in a place where tomorrow can't find us

a place to store beautiful writing & writing inspo // main blog @oflysithea

[liebesfraulein]

“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”

— Maud Hart Lovelace, “Betsy-Tacy and Tib”  

[soracities]

In the morning, the sun is rosy, transparent, warm gold. And the air itself is a little rosy, all steeped in the sun’s gentle blood. Everything is alive: stones are living and soft; iron is living and warm….

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (trans. Natasha Randall)

[jupiterreed]

we were churches

saint-killer, soul-monger, half a sacrifice on a cross: notice, your body is a black sea, and they’re washed up on the shores of it, notice, your body lights up at night, and maybe there’s a language to be learned in there somewhere, even if they won’t speak it. can’t you tell? by the end of the night, you’ll have all of heaven hanging off its hinges, your reflection in a tiered chandelier crashing down from the ceiling, your reflection in ghost eyes, your reflection in car windows, all blurring trees and rain. eyelids cut open screaming WITNESS, WITNESS, WITNESS, your bruises turned to new skin, honey we’ll tear stars down. the blasphemous cliff. of your spine, before i throw myself off it. now you hold all their attention, now you’ve got god on his knees, and your flesh SCREAMING!!! raw, humid, bad cali weather, a storm in the tropics, a gunshot in your ear, & i tell you that i want to be dead afloat in your bones. & i tell you i’ll look better if you just do as i say & keep your eyes shut. & i’ll tell you i’m too young for this, that i’m aching & hollowed, & that holiness is just a myth burned into our throats. burned blighted, held in blueness - it’s a baptism and our hands are all out of blood.

[jupiterreed]

thoughts @ random:

delicate rind. gold ferns. pink lemonade summer & coca cola brainfreeze. my face in the mirror is a warped swimming pool reflection now, & the days are teeth pulled out of my mouth. dragging; limp & heavy-boned out into the backyard for the slaughter. left to simmer, crack open like an egg on the sidewalk. yellow center. caramel jazz in the background. on days when it’s too hot to breathe through air brimmed like soup i spend the nights indoors. bare-kneed & hollow. my face in an unwashed dish lying at the bottom of the sink. living is easy until living is hard. i’m heady w/ nostalgia, baby photos stashed away in a living room that flooded 2 years ago, pink stained sheets. raspberries left to melt on burned out tongues. eyes like shattered car windows. the body a junkyard in the works. & my thoughts are flat tires. suddenly, it’s summer. suddenly, it’s 2009 again. suddenly, the shape of ur hand around the nape of my neck. whenever i dream u we speak in another language. i draw the blinds & trace ur shadow with closed eyes. the pool glitters. a dead mosquito on my window & the heat stretched out like an elk carcass; innards ripped out. lungs reduced to milkweed & left to shrivel. sun-baked hands, fingers of dust. i listen to mitski 5 nights in a row. first love / late spring on repeat. please / i can’t breathe / please / don’t say u love me. please, please. i’m tired of waking up in beds empty & grave-like. thought i caught u swimming last night. thought it would rain but it’s 36 degrees outside & baby, the world is melting. shimmering, rabid with heat. & i’m nowhere. i’m not in the desert. i’m not at home. i’m not sinking to the bottom of the pool. i’m in the pauses where we laugh, we pick our poisons. where we’ll step willingly into the expansive nothing. into dusk stars & waning sunsets. watch as our outlines glow. white.

[jupiterreed]

Self Portrait With Rabbits, (watercolour on ink)

Alright, now turn on your heel. Don’t look back. Just keep a steady pace. And don’t worry about the havoc you leave behind you. The light will fall to its knees, the sea will boil. You’ll take it one foot after the  next and you won’t think about it. About all that has gone “bad” like forgotten fruit. A haze of flies in the air. Your tiny steps, your ribs full of rabbits. The way you hide. In the distance, The white blur. Then the landmine, going off and going off, and going off. The dead, mangled fish, the charred forest, and the birds falling out of the sky. Don’t worry about the death of things. Or the sun’s eventual collapse. Just don’t look back. Feet blurring at light speed. Your pink skin is chafed and the  trees are averting their eyes. Find somewhere safe. Somewhere it rains for three weeks straight. Somewhere your voice doesn’t follow, like a sneering pack of wild dogs. On the hunt. Walk away from Arizona — & all of its broiling air & uneven sidewalks, its gold shadows in the afternoon. Your want is foolish. That’s a given.   You can board the windows & escape the noise. You would block yourself out if you could. The light scoots away from you, too. Your lungs sit idle from disuse. A slab of meat on your plate and all you can think about is the animal that it once was. You want to be gentle with yourself. So you gently peel  the skin back from the wound, and then you slip inside it. Tucked in safely. Out of reach. Unsteady, cavern-like. Whittled to a sharpened edge. Drive yourself to somewhere the sky stretches on for miles. Yellow, like a batch of sunflowers. Promising wilting things. And we can laugh about this, too. Someday. The way that I’m speaking directly to God when I say, “Here! You can take me back. You can have it all! The mouth that unloads itself like a gun, the chivalrous, immature heart. These fingers that carve themselves out of the picture! And here! You can have the brain, too! With its’ bloodshed, and self-blaming. With its skeletal frame and rheumy eyes. The body that rises out of the lake, and asks to be warm, again. With a roof over its head, and food on the table.  You sad, flightless thing. You with your missing teeth and  misplaced intentions and a lost continent for a body. You took off running, and shot yourself in the foot.

[jupiterreed]

auspicious day. and i have touched the light that clings to your shoulder, like a moth against a glass window. once again, i sleep without the peace that comes with sleep. i am slack-jawed & tired. the sky abovehead is stagnant. a hot glass of milk left on the table. a light left on in your childhood bedroom. the ceiling with the peeling plaster, and the fan that stares at u all day. you long to be something other than concave. an emancipated limb. a frail shadow. you are retched with longing. heaving into the sink, white fingertips sprawled out. your loneliness is a gas leak. it spills & spills & spills from you. you watch starry-eyed lovers on the train back home. you want the bone and the marrow of it, too. your emptiness pulled out of bed & shot down in broad daylight. you want hands that warm yours when it’s cold out. u rediscover fire. starved touch. a glow that stirs half-awake and kisses you back.

[thesuburbanghosts]

march

1. rabbit anthem  2. you are light & i’m a wasteland 3. coming of age 4. roman candles 5. switzerland   6. false realities 

[jupiterreed]

i. you are prey behind benevolent eyes, head ablaze with the sound that rings out when their imagined fists meet your damaged ear, you perch under a thin, grassy blade of moon and stare down the angels that litter your backyard. the rabbits with their many faces, their ancient wonderland roots. there’s a music note trapped in your chest, stained with the tune of a promise you’d thought you’d forgotten. hands woven into sundials. uninterrupted trill.

ii. he doesn’t know what it’s like to love what cannot be touched, my fingers dancing in aimless want, his lips like palm trees fused together in refusal. he is summer-haunted, mercurial; tempted by his own slain shadow. i stand and watch at the pulse point of the universe, flesh picked clean of flowers, all my oceans dried up, and your name, like star-drip from my mouth. 

iii. it isn’t the early 2000′s anymore, my favorite dress from when i was fourteen doesn’t quite fit, you wear your hair shorter now & i barely hear maroon 5 playing on the radio. the last time i called my best friend up for pizza & a movie she asked me to grow the fuck up & the peaches in your mum’s back garden don’t taste quite as sweet. your mum who told us about fairies hanging out beneath your tire swing & sunsets made out of honey in the evening. you listen to sufjan stevens now & i cry to true crime podcasts at 2 in the morning & every time i take the car out i forget to notice the warning of stoplights. there’s no longer a chance i’ll ever get my hogwarts letter & even though you wanted to be a pilot when you were five you gave up the dream for a office where they teach you the importance of bloodless walls & a stable job. the sky feels off & i’m starting to miss people i don’t even remember being. 

iv. they carry old gods & whisper to you of all the possibilities you buried beneath the altar of a pop idol you listened to back in the day. you steal the limn of their flames and wear them in your eyes. on tuesday, your brother confuses you for firelight & you laugh at the irony.

v. the last time it snowed europe came to us in a dream and we got lost in the geometry of your hands in mine in the pale light, how they became ghosts in their own right, lightning lit up the morning & the coffee-maker sang happily of spring’s demise, our half-young bodies hot in mid-winter. 

vi. It’s 2 AM. Go back to sleep. Can’t you see it? See what? You’re hallucinating. I’m not. (the cars line the streets like doused matchsticks, their hoods washed a familiar blood orange) I think the world’s ending. The world ended last weekend, now go back to sleep. I’m serious. Yeah, me too. (a weight on my neck, in my mouth, beneath a kingdom of escaped sighs) Do you ever feel like you’re dreaming, even when you’re awake? (i want to feel like a cathedral, unhinge the moon and drink the blood) Every night with you. 

[jupiterreed]

in the heat of the moment, things happen. stars collide in ribcages, dried up ravines grow an audience of flowers, in the heat of the moment your heart beats in time with that song on the radio that plays over & over, a church choir out of sync & baby noises. you hate that song so fucking much, and i get drunk on it. we don’t know where we’re going but it’s never up. never a sky at our fingertips, graveyard dirt in handfuls, root canals filling our mouths. in the heat of the moment, you never say it like you mean it. it’s an excuse for touching something in a museum labeled ‘fragile’ it’s an excuse for the human condition, a man painting roses along the walls of his prison cell. it’s the ugliest form of passion, what does that even mean? i could swallow a handful of pills, i could walk into a speeding car, i could fall into your arms at night, fake love until it doesn’t hurt quite like it used to. blame it on heat. on fire. on the clock. in drab lighting, under the same moon, locked like handguns & begging for it. something, anything. a moment’s respite.

my body is a room full of strangers part (i)  ||  j.r

[jupiterreed]

a lesson in colourblindness

But darling, if time  could bend, it would cut a gash through my skin and create you: paralysed in the light, a curious, sickly-green, and your eyes, without speaking, would tell me all that  I am to know. There’s the colors I dream in, and there is the stiffened toe. A hot, flesh-eating pink, the  blue murmur of your soul. The winter’s candid twilight yellow, a black stagnancy of sky. Where I  find always, drifting, a dirty reflection of me, pond-hungry & pillared,  somewhere the prophets can etch constellations of my buckled knees, somewhere the air hums & breathes, & simmers, warm, tea-like, collapsed on Crete’s shores, left mounted at the top of a shrine, between your teeth, through the dark, coalcecating red of the burnt night. The cerulean glow of my mother’s hand,  masked tightly in mine. And your voice, death-white, in the cold wake of stars. j.r

[jupiterreed]

nonsense; or a poem

flesh turned inside out, brain a haze of stars

but you can’t breathe through it, i dreamt you

into open roads & abandoned churches &

flickering streetlights. i caught the milky way

in my chest: sticky, like blood or honey, the

constellations stripped of light, a black hole

where your body used to be. i want you in my

skin, i want myself, but only in the form of a

jar of fireflies, or blueberry jam, something

that sits on the shelf and waits for your arrival.

i’m stateless, i’m torn lips i’m cold hands i’m

bedsheet ghost, rabid in you. i’ll cut myself

open against the bare teeth of a knife before i

claw my way out. i’ll become syrupy, soft, a

tube of glitter. i’ll become a concept, a dream

forced out of dreaming. a flat, stormy shore.

[jupiterreed]

it doesn’t Glow anymore. the sky is a bad sketch of a bouquet of plastic flowers, and the clouds are nipping at our ankles like angry little fish. i made a wish from ur dad’s old couch on a crushed can of dr pepper last week. & t & i dont talk anymore. i wonder if she thinks about me at all. maybe it depends on what time it is in japan right now. maybe whenever she drinks blueberry soju. i miss u, too, & breathing the same air, & late night drives (a dream wrapped in warm skin and soft eyes on mine and the skyline in the distance — bright as teeth). equally sharp, easy to cut urself on. easy to lose. familiar to let rot. im the cavity, u see. im the hole in ur barbed wire fence, the one u snuck thru when u were 8 and left u bruised-kneed. there’s a gap in between u & me now and it’s shaped like 365 days of falling asleep to the sound of the rain & trains passing in the night. i’m on the other side of the world again but the stars are all muffled the same. i’m still only a shadow along a concrete wall; a receding sunset. if u miss me i hope it’s only in the form of ghost kisses that taste like tim tams & my fingers running aimlessly thru ur hair. alcohol-warmed stomach & the way our shoulders used to brush when we watched ur favorite cartoons. somewhere time is a still thing. a steady, unmoving flame.

[jupiterreed]

thoughts on august // 24.8.19

[jupiterreed]

auspicious day. and i have touched the light that clings to your shoulder, like a moth against a glass window. once again, i sleep without the peace that comes with sleep. i am slack-jawed & tired. the sky abovehead is stagnant. a hot glass of milk left on the table. a light left on in your childhood bedroom. the ceiling with the peeling plaster, and the fan that stares at u all day. you long to be something other than concave. an emancipated limb. a frail shadow. you are retched with longing. heaving into the sink, white fingertips sprawled out. your loneliness is a gas leak. it spills & spills & spills from you. you watch starry-eyed lovers on the train back home. you want the bone and the marrow of it, too. your emptiness pulled out of bed & shot down in broad daylight. you want hands that warm yours when it’s cold out. u rediscover fire. starved touch. a glow that stirs half-awake and kisses you back.

[jupiterreed]

dig what’s hollow out of me, past skin that ripens & is unceremoniously peeled away. something or someone reminding me i have a voice. that i have a voice and it reverberates like a backhanded slap. the opposite of which is silence. a silence that prickles hotly at my eyelids. heavy & rolled back. the skull exposed. ribcage a box of fried cables. a green-red glow in evenings. the hand that feeds you, and starves you in the same breath. the fingers bent backwards & acrobat-like. thin and undeserving. the mouth pulled into a taut line. a telephone wire, birdless & humming. craving touch, like the tip of a wing. the horizon upon which, these bone-tired mornings are fleeting. a sudden shock of white, & maybe you’d like me better like that. my body turned inside out. my body in the distance. my body a suggestion of light. and the light is plenty here, gutted & left brutally maimed, its spine crushed & heels chafed. its resolve skinned alive.

[apoemaday]

To the One Who Is Reading Me

by Jorge Luis Borges

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is saved for you, one you won’t read, already graved with city, epitaph, dates of the dead. And other men are also dreams of time, not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust like you; the universe is Proteus. Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead, the fatal shadow waiting at the rim. Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

[5000letters]

You went out in search of storm and came back with more than you’d bargained for. And suddenly your hands are full of too much rain and you don’t know where to put it all down and you’re not even sure that you want to. Maybe you were bored, or maybe you wanted to be thrown around a little. Maybe there’s something about dangerous things that remind you of the times you were young and you touched burning flames even though you knew it would hurt. Or the first woman you loved who broke your heart and it felt good at the same time. You know pain now, you know how to survive it. Maybe that’s what it was. You just wanted to survive again. The thing is, before you left, everything was gentle and safe and never overwhelming. You had time to think and uncoil yourself. You were lazy Sundays and sun filled afternoons that felt so good against your skin you thought you’d never want to leave that place again. And why would you? For a tempest? For a fist clutching a spark of lightning? For the burn? And now you’re confused because you’re torn between the safe thing and the thing that will probably ruin you and it’s funny because it hurts and it’s funny because you did it to yourself and it’s not funny because it fucking hurts. You just know that you can’t have both. You can either stand in the middle of all that brutal and let it wash you up or you can find that safe place and let it be soft for you. But when you’re standing halfway through that storm, and you’re drenched through and your skin is turning itself inside out, and you’re shivering and it’s terrifying and you’ve never felt more fucking alive. That’s it, that’s what you came looking for. You found it. Congratulations. Are you going to hold onto it?

Azra.T “Lighthouse"  (via 5000letters)

[5000letters]

The God’s honest truth is this: I wanted to ruin you. It was selfish and it was delicious. I wanted you to pick out the bones of me from between your teeth for years after I happened to you. And I did happen to you. We made sure of that, didn’t we? Happened like the aftermath of some gruesome accident, it was so bloody and raw that you had to stop to look, didn’t you? And then you couldn’t take your eyes off it. It was inside of you for as long as you could remember. Then you had nightmares about all of that ugliness for days. That was how I wanted you, half thrilled and half terrified that you were never going to forget what it looked like. That it would be a splinter that never worked itself out of your skin and you’d feel it whenever you brushed against somebody else. And why should you? When I loved you like that. How could you forget? My body so full that if the ocean tried to take me, the only thing that would come back up to shore was you. Or a bag full of bones curled around the shape of your name. I loved you like how an abscessed tooth beats at the root, incessant and painful and raw. I would have swallowed the entire Earth whole if you’d asked me to. I would have taken the sky by the corners and ripped it away from the horizon. So yes, it was the hungriest I’d ever been. It was the most glorious I’d ever been, with you like that stomach like a furnace, stomach like a hungry pride of lions. Point me in the direction of any God you know and I’ll tell him, I’ll get on my knees and beg him to never let you go, ‘I want to ruin that man. I don’t want him to ever forget me.’

Azra.T "Prideful of Lions"  (via 5000letters)