Sweetest Sometimes

Poems

[sweetestsometimes]

Earth

Of course I want to write about

the kind of dappled light that pours

through the trees

many pools on the grass

shimmering glittering

wavering

and if I could feel

the breeze pick up my hair

and carry it up until it waved like a flag

the color of earth

I’d write about that too

but everywhere the image is punctured

a balloon can’t contain air

once it has even the smallest tear

and these little things I find everywhere

the ocean spits back plastic

these fragments have lost all edges

salt water turned them smooth as stone

but the color disturbs

disrupts

ruins

[sweetestsometimes]

Pain/ Love

I was hurt again, but something is changing.

I took the blow and waited for the anger to flow

out. I felt emptiness. I put in headphones with

sad music because if not anger I must be full

of tears that need to be brought out.

A few came and stopped.

I felt a warmth spreading inside me. I saw my pain,

like a candle in a cave, but then I saw others.

I wished to hold out my hand. Our pain is

energy inside us, but it’s not contained. It spreads

to others and shrinks under a warm sun. It grows

in isolation.

I would like to stop airing my pain in a

way that adds to those of others. I want to assume

the best. I want to move in a kindness that

spreads and grows. I feel love in my heart

overflowing and I want to spread it in the

knowledge we are all hurting.

[sweetestsometimes]

Princess

In her head, as a girl,

there lived princesses

shut up in desolation—

sealed in a dark sea-cave, or else

in the tree-tops of a sun-blotting forest

or at the edge of that place where

our world turns to nothingness.

Without books, they were well-read

Without perfume, they smelled like

honeysuckle, always, even in winter.

Without entertainment, they were not bored.

Without mirrors, they were beautiful

with glossy hair eclipsing their waists and

jewel-colored dresses that never frayed.

As she grew, her window on the princesses

seemed to narrow and narrow, until one day

she looked in and saw only darkness.

For years, all they had done was sit quietly and

wait, hands folded, lips posed in an almost-smile.

But she couldn’t help but feel that now in their

privacy they were changing. They were pulling

the threads out of their gowns to compose

messages, shearing their hair for the construction

of ropes and other devices. They were singing

songs they’d never shared as they planned for

another, secret future.

[sweetestsometimes]

Coin

I’ve passed so many hours in the white-hot

rush of seeing the worst in others. Complaints

burn in my throat and the cheap relief of letting

them out later turns into greater pain. In these

moments, I am the unimpeachable moral

authority of the world and I sit so high above

everyone that they’re just tiny little smudges.

It’s amazing how, once the rush is over, I crash

back to earth myself. Blood cooled, mind clear,

on an unstoppable track of shame. My vision

changes; I see how those around me are

governed by love and effort and shackled by

limitations I’ve never brushed against. I see

it so clearly but it doesn’t last.

Years pile up behind me now. I grow, but not

as fast as I thought I would. I oscillate so quickly

between empathy and judgement towards others

and towards myself. I am a spinning coin who

wishes to somehow efface one of its faces.

[sweetestsometimes]

Agnostic Prayer

The thing I want the most

is out of my control

and I wish, with desperation

that I believed in something

powerful enough to help me:

a god, or some other alien entity

for me to project all my wishes on;

to beg, to leave offerings of fruit

so ripe they can be smelled from

the clouds, or to fast in holy discomfort.

I would leave behind cheap dopamine;

I would become the picture of saintly restraint

but I have no deity to profess myself to.

So, I will make my desire known here.

I will ask the universe because it is all I have.

Please, please, please let me have this one thing.

[sweetestsometimes]

Loss

I like to imagine that in some universe our good moments are lasting forever and ever. We’re still speeding down that sidewalk, shrieking and giggling, and paying no mind to the eyes that flit to us. I’m laying beside you after spending the day together and the steady rhythm of your breaths lulls me to sleep.

But if that’s true, do the bad moments have to last forever too? Suffering alone, each of us. Misunderstanding each other, together. I don’t like that, so the moments lasting forever fantasy dissipates.

So, where are you? You never believed in God. Nor I, but my absence of belief was a wavering I don’t know while yours a steady no.

So I’d like to imagine you in some lovely afterlife, warm water and bejeweled houses, and all-encompassing love all around you. But it feels like a betrayal. So I imagine you nowhere. I hate to think you’re nowhere.

[sweetestsometimes]

Days

Right now my days are not

pinned in by anything. They’ve

started bleeding outside of the

lines of where they should be.

One day is one second and a thousand

years. Too much time to daydream:

rapidly switching between elaborate

revenge fantasies against those who have

only slightly wronged me, and envisioning

wandering the world all the while giving

and receiving overflowing love.

A rare bird is an omen. A good one and then

a bad one. And then I try to forget.

Familiar worries carve out ruts in my mind. I let

my thoughts wander like a handful of marbles and

I know where they’ll go. I decide not to let the

thoughts wander. I put the marbles in a carefully

controlled environment and establish a routine.

A thin layer of dust gathers over the ruts. I hope

one day, it will be thick, like a blizzard’s fallen and

you can’t even see what’s under all the snow.

[sweetestsometimes]

SURRENDER

I don’t want to try anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to live. I want that, maybe more than ever. It’s that I don’t want to keep offering myself to a world that rejects me. I’ve taken myself apart and reconstituted myself to be more palatable to people I don’t even like. I spend hours writing words I don’t mean and I’m met with silence usually, or at best the sort of distant friendliness reserved for an acquaintance you’re not quite sure is hitting on you but you’re very sure you’re not interested in.

I have so much love for this world. It’s always inside me and I feel it bubbling up when I see a deer crossing the street, when I meet a friendly stranger, when I notice green peeking through the cracks in the sidewalk, when I hear my best friend’s laughter, when I see my partner opening the door to let himself in. So why can’t I find my place in it? All at once, it feels like my fault and not my fault and this conflict makes me unsure of how to speak of it. Everyday that goes by it compounds. Success feels less likely. I see people’s reaction to my lack of news changing. They stop asking. Sometimes it makes me feel better and sometimes it makes me feel worse.

I buy the lottery ticket with the furthest away drawing so I can live in delusion for an extra day. What if, what if, what if. What if I didn’t have to try.

I would cook elaborate meals for my loved ones. I would take them all to the sight they’d most like to see in the world & see the look in their eyes as they saw it. I’d stop pretending.

[sweetestsometimes]

Rejection

How many days can I keep trying

when the result is always the same?

Effort they extoll

but I try and I try and I try

and nothing

So I try differently

I try harder and less hard

Some days I wear my desperation

like a white flag and others

I put on a hard face in an effort

to convince myself mostly that

I do not care, I do not care

But all to answer for all of it

is emptiness and more emptiness

and I’m wondering all the time

for how long?

[sweetestsometimes]

ESCAPE

If I have a gift, it’s that I am easily fascinated.

Provide a screen or a page & watch as I slip into it.

I am now a fading silent film star sating my

sorrows with straw-colored champagne

evoking the farm I was born in.

I am a spy who slides between identities

with my suits: pinstripe, tweed, and suede

each clothing me in a new personality.

I am a princess with flame colored hair

and a secret, pining for the day

my husband takes his last breath.

I am anyone, anywhere but me here

submitting my fortieth application,

endlessly waiting by my inbox

like a phone that never rings.

[sweetestsometimes]

Anger

Lit up inside as if by a flame, heat

lashes through my limbs, hottest

in the end of my fingers and in

the soles of my feet which

hunger, clear and vibrant

as a hard hit to a bell,

to run fast, so fast

until they bleed

or at least

until I am far

far enough from

here that I reach a

sea that thrashes cold

and strong enough to cool

my fire before it consumes me

[sweetestsometimes]

Changing

Once I was a cathedral

and now I am a meadow—

earthy and vulnerable

to the whims of the seasons.

Today the daylight pours out

sparkling and the color of straw.

Hand-in-hand, the buildings are

brighter, the voices more melodic.

One month from now the sky will drip

and drip like a half-hearted weep and

the houses we pass will all have their

blinds closed and the birds will be quiet.

But still: us, hand in hand.

Trillions of cells

spinning, together.

[sweetestsometimes]

Backslide

I tasted happiness once.

Whatever emptiness existed inside me was small as a pinhole. It wasn’t big enough to weigh down my limbs as I walked, or dark enough to cast every decision in doubt.

But lately, as I stand in the shower, or wash the dishes, or fill out job applications, I feel something inside me growing.

It’s like this: I’m standing there rinsing the conditioner out of my hair and suddenly I realize I’ve stood for ten minutes like that and my hands are barely moving. My mind doesn’t move me to the next step in my routine as it should. Instead it sings: dread, dread, dread.

I feel a chasm opening inside me where something very important used to be, though I can no longer remember what. I know enough to want to be better but when I try to take the steps to do so I find my feet are lead.

[sweetestsometimes]

Alone

The first hour I’m home I watch the door and it doesn’t open. I move by the window. I open the blinds to watch for your car and it doesn’t come. I make dinner for two and put half away. I crawl into bed expecting to wake when you get in but I wake in the morning and open all of the doors and you’re behind none of them.

[sweetestsometimes]

Girlhood

Blooming, blooming, blooming.

That’s not me.

I am more like a fire.

Growing, growing, growing.

The books said I would look

forward to this part, but I can’t.

I zip up my hoodie in mourning

and cast my eyes down.

[sweetestsometimes]

Beauty

Here I am, before a Botticelli, floating down the Seine, scouring the beach for shells, giving a presentation on Chaucer, wearing my warmest coat on the coldest day, hugging a family member I haven’t seen in a while, being standoffish at my outgoing friend’s party, hurting my feet in the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought, stepping into an intimidating clothing store, saying no thank you to another serving of chocolate cake, crossing my arms in front of my body when a stranger looks me up and down, crying in line at the coffee shop. The constant is this: I’m always imagining how I look to others.

You might think, how sad or alternatively what a conceited bitch. Both can be true. Or you might think why?

I’ve turned this question around in my head too but the answer is never satisfactory.

We could blame the magazines I read when I was 12 that treated every ounce of fat as a wrong-doing to be publicly shamed.

We could blame my mother who sighed into the mirror and complimented me on the way my looks diverged from hers.

We could blame the way I trained myself to view food, not as nourishment but as a tool of power and control.

We could blame the people who told me I was beautiful. We could blame those who told me I was not.

I’ve always resented people’s desire to tell all young girls they are all beautiful. All it does is reinforce that this one thing, unfairly doled at birth and impermanent is all that matters. They know the truth, as I did, that not everyone is beautiful. All this lie did was demonstrate that not being beautiful was such an awful truth that it could not be faced, not even by adults.

Beauty doesn’t last. It’s not a virtue. I can be happy without it. So why do I still it so badly, after all of these years?

[sweetestsometimes]

Big feelings

Lately the tears hide close behind

my eyes ready to flow out at the

slightest uptick of emotion in any

direction.

I’ve become used to showing them

in public. Twin rivers streaming down

my face as I select a bean and cheese

burrito from the grocery store freezer

or walk down the street towards the

coffee shop.

I know it makes other people uncomfortable

and perhaps that means I should try to stop it

but I don’t. Trying to stop it would be like

trying to stop ocean waves from crashing into

the shore or stopping the sky from changing

from robin’s egg to smears of orange and pink.

I hold onto faith that it will change one day like

the weather. That one day these feelings will

be safely contained in little ripples behind

the surface. But for now I accept them.