Fossil

Poetic brainvomit. A record of the so-called "human" "experience". Bake me into a pie.

[fossiljaw]

Saltwater

I was raised by thunder and lightning

Most nights, rain leaks through the roof 

Of my refuge under an overturned ship,

Half-buried in the barren mud.

Rain waters the fishbones scattered outside, 

And they grow into saltwater gardens 

Of coral and swordfish and salmon 

Sea stars and ribbon eels  

Gardens of colorful decay.

Some nights, I dream a monster finds me

Like a blot of octopus ink, hulking and formless

With bulging eyes, needles filling its maw

And its cry is a ghostly voice in a well– 

Long dead, insides covered in leeches.

Every morning, I wake to clear skies

I scrape away my iridescent skin

Like scrubbing the grout between tiles.

Flaking away layers of dead cells

That shine like sunlight through mist

I look at myself over the bathroom sink,

Sore gills flared into pink frills,

Skin smelling of bleach

Waiting for a storm to send me home.

[fossiljaw]

I haven't posted in a flamin hot minute, so thought I'd send an update to my favorite lil void to scream into (thats you!)

I changed my name.

My health is much better (and now that my body works it's over for you bitchesss)

I'm gonna start trying line poetry. Not sure if it'll be good cause I've never been one to use meter and breaks, I just kinda go with the flowy flow and overwhelm readers with gushing prose no questions asked

That's all bye *blows kiss*

[fossiljaw]

Candymouth

Honey. Sweetheart. Tongue and cheek. Don't place me on the tip of your tongue. 

Licorice. Vanilla. Don't lick my name from your lips, don't dissolve me in your saliva.

Blood as black as molasses. I am not medicine for sick men to swallow on silver spoons, with sugar or without. You devour with no throat, no teeth– a socket of cavities and sour gums, drops of lemon rotting in your maw. 

I am nothing like you. Bone-cruncher, jaw-breaker, brass teeth and black honey. I am plaster molds and decay, surgar coated, crystallized, full of bile.  

Don't mix my name with your stomach acid, bittersweet and sickly, choking on soaked earth and lavender roots.

Don't swallow whole what you can't tear with your teeth.

[fossiljaw]

I think about the knife in me: Clean cut, straight through the bone. 

They talk stupid on purpose, sacks of meat marbled with fat. They smile, they lick their teeth. But they know more than you think. They know you better than you know yourself.

God. I feel so sick, so bloated-- Lungs full of wrinkles and ribs full of groans.

a beached whale drying in the sun. 

Insides bleached, full of holes, tongue fluttering in the dry wind blowing through my throat. 

I am paper tissue and strings.

Don’t show me. I think I don’t want to know.

[fossiljaw]

Floating down a broad, slow stream, beneath the branches of tangerine trees, I feel the breeze on my bare skin. I am drifting towards the dead– a mass of dead at the end.

You want to know where we are going.

You are beside me, facedown. I am on my back. Or maybe it is the other way around.

"I don't know. My eyes are closed." Air bubbles of voice escape my throat.

I hope it feels like coming home.

[fossiljaw]

My back to the pavement and the sun in my eyes, I'm here again– thinking of my old basement. My old bed, my old neighbors and friends, burned out like birthday candles.

Nostalgic for the things I wished for, for the things that should have been– kites and loose balloons–

Drifting. I'm drifting. My head feels like a fishbowl.

I wish I ran away from home when there was still something to run from.

[fossiljaw]

Something has torn you open.

It is nameless, faceless, the memory faint as a faded scar. But the wounds it unseamed and the cavities it prodded, the sore tissue stretched open with dirty fingers– that has yet to heal properly.

You can never leave these things alone.

[fossiljaw]

A glass pane is all that divides me from the sky– A vast landscape of nimbus clouds drifting in vacancy, framed by a window. 

My soul is untethered from its mast. It streams freely, a white flag surrendered to seaside winds. The breeze blows through me easily as sheets on a clothesline, vivid dreams billowing while my head lies heavy on the pillow. 

I turn my head to look to the face half-hidden by blankets– half lost in the motionless tempest of rumbled bedsheets. 

She is awake. 

A fine strand of hair falls across her forehead, shadow curving over the bridge of her nose.

One eye gazes back with a blank stare, pupil dilated like a black hole in the blue.

A gaze that falls into the sky.

It reminds me, so quietly, how violent the world is to live through.

[fossiljaw]

Let the world teach me to write. Let its hand guide my intricate motions, blindly, leading the quill that marrs the parchment. Let me copy down each syllable in the finest calligraphy until language lies before my feet, a docile creature, so that I may soon turn on the world and dash my inkwell over its pale and sickly brow. 

Let me stain it with its own scathing poisons, splatter garrish blots across its bare face to expose it to cosmic eyes.

Let me learn to imitate the delicate art of speech. I shall pry my fingers into its flaccid maw and force it to speak, that I may feel the writhing movements of its bloated tongue, and learn for myself those anguished sounds by which I may twist the truth.

And if, as I do, the poor beast spits into my distorted face, I shall grab it by its slackened jaw and force it to gnash its yellowed teeth into my fingers, so that I, blind as I am, may learn to bite. Let my teeth become grotesque saws, my jaw a snare that snaps and clenches. Let me mangle and maim the hands that dare to caress my burning forehead.

[fossiljaw]

I capture the face in loose streaks of charcoal, sketching the outline from the forehead to the cheekbone, tracing it down to the jaw and the curve of the neck. I run darkness over the page in heavy, careless strokes, as hair falls and curls at the shoulders.

The naked expression emerges in rough dark and light, like an overexposed photo– the shadow that slants on the neck from the jaw and the gentle shading under the bottom lip; the darkness between the eyebrow and the bridge of the nose, right above the lid. 

How effortless it is to look into a face, when I have an excuse to stare.

Sooty fallout dusts the page like fine ash, waiting to be brushed away, or scattered by a breeze of soft breath. 

Eyes dart between a page and reality, as if too busy copying it down to pay attention to how they stare, and how the other returns the gaze: steadily, pupils dark with the mirror image of sight. 

I let my hand draw the upturned corners of the mouth and the subtle lift in the middle. I retrace the upper lids of each eye to darken them with lashes, deepening the shadow just beneath the lower edge. 

Solid black irises.

They burn holes in me, so quietly.

If this is how artists feel, I think– from a distance, submerged in aching secrecy, so indulgently and darkly detached–

Then how painful it must be to love an artist.

[fossiljaw]

Hi! Are you ok with your stuff being reblogged? Thanks, and have a lovely day!

Of course, feel free to reblog. Thanks for asking!

[fossiljaw]

Love your stuff. Have you participated in any slams?

Thank you!

I haven't, since I'm afraid of vulnerability and public speaking, but I have watched a few local slams and enjoyed them!

[fossiljaw]

Tin man, tin man, stocking empty tin cans; how can you be so heartless? 

With your aluminum head and your radio brain, you believe all you see on TV screens, where everything is not what they think it seems and your reason rusts in the rain. 

Scarecrow, scarecrow, planted in the crop rows, how can you be so mindless? 

Another straw man in a twisted system, with a twine-stitch grin and tattered clothes. They stick you up and fire their missiles, and you stil stand in the flaming grove. 

Lion, lion, and the train cart you die on. How can you be so afraid?

The meat on the floor is covered in flies, and through each ring of flames, your courage runs dry. You hide in your crate and pace through the night, but when the head's in your mouth, you're too scared to bite.

And forward we go, hand in hand, to the end, as we follow the yellow brick road. May those high above mend out faults on their throne, and praise us so gently towards home:

Tin man, what heart.

Scarecrow, what mind. 

Lion, what courage.

What virtue it is to trust, they say– to learn through an emerald veil. 

What virtue it is to rust, burn, and rot, for a cause that has long since failed.

Tin man, Scarecrow, and Lion, in line:

How can we be so blind?

[fossiljaw]

I take a strange solace in x-rays. The ghostly architecture of the spine and skull and the blurred arc of streaked light. The idea of having a solid framework beneath my flesh– of ribs and hips and shoulder blades–

having something to support my being other than a nebulous organic form, subject to change and decay,

and the vague sense of being alive. 

It is a part of my existence I see without uncertainty, a part of myself detached from the vulnerability of flesh. Free from nakedness, and stripped to complete transparency. 

Then I look towards the doctor's face, where the skeletal framework stays hidden under folds of skin. 

The naked eye and the veiled socket–

Which, I ask myself, holds more truth? 

[fossiljaw]

The seeds of a quiet unreality were planted in the murmurs between stained glass windows, taking root in the words within basement walls.

My young, wandering feet led me down an overgrown path far from the pastures I belonged to, and I stumbled upon something unknown to those who urged me forth into the dark grove of my humanity. That gaping crevice of earth I now call home.

Home peers from every crack dark enough to hide in. I am as separate from the world as a tunnel is from the earth, separate as blood from artery walls. 

My heart is choked with kudzu, embedded deeply in soil. My feet are dirty, my nightshirt torn and ragged. But to be wild is to be a creature of innocence. To be ugly is to be pure.

[fossiljaw]

I may be writing brighter pieces more often now since I'm emerging from a long period of no-good rotten mental and physical health.

This isn't a promise, it's a warning.

[fossiljaw]

Forgive me, for I have left you in the snow. 

I was traped by ice sheets, and they burned down your home. 

But you were a gentle monster, catching snowflakes on your tongue. 

Little one,

I was just like you when I was young.

Now I have grown old, and never dried your tears.

Forgive me.

I let them freeze on your rosy cheeks,

for you found more comfort in cold.

Yet I fear winter's warmth was not enough

To heal the teeth-marks in your bones.

I left you with a monster, but you run from its maw.

You hold its beating heart in your arms.

Your quilt is not peirced by the yawning jaws

Of steel traps around your bed.

Rest well, little one, far from harm. 

And the snowstorms in your head.

Dry your tears, lift your face to heaven. 

And run, little one.

Carry your heart high, like a scarlet banner in battle.

Leave joyus footsteps in the snow.

Leave ruby drops, bright as fallen apples.

and wash away what I have stained so long ago. 

Little one, forgive me as I go. 

You are a gentle monster,

And I have left you in the snow.