Like Bruises, Baby, I Linger

There’s a lot of half-feral poems out there. Queue posts new poetry on Sundays and reruns on Wednesdays, both at 3pm, MDT This blog may contain triggering content. Please consume poetry responsibly My Ko-Fi!

[writingfromruins]

Welcome to Writingfromruins!

I’m Blue, I use they/them pronouns, and I’m the resident poet behind writingfromruins. I’ve been running this blog for several years now, and what started out as me carving out a niche in fandom turned into an experiment to see if I could upload weekly poems. I’d call it an overall success, and I plan to keep running it for many years to come! I’m currently in the process of slowly overhauling my tagging system as well as doing some spring cleaning regarding old works, so things may be shifting around for a while. Eventually I‘ll get it all squared away to my satisfaction, but tumblr mobile (the way I usually post and manage this blog) is trash about those sorts of things so it might take a month or five. The new tagging system is as complete as it needs to be, and work has finally begun on removing old poetry from this blog and archiving it elsewhere. There shouldn’t be much of a difference, unless you’re in the habit of reading six years back into the blog, but if you *really* want my old poetry and we’ve spoken before, dm me. We’ll talk.

A note on content warnings: Much of my poetry involves death, blood, weaponry, blasphemy, body horror, and violent imagery to some degree. This is partially because of where this blog started out, but mostly because I enjoy how impactful the imagery can be. Poems tagged as Vent Poem or Kevlar Thread will usually lean furthest into these concepts. I fully admit that I don’t tag trigger warnings as much as I should, something I‘m working to get better at, but most of my archives are untagged and it will likely remain that way until I have enough time and energy to go through it all. Please read responsibly.

(Updated 7-24-21 - added new tags)

(Updated 4-26-22 - updated blog renovation status, changed some phrasing and added new information to tags)

Tags!

Inkwell Incarnate - These are poems about me! They generally explore my feelings about being queer and mentally ill. This is also where I get really soft about my friends.

FAHC poetry / LBBIL- Check out this tag for Immortality (of a sort), Romance (of a sort), and Crime (just crime). LBBIL (short for Like Bruises, Baby, I Linger) is the tag I use nowadays, and anything tagged FAHC that survives my cleaning will be swapped over to it eventually.

Eat Your Holy Heart Out - I have complicated feelings about christianity. I express those feelings by writing about really pissed off angels. That’s honestly the long and short of it.

Hey Postman - This is the tag where i put my askbox poems! If you have a line you want to see me riff off of, or some topic or imagery you’d like to see my take on, feel free to drop me an ask! May take a bit though, I’m writing them as inspirations strikes.

And Still The Light Remains (ASTLR) - Sometimes I get mugged by a image or a line and write a poem solely to get it out of my head. This tag will be where I put those, so if you’re looking for rampant imagery, this is where to go.

Party Favor - This will be a grab bag of stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere. Usually some sort of challenge I’ve given myself.

There may be some defunct tags still lingering from the blog’s past, but the above are the ones I am currently using / will use to retag old works.

That’s all! I hope you enjoy my poetry! 

[writingfromruins]

That summer the air was so thick we nearly drowned even miles from the nearest body of water you could even slightly drown in, the air was so heavy and wet to breathe and you could taste it almost in the whole cavity of your mouth and so it filled us up like gutters and storm drains in a thunderstorm but the sky was so empty and blue it was like a crayon drawing when you have only one blue crayon so you have to make the whole wide expanse from horizon to horizon the same waxy shade of blue no matter where you looked and that sky was something we were drowning in too, like you couldn’t breathe enough, like there was a pressure on your lungs to take a deeper breath than the body could allow, like you’d never breathed before, like this moment in late summer with both of us still lonely and desperate and trying to connect to each other or the world or even just manage to take a full lungful of thick blue summer air and both of us were failing but somehow succeeding in at least understanding each other and we may have been drowning but that was the first moment I felt I was ever alive.

AUGUST // PD

[writingfromruins]

Empty the suitcases, the shirts are creased and unfolded and caught in the zipper teeth, the dresser gapes empty with drawers that shriek their protests at being moved, the bed groans, the walls shift, and the aquarium against the wall begins to overflow, like the river styx breaking its banks and immortalizing every inch of the room except the outlines of where your hands clutch the doorknob and your feet bruise the carpet, in the flood you breathe in and already the pressure tries to crush your lungs, breathe out and the room gains currents that sweep around knocking down photos that sink like summer skipping stones and you have been closing the door since that lake decided to keep you, decided to embrace you in the tangling embrace of the riverweed, to flood so that no one could come near you, to wrap you in a cocoon of fishing lines and jetsam until you finally woke up and went home.

THAT SUMMER THE AIR WAS SO THICK WE DROWNED // PD

[writingfromruins]

the comfort of god is in estrangement; i'm a stranger to the people who have raised me, but i'll always have an extra absent father, whose love is a schrödinger's love: he knows me totally and cannot help but love the faults: he never looked at me once and hates me for the crooked teeth i got from him, or the shining.

A body is an image is a body, my crooked teeth a cage, prayer and tongue both captives in my maw, captivations, in my image I make mistakes. I am only so good at being loved. There is faith and there is tightrope walking. There is faith and there is mountain climbing. I do all of the above with net and harness and a knife for making sacrifices. I don’t demand this of those I love- but I am only so good at loving too. I do not understand it, I am good at cutting ropes. There is faith and there is a shape of higher power that someday I may know again, however: Today I take the bus

and all my faith is used up on that.

A HOUSE YOU DON’T GO BACK TO // PD

[writingfromruins]

It’s midnight when hunger comes around to me and sharpens itself on my tongue, eroding itself into more and more caverns, structural decay, hard candy mingling its sweetness with blood where it cuts my cheeks to ribbons, shreds, hollows.

Cravings haunt like covered mirrors- blackberry, a sweet that has long enjoyed the protection of thorns, blue raspberry, a fruit than never grows, never needs to protect itself, rootless, seedless, fruitless, sweet. In my own body I see my own foundations and take hollow honor that they exist, take no pride that I can see them. Take nothing at all. Watch my hallowed hollows haunt me.

I chase all my aversions down and attempt to drown in them- bitter as a single sip of beer, of coffee, as an excuse to leave the rest behind and stay empty. The hunger stays, cravings like a hand pressed reaching deeper and deeper into thorns to draw blood, hands around what meager sweetness that rewards me for it.

It becomes a trial to remain upright with so few places yet to empty out. Structural decay. Collapse on call. You are not meant to live like this, I know. My hands are not ones that leave projects half finished, I know now this is also a hollowness I will seek someday to fill. I am learning to be idle, I am learning to devour.

Marrow // PD

[writingfromruins]

...flat like hard candy going sharp under my tongue. Sweet like blackberry, which is to say, a kind of sweet that has grown too used to having thorns. Heavy as a midnight meal. It feels like...

...one day i saw my ribcage in the mirror and took no pride in that. One day i wrote a poem and did not remember once the dawn hit. One day i looked at myself and thought...

...bitter like my first sip of beer. bitter like coffee drowned in sugar. bitter like the entire lungs’ worth of distance. sweet like maybe i knew that...

...i never start anything i intend to finish but sometimes the ending sneaks up on me like a stalking wildcat. i never start anything i don’t intend to finish but nonetheless i’ve abandoned everything to get this done.

anger in the belly, in the tendons, in the head // PD

[writingfromruins]

You are naked, again,

Sense and sensuality discarded

just to see the shapes protruding

in the way skin moves over bone,

ribcage, pelvis, spine,

and how they twist, underneath the muscle

and clean expanse of skin, you move

and hate as it moves with you, as it does

only always what you ask of it,

it is too much,

this body, half tailored and left

fraying at the edges.

living in it feels, somedays,

like pulling at each stitch

There is a premise

you consider sometimes as you

carve through yourself and fashion

something of a body of your body:

Frankenstein, making something

(all good sense discarded)

that both could and could not

be called a resurrection

into new cloth, a body hewn together,

far too perfect to be understood

as anything a body ought to be.

Living in it must have been

like waking up tailored

into your very own funeral attire

and underneath, the body,

pulling at its stitches

unsure, like you are now,

which ones it could survive breaking

Seam Ripper // PD

[writingfromruins]

You are naked, for the first time

in years for no other reason than to strip

down and see the way the skin moves

over bone, you can see the shape

of the ribcage, pelvis, and they

twist, underneath the muscle and clean

expanse of skin, you hate it

so much, this display of a body that

never was tailored to you and cannot

be changed to fit no matter what you try

it is a bad day, for bodies

looking at this, the body that is whole

but incomplete, or completed wrong

gets you to thinking about frankenstein,

not the creature, but the man so caught

in the science of how bodies work he

never learned he had a son until the son

was able to name himself, until the son

named himself adam, and asked his

father for the creation or proof of anyone

like him, asked to be not alone. it was a

bad day for bodies then too.

I don’t have any scars or seams or

stitches on my skin. I don’t have any sign

of my creation gone wrong but i too am

asking for proof that this loneliness is not

forever. My father also didn’t know who i

was until i was able to name myself and

introduce myself by name. If i press my

fingers to the thin skin i can feel the knots

of my spine, the jaw hinging underneath

my cheek. i knew i was not alone when i

peeled the old name away and started

stitching a new one in place but I have not

seen a good day for bodies ever since.

sometimes things break inside the kiln // PD

[writingfromruins]

we miss you come back

Thank you

I’ve missed this blog too, but most of the poetry i’ve been writing lately has had to go towards other ends these last few years. I’ve been meaning to come back home to here, but just haven’t had the time to dedicate to it.

Until now.

Mind the space, new things (grown from the bones of the old) are coming ;)

[writingfromruins]

dead electric morning, every nerve standing on end because i woke up yesterday + stayed woken up alltheway until this morning and there is terror in me, terror in every single cell and i am afraid and afraid and i cannot sleep for it. i want to put my fear entire in my mouth where it is safe, where i can bite down on it at any moment, where i can swallow it down over and over again until it digests but my fear lives in my lungs instead + because it lives in my lungs it lives in my blood and my heart and my whole entire body shaking shaking with it- a convulsion half like a death rattle cough + half like a laugh + the laugh scares me more and whatever the part of me that isn’t me or the fear says

“You have to laugh at it. You have to laugh at the way you stand outside a door and pantomime knocking without ever making contact because otherwise you would scream or cry and that would be worse to explain then the laughing or the knocking you’re not doing. Sometimes you stand there hand raised and stop yourself before you can kick or collapse against or headbutt the door, anything to tell someone to open it, and you have to laugh because your laugh is silent anyways when you laugh like this. You have to laugh because you scream silent too and when you drive yourself to tears to knock on the door even then the knock is only the first step and every cell of you is still being circulated full of fear from your lungs. But the laughing keeps it all from shutting down before you knock.”

dead electric night and it is quiet in the winter as the clock ambles towards dawn and i am still all alight. Still too much in a body, too much to breathe right + laughing laughing laughing silently because there’s nothing else to do and it really does seem funny when i can’t sleep from it. Might have to shut myself down the hard way. Might have to cover the eyes and the mouth until breath hisses against the suction against the palm and my eyes seal shut. if i can make myself small and quiet and hold my breath until the ribs are tight around it the fear goes away before i can. and when the fear is gone i can breathe in and out and in and out and the only thing that pours through me is pure elation + when i laugh there is no scream i am trying to avoid just an absence of fear unfamiliar + when i am done laughing now i can finally sleep.

OH HYSTERIA // PD

[writingfromruins]

Little gods of un-nothing all up and down your sides prickling like rats who today tangle their tails in your tale and eat you whole so today you are alive on sugar, the rage you’ve kept low banked, and something roiling with tiny feet and many mouths you do not recognize but is, itself, also rage, this time unbanked, and keeping the three separate is why you are so tired these days.

You are knee deep in purple, all up and down your shins in messy little nebulas, and you open your mouth to swallow a rat whole to eat yourself from the inside out in hedonistic hunger. No half measures. No way to touch a world that doesn’t bruise you back. You walk into anything hip height or below with the grace and confidence and speed of a meteorite and let the lit up pain receptors tell you where the lines are. Where the rules are. Where the world is. You have little gods in your mouth and you can feel their little feet down your throat.

It is good to be unmade, sometimes. It is good to be devoured. You have spent most of your life not knowing what pain is when you feel it, not being able to put a name to acrid rage, a life spent raising little gods like rat kings with their tails all tangled in each other, going nowhere, starved rat corpse tied to live rat starving. You’ve been the dead rat before. You’ve been the hungry little god. A body is a body is a body is food. Your little gods of chew-through-the-wall love you like they love the promise of a way out, even when it hurts. You hold them in your mouth and your stomach and your hands and you let yourself in the spin and the hole-in-the-world get angry.

The rat you swallowed chews through some of your more essential lines, the central nervous chord ringing down your spine gets severed in the bloodrush and you go cheerfully limp and dizzydizzy from the backlash. Good little gods that keep you all giddy awake and incoherent when they struggle in the cramped dark of your stomach. The noise you make these days when you feel the ache come through the acid is more delight than damaged. You are so tired these days. When you do not stop despite this it is sometimes because you could not stop without a catastrophe.

A SOUL THE SHAPE OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE // PD

[writingfromruins]

1.

Mouth full of noise

Mouth full of other sharp things

Mouth gaping around a shattersound.

Mouth full of-

—

(Sorry)

—

The mouth is a vacant, violent thing.

The act of chewing your mouth back shut

draws blood like wick from a candle

2.

The sense of burning isn’t fire its just

the way your body isn’t built to tear at itself

from within because of the way your body

is built like this anyways,

anyways when the lungs cant hold air

anymore you get all your ribcage

lit up in neon in your torso.

Even with your eyes closed,

Pain makes you luminescent

3.

Over the years it has become more

and more of a conversation with yourself

that you’ve learned to decipher and this year

you spat the first sentence into existence

and responded with the grinding sound of

gravel pouring from your throat on

public transportation, on the damn train,

sitting cross legged on the floor during a delay,

cutting yourself off at the air supply.

Then apologizing with the same air

and throat and tongue convulsing as before

What else could it be but language?

4.

Mouth’s full of wet sound.

Nothing else you can do with it

but keep your air as still as suffocation.

Shallow grave breathing, dirt in the back

of your throat and you cough

and you cough

(Sorry)

and you cough

and all it does is lodge more and more grit

In your system

Your lungs are full too.

Thick wet mud comes coughing up tasting

like mucus and medicine. Like winter

coming back. Like it never left at all.

-

four meditations on a chronic condition // PD

[writingfromruins]

I am teaching myself to love myself the long way around. Like how i love the stubborn sidewalk weeds, the way my cat pours himself onto the windowsill, the joyful sound of my neighbors windchime in a downpour. That is to say, i love the little things enough to love the entirety. The way i stretch up all the way to my tiptoes after sitting down for too long, the way mornings feel, all dazed by dawn’s softness, the way i rock on my heels while i wait for the kettle. Someday i think i will be nothing except the little things i love, a mosaic of green things growing despite everything and soft gold pink morning glow and the grey of my cat and kettle, both chirping for my attention.

i’ll live to see the big picture remade // PD

[writingfromruins]

You fell like a skipping stone cast too far out and sunk to the middle of the nowhere on a lucky bounce. The air down here is so heavy even near the sun its like your lungs are trying to hold the ocean, trying to fill themselves with sand, and you’ve never known the kind of holy fire meant to make you the righteous kind of right so the rapture must have missed you cause you’re still here and drowning. You’re still here all awful with the right questions and a mouth full of the moon calling its tide out and out and you cant stop drowning when you breathe in.

The worst part is its a bearable type of tragedy, theatre candy sour-sweet burning the taste of hymns off your tongue, splitting it open until your mouth tastes copper and the air still swims heavy and electric around you, and in front of you the projector throws together rays of burning color and you want that fucking fire to sweep you through to your bones but instead you bite your tongue and taste the copper-color of your blood. Fork your tongue until you’re the snake with the wrong answers but the right fucking questions.

If the garden is underwater and the flood never stopped and you’re never going back up into the atmosphere where you can at least breathe easy you’re gonna drag the entire kingdom come down into a retelling of Atlantis, heaven on earth made literal, heaven on earth in the back row of a movie theatre, heaven brought down to earth so fast it lights itself in atmosphere and that righteous holy city goes down in green fire, blood-copper in your mouth an accelerant, and they all said you’d burn yourself out and you guess they were right.

faith like a scream in a city-wide blackout

[writingfromruins]

You cough, and you cough, and you keep coughing and it deprives you of air, of dignity, of pride just gasping for that next inhale to grate against your sternum. You cough and halfway through the fit your mind loses touch with itself and- and when you wrap your hands around it again it is trying to understand the racking sounds your body is making as language. There is nothing to be learned here, you want to tell yourself, nothing I have not already learned, there is no language here but still you think of it, think of your mind caught blank and helpless reaching for what it knows best in your absence, like poetry could be a seance to bring you back, like you just needed to know what your body is saying when it struggles to breathe and it would be solved. You wonder about it, shallow breaths as you recover on your knees in the hallway, and your hand snakes its way up to ring your throat in the horrible habit you’ve developed lately. You look like you’re strangling yourself as you feel for the air under your skin, press your palm tighter against the line of your neck as if you could find the problem under your skin, follow it home, learn its language. You peel your hand away, and use the wall to lever yourself standing again. You cough. Once you identified it as a monster that lived in your lungs. You wonder whether its progress to think the monster might write poetry too.

Cohabitation with something you cannot yet claim // PD

[writingfromruins]

You tear the temple down. You kill the god. You are yourself and yourself and yourself and you are the acolyte pushed too far. There is no sunrise you can see from within the rubble. No afterlife. Just you who is the temple which is the god who is the rot in the corners. You are your own unwilling apocalypse. Its never been this good before. Its never been this bad either. The crops keep failing. You’re no harvest god, you’re just standing stones that can barely keep themselves clean. You are the temple and the god and the acolyte pushed too far. You are only yourself, terrified in the face of your singularity. Terrified in the face of the truth that you are still the temple and the god and yourself and the acolyte and even the rot and dust and stress fractures. The temple still has walls and windowsills to clean. The god still can’t understand what’s wanted of it. You still exist.

You are still tired and exhaustion-sore and all cried out and it doesn’t make any difference. Your body has survived the shaking. Your mind has survived the fear. You - something ephemeral in between - still have things to do in the morning. Still have miracles to work. The things that drag at you, that hinder you, that drive you to that faraway place where you can only beg your mind and body to breathe, over and over, breathe, just keep the air moving, just keep the breaths steady, just get through one minute, one more after that, one more after that, just ride it out, those wretched things, they’re still you, still inherently, terrifyingly, ultimately you.

The temple has survived worse- it still stands. The god has survived worse- it still lives. You, the acolyte, yourself and yourself and yourself, face the sunrise from the front steps. There is still a day to be lived through. One more after that. One more after that. One more after that. Its never been this bad before. Its never been this good either. You are only yourself. You are the god who is learning. You are the temple that will not yet crumble. You are the acolyte, loyal to both. You have no obligation to love your work, but you do. You have no obligation to love every piece of yourself, but you’re trying.

recovery is recursive too // PD

[writingfromruins]

Your body is a temple and your mind is its god and you are the loyal acolyte, keeping the place as clean as you can against the entropy of existence. Your tasks are never done. You always have something to hand- a cloth that needs patching. Stairs to be scrubbed. Windows to clean until they let the light in, bright against the decay in the corners that must be swept aside. You are alone because you are the temple and you are the god and you are the acolyte of both so your work can never be done.

Time brings its blessings and trials upon the temple and the god does not speak the language of its worshipers so you sit on the altar and translate, bucket of soapy water at your feet, and listen as the god protests the things being asked of it. Its worshipers don’t speak its language, and so they ask for miracles outside its power and will not leave empty handed. You take it upon yourself to fulfill them, but its okay. Keeping this body alive means you‘ve been in the miracle business for a very long time.

Somedays when the tasks begin to wear at you you neglect to fill the offering baskets, and the whole place crumbles faster, but at least you got some sleep in the shadow of the god that is the temple that is you, scrubbing the windowsills clean. More doors here are locked than unlocked and so you pull the hinge-pins out. Spilt the doors and use them to keep the holy fires burning. You are the god and you are the acolyte and you are the temple and so once the doors are gone you stop hiding from yourself. You’ve been going hungry less. You keep the offering baskets full.

You are the sole acolyte and the temple in its entirety and a god that never knows how to keep people happy but you keep the place clean. You keep your hair washed and cut. Glasses clean, clothes warm against the chill, enough sleep to keep your hands from shaking. You’ve been going hungry less. You scrub the callouses off your feet and walk silently through the hallways of yourself which is the temple which is the god and you know you’re getting better when you don’t find any rot.

devotion is a recursive concept // PD