whiskey and rye(n)

poetry - prose || insta @whiskeyandryewords

[ccorvidae]

the moon adventures continue

[whiskeyandryewords]

All my poems are letters —

To ex friends and current friends and maybe friends

And the ghosts who read over my shoulders in my room at night

To my past self and my future self

In between whom I hope to find myself, period, someday

Because until then I feel like a ghost too hollow to speak to, to see

If I could meet me I wonder what I'd tell him 

To be kinder, to be meaner, tougher, softer, to know what was needed of him

What I need of him at any moment because I never know

I can't seal my letters with kisses because I never learned how to mean them

And I always mean my words

[whiskeyandryewords]

In my dreams I am cutting my breasts off with a saw

And I wake up elated in the moment between sleep and awareness.

In my dreams I am piercing myself with a rusting needle

Like a tenth-grade bathroom accident. 

Isn't it funny how we mostly dream about things we'd like to forget?

In my dreams I am plucking the skin off my smooth chest 

And the salt in the air is curing my wounds almost as fast as I make them.

In my dreams my brain twists like clay in my own childhood hands —  

I don't remember when I stopped thinking I was god of my own life.

In my dreams I am always running away from something

And I am simply always running away from something. 

So even in my dreams I can't fathom a destination better than just away — 

My friends call it peter pan syndrome and my mother calls it disturbed

How I sleep away years that could have been play.

In my dreams I play with knives but no one ever gets hurt

In my dreams I am still god of myself, isn't that something?

[whiskeyandryewords]

I hope he gives you the stars.

I hope when you look at him you see the whole future, I hope you get high on it.

I hope he loves you so infinitely that he feels universes inside himself.

I wish you late mornings and pancakes and movie nights.

I hope you deserve him, I hope he deserves you.

You have the power to make the earth turn

You are so beloved.

I wish you early nights and arms around you, safety and warmth.

I wish you a new kind of youth, one that opens up on forever.

I lost thousands of yesterdays on the memory of you turning the world to magic

Turning your house to my home.

I hope you know how utterly deserving you are of good things, only good things.

You have the cosmos in you.

[whiskeyandryewords]

There are things I put away when I reached adulthood that I'm only now finding again.

Remember sharing beds at slumber parties?  Your first kiss?  Quiet feet on the hardwood?

Remember the twins' house after school? 

Remember the swing set in the backyard, how it's all I wanted to do all day

And your dad's homemade putting range,

All the things you love that you lose when you're lost.

I'm learning again how to lay my head on shoulders and trust them not to shrug away.

That tenderness begets tenderness, that even when it doesn't it's a good choice nine times out of ten.

Remember my first time getting high on your couch, how we laughed until we had to run for the bathroom?

Remember s'mores pizza and religious rites?

I've learned over and over that humiliation and intimacy come in one brown paper package.

Remember when you slapped me like a soap star, back when love meant anger and anger meant hiding?

Black and white televisions are time machines, I know that now.

All kinds of things are time machines if you know where to look:

Composition notebooks, under-the-bed-bins, endless stacks of secondhand paperback books.

I never seem to run out of things I want to tell you.  Want to be pen pals again?

Remember the pool in the backyard, and the one in the park, and the one at the school?

Swimsuits and sandwiches and garden hoses and waterslides?

Remember the cookies at the Sunday school where your mom taught?

There are so many ways that you wouldn't recognize me now.

I'd like to think we'd know one another soul-deep, in the place where shadow puppets and VHS tapes live when we outgrow them.

If I lay down on the carpet in your parents' living room, my fingertips would still know it.

Would my fingertips still know yours?

Remember who we were before we were who we are?

I hope we were happy then, before we had a clue that life was an Advent calendar of sharp things. 

The only common truth between then and now is that I love you.  I love you.  I will always love you.

Remember?

[whiskeyandryewords]

I like to watch monster movies.

Perhaps I've internalized some self-hate, some inherent feeling of otherness.

Since childhood I've hyperfixated on the macabre, the things that frightened me in my bones.

But sometimes I think about the monster, the unlikelihood of life:

Stitched together and unwanted, spare parts that don't quite fit just right

Built to be beautiful, that's in the text, but ultimately feared and hated.

I've always loved scars, collecting them with a sense of pride that I can't explain.

Stitches in my chest, I know my body will be built to frighten people. 

But it's the only home I have, and I have to be broken apart and stitched together to live.

Sorry I came with spare parts, sorry my kit wasn't assembled properly.

Sorry someone gave me life without understanding it,

What I would be,

Playing god in the way that only parents really can.

I like to watch monster movies because they’re easy to empathize with.

Lonely creatures exiled because sometimes they draw blood by nature,

Things that don’t know how to be loved because they never have been.

I was called a monster too long before I ever was monstrous.

I was exiled too, had to build lonely castles in my head.

I like to watch monster movies because I have something to learn

That I don’t think I can learn from lovely, loved things.

[pusluktalaratlasi]

Albertine Bookstore, NYC

[triflingthing]

http://instagram.com/lithappens for other bookish needs 

[whiskeyandryewords]

As a child I thought that genders changed like clothes

That hand me down gym shorts made me a boy not what was inside them

Skinned knees and homemade baseball diamonds

We used to make them in the yard with recycling from the bin as bases

I used to watch cartoons and start fights

And I knew I was a girl because I'd been told

And I knew that the sound of my own name made me feel fake

I was afraid of public restrooms until I was twelve

And I don't like them much now 

Glitter never made me a girl it just made me the faggot all my peers so feared

And I can't be sorry for the way I've seen myself

Hair pulled away from my baby face

Bright young man behind the ugliest little girl you've ever seen

Maybe I really used to be a little lady 

I don't think it matters at all

I don't really stand for mourning barber shop floors

I'm right here I never left and I've always been what I am.

[whiskeyandryewords]

The air isn't air in this room and I'm a ghost

My eyes don't move my tone is flat when you force me to open my mouth

How much of life is meant to be performance?

How many invisible audiences live in your head

If I stepped outside right now the sky would be a ceiling

I could touch it and paint it and darken the world

I'll crush the neighbor's garden under massive feet

This room is so much bigger than it was yesterday

I'm afraid I'm afraid 

There's nothing to fear as the world is fake 

My eyes are dimming the light is the brightest it's ever been

[whiskeyandryewords]

There's a breed of hurt that comes from so deep inside me that I don't know its name or its cause. Sometimes I feel like it's rewriting my cells. Maybe it's all the missing pieces of me growing back from the inside out. I want to be whole but the growing pains are threatening to break my bones. I think my skin was built on fault lines.  I think my blood is lava.

[exitvisuals]

[outdoorspastelnature]

[bruwho]

[bandtshirt]

[whiskeyandryewords]

Is my love for you real if my words have dried up?

I'm trying to send you energy in little pulses across the airwaves.

We were always so good at talking.  And so good at staying silent.

You were such a ghost for so long in my mind I can't touch you anymore.

I miss you I miss you I miss you —

Blink and you'll miss me.

It doesn't matter, except when it does.  I'll go back to my real friends.

My real friends.  And what are you?  A shadow?  A miserable little memory.

I heard your eyes light up when you smile these days.

I'd sort of like to see it.  I miss you again.

You've always been mountain spring and boot laces, flowers through the concrete.

You untaught me so much pain and your own aching heart locked away in your chest — 

I want to tell you that I'm grateful.

The time has stretched out between us like a sea, I can't part it, I can't cross it.

I can't remember the color of your eyes but I remember you bright with finery

Angry and barely living, living as well as you could.

I hear you're better now, better now, backsliding.

I'm better now and still never good.

You're better now and you have always been so good.

I'm sending you brown paper packages and pressed flowers.

And love bitter with regret pressed into the pages of the books we used to love.

There's nothing to make right, our well was so poisoned from the start.

I won't brick over you.  I won't. 

I love you with nesting doll hearts.  You should know.  You should know.

I hope this letter finds you well. 

[travelingcolors-deactivated2020]