my teen years taught me nothing of importance except how to write clear and deep about what hurts I've written enough by now to fill a small library, so look back with me - I prayed for an ideal in cold rooms and I still became the only one who could save me you look at me at my worst and you tell me I've healed you look at me at my best and say I'm not enough you told me they only recognize greatness when it's in a party dress dancing, not a day older than twenty so tell me why I got more done half dead with godlike confidence than I ever did the way you asked of me?
would you have given me half your kingdom a wild prophet's head on a silver platter if I'd only been nice enough? I'm not your Salome, I'm not your beautiful daughter, I'm iron and blood with war in my veins I am the wild prophet you tried to kill call for my head all you like, I will no longer be a pawn in your game
I love you in a way you cannot love yourself in a twice divorced, second wife way that never happened, you want me so bad you don’t care if your chokehold love is killing me and I think it would kill you to stop pretending I think it would kill you to let me go even if it would save my life you call me wife and spouse and leave me screaming, but when I touched you that night I think we both knew it was over and I was grieving, I have been grieving and you don’t know how, you never did
one time, you took me out to eat and everyone in the restaurant gathered to you like flies on a carcass I’d always wanted to be invisible, forgotten but not like that
when we met you said you’d been wandering since before sunrise, trying to stay out of the house and away from your partner at the time it had been at least seven hours and you were covered in sweat as you spilled all the things you thought you wouldn’t there to me at that table
it’s been three years of riding as a pair of ghosts you’ve never stopped wandering and I’m very talented at grieving it’s practically one of my best friends now I never thought I’d have to waste so much of my youth grieving for the living grieving for myself grieving for you
I'm the result of two generations of fire, at least my grandfather saw horrors he likes to laugh about and won't talk about directly, but he replicates them compulsively when he's stressed out or bored my mother does the same thing and laughs about it too, but watches me for the same signs, the same crazy, like a ticking time bomb although often she is the cause of the insanity she fears so deeply at her core.
I want to say that the shows I like hit too close to home, but they play out like my life did for twenty four years. pyromania burned through my mother's line, held my grandfather prisoner. my mother had her own compulsions, not just fire. her hands, cold as death, were always busy, always searching, always grasping for another handhold, another tool, another soul, another project. her hazel eyes knew every entrance and exit, how to find and get leverage, and she was plagued by the nightmares, too. under the constant stress of a dying husband and warring children, her mind held her hostage for eighteen years, forcing her to build fortress after fortress, light fire after fire, see threat after threat, run and run.
and she saw me as a blackened mirror of herself, a shell burned through. she followed me like a firewatcher, as though I was a bomb primed to explode. my compulsions are not hers, but the terror is the same. the mechanism is the same or is similar enough to be indistinguishable. but I am here to quench the fire and the thirst and I might be crazy but I'm here to do things differently, so watch me if you must but be prepared for me to douse your flame
I don’t have a working title yet and frankly I don’t want to rush one or reveal it until it feels right. All I know right now is that I’ve been working through and with a lot of themes regarding mental health and cyclical patterns since my therapy session a few days ago and an interesting few poetry workshop sessions. So expect a lot of new work to do with circles and cycles! Maybe ellipses, too…hmm…
I do love a good ellipse.
There might be a poem in there, too. I really am quite eccentric (ha!)
I have some phone calls to make and I didn’t get much sleep last night since I was up until almost dawn watching Netflix – and not working – tragically, but I haven’t had access to my shows for weeks, so a good binge was in order.
More tomorrow. I’ve gotta run before my energy runs out and I lost my nerve.
Hello, everyone. I want to preface this by saying that I have absolutely no fucking clue where this is going. I started a draft of this post in the Substack app, but the links were being odd, so I am starting over from the web editor and seeing where the night takes me.
For starters, I was really, really fucking pissed off at the state of the world, and still am. I was at the tail end of a five year and some long divorce process that I address in the poem “the jailer”, and I was stuck in a deep flow state, often in the wee hours of the morning, screaming my thoughts out on paper, kinda like I’m doing now.
I felt like everything in my life was in shambles, and, desperate to regain some internal sense of control, I wrote like my life depended on it. I’ve written my way out of holes like that for years.
I’m also often up for most of the night most nights doing what the fuck ever, whether I’m writing rambles like this, crafting zines like easy to hate, catching up on messages, watching shows, or reading fluffy fanfics. It feels like a fuckload is expected of me during the day, I go nonstop, and the wee hours of the morning is the only time I get to myself to just…be and have time to do whatever I want and actually feel like I have time to be a functional person. Nobody needs me at 2:27 AM (the time I’m writing this), and if they do need me, I know it’s truly dire. In a time when I still feel like I have very little agency over my life, this is heaven.
I think I’m gonna leave y’all with a few lines from “20 January 2025”, one of my favorite poems from easy to hate:
"I hail from the hellfire that raised me and the shadows that granted me solace Black as the Pit from pole to pole And I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul."
Go forth and carve some time out to relax today. It’s rebellion.
