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the angel of death
brings me black roses dipped in my blood the shadows are dancing in the background at the prom i never attended i wear the prom queen's tiara made of razor blades and roses we all pretend i haven't already peeled my face off when i speak into the microphone everyone just hears static you drink my blood in a champagne glass and look the other way my prom dress is made of death poetry and torn bed sheets when i leave the room no one notices except him when he opens the door to the hearse he tells me black roses turn red at the end
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when the sun goes down ghosts hold me hostage their fallen memories float around me i follow the dead into the darkness of thought and time they tell me that we are all the same they observe me when i try to form something anything out of this emptiness their hollow laughs echo through the night as they dance around me my neon sadness lights the way in the dark on this road paved with open wounds we all play the fool that's how it goes
when you dance with the dead tonight should have been a night of celebration and it wasn't i sat in the darkness with my signed contract missing my daughter wishing i had anyone i could trust the dead put bracelets on my wrists or chains i can't tell anymore they wrote my book and i heard them sing when i signed these last proofs i remember reading this book when i was a kid titled phone calls from the dead if only i knew my future then these chains only we can hear the dead and i travel through time we ride on regrets we sit in basements on moth eaten couches knowing that the world has already failed us a record player keeps skipping in the dark I can't hear it anymore this hell is real last night i dreamt i was vomiting centipedes and ghosts when i wake all i wanted was to back to sleep my ghosts pin my eyes shut tape my mouth pry my ears open just so i can hear my muffled screams this is the way it is this is the way it will always be the tarot card fool is dancing in front of me his bells sound flat his eyes are black i can't breath when the dead hug me i swallow their mothball scent we laugh at the fluorescent track lights in the morgue some people call this light jesus but we know better the dead are crushing pens ink is bleeding everywhere i finger paint their words my heart is all palpitations as they paint their sorrow on my body these bruises aren't meant to heal they whisper in my ear i try to send them to the stars to the light we cannot see and they laugh i dream of shitty motel rooms my daughter is missing so i help the other wandering children in the shadows a young boy clings to my skirt another ghost attaches to me drains me we are all vampires my shadow aura grows i will be like them just another apparition that haunts orpheus sings his heartbreak song i am Demeter i am Persephone i am Hades while i write on this cold winter night i watch in the black window sadness becomes its own entity my arms open when it punctures my heart he whispers in my ear that i was born for this we fade in the dark i hold a snake by its head before it swallows its own tail i give it a kiss we melt into one i can't tell the difference between this beginning this end we howl like dogs while the moon hides behind the clouds i am medusa in a moonless night try to cut off my head before you turn you to stone watch my garden of statues so still how brave you are see my eyes glow red with revenge with sadness i weep when you are a statue but you are stone cold and don't notice as a punishment
my stepfather used to make me pull the bamboo shoots out of our side yard a sad patch of dirt near the shed door i was a sickly child with diseases unknown to the doctors at the time i wore my melancholy my sickness was an the ever present ghost i was willing to become to save my mother i want you to know i succeeded at nothing i saved no one not even myself i want you to know bamboo is stubborn it grows in the cold rocky soils of small town Maine i used to be a sad child that had hope for a future now i am just another mother lost in the anger of another cruel man he has my daughter now and all i can see is me with my crippled 12 yr old wrists kneeling in the dirt and rocks struggling to pull bamboo shoots i never did a good enough job or so my stepfather told me i was too busy fantasizing about the shed door being a portal to another world where i could be happy i pull the bamboo shoots but they keep growing my stepfather sits in his recliner drugged up on pain pills and yells at me to sit on his lap light his cigarette i see the dead rolling in their graves from regret abuse and sadness i see my future in his cigarette smoke the blue light of the never ending tv is another ending my mother is drifting away in another room my daughter will be born in trauma this story never ends angry men sad women children that pay the price she grows like the bamboo and he is pulling her out by the roots i am watching the shed door waiting for it to open the dead are screaming help it's always the mother's fault the father doesn't count when it comes to the blame of the pain but he should when i found out my father died i smiled because i knew what he did to my mother what he did to me i want you to know he was a criminal that didn't suffer enough for the pain he caused i will feel the same way about my stepfather i will feel the same way about the father of my child when they come to me with ghostly regrets i will pretend they don't exist just like they did to me my father nearly murdered a couple beat the shit out of my mother raped teenagers and when he died he came to me for forgiveness i made him live every memory of pain he caused and i had to relive it through his eyes the suffering was worth it i didn't move him on to a higher plane i gave him the darkness he gave others his soul will never rest there is no excuse the court system fails women and children from prolonged abuse so much abuse as a child made it so i see the dead everyone was afraid of my shitty dad and now as he drifts in the never ending darkness of the pain he has caused so many he is afraid of me i became friends with the darkness just so i could navigate my nightmares my shadows worship me now we are coming for the liars the abusers the ones who take children's innocence and look the other way i see your future i collect the lost souls of assholes like you i never went to prom had some shitty abusive boyfriend so young so lost that his excuse for love was enough is still no excuse i am ashamed of what i have endured i found my voice too late my demons are taking me to homecoming too late this gown woven of shadows and pain is heavy my crown hurts memories like an ax to the head my blood is invisible this poem is for all the women who tried to make nice and fucked themselves over this poem is for my seventeen yr old mother who thought love was being wanted and had me because she wanted to be loved this poem is for my daughter who doesn't know me or her family history who is making the same mistake i did trying to be perfect pretending all is well when all is very wrong protecting a father who doesn't deserve the title this poem is for the dead women who have warned me because they don't want to see another child losing a mother or a mother losing a child or another abusive man getting away with it this poem is for the mother ghosts you know who you are you know the sadness you keep the children you have lost the children you tried to save only to sit at an empty table remembering how you gave part of yourself and it never came back and no one understood and other woman that did pretended they didn't because these masks we wear are so very important those birthday parties like a contest because you wanted to your child to feel loved because you didn't those goodie bags that were supposed to mean something because you came from a small town and didn't know these things your child doesn't remember any of those birthday parties i remember my dad dealing drugs on my weekend visits the only thing he ever gave me was a whiskey flavored ice cream cone and a giant unicorn he threatened a carny for he told me not to trust anyone and my mom did too you think you have found yourself you do art to feel good but you don't feel good this is just another outlet another pretty birthday party you call art that won't be remembered your heart is broken you have accepted sadness grief loss is the only language you will ever be able to understand your empathy doesn't matter you did attachment parenting and it doesn't matter you watched your best friend die and it doesn't matter nothing matters so you watch the dead as they remember these same feelings your job is sifting through the discarded memories of the dead and helping them move on but you can't move on you always go back to that day your mother crying because the court ordered that you as a toddler visit your murdering father in prison you wanted to protect her you felt his lies when he spoke you remembered how he beat your mother when you look away from your mother's tears you see your future the scars you will inflict upon yourself your daughter will look like your mother look like you she won't understand the danger she is in you won't know what to do and eventually you will stop thinking about joy you will stop hoping that things will be different your life will just be a war story without any glory the dead will haunt you you won't sleep and when you do you won't be able to decide if the nightmares are worse then your waking life even as i close the door
on this part of my life Carl Jung is holding the door knob he points out the color of the door it's red the color of my blood even old ghosts like to mansplain shit he takes my wrists in his own and traces the veins i am a map going everywhere and nowhere i am the tree of life psychiatrists have always loved me the ghost of Carl Jung smokes his pipe he is thinking how we both like leather couches he is thinking about my scars he wishes he had some of his own but now its too late for him Joseph Campbell is riding a goat behind him he has a dagger in his hand we are all here to discuss the death of the mother archetype the blood red door is weeping i smoke Jung's pipe Campbell and I draw maps of the universe on the naked white floor of the hospital we are in I wear a deer's antlers we create the world as we see it with an abandoned box of legos my daughter drifts off into the sky we all let go of the balloons we hold on to i cry Carl pats my back in a grandfatherly way Joseph gifts me the goat that he is riding the door is still bleeding when we all decide life is fucked up last night i wept
in my daughter's bedroom while trying to sleep it is a guest room now or it was supposed to be i am gradually making it into a shrine she has been kidnapped or she has been brainwashed or she just hates me because she is 15 all i know is i did attachment parenting which was awful and apparently it didn't work i keep thinking about when i was in my twenties and this psychic told me i wasn't supposed to marry her father i was supposed to be a single mother but i was stubborn just like she is now and i did the opposite now here i am being comforted by ghosts in the dark as he slaughters my heart using her as the weapon in my past life he murdered me now he has learned how to kill in the modern age as a psychologist and a pathological liar he has turned her against me so easy when she is a teenager did he even study in graduate school? no i did all his reading for him now that she carries my pain her own and the pain of my mother this collective pain is an ink blot blooming inside of her her rage will be turned the wrong way just like mine was towards herself because dear daddy can do no wrong when he is pulling the strings to her marionette heart this will go on for more generations girls turn into women who swallow grief until it turns into this black hole of longing don't worry that longing is just the dead whispering all their regrets to you they don't wish they had been more happy because happiness is a con they wish they had been more compassionate they wish they hadn't turned away from all the pain because what they remember are the trials and tribulations my daughter's bedroom is a guest room now there will be no guests just me my sadness and this trash bag of memories in this room that was once hers the ceiling is leaking the ghosts tell me i am a poltergeist my tears manifested this room weeps because i can't i hold on to my nightmares thinking i can change them in to dreams the dead out number the living this is a real nightmare i see them everywhere all the time they are writing this poem grief is the door to the other side or it was there is no door anymore now that i am a ghost living in the past this is a ghost story
pain changes you grief wears you away until you have forgotten who you are time isn't promised to everyone as a ghost i know this i am trapped in a room all the walls are made of clocks the ticking is too loud and when it stops i know it was my heart i can't hear my voice my screams are just white noise i stand in the corner watching life go on i am dead i live off others memories and hope so i can feel alive again i flicker the lamp by your bed i tell you how to make the most out of life but you don't listen because you are already a ghost haunting yourself when you hang out with the dead you see the living more clearly i am peeling a hard boiled egg a snake sheds it skin my daughter was quiet when she was born i was quiet when she was born death was close then and they thought i didn't know her father was in the next room when they told him we might not make it the angel of death told me they were wrong he didn't have his scythe he told me everything i needed to know he brought my sister a stillborn baby showed me her death her name was sabrina she gave me the gift of my mother's pain i promised her i would name my child after her if she would just save her she left during the epidural told me the name i chose for my daughter was the right name Annabelle was stuck and then she wasn't she was born on Halloween they put a pumpkin hat on her head i held her when i couldn't remember she was mine he sat in the corner a stranger they praised for not watching football while i almost died i looked down at this this new human being and i promised to protect her from this fucked up world |
AuthorMichelle Tinklepaugh Archives
June 2023
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