With Reckless Abandon

Sometimes I think of all the poems that have been birthed, and killed, in my mind.

I’ll be brushing my teeth and looking at myself in the mirror, my grey hairs sparkling beneath the chestnut brown, peeking like a reminder. I’ll come up with a phrase, a thought, a word, that feels perfect for a poem. Sometimes I’ll write the entire poem. Other times, it’ll just be half a poem, a quarter of a poem,…

I’m afraid of starting poems, so I just don’t. I’m afraid of being rejected, so I stopped applying for new jobs. I’m afraid of not living the life I have pictured for myself in my mind, so I keep doing the same things even though they don’t make me happy.

I wrote a lot of sad poems when I was younger. Everything was drenched in concrete, you could find it in between my bones. I ached getting of…

Every night before bed, I think of pieces of poems I will never write. Words strung together so eloquently, my god, I could make someone cry. I tell you of my pain, the pain that creeps in when I turn the light off and can’t be taken away by checking for monsters under the bed. I tell you of my excitement for the future, of what I want my life to be like, all the activities I want to do, how eager…

three glasses of wine

I can understand why my mother was an alcoholic.

It took me twenty-one years to fully understand it. The roughness of a hard day, the intrusive thoughts that seem to find their way into a mind I’ve built so many walls around. The craving that seems to start in my chest and then slither it’s way towards my wrists as my hands begin to tremble – needing something to grab, something to touch, somethin…

I’ve written twelve drafts about you and not one of them feels right.

I can’t seem to find the right words to describe how you make me feel.

It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m overwhelmed with love and gratitude that you have become entangled into my life.

I love you.

I’m swimming in light.

I’m swimming in love.

My heart is fuller than I thought was possible. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Long Drives & Bedtime Stories

The way you make me feel makes me want to cry. I laid there, my body tangled in yours, your arms wrapped around me and caressing my back. Music played softly in the background, songs of my past that you don’t quite know the stories to yet. And I felt like crying.

I feel heavy when I’m with you, drunk when I’m with you, as if I could dissolve into you. I feel full when I’m with you. I feel peace…

It’s been a while since I’ve touched these keys for reasons other than academics, or venting, or speaking about things that don’t need to be said.

It’s been a while since I’ve let the blood from my heart reach the keyboard.

I’ve been listening to songs from my past, of nights when I wanted to die, of mornings when I thought I would disinagrate into the floor, of laying in my bed with these songs…

It has been seven months since we’ve spoken. We met on a cold February day in a coffee shop that looked like a Wes Anderson film and I felt like I had already known you. I left you on a Spring day. My heart racing with my thoughts and a shake in my hands that made me think I needed to see a doctor. With the warm weather, I welcomed a life without you. I danced in the sunlight, picnicked in the…

What is poetry? The dictionary says they are expressions most commonly of feelings, ideas, beauty. Is poetry an idea swaddled in a metaphor so grand that it becomes indecipherable and that’s what makes it so exciting? Is it something personal? Like the personal growth I’ve found myself in recently? An epiphany that only matters to me, or a story that is so general it connects with any human being…

SHAMELESS PROMOTION: TRAVEL BLOG

Hello fellow poetry writers and readers! I recently went on a trip to the U.K., specifically London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Although traveling has been an integral part of my life and very important into making me who I am today, I never really put in the effort to make a travel blog… until now!! It’s small and right now only has my life story, living in 8 different countries in the first 13…

My relationship was my father has always been complicated. And endless push-and-pull of love and anxiety, of anger and avoidance, of confusion and desire. It has been full of name-calling and stubbornness, of baseball pitches in the backyard and long talks in the kitchen at 2am on a school night. They were calls of frustration and horrendous emails and text messages that resulted in both of us…

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m thinking about making this blog both poetry and my new most prized possession: my bullet journal. I started this over the course of the summer and have gladly continued it into my third semester of my college career. This month was dedicated to something I’ve crossed upon a lot on the Internet (where I get most of my inspiration) is No Spend November. The layout isn’t as pretty as I’d like it to be, but it got the job done. There’s the rules I set for myself, what I actually spent money on, and my income. The idea of NSN was to save money. Which is exactly what I needed at this point: my credit card bill was up to over $2k, my college tuition bill is coming up next month, and I’ve recently planned a trip over my winter break to England and Scotland! Lots of exciting things happening, lots of expenses to have them.

NSN is a great idea for anyone who is looking to save some money, but let me put out a warning: No Spend November is not about how much you save or how much you spend, it is what you spend your money on. It is realizing what are the important things in your life that deserve to be spent on. I realized I love online shopping and end up buying a lot of things I don’t really need. It just adds to my collection of stuff once the nuance of it disappears. I realized that if I didn’t act on the impulse of buying the item immediately, it would eventually fade away and life would resume. Most of my buys are spur-of-the-moment “I want this”. The second thing I realized is that going into Philadelphia every Sunday is a very integral part of my life. I go to school across the river in Camden, which there isn’t much to do, so early on in my Freshman year, I started a ritual of going to a new coffee shop every Sunday in the city. There, I would spend hours drinking coffee, eating pastries, and completing my homework for the upcoming week. Both productive and enjoyable! But this month, I took this “luxury” away from myself, limited myself to only 2 trips (out of the 4) because I often spent $10-$15 per Sunday. I also took away my luxury of dining out with friends, meaning no Taco Tuesday’s or Wing Nights or sushi dates. This also meant no take-out, only cafeteria or homemade food. Needless to say, I ran out of my Cafeteria Dining money within two weeks and then switched to home cooked meals. In addition, I took away my love for junk food. I’m an avid chip and ice cream eater. Ice cream is my go-to when I’ve had a bad day, but I’ve taken all of that away.

About a two weeks into November, I broke down. I was feeling dissatisfied with my courses as well as having family troubles, so with these big life issues daunting on me as well as the fact that I took away any facility I had that let me really relax or cope, it all came tumbling down. My view of No Spend November wasn’t right–I was too strict and I took it too literally. I did save over $150 this month, which is wonderful, and a whole paycheck went towards paying my credit card bill which has lowered tremendously, which is a success. But, I was unhappy majority of this month.

In hindsight, I’ve gained a lot of insight into who I am as a person as well as what deserves to be spent on. I don’t need to go out to dinner every night, but maybe once every two or three weeks doesn’t hurt. Going into the city every Sunday for my coffee shop ritual is who I am and is not something that should be sacrificed for a couple of bucks. The money spent on those days also gives me the ability to explore, walk through the city, enjoy different environments while doing homework, and reflect on my past week in a way that lets me distance myself (both mentally and physically). And I should treat myself to a pint of chocolate ice cream every once in a while because I work hard and like to think I deserve it.

So let me reiterate, No Spend November is about saving money. It’s about looking at your expenses and deciding what needs to be cut, or shaved, or nicked. It’s thinking about every purchase or desire and whether you truly need it. Will it bring you happiness? Will it serve a purpose? Is it useful? And so on and so forth. So if you plan to do this, I say go for it. Save some money, but don’t hold yourself back from the little things in life that make everything else worthwhile. We all have distractions that keep us going–that doesn’t mean our lives are meaningless, it just means that sometimes it’s the little things that magnify the beauty of everything else that we have.

I can’t wait to see what December will bring. I’m hopeful that it will be a brighter month full of travels, love, journaling, and reading.

Guess Who’s Back!

Hello everyone! Do people still use this? It’s been a while. I feel most of my followers are inactive now, but to new and old followers: hello! I’m Claire, a sophomore in college studying psychology and philosophy. Lately, life hasn’t had the same kick it did last year. Let’s start from the beginning. I was depressed for about five years and writing was a place I found solace. A little over a…

I was an only child. My stuffed animals all had names and stories and sometimes I had conversations with the bubbles in the bath. I spent my time in the grass reading books and getting bit by bees, wrapped in a Junie B. Jones book in a blanket fort that was poorly made but a wonderland for a 5-year-old. I haven’t had much luck with love. The men in my life come and go with such ease. I find…

I am sitting on my bed of white sheets that I sometimes like to pretend are clouds when I awake. There’s a cold cup of tea to my right, and warm lights string themselves across my wall. I lay on this bed for one, yet crave a second body. My legs curl into my chest and I feel the rhythm of my heart try desperately to reach my knees. I go to sleep with skeletons beside me, of who I am, who I was,…

The Explanation You Will Never Receive

This is an explanation for the Read at 1:06 a.m. I have complained about you to all my friends. They know about the times you made plans and did not show up. They know about the times you never said you were sorry, and they know all of the excuses that you have typed over to me across a vast universe of zeros and ones, x’s and o’s. But I am not writing this for them. And I am not writing this for…