Btlk-like

Hands held breaths,

Claimed themselves to be Gods today;

Said:

Here lies a body-

And the life within,

Both held in my grasp.

We do not have the habit of letting go;

Even in infanthood

They taught us how to hold things,

Clutch them tight,

For anything given the chance of leaving

Will run away from you.

I have gone through life

Holding things that do not embrace me back;

I have the cuts to prove it.

Sometimes, we cut parts of ourselves

Just to watch something heal.

What are hands

If not something that holds

Another thing;

Another person,

Another body?

Sometimes hands let things fall,

Get tired of holding so much of

What does not want to stay;

Hands look in the mirror,

Ask themselves what have they become,

What have they done?

All that blood and all that glory:

You can not wash away either.

I once wrote a poem.

And the poem strangled me.

I wrote another

And it held me.

How do you know who is here for the slaughter

And who will embrace you,

Unless you see their hands

Reach for you?

You know you cherish them

When their absence aches-

A non-existence of ache

That attaches itself to you.

And sometimes we cherish those

Who slaughter us.

Like God.

Or the hands of our lovers.

I think the kindest thing a God could do

Would be to leave us alone;

To not stand there, peer over our heads,

Look into us, quite so literally-

Not keep a track of the actions,

Of intentions;

Or disapprove what we became.

Gods bring catastrophes

We are not ready for;

Bring forth wreckage,

Not knowing what to do;

Gods cause so much damage;

I mean Hands.

Hands reaching for things

They do not know how to hold yet.

Perhaps Hands should leave things be,

Unclench those fists,

See how much there is

To simply caress.

A.G.

Important Reminders

Do you think that if you love a certain thing, it is supposed to be constant throughout and it loses its charm when it stops being exactly that?

I think that the idea of loving an entity as it changes and transforms is much more endearing than going "Oh. This doesn't resemble what I initially fell for."

I think that especially with people, you have to know that they're constantly moving and they are experiencing things, and they change. To hope that something stays exactly as it was when you fell in love with it doesn't sit right with me. Haven't you changed? Do we have the right to tell something to remain stagnant when we aren't?

I think I personally have a skittish attitude towards things that remain constant; on the other hand, change feels so natural. I think I see it in this light: to be with someone or something as it changes is to get to discover more things to love, new things to love about them. I also believe that there are certain things that always remain the same. Even when the person is entirely someone different, there is always a set of habits or a preference or something specific to just this one person, that still remains constant. I find myself fascinated by the fact that even after this landslide of a change, there are moments where you can see them be the person you first go to know or how even after such an elaborate transformation, there are things that still somehow remain the same.

I think there are tiny constants even in the grandest of transformations. I quite ardently believe that people are much more endearing when they embrace their changes rather than thinking that the people who loved them when they were someone else will stop doing so as they grow into another person. I think that if the people you know do not fit the life of who you want to be or who you have become, you should let them go. So no, I do not think that anything I love owes me the grave burden of being in a state of constant; in a state of stagnancy.

-Anika

You held me close before you stabbed me.

I guess there are people close by

Who keep you at a sword's length

So they get to use it.

Your kisses tasted an awful lot like war

And I will not be your white flag anymore.

Our fights felt like the earth shaking,

Felt like war cry;

The silence felt like an interstice between two tragedies.

Our kisses grew shorter

And interruptions became devastating

Until you finally struck and won the battle,

Won the war.

There's blood between us now

And one tragedy in all of this silence//

It has been a year since we last talked.

mother of otherness, eat me.

(Sylvia Plath)

Boo.

To acknowledge the Monster is to say

It is here,

That it has been here all along;

It is to stand in the dark with a terrible thing

Hoping it does not devour you.

To be hopeful is to be terrified

Of anything otherwise;

It is to hold on

To withering threads of optimism

As the likelihood of the unfavourable

Gets the guillotine ready for your head.

To scream Monster is to say

Here stands a terrible thing

That scares me;

You cannot simply

Take the elephant out of the room

And throw it under the bus,

You know?

To be scared is to admit

You have something to be scared of

And something to be scared for.

To draw a monster and ask yourself

What makes one,

Is to ask yourself what you consider

Dreadful enough to be called inhuman.

To tell stories of your childhood

Is to say it is long gone;

It is to acknowledge

Childhood pushed you off the cliff

And ran away.

It is to say you have been

Free falling ever since,

Trying to grasp at things

That do not stay.

To have an inheritance

Is to say that

Everyone in the family is dead.

To scream Monster

Is to stand in the dark beside it

And say you know terrible well enough

To know what a Monster is.

To say you are here

Is to realize there was a time

When you were not,

That there will once again

Be a time

When you won't be here;

It is to say you don't know

What time is anymore.

To be alive

Is to be terrified

(All the time)

And hopeful,

Even if the guillotine

Is getting ready

For your very execution;

It is to turn the lights off

And sleep in the room

With the Monster

And pray like hell

It does not kill you.

- A.G.

Life should be a long drawn affair of yellow.

We kissed and fought wars

With our tongues,

You seemed to taste an awful lot

Like the lull after a bomb;

The quiet after the storm

When there is nothing more left

To break apart, nothing more left

To get undone.

We tore limbs and rearranged parts

Of our own selves-

Like the Jenga tiles

We never seemed

To arrange right.

We crumbled there on your bed,

And never could hold each other again,

Could never hold our own selves again.

Inevitable

We were a prolonged sunset,

Something beautiful

That we knew 

Would end in darkness anyways.

We were a mouthful of words

The tongue couldn't help but mess up.

We were a tiny cat

Who climbed the big tree

And forgot it had yet to learn 

How to come back down.

We went skydiving,

Up, up, up 

And the earth pulled us back down;

We free fell into our own demise

And made a mess,

We left chaos behind.

They really be erasing parts of history which make them look bad huh?