Category: Poetry

Shelf Stable

LashandaLeave a comment

My love is shelf stable.
My heart is best before sealed,
for an infinite future.

The apparent stagnation 
is really the exaltation of immortality,
the way a feeling can remain at its prime until necessary,
the bounty firm against the cheek,

waiting.

Waiting for an undetermined moment where the seal breaks,
where the sand begins to bead down the glass, 
where you are no longer inexahasutible,
and must succumb to the laws of nature,
to let bacteria consume you and your love
in slow increments. 

My love, although seemingly infinite before breakage, becomes volatile once breached. 
Who will break the seal and render me perishable? 

Things Unsullied.

LashandaLeave a comment

The eyes you have,
when you experience change,
wet like a newborn animal,
darting and buzzing as they move through the nameless, 

versus the eyes you have looking at familiarity, 
glossing over similarity,
running the same current over and over,
until there are no more sparks.

What happens between those sets of eyes?
When does it die, the wonderment? 

Eternal Unrest.

LashandaLeave a comment

When death stretches your eyelids,
so tight you don’t have time to rewind,
to have tea with your demons,
to repent and regret and relinquish yourself, 
they stay rigoured,
a forced awakening of your last moments. 

Only a life of sin would force your eyes open upon death, as if to say,
“watch yourself burn.”  

An afterlife of eternal unrest,
reserved for the wicked. 

the tradeoff for maturity.

LashandaLeave a comment

I gave up all my childhood relics too early. 
I refused my dolls, my stuffed animals, my notebooks full of novel ideas, 
to swallow maturity instead. 

I was sooner than ready ushered into adulthood, 
to wear the mark of maturity ripe on my flat chest. 
Every “you’re so mature” proclaimed from an adult singed it deeper into my flesh. 
The scar soothed my loss. 

Yet, I was not welcome in adult spaces. 
I was hushed and spoken over, my emotions belittled, 
contrived in the twilight zone of being a child in years, but not in feeling. 

Now, I am an adult in years only. 
In feeling, perhaps a quiet, old matriarch whose hands are calloused with past lives. 

But I have danced for many years in the arms of apparent maturity, 
surely I should be a natural? 

I am anything but. 
The dance is awkward and clumsy, and my teacher is absent. 
I traded the precious performance of childhood for adult approval. 

And now? I don’t know how to dance.