recognizing the voiceless

Tell me a lie

I can bare

Tell me you care

Even if it's not real

And every night I'll pray

I'll pray to every entity that listens

For your love

23:37

Like a little god, checking my code,

pulling and pulling on the window,

but still stuck in the coldness of reinvented softwood

Sometimes I lay my head down on my desk

and pretend that it’s the chest of some ancestor

or the gates of a shrine

or candles

Candles used to live for me,

finding me through the sweet sibilance of maternity

and bestowing upon me another year of smoke

to be set free by my vowels

But now

00:12

This pheasant hides in the shower

with the broken tug-of-war light

and nocturnal sun bleached onto the window

For the seventh night this month I believe that

shampoo on rashes will bring me back,

and I look at him and I feel the heat as it

lights me up again.

Just for a second.

Bear the fruits to me in the pigment of your arms

and keep the passionate shade between

your little god and those cling film eyes

which only ever look away from the body

I take to your acne like a Frenchman in Stockholm

and use it as a model for my shivering bones

00:41

I’ve become accustomed to crushing aspiration.

I retreat to my bed and let the heat

scour my body and desert it in pandemonium,

then I read journeys of black script

until my new envy castrates me

What more can I do to become you?

Porn on my laptop, poetry on my lap:

the heads and tails of

unshakeable regret

01:04

If red and green are just the same colour

then how can you live and love

love is sometimes messy yech

that you must tackle

when there is no one to help

provide all the tender care.

.

It’s not easy to be you, especially if you are someone else. You didn’t want to be like that, you didn’t want not to be yourself, but circumstances, or rather family, shaped you. So you grew up to be suspicious of everyone and everything. It was impossible for you to believe in people though you desperately sought them. You needed their company, someone to talk to, somebody to love. But you never really trusted them, and they could feel that, and you never actually loved them, you only liked the idea of them being there for you, and you only. Money is god, is what your family taught you, and that god you worshipped to no end. And you used any way you saw fit. You thought it could buy you love. It didn’t. You thought it could buy you friends. It didn’t. You thought it would make you special. It definitely did not. And now you are all alone, wondering what actually went wrong, in your blinding blindness. Oh, you fool! It’s not easy to be you, especially if you don’t know who you truly are.

Lakis

Not the greeting card version.

Not bubble bath spirituality

with watercolor affirmations taped above the toilet.

I mean love yourself

the way forests do.

The way a pine tree grows around barbed wire

and still reaches skyward

dragging the wound upward into light.

You have survived things

that would have turned softer creatures to salt.

Look at your nervous system.

That electrical cathedral.

Those synaptic highways still firing through storms of memory.

That heart pumping faithfully beneath every betrayal,

every unpaid bill,

every funeral suit,

every night you nearly mistook exhaustion for failure.

Your body has carried you

through entire eras of collapse.

And still

it wakes.

Still your lungs unzip morning air.

Still your hands reach automatically toward warmth.

Still some animal part of you believes in tomorrow enough

to brush your teeth

to feed the birds

to water plants

to laugh unexpectedly at videos of raccoons stealing cat food.

Do not overlook the holiness of this.

The universe spent billions of years

forging calcium in dead stars

just to build your teeth.

Ancient oceans rehearsed inside your blood

before your name ever existed.

You are not separate from creation.

You are creation

wearing a nervous system.

So love yourself.

Love the gray hairs arriving like winter frost on fence wire.

Love the scar tissue.

Love the stomach softened by living.

Love the strange coping mechanisms slowly becoming wisdom.

Love the younger selves still hiding in your chest

holding broken crayons and unanswered questions.

Sit beside them.

Tell them:

You survived.

You survived.

You survived.

And when your mind begins sharpening knives against itself again,

when shame enters wearing familiar perfume,

when the old voices start rebuilding cages from memory,

interrupt them.

Become enormous.

Stand in the center of your own ruin

and speak with the authority of galaxies:

I am worthy of my own tenderness.

Not because I am perfect.

Not because I am enlightened.

Not because I have conquered pain.

Because I am alive.

And being alive

TW: Blood references

You gave me that silken hood

And pulled it tight

Over my head, choking

Air in my throat turned to glass

Grating

Focus on my jugular

Press that boot harder

Squeeze the blood

Watch it drape, splash

Soak the coal carpet, liquid of life

Stomps of a rain dance echo

Watch me gather

Everything left on my bones

Shredded flesh in dress shoes

Take your boot shroud with mud stained red

Gnaw the leather right off

Swallow it whole

Watch it fill my belly

Now I am strong

Tear you down

Teeth like the iron fist

Weave the thread to a rope

My feminine hands practising

What you always wished for

And swing it over the branch

A possum hanging from another

Tilts its head to watch

I’ll take you

Down to the property line

Disturbing dirt with your weak cries

Held at the scruff

You’ll plead and say please

And my ears will lap it up

And my hands won’t stop

When I’ve let the maggots feed

I’ll drag you back up

Grey hair staining green

And feast

Brown-pink meat

Stuck between teeth

Bones left

For the dirt to have a taste

Tell me, clay riddled rock

What’s today’s flavour?

Is it told-you-so

Or reminiscent of forget-me-nots?

The daisies pushing through

28/5/26

Because I'm human.

Human. That's funny. Being human means being allowed mistakes, to try and fail or succeed, to write in margins,

to think, to feel and live.

Maybe as much as I am impulsive, I desire control of every situation and outcome to feel good.

But that should not take over my life. Things can go bad or how I didn't want to - simply because. Trying to constantly find deeper meaning between lines that dont exist, it exhausts me. Because no one will know me in the depth as me.

For once I do not want to think

I do not want to predict the future

Dont want to make sure,

that everything is perfect

Everytime I go out

I do not want to doubt,

about the eyes that follow me

And everytime I come home

I do not want to be alone,

I want to be with him

Where I can finally shut down

Where the silence is not a punishment

Where I'm enough

Where I do not need to think

Where everything clicks

Where all we have is silence

Words made before words did rhyme,

Lessons before blessed time,

Some stories survive the test,

Persisting longer than the rest,

Yet we mock them now as weak,

And those that love them we call meek,

As if our hate could make us more,

Harden our so soft core,

Oh how grand the irony,

I pass the time with fantastical words.

Numb my mind in a fiction far away.

Drowning myself with words and stories.

The window is covered up but it can't drown out the birds or the shame they draw.

The ache in my head longs to rest along its walls but I do not tire.

I itch and I rot unlit until morning.

And then seek to be clean.

The horrible need to be new takes me.

I bask in rich oils and fragrance,

I remove my cross my ring, freeing myself of the feeling on my skin.

Did you stay awake all night? She hisses

She couldn't understand.

I retreat into the watery outdoors to see the sky.

I smell the wet wood and grass.

I watch a deer.

Say a prayer

I have lost my voice. I have thought this often before, but never has it felt as final as it does now.

I can no longer commit either of my languages ​​to paper. Usually, whenever I lost my connection to one language, the other was there to take its place. Now, there is nothing left. Perhaps it was because my critical eye grew ever sharper—because I had to admit to myself that almost everything I write sounds too generic, too inauthentic.

But that should never have stopped me from picking up a pen. For writing has always been a reflex—a need that simply had to be satisfied.

I believe it still is;

but why should I do something that only fuels my self-doubt and heightens my frustration?

Perhaps I haven’t lost my voice at all.

I drove it away with perfectionism—let it merge with that obsession until using it became too painful to bear.

I miss writing, yet at the same time, I hate what it now triggers within me.

I was blown away.

Then, this weekend, while she was sitting right next to me, she wrote this poem. I was blown away. In someways it feels like something I would write. She’s nine.

I’ll die knowing that my kids will take a piece of me with them, but also, they’ve given my life definition.