Floodgates

I want to open my mouth

and have only rainbows pour out

with that same breathless quality

with which nightmares tear the ground

Flowing from my ears at night

Wild-maned terrors, champing to bite,

Iron shod hooves tossing restlessly

while my own twisted feet make no sound

except their untangling, in bedsheets strangling

slowly, insidiously, ‘round my neck snaking

Fingers cold as death on my own shaking

straining for the nearest light, to put down

the shutters, the shudders of whatever horrors

metallic-tasting dreams and bruised lip murmurs

rustling threateningly, behind creaking floodgates

Cracked fingernails leaking ink, insistently loud

But because I will,

I open my mouth

and have only rainbows pour out

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Floodgates | Yusra

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What are you not telling anyone? .

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I feel as though I am frequently guilty of this. Of simply rolling over and falling asleep, and ignoring some nagging unwellness that has been pestering me. But it scratches at you, making you increasingly restless, till it starts spilling over into the part of your life that you only ‘portray’. When the person you are is unwell, it’s only a matter or time before it starts leaking into the person you’re supposed to be.

For the sake of metaphor and stunted humor, let me say: we’re nothing more than giant bathtubs. If you don’t deal with how much is swirling in there, pretty soon it’ll be sweeping out from under the door and reaching the guests in the living room.

But it’s not about the guests at all. People who visit you don’t live with you- you live with you. We none of us take the time to recognize our existence as a little, self-contained biome that needs a little tending to flourish- and a little pruning. If the diseased parts and chipping fingernails don’t get trimmed regularly, you’re not going to be growing.

And that’s already too many house- and body part analogies, but I’m going to leave you (and myself) with one last one: this body and mind house each other. And in levels of intensity, each one of them needs your care.

Open those floodgates now and then, okay? I promise you, there will be a rainbow over all that you’ve bottled in, flowing out. ♥️

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Day Fifteen- The Man Who Was Poetry

Day Fifteen- and big news! My first book is finally close to completion. Stay tuned for updates on The Man Who Was Poetry.🙂 
And I need lots of advice from those of you who have published already. Tips and suggestions are most welcome! 

Love, 

Your Yusra Cookie ❤️

Art Beat

@j.ironword- she put the Art in my version of a heart. 🙂 

Hercules

 
I don’t know how you are so brave
How everything that bruises you leaves so
un-touching-ly
You smile that secret smile and carry on
As though you weren’t stopped, but you’d paused
And now you were walking on again
Not crippled, just resting one leg
Not sad, not aching
As if you hadn’t built that house of cards so
pain-staking-ly
Then you listen to me
And you laugh
And I forget what I was even angry about
Because you are so brave
So in-defeat-ably
That just the aftertaste of you is strong
enough to
make-me-see
Courage is as much about not mourning
as mourning
everything-that-could-not-be-saved
Or
Loving that fish,
Respecting a donut
Not wearing underwear on principle
Waking up early on thursdays to shave
And just as much shrugging
nonchalantly,
making a wrinkly nosed face, and
carrying on, because you are
that brave

 
Hercules

(c)CM
10.02.2017

Malediction- A Four Year Anniversary Curse

I am told he had ink in his veins
And she, suffered unspoken miseries
He had his heart crushed to pieces
She lived in a cottage by the sea

He walked barefoot, searching, learning
She wrote each day a different song
He grappled his whole life with intoxication
She? Delighted in being considered wrong

He was a man of a different kind
She was a girl with a bent, touched mind
He refused to conform, his will was rebellion
She had left all societal norms behind

At least, these are the reasons I could find

I have none of these, and yet all of them
Writing demented, born of a whim
Compulsion, impulsion, imprudence beget
Some reasons I cannot, some more I forget

A common disease, this malediction, this curse
To sit and remember what never occurred
Distort reality, fever blind wide open eyes
Scratch and claw paper with ink wounds incurred

Till the fit passes, and the inspiration fades from sight
We have our demons, and our redemption-
We write

 

 

Malediction

©CM
15.01.2017

 

My reasons for writing may keep evolving, but that’s alright. As long as they never run out… 🙂

 

Four years at WordPress. four  years of Calliope’s Lyre. I can’t fathom what directions my life would have taken, had I not had this blog to fall back on mentally, at so many points.

Thank you for taking this journey with me. It goes up and down but I promise, the excitement never diminishes. And as the great man said, we have miles to go before we sleep.

 

Stay tuned, dear Readers. I have just started telling my stories to the world.

 

Love, light, and monsta-sized hugs,

Cookie ❤

Dinner

  

Existential Crisis

 

Existential Crisis

‘Poetry doesn’t exist,’
he said sadly
He put his hand on my chest
Soft fingers that still smelt of whiskey
‘This.’ He whispered. ‘This is real.’
‘This imaginary dialogue in your head
This narrative, descriptive of he said she said
-It doesn’t exist.
I know you want it to
I know it makes the world more beautiful
To you
But it’s not real,’ he added,
with the air of someone breaking bad news
‘Poetry doesn’t exist.’
And he lay down with me under the moon
In the wet grass that needled my back with
Its tiny points
And his arm was under me
And we kissed

‘Stupid man,’ I thought languorously
Stretched out next to his chest, damp
With dew and sweat
He slept, and I watched him

My poetry

©CM
18.09.2016

Messages Off a Cigarette -LXIV-

  

An Ascent Into Madness

 

 

Being up before dawn is quite something.

Not sleeping at all, and waiting for a semblance of a new day, quite another.

I’m sitting on the steps that lead into my backyard, lighting a cigarette for the morning, fingers still stained here and there with old blood. My hair’s still wet from the shower, and matches fizzle out, catching stray droplets. Couple of tries and I get it though. Wish I could say the same about falling asleep. Dunno if the insomnia fuels the stress or the stress perpetuates the insomnia. Probably both, and the vicious cycle has my mind turning verbal somersaults.

Not proverbial. There is no wisdom here.

The yard is damp, there’s a promise of rain. The sky’s beginning to show the faintest of gleams shooting into the sky on my right. It’s beautiful enough, I suppose. Not nearly as the tiny ember I hold in my hand. It’s closer to earth. It holds more meaning. I realize that a cigarette can bring you more calm than the promise of a new day. It’s all about perspective.

Or maybe that’s what I lack. My vision’s gotten blurry. It’s an odd sort of focus where the world kind of weaves in and out, the green of the patch of trees blending with the incongruously placed electricity poles. They’re there, and not there. My mind buzzes with a sort of frantic awakening that my lethargic body wishes it could replicate. Even the noxious tin can promising energy sitting next to me cant give me that. Nor can the rancid tasting excuse for yogurt next to it. Tastes like cow spit.

Either way.

Dawn comes rather suddenly. One minute it’s all blue and violet, and the next minute the mysteries of the darkest night are nowhere to be seen. The sky is white. It’s a blank space, a canvas crisscrossed by telephone lines- is this why it’s a new beginning? Could I do what the man said, and paint my will across in clouds? Probably not.

Would be nice to, though.

I can barely see, and yet, I see too much. I know nothing, like that idiot Jon Snow. And I know too much. I don’t want to. I don’t want to feel this vacant buzzing in my ears, of words that form rhymes in couplets and drop off stray into the unknown. I want to gather them, pour them out so that I can refill myself properly, but there’s always some more, always some more. There was an ode to a crack in the floor just now, a series of observations about the movements of ants stealing from the bin, remnants of a three hour long conversation from last night, weighing responsibilities, pressing chores, imminent deadlines. There is no possible space for silence here.

Silence. What a word.

I never did learn the ‘meaning’ of extremes. After days like yesterday, I always realize that I still don’t know how someone with so little value for their own life can revere the keeping of others’. Where did I learn these lessons? My blood on my hands is art. Even the sight of someone else’s blood, is immediately recognized as pain. My pain is fulfilment, to be felt, to be revelled in. Someone else in pain, incites the urge to heal, to help.

Odd sort of double standards, really. Most people take it the other way round, as far as I know.

So young. So full of ideals. So old. So bitter, so inured. And love. The great equalizer, binding the two, bizarrely united halves together. I have very strange dreams to live for.

At least I can see much better now, even with the ashen aftertaste in my mouth. Morning is here properly. There’s one shrub in the far corner quivering away on its own. A collective of jackdaws chockchocking away next door. Maybe I won’t have to go very far to refill my mind. There are stories here, even in this stretch of land I know as well as the map of veins in my hand. And I haven’t even begun to hear them.

But I have begun to see. Morning is here.

Aperitivo

Aperitivo 

Speak to the seat of my senses

Stimulate my mind

Feed my ravenous thoughts that have

Been wined and dined 

By glossy superficiality 

Arrogance, and a complete lack of

Spirituality 

Absence of depth

I haven’t been fed

In polysyllables, I’ve bled

Instead of hemorrhaging

I want to wax eloquent 

But obscenely, instead 

Of shallow rhapsodizing 

I find myself despising 

The enforced simplicity 
Come here

Let’s get naked 

Talk philosophy to me 

©CM

03.11.2015