Author’s note:

Here is a sampling of a collection of my creative writing pieces. This is a huge step for me. You may learn things about me you may have never guessed. Most, if not all of my poems are in a free verse/spoken word style. I enjoy the freedom from the constraints of other styles. Each piece has a central theme or background. Hunger is a Battle: Eating disorders. Plunging into Darkness: Seasonal Affective Disorder. Confession of Expression: OCD and battling my urges. The Reflection: this one is a short story about a recurring nightmare I had where I modified the ending. Loving the Impossible: this is a piece I wrote about the young woman I love. Save Me: The process of my panic attacks and what brings me back. I will use the pen name Silenced Poet.

Hunger is a Battle

Hunger is a battle
Everyone faces.
It can be lost.
It can be won.

Its presence gives you pain.
Its absence gives you pleasure.

Oh, how delightful to fill yourself,
With every cake or cookie or roast.
Dig into your delicious fantasies
Of soup or bread or salad.

These are the winnings of the absence,
But what if you could not enjoy this joy?

What if your battle of hunger was one not won?
If the rages in your stomach went on
Because when you looked in the mirror
You saw that food destroyed you.

Your skin carved with the trenches from the battle
Your legs filled with the aftermath of a binge.

What if you ate to impress the masses
But later visited the bathhouse to rid
Of every bit consumed
Believing that food destroyed you?

Sinking deeper into the distorted image in your mind
You no longer let the food pass.

You don’t realize the image burning
Into your eyes
Isn’t the one we see
The one that has starved away.

You see a body destroyed by food and overly-flawed.
We see a body beautifully struggling with the mind.

A body tortured by the unrealistic
Molds of artificial bodies
Crafted by a dysfunctional society
Fogging eyes and ruining minds.


Plunging into Darkness

My body falls into night
Like autumn to winter

Grass loses the brightness of spring
And succumbs to the chills
The leaves decay
And are buried under coldness

My mind darkens fast
Like the day blackens early

The sun flees from the sky
A guardian defeated
Bright shields pierced through
By black arrows of nighttime

My skin splits apart
Like ice under heavy feet

Red spills out
As daggers cut through enemies
Cold ice cold skin cold soul
All the same in the time of dying

My body buried by sorrows
Like dying grass under snow

Soul decomposing
Blackness encompassing
Freezing in a declining state
Winter has seeped in…

Under my cold skin


Confession of Expression

As long as I can remember my fingers have traced
Traced lines
And curves
And eyes
And faces
It did not matter the time of day
My fingers would trace
Though not so obvious
I traced, victorious
The anxious feeling to trace has never left me
Little to none know
That under the snow
The cracks in the sidewalk
Have been traced
Over and
Over and
Over
By the poor tired fingers of these two hands
It is not as literal
As one might draw
But rather a canvass in my head
That my thumbs twitch
And fingers work
I have never found something quite so stimulating
Or frightening in my life
The lines cannot be avoided
I imagine
If I tried to avoid
I would drop to the floor
And scratch a design to be traced, myself
I have always traced eyes
The tipped sideways ovals
Circle in the center
Tangling fibers of the iris
The center pupil
Over and
Over and
Over
Green eyes
Grey eyes
Black eyes
Brown eyes
Blue eyes
Tracing the curves of the eyes
I couldn’t escape
My obsession of the entrance to the mind
It distresses me
Greatly when I can’t trace
It’s torturous
To trace too much
Or too little
And letters
Oh letters
How I loved to trace letters
Not my own
My handwriting is too unappealing
I obsess over every criss-cross
Every intersect
Every pattern
Every shape
Every character
But when I caught a glimpse of your eyes
Your eyes
Your eyes
Your eyes…
My thumbs went still
My fingers did not twitch
My canvass tore apart
There were
Two bright
Shiny
Blue
Eyes
Full of life and light and joy and hope
I look at your eyes and I don’t need to trace

The Reflection

My body aches as I twist out of my sheets and press my feet against the floor. It takes me about a minute to be able to walk sturdy and straight. As I reach the bathroom I notice a strange feeling in my jaw. Tight pain almost forcing me to open my mouth but I refuse. I flip the light switch and bright whiteness floods into my eyes. So intense that I hear a noise resembling that of when you start up an old tube tv. At first everything is blurry but my sight slowly comes into focus. I see myself in the mirror. I’m wearing a white v-neck and pajama bottoms. My hair is a brown mess with many fly-aways. My skin is pale and scattered with various markers of struggling life. Finally I look into my own eyes. At this moment they are a faded green holding despair behind them. The whites of my eyes are bloodshot and the bags around are exhausted.

The pain I felt in my jaw earlier starts to spread to my forehead. Migraine setting in, I begin to notice the hairs on my arms beginning to stand up. Although my basement is cold, this is irregular. I see something dark run across the corner of the mirror and I step back. Likely paranoia, I shake my head at my reflection. I look at my arms in the mirror and see the veins crawling and turning purple. I begin to panic and quickly look down at my hands- there is nothing there. I look back up and see the crawling purple veins in my arms. My reflection isn’t matching me- or am I not matching it?

I start losing touch with which one of me is true and what I’ll call my reflection begins to change more. The mirror shows my irises matching my bloodshot whites as they turn blood-red. The tight pain in my jaw becomes increasingly worse and I tremble until I shriek. As my mouth flings open black smoke releases from behind my lips. It surrounds me and I look down- the smoke is only in the reflection. I glare at the mirror and shake with fright. How could it show what is not true? Then I notice that my actual arms are copying the reflection. I drag my fingers across the veins in my left arm as I shake. I look up and the smoke appears closer. That can’t be right. It’s coming right out of the mirror towards me. I grab the doorknob to escape the bathroom but the door will not open.

I pound my fists against the door until they’re bruised and bleeding. The smoke is creeping closer and closer. I hear white noise and my reflection is stationary where I left it when I was standing. It is not mirroring my movements. I instinctively put my hands in front of my face and the smoke wraps around my wrists. I try to pull back but the smoke is dragging me into the mirror and the white noise screams louder into my ears. I smell burning flesh as the smoke sears my skin and flings my body forward into the mirror and the smirking reflection. My head hits the mirror and everything turns black.

I wake up at the hospital in ICU. I scream when I wake up, perhaps a delayed reaction. A nurse rushes in and I ask her what happened. She tells me I was taken in with glass shards in my head and burns on my arms. I look down and see bandages on my arms and an IV. I ask where my family is. She says only one member appeared the entire time and the hospital didn’t know who I was. I tell her my name and my emergency contact information. Before she leaves I ask who brought me into the hospital. She yells behind her shoulder “your twin did.”

I am so confused.
I don’t have a twin.

Loving the Impossible

You would think it impossible a woman such as her could have existed until she pranced through your dreams and danced upon your heart.

She was quite possibly the parallel of what mankind unleashed from Pandora’s box to my heart. A disastrous hurricane that hurled hoards of arrows from thousands of love’s archers.

She became the constant between my many selves- good and evil.

I don’t remember what I did to anger the gods to sentence me to everlasting love for this incredibly impossible woman.

She inhales- but not oxygen- it is my soul.

My true being into her lungs.

She exhales- returning pieces of me- cleansed of wrongdoing.

Before this woman came I was on the road to self destruction.

Indulging my sins with Dionysus, clouding my eyes until I could no longer see the sun I was driving towards.

After the final drops of wax melted off my tattered wings she caught me before the ocean and set me onto the beach.

She warmed my cold heart with the hot beach sand as she danced with nymphs and rhymed our epic into existence.

The gentle sound waves from her voice seeped into my bones.

With that the tail began between the elegant dancer and the lost musician.

The gentle sound waves from her voice seeped into my bones.

Save Me

“Save me,”

I whisper

To no one

I am alone

Again

I am lost

My hands

They tremble

And grasp

My heart

It races

And jumps

The sound

It screeches

And stops

The gravity

It presses

And releases

The trembling in my hands quakes the earth

The beating in my heart grows faster

The sound in my ears grows louder

The gravity around my body pulsates rapidly

My bones begin to pull apart

My skin begins to wear away

My surroundings are flooding

My ears are drowned by screeching white noise

Just as I feel my consciousness slipping away

I feel a soft touch on my shoulder

My mind is slammed back into the earth and clenched back into reality

Suddenly I am found