Dancing With Ghosts

poetry by kødiak. all work in progress. instagram.

[kodiakpoetry]

Shakespeare

He asked whether or not to be,  but he put the words in someone else’s mouth.

Maybe he was afraid, like me, that people would think his mental state was going south.

I don’t enjoy wondering  about what comes next, I just don’t know how to write about anything else.

[kodiakpoetry]

Mind games

You’ll forgive me if I doubt every word you ever said. You gave them your body, but claimed I was in your head.

[kodiakpoetry]

Chromatic

If we were colours  then I would be black, and you would be every shade that I lack.

If only I’d managed some tinges of grey, then maybe I could’ve convinced you to stay.

[kodiakpoetry]

VHS

People say that  you get one life, but that's incorrect. I spend mine rewatching, rewriting all of my regrets. It’s true you can’t hit rewind, or try to press eject, but I’ll still record over you  like a VHS cassette.

[kodiakpoetry]

Winter

Poets love the winter time, because the only rhyme that’s better for remember than November is December.

[kodiakpoetry]

Monsters (excerpt)

My demons are stronger than those of my youth, colder hands, darker eyes and longer of tooth. I no longer stress about what’s under my bed, this space is full of ghosts, but they live in my head.

[kodiakpoetry]

Madison Square

The streets may not be paved with gold, but these squares are full of ghosts. Every time my fingers found your hand to hold, we became a long dead couple’s hosts.

[kodiakpoetry]

Pretending

There really is no point in trying to pretend that they'll do anything besides leave us in the end.

[kodiakpoetry]

Mine

As we lay with our hands and our hearts intertwined,  my lungs caught every time you whispered “Mine.” I find myself hoping that maybe I’m possessed, because it’s the only explanation for why I’m so obsessed.

And why I’m willing to discard a life an ocean away, even though I know that I can never stay.

So it’s easier to believe that a ghost passed through me and got stuck, Not so different to what happened when we gave up and tried to fuck.

That’s why I shuddered as I was pulling out, You were becoming something I could no longer live without.

[kodiakpoetry]

Dancing with ghosts

There’s a ghost who lives between these walls and he’s me, or at least he responds to my name. His hand passes through mine as we stumble and fall, and we dance away all of our fear and shame.

It’s fitting when we roam that we only come out at night. It’s when I always felt most at home, so I guess it’s only right that we run the streets like wolves after everybody leaves.

But things aren’t normal here, there’s no slowly melting cube of ice circling a glass of bourbon from a bottle I could never afford. There’s no drifting jazz or frozen cocktails or pizza by the slice, sometimes we just break bottles and watch the darkness stain the floor.

The ghost who lives here is the me I was when I knew you. But you left and, when you did, the me I was back then did too.