florida’s winter kisses
consist of rough caresses and instigate
crimson blemishes on my skin.
the sun smacks tiny freckles upon my cheeks and
gropes my shoulders for a place to leave his mark and
i have no choice but to bite my tongue.
every day is an impending molestation.
i’ve gotten to be afraid of it.
so I try not to listen to the
insinuations outside and i
stay inside in my
quiet room and listen to the white-noise of
the a/c.
i let your secrets hang in the atmosphere because
they’re too heavy for me to carry and i’d
rather let them suspend endlessly in
zero-gravity.
you used to stitch butterflies onto
the ceiling
(you still love to gaze at pinned perfections)
and i used to pretend to catch them
between my palms, boasting
wide eyes and a big, lacking-grace grin while you
ironed laundry on those bed sheets you picked up
at a yard sale down the bend.
the butterflies began to fly
frantically in elliptical orbits and i
couldn’t keep up as they spun
around my head with big, lacking-grace wings and
i called for you and the steam from the iron was
terrifying and the butterflies soared into it with big, lacking-grace confidence and i dove
for the butterflies, i dove for the butterflies,
i dove unto
the clothes iron.
there are
not enough seconds and not enough words and not enough lungs
collapsing beneath my ribs
to express to you the heat i’ve been feeling.
the searing breath of pessimism against my neck is
suffocating.
words swim in my hands and i want to yell, i want to yell, i want to
drown them in
the a/c.
god knows that,
if there’s one thing i’m good at,
it’s holding back the seething words
you know i’ll never breathe.
I think this is a brilliant poem! The sentence structure emphasises certain words and images perfectly (the one of the butterflies pinned to the wall sticks out to me) but I think the lack of capitalisation at the start of the lines is really interesting! Lawrence and Plath wrote prose and used capitals, but Beckett didn’t and I think it adds a lot to the poetry (it always made me feel like ALL the words had a deliberate equality, for some reason). 😊
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Thank you so much for your comment! It truly means the world. 🙂
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Aww you are welcome!
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beautiful poem! perfect the game of words …
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Thank you so much for reading. 🙂
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