The Unkown Poet

I am seventeen-year-old poet and artist. Trying to find the extraordinary somewhere between these pages of unoriginality.

[christiebasson]

when summer fades and the sun runs faster

so do we. we gallop barefoot through the fields,

feet stained with crushed wildflowers

and yesterday’s rain, trying to outrun tomorrow

and the stars. when the moon does find us

we slip behind firecracker smiles and hide

our bleeding teeth, clutching the dripping

strawberries behind our backs

//survival once summer dies//

[christiebasson]

summer is

sucking down swallows to feel their wings

brushing against my lungs

drinking empty

the blue sky - blue like ceramic tiles and powdered paint

blue like a bruise traced with magic fingers

when bare feet trace the clouds and the wind

speaks louder than the noise, winds a fist through my hair

this is summer

this too hot, this too wild

days stretching themselves out into the future

and at night the stars

fistfight for the right to shine closer to the moon

slamming themselves together into holy destruction

summer - too sweet, too short

too empty once we’ve taken what

we want

- taming summer//killing summer

[christiebasson]

[christiebasson]

"I don't think we're ever too small for our dreams," she says quietly. "Sometimes we just feel more like a tidal pool than the deep sea. Doesn't mean we're not still the ocean.”

[christiebasson]

I hold f e a r l e s s n e s s between two fingers and then I let go. I drop b r a v e r y drop c o u r a g e drop h e r o i c s. They say I should bolden my blood reinforce my bones like it's a choice. It's not. Because when I breathe my lungs are shy they brush against my ribcage and shrink away when I swallow my throat tries to disappear on itself, contracts in horror. My body is ashamed of itself. My very cells rebel each day - they do not know the meaning of p r i d e. For too long I have broken bones and muscle trying to fit my body into a mold it was not made for. I do not give up. I simply accept. ~ christie

[christiebasson]

Witches spells in the backyard -

picking parsley and juniper,

three fat slugs and a sprinkle of dirt;

throw them together and wishes

let me be happy let me be happy let me be happy

One cup of moonshine, two sprigs of lavender

stir the pot, sip the brew and wish

let me be happy let me be happy let me be happy

Whispers in the dark, soft voices murmur

and I hear the clouds sigh

happiness is born inside your bones, little witch

Not good enough. More spells more wishes

more nights more taunts more sadness more clouds

and arms grow weary, eyes grow dim and

every night, spells spill like starlight

spill like useless raindrops in a forest fire.

Happiness is born inside your bones, little witch.

Please please please

toadstools and dewdrops and willow bark and

please please please

just for a bit

let me be happy let me be happy let me be happy

 ~ christie

[christiebasson]

Sometimes pretty words aren’t enough to fix a body that’s spilling through the cracks like candle wax, blood dripping drip drip dripping through broken bones and bruised fingers. How do you unteach your tongue relearn your teeth how do you unclench your jaw go from gaping maw to softness, to gentle tastes? From ripping apart hearts with savage mouths leaving them like featherless doves with staring eyes to twisting your tongue into words that taste like monsoon season in the desert that spill - fresh and light and soothing. Because regret tastes bitter, like gravestones dropped down your throat to lie heavy in your stomach and soon enough there isn’t space for anything else. You can only cough up rubble and dust and wait for the rain as you rearrange your mouth.

| forgiveness is heaviest on the tongue of the sinner|

~ christie

[leftiswhatgodmademe]

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@christiebasson

He swallows love, slipping soft touches and gentle words behind his teeth smiling as he devours lingering gazes and desperate hearts. He is like a child pulling wings from butterflies wide-eyed at their dying flaps, hiding his powder stained fingers afterwards. Something about carelessness becomes attractive, makes them flutter near him despite the poison on his lips. He is a flower a flame a firecracker - pulls them in and leaves them to burn in the darkness.

~ christie

[christiebasson]

I am honoured & humbled, thank you @imperiallefty

[christiebasson]

He swallows love, slipping soft touches and gentle words behind his teeth smiling as he devours lingering gazes and desperate hearts. He is like a child pulling wings from butterflies wide-eyed at their dying flaps, hiding his powder stained fingers afterwards. Something about carelessness becomes attractive, makes them flutter near him despite the poison on his lips. He is a flower a flame a firecracker - pulls them in and leaves them to burn in the darkness. ~ christie

[christiebasson]

I give the girl I should have been a Viking funeral. There’s a boat and an arrow and then all I see is flames gulping greedily, orange licking in a crazed frenzy as it feasts on the bones of a girl who will never be. I struggled with the farewell - couldn’t make my hands unfist from hers couldn’t swallow the river of could-have-beens couldn’t swallow at all as my lips cracked under the pressure of my goodbyes. I touched her face, whispered my regret into her lungs and set her free, accepting her loss like so many before her.

~ christie

[christiebasson]

Sometimes my mother tongue wraps around me - how do I explain that words can drip like rain on a sink roof at night, softly murmuring reassurance. I try to bring these words from deep inside crack open my bones to let them drip out but how do I talk about the way the sun tears through the sky, bruising the clouds as it falls how do I talk about sunset to someone who only knows the unraveling blanket of midnight? If you've only lived by starlight how can I describe words that turn your skin golden, that wrap you up, run through your bloodstream in rush like the ocean waves at noon. I try to pull these words from my mouth reshape them into something you could understand but the words sound broken, painfully reconstructed into something that reeks of desperation. I swallow them back down into the well of my lungs fist my hands together and decide that maybe mother tongues can only be born in the mouths of children. ~ christie ||on being foreign||

[christiebasson]

You broke the sky open for me. Took two edges and rippppped until the sun was dripping through the ragged tear - egg yolk spilling through the clouds - knowing that darkness would soon follow knowing that night would gulp down the light. Accepting that earth would never be the same.

|true love|

~ christie

[christiebasson]

My body is an abandoned house - shutters broken down and front door swinging open. The taps in the bathroom have long run dry, the kitchen tile shattered into hairline fractures. The skeleton of course remains: the walls, though crumbling, still stand and sometimes when the setting sun shines through the entryway, the golden glow of days past come back like the ghost of my laughter. ~ christie

[christiebasson]

I am a suitcase full of good intentions broken bones & dreams that have forgotten how to fly. I wasn't always a graveyard didn't always have apologies wrapped around my teeth, but plant enough seeds and soon enough flowers will bloom. I like to convince myself I am a storm but most days it feels like my bones are only bleached because of all the times lightning has slammed into them. ~ christie

[christiebasson]

I. My stomach was filled with a thousand moths who have flown too close to the flame. I never knew that you could poison that feeling, that flutter. I convinced myself it was love but it was only ever the treacherous moths - so easily fooled, they flitted at the sight of your ocean-storm eyes, flapped at your curved mouth. II. I never knew flowers could drown - I thought that they could swallow a thunderstorm and survive, but you taught me that even the throats of those long-stemmed flowers weren’t wide enough to withstand a tsunami. Of course I convinced myself that you were starlight in my veins and forgot that the stars are made of flame too hot to bear. I couldn’t understand why my veins were on fire, why my body felt like a funeral pyre. III. You convinced me that the dying sunflowers inside me were not a tragedy, that all breaths were short, that love tastes like broken glass and honey. I forgot that sometimes lighting makes you feel alive, that the ocean loves to kiss the shore, that diamonds come from coal. You’re gone now. Not much to say, except that grass grows on gravestones and my stomach is a valley of cocoons.

||Moths can be rebirthed||

~ christie

[christiebasson]

My mother is a good seamstress. When I was little she taught me about neat little stitches that stand to attention in a straight line. Silver needle flashing in the moonlight in out in out in out in - over and over until my bones echoed the motion in my sleep. For my fifteenth birthday she gave me scarlet thread crimson as my bloody lungs. That’s when I finally understood the lessons, when I felt the whisper in my bones: in out in out in out soldiers saluting in a straight line across my blood red lips. My mother’s eyes were brimming with silent a p o l o g i e s generations of mothers’ blood singing in her veins burden of the ancestors casting shadows on her rough palms her closed mouth tired fingers - she was always stitching stitching stitching a straight line to keep her teeth in line her tongue in check. I will become a good seamstress and one day teach my daughter about straight lines and small stitches.

|so the cycle continues|

~ christie

[christiebasson]

We are 2 oil spills floating on the tar skin of an abandoned parking lot. Or maybe the gently blown smoke, curling into the sky like twin ribbons in the autumn wind. Not much to offer, the 2 of us, just shards of glass and half- formed bones. ~ christie