🪑
As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.
I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.
I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.
Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.
He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more
and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door
Mar 17, 2024
Related Recs
I shut away the dog,
But his growls still find me every night.
I shut away the dog,
But he wants me awake,
Refused to heal the bites.
I shut away the dog,
But he wears so many names, his face shifts shape —
Yet the weight never changes.
I shut away the dog,
But he's pressing on my chest.
Like deep water,
Tense with pressure.
I shut away the dog,
But I'm so close
To letting him back in.
I shut away the dog,
But I never locked the door.
May 19, 2025
😃
Poem I wrote a bit ago when I was loathing LOL🕺
~~~~~~~
Im spectating myself,
on the screen distorted and displaced
I’m half rendered,
crude and unfinished
his hands repeat the same motions
playing a mortal game with himself
entranced by a saccharine glow
his body corrupts and transmutes into thread and dead skin
it’s silken fingers clutching and restraining his appendages
he stares at me, with deliverance inscribed in his pupils
I’m a doll in its embrace
I don’t want to leave its breast
but I know I’ll wake up tomorrow with concrete in my lungs and ribs of rebar.
May 8, 2025
I unblocked him today. Stupid, really. A gesture that meant nothing and everything at once—flick of a finger, avalanche of consequence. I don’t love him. I know this the way I know fire burns and poison kills. But there was a time I did. Or at least, I believed I did, which might be the same thing.
And now, in the pit of night, he comes back. Not in memory, which I could handle. In dreams. Those cursed, wretched dreams where love feels like a trick played on me by some malevolent god. We are soft together, whole together. It feels real. Worse: it feels good. I wake up gagging on it. That intimacy, that false safety. My brain taunts me with what could have been, and I can’t even scream back.
So I dissociate. That’s the clinical word for it. But really, I haunt myself. I float through the day like a ghost freshly exhumed, skin buzzing with sleep that clings to my body like mold. Am I still dreaming? Has waking up ever felt this fake?
I ask myself: Do I still love him?
Then a worse question: Did I ever?
And the worst of all: Did I make it up, the whole damn thing?
Because if I did—if I built it all out of nothing, like straw houses and paper people—then maybe I am what he always said I was. A liar. A little girl who makes up stories and calls it truth. My father’s daughter.
And that’s the most disgusting thing of all.
Jun 7, 2025
Top Recs from @madchen
💏
one night stand or future spouse nothing beats the anticipation.... the build...... the mystery revealed.....
Jul 23, 2024
🪙
builds character
Apr 2, 2024
📠
the old-fashioned way, like you would before the entire internet was monopolised into basically three conglomerates. why would you spend all your time on your computer swapping between instagram tiktok youtube pinterest when you could find some of the coolest websites you've never heard about learning information your algorithm would never feed to you!!!!
a good place to start is your favourite artist's websites (not just musicians!) sometimes they have blogs (especially if they're writers) and often they link websites they like.
I also like magazine websites - the face, angel food, hot literati
or craigslist missed connections. I check the new york section all the time
Oct 8, 2024