Lion's Honey

Hey so I read you self fulfilling prophecy poem about Ragnorak and I thought it was brilliant!! It's was just really good!

hello i always told myself it was ok because i only smoked when i wasnt sober but now a bright yellow pack is hidden behind my favorite books & i just read your poem "deer hunting" & it is now my favorite poem. so much so. thank you. endless love. x

I’m sorry that when I loved you the grow lamps had already blind burnt out and that everything in the greenhouse cracked, the slow glass fracture, the crash; that none of my garden had come back in, that there were no words left in me to make you a flower crown. I loved you the best I could, the way a rose bush loves blood and water, the way an apartment loves a bolt lock, the way a lighthouse loves a harbour ship when it drops anchor in the storm. You said you took to lighthousekeeping. You loved me with sentinel strong arms around me, iron wood beacon and storm’s eye, loved me wild honey whiskey bar top dancing, loved me country backroad singing sounding too much like a stray dog’s forever home. I loved us ring finger sand toes sea cliff, loved us scallop searing farmers market summer, loved us charity events fancy dress trophy wife, loved us soft violet ropes and sharp artful scars. I loved you oven left open too long, train tracks signals crossed, back turned silent treatment, loved you leave your keys behind you when you go.

'Doubt thou the stars are fire,   Doubt that the sun doth move,   Doubt truth to be a liar,   But never doubt—' [Hamlet] Stage directions are bullshit That— That is what they had to do for anyone to understand me? Dress me up in white in antithesis to your mourning shades. Dress me up in white, I am pure and innocent and bridal and empty drained clean out of everything that ever took root inside of me, flushed not with the rush of youth but flushed like a cleanse after all that blood flooded. A monsoon came through: they named it for you. White, that's the colour England knew as madness because how else would they have ever known except maybe to stop and listen to me speak before I— rue for you and rue for me —before i lay me down to sleep, i prayed for you my heart to keep and as i drowsed deep and down i left for you a flower crown: rosemaries and pansies,  fennel and columbine, daisies and violets withered on the vine, forget me not forget me not... I swelled and bloated ever whiter, my stare as vacant as my colour; for you I would have walked on water but breathing in the brook entire was easier than breathing in your love.

They always call you murderer, wolfrunner, sleep when you’re dead. Secretive, magnetic, impossible. Every mother’s cautionary tale. Most likely to take over the world, a mouthful of ashes with hard edges, bragged through a life of cigarette smoke and mirrors, stopped searching for closet monsters when you started finding them in bed. In it for the sex, scorpion sting to save your soft underbelly from prying kisses. Me, I’m hit-and-run gone faster than a tornado windstorm. Touch me quick, won’t be here long. Detached, impersonal, unpredictable. Take what I need, give nothing back, build a utopia out of your ashes. Cost of living there is too high to love me after. Worldbreaker, livewire, electric shock therapy. Drink in your emotions through the water basin I carry, spit when I don’t like the taste. But you taste like my first breath, take high tea with the monsters I made beneath my bed. In the sheets, I go electric, you're a grounding rod; when your body tells me shudder stories and your heart stops scared, I take your secrets to the grave; I shock you back to life. I want my sacrifices blood ready and you give me that, saying, ‘Go ahead, ask too much.’ I hope I can ride shotgun when you catch the sun and swallow it. That the burnt ash on your tongue tastes like the dust trails my fingers make soft as the undersides of moth wings. That it sears you inside a memory: I will stay longer than lightning. For you, I am halcyon beginnings. This is our ugliest astrology. Disaster means 'born under bad stars'; what we do is destiny. We were born to sing together while Rome burns black and rebuild after the ashes.

A girl with fangs looks at another, squints the corner of her eyes like she's framing a photograph, like she's stealing a soul. "Dark like your hands, but paler," she murmurs, "and heart-shaped with little freckles; a scar below your nose, two lines— How did you get those, anyway?— and your nose is sharp, noble kind of." She moves closer, close enough to run her nails over the bare bone curves beneath the other girl's eyes. "Your eyes are expressive, deep earth brown, volcano warm ready to go wild. A red ring is small outside your pupil. I don't think I noticed before. Your eyelashes are short sunbursts and your brows are stars arcing. How do you do that? You must get them done?" The other girl nodded, pleased she noticed. "And your lips—" the first began and then was interrupted by the cloying shade of pink she had been trying to describe. The girls broke apart, giggling. The first girl bared her fangs, laughing, saying, "Do me! Oh, my turn, do me now."

I loved you first, before the alabaster. Before stained rose windows forced over riotous roses. Before the grape juice wine bursting oversweet blood, thin cracked skin offering, tasting paper bodies. I clutched forsythia to my young heart first, tendrils of devoted words loving the blooms rejoicing in spring; vining bright hope in summer, curling around harvest come fall, resting in reflection during winter. I made a honeysuckle crown, a wand carved from the wood of the birch my parents planted when I was born knowing I was a small part of it all, a pebble in the stream where I skinned my knees, a bud on the great oak tree, a hum in the breeze where I also heard Pop-pop rocking where ever he rested. I couldn't find any of this drowned in any holy water except the sea.

Thank you very much for the poem, I really liked it, great work :)

'I love peaches,' I say. You say, 'I know.' Each time you say, 'I know,' I learn the parts of me I found important enough to tell you more than once. The parts of me that take up too much space, too many breaths, the parts of me that should need less but don't. Peaches— I love you more than peaches for all the times I've said it. That must be important. You remind me that though you howl for me like I'm the moon, the moon has a dark side and even it can learn to take up more space. My werewolf girl, you let me take up most of the bed and your body. I lay on you in the pale darkness, thinking about our pillow talk, philosophies of perception. I exist without you knowing me. If you had never known me, I would still be here, in this bedroom, nearly sleeping. Someone once asked me, 'How can you love without losing yourself?' I finally have the answer, it came to me through the open winter window after you'd thrown off all the blankets, when we were too warm and needed to take up too much space. A love like this you don't lose yourself in; you don't become small, like a wallet or a door key or a promise. A love like this tastes like peaches and only gardens you larger, takes your soil and tends to it with water and sunlight songs and knows when to leave you quiet. Love reminds you who you are when no one else is looking.

HAROLD. What did you DO. What IS that thing? Shut up shut UP. I don't CARE that it can tow upwards of 6,000 pounds. How many elephants do we keep in a two-car garage, Harold? Hmm? We already have the Impala, why do we need a Suburban? Am I pregnant and don't know it? Should we tell Kristen to expect a little brother or six? Are you the poster child for Chevrolet? That thing is atrocious! It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen! Yes, uglier than my cousin's baby pictures, what kind of question is that. It's uglier than that puke shade of green our neighbours painted their godawful house. It's uglier than a hearse that got dropped in a vat of mayonnaise and then left in the sun for sixteen straight hours in Arizona. It smells like that, anyway. Harold, you take that thing back right now or I will give you new things to be scared of in the dark. Harold, I know where you sleep.

South Carolina legislature says he could face the death penalty; that may be imposed only when there's an 'aggravating circumstance.' If, for instance, the murder happened during a robbery, or when you're driving and there's no traffic but you're stuck in the left lane behind some dumbass who won't go over 50 miles per hour, or after, when you get home, but locked your keys in the car and the driver's side window is open but only one quarter inch, which is to say helps you not the fuck at all. So you call your mother who has spares, but you haven't talked to her in months, you'd been avoiding her calls because she said your cooking was ineffective when you hosted the holidays this year, and you asked what that meant but she just sniffed, shrugged, and drank a half bottle of your best Merlot. But after an hour of waiting on the grass when she lives only half hour away, she comes with the spares and her smile fake as a lawn flamingo and asks you What's for dinner? And you grind your jaw and choke out Chinese take-out because it's the literal least you can do. After she leaves, you find that the window by your bed won't fully shut and the wind draft assaults your face and you won't sleep tonight. Like last night. And before.

The space under my bed is exactly about as high as my stuffed tiger, or was until Spot bit off his head, but anyway it's not that tall. And I keep Candyland under there and Connect 4. Next to Simba, that time I spent a whole 3 weeks' allowance on him and hated him. I don't ever want to see him again. Spot should have bit his head off. When I can see clear to the wall, I see the heater, which gets super hot. My mom says not to let the blanket touch it—or my socks, or my toes. The closet would be a better place to hide in, or the attic, but actually those are full of boxes and clothes and what I'm saying is there's just not a lot of room for a monster. If a monster could fit, it would have to be really small. Like a monster made of spiderwebs. Or gumballs. Or buttons. Or worms. Or maybe the teeth the tooth fairy takes. Or maybe teeth AND spiderwebs. What I'm saying is, maybe it would have to be a baby monster. Maybe the monster is under my bed by the heater because it's cold. Maybe it lost its mother. Maybe I would need to find spiderwebs to feed it. If there is a monster under my bed, I wouldn't be scared of it. I would be scared that I would give it Simba for company and the monster would hate Simba, too. I'd be scared of not knowing what it needed to be happy. Maybe it likes foxes better than lions. Maybe it likes playing Connect 4, maybe it likes winning, and I could let it win. I would be scared that it was all alone without its mama, cold, under my bed. What I'm saying is, I would try to get it home.

Et in Arcadia, ego— and what of it? Let Death take us from our haunted sleep: we already gossip with ghosts. If goat-footed Pan is dead, why should we aim for less? He murmurs into our dreams: "One is never in the Golden Age." Then he must not have loved Selene the way I love you. And yet, you take his leaf— seducing the moon with secrets, wrapped in a snowy bribe of wool. You drew me out of the sky disguised in a golden fleece to keep me warm through winter. Space is colder than your hands. You would make a sacrifice of your sheepskin to me, love me through death to divine. Beneath your woolen coat, truth. Not a sheep: a shepherd. Not a shepherd: a godhead. Oh, my god. Oh my god. Yes. We are in our Golden Age and we both know it, golden lipped and honey tongued prosperous until Death parts us.