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Pressure

Life’s hands didn’t shape me gently.

They pressed until something in me gave.

I remember who I was

before everything started slipping,

before laughter felt borrowed,

before silence grew teeth.

Now I carry pieces

that don’t fit the way they used to.

Some are missing.

Some I wish were.

There are parts of me

I don’t recognize anymore

the way I hesitate,

the way I expect things to fall apart

even when they haven’t yet.

People say breaking makes you stronger.

But they don’t talk about

what it takes away

how it hollows you out

and leaves echoes where a voice once lived.

Life has broken me

into the person I am today…

and I’m still trying to decide

if that’s someone worth becoming.

#original poem #lena writes #writing #poetry #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #spoken word #poertycommunity #my poem

2:14 am

It’s late, and I’m still thinking of your name,

Like saying it might bring you back somehow.

I know it won’t. I know it’s not the same.

I just don’t know who I am without you now.

I keep replaying things I should have said,

The way you left, so easy, so complete.

You took your things, but left inside my head

A version of you I can’t seem to delete.

I wonder if you ever think of me,

Or if I’m just a chapter you outgrew.

Because I’m stuck where we used to be,

Still trying to make sense of losing you.

It’s 2 a.m., and nothing feels okay

Just me, and all the words that didn’t choose to stay.

#original poem #poetry #lena writes #poertycommunity

Tastes of grief

I keep finding her in the corners of this house.

Shadows bending around the shape she used to be,

the dent in the couch,

a cup left upside down on the skin’s edge.

Evidence of a being

who no longer is,

but most certainly once was.

A life I keep trying to taste.

Now I eat differently

Bitting my tongue,

so the grief doesn’t spill into the room,

swallowing words

that taste of stale hope,

choking down tears,

that arrive uninvited,

burning like salt on the rim of my throat.

And the bite;

The bite is its own kind of prayer.

When I chew I feel the world again:

its edges, its warmth,

its refusal to let me go.

The hunger is not for food.

I crave what used to be mine:

the run of my legs,

the laugh that didn’t ache,

the sunlight I could swallow whole.

Now even air feels like a meal I have to earn.

Chewing on memory,

like it might turn into mercy,

I never seem to get full.

Because grief is not digestible.

It sits in the hollow of me

won’t soften, won’t move.

I keep gnawing at it anyway,

as if maybe this time

I’ll learn the flavor of loss.

There is a hunger illness can’t name

a craving for the soul I used to wear easily,

for a self that fit.

I keep savoring what’s left;

memories,

half dreams,

the texture of before.

I am starving for a life l can no longer live

But still, somehow,

I feed on it

even when it tastes like grief.

#a poem about hunger #original poem #poetry #writing #lena writes #spoken word #poems and poetry #poeticstories #my poem #poertycommunity

Pretty hurts

Dear one-who-sees-what-eyes-cannot.

I am coming to You from the end of myself.

I am laid out like a trembling patient

on a buzzing table of mistakes,

every flaw flashing red,

every breath setting off another alarm.

I have tried everything I know.

Everything.

I’ve pulled the outside tight,

starved it, shaped it, polished it

until even the mirror got tired of lying for me.

I’ve scrubbed the skin

until it stung with the promise of becoming new

but the rot stayed quiet and untouched,

hiding beneath the ribs.

And I’ve torn open the inside too

therapy, prayer, confession,

every word meant to heal me

echoing back into the same hollow space.

I swallow hope and it burns like acid.

I breathe and it tastes like dust.

I sleep and wake up with the same ache

coiled behind my heart.

If You are out there,

take these trembling hands of mine.

Steady them.

I cannot hold the tweezers anymore

without hearing that awful buzz,

reminding me I ruin everything I touch.

I have tried to lift myself,

but the weight keeps multiplying.

I have tried to mend myself,

but every stitch comes loose.

I have tried to pretend I’m okay,

but the pretending is killing me faster

than the truth ever could.

So I’m here

desperate, shaking,

crawling into your hands

because I have nowhere else left to go.

If you can see what I can’t

if you can touch what is festering in me

please, I’m begging you,

go where I cannot reach.

Find the fear that’s grown roots in my chest.

Find the shame wound deep like a needle I swallowed.

Find the grief that never learned how to leave.

Find the part of me whispering

that I am too broken to save.

Cut deeper than the body,

deeper than the mind,

deeper than the places I’ve tried to fix

until my fingers bled with effort.

It isn’t my face that’s failing.

It isn’t my body that’s wrong.

It isn’t my habits or my willpower

that are letting me down.

It’s the soul.

So please

open me gently

or open me completely

but don’t leave me like this.

Don’t let me drown in the place

I cannot heal alone.

It’s my soul,

my breaking, burning soul,

that needs the surgery.

#original poem #yes the Beyoncé song inspired this lol #writing #lena writes #poetry #spoken word #poems and poetry #my poem #poertycommunity #writers on tumblr

untitled.

The clock hands froze mid-motion,

the walls began to creak,

and time became a living thing

that pressed against my cheek.

The air was thick with listening,

the kind that knows your sins,

and I swore the dark could feel my heart

beating against my skin.

It wasn’t peace or promise,

nor some divine design

just the gentle, trembling certainty

that the life I feared was mine.

Dawn came soft and golden,

like mercy in disguise,

and I felt the pulse of everything

that still refused to die.

#original poem #lena writes #poetry #writing #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #poertycommunity #outside thoughts

One wish

Every year,

the date creeps closer

a quiet dread coiling in my chest,

the calendar’s whisper

turning into a countdown.

I imagine candles,

a soft light flickering in an empty room.

I whisper a wish into the quiet,

knowing it won’t change much,

but needing to say it all the same.

The same one

i’ve made since I could dream

to be seen,

to be something

worth remembering.

I wish to be special

in a way that feels ordinary,

to be loved

without asking,

to hear “happy birthday”

before the echo fades.

I scroll through messages

that don’t come,

one, maybe two

half-hearted words,

a few polite emojis

and I try to smile like it’s enough.

It still hurts,

just like when I was little.

It always lingers,

that small, stubborn part of me

that still wants to matter,

that still hopes someone

might care a little too.

#original poem #might delete idk #poetry #writing #lena writes #spoken word #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #my poem #poertycommunity #books & libraries #birthday

Last night

Thought I might die last night,

when the thunder found my name,

and the wind pressed its cold mouth

to the cracks of my windowpane.

The walls breathed like living things,

and the clock forgot its count;

every second stretched and trembled,

a mountain I couldn’t surmount.

The candle’s flame bent sideways,

as if listening for ghosts;

I whispered to the empty room

it whispered back, almost.

Then lightning carved a silver scar

across the sleeping town,

and for a breath I saw my life

turned rightside up, then down.

The books I never finished

sighed upon the shelf,

and letters I had never sent

wrote back to themselves.

I thought of hands I didn’t hold,

of words I let decay,

of laughter lost in train stations

that carried time away.

Then silence, sudden and full

the kind that feels like grace.

The storm unclenched its trembling fist,

and left me in its place.

Dawn came soft as forgiveness,

poured gold through shattered fear,

and I, still breathing, realized

I only almost disappeared.

So I made my morning coffee trembling,

and let the silence stay;

for I thought I might die last night,

and woke up anyway.

#original poem #poetry #lena writes #poems and poetry #writing #my poem #poertycommunity #writers on tumblr #ttpd

What love means to me

I do not yet know love

not in the way poets promise,

not in the way songs ache for.

What I have seen are the bright beginnings:

faces lit by novelty,

laughter tossed into the air

like confetti that always finds its way to the ground.

I wonder about what comes after.

When the air stills,

when the party thins,

when even memory grows quiet

is that not where love must begin?

I imagine it as endurance,

as the patience of autumn

when summer has folded its warmth away.

The trees stand bare,

yet their roots cling to earth unseen.

Is this not devotion

to hold on without the adornment of leaves,

to remain when beauty has shed its costume?

Perhaps love is not in the easy hours,

but in the ordinary,

the dim-lit rooms where words falter,

where silence stretches long

and no one runs from it.

Not the thunder of applause,

but the soft decision to stay

when there is no audience at all.

I cannot yet claim this knowing.

I hold only the shadow of it,

a philosophy shaped by longing,

a faith in what I have not lived.

And yet, I believe

if love is real,

it must be more than fevered light.

It must be the gaze that steadies

when joy collapses into sorrow,

the hand that remains

when there is nothing left to perform.

One day, perhaps,

I will see it:

not fireworks,

but embers;

not a song that crescendos,

but the silence after

where two souls choose stillness

and call it enough.

Until then,

I write of love as one writes of the horizon

distant, unseen,

yet certain in its promise

that somewhere it awaits.

#original poem #poetry #writing #lena writes #spoken word #poems and poetry #my poem #poertycommunity #writers on tumblr #mini essay #spilled thoughts #love

I hate sunset

I hate the sunset.

I hate the sunset because you should be here, and this isn’t right.

I hate the sunset because hours pass effortlessly,

without even putting up a fight.

How dare the day end and not acknowledge you’re missing.

How dare it become morning again

when I’m still mourning our end,

my heart left beyond fixing.

This stupid world keeps spinning,

like mine didn’t just crumble.

Another day has passed, eating tears

for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I miss you. It isn’t fair. Come back.

The words fall from my lips in a mumble.

Tomorrow arrives when I still ache for yesterday,

and today shouldn’t even exist.

Hours tick, taunting —

you haunting every thought, leaving me desolate.

I hate the sunset,

because each time, the silence it leaves

sounds a little too much like you.

#original poem #poetry #writing #lena writes #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #my poem #kinda shitty kinda idk

The only feeling left

It isn’t pain I carry now,

not even the bone-deep ache of exhaustion.

Those are old companions,

their voices dulled to background static.

What lives in me is fear.

Fear that every tremor,

every sudden flutter in my chest,

every dizzy sway

is not passing weather

but a storm taking root.

I tell myself I am dramatic,

that a cough is just a cough,

a shiver just the cold

but when the body becomes a traitor,

nothing is just anything anymore.

How do you explain

the horror of waiting inside your own skin,

unsure which spark will flare into wildfire,

which shadow’s will grow teeth?

They see me upright, smiling,

and think I am better.

But what they don’t hear

is the constant question looping in my blood:

What if this is the beginning

of something I can’t undo?

It isn’t pain I carry now.

It’s the terror

of living in a house

whose foundation crumbles

one stone at a time,

and never knowing

which room will fall next.

#original poem #poetry #spoken word #writing #lena writes #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #my poem #poertycommunity #chronic illness #chronic pain #my thougts

The perfect crime

They took my life.

With precision, with patience,

a theft so complete it left no fingerprints.

No screams.

No witnesses.

No trace of what had been.

It was flawless.

The kind of crime scholars admire

in theory,

impossible in practice,

and yet,

here I stood, hollow, erased,

a body without its history.

They dismantled me

like a clock with its gears removed,

hands frozen,

time silenced.

For a while,

I believed them.

Believed myself finished,

my pages torn out,

my name left to dissolve

in the margins of someone else’s story.

But they miscalculated.

Because in their hunger to destroy,

they left me breathing.

They took my life,

but let me live.

And that is not a mistake.

That is catastrophe.

Because the living remember.

The living rebuild.

The living rise.

What they imagined perfect

is now fractured.

I am the fracture.

I am the echo in their silence,

the reckoning they forgot to fear.

The perfect crime

was never perfect at all.

It left me

and I am not evidence.

I am the verdict.

#spoken word #writing #poetry #lena writes #original poem #writers on tumblr #poems and poetry #poertycommunity #my poem #idk anymore

I have always loved the rain. There is something about the steady rhythm of water against the windows that makes me feel less alone, as though the world itself is keeping time with me. Each drop is a reminder that even the sky needs to let go sometimes, and when it does, the earth doesn’t shatter, it grows. The sound fills the quiet spaces that I often find unbearable, replacing them with a music that is both chaotic and strangely orderly.

Thunder, too, has a strange comfort. It is unapologetic in its volume, a voice that refuses to be ignored. When it cracks through the air, it silences everything else for a moment, and I admire that kind of authority. I wish I could carry that same certainty in my own chest, to shake the air when my thoughts become too heavy. Instead, I let the thunder do it for me.

So I love the storm not because it is gentle, but because it is fierce. Not because it is quiet, but because it is louder than I will ever be. It teaches me that chaos can be beautiful, that noise can be healing, and that destruction can make room for growth.

And maybe, more than anything else, I love it because for once the storm outside is louder than the one in my head.

#original poem #spoken word #poetry #lena writes #poems and poetry #writing #writers on tumblr #poertycommunity #my poem #late night thoughts #spilled thoughts

How much longer?

How much longer do I have to bleed?

How much longer do I have to break myself open,

to pour myself out,

to prove I am worthy of being seen?

I am tired—

tired of bleeding in silence,

tired of standing in the storm alone,

tired of stitching my own skin shut

while the world walks by.

I give—

I give until my giving becomes invisible.

I give until my voice is nothing but echoes,

until my kindness becomes currency,

until my body is bankrupt of breath.

How much longer do I have to hollow myself out,

until the marrow in my bones

turns to dust,

until the clock eats the last of my breath?

I am running out of time.

I feel the seconds slicing me open,

sharp as glass,

steady as death.

Each tick a theft,

each tock a tearing,

each moment whispering—

“You are still unseen.”

How much longer do I have to bleed

before the blood becomes proof?

Before the pain becomes undeniable?

Before my suffering is more than scenery

in someone else’s story?

I am screaming softly,

and screaming loudly,

and screaming in ways you’ll never hear—

because I’ve learned that pain,

when it is familiar,

is easy to ignore.

And I can only scream into the void for so long.

Only howl into hollow air until my throat breaks,

until my voice turns into static,

until the echoes eat themselves alive.

Do you hear me?

Or am I just sound without substance,

noise without notice,

a body banging on the walls of nothingness

until madness takes my mind for company?

Because silence is not neutral,

silence is a slow suffocation.

I feel it’s hand around my neck,

it’s weight on my chest,

a chain dragging me deeper into myself

until I am drowning in thoughts too loud to contain.

And still—

still I bleed.

Still I give.

Still I tear pieces from myself,

hoping, praying, begging

that someone will see the sacrifice

before there is nothing left to save.

How much longer do I have to bleed

before the bleeding kills me?

Before the scream is the only sound left in my skull?

Before the echo replaces me completely,

and I am nothing but the memory of a voice

that nobody answered?

I am running out of time.

Running out of blood.

Running out of mind.

And if no one steps forward,

if no one reaches in,

if no one says, “Stop, you’ve bled enough”,

then the void wins.

The silence wins.

And I will not.

So I ask again,

with what voice I have left;

How much longer?

How much longer

do I have to bleed?

#original poem #spoken word #writing #lena writes #poetry #writers on tumblr #poertycommunity #poems and poetry #my poem #my thougts #brain dump #spilled words

The banners hang in tattered shreds,

The drums are mute, the horses dead;

The fields are strewn with steel and bone,

And silence crowns a broken throne.

War is lost, but who’s the winner?

Both feast on grief, both sup on sinner;

The victor weeps for all he’s slain,

The vanquished bleeds in equal pain.

What gain hath man from smoke and flame?

A laurel wreath, an empty name;

The graves are deep, the harvest thin

What spoils remain but death and sin?

So tell me not of noble fight,

Of glory’s crown or sacred right;

For when the last pale sun grows dim,

The war is lost and none shall win.

#original poem #poetry #spoken word #writing #lena writes #poems and poetry #my poem #writers on tumblr #poertycommunity #spilled ink #my thougts #writing prompt

Keepsake

Once there was this sticker

Not just any sticker, no

This one sparkled like dreams

I hadn’t yet dreamed

It was too good, too shiny

Too perfect to peel

So I kept it

Tucked it away, safe in the back of a drawer

I told myself not yet,

It was waiting for a moment

Big enough, bright enough

Worthy of its shine

But that moment never came, years passed.

The sticker stayed in the drawer.

I used to think it was just a sticker

But no, it’s a habit

A story I’ve been telling my whole life because somewhere along the way,

Stickers turned into other things

That dress I never wore

the journal with blank pages

The words I swallowed

The dreams I kept tucked away for a someday that never arrived

I became an archivist of “later”

A curator of “not yet”

And the drawer got heavier

Filled with someday,

with soon, with maybe…

I’ve spent a lifetime of waiting,

for something that has yet to come.

And isn’t that the trick?

To keep waiting,

To keep holding on,

To believe the best things

Are always somewhere ahead

Now I can’t help but wonder

How many drawers will I fill

Before I realize I’ve been saving

My whole life for later?

#original poem #poetry #spoken word #writing #lena writes #poems and poetry #writers on tumblr #my poem #poertycommunity

Only now I see

Only now I realize

I was keeping a wound fresh,

as proof for a trial

that was never going to come.

I nursed it like a ledger,

counting each cut, each slight,

each unspoken offense,

as if the world owed me justice

I would never receive.

I carried the hurt

through years of ordinary mornings,

through laughter that felt hollow,

through nights that pressed too close.

It was a wound I wore

like a talisman,

shining proof of their absence,

of the reckoning that never arrived.

And yet, in keeping it alive,

I chained myself to the past,

to ghosts that did not haunt them,

just me.

Only now I see

the trial was never theirs

it was mine,

and the only sentence I carried

was my own.

#original poem #spoken word #poetry #lena writes #writing #writers on tumblr #poems and poetry #my poem #books & libraries #poertycommunity

The day the world stopped

The day the world stopped spinning

she did not scream.

No one noticed—

not the neighbors with their morning mugs,

not the children chasing chalky hopscotch squares,

not the man at the corner shop

ringing up bread and bitter coffee.

The buses still rumbled,

the clock still clicked,

and the sky still wore its ordinary blue.

It was Tuesday, after all.

But she noticed.

In the pause between heartbeats,

in the hush beneath her ribs,

she felt the shift

the great wheel grinding into silence,

the air holding its breath.

And though she said nothing,

her silence was not surrender.

She had known stoppages before:

dreams delayed,

voices dimmed,

a life pressed beneath obligation

until it barely moved at all.

Yet she did not scream.

She steadied herself

in the stillness no one else could see,

and whispered a vow

only she could hear:

“If the world will not turn,

then I will.

If the hours will not move,

then I must.”

And so she carried Tuesday in her hands

its plainness, its pulse,

its quiet catastrophe

and walked forward,

For only she knew

the world had stopped.

#original poem #spoken word #poetry #lena writes #poems and poetry #writing #writers on tumblr #books & libraries #poertycommunity #my poem

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