By TheFeatheredSleepPosted on

My emotions

Blunted

Think of fat rolled papers and boys playing records

Think of girls proud to feel nothing but the astringent of their spite

Blunted is being a feminist and hating other women

For their exquisite abilities at checkmate cruelty, not my sister in your usery

Blunted is wanting to feel you all over, watching glass separate us, the years, maladies, the drying of our respective urge

Blunted is nighttime and death hangs her dripping wreath at your door as your neighbor builds his Pagoda and you want for the fiftieth and the first time to smoke until all is consumed in tails of ether and sour breath

Blunted are the words the high school boys left imprinted in dirty unrepeatable shocks on your fledgling body as you lay on the urine floor seeing yourself say no

Blunted is your wish to be honest and find connection, and that night and all the others, losing direction, ending eating your words with a cold slice of cheese that makes your stomach ache

But not as much as the smooth shave of the scalpel, your first female lover looking through you now like stained glass

Blunted is being old when you are young

Inhabiting a badly sewn together personhood of naught and nightmare

Your cat is dead in your lap and still you hum to some nineties song

Remembering a brief joy like it was torn out of a matchbook

But they don’t make them anymore do they?

Or Screwdrivers with half a slice of orange or sugar cubes wrapped in patterned paper

All glossy and needing to be sucked but I couldn’t could I? Because I was blunted

On your brand of artifice and my hope eternal and all the dead babies who ring a ring a rosie at midnight

Blunted? I’m standing when my legs were sawn off and left to cure in the sun

I’m still wearing your disapproval and the dress with no sleeves showing my silver lines

All carved like numerals and messages to our dead and dying secreted holes

Blunted in the fog and parchment sun

Invisible as I am here waving at retreating shadows

Someone I nearly became, distinguishable, then, lost.

Categories: #poetry

22 Replies to “Blunted”

  2. Shutdown, blunt the edges
    Of the might-have-beens
    Of what almost worked
    Of something with no name
    Neither rejection nor acceptance
    Neither love nor hate
    But sharper than indifference
    When desire and its memory
    Refuse to die as if
    Never having been
    Pack the sharp edges
    And points into words
    Consigned to the page

  3. While I always enjoy your work, sometimes you write something that is so powerful and resonates so, that the emotion and impact hits me square on, even after re-reading it. This is one of them. That last line . . . Brilliant!!

  9. High? Well, in a way, I suppose. There is something about seeking the heart, the core of the poem, the experience – a sort of “Be awake to this!” moment. Kind of Zen thing? A way of loving, being vulnerable to the feeling in the poem.

  12. You have a mind like no other, Candice. I’d know our words anywhere. I think I’ve said this multiple times before.

  15. You are hardly a blunt force to be reckoned with however my dear. My drugs of choice against the hard days are is a fast friend that sees much beyond what I see in this life and cherishes it like a delicate butterfly lit upon your hand in a momentary rest or respite from a windy day of being blown about while on its haphazard path in life.

    I am hardly ever blunted because I look to draw it all in …the good , the bad, the fear, the silly, the seductive… the beautiful and swim in it…being mindful of the that instant no matter what the outcome…it’s there …so very present whether painfully so or nurturing to the ends of my soul….both aspects are needed for me…

    But I will take that Screwdriver with the Orange Slice long as you will share one with me my dear. Much love.. and I love this poem very much… very touching… thank you

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