I reel back from the sunlight every time it caresses my cold skin, cooing in vein for me to love it back. Nothing can bring me to it. I have been burned before. I have been honest and I have been present and I have walked in the damnation of the daylight and I will not make that mistake again.
I will make it again. I will make it again. If only to see the sky, I will make the awful trek from hidden to known, again.
I had abandoned all intelligence seeing as it got the world nowhere. Maybe in a good world, with good people, advancements would forward us and make us more humane, lessen suffering, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and so on.
But put knowledge in the hands of a brute and he grows ever crueler.
What happens to memories of broken places? Do they bleed too?
When I was a child I’d only known depression through medicine commercials, where the depressed person was a porcelain wind up doll that had to be wound over and over again to walk. I didn’t really understand it then, tucked away neatly in my television set. Why wouldn’t they want to keep going, always? Why would they need to be wound? And now as I look down at my porcelain foot, I wonder why it isn’t shuffling in front of the other.
What is love but the desire to feel sunlight through their skin. And hold there.
When you wear masks like you take breaths, you don’t notice that the act is killing you. You don’t see the bags under your eyes, the redness invading your scleras. The undying tug on the corners of your thin pursed lips. You see only the delighted faces of those so pleased to see not your face, but the faces you adorn for them. Catered to them. For some, the mask you wear is a mirror, for they want nothing more than to see themselves in you. For others, black as night to obscure anything akin to their likeness. But you are so enraptured with their happiness, you neglect your own. For there is a worse fate than being unloved.
It is being loved as something you’re not.
Sincerity is the blood held in by the knife in your chest. It feels too much like dying to be honest.
Life asked Death:
Have you ever been loved?
She responded:
Unfortunately. Flickering moments of love for me in forlorn men are common. Though they always end the same. In my arms, thinking only of you.
“Why do you eat men?” The sailor asked the siren.
“You ate us first,” she replied.
Living with my mother is like living in my office. She is my boss, my judge, my jury—my executioner. I hear her performance reviews of me in the living room, sat comfortably next to her easing into the armrests. I however can’t afford to be comfortable, I live on the clock and there is only a pinpoint for my big toe to precariously perch on as I teeter in and out of her good graces.
A Bother
I don’t mean to be a bother, I really don’t. I just can’t help but ruining everything all the time.
You don’t ruin everything silly.
Breakfast?
Well yeah but that’s one off.
Mom’s anniversary with dad?
That was an accident.
So I’ve said. If I told you it was on purpose would you be mad at me?
Well, no, I’m not mom but I’d be shocked. Why would you spill wine on her at dad’s grave on purpose?
I genuinely thought it would make her laugh. Because dad spilled wine on her on their first date remember?
Ohh, right. I didn’t think of that. Did you tell her you were trying to recreate that moment? She loves telling that story.
No. I felt so bad about it I threw up behind some lady’s tombstone over the hill. Mary S. Timbleton was her name.
You never told me you threw up on a dead woman’s grave.
Behind it.
Nearly there anyways. Makes for a better story. Dad would’ve laughed.
He was certainly a better storyteller than I am.
I like your stories just fine. You’ve yet to ruin one of those.
Thanks. I think.
Why do the ones I love keep being taken from me? What have I done to deserve shards of their memory pricking my fingertips like spindles every time I scroll on my phone and see a face that has stolen a piece of them? Their eyes on someone else’s head, their smile creasing someone else’s cheeks, their ginger hair curling around someone else’s ears that don’t fucking look right! I hate that I see you everywhere. I hate more that it’s never you.
I know not what to say to her, her wide eyes eat up my thoughts as the sun does water; my head is entranced in cloud when I am with her. Siren on the rocks, I wish only for rainfall so that my skin feels as yours does.
-Diary of a siren
The candyfolk though sweet in stature were bitter hearted, something was very rotten about them. Though that didn’t stop them from whittling each other down with their tongues. Hungry, constantly. This place I’ve fallen into, it must be hell. Or if they taste well enough, a very brief heaven, and then purgatory.
She was a moth that waited for the light to find her. And when she died it was dark as always.
These teeth of mine, that I press my tongue against, will outlast my soul. I taste death, how when I die, my crooked jaw will linger here on this earth without me. It haunts me to smile and see a glimpse of what will remain.
D. Alan Holmes, Enlightenment // Signet Amenti // @cryptonature // Alan Wilsom Watts // Evan M. Cohen, "Oceans" // Nikita Gill // @pauladoodles // Julian Gough, "Minecraft End Poem" // Sleeping At Last—Saturn
In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.
I would let her put rods in my fingers and tie thin golden ropes around my wrists if it meant she’d smile at me. I’d make a good puppet, a very good puppet. And I don’t mind forgoing being her daughter, she never liked me very much that way. I make a much better puppet.
Isn’t it a shame that our empathy can be one sided? That we notice the wound of the beast first, and bleed with him, while his eyes are set on our swollen heads?
I seldom feel the words he says, I’ve steeled myself to any emotion he may try and peel off of me like loose flakes of skin. It is too tough now, calloused to the point of no return. Even his softness though, is lost on me, I feel no warmth or cold. He has forced me to this numb state. He has taught me that feeling leads only to pain.
Sweet thing didn’t bite me nearly hard enough to hurt me, though not for lack of trying. She thought I was dead, but she’d just woken me with her nibbling. My eyes dragged down to the source, a head full of spiked black hair, with droopey triangles flat on her forehead form being above water. Her eyes were black as well, I was transfixed by them, how her pupils devoured her face. The sharp point of her nose dug into my knuckle as her mouth inched it’s way up my finger. Our eyes met. She inhaled sharply and pushed herself away from me, her eyes warbled with shock, and then settled down to worry. I wasnt worried though. Not for a moment.
-Diary of a Siren
Fairies are a gentle sort, no bigger than pointer fingers. A little fire sprite burned the tip of mine once. She wasn’t sorry about it neither, she just snickered and gave me a thimble to wear over its ugly little boil. I sort of admired that unapologetic way she had about her. Her nature wasn’t wrong after all, she didn’t burn me out of hatred or malice. She burned because she was fire.
Let her die softly, let the seabed take her as if in a dream.
My cat didn’t like me much. I saved his life when he wasn’t more than two days old, but I never was his favorite person. He’d meow at me all angry like whenever I got near him, so I left him be. He’d let me pet him once in a blue moon and I treasured that. But he got sick. The sort of sick you don’t get better from. And even though he avoided me most of his life, and I respected his wishes, deep down he remembered what I did for him. His last days alive he came and sat with me. Maybe asking me again, save me. I know you can. You did it before. And with everything in me I wish I could have. I would have saved him a thousand times over even if it meant he stayed in rooms I wasn’t in, and preferred people other than me. I would give everything for him to dislike me a lifetime’s worth. But I only got four years.
How on earth did you find me?
Oh sweet siren, every inch of water you touch tastes of sugar. I couldn’t lose you if I tried.
Well you ought to at least try.
Bite your tongue lass.
Or what?
Or I’ll do it for you.
Rotten sailor. I’ve no desire to play with you anymore. Leave me be.
How can you lure me off my ship and not even finish me? What am I to do now, drown?
You’d better not. I’d snap your neck myself and let the ocean have you but she retches at the taste of pork.
I’m no pig you finned whore!
Then why’s your nose look like that? Go to shore and dry off before your wife finds you wet, piglet.
—Diary of a Siren
I find comfort in rotten men, with nothing to their name but their love for me. They are corpses of their former ambitions, if they had any to begin with not that I’d care, and I rest my head on their bloated bellies and dig my nails in their cracked old skin until scabfulls of pride fall off. What sour smell fills my nose oh I can’t get enough of it. They adore me you see, and I never have to worry about them running off. Their legs don’t often work, stationary fellows don’t often stray. Good of them not to, for if they ever did I’d put them deeper in the ground than even the most desperate woman would be willing to dig. I can’t help but be the romantic that I am, and what is there not to love in an utterly rotted man. It is addicting the level of devotion they provide, the sort only an abandoned man can. How sweet is the love of a loveless one, untouched and untainted in wait for me.
It hurts me, the rust. The moving water is both a curse and a blessing, I know it rusts my chainmail further but my skin is dying for the tips of its rushing fingers. My leg has been shattered beneath this fountain statue for nearly seven days. I cannot stand, I cannot move but inches left and right in its basin. How horrible a way to die in war, by a stone man, in an iron casket. Though if a living man had struck me down, I’d say the very same.
—a solider named Feo
Her cupids bow dips to her bottom lip, drawn constantly, words seldom loosed. I tease laughter from her with my foolishness, and every time her mouth opens another of love’s arrows is fired at me, and if I am a soldier, I am one who so longs to be struck down, I am one who would never raise a shield against her.
—Diary of a Siren
I thought I’d miss my pinky finger more dearly but I can’t seem to manage it. The way her eyes lit up as her teeth dug just beneath my knuckle, I’m tempted to let her eat something else.
—Diary of a Siren