3/23/23

recess as a kid is like a break from all of the stress and work and freedom to let our bodies play and relax 

but recess as an adult is like the world is falling apart all around you

and when you let yourself have time to have a break from all of the stress and work and give your body freedom

your mind takes that freedom away from you. 

how do i make recess and free time just mean everything and nothing to me again?

how do i turn my mind off and just relax instead of thinking about everything every millisecond, every blink my eyelashes flutter from my eyes, every time my heart thump thump thumps

remember that kid who always used to play on the jungle gym and fall through the top?

like that kid i feel like i’m trying to get to the top with every step i take, every ounce of pressure i beat through with my work and stress

and when i finally get to the finish line, in the dead of night, when the day has turned to a dusty darkness of dim fog and sunlight dispersing from the clouds

its 7 a.m. suddenly and yet i fall

crashing down like that kid from the jungle gym

because the top of the mountain, the top of the hill, the ending point of where the finish line just keeps restarting and restarting and everything i did to get to the top comes crashing back down on me

i fall and fall and fall and keep trying to get to the top over and over and over again

just for the waves of sadness to engulf me and emptiness to strangle me and tiredness to consume me

like that kid climbing to the top of the jungle gym and falling

i am so overwhelmed with both a joy of reaching to the top but a sadness from falling down.

you see, that kid probably ends up crying when he hits the ground, and yet, with a bit of motivation he gets back up.

i’m not crying, but with no motivation, and with every chance of “recess” i get, the recess where my mind roams and wanders into these kaleidoscopic realities of struggle and fear and inability to succeed, I’m not sure if in the end, i’ll ever be able to get back up.

and if i do, in the end, is it ever really worth it?

– j.ds

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i-

i –

i – 

i am unsure if i love you anymore and that scares me 

an eternity of worries rise in my body like roaring waves waving within my soul 

for me to finally cross to the other side of the road, get to the shore, and stop being drowned by you. 

but – 

but – 

you say you love me and i’m suddenly poisoned by the way your words sound like a drunken man, speaking in cursive, and putting hearts on your ‘i’s” to reel me in closer not letting me leave not letting me breathe i’m so close to you and stuck on to you it’s almost as if i’m no longer my own person no longer able to breathe 

Breathe – 

Breathe – 

my own air. instead, i’m inhaling your drunken words and you’re not even drunk but loving you feels like a never-ending hangover constant spiraling of love and hatred, love and anger, love and something that feels similar to love but it is not. i’m slith

Slith- 

Slith- 

slithering to your heart hoping to hear your heart beats beating faster and faster for me but instead your eyes wander to others and my heart is the one beating fast my fingers are picking at my nailbeds and i start to feel like the way you love me, em-

Emp-

Empt-

Empty and devoured by nothingness. 

the way you forgot me

The one thing I keep circling back to is the question why. why would he do this and what was i doing that made him feel that what he did was the right road to take. i don’t want to think about this anymore but most days when i start to feel happy again and refreshed by the sunlight in the sky my brain rewinds back to that night and my smiles turn to blank stares of emptiness and no one even notices.

my thoughts rumble and turn and twist and it’s not like i can’t focus on things that have to be done because i can and i normally do and it takes my mind off of it but on the moments where i am making a moment in my life it suddenly all crawls back.

or when the night is too quiet and nobody is speaking to me i think about the warmth of my tears that day how they felt like hells burning flames of fire on my soft sensitive skin and i think about all of the rage and all of the pain and i wonder why.

i want to know why i don’t want to hear the i’m sorry’s that don’t even sound like apologies anymore because each time they’re said a sigh comes afterwards like you’re tired of apologizing.

i’m tired of feeling like i cannot be loved because every person who ever comes into my life leaves me unloved.

i want to feel the way we felt when we first met in that parking lot. you know, when you laughed at every stupid little joke i made and when i thought you were genuine and sincere and honest.

i want to feel the way we felt when we had our first kiss. passion and compassion roaming around both of our bodies like two angels were helping us intertwine our love together to form one powerful eternal love.

i want to go back to that but i can’t. because i keep asking myself why and thinking too much and its almost been two years and i don’t know how to continue. i don’t know how to talk to you without you making me feel like i’m crazy for being upset or dumb for not being able to move on.

there’s only so many lies and fake apologies i can take and i’m not sure if i can accept this one. i’m not sure if i can forget. i’m not sure if there’s any chance of me going back to the way i used to love you and i don’t know if me forgiving too soon is why i’m still unhealed from your poisonous words so

i hope you can forgive me just like the way you forgot me.

The Playground

As I sit here, I wonder what’s so special about the playground. To play on it hours on end, I’d go out of my mind. But they scream for turns on the swings as loud as their voices allow them. Almost as if they saw an ice cream truck driving through the neighborhood. They run around, climbing up the slides, because the sheer thought of being able to climb high into the sky, as if they’re climbing the clouds, hypnotize them.

The playground plays with the children, just as much as it plays with the mind.

And so I sit here. My throat tickles from yesterday’s laughter but burns today from the germs of the playground. The slides open wounds slash onto my skin and sickness rumbles in my veins. I sit here wishing that someone had healed that slide.

So that maybe I wouldn’t have to be sitting here, wondering, with my throat tickling, and wishing for a better day or a better feeling in my body as I sit here, on this playground.

– j.ds

june 1st 2022

i’m trying to understand the people in my life but it’s hard

why do they do the things they do or say the things they do or don’t do the things that are worthwhile

i’m trying to be okay with the way things are but there’s a never ending line of questions in my mind

and i can’t help but wonder if the line is ever going to end or shorten or if the questions will be answered

or will they just float in my brain until they’re ignored over and over again

when i speak i wonder if my words are recognizable or am i simply speaking gibberish words that are aligned into a sentence that doesn’t coherently make sense do i make sense or are they simply not understanding

it’s so difficult to deal with people who do not understand who let things slide who sit in a sea of disgust and drown in their sorrows and sink in their depression

i am trying and trying and trying to be better for those who need me but yet they barely understand me and it’s worse when my mind is filled with these questions

these questions that i’ve just learned

to stop asking.

untitled

there is desperation in this home

and there is a girl who dreamt of life and beautiful people

a girl who collected love from others hands like seashells on the sand

from wolves disguised as men.

there is desperation in this girl

who saw the good in people instead of the bad

a girl who received I love you’ from people incapable of truly knowing how to love.

there is desperation here

in this place of heaven and hell

we are all searching for love with our hearts instead of our minds.

maybe that’s why the wolves are tearing us apart

using our hearts to get what they want.

there is desperation inside our homes

and there is a desperation inside our souls.

– j.ds

a sea of an open world

we’re in a sea of an open world. and yet he desires everything and every little skinny legged brunette or blonde but me. it’s as if my voice is not loud enough like the tidal waves crashing on the shore instead he must think my words are sweet and silky like the flutter of a butterfly wing meeting its other half silently. we’re in a sea of an open world but not an open relationship. and yet sometimes it seems as though he wouldn’t mind anyone else even though he knows no one else could love him the way i do. because with what meets the eye there isn’t much to see but a man who has a little too much dandruff on his beard and flakes of unmoisturized skin resting on the roof of his nose and top of his lip. why would anyone dare to kiss him with the thought of being infested with snowflakes of dried skin from the lack of tenderness from his face does he take care of his body? no. so how could he take care of anybody if he cannot take care of the one thing people rest their eyes on first. unless you’re a woman, forget it, the first thing people’s eyes darts to is your body. a man will never look into your eyes first, your eyes will be the last thing to be looked at.

the world may be a sea of openness but i did not consent to him being so open about his lack of honesty. his words being mistaken as truthful, knowing that they are not: but i move on because i love him because i know he doesn’t mean to hurt me even though he continues to over and over again because he does not understand the importance of being truthful or understand the understanding that loving someone means loving someone with all of your heart not just 50%. i am not worthy of just a half love but the world is a sea of openness and when he said that i mistook it for him believing that perhaps the world is open like an unending road, a street without traffic, endless possibilities, and with each one of those possibilities i am not a part of it. i am no longer his partner. i am just a piece of a part of his life that he uses while he sits in the restaurant in front of me and watches other girls. sits in bed with me while i’m asleep holding his hand thinking about how much i love this man in my dreams while he watches someone else undress and speaks to them online with words that makes me think i barely know him.

but he wants a world with a sea of openness a world with no rules or respect for your partner and yet he forgets, that i am there with him every time. not those skinny legged brunettes or blondes that make me feel that i am not skinny enough which is absurd because i know that i am more than enough bones than actual flesh and yet he still looks at the other girls. or perhaps its because of their bodies. to him everyone is just a body.

the truth hurts and he knows it. and yet i’ll never be like those girls he watched when i was asleep into the darkness of the room. he laid there and i laid next to the devil. touching himself to the sight of someone else and paid money and i just want to scream because my world is not a sea of openness my world is closed off my world is opened by a passcode of trust of love and if i let you in it it means that i believe you to be honest and worthy and yet he was the opposite. and when i bring up my anger or ask questions to try and understand he gets defensive and i sit in the corner of my world and wonder what was i thinking or perhaps what was he thinking and in my head there is this back and forth tennis match of who is right and who is wrong and this sheer thought that maybe i will never be good enough that maybe it is my fault that i wasn’t trying hard enough where we were intimate maybe it was me that caused him to search for affection elsewhere.

i start to blame myself and every piece of me hates myself for inviting him into my world and yet even though i stay, even though he continues to stay with me after all of his secrets are out, he continues to want a sea of an open world. because deep down in the depths of my despair in the depths of my brokenness and hopes of understanding his actions, he continues to lie to me while he loves me, while he is intimate with me, while he sleeps besides me, he is secretive more than ever and distant and it is my fault. for if i had kept my mouth shut and just accepted the fact that i will never be his only one, only desire, perhaps he would be more honest with me or perhaps he would love me the way i would hoped when we had first met in 2018.

– j.ds

feel

I just want to feel something/maybe I should make list of things I should do the next time I am heartbroken/I wish people could subscribe to my body and stay/but everyone tends to leave because of my bony fashion/the memories of him sink away like tangled seaweed at the bottom of the ocean/he lays at the bottom of my heart/during Sunday solitude I pray for him/even though all he ever wanted was a one night stand/

I just want to feel something/but when I think of him I feel his hands on my neck/the same hands that left invisible marks I thought I could forget/his knuckles red/from internal anger he let out onto the walls of his room/my cheeks bursting into flames/because at one moment/I thought he was everything I never knew I wanted/

he made me feel wanted/he made me feel something/and now with him gone/I feel nothing at all/like a skeleton sourcing for a body to hold onto/a stinging soul/lightning bolts rage within me/I want to unsubscribe to this pain/I want to feel something/anything else/than this

– j.ds

dead words

the smell of dead words dribble from people’s mouths like a heated soccer game. sweat perspires from the epidermis like a glass of iced coffee from a caffe on mars in the south pole. the smell of dead words is cold – like a young girl playing hopscotch in the middle of a snowstorm. or cold – like a husband hurting his Childs mother because she took the last sip of his Chateau Margaux 2009 Balthazar wine. the dead words repaint their wounds with marigolds. in hopes that the death of the words could reincarnate into something that may flourish. the red and yellow gems of mother nature breathe in happiness every summer. while the dead words inhale sadness every season. the dead words smell like an aching woe, a low spirit with buttoned down ribs, filling the words of what used to be a poet’s pens companion, with gloom.

– j.ds

The Bench, 1882 Vincent van Gogh

The bench holds a few memories of you and me 

in pomerance park where we once sat 

you told me a story about a girl you cheated on 

apologizing consistently 

but i wasn’t that girl 

why were you apologizing to me? 

 

you asked me if it was okay for you to take a smoke break 

pulling out a cigarette box 

red and white 

marlboros were your favorite 

but the smell of the ash was not mine. 

why did you ask me if it was okay if you knew it wasn’t? 

 

at the bench you told me about her 

a name i forced myself to forget 

because remembering 

would make me feel like i have competition

and everytime i compete with someone else 

i never win. 

why did you never focus on me? 

 

under the tree

we called it our tree 

you held my hand for the first time 

and told me about the way you liked to intertwine your fingers 

it was the same way you did it with her 

 

the roots seemed better connected than we ever were 

underneath our soles of our shoes my soul broke 

every time you mentioned her. 

 

now i sit on the bench alone 

wondering if you ever got what you wanted. 

did you ever want me or were you always going to be hung up on her? 

– j.ds