JANUARY 1ST, 2016
"she'd rather be stellar"
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When she cranes her neck up at the night sky,
Steamy breath whirling across her vision
A foggy, transparent banner shielding the stars
And takes a sharp inhale as her hand gathers frost from her carseat handle
And gives a Cheshire Cat smile as her soul sops up rainwater
When she realizes for the first time in her life that there is something beautiful, something grander than her out there, and she wants to be a part of that
She'd rather be stellar.
When she bites her lip so hard an iron pool clangs in her throat,
And her cheeks are the color of an embossed royal stamp
that seals the fancy cursive words curling from his mouth,
[they're probably not worth a monarchy, but she'd always thought freckles looked like constellations]
And not for the first time in her life she sees the cosmos put into something real, something alive, with a heartbeat, Something she can reach out and hold in her hand, or gaze from afar the way she did the stars with her telescope
In that moment, when her mind is screaming scolds that prick like needles, asking her why couldn't she be galactic, why couldn't she have whirlpools of stardust in her eyes, or Saturn's rings for smiles,
She'd rather be stellar.
When her face is dull and gray,
Flat and dormant like an old floral couch that faded away in the winter, and was tossed so that it's patterns would never breathe sunlight,
When her split ends feel like tiny little flaws that she cannot afford to have, because imperfection kills, and how can she be stellar if the tiniest dewdrops oozing from her are poisonous?
She'd rather be stellar, because maybe then she'd have the gravity to suck humans into her life like the sun attracts asteroid belts, and shooting comets, instead of being the distant rock that floats through an infinite black cloak, since no star has the charity to pull her in.
When there are oceans leaking from her eyes, and her tear ducts are a Polish salt mine,
When the notebook paper is splattered with blots of her poison, blots that will shrink in a desert to the point where you could mistake them for an oasis...
When her entire freaking life story is wandering through the dormant desert, hallucinating the oasis that is just a couple of feet away, but when she finally reaches it, it's just a couple feet further somehow, keep going, keep going, yet somehow it's a game of cat and mouse, and she can never trap happiness under her paw...
When she wishes she could just bury herself in a sandstorm, take it all in like a slippery hourglass and finally bathe in the misery that she is,
But no, she has to believe in something better, she has to keep going till her feet are gnarled tree stumps and she has leaked enough ocean to turn this desert into a rainforest, and why can't she just give up already-
She'd rather be stellar.
When her eyes are raw and empty,
And she has given every single thing from her soul for a whirling universe eons away that could care less,
When her voice at it's highest peak cannot reach above a whisper, and blends into the masses of others that need something much more than she
When she feels more petite and irrelevant than a grain of sand compared to the dunes that are everything, the dunes of creation, the ones that outweigh her raw screams and every little "I" tragedy,
That she may as well be marooned on a cactus needle in the middle of bloody nowhere, never to be recalled like Cleopatra [who, in the grand scheme was never remembered anyway], or the stars and galaxies and floods of gods that were only grains of sand wishing they could be more than a fleck you tread upon as you rush to your ocean oasis...
[but isn't she all those things already?]
When her heart is compressed like a dull flower plucked from a sidewalk crack, two dimensionally dreadful, not nearly as beautiful as it once was but much more on display now, stuck claustrophobically between the two sticky pages that are Right and Wrong, stuck in the middle, in the gray mix of Black and White, Good and Evil...
When the world is so heavy that she tumbles to the earth and becomes nothing more than a stone plaque of "Here Lies", When she can no longer glance into space without comparing the lines of Jupiter to the wrinkles on her face, without wanting to build herself a rocket to the moon, [the moon, her sister, flat and colorless with scars on every cell of it's skin] and never come back,
When she looks back at her blip of a life and sees her earthen husband who hits her like a meteoroid smashes to surfaces, when she looks around her and sees people crying, bleeding, dying, fighting, people everywhere who wish they could for one second in time be something more than a piece of dirt-
Really, the world would rather be stellar.
But it can't.
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hey, what is upppp
[I regularly run out of greetings for the authors notes^^]
This is a pretty depressing poem in my opinion, about a woman going through different stages of life [childhood, teenaged crushes, depression, marriage] and consistently hoping she could be something better :/
idk about you guys, but I struggle with this sort of feeling a lot, and can relate with general emptiness or loneliness, so feel more than welcome to PM me whenever you want if you just want to talk or are bored out of your skull.. [pretty sure I failed to mention that in the forward, so there you go :)]
whatever you do or don't celebrate, hope you had a great holiday season [also, happy new year!]
this is a longer A/N than I usually do, but thanks for reading + please vote if you enjoyed!
- payton.
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YOU ARE READING
Shards of Stars
PuisiSHARDS OF STARS [Coming Soon in January 2016] An earthen year's worth of poetry, in which an alien marooned on a satellite, a Red Queen, a time traveller, a Greek god [and more] wonder whether their veins curse with sin, stardust or perhaps a little...
