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My soul is quiet this evening
Because the dead men who live there
Want me to move on tonight.

They’ll change their minds in a few days.

© Me, Betsy

Tonight’s a night for insomnia.

Tonight’s a night for insomnia
A waning gibbous night for sleeplessness
A clear May dusk for thinking
on what makes lesser women sob.

Tonight’s a night for wretched held-back moans
A muffled eve for thoughts of bones
A dusty page reread from my blood brain tomes
that clerics would illuminate with tears.

Tonight’s a night for thoughts on too much death
Tonight’s a night for thoughts on lacking love
A night with innocence dissolved
as the waning gibbous falls

Tonight’s a night for insomnia
I sense it as morning coffee hits my lips
I take comfort though: I will not dream
Tonight I’m only haunted by
the blood brain gibbous me.

© Me, Betsy

To Live Deliberately.

A man went to the woods to live deliberately.
But that choice only appeals to those bored by
the in-deliberate,
the fanciful,
the false hope,
the true hope.

These are the guilty pleasures I can’t deny myself
If I lived deliberately, I’d lose all the things I wake up for in the morning
All the things I lament not getting as I put myself to sleep at night.
The reality of the deliberate hurts too much.

But I? I do go to the woods. For an hour or two.
That’s the only place I can cry alone.

© Me, Betsy

Don’t hold my hand

Don’t hold my hand
while we drive along
Glen Coolidge Drive
at dusk on a tuesday
while the stars say hello.

Don’t kiss the skin there
as we slow for a bicyclist
ambling along the shoulder
vest reflecting stars.

Don’t smile into the night
as you drive one handed
hands warm with a bright scar
star-white on your tan skin.

Don’t love me in my dream
because I’ve never hated waking up
more than I ever have
these star years I’ve known you.

Don’t sit silent, I know you mumble-sing when it’s quiet
I guess my brain can’t copy you well enough in my sleep.

But it can make the most beautiful stars…

© Me, Betsy

The Death-Taste Caramel

I know the bitter ache of death-taste on my tongue
It’s salted caramel, pennies, rocks scraping the roof of your mouth
Like Cap’n Crunch, without the Saturday morning cartoons.

I know the tangy burn of death-smell in my nose
It’s sulphur granite marbles paint, and acrid bus exhaust in cold night
Hot and sacrosanct, the only way to travel in the city.

I know the trembling tickle tick of death-feel on my skin
Hair-rise and burning sticky caramel waxing, scarring, skin-changing
Reminders of life-breath gasping.

It’s the buzzings from a phantom phone,
My number’s changed since then
It’s been so long since then.
But I wake before my alarm sometimes,
Certain of a text from you,
Certain I’ll think of you that day.

Vibrations run up my leg during school and I check my phone and there’s nothing there and it hurts more than sunshine sometimes, but I will never learn from my mistakes and I’ll always wait for you to say sorry that you tainted caramel for me. It’s been so long since then.

Tonight I wonder if he was cremated.
I never was actually told. I never asked.
Tonight I think a little bit about when caramel didn’t hurt.
It’s been so long since then.

© Me, Betsy.

Old Gods in Porter

onceuponabetsy:

Remind me, oh muse, of that day in September!

Just a group of ancient gods in congress in the field behind Porter.
Beer for Set’s birthday, after Latin on chalkboards.
The nymph brought the libations, dressed them with candles and box tape.
Circe herself is bawdy and tricky; chaotic, spontaneous, leather bag at her side.
Cicero and Triptolemus pose for the camera, laughing at nothing, having nothing but time.
Hecate smiles; sitting quiet and awkward; words spinning overhead a cricket-chirp chorus.

Joking ‘bout sex, nouns and verbs, professors, declensions;
Smelling of smoke, and the ocean, dry tree roots and wind;
Thinking on futures, mortality and grad school;
Tasting the beer and the dust-air on tongues;
These are the things the gods did for this time.

For a moment in time, nothing could hurt us;
For a moment in time, we had nothing to lose;
For a moment in time, the world stopped spinning;
Just for us gods, for an hour or two.

And there’s hope with their future, their mornings are bright.
Mysteriously, boastfully, their sun always shines.
And I, cold Hecate, had never been more frightened of my uncertain fate.

We brushed ants off our legs, and brushed cares off our skin.
We were in love with the air and we breathed it full in.

Then we dispersed, us old gods, remembered only by Hecate of the crossroads.

Remind her, oh muse, of that day in September.

© Me, Betsy

Just ignoring my essay… don’t mind me (I should probably repost this to my writing blog, but I just got a lot of feels, so it’s going into my personal blog first! I actually started writing this in October, believe it or not, but I’m only now just finishing it. Being done with my comps kind of gives it new meaning…).

Deserts and Oceans

Both the desert and the ocean
have horizons unobtainable.
We change the sky and her colors
with our aether and our moisture.
If our particles hit skin, harsh enough, fast enough
We’ll both sting; by chance or in vengeance
at the wronging of our sands.
But you would not notice
Rainy storms on the horizon
While I’ll flash-flood,
panicked by the water so in tandem with you.

There was a drought this year,
and I thought I could last this California sun
Dusty desert under wrong red-wood shade
But Santa Cruz is a beach-town
And you fell on me in storms,
Rained on me in waves.
Filled my horizon, flooded my cracked earth
All the while, not noticing the drizzle
sprinkling on your seas.

It rains at least once a year on me
You rained on me.
And you always will; flash-flooding me.

Ocean monster.

© Me, Betsy

Here’s another one I don’t quite like… the images I’ve been thinking about are cool (deserts and oceans never really leave my head), I just can’t write them down right now in a way I like (or that is good at all). It’s a little sad, but to be fair, I need to be focusing on my studies more than this. Piffle.

Priam’s Daughter

I am Priam’s daughter.
And just as my father became the first
First to supplicate,
First to speak without a speaker,
First to beg for my brother’s body
I became the first daughter to watch her father
Give up everything
In the name of mighty Hector.
I am Priam’s daughter
And I grew in inches and soul-bursts
by the tears on his face.

I worry
If it had been me
that I might have left the corpse of mighty Hector with fire haired Achilles
if my fear of growing up had won.

I worry
about the writing of history,
and whether it was really worth the loss of
my innocence,
my father,
my un-sore knees not used to begging on hard ground.

My stars were brighter before my father
put his lips on the hands
of the man who killed his son.

© Me, Betsy

I don’t like this very much. I kind of had a moment last night in bed and typed it out on my phone.  Like most things, it does not feel as good in the morning.

Something Rabid Ate My Father

Something rabid ate my father
And my hands are caramel-sticky with his blood
Brown-red with cooling life
As I kneel in foreign pine woods
Clutching a carcass
Limp-wet like noodles and rocks in a bag.

Something rabid ate my father
And I know I don’t want to tell mom about it,
because I think it might have been my fault.
I’ll blame the boys,
they’re always getting into trouble like that
And I’m a shitty sister.

Something rabid ate my father
it was large, and black; archaic like the moon
I’ve got blow-job knees from kneeling at the beast’s leftovers
and i can smell dank musky hair
And slobber in my father
and his saw-dust scented clothes.

Something rabid ate my father
last night in a REM cycle.
And a night last week;
Three times this last month and just
Every so often since I turned twelve.
My father has been eaten so many times
If that was how he died
I’m not sure I’d be surprised.

© Me, Betsy