I hope these poems give you something.

-Charlotte Lindsay Marron

I hope these poems give you something. -Charlotte Lindsay Marron

Peace came this Sunday
She came when I sought solace 
She was a good friend and a great houseguest
I found her in spiral notebooks and sunsets
I told her I was sorry I wasn’t fully present to her presence
She said it’s quite alright and she isn’t here for recognition 
She is just here for the interim,
She is here because she knows I shouldn’t live in extremity and I need not stay suffering
She is here to say it doesn’t always have to be 'that' way - the only way I ever knew, 
"you don’t need to break to have a breakthrough"
Sometimes you can just take baby steps and wrap your sadness in cozy blankets
Everything will be okay, darling

I grew up twisting the word complacent around my tongue and I’d knot it as though it was a cherry stem [I think we’re all trying to escape something]

I spoke in less words then I ever had before
And as a child who grew up screaming in an undying staircase of instability, I knew something was seriously wrong when my lips weren’t chapped for the first time in years
I wasn’t spitting out the only assemblage of my strength and I was pretty sure that meant I was smaller than I used to be

Someone once said if you kept it inside you long enough, the sky would erupt
But I believe now there was a hole in my belly and the last pieces of me spilled into the crevices of the places where no one was looking
I know that because I had to find them alone
And my bread crumb trail brought visitors home
…critters
It’s a big bright forrest now
And it’s rather beautiful

Do lovers ever think of one another and then think of me?

Cupid paces the room in purgatory.

They’re missing your magic, while you're so busy perfecting it ----

They’re missing your magic, while you're so busy perfecting it ----

Perhaps, things are getting lost... less ----

Perhaps, things are getting lost... less ----

Each and every ending births a new beginning ---

Each and every ending births a new beginning ---

MISFORTUNE DISGUISES FLIGHT AS ONLY TURBULENCE

Dear Diary,

Sometimes I expect someone to comprehend the depth of my emotional body. As I do to them, I hope they would want to probe deeper into the revolting core of my being. I once believed that empathy allowed me to see all human beings as inherently good. Then one day, that statement stopped holding true. I began to see that in reality, my empathy allowed me to see people as they are - underneath everything they do to mask themselves.

Trauma gives context for bad behaviour, but it also introduces the factor of inescapable complexity. Some memories have no solution, and the further you intertwine yourself into them, the more they shapeshift into your future.

Empathy can do that to you, make you hold another’s pain as your own. Be cautious of the shadows that knock at your door; the only way to survive them is to enter a state of survival. To survive is to sacrifice your soul, at least for a little while. Empathetic people should be taught to slam doors - to scream louder - to wreck havoc on the disastrous disembodiment of empathy’s antonym.

To be empathetic is to be strong enough to speak stories into existence. But to be a storyteller, you first must escape it.

Always and forever, Charlotte

An honourary guest at the precipice of the entrance

In these moments, someone begs to crawl inside themselves as opposed to crawling into the limelight. [their request is denied]

They hear the clatter of bodies cramming themselves into hiding, coming from inside. Everyone is trying their very best to enhance the surprise.

The birthday girl has outsmarted the whole room that awaits her. Her stomach churns in all the places she wishes to disappear to. But in moments like these, she recognizes her calling.

She turns the doorknob slowly and steps through the doorway. She’s older now but she’s still growing.

Here, in this garden of blue-light note-taking and ideas that bloom into poems, I didn’t realize I have been planting seeds for centuries. Along my way, I stumbled into gardening. 

I now know that I reap what I sew. I trust myself to be a careful notetaker. 

You know, somewhere between when I started these notes and now, I watered my own soil - waiting and wilting and waxing and waning, until we would entangle into one other.

You seem to have struggled too. 

I took a journey down the wrong story just to find you.

I am having trouble telling you that I haven’t always had a home inside myself. I shrivelled into an audience member.

I was exiled from my mind at that moment in time. I lived on the outside, looking in to my own garden as it started blossoming. 

My throat burned for nourishment, and only as I was pulled into the stabbing wound of my skin did I re-enter my garden.

I’m growing and I’m around to take notice, not as a cynic or a brooding critic but as a friend to myself and a friend to you.

You know, I thought the best part of me was so fragile it would fade away… but it was kept safe and returned delicately.

You know what’s worse?

I once believed the closer you looked at me, the more ugly you’d take in. I never dared to realize that’s because I grew up breaking. When you break like that, with subtle cracks that hardly surface, you live under the impression that you look better from a distance. I was small, sliced skin and scars up close but, you know what’s worse? I was wrong. How delightfully atrocious is that?

Now I get to reinvent my mirror and mother myself. I am the interior decorator of my mind.

But before anything, I am a gardener.

I grew without roots and I rotted.But my carcass, lost in the wilderness of darkness, broke ground. The gift in the abyss of my death is the life I’ve since found.

The Ways in Which You Stole My Solitude

For a little long while I longed to be a poet

I cradled myself in a sea of my lonesomeness. I lost myself to its vast expansiveness. I was whole in my belittling lack of being stable

And I wrote about the life I longed to live, but never would

I was the shape of my sadness, and I wrote as an estranged lyricist

Artists paint the brightest portraits of themselves when their lights go out

You were once the shape of my superstitions

You made niceties of my politeness

I made the habit of allowing you to probe deeper into the ocean of my depth, knowing full-heartedly you’d never reach deep enough to ever mean anything

And then it all started to mean something

Either fate or cruel, cruel irony intervened herself into our story

I realized I no longer felt at home drowning out there on my own

Suddenly I felt the need to call you

Then I taught you how to understand me and for the first time I felt what it was like to touch the ground

You stole the solitude I never found

I had never known myself well enough to stand alone

You stole the solitude I created from soft soliloquies, just hoping one day they would be tangible enough to love me

Solitude never was a lover

But you were, in all the ways stealing my solitude has proven worthwhile

Your name is lifeforce, the act of presence, the way I can get lost in life without heading home to my hermitage

I hadn’t intended to fall for you, I just did

Just as I hadn’t intended to show you my whole ocean… it just happened

You are the catalyst to my belief in happenstances

The impetus to my reawakening

The cataclysmic uprising that burned down the walls of my soul, and welcomed you to seek refuge in my whole

And in you I found home

You stand on two feet in my entirety

Dear lifeforce, I thank you profusely