change your mind

[lamentedlove]

my god, isn’t life so beautiful? what a wondrous thing: celebrating a friend’s birthday. a lover’s birthday. gifts purchased with love. celebrating time passed with friends. meeting acquaintances again. exploring a home you’ve visited before and finding that the furniture has changed. this time, you’re here with almost a completely different set of visitors.

[lamentedlove]

I forgot your birthday.

I live in a house you’ve never been to.

I am new in a way that you’ve never seen.

I love in a way you couldn’t take away from me.

I drive routes that you’ve never taken.

I have friends that you’ve never met.

I dream of things you’ve never experienced.

I learn things you wouldn’t understand.

[lamentedlove]

my favorite lines I’ve written

since I’ve honestly abandoned this blog for the most part I thought I’d share the things that I loved so much about it. here are the lines I wrote that still keep me up at night sometimes. poems linked.

i’m coughing up wild new york city in the back of our hotel room & you sleep like the dead, like you can’t hear me. (x)

baby please make me out of blue porcelain & painstakingly carve each tick of the clock into my body, each heartbeat and breath inscribed into the clay before you scrape it, removing all the flawed parts, making the fingernail marks that others have left upon my soul disappear. (x)

take me downriver to the groves where the bare trees crack in the wind and rustle around us like footsteps, where i look like a new mexico bloodstain against the leaves and you fill me with monochrome love. (x)

sharp-cheeked sunburnt teenage aura in the backseat keeps burning through the leather & i know how much it pisses you off. so much that you wait with me at the locked door and kick the rock into the jamb so we can let ourselves back in. (x)

why can’t i kiss you like tiretracks on hot asphalt in summer? i want to melt into your lips like vanilla ice cream drips on concrete, slowly and then all at once (x)

tonight i break like a twig from a summer cottonwood tree, graceful broken bend without the separation. tomorrow i snap like the dry branch, revealing stars inside. (x)

[lamentedlove]

all i see is you, your feet in the river and your shoes in your hands as you wade and step along shores crystalline enough to glow faintly under the moonlight.

the same moonlight your eyes glimmer in as they catch on the blue-pink mountain expanse and fall on mine. i think your smile is like a watermelon slice and maybe that’s just because it’s summer and you can’t walk ten feet in my town without seeing fresh crisp red & green fruit.

i watch as the water comes up to your waist, up past the wildly bunched rolls of your jeans at your knee, past your pockets filled with smooth river stones we’ve collected. i see you stand there, shoes held above your head as the silvery minnows peck and nibble at your ankles. the night feels fresh and sweet, like the first bite of a peach in the summer—orange and red, like the sunset

clear creek | r.h.

[lamentedlove]

for a while everything was peaceful wind and babbling brook and dandelions pushing through the soil to face the sky, but now—

each breath is so hard to breathe and i feel like a seed that will never sprout, always stuck, forever a scared little child. too much to love but still invisible under the mulch. & now it’s too cold to emerge and see the stars, & now i wonder if i am secretly rotting away from the center and by next spring i will have disappeared

[lamentedlove]

Hi, I love your poetry! I first read "who they are without wings" several months back and couldnt stop thinking about it, and then had to go back and find the rest of your work. Your descriptions are vivid and atmospheric, and all of your work has a very unique feeling to it. Keep it up!

thank you <3 I have found my love & passion somewhere else by now but perhaps one day you will see my work out in the world. I’ll be back to write more if I find that I have more to say

[lamentedlove]

i. the stars don’t spin when i’m not around you, when i’m frozen under oceans of sound and light and years i have missed just by thinking of you.

iii. you make my world spin faster than the sun and the moon dance together in infinite harmony and I am unsteady on my feet

iii. i fought back but i lost to lovely cupid in the end

[lamentedlove]

i’m coughing up wild new york city in the back of our hotel room & you sleep like the dead, like you can’t hear me.

god I wish I fell in love right away but instead i’ve been the sparrow preyed upon by the hungry falcon, the pounding terror flooding and pouring from my ears, hot, red, viscously metallic and biting like talons through soft skin & feathers.

everything is subtropical and nothing hurts except everything does, and the bruise on my neck aches as you lean on me but yet don’t trust me

— meet me at the hilton at six, r.h.

[lamentedlove]

I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but,

i fell in love like falling off a tightrope,

straight deep dive into the ground

and as I felt the world pull me back down to gravity, you caught me

lifting me out of her grasp in both defiance and love of her

as you lent me your gift to fly high above the ground, for a little while

but when we were both back down to earth you kissed me in front of the pine trees and we both felt like we could fly,

for a minute.

[lamentedlove]

you are everywhere I go and you always will be, in the faces of a million strangers, in the shadows as i walk alone, in the possibility that at any moment you will walk straight out of my mind and onto the pavement in front of me, and i will have to face that anemic pounding in my head. it will spread to my chest like a disease, squeezing water from my lungs as one glimpse of that façade sends me through months of my life in a single moment. though it has been years by now, i see your laugh in the man in the cafeteria, your stature in the woman walking the city sidewalks, your photo shoot taken a blink away from my home, where you once made different photos that were even less art than cat-eye sunglasses at a run down park. you are everywhere i go, in the timelines of my friends and in their hearts until i nurture the courage to speak, everywhere, even the end of the world looks back at me with a face stone-cold and i am a child again, playing my last card unknowingly into your hand. you are everywhere i go, and i will escape you when the earth slows and crumbles into a meteor shower.

you smile at me sometimes, and with a heavy heart i know you will never leave me.

3 years, r.h.

[lamentedlove]

i was growing in his garden and then one day he turned the water off. sprinklers ran dry and bubbles until the valves shut, leaving my burnt & touch-starved roots reaching for love that wasn’t there.

we both knew he couldn’t bridge the gap between beautiful and good enough, he wanted my bones for potpourri and I did not want to be the one to cleanse his tired air.

& then on a cold january day when the soil was dry and frozen, he dug up my corpse and left it on cold concrete to die; no cracked watering can, no forced love, no gentle touch to my leaves followed by the picking sting.

your gentle hands pruned my wounds and transplanted my dying body into the earth once again, cutting out the rot and washing the infection from my roots.

you unlocked the door of his home and made it yours, filling life with bright things and the garden with fertilizer when the soil called out for it. each morning you drank your morning coffee as you fed me mine, soaking the ground with your love so that i could reach up into the world once again.

you could never fix the sprinkler system, but you brought the garden back to life.

lover’s guide to gardening, r.h.

[lamentedlove]

i want to trip off a cliff into love & sink deepdeepdeep into a dark blue embrace. so when will it be? after the turning & hiking & wasting time? or after lonely dusk bike rides across the city bridges? when will you see me & fall in love, and will i see you? i’m sure you’re somewhere near but every time you catch my eye i look again and it’s someone else entirely. when will you find me?

— love, love, love(d). r.h.

[lamentedlove]

i want to teach you my mother’s language & the way she bakes chocolate chip cookies with extra oats & cinnamon. i want to show you the clicking steps i have to take before skating, to satiate my whirring, anxious mind. i want to love you, i want to hold you, i want to choose you. but you’re nowhere to be found; not in the cook’s crooked smile or the skater’s warm eyes or even the young friend’s goofy grin. you just aren’t here yet, and i’m starting to wonder when you’ll arrive, because i need to show you the graves of my childhood friends, the skyline in my favorite cities, the hotel diner off of broadway, the art in the arroyo, and the way the mountains turn watermelon pink as the sun sets. i need to give you a piece of myself in exchange for your love, so hurry up.

— wishing, r.h.

[lamentedlove]

summer love isn’t real. let me tell you why — it’s not real because it does not exist out of love, but rather out of the deep longing that comes from being alone when the light dims at four pm on a wednesday.

it’s not real because the boy i chase after every june ceases to exist on july first. it’s almost like we don’t exist on the same plane, but perhaps on two strings that spin around the sun and only occasionally cross.

summer love doesn’t exist because the ocean and the sky call me away from home and no matter who i meet i will never forget the boy in seattle that my heart is bound to by the red thread of life.

it’s an idea created by tired highschoolers looking for something to focus on instead of trigonometry. everyone asks if you played the baseball game of summer love, and people are especially wondering exactly how you played.

summer love isn’t real | r.h.

[traumatizedsuggestion]

“you tell me “cite a specific grievance” as if there is a form i can fill out to retrieve stolen memories.”

— r.h. (via silverysuggestion)

[lamentedlove]

every day lately i am drowning somewhere that i don’t want to be, complying simply because it’s easier on my paper-thin heart than saying no. so when does that change? when do I dream of you and wake up telling myself not to chase unreality, when do i undo the mystery? and when can i finally stop becoming thin, folded crisp origami that withers in the face of truth? every day lately i want to drop my façade into the wind and let it fly like litter, to tell you something other than “it’s fine” or “no thank you,” to speak my mind instead of crumbling as you toss me aimlessly into the wastebasket.

— every day lately i’m origami

[lamentedlove]

i woke up loving you again, as if I had just spent the last eight hours holding your hand, or if I had ever told you what went wrong. as if you could fix it. as if, today, you are anything more than a fantasy that I now miss more than the real you.

i woke up loving you again, like i had never grabbed your hand and then realized we were bringing each other down, like i had been able to do more than love blindly through the holidays, like you had somehow crawled your way into my heart at 2 am and held on.

i woke up loving you again, the version of you who always wanted to talk, the version of you that had kinder eyes and was young and lost, not aimless. the version of you that was an open book in my hands and allowed me to bloom slowly instead of all at once.

— i woke up loving you again, but it was not you. r.h.