// the writer’s room //

9 Replies

I think the toughest part is accepting that you have to write all of it for any of it to be any good, just like you have to live all of it if you want to be alive. There is no good and bad there is only the sacred freedom to experience everything.

You have to be able – not even able, you just have to be willing, the muse / gods / universe / angels will take care of ‘able’ as long as you show up – to write the deep and the shallow, the real and the surreal, the pain and the joy, the light and the dark, infinitely. To keep moving your hand across the page is to get out past the fear, shame, and judgment that swipe at the throat of every artist all the time.

You don’t have to publish or share all of it, but you have to write all of it. Somehow. You have to find a way to do the work :: doing the work is the way.

It’s all part of the movement of the energy of creation. It’s all part of life as struggle, as play, as an act of worship, reverence, and humility. The degree to which you cut off the limbs of your feelings is the degree to which you will remain stuck. Art, spirituality, love, pain, it’s all about movement, that’s the Must.

Keep moving.

Whatever it is, open your veins wide, your mouth, ribs and eyes wide, your heart wide, and let it all move through you. The journey of the writer is the journey of the warrior. They are the same.

Butterfly wings, beloved, that’s all. Little tiny beats. The more you move your hand across the page the more you move the words that move the world.

// feed the beast //

4 Replies

Poetry is not dead but it’s not leather candy bodices laced with perfume either. This is what seems to be so hard for regular people to understand. That if left to our own devices, we crave the things we seek to destroy.

The way your fingers pressure the small of my back is the frothing of words I cannot find. Somewhere in the soft haze between sleeping and wake, I confuse the hum of your body in the dark with your desire to fill me, and we become a puzzle I can’t make fit. It’s the cruelest kind of poetry, the kind you mouth the words to in daydreams as you watch your own reflection splitting across train car windows but cannot force into existence.

Slow motion tears peel down your face, a fist comes through the bulletproof glass of my breaking heart.

Is it still poetry if I spell it out with paper straws in a language you didn’t study close enough? How can I help it. When love is the last word on the walls of a house that’s crumbling it sounds like renovation but out in the world no one seems to agree what it means. I’m only satisfied when the rain moves in and I wish you didn’t have to understand that when I tell my story I’m trying to give myself to you and spare you the weight of me at the same time.

The temptation is the trap; new lovers naked at the tip of a thousand knives.

You seduce strangers without losing sleep and still walk me home, chain-smoking cigarettes, talking about the way you used to make love to other women you thought would have been more tender at it. The ones you see in me when I curl up and threaten to leave. No one wants to believe that part of staying on the upswing of this pendulum life is to fall for the way it knocks the wind out of you when it slams you down. I avoid the fire the same way I walk into it, by shutting my eyelids over my feet. In the wake of the words I am the casual turning of corners, trust is a maze kept secret from me.

Words are to anguish as they are to ecstasy, a race without legs toward a freedom you’re never quite sure if you deserve. We are lions caught in butterfly nets, admiring our paws, licking our bloodstained teeth. All we want is to get close enough to abandon ourselves, to give everything away so we don’t have to eat what we’re worth.

I hand you my skin and ask with my bones if it is love. You hold tight, tell me it is warm whiskey charm, and don’t answer the rest.

In the vacancy of night, the moon washes over me a pale blue angelic light and I remember the way your beautiful jaw fits in my hands, the way the motionless bending flowers on the bookshelf mean someone’s in love in a vase, alone. When the soft creep of morning comes I’ll spend it sunk low in the hot soak of a pink salt bath, trying to be too many things. Cold cream: every face I try on feels closer to who I think I’m supposed to be, so I wear all of them at once.

No wonder it’s so hard to read me.

// come away with me //

4 Replies

I don’t need to touch you, flesh and bone too often hide the voice I would die for if you would just speak. The world is a crumbling crystal mountain range falling into midnight, the sharp plunge of a deep-sea grave, but the life we scream for at birth is infinite. There will be cold footsteps under the glow of a harvest moon, glimpses of freedom in a purple dawn, wrought iron staircases into heavy clouds as they weep, raspberry lipstick mouths and the way you prick hot wax on the beg of my pale skin.

We are the strange and magical ones who sense the coming storms by the taste of static wind on our tongues. I am alone as you turn to leave, they have told you that the only way to see me is to close your eyes. I want to reach through you to the other side, take my ribs and spread you wider than planets that orbit the sky until you become thin as the healing breath on the lonely limbs of those neglected, a shelter for the abandoned, a hand written letter inside glass bottles that contain clippings of the salt of the ocean.

All you ever asked for was a taste but I know you seek the flood, for every word you catch in your palms as it drips from the silken lips of my aching desire becomes your blood. There is no other way. This is the love of the beating hearts of every creature who ever walked the earth, man, woman, child, beast, criminal, angel, thief, opening you like a gaping cavern hollow enough to receive. Tell me how to build a room grand enough. I need not keep you, lover, to call you mine, nor hold you to sweep your amber beauty across my alien evening mind. This is a love that has outrun time.

// the trouble with heaven //

10 Replies

I’m too much of a dreamer, so the story goes, but the truth is that what they call reality often turns my stomach in ways that are hard to describe. People want straight lines and I want the way pink stained glass bends images into cigarette smoke curling foreign tongues down your throat. As everyone else joins hands and I fall farther and farther away from the circle, I tuck myself inside a faith in the broken shards, the holes in the floors, all the crooked sides of my comical cosmic existence, and attempt to pour forth a drench of words that flood the earth until we all worship at the single altar of mad love instead of sadistic runaway greed.

What is the harm? What is this fear no one can seem to define, yet lives within all of us roaming freely, assembling crucifixions like clues on a board game. Is it blindness or hope that gathers us together, vulgarizes us, vilifies us, heals us, gently carries us toward a distant red sun that delivers us to the promised land of how brief we are, how inconvenient, how troubled, how beautiful.

Will they release or neglect me, these graphic phantom fantasies I press my head against in the quiet of night? Perhaps too many times already, the vacant songs of the things I’ve loved and lost could have remained my veins, my daily ritual black, but somehow I’m the dream coming true in spite of itself. Magic is a fragile flower welcoming the sweet assault of the rain. My obedience arouses you, something in your disarming movement touches me with invisible hands, holds my fickle attention. I want only for you to descend with me and escape, love is the danger of infinite folds, a sapphire ribbon of milk skin; resurrection is your hunger for my sacrificial bones.

Bodies on the pavement, serpents in the sky, and I am undone by the slightest trigger in your eyes. Grace is stillness swallowing hurricanes as an exotic universe creates and destroys itself just to please you. Your teeth against my pulsing wrist startles a flock tiny ancient birds: thin flutters thrusting violent wings in my chest, a dead world ecstatically disturbed. Your mouth on my breast is baptism, the way you collect me breaks us down by fire, fingertips for flames, the gravity between us absorbs the cries of a helpless world, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sometimes, angel, pain is freedom and the prophets reach for heaven in reverse.

You tip my chin up to the sky, bend me just too far before letting go, I am aware my limits are merely physical. A matchstick glides backwards across the splintered catches in my mind. And as the clouds eclipse the windowless room we inhabit underground, deep beneath the time the gods play roulette with and wider than the desperate gaps between our staggered breathing, our union may be distorted but it is certain. Let the hoards of humanity speak, lifetimes of faces become one face and I’ve lost my lust for listening.

Lovers on the edge have the unfortunate habit of spilling dark secrets when their backs are naked against the wall, but I hold on to mine: silence is my only vision, a castle built upon the rugged journey of your voice as it calls me home, even after all this wasted time.

// private lives //

10 Replies

We are restless and unborn. We have been wounded by over exposure, the futile beg for love denied, maybe that’s why I clench my teeth so terribly at night that in dreams they split my gums and fall out in clumps. Such brutality, such crush, we are scattered little bugs, terrified of ugliness, we want to be beautiful and strange, want to be stroked to the dripping heat of heavy crippling pleasure and left to walk the streets alone. Daylight is the flash of a screen but I escape to the dark matter of my own haunted castle mind, my crumpled writer’s room, my wrought iron winter garden, listening in stillness for the linen voice of the ghost you hung to dry on the line. Where I can stand the thrust of the words, where limbs like curtains reach for me on the wind.

My messages caress you like candlelit passageways that open onto the tops of trees and spill my lucid thoughts out over a vacant listless sky, every star a headstone carved with the crude tools of their abbreviated lives. They call me crazy but I call it hopeful, for I believe you loved my bones before we met. Someplace inside you is where I come from and where I long to return, smooth and familiar is the way you taste like liquid metal knives and the crystal jewels of molten sex, a golden chalice erects in the healing hands of God. Love is religion like pavement glitter and nuclear dust clouds, a way to glorify the beginning of a thousand setting suns.

As I’m turning down the bed, your motionless face is rain sliding down the window of this house you occupy inside me. I wish you could trade my awful secrets for something better than I deserve, but lover, I will drink from you until the moons have turned themselves to snakes orbiting the delicate feet of angels if you would only look at me. Let them wonder about us, let them spin their every seductive bedtime story from the one we’re killing ourselves to write with our surrender. All that matters is this moment, everything else is fair disease. You and I are a single tragic blink, every second is eternity, every breath between us a fragile ritual. We have birthed each other, been raised from death into life after death.

We are fading and obedient bodies, thick volumes of handwritten history buried under lock and key, plunged in glossy wooden tombs to the bottom of the ocean. Instinctively, you know when I am wet and you dangle me there on the edge of my own pearlescent cliff, my mysterious gift, until the way I crave you becomes the quiet shatter of truth at the apex of desire. I can read the casual insanity behind your devotion as if through scars and blindness the code of your flesh will finally make sense of mine. Come and bow your head into my private madness, beloved, I am the tranquil depths you seek. Make me dangerous while everyone else is watching. We are as wild as we are high, painted figures in glass boxes wearing our scratches like diamonds, feathers, swords and star dust falling from our newborn eyes.

// lady in waiting //

12 Replies

I sit down to write but the only thing that comes to me is everything I’d rather not say. Writing is just like anything else, the hardest part is finding a way in. Shadowy advances, wet wide eyes, shattered hearts, lovers stalking alley ways, all come in jars they hope you can’t see, but writing is tougher to open even on a good day. A drink and a half later, I’m undressing in the doorway, watching you as you absorb the fading evening light that drapes itself around my body. I wish you thought of me as a temple, intricate tunnels adorned in golden dragons with emerald eyes, ferocious winged mystical things, but delusions like these are just a way of shadowboxing with the truth. Even in this heady haze I know what we want to be and what we are is split by glass of a thick and distorted kind. You ask me to spread myself over you and my skin is hot pricks head to toe, the way you barely touch me makes the beginning taste like spiced flecks of the afterglow, just the way I like it.

Under your command I am a dove, an alien, a robbery, a beast because I have learned to stay awake even in my sleep. Once you become aware of the ground beneath you in dreams, the rest is simply sleight of hand. We try to shift ourselves wide enough to take more than we ever thought possible but it’s hard when you’re certain there’s a message tucked behind the eyelids of everything, and you’d swear on your headstone that the rain smells of swollen lips and secrets you thought were buried inside someone else. Seven minutes in heaven, spin the bottle, the time you skinned your knees on ice, slammed back to life by the sting. Your first kiss stabs me in the back, spills blood across the time before all the times you can’t stop sifting through now.

Be patient with me, angel, even in expert hands like yours this doesn’t get any easier. Winter seems to follow winter, all the seasons of dying and frost take place at once like a crystalline nest of frozen trees that crush your tender throat. Time is a gift and a thief and a scream and I promise to collapse the minute you leave. You wrap my hair in braids tight around your strongest arm, the pain is just enough to catch my breath on a single hook. This bizarre strain of release, a decadent thorn. There will be rug burns and bathtubs but my mind is walking on the street counting black birds on a wire over the railroads tracks I was framing for photos; five, six, seven of them in a crooked row and one far off, alone. This doesn’t mean anything, of course, except that I am not in the world the way I’m supposed to be; I’m in the one I resurrected from cut-out dolls, cardboard panoramic scenes, living in the cream-colored curl of imaginary pages.

Pain comes to me daily but I trust it, I let it lead if it wants to, it teaches me not to hide as much. The way you slide into me is a forked tongue, one side torture, the other ecstasy; I have to take them both or deprivation. As night takes over the moon, the salt in my veins sparks and flashes all around us like colors from the dark side of rainbows. You need not cry for this strange love, I like to watch the pieces of me fall, it’s the only way they catch the light. I’m stronger now. And even though generations of misguided wars rupture themselves through me before you can even say my name, it’s beautiful madness to hear you try.

// iron boxes //

10 Replies

You reach for me but I am a void, I am a hellish collision of dying worlds inside. These cruel words hang me on the wall and leave me there, exposed, afraid, unraveling, alone. And I’ve been writing, baby love, writing, writing, awful, awful, terrible writing, it ought to be a crime these unforgivable lines slashed in defiance against borrowed time, wretched incoherent manic overflow like bleeding an animal of poison, I’ve written one hundred journals in a mouthful of days, page after page, one more useless than the one before, stacking them, digging them, dragging them through the mud and the rage with me. Please don’t touch me anywhere, I am fever. My eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of this strange religion, where wings are clipped and spread at will.

Still as a cradle robbed of death, but for the smooth motion of the weapon in my hand, and the raking in my brain, and the slamming in my chest to the beat of city after city dropping to their weakened knees, I’ve kept on like the possessed searching for something. Moon rise, moon set, I have not aged since birth and I have never been so sure I’ve died too many times, I am only a pale reflection of myself, the blue fade of a forgotten lust for beautiful sins. The days have been rusted white cages, feathered ink, lace candy legs, something is dark and tethered inside me, darting its many faces in and out of the brush. Something nameless in me that I can’t seem to clutch, needs a love beyond anything the world can produce; a flower opens itself to an empty room.

And I am trying and I am failing, and this thing, this need that swallows itself into me – it is still waiting. All the world is wasted panting breath and me on the wall, and these words like ears on such abysmal pages, we are all waiting.

// black sparrow //

12 Replies

We are all midnight animals groping for a beautiful starlit chaos we can never grasp. Searching through lifetimes, little galaxies born and reborn within our tangled mouths, fingers, bodies, words, smiles, lies. In dreams we speak the anatomy of hearts roaming like wild herds of instinctual beasts across an African plain as the mist rolls in. We smell the coming darkness in the air and move forward in collective silence, listening for the shifting of the earth.

Music plays in gentle cascades of silken sound as I kneel before you on the lawn in the rain, ready, willing, hungry for the darkening storm of you. You get me so close I can taste the salt waves of a thousand oceans crashing underneath my skin, again, again, again. The way you search me like the beak of a gull prying shells to expose his prey reminds me that since childhood we have wanted to be free of the injuries of who they told us we would turn into if we turned the corner, swam away, sunk within. The flesh is soft inside, and sweet, and the more we seduce the more we unleash. You bring to radiant life my bare desire and my eternal struggle.

But after the lullabies, after the bruises, after the climax, after the desecration, after the warmth and vacancy of centuries of setting suns across a desolate planet with a name long forgotten, in our calculated madness we still crave the kind of love that is not a lush pink tongue, not a milky white pearl, not a nimble body, not a portrait, not a poem. What we want to find scrawled across the pages of the secret ancient diaries of the gods, hidden underneath broken stacks of golden beds on fire, is the secret to spreading ourselves inside a love that is unrelenting in its heat. Be slit up the core by the clutch of a thing more peculiar than death; a thing that will not let us go, a thing that cannot be held or captured or touched.

Love is not a person, people were made to let go and let go of. These human faces are masks, the haunted hunt for deliverance in painted disguise. Clever but untrue. Don’t be so easily fooled, so easily amused, so easily distracted, love, it’s unbecoming. Love is not the phantom; it’s what is beautiful about the phantom. What you really want to taste I cannot give to you, for what you truly worship is that she’s left you and she’s coming back for you and she’s trembling before you now all in the same glistening moment; not for long but forever. Love is staring back at the ghosts behind you in the mirror, speaking in wordless angelic verse. Love is your shadow dancing on these walls, and you don’t live here anymore.

// evidence of bodies //

8 Replies

I don’t want your body, I want your secrets. I know the games you play and why you play them but you’re so lovely it makes my mind bleed. Even the dreams in me have dreams and yet I can’t manage to extract a single one. Of course, no one ever said love makes sense. I pour a glass of Merlot and my insides are a relentless penetrating bloom of thick red roses groping their thorny vines around the veins that push my blood toward a heart that knows no boundaries.

When the last sliver of daylight finally fades across the grass, I can feel the setting sun unbuttoning my inhibitions. The way you wait so patiently for me binds me with threaded ropes, framing erotic images that deepen my darkening mood. You want to touch me but I’m not where you thought I’d be; my mind is seductive but it’s always somewhere else.

Using only the memory of your hands, you wrap me in crimson ribbons of delicious heat. The swift movement of your body sets me free to water midnight gardens of savage desire in beautiful rings around the moon. I’m ugly in ways only you can make an aphrodisiac as the twisted things I long for hang suspended from the ceiling, purple faces tongue the agony of my ecstatic soul. Everyone seems to think they know how your life will end up if you’d just sit still and listen but most try very hard not to understand anything that could make a difference.

Sliding past everyone else’s better judgment, I light three rows of candles and drop into a darkness that is not sleep. It’s more like a strange way of awakening in order to hold hands with death and own him before he owns me. We all worry about being invisible; that’s why we hide. I devour volumes of ancient spiritual texts and Bukowski, they seem to break me apart and deliver me back to who I am in a package I almost recognize. Deciphering their codes is the plot of every gutting love story ever written. The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life grow like inverted mirror images, side by side. To be human is to have a grasp on neither.

I drip hot lavender oil into a steaming bath and sink in as I envision you with cake in your hands. I’m kneeling at your feet licking icing from a dozen silver spoons between your fingers; the sweet life is not always what it seems, but we do try. At the center of something more encompassing and brilliant than we can possibly fathom, everything is submerged. Right here. Everything is different and the same. Every safe choice should make us more and more afraid.

It’s warm underwater and even though I drown my head in thoughts of self-defeat to keep from slipping into the vacant sky where I might finally be free, I trust being alone more than I trust anything else. I don’t know if God is alone but I know this world is mass murder on painted screens that cover up the truth.

In my makeshift blackout room, spinning pins and needles on the windowsill of the universe, all I ever wanted was to make a spark that would catch the hills on fire.

It’s not hard to breathe in the dark, it’s just that you see so little of who you really are.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// of thy flesh //

11 Replies

aren’t we only here for so long, angel,
aren’t we only a lonely nighttime street
stacked high with patterned silhouettes
of celestial bodies wearing blindfold eyes
no words left to speak.
do you taste me like traces of fire blood on lips
pressed against the looking glass
strung up above intimate scenes.
aren’t we only a mouth full of whispers
panting on the feathered tips of forbidden things
while other people
scream.
aren’t we only the siren curves of an hourglass
sifting through phases of the moon
from the grave to the skies
i wear you like an echo of time
when the soft in the skin
that drove you mad
was mine.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// black holes //

8 Replies

Lining my eyes with charcoal and the scorch of tears, I can’t escape the immovable truth that whatever your twisted secrets, you are the one who makes me glow.

The human mask ruptures by its own flawed design and I am reminded that the flesh was created to crumble; for our own protection, we are not shatterproof. I am as fragile as I am supple, I am the fading trace of whispered delusions, echoing through the dead of nights hanging from trees, their slender roots planted firmly in the sky. The cracks in the vessel of my soft skin are beginning to show. I do not cover them. I do not fill them in. I am coming apart; I am lost. I am without a single answer of any kind. I know not where I have been, how it is I have come to be here, where I will emerge again, or if.

I am muted and surrendered to the rising flood waters of my own weakness. My hesitant steps are taken in timid stumbles, but mostly not at all. I am still, motionless, patient, obedient, rebellious, as the windows of every castle we ever built come crashing in.

Becoming the sound of the explosion itself, I watch for the light, the way it catches, the way it reflects.

What right have I even to be here in this obscene manner, in the way my gray animal eyes flash in the headlights, grow angry, distressed, and combative in their hunger? Who am I in my shivering thoughtlessness, in my primal confusion, in my wide and defiant uselessness?

I search the halls of ancient cities buried under the ash of a thousand graves upon ten thousand years with a heavy heart and burdened mind for a thing I cannot grasp. My soul makes its truest offerings of itself in the shelter of this darkness. Shadowy figures are at play, the way my exotic spirit dances in the flames of the fires she feeds mercilessly within. My satin hands touch themselves to my throat and I am ecstatic for the mystery I am suspended within. Consumed to the core with liberation and unworthiness, I am a dewy web of prismatic shine at the center of your calculated chaos.

I am alone, defenseless, in this ruined room with trembling walls; stripped bare of arrogance, pretense, and facade. Here I am tested, made to look upon my own frustrating limits; I tug with my teeth at the threads of a thick cascade of drenching compassion for a woman on the precipice of life and death, staring out into the Great Abyss.

Here I am made ready. Here I am destroyed and rebuilt as I confess that I do not know the way, I do not have the answers, I would not know how to open my mouth if not for Love’s insatiable desire to burn me with Her beautiful, healing grace.

From the depths of this blind wilderness, I am grateful. I am richer for the shadows, for that which is hidden must have its way with me.

In my nakedness I am the ritual. In my emptiness I am the gift.

// blood of the innocent //

4 Replies

The steel bars of the past are only shadows now, still I close my eyes, press myself against them and romanticize the sting. When I’m alone inside a mind that too often slips out of her black leather cuffs and escapes me, I fantasize about the way you were the first to bite my lips. How every bone in my new body loosened from its hinges and fell away, how I watched from screened in porches by the light of glass jars filled with fireflies and marveled at the ravenous creatures we were becoming. Awakening together an iron taste for worship of a similar strangeness. Pain forever threaded with pleasure, licks of orgasmic death cradled inside a private nebulous universe just ripening.

The world burns itself for entertainment but blessed are we the holy ones who are bred without lungs and breathe steady underwater until eternity collapses. Bodies marching to the sound of distant trains running off their wooden tracks offer themselves up in sacrifice that we may be born to wander an alien earth. I’m tired, beloved, tied to a tree and your stomach in knots over watching me, so close in dreams you become aroused as the ropes and my wrists struggle to break free. Lace nightgowns, black ink roses on fevered skin, instruments of blind release and trading your safe place for a stab at the ghost of the way we used to be.

You were a fetish I couldn’t put down until every bedtime story began folding us into the pages of eternal dust. You and I, we were born thirsty.

The relentless plunge of your expert fingers is just another hypnotic link in these chains that pull me back to who I was before cruelty ever touched me the way you never did. Who are you that owns the body in my mind? Where have you been leading me in darkness all this time?

As I walk through the days after, every empty street slides up and away under my bare feet. Beneath a concrete urban moon I hold still before you as ten thousand broken cups shatter against the wind. I sip like an abandoned animal the tears from the lines in your hands.

I remember the way we grew up seeking fire and it illuminates the ancient codes carved deep within my cells: skinning our naked knees, crossing my heart and hoping to fly, running, running, running through fields of falling stars across an endless sky.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// pretty little deaths //

15 Replies

There are secrets within me, secrets I keep alive but quiet like moth wings fluttering around my heart for protection as they eat away at my insides. The things I would die for, lay down my inhibitions for, the desires I beg for relief from even as I fiend for the struggle to fulfill them. When I grow brave – then again maybe I’m not even brave, maybe I’m just worn down by a world that abuses itself – I look at them.

Most people won’t become writers, not because they can’t find the words. There will always be words. But because they won’t look. They won’t look within themselves for fear of descending into a place where words dissolve the breath and feelings tear the curtains down from the ceiling of their heaviest sins, jet black bedroom eyes cringing in the daylight; where emotions run like hunted nymphs, naked through a thick forest of forbidden needs.

I look at other writers, too – the true artists, the ones who slide like elegant snakes beneath your chemical skin right before their poisonous spikes dig into your bones, the ones who wet you down with lust and inject you mad with a rage you never knew you carried all this time but find suddenly scorching up your limbs. I watch the words they use until I find the ones they didn’t, those are the words that matter most. The ones they hide from you to keep for themselves.

I’ve always wanted more. So often I can sense when people are holding their most useful, gutting stuff back. It’s the way watching a heavy storm rolling in makes me want to undress. It’s in my nature, something primordial lives in me and reaches out to find itself in others but there’s nothing there to clutch. People are gone. There’s a pressure rising in the air between their two faces and I just want to be there when the heavens finally break.

Feeling the mounting crush of the hoards of people who have nothing to say, a comforting sadness walks alongside me like a shadow, rising in the snow on the moon orbiting my cosmic thoughts. Wherever it is we come from, whatever it is we think we’re made of, part of us will always be lost.

Even after all this time I still think of you and the way we never understood each other. I didn’t want to tell you that I didn’t want to understand you. I wanted to maul you to pieces and take only your most infuriating bits with me. We fall in love like savages and paint our nails like a strip tease. We fall on our knees for the beautiful pain and the thrill of a few fingers in a gaping mouth, blood pulsing against blood. I could reach inside your chest even now, lace my fingers and pull my own heart out from your body.

I’ve done it before and you’d always thank me with those kisses at the end of your most punishing, adoring letters. I can do it again just as sure as I’m doing it now. Everything we’ve ever done, dust to cradle to grave to resurrection, is written down and hanging in the gaps between every moment you occupy with the things you know don’t matter as much as love once did.

I wish I didn’t still crave your cigarettes. But I guess in places beyond the years we spend hiding, we all still crave what we’re told we shouldn’t. Smoke and mirrors, flesh of my flesh, bone of thy bone, reflections of the same side of silence.

On the street, every person is a distant galaxy hurling itself backwards and dead bird feathers continue dripping in the rain. In daydreams, I touch you with everything I have as broken wings fall around us everywhere.

And no one writes anything anymore.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// masterpiece //

// shatter //

// exposure //

7 Replies

I want to violate you
spend lifetimes invading the sharp blades of the lightning
mind of you,
feel the snowy nights rising in the quiet undressed
shadow
of
you,
consume the last discarded scraps of the hopes
of
you,
reach for you in your pale moon skin
as you float away in a midnight ocean,
rupture the veins in the madness of your
beautiful crooked thought patterns as they
throb at your fingertips,
feed you word after word after word on every
page of my foolish
poetry
as the wolves lie in wait all around the
muscle, bone, and blood
of
you.
I want to
collect you, spread you wild the way storm clouds curl and rage
and divide themselves again and again
overtaking a desperate
desolate landscape, the thirst
for
you
reflected in my blue almond
desert eyes.
I want to capture you
captivate you;
make you feel
at home
inside this tiny
little rib
cage
that hangs in the creature of my
body
at the center of the
endless falling sky
of
you.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// misfit //

4 Replies

We live in a world that treats the quiet ones like misfits, mutants, outcasts, freaks. Most people talk because they don’t have any idea what to say. Don’t disgrace the words by spilling them before they’ve impregnated you, been a heavy ridiculous burden inside the pulsing womb that is the mad torture of your own mind, grown into monsters with seven heads and screaming, until you are disturbed enough to feel them like thick vines tracking around your spine.

So often the world mistakes silence for ignorance, weakness, powerlessness, thoughtlessness, carelessness. But silence is how I write, how I grow rich, how I build my own bones and breed my own skin. The magic of the artist lies in the soundless, in the molten fluid pools of her willing and complete submission to the fullness of her every delicate experience.

How often to speak is to destroy the stimulus, to ruin the provocative overwhelm. The only hope I have of continuing to work is to remain alert, open to all of it. That everyday I may push further upon the unfolding of my own expanse.

There are infinite glorious worlds of pleasure and agony in my cup of silence.

And as they all misunderstand, I stay still and wait patiently like the wild hidden in the blood of the animal. I am quiet like an elegant death even as I watch you with the electricity of my entire being. I listen with my whole body as you speak. Like a thousand knives gutting the heavens are the beautiful invisible tremors I channel through me.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love, gratitude, and mad affection. x

// tongues //

2 Replies

the sun hides itself behind the candles on the walls
as i wait within my ritual silence
and close my starlit alien
eyes.
i am electric with the systems you
spin within me like
webs of silken skin, glistening
wet with the thoughts that
work at my
twisted mind.
i am still
as you touch me
in places i was taught
were beautiful,
soft
and
forbidden.
out the window sliding with rain over my head,
chained to the monster
i might have been
i can taste the metal clouds
rushing in.
the air is amber honey in a primitive
version of heaven
pouring down everywhere
and yet
redemption escapes
me.
i know the heat in your eyes
i know the hollow in the words like black birds falling from the
crumbling skies
curtains torn up from the floor become
a circle of white dresses dancing headless
out on the lawn, laughing.
something in the way you move reminds me
that we can no longer afford to live
the way it was
before the storm.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// wet //

4 Replies

every move I make is deliberate and
exaggerated:
we can’t afford
mistakes.
I know you see through my x-ray body
and this
puts you
at ease.
I dip my liquid fingers deep
in crimson
paint
it drips to the floor –
maniacal waves relentless
in every
drop.
it stains my elbows and
my knees
rushes at your feet
as I sketch giant lusty images
on the ceiling.
I need you inside me
so that
I can
breathe
(forget everything they told you
to pray for,
angel,
the gods need us aching
like
this).
you read the tension in this
our silent vibrating communication with
an unhinged grace,
I watch your focus heavy
with animal eyes
as you absorb me
and
all
the
painted
figures
bleed.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.

Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.

All my deepest love and mad affection. x

// break //

5 Replies

Some days punish and stimulate like cascades of warm rain sliding in hot crystal streams over bare summer skin. Like a lover’s willing mouth open, plush and ready, locked in a room you can’t find, in a building with walls that mirror each other.

Some days you are the artist and her muse, in a strange and masterful chaos you become the one you seek to observe: an illicit object, a distorted galaxy, a rotating world of tempt and threat, undressing.

I have felt Love on me like hands so crushingly gentle they shatter and collect me with every handsome, brutal intrusion; so commanding that even as I am falling apart, I am falling back together.

I have seen myself as beautiful even as I am drowning in self-abuse and self-sabotage. Something bigger than suffering exists. It watches without exhaust, it waits for millennia without tire or question.

Something so infinitely vast that it can cradle any amount of suffering and love all of it, as if nothing exists that is not Its own.