Like Bruises, Baby, I Linger

I’m Blue, I use they/them pronouns, and I’m the resident poet behind writingfromruins. I’ve been running this blog for several years now, and what started out as me carving out a niche in fandom turned into an experiment to see if I could upload weekly poems. I’d call it an overall success, and I plan to keep running it for many years to come! I’m currently in the process of slowly overhauling my tagging system as well as doing some spring cleaning regarding old works, so things may be shifting around for a while. Eventually I‘ll get it all squared away to my satisfaction, but tumblr mobile (the way I usually post and manage this blog) is trash about those sorts of things so it might take a month or five. The new tagging system is as complete as it needs to be, and work has finally begun on removing old poetry from this blog and archiving it elsewhere. There shouldn’t be much of a difference, unless you’re in the habit of reading six years back into the blog, but if you *really* want my old poetry and we’ve spoken before, dm me. We’ll talk.

A note on content warnings: Much of my poetry involves death, blood, weaponry, blasphemy, body horror, and violent imagery to some degree. This is partially because of where this blog started out, but mostly because I enjoy how impactful the imagery can be. Poems tagged as Vent Poem or Kevlar Thread will usually lean furthest into these concepts. I fully admit that I don’t tag trigger warnings as much as I should, something I‘m working to get better at, but most of my archives are untagged and it will likely remain that way until I have enough time and energy to go through it all. Please read responsibly.

(Updated 7-24-21 - added new tags)

(Updated 4-26-22 - updated blog renovation status, changed some phrasing and added new information to tags)

Tags!

Inkwell Incarnate - These are poems about me! They generally explore my feelings about being queer and mentally ill. This is also where I get really soft about my friends.

FAHC poetry / LBBIL- Check out this tag for Immortality (of a sort), Romance (of a sort), and Crime (just crime). LBBIL (short for Like Bruises, Baby, I Linger) is the tag I use nowadays, and anything tagged FAHC that survives my cleaning will be swapped over to it eventually.

Eat Your Holy Heart Out - I have complicated feelings about christianity. I express those feelings by writing about really pissed off angels. That’s honestly the long and short of it.

Hey Postman - This is the tag where i put my askbox poems! If you have a line you want to see me riff off of, or some topic or imagery you’d like to see my take on, feel free to drop me an ask! May take a bit though, I’m writing them as inspirations strikes.

And Still The Light Remains (ASTLR) - Sometimes I get mugged by a image or a line and write a poem solely to get it out of my head. This tag will be where I put those, so if you’re looking for rampant imagery, this is where to go.

Party Favor - This will be a grab bag of stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere. Usually some sort of challenge I’ve given myself.

There may be some defunct tags still lingering from the blog’s past, but the above are the ones I am currently using / will use to retag old works.

A body is an image is a body, my crooked teeth a cage, prayer and tongue both captives in my maw, captivations, in my image I make mistakes. I am only so good at being loved. There is faith and there is tightrope walking. There is faith and there is mountain climbing. I do all of the above with net and harness and a knife for making sacrifices. I don’t demand this of those I love- but I am only so good at loving too. I do not understand it, I am good at cutting ropes. There is faith and there is a shape of higher power that someday I may know again, however: Today I take the bus

and all my faith is used up on that.

Cravings haunt like covered mirrors- blackberry, a sweet that has long enjoyed the protection of thorns, blue raspberry, a fruit than never grows, never needs to protect itself, rootless, seedless, fruitless, sweet. In my own body I see my own foundations and take hollow honor that they exist, take no pride that I can see them. Take nothing at all. Watch my hallowed hollows haunt me.

I chase all my aversions down and attempt to drown in them- bitter as a single sip of beer, of coffee, as an excuse to leave the rest behind and stay empty. The hunger stays, cravings like a hand pressed reaching deeper and deeper into thorns to draw blood, hands around what meager sweetness that rewards me for it.

It becomes a trial to remain upright with so few places yet to empty out. Structural decay. Collapse on call. You are not meant to live like this, I know. My hands are not ones that leave projects half finished, I know now this is also a hollowness I will seek someday to fill. I am learning to be idle, I am learning to devour.

Sense and sensuality discarded

just to see the shapes protruding

in the way skin moves over bone,

ribcage, pelvis, spine,

and how they twist, underneath the muscle

and clean expanse of skin, you move

and hate as it moves with you, as it does

only always what you ask of it,

it is too much,

this body, half tailored and left

fraying at the edges.

living in it feels, somedays,

like pulling at each stitch

There is a premise

you consider sometimes as you

carve through yourself and fashion

something of a body of your body:

Frankenstein, making something

(all good sense discarded)

that both could and could not

be called a resurrection

into new cloth, a body hewn together,

far too perfect to be understood

as anything a body ought to be.

Living in it must have been

like waking up tailored

into your very own funeral attire

and underneath, the body,

pulling at its stitches

unsure, like you are now,

which ones it could survive breaking

Thank you

I’ve missed this blog too, but most of the poetry i’ve been writing lately has had to go towards other ends these last few years. I’ve been meaning to come back home to here, but just haven’t had the time to dedicate to it.

Until now.

“You have to laugh at it. You have to laugh at the way you stand outside a door and pantomime knocking without ever making contact because otherwise you would scream or cry and that would be worse to explain then the laughing or the knocking you’re not doing. Sometimes you stand there hand raised and stop yourself before you can kick or collapse against or headbutt the door, anything to tell someone to open it, and you have to laugh because your laugh is silent anyways when you laugh like this. You have to laugh because you scream silent too and when you drive yourself to tears to knock on the door even then the knock is only the first step and every cell of you is still being circulated full of fear from your lungs. But the laughing keeps it all from shutting down before you knock.”

dead electric night and it is quiet in the winter as the clock ambles towards dawn and i am still all alight. Still too much in a body, too much to breathe right + laughing laughing laughing silently because there’s nothing else to do and it really does seem funny when i can’t sleep from it. Might have to shut myself down the hard way. Might have to cover the eyes and the mouth until breath hisses against the suction against the palm and my eyes seal shut. if i can make myself small and quiet and hold my breath until the ribs are tight around it the fear goes away before i can. and when the fear is gone i can breathe in and out and in and out and the only thing that pours through me is pure elation + when i laugh there is no scream i am trying to avoid just an absence of fear unfamiliar + when i am done laughing now i can finally sleep.

You are knee deep in purple, all up and down your shins in messy little nebulas, and you open your mouth to swallow a rat whole to eat yourself from the inside out in hedonistic hunger. No half measures. No way to touch a world that doesn’t bruise you back. You walk into anything hip height or below with the grace and confidence and speed of a meteorite and let the lit up pain receptors tell you where the lines are. Where the rules are. Where the world is. You have little gods in your mouth and you can feel their little feet down your throat.

It is good to be unmade, sometimes. It is good to be devoured. You have spent most of your life not knowing what pain is when you feel it, not being able to put a name to acrid rage, a life spent raising little gods like rat kings with their tails all tangled in each other, going nowhere, starved rat corpse tied to live rat starving. You’ve been the dead rat before. You’ve been the hungry little god. A body is a body is a body is food. Your little gods of chew-through-the-wall love you like they love the promise of a way out, even when it hurts. You hold them in your mouth and your stomach and your hands and you let yourself in the spin and the hole-in-the-world get angry.

The rat you swallowed chews through some of your more essential lines, the central nervous chord ringing down your spine gets severed in the bloodrush and you go cheerfully limp and dizzydizzy from the backlash. Good little gods that keep you all giddy awake and incoherent when they struggle in the cramped dark of your stomach. The noise you make these days when you feel the ache come through the acid is more delight than damaged. You are so tired these days. When you do not stop despite this it is sometimes because you could not stop without a catastrophe.

Mouth full of noise

Mouth full of other sharp things

Mouth gaping around a shattersound.

Mouth full of-

—

(Sorry)

—

The mouth is a vacant, violent thing.

The act of chewing your mouth back shut

draws blood like wick from a candle

2.

The sense of burning isn’t fire its just

the way your body isn’t built to tear at itself

from within because of the way your body

is built like this anyways,

anyways when the lungs cant hold air

anymore you get all your ribcage

lit up in neon in your torso.

Even with your eyes closed,

Pain makes you luminescent

3.

Over the years it has become more

and more of a conversation with yourself

that you’ve learned to decipher and this year

you spat the first sentence into existence

and responded with the grinding sound of

gravel pouring from your throat on

public transportation, on the damn train,

sitting cross legged on the floor during a delay,

cutting yourself off at the air supply.

Then apologizing with the same air

and throat and tongue convulsing as before

What else could it be but language?

4.

Mouth’s full of wet sound.

Nothing else you can do with it

but keep your air as still as suffocation.

Shallow grave breathing, dirt in the back

of your throat and you cough

and you cough

(Sorry)

and you cough

and all it does is lodge more and more grit

In your system

Your lungs are full too.

Thick wet mud comes coughing up tasting

like mucus and medicine. Like winter

coming back. Like it never left at all.

-