Awake & Still Alive, She Said

Crash. Writer of poetry and creative nonfiction. I wrote a book called Crazy Beautiful Life More about me

[crashmargulies]

Tumblr is a disaster, and I’m not thrilled with it

I’ll continue checking my dash for the folks who are still posting and I’ll keep my blogs up for archival purposes for myself (until they disappear lmao) but I don’t plan on posting any longer

Keep up with me @crashmargulies on IG/FB and @crashmargulies_ on Twitter for more info/an eventual proper website!

Cheers,

Crash

[whereitglows]

i wish that my sadness was like a peach pit hardness hidden in my soft to excise with a sharp knife. I never get through november without wanting to die, but at least this time I am trying to vomit it up, arsenic in the apple seeds, cyanide in the cherries.

I have been eating my poems alive to feed the grief in my stomach, feeding them to it line by line, word by word, l e t t e r by l e t t e r. it keeps me breathing but it keeps the sadness breathing, too, its teeth in my lungs, fists tangled up in my guts. does it come forth from november, grey, or does november come for it? lost child, orphaned thing, clinging to life in my ribcage but keeping me as prisoner.

here is where the fruit rots, the ground drought-thirsty drinking all the cider made from our neglect, tasting the regret of having missed the season again. when we say 'next year,' how many of us mean it, and how many are making space in their chests for the beasts that come in on november's back?

this year there is nothing hard in me to find with that sharp knife, just november clouds, space for the poems that decomposed for something that never grew. just the lingered peach-pit sweetness, taunting, ready to feed itself to november poem by poem, leaving nothing for me.

—november // for @julykings prompts #7

[whereitglows]

when they start taking the children

I am sitting on the number three bus and crying. This is not the first time I’ve cried on a bus, and not even the first time I’ve cried on this particular bus. Daughter is playing on my headphones and my phone is at 21% and this afternoon the Park Ranger at Saint Anthony Falls said the president is trying to close down the Army Corps of Engineers.

I'm not crying about the Army Corps of Engineers. I'm crying because there are children in cages and people are arguing semantics about the word “fence" versus “wall.” I'm crying because my Jewish father, a second generation immigrant whose grandparents still spoke Romanian and Hungarian and Yiddish, still thinks Mexicans are trying to steal his jobs. He dealt with me dating a mixed-race person, barely, but I could never introduce him to my girlfriend. I'm crying because that same mixed race ex-partner is the one who checked in with me, queer Jewish neurodivergent woman (that's four targets on my back). They asked about the internment camps, asked, “How are you doing with all this?” even though they're a trans person of color living in Texas who told me three days ago, “An immigration lawyer told me I'd have a good chance of being able to emigrate to Canada.”

I'm crying because I told them to go if they had the chance. Because they said I should, too. Because I wanted to tell them to come up I-35 through Minnesota and grab me on their way North, but instead I said, “I can't. I have people here.”

People like my two trans best friends. My chronically ill mother. My mentally ill Jewish brother. People like my pregnant-possible friends, who watch the Handmaid’s Tale and then go drink afterwards, because how the fuck else are we supposed to deal with that? People like the youth of color I've worked with, like the youth with cognitive differences who can't speak, like the youth who tell me they’re queer, they're sick, they're afraid they'll be next.

I'm afraid I'll be next. I want to write my cousin in Germany and ask if she'll take me. I want to drop out of school, take a Greyhound to Texas, and chain myself to an internment camp door. I want to clear out the closet under our stairs and build a false wall good enough to hide behind. I want to stand on a highway bridge with a noose hanging from the fence and a sign in red paint that says, “Who will be next?”

Suddenly, I am looking at my coworkers and neighbors and wondering, If we had lived in Nazi Germany, would they have helped protect me? I’m wondering, Since we live in a fascist country, are we going to protect others?

Never again is supposed to mean never again. I know someone whose parents crossed the Alps on foot to escape Europe. Both my grandfathers served in World War II. Was it all for nothing? Are human beings going to do this until we’re all extinct? I took an entire college history course about the Holocaust. The final paper and underlying theme was, “Was the Holocaust an unavoidable consequence of modernity?”

I don’t remember my answer, but if I had to write the paper now, I would wrote the word WHY? over and over for a hundred pages. Why are we doing this? Why are we still doing this?

Niemoller wrote about no one being left to stand up. 

I wonder who will be left to write about the time when there is no one left to take?

[whereitglows]

I've been away from social media and writing mostly fanfiction when I'm not focused on school, but here's a poem I found in my phone memos from last week. I hope everyone's winter has some warmth in it somewhere.

[crashmargulies]

informal reminder in honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week that I wrote a book about young people and mental illness. $5 (~30% of my proceeds) from the book is donated directly to NAMI–either my local chapter or the national organization. 

Each purchase also helps support me, a mentally ill Occupational Therapy Assistant student who is hoping to work with mentally ill adolescents and adults in the future.

Cheers.

[art blog] [writing blog] [instagram] [online store]

[whereitglows]

A reblog from my main art blog

[whereitglows]

Another part of chapbook poem draft. I've never written about this person or situation after it happened and it's intimidating but liberating. If you are in a relationship and feel violated, speak up, speak to others, and leave as soon as you can. Don't let them convinced you your discomfort doesn't matter

[whereitglows]

Another work in progress for what will hopefully be a chapbook sometime in 2018. I've got some elaborate and exciting plans to make this maybe-book into a part of a bigger project as well, so look out for that!

[whereitglows]

Would you believe I was watching Doomsday Preppers when I wrote this? Some apocalyptic fragments while I attempt, in vain, to sleep.

[crashmargulies]

CRAZY BEAUTIFUL LIFE: A story of friendship, love, addiction, and death

How do our childhood choices lead us to our adult lives? 

Is there such a thing as destiny? 

Are there soulmates, or only people who come into your life and change it forever?

A journey through teenage love, the beginnings of mental illness, and the push-and-pull of addiction, Crazy Beautiful Life explores these questions through nonfiction as part biography, part autobiography, part eulogy, and one hundred percent love letter.

Written over the course of a decade, it is a symphony of poetry, letters, journal entries, and other small objects that create a life, assembled together in the wake of a death, to celebrate a friendship.

I am very excited to finally be able to offer preorders for Crazy Beautiful Life! This book represents the best of the past ten years of my writing–that’s right, there are pieces in this book a decade old.  If you have read and enjoyed my writing at any point in the past ten years, I would love to share this book with you. It was and continues to be a labor of love above all else

I hope to have orders shipped by December 1, but once you preorder, you will be added to my email list for updates regarding printing and shipping of the book.

You can preorder and read FAQs here. If you’re interested in continuing to support my writing and art, you can also find me on Patreon

[whereitglows]

In case you missed it: I wrote a book.

[whereitglows]

For the newcomers on my blog: I have a book available full of nonfiction prose and poetry. I'm also working on pieces for a chapbook to be reamed sometime in the spring!

[whereitglows]

I'm frequently starting poems and writing down lines and symbolism for the first time since before I wrote Crazy Beautiful Life. I hope 2018 brings enough material for a chapbook. If you had a book of my poetry, what kind of things would you want in it?

[whereitglows]

A fragment from my Google Drive.

[whereitglows]

Five Times Micah Died (And One Time He Lived)

Part of The Real Unholy Trinity Universe, which I write with @shiverofjoy​ and @brushingpast​. This piece is just by me.

Prompt: Work Song for our Hozier Series

Warnings: Blood, gore, injury, suicide, death

The boys are stuck in a time loop and Micah is the linchpin. He fucks up a lot before he gets it right.

When my time comes around Lay me gently in the cold dark earth No grave can hold my body down I'll crawl home to her My baby never fret none About what my hands and my body done If the lord don't forgive me I'd still have my baby and my babe would have me

one.

The room is spinning. It’s hard to get his eyes to focus, but out of his peripheral vision--which is pulsing red with his heartbeat, is that bad? It’s probably bad--he can see the scrawl of permanent marker across his formerly cream-colored bedroom walls. The three-headed beast with his friends faces on it seems to move, as if it’s shouting from the plaster and paint.

How much blood did he have to lose before the goddamn voices fucking stopped?

Apparently a lot.

They are still talking to him. Sometimes he thinks he recognizes them. Other times, not so much.

His phone vibrates, inches from his left hand where he had held it as be bled, reading the messages he had saved from his friends.

Lucian: You’re a good guy, Micah.

Jules: yeah man if anyone was getting into the Good Afterlife when you died it would be you, fuck what your mom says.

The voices are laughing at him when he dies.

-

two.

He cashes in the jars of change his mother hoards all over the house and buys a bus ticket. It takes him weeks, but he does it a pickle jar at a time, so that Tammy won’t notice. At the end of it all, with the help of some scrounging for cans and a few incidents of theft from his mother’s wallet, he manages to scrape together almost $400--twice as much as he had expected and more than enough to cover a one-way ticket to Minneapolis.

He considers going to Columbus. Strongly. But there is no chance he could show up at Lucian's family home. The streets of Minneapolis are a different story.

On a morning in April, he throws himself into a whirlwind of transportation. First, a cab from his town to the next town. A stolen bicycle, unlocked in front of a library, to the train station. (He leaves a note tied to the handle with where he stole it and hides a $20 bill under the seat; he hopes it will find its way back to its owner). A train from Rhinecliff to Poughkeepsie. A train from Poughkeepsie to New York City.

The city is loud, brash, and oppressive. It stirs up the silt in his brain, clouding his thoughts like river water. He leaves the relative brightness of Grand Central to a corner bodega, where he pulls his wad of change-jar money out of a jeans pocket and peels off an astounding $20 for a pack of cigarettes and a plain white lighter.

He doesn’t notice the man follow him out until the hand falls onto his shoulder and he jumps.

“Eeeeyyyy man, gotta light?”

Micah turns around. There is a man in baggy clothes, a black knit cap, and a tangled beard over a mostly-toothless mouth where an unlit cigarette bobbs in time with his words.

“Oh, yeah, I--” Micah reaches into his jeans pocket awkwardly, squeezing around the hip strap of his backpack. When he draws his hand out of his pocket, his clumsy money roll follows it. “Fuck, hold on--”

He never sees the man’s eyes light up. He never sees the knife.

He finally dies in an alley mere seconds after his bus pulls out of the garage, bound for Ohio, thinking, man, I never even fucking got to smoke a goddam cigarette. For a moment, he is standing, once again, in the bright lobby with the clocks and the ticket booths, but without the commuters. A tall, thin person with dark eyes, a long braid, and a red and gold sari approaches him. “You’re not supposed to be here yet,” ey say, sounding annoyed. Micah tries to speak and finds he cannot. The person rolls eir eyes. “Julian, get it right this time.” Micah thinks his friend’s name sounds more like an epithet on the person’s lips than a name.

-

three.

This time around, he makes it far enough to see them, and they are in a shitty car that Luc or Jules probably stole and they are driving through Ohio and fuck, who ever thought Ohio would be beautiful? But Jules is driving with one hand and Lucian is reading a well-worn book in the backseat and Micah is watching the sun set out the passenger side window. He has stolen the aux cord over everyone’s objections, and he trusts them enough to let the armor slip, to play something soft, like the dust motes drifting over the wheatfields in the distance.

The car swerves and Jules laughs. Micah’s head snaps around and sees Jules has traded one hand on that damn steering wheel knob-thing for both knees pressed to the wheel as he tears open a bag of chips. Suddenly the golden light of the sunset is gone, replaced by the red-black pulse of Micah’s tunnel vision and the tell-tale whispers that precede a vision.

“Jules--” he says through his distress. Jules laughs.

“Look ma, no hands!” he crows proudly. Lucian chuckles from the back seat and when Micah turns to look at him, half of his face is missing and Micah can see brain through his based in skull. He thinks he will vomit, turns to Jules to make him pull over, has no desire to vomit on his lap, but Jules is slumped back against the seat, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling out of a bloody, foaming mouth, and Micah lunges for the steering wheel.

The voices are persistent; he is sure he hears both Luc and Jules shouting at him as he yanks the dumb black knob hard to the right, even though they are dead, died somewhere in the golden sunset without Micah even noticing--

The car skids roughly from the highway, hits a ditch, rolls twice and lands upside down. Lucian, never one to impede comfort, has not been wearing his seatbelt and he is thrown around the sedan like a ragdoll. His head hits the half-open backseat window at just the right angle to tear the skin from one side of his face and break open his skull. Jule’s head whips back and one of the metal posts from the shitty, broken headrest impales him in the base of the neck. He is brain-dead before the car even stops moving.

Micah dangles upside down and somehow manages to undo his seatbelt, even though he’s sure that isn’t supposed to happen. He is screaming their names. Jules does not answer, but there is a rasped breath from behind him and he crawls across the ceiling of the car until he is with Lucian, holding his spasming hand.

“I fucked it up, Luc,” Micah cries. There is a stabbing pain in his back, near his shoulder. Perhaps he dislocated it when he dropped from his seat. “Luc, I’m sorry, I fucked it up, I fucked it up.”

Lucian’s functional eye swivels to look at Micah. His lips twitch in what might be a kind of a smile. “Not… fault,” he breathes. There is blood in his mouth. Micah finds one of Lucian’s hands and he is kissing the knuckles.

“I fucked up, I fucked up.”

“‘S always…. Next time…” Luc rasps. With surprising strength, he grabs Micah by the shirt and pulls him close. Micah smells blood and shit and gasoline. Is something burning? Lucian’s lips press to his forehead. “I… forgive you,” he says.

By the time the car burns, Micah has dragged Jules to be with them as well. Their ashes mingle in the corn fields.

-

four.

The duplex is narrow and old and sometimes the power goes out, but Micah loves it. He knows that they will leave soon--Luc is gone more often and Jules laughs whenever Micah mentions any time-frame longer than a few weeks--but for now, he loves it.

Usually.

Then there are nights like this, when Luc is gone somewhere and Jules has been holed up in his room for hours and Micah hasn’t spoken to a living soul since lunch. The internet is down again and so he can’t even watch Netflix on the ChromeCast in the livingroom. He’s read every book in the house by now and he can only imagine the derision he would face from the others  if he was caught signing up for a library card with the duplex listed as his address. Still, he has checked every app on his phone twelve times and beat 2048 twice, and has seen neither hide nor hair of his friends.

He realizes the sun has finally set at the same time he notices the glow that flashes on-off-on against the wall of the staircase. From the accompanying curses, he can only assume it’s related to whatever Jules has been working on up there, alone.

After a short internal debate, Micah ascends the stairs, careful of the rough wood under his bare feet. He finds that Jules’ door is slightly ajar, and peeks in.

There is a black-purple light around Jules’ hands. He is staring at it with his brow furrowed. Severus, his snake, is on the floor in front of him and appears to also be watching intently. The light is shifting, changing form, and Micah can’t tell if Jules is encouraging it or fighting against it. At first it is the size of a softball, then a football, then a basketball. It shrinks then, back through the progression until it is golf-ball sized again. It does this several times, and the intense and uncharacteristic expression of concentration on Jules’ face never wavers. I’ve never seen him this focused on anything, Micah thinks.

Suddenly, the light flashes a bright red and grows to half the size of the room. Forgetting himself, Micah shouts in surprise and slips against the doorframe. The door swings open into Jules’ room. Jules’ head snaps around just in time to see Micah. He shouts and the ball of light continues to expand, until red is all Micah can see. He hears Jules’ voice--“Oh, balls! Not again, you nosey motherfucker!”--and then nothing.

-

five.

Lucian stands before him, but it is not Lucian. Jules has come up with a phrase for Lucian’s in-between moments, when he was neither Luc nor Lucifer--Lux. A crossing. An uncertainty.

This is not Lux.

“God fucking dammit, Micah,” Lucifer breathes. “What have you done?”

There is blood on Micah’s hands, in his hair. He can feel it on his torn t-shirt. He tastes metal on his tongue--is that blood, too, or only terror? Paul, the leader of the cult, slumps dead and cold in the corner of his office. There is darkness pulsing in the corners of Micah’s vision. The whispers slide over each other like the rasp of the sheets on Lucian’s skin.

“I didn’t want to,” Micah says. Is he speaking out loud? Does it matter? Probably not. If anyone can hear his thoughts, it’s the Light Bringer, isn’t it? “Lu--. He tried--.”

Lucifer’s skin--Lucian’s skin, with Lucifer’s intent--is cool on his face. His lips are soft, patient. Micah kisses him as if Lucifer is air and Micah is drowning, is trapped in a house fire, is halfway to the moon with nothing around him. Lucifer--Lucian--Lux’s tongue is sliding along his jaw, licking the blood from his face. Micah doesn’t mind. He twines his hands into Lux’s hair, staining it pink with Paul’s blood.

“I’m sorry,” Micah say, the words rasping in his throat. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“So am I, Micah,” Lucifer says. He pulls back from Micah’s neck where he has left bite marks that are already bruising. “I really hoped I didn’t have to do this this time around.”

His fist punches through skin and muscle, and up through Micah’s diaphragm like wet tissue paper. Then, suddenly, there is a look of horror on Lucian’s face.

“Micah, no,” he moans. He looks at his arm, buried up the elbow in torn and bloody flesh, and winces. He doesn’t try to move.

“I k-k…. I killed Paul,” Micah says.

“I know. Lucifer, he--we need Paul, he says we can’t go on without him.”

“What about m-m-me?”

“You’re the anchor point,” Lucian says. This means nothing to Micah. “Lucifer says… he says when you die, we get to try again.”

“I didn’t… didn’t m-m-mean t-to,” he manages, and he swears he feels Lucian’s fist against his lungs when he tries to breathe.

“I know, kid, I know,” Luc says. “It’s not your fault. We’ve done this before. I see it sometimes, in the blackouts. I don’t remember a lot, but Lucifer does. Sometimes he lends the memories to me.” He smiles weakly. “I’ve seen you do way worse. One time, early on, you killed me. Crashed the damn car.” He is quiet for a moment, his left arm quivering with the weight of Micah’s body. “I gotta let go now, Micah. I’ll see you next time around.”

“I killed someone, I--”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ve all killed people somewhere in the loops.”

“Luc--”

“Sorry Micah. It’s time to go. I promise, you’ll find us again.”

-

six.

The building seems much higher now that he’s standing on top of it. The wind, barely noticeable from the ground, whips his hair around his face. He realizes it has grown long since he left New York.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks his friends. Jules pats him roughly on the back.

“Of course it is! Paul is giving his press conference about the cult down there.” Jules points down what seems like an impossible distance, to where people scurry like ants around news vans that can’t be bigger than a soda can. “When you fall and you don’t die, it’ll prove to all his cronies that we’re telling the truth, and that we are who we say we are. Then we have the energy we need.” There is an unusual hunger on Jules’ usually playful face. “Can you imagine what we can do once our parlor tricks don’t drain us? How well you’ll be able to see the future, how far I’ll be able to teleport us? And not to mention Lux--I mean Lucifer. With enough power from believers, he said he’ll leave our good buddy Luc here all to himself and find a better way to--what was it? ‘Cross ethereal planes of existence’?” He falls silent and there is a faraway look in his eyes for a moment before he snaps back to himself. He looks almost guiltily at Micah. Micah has a feeling that, for the first time, he may have glimpsed the Antichrist hiding in his class clown of a friend.

“Besides,” Lucian chimes in. “If you do die, we know we fucked up somewhere along the line and we’ll just have to reset anyway.”

“Comforting,” Micah mutters. “What happens to you guys when I die, anyway?”

Luc shrugs. “Lucifer doesn’t usually share the memories of the other cycles. He just tells me they exist. From the few times you and I have caught glimpses of the same stuff, I assume he’s telling the truth.”

“We live,” Jules says shortly. He is still looking out over the Dallas skyline, as if he is searching for something. “Until we die. And then we just come back again. As babies. Until we meet each other.”

Micah isn’t sure what to say about that. The silence is thick and unbroken until Jules breaks whatever reverie he was in. “Anyway!” he says brightly. “Luc and I will head downstairs. When you hear your phone ring, that’s when you jump. Okay?”

Jules and Luc turn to leave down the series of fire escapes before Micah has a chance to answer.

It feels like he’s alone on the roof for hours, shivering a little as the wind picks up. Isn’t it always supposed to be warm in Texas? Why the fuck does he feel like his snot is going to freeze? Will it be even colder on the way down, with 33 stories to fall before he hits the pavement? Will he hit the ground? A car? People?

Will he land on his friends?

His phone rings, and he realizes it’s the ringtone he set for Lucian in a moment of sentimentality. He never thought he would actually hear it; they never call each other, only text in rare moments when they are not together anyway. Hozier’s deep, Irish voice sounds small and tinny in his pocket.

Boys workin' on empty Is that the kinda way to face the burning heat? I just think about my baby I'm so full of love I could barely eat

He takes a deep breath and runs. Don’t trip, he thinks madly. Don’t trip, don’t trip-- When he reaches the lip at the end of the roof, he vaults it like a gymnast. He has a moment to wonder if he’ll roll his ankle when he lands before he remembers he won’t be landing, at least not like he normally would.

He falls and thinks of roller coasters, of parachutes, of birds, and then of none of those things. The ant people are cockroach people, then mouse people, then dog people, and then he sees faces, whites of eyes, individual hairs blowing in the Texas spring wind--

He lands four feet to the left of Paul’s impromptu press-conference. His neck snaps. When his head rotates, he sees Luc and Jules leaning nonchalantly against a streetlight. Jules winks at him. People are screaming, he can tell eyes and cameras alike are turning to look at his broken body on the concrete.

He finds he can move his hands, gets them beneath his chest, pushes himself up off the sidewalk, feels the gravel embedded in his palms. He cracks his neck like he fell asleep wrong on the couch; peolple around him are too scared to do more than gasp. The screams, he thinks, will come later. He feels people near him, realizes Jules and Lucian are coming to stand at his shoulders. This is it. I’m the prophet now. Front and center. The ring of horrified observers has become a semicircular audience. Micah wants to touch his face, to see if it’s all still there, but he doesn’t dare. Instead, he turns to face the cameras.

“I’m alive,” he says to the cameras. “And it’s not because of Paul Sangano’s cult. It’s because I am the Prophet Micah.” He reaches to either side, finds Luc and Jules’ hands, and has an intense deja vu--dead in New York City, dead in Ohio, dead, dead, dead--and it rolls off of him.

“I am the Prophet Micah. I’m here to save the world.”

[whereitglows]

water and rocks // journal pages

I get to leave school early the week before my final exams. It feels good to be on the number 3 bus again, like I am home. The sun is out and the air seems almost warm enough to take of my leggings from under my shorts. The first real push of summer after it snowed on May Day. I am on my way to my wilderness guiding company, and like I do often, I am reflecting on how strange it is that I always find myself there. My life goes in circles. At fifteen I have my first “coming of age” experience, do something that none of my friends are doing, and six years later I am back in that place. Guides led me across the stones at Itasca State Park where the Mississippi starts; six years later I am the guide, bringing other 15-year-olds over the same rocks. The guiding company warehouse felt like home when I first saw it–everything open and big and ready for adventure. I feel this way now. I hope the feeling stays in me the way it has stayed in the warehouse, with its cedar-strip boats and oldies playing on the ancient mounted speakers on the walls. My bus crosses the Mississippi River on the Washington Avenue bridge and there is a stone in my stomach. We cross the Mississippi River and I am suddenly reminded of its power over me. We cross the Mississippi River and the river never even sees us. It wouldn’t care, even if it could. A week ago, Chris, a coworker, was swept over Saint Anthony Falls. No one has seen him since. They are doing a foot search along the riverbanks on Friday, his friends from the University and his family. I will probably be at the warehouse, seeing him between the shelves–bright neon hat that we all wear, braces on his teeth bared in a genuine smile. Another coworker, a park ranger, wrote a piece more eloquent than I ever could. I think, I wrote a book about someone who disappeared; I can rest my voice. I can stay quiet about this one. But I can’t, no more than I can keep my silence about Wade, a poet and friend of mine in Austin, Texas who killed himself days after I learned about my coworker being lost in the water. And Joe himself, subject of the only book I will probably ever write, his ghost seeming to get stronger the closer we get to the day of his death. They stand somewhere inside my head, and every time I turn to greet them, I find that they have just left. On Friday, I get to paddle the river for the first time since October, and in another life, Chris will be in the backs of our canoes with us, his stern paddle proving his power over the water, at least for a while. On Saturday, it will be a year without Joe, and my best friend and I will spray paint the walls of the overpass until we feel better. My boyfriend and I will walk around his neighborhood until the sun comes up. In another life, Joe will be laughing at us and shouting obscene suggestions about what to draw, will be walking with us and deciding which way we should go in the dark. In less than two weeks, I’ll be in Austin, where I once stood on the tiny balcony of Wade’s apartment and could stare straight at the capitol building down the street. In another life, Wade will be there with his baseball cap on backwards and a cigarette to lend me, if I want it. One day I will stop coming back to the rocks in the river. There will be new teenagers crossing its head, new guides making sure they don’t slip on the rocks. Chris will still be laughing on the river. Joe will still be grinning somewhere in a tree. In a bar in Austin, Wade will be having a drink with his fake ID. Time will flow on without them, until it has swept over them enough that they will be sand, and no one will remember their names. No one but the river. Nothing but the stones.

[whereitglows]

little girl lost little girl not so little anymore, still lost. girl not so sure she’s a girl, but still feeling like maybe she’s a babe in Toyland, or Texas. you live in enough places, they all start to look the same. not-so-little not-so-girl decides to write herself a poem, decides to write herself a story, decides to write herself a life. not like she’s getting one anywhere else. little poet lost her vices. little poet lost her boyfriend. little poet found out that “lost” might be the best word she knows lost poet shouts, then whispers, then mouths all the prayers her not-so-god never answers. lost poet lost her way, but she still found the prayers in the dark lost human rebels. lost human grumbles. lost human fights and punches and cries. lost human tries to find meaning in the chaos. little human finds only darkness and stars, and deer in the bushes, and fireflies, and rainstorms– lost, little human feels a little bit human can’t ask for much more than that

Little Poet Lost (5/30) // @whereitglows

Posted this late last night, reblogging in case you missed it!

[whereitglows]

HEIRS OF GRIEF: RECOVER children were never meant to be gods. after the dust settles you meet the ones who made you, and you find that the ruins of your suffering and your deaths (and deaths and deaths and deaths) are no longer yours– they have spread like the cracks in the goddamned sky into legend and myth, into story and scripture into Time and Space, into Mind and Heart into Blood and Life in shrines unending, in churches pouring skaiaward: those moments in glass, those gravestones for your innocence. here, the blood of your lover; here the head of your brother; here, her sightless eyes, his useless legs. here the death of everyone you ever loved. everything you swore would be forgiven forced onto you like horrorterrors. like this divinity you did not want and never asked for you linger, yes, you drift, you mourn, you scatter to silence, to darkness, to places that green sun never touched. to places they cannot see the way this broke you. like cracks in the goddamned sky. gods were never meant to go home. HEIRS OF GRIEF: RETREAT

HEIRS OF GRIEF (or, What Happened After) [9/30] // @whereitglows

[crashmargulies]

Crash Margulies is creating writing, photography, and other art | Patreon

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Decided to take the plunge and do this Patreon thing.

If you enjoy my creations, consider checking out this page.

Also, the any and all news about commissions, new pieces, and my book will go to Patreon a full week before being posted anywhere else! All Patrons have access to breaking art news and updates, for as little as a dollar.

Thanks in advance for considering being a patron. Also, signal boosting is neat.

Much love, ♥ Crash

[whereitglows]

Look, here we are in our liminal space, fighting the sunrise.

I have spent five years with steel in my spine, wondering what strength there is in being tender, in being open– like a flower, like a wound.

Three hours burned themselves away with the morning mist and in the back seat of your car we whispered, soft, soft, soft

There has never been such power in the dawn.