Monday, 19th July 2021
I have scars on my knees from when I was six, hopeful of the days that I could run free from the tangled branches enclosing my mind. They wrapped me in with faces whose eyes always slipped across mine. And then they found my legs and let me slip, numb again from yesterday's wound. I would run, all limitations abandoned, chasing the friends I wasn't close to, always branches apart from the world I was already consumed by. But I was happy. And then I would fall. It happened again and again until I saw the danger in falling, now white stretching marks across the bottom of my knees. I saw the danger in everything.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis // @i-wrotethisforme // Jorge Louis Berges // @smokeinsilence //@viridianmasquerade //Jorge Louis Berges // @honeytuesday // Kaveh Akbar // F. Scott Fitzgerald // AKR //Olivie Blake, from “Alone With You in the Ether” // Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrimage
let me stay,
dancing like fae among flowers
lost to the breeze
and summer sun-showers
Fill me with desire, I've been parched these last hundred years, died too young, left my heart out on a bookcase then forgotten, I forgot to want myself and everything I grew into.
I forgot to write and love it.
I forgot to love the darkness inside of me, the shadows that held my jaw and pulled me into you.
I forgot that you held everything I ever wanted and feared, that I traded love for fear.
My desire has not completely left, I still want everything that I lost and will feel again.
I still want you.
I feel laden with unsaid dreams
spilling over my hair, my feet
walking through a daylit night
full of sparkling stars and troubled sleep
“We cannot solve problems with the kind of thinking we employed when we came up with them.” — Albert Einstein
Sara Teasdale, from 'Two Songs for Solitude; The Crystal Gazer' published in 'American Poetry, 1922: A Miscellany'
I am more a fool for thinking, wiser for feeling, as if my head had ever the chance of hiding this from me
Will this day ever end
for fear of waking again;
a new rise, a new day
forever a lifetime away
i am haunted. i am my own haunting. i am the ghost in the graveyard of my body, mournful, monstrous.
Historian, writer, and poet | proofreader and tarot card lover | Virgo and INTJ | dyspraxic and hypermobile | You'll find my poetry and other creative outlets stored here. Read my Substack newsletter Hidden Within These Walls. Copyright © 2016 Ruth Karan.
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