We tried asking politely,
Quietly, talking amongst ourselves
Hoping you’d overhear in hushed
Rustles, a subliminal message
In your ear (save us).
Always – A poem
Old lovers, old friends, had beginnings and ends,
But as my grip slips from the recollection, vines wind
Their way up a sleeping spine to twist into my sleeping mind,
Thorns hooked onto the memory, grown into a dream –
Becoming a dance with the familiar amongst the unseen.
Haunted house – A poem
Some nights make a haunted house out of a home,
when the midnight sleep silence leaves the awake on their own.
A phantom hand on my shoulder, a chill in my room,
or the faint scent of an oddly familiar perfume.
A dream caught by a thread – A poem
I awoke without thought,
Just blank in my head
And a dream still hauntingly
Hung by a thread,
Unravelling a deepening
Hole in my chest.
Made of Rain – A poem
I can’t touch the heart of the rain, it can only touch me
As it slips right through my fingers
Where a liquid hand can’t be held.
And the rain may have a beat but it’s too soft and quick
To be human and too rhythmic to be alive.
The rain never stutters or skips a beat
And I can dance in it but it can’t dance with me.
I can speak a soliloquy and pretend the rain is listening
But it can never confess a single secret back to me.
The rain may smell like a breath or a familiar comfort
But the rain is everything that has ever felt lonely.
Drunk on too much life – A poem
I have days lined up in bottles,
Hours pouring out the tap.
I fill glass after glass with minutes
And drink more time than can elapse.
Costumes of myself – A poem
Maybe tomorrow I will slip back into an old skin
To be momentarily reacquainted with
A memory, for the fun of remembering.
I will cloak myself in a costume of my past self,
Playing dress up in a skin and a mind once mine,
And the wrong-er it feels makes my new self feel right-er.
I will close my eyes and ignore the ill-fitting
Tight squeeze, stretched straps, and snapped seams.
For in a dance of vivid recall I remember: this,
This is what it once felt like to be me.
In Between Days (and other blackout poems)
These are a few blackout poems I have created, some recently and some from a little while ago. I like doing these when I want to write something but don’t want to conjure something from the depths of my brain. It’s also an interesting restriction to place upon one’s creative capacity, because there are only…
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I wonder how I look when I don’t quite look like me – A poem
I found you in a song the other day
And you’ve been stuck in my head ever since.
You hide in faceless laughs and sideways glances,
An illusion in the corner of my eye.
I think I see a flicker of familiar and then
You’re gone, lingering as a distant relic
Or existing in only two dimensions –
Frozen in photographs
Where I don’t quite look like me.
The mind is a time machine – A poem
The mind is a time machine,
A look back upon our lives machine,
Think forward with our mind machine.
But there’s a difference between what you saw
And what you see, through a growing and different
Set of the same eyes.
Lauren Kathleen 