note: this poem was part of a three-poem submission that was long-listed for the erbacce prize in 2022, an international poetry competition which, in addition to its winners, selects the top 100 poets from a pool of over 15,000 for their long list. the other two poems will (maybe) be released here on this newsletter later on this month.
so you came to the end of your rope, and tied a knot, and hung on.
so the seagulls called to you
and you locked yourself inside the lighthouse
so that they couldn’t
find you.
so they tried to find you anyway.
so they tried to drag your body out to sea.
so you slept alone with nothing but a conch shell and an oil spill
for company. so you drank yourself sick with honey pine
and foaming soap.
so you ate the entire table
and the whole pie, too.
so you sang yourself a lullaby made of orchids and faded scrapbooks.
so you burned yourself in every sacred place you could find.
so you shoved an entire lifetime in between eighteenyearold legs
to prove you weren’t afraid of anyone.
so you let the big bad wolf in, and he acted
like the big bad wolf.
so you let the big bad wolf in,
and when you told him it was time to go
he begged and pleaded and asked you not to leave.
so you spent more darknights than you can count
comma curled on the vaguely lit airport terminal floor,
begging god for another shot.
so you went vegan.
so you did yoga every day for a whole month.
for a whole year.
so you fixed it.
so you got a medal.
so everyone told you they were proud of you.
so the dark jagged branch of mercy never quite
made it through your skin.
so your stomach carved a stone twice as big and three times as deep
as your false courage.
so you ate the flesh of man,
and the inside of a maple, and the belly of a fish, and none of it
made any difference.
so you walked halfway across
the continent, halfway
across the desert, halfway
thru the grand canyon.
so you went to the grand canyon.
so you loved and loved and loved
until a pin drop was enough to make you shatter.
so you swept the pieces of yourself into a dustpan,
and cut it with a credit card
and sold it smooth as coke
to your sixteen year old self.
so your sixteen year old self
took one snort
of your twentysix year old self
and overdosed right on the spot.
so you snorted the rest of yourself into the void.
so you gorged yourself on elderberry and lavender and full moon circles,
but they kept calling you the divine feminine
and no one would call you by the truth.
so the crone showed you a mirror in the woods
that led you back to eden.
so you found eden.
so you got kicked out,
and sailed across an ocean, and built a cabin
with your hands.
so you found god, again,
and he touched you where you didn’t want to be touched.
so you never got to be a virgin.
so you never got to be a child.
so you what did you get was lost, a few times actually,
and so you wandered in the desert
for forty days and forty nights.
so you had to crawl
on hands and knees
begging for forgiveness
but no one ever
forgave you back.
so you had to crawl
on hands and knees
out of desert wilderness
and back into the real world
and when you got back nobody had even noticed you were gone.
so you still check your phone every day
like someone is going to invite you to salvation.
so you made a whole covenant of youth, and no one
told you that even you would get older.
so you were seventeen,
more seventeen than a person’s ever been, and
you came into yourself like
a hunter wrestles with a pack of wild dogs.
so you howled
and you howled
and you howled,
and the moon
never even called you back.
so your house plants keep dying.
so you wrote a poem about being homesick
while you were sitting
in your own home.
so the planet is on fire.
big deal.
so you’re trapped
in new and exciting ways
by new and exciting wardens
in new and exciting prisons,
and you only run into the tug of your chain
when you think you’ve already broken free.
so you pretend to be an anarchist
but you still want to be powerful.
so you pretend to be a feminist
but you still want him to choke you.
so he choked you.
so you squeezed an entire river
out of your ugly guts,
and when the river died down
you spray painted your own name
on to the canyon walls.
so they excavated you
and all they found were a few dingy bottles
of jagermeister.
so they named you a national park,
and all your enemies got to come
and smugly read your eulogy.
so they named you a national park,
and all your rapists
got to come and leer one last and final time.
so they named you a national park,
and nobody came, except a few
elderly snowbirds, but
that was only cus
you were on the way
to memphis.
so you sunk
into the earth,
and you made a mountain of your hunger,
and you swallowed up
an entire rainforest in your infinite greed.
so you never got to fall in love for real.
big fucking deal.
so you ate a crawfish in louisana,
and nobody told you it would
wiggle
all the way down your throat and stomach.
so you placed your bets on amsterdam,
and nobody died while you were there,
and now they think you’re a god.
ok, so you’re a god.
so you’re good at your job but you’re broke. so
you never have a tampon
when you need one. so
you don’t shave your legs but you hate
your leg hair. so
he didn’t love you, not the way you needed
to be loved. so he never even touched you. so
you keep failing your heroes, or your heroes keep failing you,
but either way someone is failing. so you built
an entire railway in the notches
of your spine, and every time the train rides thru
it burrows deeper in your bones. so you’re a ghost. so
you’re sixteen, hanging in your mother’s closet,
a belt from walmart wrapped around your neck. so
you never really learned to tie
a proper noose.
so you got to live
because of the things
you didn’t know to know.
so you got to live
because of the things
you didn’t know.
so you got up in the morning
and you brushed your teeth
and sat forty-five minutes through geometry,
and when someone asked you how your day was
you didn’t even say “i tried to kill myself last night.”
so now you’re twenty-six,
and you still
haven’t bought a plot
at the cemetery. so?
the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is a free newsletter (and the occasional poem) from joelle schumacher. if you enjoy their work or would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber, subscribe to or write in to their advice column, or buy them a coffee. they are also currently offering a limited-space online class for interested students who want to learn how to access their innate creativity and how to become (and actually embody) a real life artist.
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glad to know you dont know