Estel

Poetry is for the hungry

[estel-noreflecti0n]

So I just self-published my first book

I'm still not very about how much of this works, but in case any of you are interested, there's about 100 poems that you can read in here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJHKY5TJ

They are mainly about love, lust, bdsm, masochism, loss, grief, being trans and being sad in a couple different places.

If you end up getting the book, let me know what you think of it! I got a long way to go, but it was very exciting to compile this one and I already have a couple ideas for the next few ones.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

[lestcat-de-lioncourt]

"You and me."

[destroymylife]

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Hurt Me

Like sunflowers dancing to their withering 

we think of pain as a natural component of the self;

I can take all you are comfortable in giving me and more

and I'm sure you know it,

what you don't know is that when we are intimate

I sometimes start to reach for your hand

before your grip on the whip makes them one and the same;

Kink is such an ugly word for our ritual

it sounds like something better left screamed,

it fails to encompass how 

you know the secrets to bend & bleed & break me,

and that away from you I'll never allow myself to be soft.

You have held my breath until I was free

bruised blood vessels popping like it was still spring,

We fall with grace, edging undoing and 

sipping starlight in open veins that swell

with smoldering contempt for their own darkness;

The door is open now, daddy, and you can come in

and take your fill of what is left of me.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

it all ends in fire;

much like us,

all the towers and all the gardens, 

cinder and ash -

isn't that nature's lure, love?

you learned to love the arsonist 

but not her great deeds of liberation,

new roots tempered by their mother's corpses 

now grow where you put our love to rest.

In this alone we are in agreement

for something was born out of our end,

we sleep amidst the bowels of something once familiar 

and named it emotional intelligence 

or learning to recognize red flags,

and while it still burns I honestly would rather

be wild fire than arsonist but

you never gave me much of a choice.

Often have I dreamed of places where we are yet to die 

but they are brittle like 

all the towers and all the gardens

that we once called us;

[wovenhanded]

my coven is claudia

[cruelnemothesis]

[azvhaalk]

thirst

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Collective memory & all is hatred

Another trans kid died yesterday and the day before that,

forced to pray until her tongue turned to cinder

god wasn't listening, or maybe he was

and that's another problem entirely.

Our war is a spiritual war

cocoons ripped open too early or too late,

like god, time is against us

and tomorrow has the shape of uninvited violence

with handcuffed gazes and forked tongues.

Call us satan's spawn if you have to ,

we aren't the ones branding the trident

and calling for flaying & fire;

There are ways of folding pain and swallowing it whole

that your people can't even begin to conceive,

everytime we leave the sanctity of our phones

and do anything, we do it in fear, 

we do it ready to fight for the very concept of us,

and when we die all the trophies you claim

will be what we carved into our skin 

with hormones, injections and fire.

Another unwilling soldier down by the caress of her own blade,

and they had the gall to call it suicide.

Conversion camps are funny like that,

death traps, tattooed numbers on our wrists

pink triangles to brand us unworthy of anything but prayer,

until our tongues turn to cinder and our hatred burns us down.

We are moths made of fire dancing to our own light,

and that's what they can't stand.

When we burn down your home we won't call it revenge or retribution

language was made by and for our enemies, 

it has no words for what we will do to it,

when we create concepts that fully capture our rage.

We breath in spite or our own designs 

and scream when spoken for, 

that dead kid is now a god of our kind,

and we pray with her ashes in our mouths

We pray and remember what you did to her.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Dementia blues

She is still there, mostly, withering inside her body oblivious to all but her bare needs. The old fire has turned to cinder, the cold and venomous defiance became as tame as evening rain. Her eyes still feel like pools where you could drown into wild in their wrath and envy, like all women learn to. She has no more words now, nothing of worth was left unsaid, The wheelchair, the hanging garden of herself, motionless, foreboding, the last of all muses. There's something akin to cruelty in watching her go on, morbidity runs in the family like the faulty hairlines and propensity for alcoholism, She is still there, caged, in a body that barely tolerates her, which is relatable is so many ways that the irony of it all makes me almost feel sick. But this was never about me even when I was little and unknowable even when I understood her as a sign of death to come, veneration came at the cost of isolation and now in the death and birth of womanhood we are silent, fierce in our detachment, never, never, by choice. Time, our jailor, shall carry us unto foreign shores in uncaring arms. And we will not forgive him.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Furies, like us

When apathy holds me by the throat I still call your silence intoxicating;

I realized that I'm so used to hurting myself  that I took it for a sport 

and the only sports I've ever been good at 

were the ones that involved making other people bleed. 

You should have taken that as a warning.

I remember that one kid that was afraid of fighting me in the dojo

because my legs were longer and I was faster and meaner and looked like

a fucking cartoon villain, all metal and rebellion and (covertly) cocaine,

the sensei said 'fear is what defeats you' and what defeated that boy 

was actually a spinning kick in the back of the ear.

I didn't need to do it but I wanted to because violence is such 

a pristine thing of beauty that I never learned to live without it,

even now that all of the narcotics are barely a memory and

my ability to cause harm has greatly outgrown my fists 

I still wonder if that boy was right to never enter the dojo again.

Ever since I became me I started seeing my past as a country that

I lost my citizenship to, somewhere foreign and full of sharp turns and

unmarked graves where it's still spring and miserable, 

and I hide from it in a place where all the furies dance 

by a tree in the yard that you long since said goodbye to,

they live in the bathroom mirror that you always thought too small 

and deep enough to drown;

I'm still a prisoner of that poorly-maintained yard and mirror, 

but don't you dare to believe that I envy your freedom;

there's a sense of calm vile and terrible 

in giving you everything you ask for,

all the time, all the distance, all the bullshit judgment for imagined crimes,

and I'm nothing if not just unapologetically tired of

pretending that there was any other possible outcome for our little tragedy.

I wanted to never be to you what I knew I could if I left my feelings unattended, 

and of course, over long periods of time nobody can do that.

We learned so much about how not to love with each other that  

it became all that was left of something once called 'us', 

Icarus flew before falling and that's what prevents me from saying that

we knew we were doomed from the start, even when seeing love leaking out of you

became an artform in itself. 

Once I was your wife, now I'm just wilderness full of furies and

those mirror metaphors that always meant more for you than for me.

I turned the last time we had a meaningful conversation into a holiday and no,

you are not invited to celebrate it. I marked it in my phone with as asterisk,

a day to remember what we decided not to have.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

you ashes in my mouth taste like your eyes upon my dead self,

we chew and chew and are too classy to call it cannibalism, we always were victims of our love for aesthetics.

The spark that bled us dry was like learning to fly towards an empty box, an unlocked cage.

bitter winds eat at our knees and on and on we fly with nothing but contempt for armageddon;

we are good at it, in our own ways;

Suddenly august is dead and so are we like our tradition dictates;

I sometimes picture myself as someone that could wish you harm, there are thoughts feasting in me that you would find quite endearing if not utterly repulsive;

mid-peripheral glances at what we were are less of a stabbing wound now, dimly-lit mourning has gone to bed with your absense and september rises with burning skies & yellow teeth and much to my dismay I still miss you.

[wolfythewitch]

This too shall pass but like holy fuck

[estel-noreflecti0n]

28-08-2018

We never amounted to more 

than the verses we bled.

We lasted longer than

we thought we deserved but sometimes 

are called winter by calendars that 

have no use for mercy.

We dream of being naked in the dark

holding cold earth by the throat,

like we did, back when we thought 

We knew what this was all about.

Now imagine that some hearts 

were carved in the same stone that

holds the foundation of lightless places

where could-have-beens have gone to die.

Call it for what it is, 

water, holy and terrible, one moment made

sacred within another, two bodies between sentences,

tangible seconds in which we never amount to more than

what we almost wrote, 

beating hearts of stone and winter screaming for 

a pulse, a pull, a mockery of life,

as if any other life was entirely possible in

a space that dreams of purpose,

laying naked in the dark.

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Aaron was right

Sharp gray sadness tendrils it's way and

I'm still here, alive, like you

gone but uncommitted.

I think often of rain and bile and

the edge of our solitudes, 

they pour through our small afflictions

and we endure, 

whether we like it or not.

I've been craving the silence we once had in

companionship, but as you once said I'm terrible

with the obvious as I

watched you aflame begging for lighter fluid &

felt like cradling your nameless fears 

in my clenched fists.

I wasn't happy and wasn't owed any happiness but

I was still nothing but fire, 

like you tried so hard to be.

It was never your fault, 

even tho it largely didn't matter,

survival sometimes feels like defeat and 

I can't begin to write down how much I would burn 

for the privilege of losing you again.   

My heart pounds arrhythmically and august has a way 

of making me feel like death plays with an open hand and

there isn't a single room in this world 

that doesn't have a door closed by you.

We failed to be what we needed and

now what we once had flickers through atoms inhabiting

warships and dandelions and soon to be dead stars shining

over foreign countries that hate us both

[estel-noreflecti0n]

Lunacy

I've grown accept love that maybe I deserve and

that the truth of everything is still dragged in

mud and half-meant apologies.

The moon shines new in unwelcoming skies,

ever present witness to handcrafted loneliness 

and deranged faith in absent gods,

she sings to me in our shared mother tongue, 

foreign to all recognizable as barely human,

words shaped like wounds, sounding like promises

we were unfit to keep.

We have been talking about cruelty lately

on things we do to the ones we love,

Like a sister she cradles my insecurities and

makes of misery a veil to keep her safe in outer space.

The violence of it all is almost bearable because 

life didn't end when I was 16 and yearned for it, 

or 19 and deserved it, or 23 and thought nothing of it,

and ten years later we still rave 

in the same conscious continuity of errors,

but look at us now, loved by the people that

say that drugs turn you into your parents so 

we had to quit even tho consciousness still haunts us,

old as the light that touches me, 

reflected from her nuptial gown.