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Claire Ryan Poem
Something nice from someone not so nice,
Happy things that distract you so much you become sad,
Liking someone leading to stress about liking them,
Not being able to breathe because you are on top of the world and the air is so very thin but you are still on top of the world, untouchable, unfathomably pleased.
Oh the irony.
A cursed and blessed and odd sensation of oxymoronic irony.
A beautiful twisted villain in the fate of star crossed lovers, but a gorgeous heroic Deus Ex Machina in the story of otherwise unparalleled lives
The demise from too much love-- ironic.
The accidental meet cute-- ironic.
It flips, it flops, but at the end of the day, nothing stops Irony,
She does what she wants.
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
I’m so sick of feeling small,
But too big to fit,
And not small enough,
But too small to speak
(Not enough room for words).
Silenced.
Do not make me feel small
You make me feel small
So much makes me feel small
And then there are days when I feel too big.
Clunky
Unwelcome
I outgrew my body.
My voice,
My personality,
My laughter
Outgrew my body.
And you try to shove it all back in to fit and it gets overcrowded and I feel overcrowded like there isn’t enough room in this universe for both
Me
And
You.
Stop making yourself feel small
You are big
And big is ok
Lots of things are BIG
And OK
The universe is ever expanding
Exponentially
Infinitely
Into the nothingness that surrounds it
And I think it’s ok.
Why can’t I have infinite nothingness to expand into?
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
Bittersweet--
a word that has always meant so much more to me than
I think it was supposed to.
Of course, bitter coffee with sweet sugar comes to my tongue before anything else and then more:
Bittersweet,
A mood,
A feeling,
An attitude,
Meaningful but lackluster,
Luke warm (a temperature that no one despises but no one longs for either),
A state of being.
The word itself sustains a consistent oxymoron in its every use.
It is neither bitter nor is it sweet
Although it pretends to be both.
The duo warps into a romantic loneliness.
The bittersweet goodbye is neither filled with unending sorrow or limitless happiness,
But instead a tinted contentment.
I am bittersweet. Bittersweet found in the moment before the radio hums into music, after you pushed the covers from the bed but before you stood, hidden between the momentum of childhood and halt of teenage change, splattered across the wall as you hear someone say
“I love you” without meaning it in the same way you do.
The mix of romanticism and cynicism at its finest.
It’s not sad or unpleasing, not joyous or fulfilling.
But
It is enough.
Bittersweet is enough, I am enough, this feeling is enough,
regardless
of the flavor
we may leave
in your mouth
and on your tastebuds.
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
Laptop Note Leftovers
things I am currently stressed about:
this feeling i have
this. i found this today. i was going about my life and i found this.
i make lists about things
that make me anxious and i delete them when they have been resolved or i’ve moved on.
this was never deleted. i’m worried i may never delete it.
this was given to me by you.
the feeling you have left me with comes with a bitter taste in the back of my throat, a smell like leftovers that have been rotting in my fridge because i have barely had the capability to get out of bed let alone eat food, a hate for people who remind me of you, an inability to blink when i see you from a distance. i can’t even shake you when i’m alive and well and happy.
every once in a while, i will feel beyond it, beyond you, and then a small minuscule insignificant thing pushes me back into
that dusty feeling again, the one that makes me feel unclean and unmotivated,
you have made me flinch at people with the same name you hold, you have made me see humanity in a darker light, and i only have you to blame for that, because i refuse to blame myself for it any longer.
i’m hoping that one day i can delete this list,
That one day i will write my last poem about you
(because i’ve written more poems about you than about the people i have loved and do love and i need to stop)
that day may not be today but it will be someday and someday soon because i can feel myself accept my anger rather than resist it, accept that the world isn’t the problem,
you
are.
you are the problem and while you may not be doing anything
on purpose,
you are still to blame, you are still responsible for your actions, it may be that the power given to you by society and by those around us make you say and do the things that you do without you intending to inflict me harm, but it was still you.
no one else did it.
you did.
And for today, that’s enough for me to hang onto to know that the world still has my back and can still be bright and can taste sweet and smell pleasant and make me smile
Despite your existence in it.
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
It's weird how
I still don't know
what to say about him.
Every time that I think I have words
I run out
or
they don't seem suiting
or
they don't seem like enough.
I don't know what to think about him.
Thoughts don't fit him, he just simply
won't
fit.
Every time I think
"Over it"
He hits me with a bag of bricks,
if this feeling can be equated to the weight of a bag of bricks,
which I think it can.
It certainly feels like a bag of bricks.
And that smile.
That smile hits me with ten thousand bags of bricks on its own.
And that laugh.
And for that matter,
the way he says small things like
"wait"
and
"okay, claire"
I just can't help but feel stupid happy when he's around.
Weird, right?
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
Pleasure is ephemeral, but at least misery shares some of this same quality.
And as we know, misery loves company.
Don’t we all, misery? Company. We would all love some company.
But that’s the misery of it,
What we love is often out of reach,
Hard to snag,
Pleasurable, and thus
Ephemeral.
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2019
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Claire Ryan Poem
I don’t want to fix you.
And I certainly don’t need to be fixed.
But if we were to fix each other, it would be like this.
We'll start
with our broken smiles
But forget mending a broken heart
because what’s the point on fixing things that are meant to be broken
Like a glass stomped on at a wedding
The heart is meant to shatter and be mended and shatter and be mended and shatter again
Our gazes, though, those can be fixed
My eyes glass over more often than not which has much to do with the depths my mind travels to
Your eyes dart around the room, as if to pace with you,
as if to mimic my anxious mind races.
And those we can ease as well, our anxious minds.
And maybe that will fix enough.
It won't even feel like fixing
because we just might forget that we were ever broken
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2021
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Claire Ryan Poem
Dearest almost,
I never wrote a poem about you
Now, I know that is not saying much
because I don’t actually write that many poems
But I still want to write one now
to make up for it
You never broke my heart
so thank you
Granted, I never really gave it to you
so you couldn’t have broken it if you wanted to but still,
thanks
Speaking to you was sometimes halted and awkward
But I enjoyed every moment
Knowing you was challenging
Which was mostly my fault because
I never gave you a reason to trust me
We always half-fit
and sometimes there was a sweet moment of
perfect
understanding
But those moments were never long enough
And they became fewer and far between
And we stopped fitting at all
And we let each other float away
And it didn’t hurt
And it was easy
And clean
But I never got to tell you the one thing I have since always wanted to say
I do not regret a single thing and I hope
with all my heart
that you find someone who fits, who fills the gaps that I did not
And that you don’t regret me either.
Love,
Your nobody
Copyright © Claire Ryan | Year Posted 2021
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