Brain Matter

Poetry. Too many commas.

[supercomms]

[starkinkdrops]

"You sleep, but there is no rest. Tripping down the staircase of your ribs, your honey pools on your belly button, all of your sweet. Your skin swells and splits and swallows. And I swear you were golden there. I swear that I could hear bees when you clenched your teeth. They hummed and you arched and I moaned. Swear I couldn't touch you for the stinging. Swear you bit off my fingertips anyway." K.Stark/Clench

[starkinkdrops]

Quick and Dirty

"The dust of my teeth { lessons that were hard learned } that I swallowed. April 2016-January 2017. No regrets is the maxim of the selfish-life is not just for you. You can't lunge for days into an avalanche. You breathe when buried. You need to take care, there is soft skin all around you. Eyes, lips, tongue, bruising fingers. Curve into shatterglass. You { they } may be better off alone." -K.Stark/Quick and Dirty

[starkinkdrops]

"The older I get the more I want to curl up in the blue beam on my living room floor. Let it soak through my hair, my skin, my brain. The biggest disappointment that comes with my age is the way sadness has saturated my life like sunshine through a poorly sealed door. Illuminating my smile. Casting the longest shadow. Leaving even my laughter cold and wet. " -K.Stark/ Here, to the Drop

[starkinkdrops]

"There is very little lonely like the edge of a bar at Christmas time. Your friends on the dance floor, viscous and sordid and you, cold and buzzing, with the quietest of noise. Your life opens before you and it is you, at the edge of a bar at Christmas time. How much flayed than this. Your lungs ache from smoke and there is a beat in your chest that isn't your heart and you are aching to be touched but alone. And lonely." -K.Stark/Hark, The Bells

[starkinkdrops]

"Dreams are gagging me on my salt again and I woke up gasping, defense spilling out of me like scorched coffee. Love-there is no fleeing anywhere but ahead. Teeth prints down the knots of my spine, the time presses along bridge of my nose, it's weight making it hard to breath through it, making my skin skid into the crevasse of my eye. I cannot stand to you. I've tried, but I splintered. I'm all over in little cracks. Sand-wrinkled, thin and aching, stretched and raw. The edges of my lips are over-ripe. Stinging." -K.Stark/Parched

[starkinkdrops]

"Black scuffs where the frame meets the floor-the edge of a boot, leaving. You haven't reached the front door yet, but I'm already digging my shrapnel out of the yellow walls. I won't admit it tomorrow. This was an explosion. You still left me shattered and smoking, but I know where my solder is. I've got a torch on my bedside table, my bones go white and then red and then melt together. You call me three hours later. It's an apology where you say anything but apologies. I've already gotten my frame solid. Started in on my muscles and skin. Lock my phone. Look in the mirror. Wonder where all my gentle forgiveness went." -K.Stark/Calcification

[starkinkdrops]

“This afternoon the clouds rolled in on an old muscle car, muffler shot and never fixed ‘cause sometimes you need something to scream for you.

‘Christ.’ They say, ‘Today was fucked. Today was tearing your last good pair of tights, was spilling coffee on the white work wall, was running out of gas a damn near five miles from anything that could fill you up.’

They lean their forehead against yours. You melt, skin into gray.

'Christ.’ They say. 'How many little things will it take.’

They say, 'You could fit monsters in the caves of your eyes.’

They say, 'We know, darling. You couldn’t take the sun today.’”

-K.Stark/Hill Country, Sending Me Thunderstorms

[starkinkdrops]

Getting nostalgic for home already

[starkinkdrops]

“I never understood women who stayed, ‘till I was four years deep in a bad decision, scrubbing too many dishes, up to elbow in dirty water. Phone still showing that last text ‘Sorry, won’t make it tonight’.

Realizing you didn’t care enough to call. Realizing I had flung myself heart-first at a clumsy soul. Realizing the candles were about to sputter out and I was unsuprised.

The pond outside my grandma’s house has a mud bottom, but only when you wade too far towards the center. One step is pebbles, pebbles, pebbles, and the next you’re ankle sunk in dark silk, trying to swallow you like a baited hook. You always stay longer in the middle then you meant.

I’m elbow deep in dirty water. There’s mud under my fingernails. You text me again 'We’re okay, right?

You’re not mad, right?’”

-K.Stark/Fishing

[starkinkdrops]

“Your hands flicker in and out, bad connection. Worse day for it. Your boss says, ‘We talked about your punctuality.’

You don’t say, ‘I spent three hours this morning against the bathroom door, full of static. Dripping on the floor . Shower running- my water bill is going to fuck me over. But the water had hit my thighs and felt for a second like fingertips.’

You don’t say, 'In doorways, I press my palm to my stomach, my throat to hold it together, to swallow it down.’

You don’t say, 'My head is rain on a TV screen. My thoughts come slow and buffered.’

You don’t say, 'I’m coming to you through a lightning storm, my timeliness is a small drop in this well of disappointment. I’m an empty box today. I’m thick tongued and all noise and-

'I’ll be better,’ You say and you hope it is true.”

-K.Stark/9.29.2015 Was a Bad Day

[starkinkdrops]

A year. I stood in the same hallways and bit down on the inside of my lips so hard it bled.

[starkinkdrops]

“Oh, not again. Not Hades’ heart again. Darling, this one is the wrong god to give your worship to. This locus-filled pit of please, please, please. This incurable hunger. This unquenchable thirst. Please. Not this man.

Playing deity games with the desperate dead takes a cyclic type of lonely, but he keeps pulling spirits. Your mother’s swollen lips warned you off men who drink you down like that.

Some men are empty souls. Some men will take and take to fill their puzzle piece gaps. Whether you fit or not.

Whether you want or not.

There is nothing here but ghosts, you say.

I AM ALONE, he says. He looks through your throat like a windowpane. He whispers to his faded reflection, hand clenched tight in your curtain clothes. I AM ALONE. he says.”

-K.Stark/Excuses for the Damned

[starkinkdrops]

Halloween poems again (translation:that boy was a nightmare)

[starkinkdrops]

“He said it wasn’t love. Not tangling a callused hand in the spider webs behind my knee. Not pulling the hair on my arm out strand by strand to watch me flinch.

But I unhinged my jaw.

I snapped my pelvis in two with a hunting knife. I couldn’t have left myself more open and raw if I had scraped off my skin.

I invited him in and he came.

If I told myself a nightmare was a dream so deeply I believed it, well I still believed it.

It was love or nothing at all.

I was in love or nothing at all.

I will let no one pretend that this didn’t matter, because it devoured me from under my skin, because I wear wool socks and thick coats and I’m always cold.

Because I’m covered in veins rising to the surface, still begging for him to touch them.”

-K.Stark/A Melody of Fall

[starkinkdrops]

Personal

I rarely post about my life, but I am moving from deep Texas to NYC and I am, to put it softly, terrified.

[starkinkdrops]

“Sometimes I want to set my brave face down on the dresser with my unclasped bracelets and scattered, bent earrings and hide in the junction of my green wall and white door. Hold my ribs together with dry hands, moaning, ‘My heart, my heart, my heart.’”

-K.Stark/Courage

[starkinkdrops]

Strange how familiar these are when they are a year (or two or three) old. That worries me as much as it comforts me.

[starkinkdrops]

"I avoid haunted houses because my first instinct when something scares me is to lash out with my fists. I grew tired of using apologies like bandaids. That is to say, I've learned there are some things that cannot be forgiven. I will never watch a horror movie with you. I cannot let myself be scared by things I cannot fight Terror deafens me. I find no joy in fear. When you throw me out. When you tire of my silence and shaking, I'll stand flayed in the empty street, daring the dark to come for me. My hands clenched in fists. I wish I knew how to speak to you." -K.Stark/A Family Filled with Quiet Brawlers

[starkinkdrops]

“I am in the middle of sweeping my living room with a broom. (I hate the sound a vacuum makes.) You're coming over -a truck stop between college and home. You’ll park outside and knock. And eat. And fuck. And leave before I made coffee. We have been dating for two years when I realize you don’t love me. There is nothing to do but get the dirt off the floor.”

-K.Stark/Quietly

[starkinkdrops]

“Have you ever been blindsided by someone pressing deep into a wound you thought you had closed? You spent so much time on those stitches, how dare you unravel me here. For all the revelers to see.” -K.Stark/The Bar