I Need To Stop Going To YouTube Shorts Or Instagram Reels When I’m Seeking Auditory Or Visual Stimulus.

I've been smoking cigarettes made from your veins huffing that pain worshipping your blood like it wasn't enough just to keep you alive needed it inside me to be a part of the prophecy which hums with power what I've become condensates in the shower a touch of evening air a balmy breeze through his hair that's all you think of me and think of me often? Hardly.

Words by me <3

Ohio Total Solar Eclipse

Wara! 2023 - oil on canvas — Krzysztof Powałka (Polish, b.1985)

https://www.instagram.com/k.powalka_oilpaintings

Sappho, tr. by Anne Carson, from “If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” (x)

Trying to tame the electricity in my veins

Trazodone, Xanax, Abels and ‘caines

I think this weekend I’ll go on an alcohol bender

But at least drinks are free when you’re the bartender.

The Elevator is Out of Service- Please Use the Stairs - by Katie Walters

Fibromyalgia, took my bones when I was sleeping.

Crept in while I was resting,

Breathing deep against my pillow,

Or the paper of the books I could no longer read.

It grew inside me,

Drank my mitochondria like wine,

Took an angle grinder to my spine,

And wore me away like twilight.

I, got sick at uni,

In a small room, where nobody could hear me cry,

Or permit me to.

My nervous system quit, while I was working.

In the library where my legs were burning,

Like the oven door against my forearms,

And the stovetop, where I made myself curry. For the first time.

Independence, embryonic.

I was nineteen.

November was cold that year, and

January was colder.

As fresh and new as I was, and as,

Stark and clean and painful as my fading autonomy.

I tried to crystallize it.

In an essay, or a poem, in biro ink and off-brand toothpaste.

Like if I wrote it right I could write myself well

And when the rain fell in February,

I fell,

In Tesco and at the train station and on the stairs.

Swallowed the stones in my throat, chose not to dare question why it was that I kept falling.

And got back up.

Because strong people don’t get sick,

You stick it out, you do not quit,

And when the elevator is out of service,

You use the stairs.

I never knew how high the curb was until I could not climb it.

We searched for my bones in decomposing diagnoses,

Degrading medication on my tongue,

Took blood tests of my blood lines,

And on the coastline,

Tried to calcify my insides strong again.

Put our hands in the wet sand,

To build a tibia. Shape my sternum like a castle.

Clavicle and mandible and cranium.

Starlight and seafoam and gone.

My bones, are in the Rotunda museum,

Under the skin of the Gristhorpe man,

We walk where he walked, and I walk no longer,

Pressed behind glass, my skin tight as leather.

My bones, are in the limestone cliffs edge,

Grown from sediment,

Calcium carbonate, cycling, infinite, ground down to shale,

My bones are food for minke whales.

I am lying in bed, and ugly, like a princess.

Limp, and formless, and rolled out to sea

I am blue badge on double yellows,

Pepsi Max and heavy metal,

Flat on the backseat, and staring through the windscreen, where the starlings will dance until nightfall.

My bones, are a murmur of starlings,

Dark and undulating

The shapeless, shape of nature,

Inexplicable,

Impermanent,

And strong.

And I will not be another fucking tragedy,

Another DWP dispensability,

Too many of us have already died.

We build on their bodies. Defiant.

I, am a being of duty, and fury, and I want you to know, that I am broken,

Because they could not contain me whole.

Fibromyalgia, took my bones, and they grew. Fragmented, transcendent, and new,

I am fragile. And grounded. Bound to dropped kerbs. Sick insides.

But my bones?

Oh, my bones, are the sky.

Crawling out of the swamps where you buried me like the setting sun and the moon rises an enemy.

Carolina Outcrop. Never Trust a Woman Who Writes.

Be, be as you've always been

Be like the love that discovered the sin

That freed the first man and will do so again

And, lover, be good to me

Be that hope when Eden was lost

It's been deaf to our laughter since the master was crossed

Which side of the wall really suffers that cost?

And, lover, be good to me

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be, be as you've always been

True to the time and the placе you've been given

Your heart in thе world, and a world there within

And, lover, be good to me

Be there and just as you stand

Or be like the rose that you'd hold in your hand

That grows bold in a barren and an uneasy land

And, lover, be good to me

And, be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

Be as you've always been

I read the flecks in your eyes

like how a girl all alone

would read poetry.

.

Your eyes tell an odyssey

of the thousand lies you've heard,

each one a dark star.

.

Somewhere within your iris

there's an epic of pain and

love in equal parts.

.

Eyes like the night sky.

I see the galaxy and

wonder where I could fit in.

wet evening in April by Patrick Kavanagh