Nepenthenet - Tumblr Posts - Page 2
foreign(or) god
god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.
DEAR MEN:
this is not a poem to say i hate men. but-
i am cat called by cars on three separate occasions on the same stretch of road while i am running just in one week and there are only so many times you can say fuck you before someone takes you up on it.
i am not flattered. i am always afraid.
because the men on motorcycles at a rest stop say hey dear in that voice, and suddenly i don’t want to stop.
because they make fun of women for going to the bathroom together when they know what happens when we go alone.
because a man buys a drink for me and it’s fruity and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a whiskey.
because i eat and i am called fat and i don’t eat and he goes babe, do you have an eating disorder or some shit? i don’t want to deal with that.
because i want to pay for my own dinner so you don’t have to deal with that.
because a man buys me a whiskey and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a sangria.
because i would like to buy my own damn drink.
because i go to work out at the gym and i can feel them looking at me, i can feel it itching over me.
because one of them slaps me on the ass and says look at that to his friends when it jiggles.
because it was like a gunshot and i am still flinching.
because it was a touch and i am still flinching.
because it was a long time ago and i am still flinching.
because every day there are these men and they don’t understand that i am a person and not a body and a human and not a body and i am a woman and not a body and this body is not your own.
dear men: you are one letter away from mean.
dear men: i don’t hate you*
*all.
dear men: sometimes i love you. too much. sometimes i need to let you go.
dear dad: i love you too. this is not a poem about you, for once. it’s about them.
dear men: THIS IS NOT YOURS. dear boys: learn from this. dear men: LISTEN TO THIS. dear women: do not take this.
the genocide of xenophilia
there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.
i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.
i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.
but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.
so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?
(please come kill this spider.)
i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.
the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.
our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.
it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.
but how could they have ever stopped it.
a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.
a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.
even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-
the silence of one body slipping away from view.
washing away the guilt of what we have done. how much guilt the world must hold.
the eat-your-feelings cafe
i eat past hungry to make up for the lonely. i eat for the empty chairs around me. this hungry swallows me whole. mouth turned inside out becomes a hole, becomes a table. table sits in front of empty chairs besides me. i am hungry. i am starving for anything more than nothing, something to feed this loneliness. empty mouth has hollow teeth. bite sharp in your own wicked. crave me to create me: inhale me whole.
bitter kisses
i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.
does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?
another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.
suck on the pulp and kiss everyone good bye. i leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. i leave a bitter sweetness on their tongue.
#prayforcharlottesville
i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.
after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?
HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?
and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.
That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.