#rose avalanche

[quietavalanche]

5th November, 2014

Saw my breath two different states today; once in soft billowing clouds on the walk to campus and once in faint bullets of panic, like fireworks inside my chest when I ran out of choir. Dammit.

[quietavalanche]

4th November, 2014

Words are so difficult to get down sometimes, like that medicine you used to take as a child; you know, the one that definitely isn't cherry flavoured. Oh, and siri in Swahili means secrets.

[quietavalanche]

Distance

I wish you were here

so you could wrap me in your arms;

instead, your clothes are as close as I get

to touching you, or being touched.

I wish you were here

so that the memories on my bedsheets

were of the plural, us instead

of my singular, self.

I can't write love poems,

but I did love you.

- Rose Avalanche

[quietavalanche]

Synthesis

Some have said this isn’t a poem

because it doesn’t rhyme, and hasn’t metre. But

once they said black wasn’t a colour

and woman wasn’t a voice. So what if I told you

I hear these phrases in my head the way

musicians hear melodies? I thought so.

It makes me question my identity,

ask favours of whatever creation that makes me; it

makes me wonder why I ever deemed myself

part of that collective. So then I think..

maybe this isn’t poetry and maybe I’m

neither a poet, nor a melodic major.

And it scares me to meditate such audacities

because if I’m neither of the two, something

less relevant than these arts I attempt at,

rather than strive to be, what am I?

Or, which is more to the point,

what can I ever be?

- Rose Avalanche

[quietavalanche]

Dynamic.

He had bruises inside his skull which

restricted his songs to the moonlight and

in some redundant, metaphorical way, his

broken words and the phrases he used

represented the gaps between 

his intercostal muscles. He wrote melodies 

capable of putting the sunrise to shame.

Watching him, I forgot

that music used to write me letters too;

sealed inside whispered thoughts

and carried in the palms of daydreams

or falling leaves, I forgot about them

until the future made me nostalgic.

But when he spoke in notes, when he

showed me those spontaneous melodies,

it snapped my every heartstring

because I'd forgotten, I used to do that too.

And I wish never to forget again,

no matter how unfinished an idea may be

or how much it hurts to relinquish a melody,

I shall never forget that. Music.

- Rose Avalanche

[quietavalanche]

Titanic.

You found her when she was made of oceans;

she'd sing you to sleep with stagnant melodies, even

when her tears became the disjointed overture

to the sleepless nights of your adolescence.

But she was confined to turbulence and thunderstorms

like you've caged yourself between pieces of paper;

folded out of sight into threadbare trouser pockets

or tucked into the stone walls of her innocence.

And you scared her no end. Because just like the

ocean of which she was so reminiscent, you

were uncontrollable as the thoughts which

permeated the unwritten words of that brief

Freedom.

- Rose Avalanche

[quietavalanche]

Anaemia.

She was fifteen when her blood thinned and

revealed her fragile equilibrium. She 

discovered that people are not made of

constellations (as she'd once hoped), but

of promises, confined like hummingbirds to glass cages, 

collecting dust on an old bookshop's shelves.

We were both strangers there.

And you were unknown to her hence, she

dreamed us different to what we became;

in her dreams, you turned to marble cobwebs

and she discarded them as a nightmare. With

evolution, her blood no longer flowed even;

I am unsure it flowed at all.

But she followed your dreams to the bottom of

the sea, like the blue diamond in Titanic.

We are existent without magic or wonder,

simply through prolonged evolution; within these

iron pillows upon which we rest our dreams, our

myopic eyes are mirrors, unintentional artists

of patterns on bare skin and 

tribal masks of shattered dreams.

But is a dream, fractured beyond

recognition, a nightmare? I suppose

that was the question of our lifetime;

inconsequential to all but ourselves.

- Rose Avalanche

[quietavalanche]

Navegador.

Qué ganas de cambiar el mundo

desde un barco repuesto en una ola;

qué ganas de superar el destino,

hacer del desafortunado, artista, y

regalar sonrisas a sus cielos caídos.

Qué ganas de entender tu mente,

apropiarme de tu biblioteca perdida,

compartir tus cicatrices. Aunque

seas bastante extranjero, mundo

qué ganas de perderme en ti.

- Rose Avalanche