I was Baptized in Cigarette Smoke,

A place I'm going to plop my miscellaneous writings/poems, an archive for them. If you happen to read them, I hope you enjoy! Some content may be triggering to some readers, read and proceed with caution.

[ode-to-odyn]

[ BEHIND THE WRITING ... ]

My name is O.C. I'm 20-something, male, and I write as a form of catharsis and as a way to put into words the things I have experienced in my life. I am Autistic and Disabled. I adore cats, dragonflies, and the moon. I hope that when others read what I write, that it touches them in some way, or causes them to think from a new perspective.

I'm a lot of things. I'm plural. I'm mentally ill. I'm passionate about mental illness and listening to others who are mentally ill. I love questioning the world and its faulty infrastructures just as much as I love to goof off with someone. I believe we should be free to speak about the things that are less than savory, even though for me it's still a work in progress.

I am a victim of many things. It has shaped me into the person I am now. But it doesn't define me. I found myself in spite of the things that happened to me. Despite it all I still chose to be myself. That's why I was hated. But that hate is nothing in comparison to the freedom I gain in being me. I believe every person has a place in this world. Mother Earth is bountiful and endlessly gentle, but we need to show her respect to know it and to learn the beauty ourselves.

I am imperfect; and I'm always prepared to put down my ego to learn something new. Knowledge is something no one can ever take from you. You will always have that strength. If you read this and don't see these things reflected in yourself, I have faith that someday you will find it, and yourself. Your journey is winding but this only means the twists and turns will greet you with what you truly need. Just as it will for me&.

Thanks for visiting my little corner of the web. Come and go as you like.

[ode-to-odyn]

1 AM.

I sit at my dinner table, and I cannot sleep.

I opened my voicemail to hear someone call out, maybe confused, maybe apprehensive,

but it sounded like you.

And I sit here and chew upon that, like I do the apple I carve for my midnight snack, my spiced tea aromatic and wafting.

My brain lights up now, misaligned. I smell the airspun powder. The one you used to freshen your face, like your mother did, maybe her mother, too: some sort of tradition.

Was it tradition for you, too, to be covered along your face and neck to hide the bruising? To stay complacent in the violence?

This presses on the bruise in my mind. I feel the static fuzz and cotton balls of dissociation settle into my head, melting away the perfumed things. My nose drips a little from the cold air of the morning. A distant train some sort of reminder alarm.

I think I've had enough musing on it for now. So I'll head to bed. And expect again that you'll invade the space of my restless sleeps.

You've always been the type to want the last word.

“Setting Powder”, 2024

[ode-to-odyn]

Someone else lives in my home. I didn’t invite him in, and I don’t know him.

He paces invisible paths along floors in directions I don’t know. Stares aimlessly into mirrors, to see if the image in front of him will resonate anything more than a cardboard cutout. He drags his nails along my face with contempt, and smears my reflection.

He leaves my stoves burning, my baths overflowing. My clothes and trash are flung about in his traipse. Words spill from his mouth in a foamed garble, and bitter film lines my tongue any time he speaks. I can’t wipe it away no matter how hard I scrub my teeth.

I lay beside myself in bed each night, I am cold and unwelcoming. He intertwines his fingers into mine and I feel my skin bristle against the sheets as I guard myself; I know this routine by heart. I shove away the hundreds of invisible hands that try to tear at me again, but the fan blades above feel squeamishly rhythmic, pallidly reminiscent,

and I am sunken.

I feel my breath slip beneath me, my lungs fold.

I only know his own heaves now, rippled and jagged as he cradles me close to toss me in my sleep. He gingerly slides muffled screams like knives into my throat. Clenches my shaken hands into fists to fight invisible enemies. Broken pictures and sounds flicker in my mind until they’re pasted like projections against my crepe eyelids, until I am silenced. I let myself drown into pools of cold sweat. Pinned down by his arms, I surrender into that familiar, fragile sleep.

I am a Venn diagram; an afterimage of a person. We are conjoined comfortably, intertwined viscerally. Lenses overlap lenses, the chromatic aberrations kissing the chalk outlines of where I was and where I am now.

Someone else lives in my home. He is me, and I am not him.

“Intruder”, 2024

[defrostedvertebrae]

Snowshoe Hare (lepus americanus) holding a piece of meat

Source

[ode-to-odyn]

Rice boiling over

reflecting my state of mind:

Tender, suspended.

"Dinnertime tension", 2024

[comparativetarot]

Queen of Pentacles. Art by ​Linzi Silverman, from ​The Intuitive Night Goddess Tarot.

[ode-to-odyn]

The other morning I awoke

her pooling into me

me pooling into her

churning into shapes, buzzing colors

statically frantic

as the memories and feelings stay tucked away behind thin eyelids

you reached to grab my hand

at first gently, maybe half-heartedly

because I know hands have rarely shown you anything but defilement

fingers were more like teeth and knives

than they ever were caressing

and during that mid-thought,

you grip my hand tightly.

shuffling around the loose bones and digits as if they were the pick-up sticks we lost as kids.

I feel uneasy.

maybe it's reminiscent

of those gnawing knife-fingers

that we know all too well

but I lay with you in the silence, like I always do

lay alongside the apprehension and mumbling fuss

inside oceans of velvet delirium

until it shrinks into abstraction

and I think now,

that you weren't grasping my hand

the way a snare captures prey

that instead you felt I was your linchpin

the way a child holds his parent's hands

a cage now weaved with wool instead of tines.

"an ode to how we hold hands", 2023.

[feral-ballad]

Jihyun Yun, from Some Are Always Hungry; “The Leaving Season”

[Text ID: “It’s strange / to know this world I loved, / loves me best / dismembered.”]

[feral-ballad]

Ghassan Zaqtan, tr. by Fady Joudah, from The Silence That Remains: Selected Poems (1982-2003); "Strangeness"

[Text ID: “be careful! / you’re breaking me / with your hands / be careful / when you squeeze my ribs / or press a lax / joint in my arm / my bones / are frail / my song / grinds stone”]

[weltenwellen]

Jenny Zhang, from "my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life"

[ode-to-odyn]

i.

and you might as well be a ghost

the way you haunt my core

maybe I left you for dead,

but isn't that what a son is for?

After all, I was built to

make you atone

make your epiphany

burying your dread

as you beg for remedy

this concussion-thinking's carousel

breaks the bough

I'm feeling something bend

Amongst the hundreds of fractured vow

ii.

I wonder what it means to be,

I beg on tired knees what it is to me

to breathe outside that nauseous, tilted town

to be placed past the calls of banshee

Burying my dead and dying down

iii.

You know well enough by now,

I've never been one to make a promise.

admittedly, they're too easy to break;

But it seems safe enough to say

I promise my living

And breathing, and carrying on

Is one I'm meant to speak.

minipoem in 3, "Breathing in Elegies"

[ode-to-odyn]

OFF THE PEN;

A little bit ago I recorded a spoken version of parts ii. and iii. for suicide prevention month, and talked more on my first experience with suicide when I was 16. Content warning for that topic in the caption.

As an aside and on the topic, thank you for carrying on. Thank you for still trying when you feel like you can't anymore. You deserve to live and breathe beyond the things that are hurting or have hurt you. It means something to keep going even if you don't see it yet.

[ode-to-odyn]

Content warning for descriptions of CSA, drug abuse, violence and kidnapping.

"The body replaces all of its cells every seven years."

Is what I see some people tell survivors of rape and molestation. A reassurance, a glint of a hope and healing.

As if that erases, or replaces the hundreds of hands that gripped to shut my small throat, and tore me apart from the outside-in:

that I was dragged away, blindfolded and comatose from the sore punctures that were pointed over and over into my arm.

My flaccid body flung onto a stained slab flooring, as I hope to look up at the lofty ceiling beams instead of the countless men that take turns towering over me.

Hands and bodies that left me with friction scars and rough tissue, but got to walk away free.

Every seven years.

They want to think that this magic number absolves the nightmares, the cold and hot sweats, the pushing away of anyone who might love me because love only ever felt like tearing and spitting alcoholic breath in commands.

That it cures the rough knees and heaving breaths as I crawled on the floor to hide in his closet, beside his finely polished boots and dead spiders where I curl myself up in.

I curl myself up into the residue of cocaine

that he rubbed onto me with slopping kisses, and I hold my breath as I wait for it to be finished.

Every seven years.

I wonder how someone can feel comfortable enough to tell me that

I'm not the same person who knows the gaping lacerations of violation, and the desperation that hides in that powerlessness.

It isn't to say that

I know and feel these bones will cage me forever; that I am not meant for healing.

Only that I must learn to build a new infrastructure on my own, that imprisons hope instead of survival.

"Every 7 Years" , 2023

[ode-to-odyn]

Stench of Burned Film

Necrotic in the Mind-Eye

I Pull,

Last Suture frayed

Shaking,

Only to Find next Blooming.

I Crawl to Stairway

Heaving Decades of Bile

Black and Sludged, I grasp Forward

Slipping to fall as Flippantly

As trying Insect crawl 'Way from Sun-glass Magnify.

Insect would Scurry if wanting No Smolders, you Say,

Perhaps He only wanted taste of Sun.

Perhaps She only wished for Days past Dirt Tunnels.

Untitled. Co-written with Acrid

[ode-to-odyn]

I'm still learning how to live after so many years of dying.

The Phoenix's feathers never sprouted with grace, but instead wedged themselves uncomfortably between me and my many scars. They nestled between the frayed nylon of a hundred nooses, snuck themselves into ruptured veins and hoarse wheezes.

My only reward was discolored, mottled skin, and a raspy cough if I eat too much ice cream in one sitting.

I don't think there's any art to dying; I think it sits in a back alley, wounded and starved, it looks up with pleading eyes like some sort of sick dog.

And it's up to you to look it back in the eyes, a look of acceptance and understanding before snuffing it out.

Or to turn away completely, only to find it again one way or another, already decomposed.

"Back alley Dog", 2023

[ode-to-odyn]

Art, blood

"Blood Oaths Denied", 2023

[ode-to-odyn]

“Sometimes I still ache”, mini comic plus spoken recording

OFF THE PEN; Hi I have a bit of a flat affect due to being autistic, I’m not particularly sad as I‘m reading this, I am just. Kind of monotonous /lh

[ode-to-odyn]

i.

and you might as well be a ghost

the way you haunt my core

maybe I left you for dead,

but isn't that what a son is for?

After all, I was built to

make you atone

make your epiphany

burying your dread

as you beg for remedy

this concussion-thinking's carousel

breaks the bough

I'm feeling something bend

Amongst the hundreds of fractured vow

ii.

I wonder what it means to be,

I beg on tired knees what it is to me

to breathe outside that nauseous, tilted town

to be placed past the calls of banshee

Burying my dead and dying down

iii.

You know well enough by now,

I've never been one to make a promise.

admittedly, they're too easy to break;

But it seems safe enough to say

I promise my living

And breathing, and carrying on

Is one I'm meant to speak.

minipoem in 3, "Breathing in Elegies"