Love Letters I Wrote Myself

This is just a collection of short poems I write. Most of them are love poems because I'm romantic as shit but since I am single I choose to view them as love letters to myself. Most of these I write in a class or meeting so… I'm not a role model.

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

Hurting you was my favorite moment of the day

The ravenous craters you’ve left in my heart were thrown tiny scraps of your agony.

I do not want to say I hate you.

I want to say I’ve forgotten you.

I want to take all the ropes you’ve tied around my neck and pull on them until I either choke or you let go.

And when they find my body, I want them to convict you but they won’t.

Maybe then I can hurt you as much as you hurt me.

Or maybe you will have already forgotten.

- in which I’m tired of always being the one who gets hurt

SGM

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

I have always been too heavy handed. Dug shallow graves beneath my words, buried in ink. Every mechanical pencil splintered and cracked under the pressure to keep its rigid posture. When I met you my first thought was how delicate you were. How you stood tall so effortlessly as if you were a sunflower and I could be your sun. But I was afraid that if I tried to carve my name into your rice paper skin, it would splinter and crack like porcelain, or lead.

-Darling, teach me to hold your heart more carefully than I hold my own

SGM

[lifeinpoetry]

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

Sometimes I think so hard about emotions that I forget to feel them. By this, I mean I’ve forgotten how to cry. Once I spent so long trying to work my way into tears. Trying to remember the way that sadness feels. But it’s like trying to remember the way your childhood home smells. Distant and visceral, waiting to be recaptured. Never quite gone but forever out of reach. What I really feel, this ice cold numbness, is a poor substitute for the emotions that I know used to torture and tantalize me. It’s like that scented candle I bought called “Home,” arrogant and presumptive in its assumption that it could ever bring back that broken and distant part of my past. But so close. So close as to have me shaking with desperate, wanting, remembrance.

- i am an amalgamation of forgotten things.

SGM

[inkskinned]

“i think icarus died with the sun still clenched in his palms and that the sound of his feathers flush with thin air must have been like a rainstorm and funeral song at the same time and i think he tasted his home for a brief moment and maybe in the clouds glanced the open arms of his mother i think icarus splashed into that blood-dark ocean and i think someone somewhere must have mistaken that brightness for a shooting star and wished upon him i think i have been in love with icarus since the day i learned of someone who was so kindred to me he could sense death coming and still rose up in greeting.”

— sunchaser/ocean breaker/maybe a body always in danger /// r.i.d (via inkskinned)

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

I have made peace with the fact that you and I will never love each other the same way.

Yours will always be a winter hearth.

A gentle whisper of comfort,

A home you can always rely on,

Something that burns at the back of the house and may easily be forgotten while you go about the days work.

Mine will always be a wild fire.

A painful spark of longing,

A threatening conflagration,

Something that consumes hearth and house alike until the only thing that remains is ash.

To say I have made my peace with it means I have let it burn every acre of land it touches except yours.

At least the smoke is comforting someone while it’s suffocating me.

-in which smoke inhalation becomes my favorite hobby

SGM

[books-n-quotes]

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

— Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (via books-n-quotes)

[purplebuddhaproject]

“And like all lovers and sad people, I’m a poet.”

— Allen Ginsberg (via purplebuddhaquotes)

[butyoucouldstay]

I was looking for a new project and remembered how much I love @inkskinned s stuff. And also Icarus. And so I made this. Thanks always Raquel for your wonderful words

[inkskinned]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

I am writing love letters to my bed frame.

Empty bits of prose, elegant and derivative:

“I love you like Icarus loved the sun - hopelessly, fatally.”

Words and phrases I speak out into the vacuum of my room.

Empty promises jettisoned into space with the hopeless desire for reply.

No one ever replies.

It has been so long now that I wonder if I am the only living thing in existence.

Some days I wonder if I will always be alone.

How long will I continue to whisper words of love into the warm side of my pillow?

Some days I speak it so loudly and so close that I can almost hear her echoed response.

“I love you like Atlas loved the earth- painfully, eternally.”

She buries her head in my neck and I can almost feel the heat of her breath as she sleeps.

The vacuum is silent and in its center I set myself adrift, alone.

-in which not even gravity can bring us together.

[mavienkilodrame]

“And when she cried, I drowned.”

— youbetterworkk (via wnq-writers)

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

I find myself wondering, often, what it is you get out of being my friend. What commodities do I provide that you cannot find elsewhere, as if this is a fucking business transaction, as if I can imagine a time when your use for me will be fulfilled and you will move on to someone new. If you asked me the same question I think I would be shocked. “Your very existence brings me so much fucking joy” I would say “there is no balance book that can be kept for the depth of love I have for you.” I’d like to think that would be your response too. But part of me believes, in some unalterable way, that I cannot possibly be worth that much to anybody. That for me love will always require a tax, will always need to be balanced and measured. And there are no words for the sorrow that brings me.

-I always bring my checkbook just in case

[lovelettersiwrotemyself]

I don’t think I ever realized just how lonely I am until I started photoshopping you into every lonely moment. Arguing with your ghost over food. Playing music so loud in the car that I cannot hear your muttered remarks, cannot distinguish them from the purr of the engine and the squeak of the tires. Smiling at the echo of a joke on the couch when no one is around to witness my unraveling. What a burden it is to live a life unwitnessed. Such a burden that I must conjure you up, a specter to remember me by, but with no substance to preserve that memory. I wish from all those miles away you could hear my thoughts, that I could share something with you always, if only a spirit to follow you on your day and keep you company.

-in which we are all ghosts haunting ourselves.

[books-n-quotes]

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil (via books-n-quotes)

[poemsforpersephone]

i wish the way i love could be quieter, more like the hush of a winter garden under a blanket of the seasons first snow than the howling wind that accompanies summers first storm. i get so tired of loving loudly when people pretend not to hear; at least if i were to whisper i could try to fool myself into thinking they just didn’t realise i was here. 

l.s. | i hate that i love loudly © 2018

[books-n-quotes]

“I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you’ve ever said to me…”

— Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas (via books-n-quotes)

[books-n-quotes]

“You cannot live when you are untouchable. Life is vulnerability.”

— Édouard Boubat, Edouard Boubat: A Gentle Eye (via books-n-quotes)