sometimes words work. sometimes they dont.

i don’t know what I’m doing but I’m having fun so there’s that all of my writing is under the tag #poodle works

[poodlesauce]

It is August and she weeps for what we’ve left her.

A wet, cold-shoulder summer draped acrost her,

a burden she should not bear.

August begs to be seen. To be heard. She is forgotten.

[poodlesauce]

I hold it in my hands.

Small, porcelain, soft but not free of bumps.

Absolutely, completely mundane, this egg.

I crack it against the counter-

I split its shell with my thumbs-

I slice the yolk with its own protection and pull open the trash and adjust the flame and all at once it is no longer the same egg.

It is entirely naked and destroyed in my pan on my stove.

I add salt and pepper and a splash of milk and tear it further; breakfast isn’t breakfast without scrambled eggs.

I eat it knowing full well I never cook them enough and later I feel sick and yet I will cook them again tomorrow.

I think of the shell in the trash as I lock the door behind me- the fragile, gentle exterior that holds no true power beyond a comfort.

[poodlesauce]

the temperature drops as the heat in my cheeks rises;

I can’t keep from smiling.

Your voice fills the air, twisting through the

leaves

branches crickets,

and and

the night joining your song.

You reach out a hand-

-I take it,

and time stops, just for us.

the stars slow, my heart trills, and you swing me around so that I am flying.

If this moment could last forever it should.

the breeze sends a shiver up my spine (the breeze, nothing else) and

I fall from your arms

but

am caught by your lips.

they shield me from the chill but still I tremor.

I feel I could shine in the night above.

We are pulled away by invisible hands in the backs of our shirts

yet a small thread holds

us there, heart-to-heart.

even as I drive away it holds tight to you, a memory that promises not to fade.

it may be an evening or a summer or nothing at all,

but it will be something I won’t forget.

[poodlesauce]

quieter,

and quieter still.

the night slowly rising from her slumber,

casting her blanket over me.

I listen as she stretches, admire the stars that shake out of her hair.

She reaches out a hand and brushes my eyelids shut,

and I wish for the day to become shorter so that I may see her sooner.

the night is my love,

and while we talk in crickets and silence

I know I am hers too.

[poodlesauce]

I will not pretend I don’t love you.

I know I do.

The question is how, in what manner, do I feel this love?

Is it the love of a true friend?

The burning of a twin flame?

The love of a lover, of one I wish to hold dear?

It would explain some things, if I wished for you to be my lover;

I don’t believe I do.

It would explain some things, if you were my twin flame;

I don’t believe you are.

It would explain some things, as a true and forever friend;

This I wonder most.

For I know you care truly, despite the jokes you make. Why else would you point out flowering trees I would otherwise miss? Send me pictures of them while we are apart?

And I know I care truly, despite the words I say. Why else would I tell you of chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast that you might otherwise miss? Make you a second milkshake before I had my own?

We care. That much is true. But how much?

I feel as if I stand on a lake in winter, frozen over enough to stand, on but thin enough I remember the water underneath.

My love for you is the ice. I stand upon it, supported by whatever it is, but burdened by the knowledge that I may fall through into something deeper. I both fear and wonder what that may be.

I love you. I won’t pretend I don’t.

I won’t tell you I do.

I love you.

And my god, am I afraid of it.

[exhaled-spirals]

— Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things”, from Another River: New and Selected Poems 

[harunohini]

[text ID: It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they’re supposed to be. I’ve been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window? /end ID]

[poodlesauce]

I stretch out a hand, searching, grabbing

Reaching for a verdict I will not find.

I stretch out a foot, trepid but trying

To touch a trueness i will not know.

I offer out my heart, bleeding alive

Risking a certain life for a loved one.

Despite the hollowness behind your chest

Despite the hollowness behind your acts

Despite the hollowness behind our words

I feel solid in your arms and you in mine.

How could I miss you more from breaths away? Less from across a great divide?

Lend me your warmth and I may stay.

[deepwaterfiction]

Deep Water Prompt #2064

Every time I save the world, it gets a little harder to resist. I can probably manage one more show of heroics, before the real me can’t take it anymore. 

[sadoeuphemist]

Listen: here is what he cannot tell them.

That the disguise is the truth. That he does not slump his shoulders to hide his height, nor pouch out his belly to make himself look slovenly and out-of-shape, but that the posture is as natural to him as breathing. He must force himself to straighten his back when he ties on the cape, stand with a confidence he does not at all feel. The fumbling stammer is his real voice; the stentorian tones a theatrical affectation. His meekness is the truth, his mild manners, and the hero who saves the world is a complete construction.

Even the glasses are real, prescription, from that spring morning when he tried to focus on the chalk letters on the blackboard and only saw the neighboring class beyond them, and spent an afternoon at the optometrist mumbling ‘these’ or ‘the last ones’ as the kindly old man with a heart murmur - he could hear it, lub-whoosh, lub-whoosh, lub-whoosh - swapped the lenses in and out, all of them equally useless, ineffectual.

Here is the horrible, unbearable truth, such gratifying pablum at first, until you let it sit in your mouth and swallow: his secret identity truly is his real self.

He could not let them know. He could not fly, as himself, to save the day, to carry home a cheering ocean liner plucked from destruction. They would find his meekness perverse, repulsive - he loathes it himself, that cringing neurotic knot of him! He is bulletproof. Invulnerable. He can cross continents with a leap, behold the Earth from orbit, level mountains, burn away all barriers with his gaze. He is superhuman! The most powerful being on the planet! And yet this is him, the withdrawing nerd who cannot muster the courage to raise his voice to keep from being contradicted. The putrid false humility would be unbearable to them, the sheer self-aggrandizing self-deprecation. They would lose all trust in him. They would be right to! A man like that, who carries his unimaginable powers inside a fumbling and resentful shell - how long would it be until he snapped?

He had to create for them a hero. He had to intervene - there was no way he could not! He does not think of his interventions as heroism at all, but as an apparent and inescapable necessity. You see a hundred people falling out of the sky, falling to their deaths - would you not catch them? When all you needed to do was hold out your hands?

Ah, but he had human hands, a human face, for the people he saved to look up into, and what was he to do but to create a persona for them? To smile, and speak confidently and comfortingly. To puff out his chest. To pretend. That heroism existed, and here a hero was in front of them. That in his cape and tights and spit-curl and smiling presentation, he could be trusted implicitly to do always what was right.

Ah, but you hear people crying out for help, their voices crystal-clear in your ears, and you could save them as easily as plucking a leaf out of a puddle. Is that heroism? How could it be heroism? How could you not? How could you not?

And then the man he made grew larger and larger, and he was obliged to keep up the pretense, having to nod to them, listen, as they looked up to him worshipfully. Pretend that he was a person of his own, with goals and dreams and aspirations - a vision of the world, and the strength and sinew needed to make that vision happen - instead of the meek and mild directionless nobody that he truly was.

It is insufferable. Unbearable. Expected to speak as a hero would speak, act as a hero would act, to climb into the skin of a smiling golden god and puppet it around until it becomes as second nature. It is too much! It can no longer be borne. He lets himself drift now, counting down the final moments. This is the last time he will speak to them as a hero. The last time he will be seen, as a hero. The last act of heroism he shall ever do.

Oh, they will be scared, confused, their world falling out from under them. That is a sad inevitability. But to explain would be to do them no good, would only upset them further. He appeared one day into the world - unexpected, miraculous - and so is it not right that he should likewise change without explanation? They will grow inured to it in time, just as they grew to expect a hero to save the world, lowering planes down gently from the sky. The world will change, and be new, and go ever onward. They will accept, even if they never come to understand.

This is his self: the sixteen-year-old boy lying in his bed staring up through the ceiling at the stars and quasars and distant alien civilizations, hearing the rabbits scream as they are strangled by foxes in the woods, the sound of his mother’s footsteps as she puts away the dishes, gunshots from the distant city, radio waves whispering advertisements and symphonies, the tectonic motions of the earth, raindrops falling, the sequence of neurons firing that indicates desperation and misery, light bulbs burning out, fossil fuels burning, a war on the other side of the world, the endless tidal sweep of life and death and endings and becomings, all of it near to him, in the space around his senses, at his fingertips, the muscles tensing that could be halfway around the world in seconds, the impossible weight and immediacy of all of it for him to change and sweep and dictate in its paths; and the sixteen-year-old boy lying awake, wishing very dearly for nothing more than to be made insignificant.

This is him. This is his self. After this he will move bluntly, without having to compose himself and stand and smile and pose for pictures and reassure, without having to pretend to be a human being. He will move instinctively, responding to cries of help and then away again, faster than the eye can see; always another cry of help, always, always more, nothing left of him but the blur and the motive and the fundamental force as plain as gravity. The repulsive little man who hated people, hated being seen by them, who slouched and stammered and equivocated and wanted dearly more than anything to disappear. The real him, hidden in a place beyond where anyone can see.

[poodlesauce]

and there is a religion inside me.

I cannot say I know its god

but I know that to her I worship

and to her I have to thank

for all the leaves that rush past me.

for all the drops of water that course my cheeks.

for the intimacy of this life that I am so enthralled in.

she speaks to me in the most silent of ways yet when she calls

I find my knees and learn what it means to pray.

[deepwaterfiction]

Text: My best friend had no insides. No bones, no heart. She showed me once, after I promised not to tell. 

[sadoeuphemist]

so, what, you looked inside her mouth? or…

yeah. her mouth

yeah? and?

she opened up her mouth. said aah, like we were playing doctor. it was … it was her throat in there, the dark red thing, like the ridged red roof of her mouth, only it went on forever. i got a flashlight, shone it in. just her throat, opening up. just a hole in there, this gleaming red black pit that i couldn’t see the bottom of

… like, there was nothing?

nothing

no, so, what do you mean? she didn’t have any bones? like, in her arms, or …

no. nothing. i felt her throat. i felt her wrists, her shoulders. i put my hand just below her neck where the collarbones should be. it was … all of her, it was hard rubber. cartilage. like a rubber tube, you know? like it’s hollow, but it wants to keep its shape? that was all of her. i squeezed tight on her wrists, i pressed down on her chest. bumps, knobby things, like where the bones should be. only they had give. they yielded, ever so slightly. like if i just squeezed hard enough i could press her flat

whoa. and she just let you do this?

yeah. she let me. she, uh

yeah?

she was just watching me. letting me do it to her. experimental. letting me press down on her wherever i wanted. just very still. quiet. watching me patiently. she was very patient. waiting for me to stop

whoa. that’s so weird. wow. like, wasn’t it weird for her?

i mean, she told it to me. she just leaned over me and told me she was hollow. she opened her mouth and let me look in, i didn’t ask her to do that. she held out her wrist to me like i could

no, no. i mean wasn’t it weird for her to go around all hollow?

oh. uh, no. she said - she said she didn’t know anything but being hollow. it wasn’t weird. she asked me if i felt weird, walking around with organs inside me all the time

huh. i mean, yeah, that makes sense i guess

yeah

it’s weird both ways, right? having all these organs inside of you, or not

yeah

when you think about it

mhm

sorry. that was stupid. i guess it is weirder being hollow. i mean, you saw that for yourself. it must have been real freaky, to see something like that in person

no, no, you’re right. sometimes i feel my heart in my chest, and then i think, i’ve got lungs in there, stomach, kidneys, pancreas, whatever, all these organs that have nothing to do with me, i don’t think about them - i don’t even know what some of them do! all these organs just beating, pulsing inside of me … meat. organ meat. all just doing what they do

yeah. it’s weird …. uh, can i ask you something personal?

yeah?

why are you telling me all this?

huh?

i mean, you said she was your best friend, right? and she made you promise not to tell anyone? so, like, were you not best friends with her after that? or

no. we’re - she’s my best friend. we’re still friends. we don’t get to hang out so much anymore, what with everything, but we still talk online all the time. she sent me this star lamp for my birthday. we’re close. we’re very close

so … why tell me all about this, then?

…

because, like, i feel weird, knowing about this stuff, if she didn’t want you to tell anyone …

i don’t know. no. maybe you don’t really understand. i wouldn’t do anything that would hurt her. you think i’d be doing any of this, if i thought it’d hurt her? we’re friends. she’s my best friend! i wouldn’t betray her trust

but, like …

no. you don’t get it.

okay. don’t get defensive

look, you don’t get it! don’t you think i was scared of hurting her? when i - when i had my wrists in her hands. when i pressed down on her chest. i was so scared of pressing too hard and breaking her, but … but she wasn’t scared at all. that’s what she meant, when she said that she didn’t have a heart, that she was hollow. that’s what she wanted me to know

…

and i could feel my own heart, and my stomach, and all my organs churning away inside me, and she told me there, in her room, that there wasn’t anything inside her, that i could promise her anything and it would fall into that deep dark pit and be swallowed up forever, that no matter how hard i pressed down there was nothing i could do to hurt her, nothing i could do at all

[poodlesauce]

I would like to cry, and drown in it.

Let the salt fill my wounds and hurt me.

I am so tired of it all.

[poodlesauce]

I wonder if a punch hurts less if you see it coming. Your body prepares for it, your mind braces for what it will feel.

Does it hurt more when you’re blindsided? When it comes from behind, out of the blue, with no warning at all? Your skin your mind your heart still soft, unaware of the pain headed towards it?

I wonder if you thought the same.

I suppose you must think that no warning is what’s right. It’s what you did to me after all.

It only took one day. One night of worry, one afternoon of relief, and a month of hurt. I never saw it coming. You’ve known.

[deepwaterfiction]

Deep Water Prompt #2014

The Tangle didn’t used to be a nightmare. It used to be a garden for the youngest prince, where trees bent to keep the sun out of his eyes, and a carpet of flowers grew in his footsteps.

[sadoeuphemist]

This is the unfortunate nature of the world: that sometimes even the youngest princes grow up to be kings.

Once upon a time, when the history of the world had yet to be written, there was a king and queen who had three sons. The first was bold, the second clever, and the youngest of a sweet and delicate disposition. The queen, unfortunately, was ailing, and in the last years of her life ordered the construction of a garden for her youngest son, to shelter him and care for him longer after she passed.

And so it came to be that while the youngest prince spent carefree afternoons alone in his garden, the trees bending to give him shade, flowers blooming in his footsteps, his second-eldest brother whispered with the vizier to plot a coup and so both were found out and beheaded; his eldest brother led an army into battle and was pierced in the side with an arrow, and the wound grew infected, and he died. And so when the king, sick with grief, passed away to join his wife, it was the young princeling who took the throne.

His rule at first was benign; he was uninterested in ruling and there were many advisors and viziers eager to do the work for him. But a king must at some point behold his kingdom, and so it was when he was paraded before his people, beyond the walls of the palace, that the sun shone down brightly, and the common trees beyond his garden failed to bend to catch the sunbeam, and so the glare of the sun struck his eye unmitigated.

The young king scowled.

His subsequent decree - his first! - was measured, but unyielding: the trees and flowering greenery of his garden must be transplanted throughout the palace grounds and throughout his kingdom, wherever a king might visit, so that no such indignity might ever befall him again.

The wiser viziers frowned at this, but the king was the king, and his decrees must be obeyed, and after all this was a small price to pay to keep him happy, and so the expansion of his wonderful little garden commenced. Seeds were gathered, saplings transplanted. Beds of grass and flowers and soil were dug out in compacted strips, replanted all around the palace and beyond. His lovely little garden was left quite bereft, at first, but the flowers grew back to greet him and soon it looked just as lovely as before.

The years passed. Beyond the palace walls, the trees and flowers cast their pollen to the winds, interbred with all the common vegetation. The inhabitants of the kingdom noticed new flowers growing, if they paid attention noted that certain trees seemed to bend in the direction of the palace, even without wind. But this was all gradual, as unremarkable as the growing of the grass, and so they thought nothing of it.

The king, no longer young, had grown neither particularly cruel, for a king, nor particularly wise. But where he walked, the flowers grew beneath him, and the trees bent their branches to shade him from the sun, and so his subjects thought he must be a very good king indeed. The king himself had largely put the decrees of his youth out of his mind, and had come to believe that the land itself recognized him as its king, and so strewed flowers in his footsteps, bowed low to be of service. 

Had he been more inquisitive, he would have come to wonder how the trees knew to serve him so instinctively, so that he never had to raise a hand to block the sun’s glare; he might have pondered on the nature of causality: if flowers grew wherever he walked, was that the land’s doing or his own? Or, like two legs moving in conjunction, where they part of a single system that could not easily be divided into two independent things?

But he thought nothing of this, as an arm does not think to wonder if it is part of a body. So he grew older, and all across the kingdom roots grew deeper into the earth.

In time, the king grew old, as all men do, and found himself regressing into childhood, spending more and more time alone in his garden. The flowers, the grass itself seemed to reshape itself beneath his feet to catch him should he stumble; the branches bent to support him. He was braced by roots, his back held straight by the trunks of trees. When he found it hard to breathe, the leaves fanned themselves open and exhaled their cool air into him. He was sheltered and cared for entirely by green and growing things.

And when his heart stopped beating, it was the roots and branches all across his kingdom that writhed and convulsed and reshaped themselves in response.

The survivors will tell you about the outbreak of the Tangle. Everywhere trees suddenly lurched in the direction of the palace as if caught in a sudden gale, branches grasping desperately in the still air, violently snapping, roots tearing themselves out of the earth. The earth itself upheaved, became liquid, generations of root networks tunneling out from beneath it as buildings toppled and collapsed. The air was filled with a bellow of dust and pollen. Blades of grass and leaves blotted out the sun like locusts. In the aftermath, at the outskirts of the kingdom, the earth was barren, not a single glint of green left to be seen. And where the palace had once stood, the Tangle loomed, consuming all around it, still wild and unformed and grasping at itself with a hundred desperate gnashing open-mouthed limbs.

These days, the Tangle has settled somewhat, spread out. Its edges are navigable. The trees are bent in horrible contortions, branches twisted together like flayed muscle. The deeper you go, the stronger the floral stench of rot, ebbing and pulsing through the air as if there is a faltering heart that pumps out the vapors, or a necrotizing creature still shambling between the trees, evading capture. Wet patches of flowers hang from branches like entrails. At its depths in is impossibly dark; the canopy blocks out the sun. 

The perimeter of the Tangle has changed over time, receded, regained ground, despite all attempts to push it back. According to the testimony of the birds who migrate over it with the seasons, it has the shape of a human being spread out darkly over the earth, writhing and trying desperately to stand.

[poodlesauce]

I am too easily moved,

Blown in winds weak and mighty.

A single drop causes me to bend,

And a storm wrings me dry.

I never liked it about myself but today I realized

that because I bend

I am still standing.

[poodlesauce]

Do you know how much I miss you? How often I think of you? I’m probably gone entirely from your mind, honestly. I’m not really surprised. I’ve read and reread through old messages until I couldn’t anymore and had to delete them. Still not sure that was a good thing. I saw a lot of things that I’ve said that I regret. I see how I was a strain, how my insecurities would make being with me hard. You didn’t deserve that, that pressure or responsibility or any of it. I truly am sorry. I don’t know what good sending this message would do. You don’t love me anymore. It can’t be helped. And I really, truly, have no idea if you are someone I could be with again. Don’t get me wrong- I loved you and I still do, deeply. I don’t regret any of the time we spent together. You made me so happy, and were so supportive of me for so long. I am so grateful for it. It’s just, I still can’t help but wonder if you felt the same, at any point. I know you were under stress and were so busy, and family and school and you come first, but I still wonder if I was ever in there. How much of me did you enjoy? How much did you really love? How much of me was too much or too little or just never right?

I wish I could’ve seen it coming. I still can’t tell if you did. I’m stuck between wishing for you to never hurt, and wanting you to feel how this has made me feel. How it is to love someone so deeply you keep on going when they won’t find time fo you, and to have them say they’re glad you made it work but then avoid them even when you’re together, and then to call, one of the only times they’ve ever called, and tell you they’re done. To call it a break and that they need to work on themselves, but in the five days since you’ve seen them (less, I know what that last goodnight meant) fall out of love for no reason at all. To lose someone and not be able to blame them, to be alone in your grief and have no one to blame but yourself. Do you feel anything at all? Do you miss the texting, the goodmorning and good nights, the pet names and the video kisses, the inside jokes and the raunchy stuff I always picked the wrong time for? Or is it all gone like it never really happened? I wish I could ask. I wish I could know.

But I wouldn’t like the answer would I.

No.

I don’t think I would.

[poodlesauce]

I can’t help but dream of you,

How your lips caress mine.

I can’t help but dream of two,

You and I intertwined.

I miss your warmth and the heat of your love

And wonder if you’d forget me.

I saw you as my first morning dove,

Now I know there’s nothing as deadly.

You left me for what?

On a whim, on a dare?

To work on yourself, but

That doesn’t seem fair.

I did what I could and I did what I said.

It wasn’t enough to keep you.

You did what I should and left me with dread,

It shouldn’t be couldn’t be true.

Alone here I sleep with you in my dreams

Haunting me day and night.

You want to be friends you want to redeem

What I couldn’t fight.

I am left lonely.

And you are left free.

It is wrong, I know it to be.

[poodlesauce]

Day 2.

I feel lonelier than I have in a long time. 419 days, to be specific.

I see you in everything. I see you in sunlight dancing across the walls, I see you in the pillow I hold at night, I see you in the tears falling on my hands.

I can hear you, too. In the jokes others make, in the phrases you taught me, in the glimpses of our life together that never stop running through my mind.

I’m surrounded by you, entirely. And yet I’ve never been farther.

I miss you so much.

Please come back.

Please call.

Please.