Survivor
I don't want to be a survivor, I don't want to be brave
I don't want to be stronger, I don't want to be saved
I don't want to be tested to see if I'll do it right
I don't want your God to use me to fix your broken life.
I don't want to be a survivor, I don't want to be brave
I don't want to be stronger, I don't want to be saved
I don't want to be tested to see if I'll do it right
I don't want your God to use me to fix your broken life.
I thought I liked the way you held your head,
it was casual and sincere,
not unlike the way you smiled.
But this was different from your smile…
There was something else to it,
something I didn’t notice before.
Perhaps I daydreamed too much
or imagined too little,
but I did notice,
as I pretended not to notice.
Your eyes were down
but I saw you glance up
once or twice.
Your hand was on the cup
that you swore you’d never sip from.
I know now that you were breaking
but I didn’t know it then.
I thought I liked the way you held your head;
I thought there was some sort of beauty in the tragedy.
There was no beauty.
There was no beauty.
You slid me a pencil,
an old wooden kind,
and told me to write a story on my napkin.
I wrote about Jesus and slid them both back.
You burned the napkin
with your cigarette lighter
and pocketed the pencil.
Then you lit one up
and spun to face me.
Your eyes were blue,
mine were green,
but your oceans were all dried up
while my forest stayed in spring.
You said “You don’t smile enough”
Breathing out a swirling smoke,
as you sat cross-legged on the barstool.
I in reply grinned poorly
and turned away.
I assumed you turned away also.
I soon grabbed my coat
and began to shuffle out the door.
I looked back,
your head was in that way I thought I liked.
I watched as you blew a smoke ring up to heaven;
It made a halo.
I walked out
and you never shed another tear on my behalf.
Dreaming
Like floating
In the impossible abyss of unknown.
Subconscious
Becomes conscious
Becomes something
Not quite reality
Not quite not reality.
Dreams are an in between
An invisible world
The gray world that belongs to you.
Why do we dream?
Does it mean something?
Like stress, translating into your dreams where you're late for a meeting?
Or anger, where you dream of betrayal?
Or sadness, where you dream of a forgotten blue world?
Or even the dreams of the book you're reading, with twists and turns and not-quite-characters?
And then the vivid dreams
The ones you can't forget
When you wake groggily with sleep inertia and curse your alarm
And forget
The dream you had last night.
And then someone
Says something
They said in your dream.
Then it all comes crashing back;
Every
Little
Detail
And for me, these vivid dreams
Are the worst of all;
They could be so real
They feel so real
But they aren't
But I wish they were
But I wish they weren't
Leaving me with a muddled sense of reality
Not sure what is, what was, what could be.
Dreams
Twisting everything
Into sharp shards and even sharper shadows
Wet lightning and dry rain
Upside-down clouds and talking animals
Book characters come to life
The impossible, possible
The improbable, probable.
I like dreams
Because while you can't control them
They are the adventure
The nighttime adventure
The fun and crazy and spontaneous and weird
And none of it makes sense.
That's the point.
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[Art credit: "Lightning Bug Kisses" by Erin Bundock, YWP alumna and board member]
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Whoa this looks so cool! (This is incredibly random but did you happen to be making pretzels? This happens to me whenever I make those lol) :)
OMG I was making pretzel bites! LOL it always boils over
They almost look like rock formations! I swear I can see a mountain range rising up, surrounded by smaller outcroppings of rock. I wonder how this effect might evolve if you repeated the experiment with food dye added!
Ooh what a good idea! My mom my kill me though if I spill more baking soda on the stove lol.
I boiled baking soda until it overflowed and dried into a cool pattern on the stove.
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