There is a curse in this house.

It hangs in the air, hides beneath the foundations.

It oozes off the walls,

Drip, drip, drip,

A slow and steady rhythm like the ticking of a bomb.

They try to wash it away with soap and tears

But it always lingers, always grows,

Until the dinner table and happy photos

Are covered in pitch.

It blackens and fills our lungs until we are suffocated.

Poison runs through our veins.

I couldn’t see it when I was young,

Couldn’t see the ash on our clothes

Or the dark sludge in the corners of my vision.

I don’t know when it was born,

But it slithered from the drains into a place that was once a home.

They say there is no way to break it

And try their best to ignore the screams. 

I don’t know how they can.

I am choking, dying,

Cursed just as well as this forsaken house, as long as I remain here.

self-made universe

i.

sometimes the world is too loud,

and I

slip away,

finding refuge in 

art and books and music

creating my own small universe

where there is nothing but

myself

and my pictures 

and my stories

and my sound.

I repaint the sky

a softer color, periwinkle over ultramarine,

replace the constant constant chatter and movement and noise

with music to match my mood

(fleurie for soft sad days, aurora & lindsey stirling for triumphant ones)

orchestrated, congruent sound, fitting simply into steady time.

I replace the tense, confusing, all-consuming story of my life with simpler ones, 

following a structure, more or less; they're not always happy, but they always make some sort of sense,

unlike life.

ii. 

I'm an escape artist,

painting over the canvas I don't care for with a universe I do,

briefly finding something like

peace

in my world.

iii. 

art -- my own and other people's -- is how I find myself

under all the layers of anxiety and labels.

for a brief lovely moment (why is it that so many lovely things are so brief?)

I am not a model student, high school freshman, daughter and sister and friend and acquaintance, that stranger with the brown eyes who worries too much;

I'm just a person drawing a picture or looking at a painting,

writing a story or reading a book,

making music or listening to other people's.

I'm myself.

it's the same sort of vast marvelous feeling that comes of looking at the stars -- it's what, I think, the ancient greeks called agape, love of the world. it's wonder and the discovery of truth and that

stubborn feathered creature called hope.

!!! How do you do it, Artemis? This poem and the one you posted earlier of "atemporal love story" are so good!

Not posting any of my own poetry because I don't want to post anything I've written earlier and I can't make one up on the spur of the moment right now... :(

Actually, I have now gone and rummaged among my notebooks and found... a poem to post! Not very good, but here it is.

Summer Winds

Sitting under the stars on a cool summer night,

I enter into a world apart.

The soft winds rustling the leaves

Seem to whisper, quietly, to me

Of the secrets in my own heart.    

my favorite people are the ones with flowers growing in their soul. 

the type with wild hair and thoughtful eyes and a patchwork of clothing styles. 

you know them, 

the people who let you squeeze beneath their umbrella because you forgot yours, 

the ones who look at the rain as if it's perfectly lovely, 

and make tea for you on cold days.   

it's the person who will braid your hair, 

and has paint splattered on their jeans, 

and stares at the stars, 

and have gardens every shade of green.  

I think I only have sprouts in my soul, 

but I hope they'll bloom someday.  

I shout secrets into The Void

An echoed voice would be too kind,

I instead listen to silence throbbing

Through my pulse and ears,

Myself the sole wind in this cold place.

Yes, I must become

The great stirring force

Within the dark, so small;

Impossible. 

I am all sound and only source of little light

Dim as I am, whispers consuming my voice.

Nothing, empty

One with this hollowed Abyss. 

I suppose now I can say

I am of The Void.

"Don't you dare go hollow"

To go hollow is to let go of hope,

Lose direction, become an aimless husk

To get stuck in the looping mediocrity and pain

Of everyday life.

To lose sight of the light,

To break, and let oneself shatter.

Indeed, when one is cracked

It becomes so easy to fall apart -- tempting

to fall, cold and brittle, into the dark -- 

Indeed, everything is so much simpler if all is lost.

So one must question why they still insist;

Shouting, imploring,

"Don't you dare go hollow"

Wrote this a few days ago -- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

looking for blue

i.

everything feels gray & pointless, like

the colors have bled out of the universe like

watercolors in the rain.

even the sky is wearing gray --

a peculiar sort of wedding dress, or maybe

a mourning gown;

after all, weeping is for those left behind, not brides,

and what is rain, but the tears of the sky?

ii.

I remember when the sky was ten thousand shades of blue --

a soft silk cloak the color of sapphires,

spangled with white-diamond stars on its darkling underside.

but now it has lost its brilliance,

faded to a passionless, apathetic grayscale:

a black-and-white photograph,

a charcoal portrait of lonesome listless lingering in a life

I'm no longer sure I want to live.

iii.

everything is colorless & predictable --

my life is a mess of school and socializing and

other things that used to feel important, but are now just more

rocks on top of a mountain I've lost the will to climb.

I feel adrift

I'm a wanderer above a sea of fog.

I've lost the map to my life & forgotten where I 

was going in the first place,

but I keep going anyway, trying not to cry

when I realize the world has lost its bright flamboyant colors and turned to a foreign fog-shroud place with a sky of gray;

when I realize

I am lost.

iv.

I want to leave this gray universe behind;

I want my colors back.

I can't live in this colorless castle any longer

give me back my blue

stripy green rainboots, 

golden leaves, 

the pit-pattering of rain on my pink umbrella, 

your face freckled with raindrops--

do you remember? 

yellow coat, 

steaming tea, 

your boots splashing through the sidewalk, 

my cheeks pink from the cold--

do you remember? 

grey and brown scarves, 

a stack of books, 

my soaked hair curling in the rain, 

your hat slipping into your eyes-- 

do you remember? 

Everything is water, and a thousand times I've drowned

Drowned in music, pure, clear, cold, sweet,
or warm, deep, and comforting
Drowned in the embrace of the darkness of night
Drowned in sugar-high adrenaline on a zipline

Drowned in the endless droning roar of people
Swept away
Drowned in the sickly, choking stench of a closed-off classroom
Drowned in the chaos of a crowd so often that I have become water
Permeable and swollen, a cell resisting lysis

Drowned out the inner child's screams
As I sat
Expression neutral
Letting sound wash over me
Numb
Safe?
Immune.