uselesspoetbox
A Useless Poet's Useless Mailbox
This useless mailbox is filled with "letters" from a useless poet. All contain the things they can never say or write, to those who can or will never know. A year-long project. And please, go easy on the poestmaster: they've never really used this site before.
74 posts
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Last Seen Blogs
omsecondhand
OMsecondhand
augustusbirchell
Untitled
livefordrama
Asian Drama That Is
pommesdestroyer
International Business Student
largando
Untitled
Text
Looking across the horizon,
I wonder if anything has happened to me.
I know something has occurred, but
has it changed me? Am I different? Am I
ready?
This is for me.
Arrogance. But
seeing the sun come up from its bed,
I resolve to face this new world as a master,
a weaver of fate,
clear, confident control.
This is for me.
I can take it.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#happy new year#i hope it's a good year for you all :)
1 note
·
View note
Text
It's 0245 and I'm in the shower.
I give myself... forty minutes, just in case.
I'm thinking of you.
The lights are off in the bathroom.
I close my eyes, and open them—
I see the same nothing.
You asked me:
Have you ever been under water so hot you could feel it stinging,
and still felt cold?
For you, it was an illness of the body.
For me, it is something else, something
that makes me understand your disease.
When I breathe out against the damp washcloth over my face,
the air is deathly cold,
the biting winds in my lungs dredged up into the balmy dark.
I stand under the hot spray—
Closing and opening my eyes, I see the same nothing.
I can't feel the water, or the soap on my skin.
I can only smell, and hate, and wish I had your soap instead.
Curled against the warm wall, shivering, wet
suffocating in the steam. I want to wash away.
I turn off the water and let my ears ring in the black.
I get up. I towel off.
Every time I close my eyes, and open my eyes,
I see the same nothing.
Skin strips off me in rolls. As usual, I pay it no mind.
0 notes
Text
You sent me a picture over text, of the cuts crawling up your sides,
beading blood from the razor you'd run over them.
I saved it.
I held it, for a long time.
You swore me to secrecy, and I loved you, so I let you tear yourself apart. But that picture reminded me of your pain.
Your pain, too big to stay in your body.
So foul it had to be bled from you.
0 notes
Text
As a kid, your backyard loomed impossibly. The garage seething with stunted machines and ice pops; the blooming garden, crawling up its walls, up the rusted fence, too living to be contained. I always had a black thumb, and so did you, but green veins popped out of your skin, your arms.
You pulled a turnip out of the ground with me, both you and it impossibly big to my smallness. Had barely brushed the deep dirt before you offered me a bite.
This was my hiding place. Inside the house there were iron-pressed beds, fine china jailed in cabinets. Not here.
I made my best friend a worn tennis ball, and we would play as a two-man circus under the cheap clotheslines. When my brother was born, he tried to make friends, too, but he threw too far to be too close.
Treats poured from pockets and plastic like magic. Spicy peanuts, shelled pistachios, the white-chocolate covered pretzels that sit under the produce at the grocery store—the kind my mom would never let me have.
I don't know if you fixed the lawnmower before you died. If you ever got the parts. All the things I know I heard in pieces: hushed whispers, harsh curses, heavy tears.
We were all hurting. There was nothing I could do but write. Nothing I could see but your ugly, useless car filled with plant boxes and old receipts. Nothing I could kill but the garden, wild with weeds. Untended. No one else knew how.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#tw death#family death mention#it's inevitable that your elders will die#but when you love them#it always feels like it's too soon
0 notes
Text
The sight of your choppy hair makes me wonder whether ours was a love always doomed to be trimmed:
Me, skittering like a cockroach, brown and headless;
you, stomping in your beat-up boots across the floor.
0 notes
Text
Tell me where I went wrong.
I know that's a lot
(and you're busy) but
tell me what I should've said,
what light should've shined
from my bulb in my mouth
into your dark eyes.
I see peeks of you still,
like sun through blinds,
that grow up in wonder,
flourish and mature.
But so many fields are still burnt,
shriveled.
I can't see you flowering.
Love you, good night.
I’ll see you in the morning.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#family
0 notes
Text
Nothing's different.
The same face,
with the same strange, sloping shapes,
same imperfections.
Same virtues, too.
Nothing's different.
The same hands,
with the same crooked, awkward fingers,
fluvial veins,
same bitten nails.
Nothing's different.
The same woman,
with the same stained views:
champagne and tears,
creeping new ambitions,
bloody broken dreams.
A year is too short to change.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#it's my birthday#so it's a little birthday poem :)
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Silver slips through my fingers,
into your well of tears.
What are you wishing for?
(You only get three.)
Me? I'm wishing for
sturdier hands,
thicker fingers,
a rough, calloused grip.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#schadenfreude#hard to explain this one#even to myself#it's just how i'm feeling
0 notes
Text
Waking me with your aching.
We are both wrong, in ways.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#pain#internal and external#and whoever's fault
0 notes
Text
I find myself trying to learn you,
to learn to love you,
despite the fact that you have been
a constant comfort,
a piece of home, overseas.
My understander when I couldn't speak,
couldn't sign,
taking your time with me.
I do love you:
perhaps it'd be better to say I am
learning to love you better,
treat you better,
know you better.
Be better,
for you.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#even our things deserve more care
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sitting on the edge of our little swamp,
watching you
ram your head into the sucking mud,
over
and
over.
Pulling on your leg,
token protests.
Still, you
yank your ankle away
so you can keep
drowning yourself,
suffocating yourself,
killing yourself:
whatever it is
you think you're doing.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#watching others self-destruct#unable to get out of the grave they've dug#and not being able or willing to help anymore
0 notes
Text
Sometimes I stare at your messages
(inescapable across my phone)
and I wonder
when it will be right to let go of you.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#old friends#love#and lost love
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
You are not a corpse, not yet, but I can't help but imagine you as one when I see you lying in bed, idly scrolling on your phone.
Silent.
Your cancer returned, but you had beaten it once before, and your mother before you twice: I was worried, but just that.
Your son laughed, and I hated him, but you said that he was just "processing differently", and I accepted it.
And then, a week later, you said the word
"incurable".
The floor didn't fall out from under me. I didn't faint, or cry, not with you looking and speaking the same as always: as if some things are facts of life.
Numbers circle in my head:
1,500 dollars for the bone infusion treatment that left you bedridden
with a fever of 104 degrees;
two to three years of taking
one medication before you'd most likely stop responding to it.
The doctors don't know how long you'll live, but they say "many years". Neither of us is satisfied with their answer.
We had a long talk on your bed in the dark in the middle of the afternoon. I slipped up and shared my frustration with not knowing this last, most vital number, and you placated me with science and averages and miracle cases, and made me laugh with a story about a man who spent like he was going to die only to wind up still living and flat broke.
You are not a corpse.
But when I think of the toxic cells spread so far through your body there's no hope of removing them, I think of how long your children have had you and how long they will. I think of whether I have loved you enough, whether I have showed you that I loved you enough.
You are not a corpse,
so I cannot treat you like something dead, and life must go on, as normal.
But you are a person in death,
trapped in a perpetual fall closing in on concrete faster than anyone else, and I cannot start regretting after you meet it.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#cancer#tw cancer#terminal illness#tw terminal illness#it's hard to live with#but it will never be as hard for me#as it is for her
1 note
·
View note
Text
I never understood why you seemed to respect me.
No, you respected me—
each action too deliberate
to be described as "seeming".
So many others were disrespected,
grievously, even,
in the rows ahead of mine.
You paraded around your captives,
a triumphant soldier in the midst of war,
but you saw me,
and never moved to shoot.
I was too quiet when you knew me.
Too insecure,
too afraid.
I don’t know if that has changed.
I would need your word,
written too sharply red,
to be sure.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#teachers#their effects are lasting indeed
1 note
·
View note
Text
You’re older now,
taller, wider.
You’ve grown out of what defines you.
Extroverted and confident are
too tight and too short;
Arrogant fits like it always has:
right in the thighs,
too loose in the waist.
You replace wide sun hats with dark veils,
awkward netting over my face.
Blouses smell depressed, but
I think it’s your detergent;
shoes squeaking smart that smart,
pinch at the sides of your boxy feet.
Diligent and humorous tangled
lying around your throat.
Sweeps of childish and afraidover either of your cheeks.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#should we hold on to our personal labels#or are they more trouble than they're worth?
1 note
·
View note
Text
You’ve welcomed yourself in,
over and over.
To my house,
To my mother’s.
To her mother’s.
Get out.
Eyeing my sister’s skinny apartment
with covetous eyes.
Get out.
Unwelcome guest,
I have never known a parasite
like you.
One that leaves hungry,
returns ravenous.
One that eats us,
and eats our homes, too—
every hidden structure,
layer by layer.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#some pests are hereditary
0 notes
Text
Hey, U. Yes, you—
closed-off,
rude,
evasive, even.
That's you, U.
Snobbish,
standoffish,
(still tainting my memories,
with fondness.)
Hey, U...
You gave me back things
I lost way back when.
Pushed me into my skin.
Let it sink in.
You un-trained me,
un-washed me,
and I understood myself then,
only then,
growing things again,
things that only live where
land is fertile, deep with
dust and soil,
love and sleep.
So thanks, U.
Let's sing to
becoming part of something
bigger than ourselves,
becoming something
that is ourselves,
bigger.
#aupum#poestmaster#poetry#letters#original poetry#spilled ink#original poem#epistolary poetry#the most explicit i'll ever be with a poetry subject in the actual text probably#sometimes people and things change us#for better#even if they bog us down with minor inconveniences
0 notes