That Blonde Writer

But it hurts so fucking bad

This hurts more than the end did

This hurts more than everything

I didn't realise I still loved you

And I don't want us to end

Ever

But we had to

And as long as you were alone

You were still mine

But you never really were

And you will never be again

And I think I want everything to end

And I want to leave

And god I knew this time of year was cursed for me

But I didn't know that I could lose even

More than I already had

And I didn't know shitty TV shows would make me cry

Because I still think you're watching them

Next to me

And I still hear what you'd be saying

And sometimes I hold the ice cream tub out as if you'd take a scoop too

I didn't realise that I was gone

What if I actually fall in

Love again?

Will it feel like glass shards in my heart

Or broken promises

Splattered against the inside of my eyelids

In blinding neon?

I hope it does. I don't

Want to feel the warmth

Of laughter and real tears;

The nights feel shorter because

I'm not alone again

And beginning to dream.

Let me keep my nightmares.

Please don't make me

And the Earth

I'd spin the stars across the night sky until there

Was only enough black velvet to set off their light:

No black empty voids

To swallow gazes

And hope

And the idealism of small children

Who stay up

Long past their bedtimes

Staring at the moon until their eyes grow heavy with sleep or tears,

I tried to chill myself out by reading Frost’s Collected Poems. Because you know, poems about nature...should be chill. 

And as stand-alone pieces they are very relaxing, they call to mind old English hollows in woods, untouched by man. The brambled paths you remember so vividly that you stumbled upon as a child. The silence of a morning, and the intelligence of woodland animals that seemed to be one with you when you ran as far away from humankind as possible. 

But never read them as a whole. His overwhelming guilt at his perceived role in the death of his long time friend Edward Thomas spins what were once existential questions that one asks oneself when faced with man’s insignificance when surrounded by nature, become internalised wrath and suicidal pleas. His lauding of the purity and holiness of Nature becomes a struggle against God and Mankind. What seems like a poetic trip of the tongue becomes a rage against the being he called ‘his Maker’ and his willingness to see the world burn in flames- but not out of anger at the world, more out of a deep need to see Judgement, and a belief that he could watch Impending Doom from the pedestal he placed himself on alongside God. This narcissism is so contradictory to his self-hatred that this poem becomes the proverbial devil on one’s shoulder and the next, the angel. I felt like with each poem I was led to one conclusion and the succeeding one, quite the opposite. 

Frost’s poems are not peaceful. They are not reminiscent of bygone days in the British and American countryside. They are a desperate attempt to out what he believed to be his sins- a never ending war with himself, his God, and humanity- on the metaphorical old altar in the tabernacle in Jerusalem. (He did himself hint at this when speaking to his friend Lawrence Thompson, 1948)