steal the blood that kept me standing. and you

below, floating in an unforgiving sea, waited for something to make you breathless.

i was the perfect stone in your pocket, a glinting trinket to weigh you down.

you were the perfect blade, carving constellations into skin.

we were the perfect storm when we collided, a boiling of sea of sky turned to haze.

[burningskylines]

[Scene One] - Thoughts

Finally, the so-called beginning. A tranquil image of two girls sheltering from thee winter cold in the back of a warm coffee shop. This moment is liminal and insulated and entirely untouchable - except for the things those girls cannot control, cannot know about. Even without the invading fear of being found, the narrator comes in to tinge the scene in melancholy, to scoff at the naivety of her younger self.  Foreshadowing - or recalling - the painting metaphor which consumes her entirely in [Interval], reminding the reader that the play has already ended; the conclusion is already drawn, and close at hand.

It was important to me to include the line “if the world collapsed, as it has been trying to our whole lives” as, whilst not directly related to anything in the scene, it is an intrinsic context. The fear in this poem is not just one of homophobia, but that underlying fear the entirety of Gen Z is growing up with: that the world is ending, slowly. That this is an apocalypse movie, and not the fun kind where you get sorted into Hogwarts houses and find the love of your life in the revolution. Everything is immediate - there is no concept of planning, or waiting, or saving things for later, since we are convinced there is no later to look forward to. This somewhat explains the impulsivity of the narrator and her girlfriend, their desperation to find love and meaning as they are drowning.

[burningskylines]

final collection (7)

[Scene One]

a warm cup shared between freezing fingers. we are hidden at the back of a coffee shop, the fear of being seen a spectre between our lips. if the world collapsed, as it has been trying to our whole lives, we would not notice.

we thought we had read infinity in our tea leaves, tasted it in the sugar-high of another lipgloss, as if we could know the whole painting from a single stroke, the end of the play before the curtain ever rose.

[burningskylines]

mixing metaphors - Thoughts

This poem came about after realising that I have an issue with oversaturating my poems with metaphors. Walt Whitman’s line “I contain multitudes” comes to mind - trying to encapsulate the torrent of changing emotion and feeling and perspective held within a single person, let alone a person with mental illness. In that way this is a metapoem - the narrator is talking about howw they have been told to write about their lover.

I return to the motif of the snake, now internalised by the narrator but weaponised against her. The water imagery is now inside her, and uncontainable. The “swarm of bees banging mallets against the anvil” refers to the myth of Metis, who was imprisoned in the form of a bee inside Zeus’ head, and continued to make armour on an anvil inside there for her daughter Athena.

The girlfriend is again a contrast of calm and storm, the same rain that waters the flowerbeds destroys the flowers. The image of the “church-window silhouette” refers to light through stained glass windows, as well as alluding to the relgious trauma experienced by many queer people growing up, told they are sinful, are going to Hell, for who they love.

[burningskylines]

final collection (6)

mixing metaphors

they told me you should be red and roses; the scent of a garden freshened up by rain, spilling colours across the summer grass. nothing said of the storm itself, the rage beating senseless the limp flowers sheltering beneath fragile leaves. nothing said of the petals torn away like clumps of hair, crushed underfoot.

they told me i could be a crow, fluttering in silhouette against a ribcage. or perhaps the insect swarm buzzing beneath my skin. nothing said of the coiled snake, squeezing my heart into purple rings. nothing said of the waterfall quiet freezing into ice around my bones.

how do i explain the truth of a whirlwind in human form? you are red and roses. you are a bluebird: beautiful songs, and the winged flutter of anxiety, searching for exit signs. the morning sun through glass, and the rain chill on my skin. you are ink-soaked, a masterpiece, leaching colour from my world to paint yours in church-window silhouette.

i am a cardboard cup soaked through, dripping at the seams. i am the swarm of bees banging mallets against the anvil of my brain, and the crow, perched lightly on a single rib, half in love with a bluebird, half in love with the storm.

[burningskylines]

[Interval] - Thoughts

Here is the second poem from the original whole Tragedy. It is a sudden remove from the relative calm of the last three poems, a sudden reminder that this story doesn’t just end badly, but ends bloody.

I return to the visceral imagery of blood, mixed in with such normal things as mascara and water. The bathroom is a very important place for the narrator, a place well known by those suffering depression: the easiest place to hide, a liminal space at night - providing the eponymous interval break - and home to the mirror, the one thing you wish desperately to avoid.

Here we have the fear of intimacy that so heavily underlines this sequence, the fear of time running out, whether due to life or your own mistakes, there is a certainty to ending that doesn’t just come from retrospect.

The beginning of this poem is deliberately shocking. Who is the body in the bathtub? Is it metaphorical, or literal? I think many readings are valid. The body of the narrator, who has finally succeeded in killing herself and is now staring at her ghostly reflection, regretting her decisions, unable to remember who she really is. The body of her girlfriend, who she blames herself for finally killing. Their relationship, or their metaphoorical selves; their happiness. The point is, this relationship has been destructive, and we’re only half way there.

[burningskylines]

final collection (5)

[Interval]

a body lies in the bathtub. i stand at the mirror, watching droplets fall: mascara, water, dirt, blood, an image painted in so many colours i cannot remember which shades are yours. i cannot remember

the canvas beneath, only the brush against my jaw. the cup of tea you mistook for a paint pot and i continued to drink from for fear it was the closest i would ever get to you inside me.