Esmie's poetry corner

(did you know a redwood often only burns on the inside and can continue growing even after its core is reduced to charcoal?)

I met myself last night

Or not quite.

I met a younger me,

Barely past my knee.

He was.... I don't know.

His face was hidden.

Like an object's place is forgotten.

I told him that he would die.

That he would spend his youth watching his own grave being dug,

And the realization is exactly what kills him.

I told him he dies,

But he wouldn't end.

There's a great many things I don't remember.

The older I get, the less I remember about who that child was.

I honestly couldn't say I know him anymore.

But I still know our nature,

The essence I share with him.

And when I told him of his inevitable death

And of my birth from his dreams,

He stared at me with stars in his eyes.

And while his last words replayed

were obscured by my waking moments,

I know he saw the freedom of his aching heart,

having crawled still beating out of that grave,

Finally walking,

Breathing in the scents of life.

Though I may forget him in time,

I'll always honor him.

Try to live the loving life he could only dream of,

And find all those details,

Those flowery scents,

Oh Raven, won't you sing me a happy song I don't know if i was ever enough, But I always tried to be. Never learned what enough was, Never saw the path past that fog. If my worth is attachment and service, Then tell me this. Why am I me? Maybe that's why I can't remember, I gave them even the limbs they carelessly wounded.

Oh Raven, won't you sing me a muffled song. Child's fixation on child, Limbless doll, Once again the prodigal (NOT SON) to one who deluded themselves a teacher, carer, and authority

Oh Raven, won't you sing me a silent song Pictured core of a muse pictured presence of a preacher the student never let to learn, only allowed to be taught absence of a companion thought intimate

Oh Raven, won't you sing me a screaming song leave why did you leave? why won't you leave? I can still hear your song, Maddening in attempts at sirenhood, Entrapping in the eye of its storm, you were wrong and oh so horrible, and only a mere friend, but I can't seem to forget you, unlike all the forgotten wounds you gave me.

It's an odd feeling to be on a pendulum's backswing. you've seen what is called the peak. you know it's a home not an event. a condition of the journey. And yet, you're not where you once were Instead, you're where you almost stayed.

These days, I find it difficult to think of the future. I seem to be walking the line between living and miring, embossed in the present tense.

I've been a romantic, a dreaming creature of futures, soul resonating often through the struggle, but not anymore, not yet.

I've been birthed in forgotten dreams, knowing only survival then as i do now, wading through waters I once floated over.

I can still feel that old future me, in those moments of resonance. When I know the future I'm blind to will still have me, and I'll still have joy.

I'm not who i used to be. The years i spent developing feel empty, because it wasn't me developing or maybe it was me, but i wasn't developing I can't seem to remember

I know there's little left from those years I've abandoned my youth in ways not many do, there's no angst there, nor despair just a gap.

I don't remember being a teenage dirtbag, i didn't have a love life, i didn't achieve many things, he didn't live very much, or maybe i wasn't alive yet.

Was he empty, or do i just only have access to his memories through a termite-ridden shelf? what happened in those years? every year that i live as myself, i remember less. I can't tell if i'm missing those parts given through youth, if they died with him, or were withheld by the cult.

Nowadays i'm me, but sometimes. sometimes i'm not sure who i am. I am my actions, my habits, but what of my foundation? My well of experiences is shallow, it's depths buried below the bricks made of bone and corpse

Even on days i am a full-made person, i am never sure of it. Past the dead years, i can barely remember my own. who am i if i can't perceive myself? who is me? who is in this mirror, looking back with that piercing, swirling, stare looking blindly into my own depths

I remember him sometimes not as an experience, but as a character. one with a background, with parents he struggled against, drowning in the culture he was raised in, unable to find the will to have aspiration for dream or life

he was certainly a character played, but he was also the unwilling actor. maybe that's why he dreamt me up, not as a savior, but as an escape. Someone who liked life enough to be content just living it, who loved themselves enough to have some kind of aspiration, to have a will to live, scarred but unbroken.

He wasn't the type to give up, but that asserts a choice he never had. He merely trudged on, never quite knowing why.

maybe that's why those years are so empty in my mind. despite his struggle for will, his desire for desire, he often had little opportunity to have a purpose. he wasn't capable of conceiving of a future. he was merely present. an emotional human like the rest, but considered, in his unconscious mind, maybe less of a person than his peers.

I sometimes find myself staring out a window at a busy landscape, as he was often wont to do. There's a peaceful kind of introspection to a solitary view of a living world. And I remember him. I cannot hear his voice, but i can read what he wrote, and give eulogy to his struggles.

I speak of days old and new, of cycles of love and life, from thought to thesis, incubation to infant, journeys of loss and learning, taught by grief & growth, unmatched lesbian teachers.

I started a small boy, though he didn't recognize himself as one, though I took part in systems, the internalizations could never touch the true self, the identity at his core.

I was a fae child, a thing of alien curiosity, at once adored and hated. Left apart from his peers, I learned how to help myself.

He grew up in systems of structure, sterility loved more than humanity, love restrained by senseless systems of worship.

I grew mad in that world, A fae made of wild passion, imprisoned in an iron chapel, shackled into prayer to an invented idol, false in its worship, real in its cruel power.

But as his madness grew to fever pitch, so too did my heart swell against its cage. day by day, his actions grew softer, my hatred once senseless now directed towards those that brought pain.

He now sat in the pews, shackles weak with rust, and I saw my time for what it was.

I slunk out of that chapel unnoticed, A wounded animal still, though they thought me tamed, that heart still beat with primal anger and fear. his unseen claws much more dangerous than those they had so painfully removed.

And so the prodigal son left, into a world he could no longer embrace, for the light had blinded him to truth. but he still had what they never were able to tarnish, his dreams, his artful whimsies and hopes, expressed by his sleeping, imprisoned mind.

And so, he laid to slumber, to give rise to my first form, a being as capricious and confused as any dream, for that's all that i was at the time.

And as any being does, (for that's what I newly was) I lived, grew, learned. Free from the locks my progenitor lived within, I embraced the nature he had been denied,

And as i knew him, I began to know myself. As much his creation as my own, we shared that nature now bared.

His had been twisted into worship of an idol, whipped into obedience. His temple acid washed until white as a frozen corpse laying on an altar of marble.

My nature was his laid bare in all its eccentricities; Love, damaged but breathing, connection, pale from being locked away, identity, branded yet untamed, And me, his hope embodied.

I returned to our roots, finding love at my core, aiding connection for those unable, nurturing identities unsupported.

And as my love grew, so did I, as is the nature of hope. I was no longer a dream, but a reality.

And that old temple, the pillars I had inherited, began to grow again after so long. As my beginning had let his blood run down the altar, he had given it another life, another caretaker in me. I care for these grounds as his corpse decorates the throne once occupied by that patriarchal idol, cruel manhood replaced by the kindness of one forced into boyhood.

Now this temple has grown a mask aligned with our true core, one of raucously loving femininity, until such time I can tear down the sterile marble for something more humble in stature, more beautiful in its detail.

A temple containing my past and present, Corpse and Creation, Dedicated to the only two gods worthy of worship, love for one another, And Narcissus' love,

...It's like you've been forgotten

Every evidence of your entrance

Deleted or displaced,

Sentiment left behind,

Emotion scrubbed clean.

But your imprint never left

You expanded my horizons

Then left a gap right there.

I learned things,

Felt myself in new ways,

Became aware of so much,

Of so many more ways to live.

And I can still feel it.

I can't turn on my TV anymore without feeling like the air beside me is empty.

(That cold television light still makes me remember the warmth it brought with it)

Can't climb into my bed without feeling the absence of another waiting,

Can't help but try to remember the way your body felt on mine,

The intimate mundanity of a couch or bed,

The comfort of someone who cared so intimately.

I've gone on with my life,

Began other things,

Other conversations,

Other futures.

And I thought I had moved on.

And maybe I had, but I never forgot.

You were so many little firsts,

And though you would never have been forever,

I met a thing.

A life,

A word,

A meaning.

She is presence incarnate,

Impossible not to perceive,

Holding passions for people and past,

A curious being who speaks out her ears.

It wished to scream,

Rebelling against the physical,

Striving to transform itself and the world.

Yet struggle brought it to no utopia,

But only to those that would share the labor

He is immaterial,

Made of passion and idea,

Turned begrudgingly corporeal,

He loves his world through others,

Gaining all the more for it.

They are a creature of abstraction,

A mind drowning in itself.

Curious but unknowing

Struggling for no goal,

A restless soul striving to slow,

Too much presence,

Not enough person.

I may never know myself of a surety,

But I can see where my soul connects with others',

You drift off,

Not gone but somewhere

Like a mind rocking imperceptibly slow,

In motion yet relaxed

Through another world you now venture,

As attention turns inwards

And senses are forgotten

Only the immaterial matters,

The preoccupation with abstraction.

Through dunes of words you wade,

Each grain a piece of meaning,

And wonder how anyone with eyes

Could deign to describe sane

You marvel at the machinations of the breeze,

Making hypnotic patterns of meaning and mind,

Not quite beautiful,

Something less and more

You know what folly it is to name the wind,

To pretend you see something behind it all,

But there is nothing.

No meaning

No guiding hand

No purpose

Ennui sets in,

And you revel in it

You take that nothing into hands and selves similarly not,

And you mold it.

You take that yawning emptiness called divinity,

And make it your own through rejecting it,

Purpose discarded in favor of life.

You have a connection to this disconnect,

Less like love,

More like essence.

And you know that despite your knowledge of failure,

You are satisfied with a half-content life,

Always reaching for satisfaction.

You will take no destiny,

Merely your own essence,

As benign, benevolent and malevolent it is,

Circles within circles within curves plastered on orbs Symbols of the soul carved into supple flesh like honeycombs A vortex of meaning whose beauty is not seen by the naked eye, But by glimpse of soul

Little meaning to those without connection Beauty transcendent to those that live in it Transfixing because there is something you can’t see Something that stares back Pretty damn ironic Especially because i can’t seem to look away from my own

Something like another self looking back But its not another No other agency No parallel Only the recognition of my own existence Of the complexity of my soul Of the depth of what i am that even i can’t comprehend And for some reason it’s equally horrifying and ascendant

Like i know how incredible of a masterpiece i am But i am scared to be bare, Even to myself Ironic considering that’s all i am seeking To look into the eyes of another And know I am as seen as staring into my own.

But i know little of how to communicate Though i study them, I can only parrot the symbols The codes The abstraction we call speech, We call text, We call art, The parody of knowing that we call telling, And yet even that i cannot do.

Maybe that’s why i love art, Seeing all those hidden meanings, Seeing those fervent to find them, Considering the life and times of an artist, Almost obsessively poring over the details, Desperate to KNOW them. Maybe that’s what i want, In my most fevered dreams That even i am discomforted by.

But at the end of the day, I will look into the eyes of another And see only circles within circles, No transcendent beauty i am expected to find, Certainly not what i am told i have, The only importance found The transfixing acknowledgement I find in my own reflection of vision,

Unblockable,

Unstoppable,

Unflinching,

Direct,

Knowing.

I walk through a forest The trees are tall and lonely The place is thick with them

The roots embrace my path, Reaching out to a symbolic stem, Where feet have trodden, Travelers have gone, Into a beyond only imagined

The air is thick with red A dark, rich red that speaks of dim living rooms, Of nights in angst-filled comfort, Of minds that twist and turn, Forming to resemble what stretches out before me

My vision stretches out to a not-horizon, Unclear if i am moving forward or backwards, But moving all the same. I see ghosts of future and past, Moving alongside and parallel, Even through at times, Yet never with me

I see myself a hundred fold, Wisps and whispers in the white, Pieces of perceptions, Shreds of speech, A whole unimagined, Barely spoken into life

I see a hundred others, Holding these parts, Some old and crippled, Some young and shining, Yet not often matching the people holding them.

I take a step, and fifty others echo I listen and hear no sound.

I look at my feet and notice a small dog, Dark as midnight, With a small mark on its forehead It doesn't just follow, It matches me, Pulling me ahead when i would stop, Giving me reason to move. Whether it brings my stubbornness or hope,  I couldn’t tell you

But I don't know if there’s a difference.

Our motion is constant, Slow or fast become the other, Progress’s measure obscured by more fog But steps are set, And footfalls are felt. And that little black dog pushes me still.

In time new shades fall into step, None of us following another, But forging converging paths,  Moving in similar directions. Each a different shade, Each a different sound, Each a different beat of heart and mind, But joining together for a time, In a wonderful disharmony of community.

Sometimes we arrive at a place, We sit and speak, Laughter and love is heard, Names are exchanged, Intimacies of every kind discovered, But the path beckons.