#emopoetree

[trickstersaint]

maybe i’ll wake up one day and i’ll know what they’ve been talking about, all this time. i’ll open my eyes and the world will be brighter, and i will be in love, and things will be fantastic and beautiful, and i’ll know why every book i ever read as a kid had a romance. i’ll know why romance makes us human. i’ll finally understand what made me so inhuman the night before. and then life will go on, and i’ll be normal. i’ll have no explanations and excuses to make; i’ll share a bed with someone. it will be exactly what i’ve been watching, uncomprehending, my entire life: the princess finally feels the pea, and the frog is miraculously a prince (and that’s the power of love, you know, that’s what i’ve been told. a kiss makes you human. isn’t it poignant? i think i should be less shy with my metaphors).

maybe i will. and then i can let go of the wrench in my heart when romantic love is put forth as an expectation for personhood. when it’s put forth as an expectation to be loved, in return. is that what it takes, to be loved? to wake up different? normal? it’s a horrifying thought, really. i wouldn’t want it, given the choice. i’d be different. i won’t abandon myself so easily.

[trickstersaint]

ophelia is a saint to me. wouldn’t she be to you? beautiful dead girl, drowned for a cause; faith hardly stops being something to die for when it isn’t faith in god. call her a martyr. it still rings true: she dies for some glorious cause, or perhaps because of it, and isn’t every martyr the same? she was religious anyway. couldn’t be buried in the churchyard since they thought it was suicide, and don’t you just feel for laertes, with the body of his sister, told that god won’t take her after all this time. i would forsake the religion entirely.

ophelia is the picture of religion, though. floating, pretty, clutching flowers to her chest; that’s the thing about a saint. they’re always beautiful. there is nothing gruesome about the memory of a saint, even as devotees scramble for bones and flesh and vials of blood. saint cecilia died three days late of three swords to the neck but we do not remember her bloody. we do not remember her sweaty, bedridden, surviving the three days to die in earnest. she is a murdered, pretty girl with a harp. presumably dead for the love of god. and ophelia is the same to me. hold your rosemary, pretty dead girl. the water carries you on. your body will be remembered beautiful. it will be remembered beautiful.

[trickstersaint]

they call it sweet, love, but it is not a weakness. it is not soft, this keening of the foxes in my ribs. this love is big enough to rip its way out of my chest. i think it will have to, someday. and love and blood are the same color; and is there not a savagery to holding a heart?

[trickstersaint]

i think of icarus often; in my head, i have an image of his hand outstretched toward the sun, the lines of his fingers and the curve where his thumb meets the wrist. defined. classical.

and in my image, icarus' skin is sun-kissed. it should be pale, i know, from life in a tower, but i imagine that icarus is beloved by the sun. there are freckles on his shoulders, on his nose. the skin of his hand, reaching, reaching, is golden as his wings.

there must have been sun in the tower. maybe icarus lived in windows. there are many ways of trying to reach for the sun.

[trickstersaint]

what makes up a god?

power, some might say; but a god is no stronger than a mortal, only different. the power of creation shows itself in many ways, and pulling a living being together from the elements of air and earth is not so far from capturing the spirit of a sunset with colors made from earth and not from sky, bringing a vision to life in a flat space too small for its grandeur with hands made by another. a god looks down over its creation and feels detached. a mortal looks down over their creation and feels the surge of connection, of emotion: this is how a god and a mortal are different. a mortal knows connection. knows love. knows hatred. and they are stronger for it.

a god would crumble under the weight of grief, i think. a mortal faces a hundred blows to the heart every day that they live, and still they continue: a god knows nothing but the still nothingness of a world in which there is no turmoil to be contended with. how can a god know pain? they are not so much stronger than mortals. only different. if a god were to be pained, it would destroy them. if loss were to tear at the heartstrings of a god, the instrument would break, shatter apart, send splinters into the other organs. loss plays melancholy melodies on the lyre of humanity. painful, yes: but mortals are used to larger things fiddling with their existences (were they not created by a god, after all?) and the tune, though ugly, has a certain beauty at the end, when one can listen to the piece in whole. the song of a god’s grief has no completion. there is no god that would survive a true loss. no god has ever had anything to lose.

[trickstersaint]

i do not love the way that the rest of the world does. i know this. i think i understand love all the more, for that. i had to discover love—had to slice it out of my chest, dripping blood, with edges like thorns, to really look at it, to know it. to understand. so i'm shaping myself into the form of love. the colors of it. i'm fitting myself into the sharp point of a heart, the tip of an arrow; cupid's bow cannot sacrifice efficiency for gentleness. love does not exist soft. i am draping myself in red, like love, like blood; sharp planes cut like the edges of paper flowers. i do not love the way you do, so i will become it, until love is what i make it. it can be mine, because it will be me. i know love. i am love.

[trickstersaint]

here is the story: bodies are houses. i am a haunted thing. my body, by consequence, is all the more haunted— that's what it's called, when you're a house with a ghost. the spiderwebs are not by consequence of the haunting. the house of my body is cobwebbed with disuse, creaking and decaying, in disrepair, but it is not the fault of the ghost. it's only because the house hasn't been lived in (and the ghost, poor soul, is not alive). one day, i think, i will bring myself to live here (but i am dead in this moment). i am a haunted thing. i am a haunting thing. my body is a house with cobwebs.

[trickstersaint]

i was asked for a love poem. so i'm writing another love poem.

although— were they love poems before? my love is not the same as the rest. there is something different to me. i know i love. but i know what you want when you ask for a love poem. (they're not the same.)

i can write you a love poem. i know all the words to write for love: i know every metaphor, and i know the formula to create them anew. your eyes shine like stardust, darling. my love flutters like a butterfly in the cage of my heart. i can write you a (hollow) love poem. it will be (formulaically) pretty. i only know pretty words for love. i had to learn them from love poems.

it will be a good chance, at least, to practice pretty turns of phrase. i don't get to use them for myself. i don't write those types of love poems. i don't love that type of love.