so one day I was reading poetry, and this kinda happened... "A Responsibility to Awe" by Rebecca Elson, it was, and it's amazing...

I still think in sentences, fascinated by the structure of the stories I will never be a part of. I play with style and end with prepositions and invert the inversions when they come too often: but still. Even my fragments are phrases.

succinct in her verbosity

cancer is resonant, always,
yet I do not fear it –
though my female forebears,
the three I knew,
went at its urging
still I feel, perhaps,
that if it touches me
the cures that came too late
will ward it off.
my youth, my health,
my this and that –
my simple intuition
that it is not for me.
my simple wish
for a blaze of glory.

Deaths of comets
Deaths of people
To fade away
To impact
To boil away in the face of a far greater passion

poetry is like a drug, like a high, sitting on a different plane, slightly out of phase with logical thought, reducing the experience to its smallest constituent parts like simplifying equations,
like E=mc² implies the mysteries of the universe

easier to sing
to give meaning
through someone else’s words
to give emotion
through someone else’s cadences
easier to sing
than simply to speak

comet – a light lithe child, skipping round its corpulent father, running free and wide and wild – yet tied, still, checking back to see if it’s right, it’s good, and running away again shedding tears as self-confidence and heart are slowly shredded by implacable careless heat

A girl, writing,
Back to the window
Does not notice
The day that dawned so clear
Has turned, with night, to rain;
She could have gone home
Hours ago
Watched sun setting over sea
Felt the chill sweep by her
Then later have thanked providence
That she did not wait
To be sodden
To drip from beautiful impractical coat
And self-cropped hair.

[this is evidence, see? If I hadn’t been reading poetry, I’d have written something closer to “shit, it’s raining, should have gone home hours ago and I wouldn’t have got soaked like I’m about to”]

blue and black and green and black and blue
umbrella, coat, bag, jeans, shirt
and beneath the clothes, hidden,
blood seeping under the skin