"Nobody is coming to save you"

Georgia Groza

Nobody is coming to save you

Stitch it back up, learn to live with it.

The world doesn’t begin and end at the kitchen table

more than likely everything is preceded by a bed.

It ends with or without a death grip

With or without the altar and the humming

With or without divine intervention or a prayer or a poem

Don’t correct me if I’ve told this story before.

It is not misanthropic rambling

It is not an excuse to pathologize you it is the unblinking chasm in my chest,

it is the ugly thrashing before the repose, it is the stain before the bleach.

You conducted every conversation with the sway and tide of your wet sadness, the rush to overturn the words you couldn’t say so I couldn’t either, even if I was just trying to tell you the memories I was built from.

You only permitted yourself to know me when the story couldn’t hurt you.

My bedside table growing things, Your clothes on the floor, this was a body,

filling the room, kneeling. I tried to cauterise it, I did, but I couldn’t find my way back to you in all that muck, it was just one of those things we couldn’t talk about.

When I was 16 and lawless and bitter I learned how to tie a tourniquet. I packed my clothes and did it all by myself, all spit and gnashing teeth.

The house was burning so I signed a new lease.

The insurmountable grief hits me in adulthood.

If I had time to let it calcify, if I crawled my way back home,

How come nobody else can?

How am I the only person alive to reach the summit?

To tumble down with the faultless epiphany

I am not the blueprint, I’m just the only one who got back up.

Knowing the way out didn’t make the journey mine to justify.

I just didn’t turn back around. I took Eurydice with me.

I kept an even pace.

I cannot be the only one who came to this conclusion.

There is no such thing as thriving.

You suck the poison out or let it kill you.

You are here, now. You didn’t choose it, you just have to live with it.

Tie a ribbon around the rotten tooth and slam the door.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Write After: National Poetry Month with One Poem Only

Write After is a way to encourage poets to listen and write, and use National Poetry Month to highlight how listening to poetry makes us better poets. I know I write the best when I’m surrounded by beautiful poetry–it’s part of the reason I created this podcast, and I want to encourage others to share this practice. We'll get started in April. You can share to #WriteAfterOPO.

#WriteAfterOPO