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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
I bent over to touch my toes
and the ground tore open like a backbone.
I tried to feed myself the sky;
to splice my tearducts into the universe
so that, when the pavement cried, it would mean something to me.
My fingernails punctured that slimy membrane
congealed with stars,
and I brought a slice of it to my lips,
hot and slippery like a jellyfish.
Peach juice, chalky-sweet, flowed,
fleshy particles snagged in my teeth,
and the colors erupted within my mouth.
Synthesia took over my lungs.
The hollows between my knuckles flooded with synovia
and all the ectoplasm threatened to separate from my cells
with a sound like thunder.
Diphthong tasted rusty like leukoplakia as it tiptoed across my tongue.
Tomorrow rose like the skeletons of trees,
groping for a feeling similar to catharsis
[catharsis tender as the broken wings of doves,
crunching underfoot like shattered glass.]
The clouds opened their thunderous maws
- teeth snicker-snacking, lamplight-eyes flaming the color of E#'s -
and consumed me.
I felt my skin turn to something other than skin:
thick and rough with scales,
my fingerprints melting into something waxen, smooth and opaque,
like pomegranate kisses on coffee mugs.
A feeling ignited deep in my structure;
cedillas blossoming like lilies from my lips,
fragmented sentences stretching taut as guitar strings
between my thumb and forefingers.
A flutter gentle and demonic as Calcifer erupted from my system
- splattering hot and frothing into my hand -
and fluid rushed in.
I dared to taste oblivion,
and the sky swallowed me.
My lungs failed to be lungs.
They flooded with caustic matter,
and I coughed up reflections sharp as fiberglass;
fighting with organs phthisical and sore.
I struggled to find a way to describe it:
the feeling of consuming something greater than yourself,
of opening your eyes and tasting the sound of rain.
It was like swimming,
but inside out.
I bent over to touch my toes,
and my spine tore open;
the loose laces unraveling, veterbrae poking out
like the tines of forks.
I tried to contort myself into the beginning,
but I only found where I end.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2012
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
Sit and watch the thin, blank dawn
that never quite sweeps you off your feet.
Wrestle with memories that don't want to be suppressed,
and repress the urge to canon-ball into the ocean.
(sinking: sinking slowly, because you never learned how to swim.)
Listen to rainbows churning in oil-spill puddles,
and wait for the beautiful oblivion to take its toll.
Somewhere inside you know things will never be the same again,
but that's okay with you, sickening as it seems.
(you want to float away into seaweed forests and play fetch with the big, bad wolf.)
Dream of living a full, happy life
while you tear your world apart.
Sell your body to those dark, dank demons in your cerebrum,
whimpering and wondering deep into the night.
(praying for a chance to show your worth while you still exist.)
Sink low beneath the foaming sea,
wring out your hands and paint your thighs with scarlet letters.
Let the wolves lap the salmonella from your fingertips
and wrap yourself in red - lay face down in the snow, don't breathe too deeply:
(someone dances in snowflakes nearby.)
Watch the thin, blank dusk
that never quite sweeps you off your feet.
Wish for brazen arms and a warm crook of the neck to rest in.
Hug yourself beneath the covers and silently cry; you know now...
(no one wants to comfort a girl who craves suffering.)
You will never be what anyone wants.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
Slip, slip, trip, and fall --> down that path of pain and betrayal - stall
until time is almost out,
then bing--bang--boom
dance until the world thinks you're happy
and turns the other way...
Ten, nine, eight...lift off:
slip, slip, trip (your worth is so small) --> down the rabbit hole you fall.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
The
ocean
open its arms to me, comforting
in its thunderous exclamations of love: “come to my
foaming embrace and I will carry you, fragile
one”, it caws through the
beaks of ravenous seagulls circling with beady
eyes,
searching
for the breadcrumbs of your desire.
Its sand-dollar shores beckon you to search and discover,
to wander aimlessly like a child again and
ignore the salt biting fresh
wounds. The shimmering pebbles draw you to
gently
ro l l i n g
arms; “wade deeper, deeper”, the ocean
sings, “and I will rock you like a baby
as the tide creeps in. Come to me,
fragile one, and I will
never let you fall”. The ocean opens
its
arms
to you, comforting in its thunderous
exclamations of love: its roars and rocks, but you
are unafraid. You let it carry you as
you float among the stars.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
I stare blankly ahead of me;
stare into the cracked soul of the being who used to reflect a smile
- the girl I used to love unconditionally.
That love evades me now.
Where has it gone?
I search desperately, but I fear it is lost forever
- lost forever in the turbulent streams of my --self--consciousness;
lost in the dark recesses of my mind,
in the shrunken cockles of my heart.
I fear I may never find it.
But surely nothing is ever truly gone;
surely it is simply hiding from me
- playing a twisted game of hide and seek -
or creeping in the shadows of my despair until it is needed again.
I need it now.
Words cannot express how deeply, how utterly, I want to love that person;
to see something of worth or merit in those dark eyes,
to smile back when those pale contours
find their pride again.
But somehow, I just can't see that face the same way.
All I see are lips chapped from saying "no"
- from constantly repenting sins they will soon commit again and again.
All I see are those blank, empty eyes staring back at me
- the cracked soul within beating herself bloody to be freed.
I wish I could see it - I wish I could set that girl free - but somehow I can't find how.
I want to see it again:
the eyes so full of promise and hope that they blossom,
the smile of a girl who knows the world will keep spinning.
the face of a girl who may be chipping away piece by piece, but is still trying.
But you can't see what just isn't there.
I'd like to think that with enough wishing, that face will return;
that somehow the withering girl - bound by her own will - may find the sun again.
That against all odds, the cracks will begin to fade - the splintered child will heal -
and maybe, eventually, time will turn back and her smile will find its way through the pain.
I'd like to think that miracles are a stones-throw away - that all you need is a little bit of pixie dust.
I'd like to believe that love does conquer all - much as the world would like to prove otherwise.
I'd like to believe that, beneath the face of a girl with only bad days left, there hides another girl.
I'd like to believe that inside those soulless eyes,
buried deep within a chasm of depression,
hiding, timid, in the shadows,
there lies another face:
A face that, maybe,
I can love
- or at least smile back at in the mirror.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
Speak to me in iambic pentameter
and weave Shakespeare sonnets with Milton anecdotes.
Read me riddles and rhymes divulged
over uneaten dinners and swing-sets with broken chains.
Allow me to lip-synch to your ballad of broken piano-fingers
and I will lay next to you in the dew grass and smoke memories
wrapped in Marlboros.
Paint anagrams for me in the colors of
raindrops and oil spills.
Send moonlight messages in the austere silence
of silhouettes and shadows puppeteered
by flashing fingers and flickering wicks.
Dance with me in the musky autumn aroma
of crackling, symphonic leaves
and I will smash angels into frozen oceans
and lay breathless beneath you and a blanket of snow.
Together we will dodge the juxtaposition
of an angry bonfire affection,
and let the consonants bound ahead of us
as we lay beneath oak trees and dream of laughter.
Lie to me in stanzas of forgotten rhyme schemes
and fill my ears with cotton and Dr. Seuss until
the syllables of make-believe words contort
themselves into definitions.
Play me a harmony of grace-notes that last
as long as a hummingbird’s heartbeat
and drum me a cadence that filters up
from the ground like dust-motes in sunlight.
Allow me to lay 3/8ths of an inch from your embrace
and feel the dove wing kiss of your pulse
against my snow-cap knees.
Permit me to take one last look at the
collapsing stars above, to take in the startling brilliance
of a beautiful thing that consumes itself,
and I will be content to close my eyes forever
and let you be my supernova.
Allow me one more peek,
one more snapshot of clairvoyance,
and I will let your fingers tangle with my hair once more.
I will let your ear rest upon my stereophonic heart
and your hand to settle delicately on my concave waistline.
I will permit your butterfly touch to read the Braille
engraved in the crease of my elbow,
and your quivering fingers to slide along
the skin of my forearm, smooth as fiberglass.
Chase me with arms wide open
and a daunting smile on heavy-set lips.
Fill me with sweet connotations and lullabies,
and sweep the denotations from my grasp with gentle
whispers and caresses.
Allow me a glimpse of what is good, and true,
and honest,
and I will float forever without looking up
and wondering why.
Speak to me, dear,
--together we will race to the ends of time,
and find that nothing exists but the warm imprint
left by two bodies in the dew grass.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
They heard a murmur in your chest,
a whisper:
tiny fish lips bulging the surface.
A bubble, a b u r s t,
a blurp of sound
innocent as baby-lung collapses (expansions)
-- a gurgle in the night: taciturn.
You had to swallow a tube
and I know you hated that.
You hated the taste of dependency:
machinery air -- filtered, rancid,
thick like plant water.
You said your throat rasped, your lungs opened
with a sound like a suction cup,
and the machinery h i s s e d, licking its lips for alcohol and cancer.
They took pictures with sound waves,
rebounding them off your reverberating heart
and filling in the dark spaces with oscillating light.
And the whole time your chest continued its phthisic monologue,
whispering in stil.ted rib-cage morse code
-universal SOS, lighthouse wail-
leaving braille on the underside of your sternum
that not even I could
touch.
They said your heart had thickened beyond weakening,
churning your blood like milk into butter,
and I went into the bathroom and screamed myself h o a r s e
water running, hands over ears.
Later you would ask me why I splintered the mirror,
why I placed my palm and pushed
until spider webs spun themselves under my fingers
and bits snapped and sunk like thinthin ice beneath tiny children.
Why I stood in the road on a snowy evening,
arms outstretched,
waiting for the white of winter to consume me.
Why I cried as the shower beat down on me,
fingers searching for life beneath layers of skin:
tiny oval seeds g r o w i n g,
little black masses with tendrils sprouting,
roots delving.
A lump in one breast,
transfigured ellipsoid:
multiplying, metastasizing.
--milky white matter with blue veins extending.
Why?
Because you found a way to die: beautifully, tragically, easily, undoubtedly
and we both know it was me
who wanted to breathe through tubes,
no more heart
murmuring.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2012
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
That palm-smeared red flower
blossoming down your fingers;
reminding you of when tying shoelaces
was an accomplishment.
When falling down wasn't a blessure,
but a scrap
- a prize worthy of adhesive
and swift kiss.
It is the instinct to lean back
and (*) give yourself an aneurysm.
*swallow; to take back what was once yours.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2012
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
Winter has taken hold of my heart.
In the dark of night she slunk in, leaving frosty-footprints on the glass,
and sang me to sleep with lips as soundless as an owl's wing-feather,
dusting my eyes with powder to help them seal shut.
With snowy fingers she incised my breastbone
and plucked my ribs like the petals of the last flower:
one for me, one for her, one for me…
they cascade to the floor, white and crumbling.
She raised herself up, back arching, and drove her feelers
- silvery tentacles, glistening like dew -
through my system, latching herself onto me,
drilling nails into the soft-spots on my bones.
She hooked my veins together like a bundle of cords and seeped down into them like battery-acid:
eating away at my nerves until only the tips of my fingers
remembered how to feel.
She stroked my heart, cooing softly,
thumb and forefinger reaching down with elegance and demonic-grace
to take that tiny thrumming machine into her hand,
and--
…twist…
I could not even cry for what I had lost.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2012
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Elizabeth Nathaniel Poem
Run little girl;
run until your lungs give out
and your legs scream for an end,
and then keep running.
Life is a race, little one,
and if you run fast enough
you just might win.
But be careful;
there are obstacles
ready to be thrown in your way,
and sometimes the cars refuse to merge.
It's hard sometimes
to keep going
- I know it is -
but trust me,
just keep running
and it'll get easier:
you'll get stronger
and sooner or later
your lungs will expand
and your legs will numb
and your body will
rise up and down
with the buoyancy of ease
and become weightless.
So run little girl;
run until your legs turn strong
and your lungs don't burn as brightly.
Run until the pavement
and the heat
and the exhaustion disappear
and you're simply floating on air.
Run until your body goes numb
and all you feel is the splendid
natural high of endorphins
fighting the pain.
They told me to stop running
- silly doctors -
they worry that my body can't take it.
What they will never understand
is that my body needs this:
I need this
because it stops the pain.
I run to feel
and not to feel.
I run to escape
because life seems so much simpler
when it's just you and the road
and a pair of worn out sneakers.
I run because it's the only thing
I know how to do anymore.
I run because,
if I didn't,
I'd be running on the inside anyways,
and I might as well get somewhere.
So run little girl;
run because it heals your wounds.
Run because it's the only thing
you're good at.
Run because eventually
you'll get stronger,
and one day
you'll be able to breathe again.
Copyright © Elizabeth Nathaniel | Year Posted 2011
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