Ashe Vernon's Blog, page 131
November 9, 2015
"Two years ago, you were all white knuckle and grit.
You abandoned your softness in a cardboard..."
You abandoned your softness in a cardboard box
on the side of the road—decided it was
someone else’s problem, now.
Two years ago, your depression was
an undiagnosed monster in the pit of your stomach
and it swallowed everything.
You felt like a cardboard cutout of a person;
you felt like TV static.
You wrote yourself into something ugly
so that you didn’t have to be so soft–
so small, so honey-heart.
It didn’t work, did it?
Take a good look at the person you become
two years from now: look
how she is frayed at the edges
like hand-me-down lace. Look
how her bones are too old for her,
how they creak like a house
full of someone else’s photo albums.
Look how soft she is:
like you could press your hand right through
her stomach and
come out the other side. She knows, that
every boy you fall in love with between there and now
takes you for granted.
Every girl who lets you kiss her
stops texting you back.
That you keep filling your empty bed,
because you don’t know how to fill your empty chest.
Trouble is, you keep falling in love with open wounds
then acting surprised when you are left with nothing
but blood in a lifeboat.
It’s time to stop sinking.
You are important,
even if no one ever likes your poetry.
You are important,
even if he doesn’t love you back,
even if she’s only interested in sleeping with you,
even if he isn’t.
Your voice matters, even if no one listens to it.
Your worth does not come with
clauses and conditions.
It does not disappear
with no one to validate it–
you
are valid.
Even if no one else thinks so.
Two years from now, you will be soft.
You will be all split-ends and paperbacks.
It will hurt.
And it’ll be okay.
These are the growing pains we never grow out of.
I know
you never asked to be born.
But that’s because people don’t ask
for miracles: they are given.
You exist, even though it would be
much easier for you not to. Even though
there are literally billions of events
that had to happen before you could happen,
which makes you
one of the most improbable things in existence
and yet, you are here.
But I don’t expect you to say thank you.
There is too much ache in your upbringing.
There have been too many bad days.
Two years ago,
you declared war on your gentle everything.
It will take the full two years to realize
you are only hurting
yourself.”
- SELF PORTRAIT DRESSED AS A SELF-HELP PROGRAM by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
"For an entire month, the Texas sky was nothing but
a broken water-main—and the state that had..."
For an entire month, the Texas sky was nothing but
a broken water-main—and the state that had spent
decades slow-roasting over a pit of Christian gospel
and light-skinned southern values was suddenly
neck-deep in its own baptism.
Turns out that when you have been this starving for rain,
when you have been dry for this long,
the end of the drought only looks like a miracle
on day one.
By day thirty, our cities are drowning.
I know, now, how easily
skin can turn swampland—
that desert soil is the first to oversaturate,
that it only takes two weeks of proper attention
for my body to spill over.
It wasn’t long after I met you that I became
all flash flood and rising water tables.
Understand what torrential rain does
to a heart in a fifteen year drought—
just look what mother nature did to Texas.
I met you and suddenly there were no more dry-spells.
My valleys sloshed with rainwater;
there was nowhere to put all that sky.
It was all the ocean could do to keep up with us.
It was all I could do to keep my head above water.
There’s a reason you don’t give a starving man
a feast—his body has forgotten
how to be full.
He will make himself sick
with this wanting.
When all that Texas drought met you
I flooded my rivers, abandoned my cities,
soaked rot into the walls of my apartment.
For forty days and forty nights
Texas and I became new seas.
I drowned under the weight of what
you thought was a good thing–it’s been too long
since this was freely given and not something
I had to go searching for in the night—too long
since the sky has been anything but clear.
The storm should have been the end to the dry season.
Instead, it was the start of the flood.
You can’t dump heaven on the drought;
all you learn, is that Texas red dirt
can turn quicksand in an instant.
The end of the drought only looks
like a miracle on day one.
By day thirty, I am all tremor and panic attack,
fear flooding the basement. Your smile–
the place where the sky opens up
and pours.
”- I GAVE YOU FLOOD by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
November 8, 2015
"Two months in and all you know
is your new medication
makes your hands shake.
Twenty-four years..."
is your new medication
makes your hands shake.
Twenty-four years old,
and you’re finally starting to understand
that calling a place home
doesn’t make it feel like one.
Yesterday, you learned how to change a tire, but
you still don’t know
how to love someone without
cracking your ribs open
and spilling through the fault lines,
like some kind of natural disaster.
You’re pretending if you keep laughing
you won’t have to admit
you’re afraid;
pretending like love’s gonna
solve all your problems;
pretending you’ve got it all together
when you don’t have it at all.
You have made so much
out of so little–
you built yourself tall
on the backs of every person
who told you you couldn’t.
You flew your colors in a war zone–
made it back wounded and alive.
You have done everything you know how,
and it means something
to have tried.”
- Twenty-Four by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
November 7, 2015
"The girls who love you
keep slipping through your fingers
after of all this talk
of how sure you are..."
keep slipping through your fingers
after of all this talk
of how sure you are that
they deserve better.
This is how you push women
out of your life with mouthfuls
of good intentions.
You know what you’re doing,
but they were always
so beautiful and so kind,
and you never believed
you could love them right.
Not when you loved like the
rusty joints of rattling traincars.
You’ve never had hands like
a midsummer sunset, but god—
you loved a woman who did.
She was too much for you.
Too real, too alive.
She kissed the crickets
from your lungs, and you
forgot how to speak in the face
of her fearless quiet.
Like handspun glory,
like the divots in a hardwood floor—
her skin was soft and dark and holy,
and you were lying
when you said
you didn’t love her
anymore.”
- But You Leave Them, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
Thank you so much, i am honestly so close to giving up and your poems give me so much hope god i love you so much
Oh, baby, please don’t ever give up. You are too important. The world needs you too much.
Hey! I have a question. Do you think it took awhile to get to the level of writing you're at? Because I love your work and I'm worried I'll never reach that kind of writing
Oh, sunshine, absolutely!! Literally my whole life! I’ve been writing ever since I can remember, and I can P R O M I S E you, my first attempts at poetry were TRAGIC in how bad they were. You don’t need to compare yourself to me. I’m at a completely different point in my life and my writing than you are. That’s okay. You don’t ever need to write like me–you write like you, and that’s something that nobody else does.
And it’s really important.
November 6, 2015
"Sometimes I write about you
in the kind of filthy vernacular
a mother hopes her daughter
never..."
in the kind of filthy vernacular
a mother hopes her daughter
never learns.
So maybe it isn’t love,
but maybe it’s something–
sweet in the middle,
rough around the edges.
The kind where we kiss just before
we sink our teeth in.
After all, I am no sacred relic,
no uncovered altar:
I am not a place for pious hands.
Baby, I’m looking for a train wreck
–unkempt, unclean, unholy–
and I keep trying to make that
seem profound.
But the truth is,
I’ve got no room for poetry.
Not when my hangnail chest
goes hungry
at the mention of your name.
Not when the salt in the wound
is as much exodus as revelation–
now if you would just fuck me
the way you look at me
I might actually have something
to believe in.”
- As If in Prayer, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
November 5, 2015
"I’ve got a romantic’s heart
strapped inside of a cynic’s chest
and no where near the courage
to do..."
strapped inside of a cynic’s chest
and no where near the courage
to do anything about it.
Everyday, I go to war with a body
that gives like the trussel
on an old sewing machine,
and write soliloquies
to the seam of my ribs,
all because I am too afraid
to lift my shirt
and actually
touch it.”
- The Contradiction, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
"The problem is
I still call myself a woman
and every time it drops from my mouth
the word feels like..."
The problem is
I still call myself a woman
and every time it drops from my mouth
the word feels like a bar of soap slipping
through my fingers,
fish out of water,
something I wish I could reel back into myself.
I call myself a woman and it feels like an accident:
like a six car pile-up just outside city limits, like
you were so close to home.
You were so close.
You could have been exactly
what they wanted you to be
when they wrapped you in a pink blanket,
when the doctor said girl
and they were so happy.
But how could the word woman
feel like such a stranger
when I have been wearing it my entire life?
The problem is
my gender is language I cannot speak, yet.
I go wide-eyed-jealous, sticky-handed child
reaching for the bodies of the strong-limbed boys
I have always wanted to look like.
I think of how many things I’d be willing to give up
so that I could look so long, so that I could look so flat,
look so sharp and so boy.
But my curves are something I am not ready
to be divorced of, yet.
I look down at my body and think
no, I will not abandon you. Not yet, not again,
not like the rest of them.
I think—Girl.
I think—Girl.
I think,
Girl, you have been unwanted in so many hands.
And I can’t turn traitor to my own powder pink.
I can’t bleed the woman out of my lungs.
I have tried.
She does
not
go
easy.
Instead, I wear woman like a coat two sizes too small.
It doesn’t fit, anymore, but it smells like home.
When I was thirteen, all my daydreams
were technicolor:
taking these heavy, useless things
on the front of my body
and chopping them off with a hacksaw.
I say I want the reduction because my back hurts–
because they have crippled my body into
something unusable.
What I am afraid to admit
is I want the reduction
because I don’t want
them, anymore.
What do you do when you are given the choice
between two costumes
and neither of them has enough elbow room?
What do you do when the word woman
is the only one that shares all the violence
that’s been done to you for daring to look so
sweet?
What do you do when the word woman isn’t
wrong—it’s just not the whole story?
And you don’t have a word for your story.
What do you do when you love that word–
woman. Girl. She. Her. Her’s–
but you don’t like how it looks on you.
But “he” just looks like it’s missing something–
the word man has never belonged to me without
woman in front of it.
Sometimes
all these words feel like an ancient text
that don’t have the degrees to decipher.
They don’t make sense to me.
I don’t want them. But I live in a society that says
I have to be one or the other, that there is no
in-between, just accidentally mismatching
of body parts. At the end of the day, I have no quarrel
with my body—only the things everyone else seems
to assign to it. Only these words that feel useless
up against the person I have worked so hard
to love.
Only woman: ill-fitting as it sometimes is.
What I want to know, is
am I allowed to hold woman at arm’s length
and love it like my favorite dress?
Am I allowed to put it down
when it is too heavy
to carry?
- QUESTIONS FOR GOD, OR JUST ANYONE WHO’S LISTENING by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
