Silvertongue

hi! to anyone who doesn’t know me personally, just want to let you know i’m moving blogs!! this one was actually for a university writing module. im deleting this so that i can transfer everything to my writing/book blog @inkytealeaves and/or so i can enter some of these poems in competitions

This poem comes at the end of the collection to remind the reader that this is less than one half of the story. This is a romanticised, bitter, wistful narrator who, while she does a fairly good job of admitting to her own guilt, is in no way unbiased. Now she takes a moment to acknowledge that her lover likely has an entirely different reading, and that there is much she couldn’t depict in her narrative, whilst also wishing that they had been honest with each other, admit their faults and flaws and what was truly happening with them, rather than painting over it and hoping to force everything to work.

The ‘deaths’ in the final stanza can be read as metaphorical or literal. Throughout the sequence the narrator has been trying to bleed out, and the girlfriend has been trying to drown, and in some ways they succeed - and helped each other. There is no moral judgement here, just an acknowledgement of guilt.

The body in the bathtub in [Interval] is also supposedly revealed - though as discussed, it could be either of them. Is it the narrator bleeding out, or the girlfriend drowning? Are they together, or distant?

missing scenes

our first kiss in the dark of a theatre, behind the wings. our first fight, nails drawing blood in the rain. all the paintings held only in your mind, that you should have described to me as we curled up together beside a winter’s hearth, but didn’t.

i imagine her monologue would go something like this

i wanted someone to listen to me cry, hold my tears in a bathtub before me. i wanted someone to take my heart out of my chest, so i could sleep without a drumbeat in my ears. i wanted a paper doll wrapped around my arm, i wanted someone to take every word i said and fossilise it, displayed in a museum alongside marble and gemstone and bone.

This poem is deliberately placed after Scene One to juxtapose the tone and recontextualise the whole narrative. Inititally this poem contained the line “the best way to kill yourself is to find someone who cannot love you forever, and love them”.

Throughout the sequence I return to the water, to the cliffs. The narrator still feels high above on that cliff, distant from everything. The girlfriend never left the sea, has only been piling experiences like rocks in her pocket in the hopes eventually she will have the courage to drown. Seeking out bad experiences because they believe they deserve them. Both so distant, coming from incredibly different angles at life, and yet the same, because they are both out there at the edge of the world, alone, seeking any sort of solace. Their love is violent but powerful, and brief.

The two of them are exactly what the other wants, and exactly what is worst for them.

[Prologue]

that night we were looking for ways to kill ourselves. hidden under a lover’s moon

i stood at the cliff’s edge and waited for gravity to steal the blood that kept me standing. and you

below, floating in an unforgiving sea, waited for something to make you breathless.

i was the perfect stone in your pocket, a glinting trinket to weigh you down.

you were the perfect blade, carving constellations into skin.

Finally, the so-called beginning. A tranquil image of two girls sheltering from thee winter cold in the back of a warm coffee shop. This moment is liminal and insulated and entirely untouchable - except for the things those girls cannot control, cannot know about. Even without the invading fear of being found, the narrator comes in to tinge the scene in melancholy, to scoff at the naivety of her younger self.  Foreshadowing - or recalling - the painting metaphor which consumes her entirely in [Interval], reminding the reader that the play has already ended; the conclusion is already drawn, and close at hand.

[Scene One]

a warm cup shared between freezing fingers. we are hidden at the back of a coffee shop, the fear of being seen a spectre between our lips. if the world collapsed, as it has been trying to our whole lives, we would not notice.

This poem came about after realising that I have an issue with oversaturating my poems with metaphors. Walt Whitman’s line “I contain multitudes” comes to mind - trying to encapsulate the torrent of changing emotion and feeling and perspective held within a single person, let alone a person with mental illness. In that way this is a metapoem - the narrator is talking about howw they have been told to write about their lover.

I return to the motif of the snake, now internalised by the narrator but weaponised against her. The water imagery is now inside her, and uncontainable. The “swarm of bees banging mallets against the anvil” refers to the myth of Metis, who was imprisoned in the form of a bee inside Zeus’ head, and continued to make armour on an anvil inside there for her daughter Athena.

mixing metaphors

they told me you should be red and roses; the scent of a garden freshened up by rain, spilling colours across the summer grass. nothing said of the storm itself, the rage beating senseless the limp flowers sheltering beneath fragile leaves. nothing said of the petals torn away like clumps of hair, crushed underfoot.

they told me i could be a crow, fluttering in silhouette against a ribcage. or perhaps the insect swarm buzzing beneath my skin. nothing said of the coiled snake, squeezing my heart into purple rings. nothing said of the waterfall quiet freezing into ice around my bones.

how do i explain the truth of a whirlwind in human form? you are red and roses. you are a bluebird: beautiful songs, and the winged flutter of anxiety, searching for exit signs. the morning sun through glass, and the rain chill on my skin. you are ink-soaked, a masterpiece, leaching colour from my world to paint yours in church-window silhouette.

Here is the second poem from the original whole Tragedy. It is a sudden remove from the relative calm of the last three poems, a sudden reminder that this story doesn’t just end badly, but ends bloody.

I return to the visceral imagery of blood, mixed in with such normal things as mascara and water. The bathroom is a very important place for the narrator, a place well known by those suffering depression: the easiest place to hide, a liminal space at night - providing the eponymous interval break - and home to the mirror, the one thing you wish desperately to avoid.

Here we have the fear of intimacy that so heavily underlines this sequence, the fear of time running out, whether due to life or your own mistakes, there is a certainty to ending that doesn’t just come from retrospect.

[Interval]

a body lies in the bathtub. i stand at the mirror, watching droplets fall: mascara, water, dirt, blood, an image painted in so many colours i cannot remember which shades are yours. i cannot remember