What a mess. @whoopsiepoopsie - Tumblr Blog

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whoopsiepoopsie

I know the exact angle of your smiling eye crinkle

And there is always a moment in our laughter when our staccato and pitch line up exactly

Our mothers witches cackle ringing out in rooms where she is not present

I know which bite of my food will be the one your fork reaches for

I can smell the change in the air when your mood switches to manic

I know all of your best stories

And you are the one who tells me mine from when I was small enough to be folded up into your arms and be carried

On the phone my best friend can’t tell my voice from yours

Your houses don’t smell like the ones we grew up in but they still smell like home somehow

We are separated by years and personality disorders and and the fact that we all had to live through each other being individually fourteen

(Which is universally acknowledged as the worst age to have to know somebody at)

But when I sit next to you I can never quite remember where I end and you begin

Your face in profile is mine, thin bridged nose, an upper lip we both hate

Your wild hand gestures are something I unconsciously replicate

Sisters, you are the gift our parents gave me before I even existed

The wild in the room, the calm in the storm, the hand to hold, the shoulder to cry on

My reckless streak, my burnt dinners, my kindest parts, this mouth that goes like a whipoorwills ass, and my inability to keep a secret are all from you

My heart is made up of puzzle pieces you helped shape and so it belongs to you whether you want it or not

#poetry #sister #prose #poem #family

The way you cry is like childhood tears

The hot sticky kind of cry

Unashamed and painful in the belly

The way how when you are small

You might start crying for one reason

And finish crying about another

How you could cry yourself into a whole nights sleep

Just to wake up the next day

And only the tenderness of your upper lid meeting your lower

Is left to remind you of having ever cried at all.

#poetry #poem #written word

whoopsiepoopsie

So when my dad died everything was on fire.

We were in a house with 100 rooms and there was a small fire in every single one of them and as those of us who were closest to him ran around trying to contain the fire it made everything a million times worse because his last breath turned us into wind storms and we were fanning all of the small fires into infernos.

As we checked in with the people who were on the peripherals of his life we made a grave error and handed them parts of our sadness and let them hold it like it belonged to them and since all’s they had were dry brush memories from years ago left of him they went up like kindling and they named it grief and called it their own.

Now they won’t hand it back, they make it an interesting facet of their personalities, but put it on a shelf when they aren’t using it.

Meanwhile I’m still blowing through the house where most of the rooms are empty now because nobody can stay sad forever and I’m trying to figure out how to take my wild winds and pull them back inside of me because I am carrying missing him around and it somehow weighs even more now than it did almost three years ago and I am exhausted.

He was not yours. He was never yours. He is ours. He belongs in our saddest and happiest parts. He is not your fleeting moments, he is our sunrise and sunset.

You don’t get to have him now that your only weight to bear is a memory drenched in sepia tones.

I cannot sit in the middle of an inferno and watch you dance around a lit candle and say what we feel is the same.

#poem #grief #written word

My heaven is a YouTube homecoming video

I am the little girl leaping into her too long gone fathers arms

I am the mother crouching down bracing for her incoming child’s hug

The pet owner reunited with their lost dog after months or years of searching

I have known what it is to mourn and to miss for as long as I can remember. My losses were inherited and integrated into my personality before I even knew what they meant. Mother Mary is prayed to by a girl who has never kneeled in a church

My heaven is a lush backyard and a crinkle eyed smile over a silver bullet

It is tiny hands that never ever let go

It is a snowy afternoon and a hundred thrown snowballs that are never caught

My dresser top is a menagerie of small jade and wooden animals, a lone brass elephant stands guard. Gifts from a woman I do not remember but am told second hand stories of her devotion.

My heaven is a Sunday morning waffle feast with chocolate milk from the glass bottles

My heaven is the flutter in my belly growing into a piece of my heart that lives outside of my body

My heaven is sun warmed fur pressing into my hand, pushing to walk for just one more street.

I am well versed in the art of watching the door close behind somebody who wasn’t supposed to leave. I am excellent at goodbyes that linger until they spoil in a part of you that you can’t clean out

#poem #poetry #spilled ink #written word