This Tornado Loves You @maidofheart - Tumblr Blog

““Even exceptionally powerful and passionate connections require care and attention. Chemistry might bring two people together, but it is quiet, consistent, everyday effort that makes a relationship truly remarkable.””

— Beau Taplin

In Limbo

The marigolds are burning the pavement at noon; good riddance, they say. The sidewalk cracks and sighs as it vanishes, all at once, in the summer heat.

The one-whiskered cat that haunts my neighborhood has gone missing; he has no eyes, he has no ears. I am not sure how he will find the milk I left out for him.

I fill my truck with lonely sonnets and scream them to the crickets. I do this every night. I do this only after midnight, when the moon has time to humor me.

I long to hide inside a tulip's wings. I long to be the light on a sparrow's feathers, brushed brown and soft. I long to be fern song, just after dawn...

But I am the spiderweb you are forever walking into, and dreading, between the trees. My raccoon eyes are purple-rimmed and startling. Your hands fly up like wraiths on a Scottish night. You apologize, wring your wolf hands in the dark. I am not easy to love; I do not blame you.

My ribs were carved from a star; the brilliance of their bone-hunger keeps me walking on, away, from the creatures that would seek me out to harvest them. The marigolds, such hungry carnivores are they, shall have me someday.

My life is a series of not yets and maybes. I live in a sea of question marks, an ocean of uncertainty. The windows have cracked just enough to let the water in. I trace their fault-lines with bloodless fingers and think once again, of endings.

I am afraid to write of tenderness because I am afraid of the word itself. I am afraid of: My eyes, all rimmed with red and water The way my dog leaps up to meet me Music melting in the rain Your feet resting on mine as if to say, You're here, you're alive, let me... just this once, just this once, but in love it is never just this once.

No one has touched me since I was ten I watch mothers with their babies on TV shows, on the street, on the train Half the time the babies are asleep, little fingers splayed like blossoms And my heart surprises me each time it wishes to be a child so that I might learn a trust without strings; that never existed when my bones were truly acorn-soft and fractured

And yet, a short list of things that have held me: Sunshine Thunder and wind Insomnia Seat belts Hair clips Loneliness

I am spilling like dominos into you, but nothing frightens me more than tenderness, more than your hands on my back, your voice in my ear.

Oh love, I am all splinters still.

Comparing emptiness to a wolf howling at the moon is easy; call me instead a bird, singing in vain to the sun--

birdsong fills the air like light but the sun has no ears, not even a mouth to reply with--

The birds sing themselves to night. Sometimes in my dreams, the darkness mutters a lullaby but the birds have all gone to sleep.

Oh insomniac, only you have heard the shadows strum.

Oh insomniac, how you dream awake of birds that do not sing for you.

I'm watching shadows outside blur and stumble in the dark. All of them have your voice. All of them have my hands.

My own shadow flutters around me like a moth, scared she'll lose me and be cast out into the skeleton of their collective consciousness if she does. I thank her for her service and open the door. It creaks because I have forgotten to oil the hinges again. She does not want to let go.

I watch her--a creature on the doorstep of light and dark.

Frankenstein

Did Frankenstein feel the stitches, feel his jaw marry his cheeks, feel the lightning cup him like wildfire hands?

I must know every parking lot in the city by now; I'm driving again--my death certificate will say I spent a quarter of my life in a car

So let the monster loose, whichever Frankenstein that is, let him wander, contemplate the meaning in a pitchfork, smooth the tripwires inside him away forever, stop listening to their rattling

And if he can't, if he can't, let him find solace in bitter cold, bitter like birth, bitter like becoming

Let him fade, let him decide what it is HE IS

Monsters are just born like everything else, didn't ask for life, didn't ask for a stranger's fingers to comb his skin from the dirt, didn't ask, didn't ask, didn't ask GODDAMNIT

And girls are scared of him but he is far more scared of them; yeah let them talk about bad luck and the way he brings carrion to their hollow tree souls, forces them to look Lady Death in the eyes...

So come on, pluck the sky from my teeth like floss if you're willing, if you're brave enough

......and then you will see me, and you will stop singing monster hymns and I will stop cutting myself open, stitching myself back to life, cutting myself open, stitching myself--

I keep thinking of my biological grandfather, growing up gay in the 1940s, how the shame that nested in his bones made him marry five women, have children with all of them, how one of those children gave him a lesbian granddaughter that wrote to him one day out of the blue, asking about his life. I keep thinking about what a shock that must have been for him.

It's 2018 now but I was too afraid to ask if the bookstore had anything by Alison Bechdel tonight, too afraid to name what I am in front of my equally lesbian therapist, too afraid to talk about it for more than a few scattered moments. I don't know who told me I was too much but that phrase reverberates through my mind, too much. Too much. Am I too gay? Am I too open? Am I too loud? Am I too angry?

God, it is constant. And this was going to be a poem--something sharp and biting, something only the people that have been in the same place would find comfort in but instead it is just this. Too much, too much, too much.

Straight awkwardness breeds gay shame just like overt hatred.

There is not poetry in this: I do not want to be alive, in an exhausted, I-know-I-won't-do-anything-about-it kind of way. There is just silence and the frustration of living. There is just fear of the arms that would hold me and self-loathing and the quiet violence of depression after midnight.

The cats are calling themselves and I'm thinking about what it would be like to live as a hydrogen molecule instead of myself, again. Thinking about streetlights in the snow, the difference between running away and drifting. Death is funny in the way she catches up to you.

I'm learning a lot from my rabbit. She's a very nervous creature and used to bite me every time I tried to pet her so lately I've tried to just sit in her presence with the hutch open; today she sniffed my hands and approached the open door for the first time.

I think I like rabbits and deer and other prey animals because I know what it's like to be one; I know what it's like to be trapped by something bigger than you, to feel helpless and small, to flinch at the slightest of touches. And I know I'm not something scary and I know I'm a very gentle person...but my rabbit doesn't. It's strange to see yourself in a rabbit, to wonder if maybe all the people you are scared of are just as gentle. And it's also a lesson in patience; I'm not frustrated with my rabbit like I used to be, not so desperate for a final outcome.

I think my writing process could use that same gentle curiosity, and patience I've shown to my rabbit. I think I could use it sometimes when I am afraid and frustrated with myself for not just being fine.

Watching my rabbit is something I used to do when I was little--watching nature, in general, is something I did a lot of growing up. I used to have determination without fear, without spite, without desperation. My curiousity translated into creative writing which used to be fun for me and has lately felt like an exercise in frustration and imperfection.

I have to learn to love the process of writing and of living to feel better. I have to stop wishing I was someplace and somebody else.

It's just after midnight and I'm tired but not unpleasantly. "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel is stuck in my head and I'm thinking about birds' wings and the tiny structures of their feathers--the ways they cup and embody all the light we cannot see, how there might be angels after all. My heart's been tired lately, tired like it hurts and I want someone to hold me (even though that scares me) And I keep thinking about how I hardly ever write anymore, about how things don't come out hissing, spitting, burning, glowing anymore. And how I wonder if they ever will again. Midnight feels so early now, hardly like the witching hour the stories used to promise the brave or the stubborn. Failing would be an ending but not trying would be too, but what do you do when trying feels like dragging your nails down an aging fencepost?

A scattering of sparrows. I cupped their tiny faces, watched them get drunk on the grain I held in my hands. Watched them scatter when I tried to reach out. Backed up. Waited. Watched them watch me.

I know. I know what it's like to be afraid of the sun, to be afraid of anything bigger than you. They're afraid to blink. Little feet churning against the concrete. Hiding in plain air. I know, I know, how indecision can feel like death, how mistrust eats your heart over the years.

Maybe we will learn how to be unafraid together. Maybe you will close your velvet eyes, hang like thread from the spool of my hands, one day. Maybe you will teach me how to sing. Maybe I will teach you what it means to be gentle beyond words.

Maybe.

Accident

Saw you walking through the fog

Didn't trust my bullet-threaded tongue to recognize you

You were wearing lace, a sun hat, coral-tinged lipstick

You didn't notice the sweat-colored drops of grey that clawed at your dress

Your smile like a lighthouse

Mine like old flint

And I saw how you glowed--changing quietly into moonstone and amethyst and aquamarine

Kaleidoscope shadows

Watercolor running onto the old paper of my eyes

And I wanted you to stay like that

Like fern's breath

Like a tuned piano at dawn

My sister, the sun

Forget the moon, sweet

She's gone out for a bit

No use trying to put smoke over ink

Close your eyes and listen

Hear her turning in her sleep

Hear the sounds a million-year old collision makes

Just. before. it c r a c k s

Imagine the universe as something that exists on the edge of a soap bubble. Imagine the universe as something that lurks on the flimsy edges of something transparent, something iridescent and alive with all the colors you can imagine and all the colors you can't. Only a giant could see it. Only a giant could see all the variations that exist around it: its parallels.

One of these parallels includes us and all the things that exist only in our peculiar world: hummingbird feeders, greasy pizza, hubcaps, dinosaur bones, the smell of old leather. Others include things we could scarcely understand like wolves with human voices, feathers that measure the quality of your heart and more and more until forever has gone and passed.

And at the center of the soap bubble are thin threads that connect all these parallels, stringing them along like beads in a necklace. And on and around these threads are the star-wanderers, old gods that feed off the energy of everything and thus keep the energy from spilling over into the wrong place or time for it. And inside this bubble is a planet full of bird-people that are wilder than you might think, a mysterious magical group that some might dare name angels. Only they know their true names and only they know how to tend the star-wanderers.

Soap bubbles, however, are short-lived. They tend to run into each other, diluting and running colors until the whole thing--

Pops!

And that is precisely what happens here.

Blue

A friend gave me an origami book when he graduated last year and told me I'd have more use for it: he'd memorized all the patterns, years ago, you see

I got out of the mental hospital Monday, first thing I did was stumble around Michaels, looking for origami paper: I wanted to get something right, something that came with an instruction manual...

I bought a pack of blues: ink to cornflower to sky and back again and I opened the book, decided on whales and tried.

Mine had creases where they shouldn't be, crinkles in its stomach, a Frankenstein-like flatness to its head that me left frustrated with my attempts at creating life

I liked how the packaging lined the blues up though; I liked how dark and light met in the middle (no shadows, just gradual flow)

And I liked how my "whale" still sort of resembled a whale, no quotes needed. It sits on top of the self-help books my mom bought me, on top of my therapist's business card, beside the pen no one is afraid I'll stab myself with anymore--

An imperfection. But alive.

Hey, little sister, I'm doing a lot of watching lately. Just looking at everything. I haven't written poetry in maybe a year and my new therapist wants me to write again. Everything comes out like nail clippings, hollow and yellow and torn. I used to make things I was proud of. But I'm doing a lot of watching lately, a lot of observing. Deer have always been my favorite animal, I think because they're the only thing better than me at being quiet and awkward and one step from running away (makes me feel like I'm doing well in comparison) My old stuff had a lot of goddesses in it; they make me feel strong, make me want to honor women in whatever way I can because I think we're pretty tired, as a group. I'm reading a book about Wonder Woman now; I got out of the mental hospital Monday and Dad got it for me while I was in there. It's strange how many choices we have out here. I keep noticing the trees and how many different types there are, keep staring when they ask me what I want at restaurants. I'm scared some braver part of me has died. I'm alive. I'm alive. I'll just keep telling myself that, keep watching. Mom says I look tired. I tell her I'm learning how to see in color again.

#diary

Kit

A girl raised by a robot. A girl living inside ice. A girl that can gut seals faster than you could register the blood on the snow. A girl with a soft spot for discarded metal, brick, memory. A girl who outran the bombers and the smoke and the gas, who outran her mother and brother. A girl who grew up sharp from freezing air, a girl who grew up blunt and a little bit cocky from living in the one place the monsters couldn't get to. A girl who grew up frustrated and wondering where the Earth went; pretty poorly named, in her opinion. A girl who needs to learn attachment, who needs to learn trust. A girl who is hungry for something she doesn't quite understand yet, a girl who will settle for adrenaline, though. A girl who pretty much only looks out for herself.

#scifi book

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