Me telling the web everything I want to tell you.

Instagram: phoebe.a.poetry

[phoebe-a-poetry]

I don’t know how to explain to them that there is no room in my body for tepid blood. I need to be boiling or I need to be dead. This is a metaphor for love and I know that sounds insane. I know this scares some people and their visceral reaction to my intensity is exactly how I feel when my mouth tastes the word settle. I won’t stay if the best I can do is tolerate. Or if the thought of being alone is scarier than wasting thousands of sunsets only to wake up half alive. I don’t want to be held. I want to be devoured, consumed, embraced. It’s a terrifying realization and sometimes I envy those who don’t understand the way I intake love. It took me years to swallow it myself.

Instagram: @phoebe.a.poetry

[phoebe-a-poetry]

Do it. Do it scared if you must. But do it anyway.

And now I know that I was never ready. Ready to leave the only place, the only people, I ever knew how to love. The town that raised me, broke me, loved me. I wasn’t ready but I left anyway. I left scared and alone and unsure about everything except knowing that if I stayed I wasn’t going to make it. And now my chest pains every time the pilot says “if you are not visiting, welcome home” because I don’t know where I fit into that sentence. Maybe I don’t fit into it at all and maybe it has always been that way. Blessed be the anger, the pain, that moved me forward. Bless the arms that hold me every time I decide to go back. My heart still aches with every take off, every landing. I return to the sameness of when I last left and there is immense comfort in that. But I return as someone different, something new every time. It’s the forever sappy line of “I love you but I have to leave.” Leaving was the bravest thing I have ever done and maybe staying was theirs.

[phoebe-a-poetry]

A long time ago, before I was a cell living in a pool of fluid swallowing the fear of my mother, there were people disgusted by the behavior of humanity. It is a strange feeling to know all that I know, is nothing unknown.

I think if I could do it over again, I would ignore the men. I never needed to be liked, or lusted over. I didn’t even need to be loved by them. I just needed to be. Rooted. Myself. Left alone.

Ask me anything… I can answer you better now. I am more of a sure thing.

[phoebe-a-poetry]

The gap between my teeth speaks for my whole body and I say this with my whole chest, I’ve always been a person who needs space.

Please don’t make a home inside the pit of my stomach. I’ll spend years watching you love me before one day gaging up all the validation in chucks. I am not something to be filled. Sex is never the first thing I want and always the last thing I need.

[phoebe-a-poetry]

I’ve stopped speaking because my bones regularly twist into discomfort then ache with rage and if I open my mouth I’m afraid I’ll never stop screaming. Which is to say: I am loved by a kind man but I couldn’t tell you the last time I felt loved by men. I have handfuls of proof that good exists yet invisible scars on my body reminding me to keep my lips in a straight line to avoid unwanted assumptions. I pray to a female god because a man has never offered to clean up a mess unless he gets something in return. Kindness isn’t currency. My religion is flowers delivered at the door without oral sex later that night. Calculate my agony without personally adding yourself into the equation. Maybe this isn’t about you or him or anyone. It’s about everyone, it’s about me, living in skin drenched with disappointment.

[weirdgirlvampire]

again and again and again and again

[sea-webs]

"I don't know who I want to be, anymore."

Oc - Cirque | The Dragon Chosen by the Shadows |

| mary oliver / franz wright / chelsea dingman / mary oliver / sue zhao / can't find :( / can't find :( / i am a dog. i have blood all over my teeth. - sciencedfiction / little weirds - jenny slate / the unabridged journals of sylvia |

[phoebe-a-poetry]

[inhale]

I once wrote about love, how it isn’t defined as the absence of pain. I think now all I can say is that I am loved. Deeply loved. Wholly, knowingly loved. And I am lonely. It’s like my mouth can still taste the screams that once echoed in the back of my throat. Even though that was a very, very long time ago. (Even if it was only yesterday.) What happens to a person, doesn’t always leave. Sometimes it waits by the door, quietly holding a coat. I carry a thousand stories in my head. And most of them will never hear the sound of the narrators voice. They do not know “you” like I know you. They have not seen what I have seen. My loneliness isn’t bread from fear, but from exhaustion. I open my mouth to tell someone about “you”, and nothing comes out. How can anything? There is too much. I know too much that I wouldn’t even know where to start.

[exhale]

[phoebe-a-poetry]

I get on my knees to pray but throw up instead. I nauseate myself when I remember how it felt to look up at love instead of resting equal to it.

I WAS NINETEEN. I AM NO LONGER HER. SHE HAS NEVER LEFT ME. // phoebe. a.poetry

[phoebe-a-poetry]

THERE IS SOMETHING LIVING IN THE CORNER OF MY ROOM. FUELING MY DESIRES. FEEDING MY DISGUST. //phoebe.a.poetry

[phoebe-a-poetry]

To crack under pressure is to say fate let me live. I do not understand you but I see you.

///phoebe.a.poetry

God bumps pimple up on my skin. I have to listen. The red on the walls bathes anyone brave enough to soak in it. I never asked the sun to dance naked for me. She enjoys showing off. I enjoy getting off. A milk white stain rests on my front tooth, it greets you harshly like orange juice and mint. Even in my quiet, he made me loud.

[phoebe-a-poetry]

REASON 107 TO CHOOSE THE BEAR//phoebe.a.poetry Via Instagram

[phoebe-a-poetry]

[phoebe-a-poetry]

You went to the butchers as a kid didn’t you? Watched your fathers dreams die on that table & carried your mothers sadness in your gut. Because it is your angers first response to be righteous and your hearts loudest pulse to be loyal.

And sometimes you hate yourself because when you look in the mirror someone else stares back at you. And all the time you cannot figure out who it is you are really running from.

I look nothing like you. // I am just like you.

Phoebe Fries

[phoebe-a-poetry]

There are slits indented into the tissue of my bottom lip that look more like a birth mark than the mark of unwanted womb removal since June of ‘97. I didn’t come out kicking and screaming, fear latched onto my limbs the second air filled my lungs, freezing me with docile yearning.

26 years later I cried when I said “mama I need to go to rehab”, she cried too and asked me where she went wrong. So I went away and everyday she wanted to know how I was. I didn’t know what to say so I told her stories that made her laugh and let my miss yous hold weight so that she didn’t have to feel the loneliness alone.

Most people ask me if I’m liking the sunshine. They tell me that my skin looks better under the sun than blended in with the snow. But my one friend likes to show me her humanity (mostly so I feel comfortable showing her mine I think) and asks me for the dirty details. “Be awful, be human, give me something real.” So I tell her if I could inject coffee into my blood stream I would but that ironically most meetings make shitty coffee anyway and a lot of people wear the same four t-shirts over and over, mostly because they are broke but also because they have no one to impress except a room full of drunks. That I can be an asshole, she laughed a lot at that statement, and how figuring out why I am so upset at this life kills me everyday before it revives me.

Voyeurism intrigues me, not because I particularly like the idea of watching other people have sex but the idea of simply not existing turns me on. I’m insane I know, I just have this habit of writing exactly what I’m thinking but I never say it out loud so everyone thinks I’m normal. Being sober isn’t hard, being anything other than okay makes me what to burry myself alive just so I can crawl out of my skin.

My need to be submissive doesn’t exist in when I write. I delusionally convince myself that no one will read this. (I disassociate. And that’s a work in progress that I do not want to talk about yet.) I have to think this way because I would never write again if I thought long and hard about my internet presence.

I have indents in my lips and every so often someone tells me I need chapstick. Before I get angry and insecure and plot out the next mean thing I will say, I recognize them as a vessel. A message to take care. To sit still but this time with purpose.

[phoebe-a-poetry]

Let me tell you what I don’t know, everything.

Anything to do with math and oblivion and genetics.

Because my mother cries when she gets angry. My dad cries all the time. I don’t cry at all and I can go murderously silent as punishment while making everything about me that even the mood of others is a direct result of my existence just the same way my dads nose was stamped on my face and my mothers coloring painted to my flesh.

How I’m making dinner for two men, reading labels for serving size and counting the couch cushions [1, 2, 3] to set on the floor because a table doesn’t equal a family meal.

And my lover called me ominous a while back because I said that everything is temporary. I meant it too. This life in my hands falls through my fingers like sand and I am powerless over it. It will disappear one day and I’m okay with that, I have to be.

Breathing became so much easier once I understood that one day I won’t be able to. So really, I don’t know much but the little I do has kept me alive.

[remanence-of-love]