Sam Alexandra Rose

Author: writersamr

  • I have missed

    I have missed
    the complexity of this

  • Five hours before dawn

    Five hours before dawn
    we hunt for our clothes in the
    dim blue light of phones

  • If Pain Were Punctuation

    If physical pain were punctuation,
    it would be a question mark
    searching for reasons and explanations.
    Or it would be an interrobang –
    frenzied alarm and insinuations.

    If doubt were punctuation,
    it would be an ellipses.
    There is more to follow
    and it may not be what you expected. 

    If fear were punctuation,
    it would be a comma –
    a run-on sentence, trying to flee
    from itself and the trauma.

    If peace of mind were punctuation,
    it would be an apostrophe –
    only noticed when it is missing,
    appreciated by someone like me.

  • midway

    as a human
    I think                 I’ve gotten both better and worse
    I have improved
                                      and fucked up
    my flaws have multiplied
                      and dissipated
    I don’t know anything anymore
    the size of my ego
    once huge
           is now   s k ew e d
    and I don’t know how to go
    one way or another.
    I don’t want to stay here
    midway between nothing
    and nothing else.

  • There’s no therapy

  • This is helping

    I didn’t die today.
    What, that’s my inspiration
    for writing poetry today?
    I’m starting to wonder if there’s
    something wrong with me,
    but there’s no gaping hole
    where my optimism should be.
    Everything is intact. 

    Sometimes the kindest thing I can do for myself
    is repeat over and over in my head
    “This is not helping this is not helping this is not helping this is not” 

    When does poetry turn into the demented ramblings of a mad person?

    But this is helping this is helping this is helping this is

    People say life’s too short
    to not have fun
    but it’s also too long
    to not have fun
    so maybe life is the perfect length. 

    When people say “are you okay?”
    what does okay mean anyway?
    Is there one definitive definition?
    Okay is defined as:
    “satisfactory but not especially good”.
    But what I would call satisfactory might
    not be satisfactory for someone else.
    Is my okay your okay?
    If you were me, would you be okay
    or would you be fading and waning
    under the bright light of day?
    Yes, I’m okay, but that doesn’t
    really mean anything, does it?
    Maybe instead we should ask
    “are you good?” because good is
    good, there is no doubt about it.
    And if you’re obviously lying,
    why does nobody ever say
    “I don’t believe you”?
    I might say I’m okay when I’m
    feeling barely satisfactory at all,
    but there is no confusion in good.
    Though I sometimes wonder
    If it sticks around like it used to.

    This is helping this is helping this is helping

  • I never collapsed on you.

    I never collapsed on you.
    I tried really hard not to, and
    I always found somewhere else
    to lean, or to just fall over sideways.
    I hate that I was the one to make
    you worry, and I never go on guilt trips
    so this is new to me, but I made sure
    to buy a return ticket. 

    I’ll still never collapse on you.
    I could lean on somebody new
    but I’d just feel bad for that too, 

    eventually. I feel better telling myself
    that I never collapsed on you
    but a suppressed memory is telling me
    that’s not really true.

    I rarely collapsed on you.

  • The Scarf

    The first time my partner saw it he asked me why I was wearing a curtain, but I loved it anyway. It was huge – long and wide like a pashmina, but thin, and it was such great quality. It had a patchwork of different coloured squares with pattern overlay, shiny and silky on one side and matt on the other. Blues, reds, greens, oranges, yellows. Maybe that was the start of a love affair with multi-coloured things. A time when I stopped declaring blue or purple or red as my favourite colour (I can’t even remember what my favourite colour was), and started loving all colours in equal measure, and all at once. 

    That scarf was special. I loved it like I had never loved any other scarf, and I’ll probably never find a true replacement for it. I could gather it up and use it like a regular scarf, or wrap it around my shoulders, fold my arms into it and get lost inside that rainbow of comfort. It was like a blanket I could take with me anywhere. So in January 2010 when I wasn’t well and had to go to the doctors, I wore it.

    I remember standing in my bedroom wondering if I should take it or not – I can so vividly remember the spot I was standing in, looking down at the heap of clothes on the floor, and debating on whether or not to wear it. I really wish I had decided not to.

    But I did take it. Which meant when the doctor told me to go to A&E, I was wearing it. And when I was taken up to a bed on the ward, I had it. And when my parents took some of my things to the car out of the way, they had it. And then they didn’t have it. It wasn’t in the car, in the A&E ward, or anywhere in between.

    Calls to the hospital afterwards yielded nothing. Nothing in the lost and found. I looked on the internet for another one but the shop didn’t sell them anymore. It was from Tie Rack. I even emailed them to ask if there was any hope of getting another one somehow. I sent them a picture: Have you seen this scarf? Can you help me get another one? Nothing.

    There are similar ones out there, and I have one sitting somewhere at my parents’ house. It’s nice. But it’s nowhere near the same. It feels like a cheap copy. And I haven’t felt the same way about another scarf since.

    Sure, there is my winter USA scarf  – stars on one side, stripes on the other. Stars and stripes and hopes and home. And my cosy red snood I got from my Secret Santa at work last year. But nothing else feels the same as that multi-coloured scarf did.

    I’m beginning to think that scarf holds some kind of metaphorical meaning. And maybe if I did somehow become reunited with it after the five years it’s been missing, I still wouldn’t feel the same. Even if it was the very one I lost, it still wouldn’t make up for all the time in between. Because so much has changed.

    I don’t even know why I still think about it sometimes, but I always seem to go back to thinking about that damn scarf.

    image

  • Make-believe

    I hope the roads are straight from here,
    I hope the next year brings no fear.
    I hope injustice will be wiped out,
    so we’ll have nothing to be outraged about.
    I hope for no blemishes on our landscape,
    no more capsizing and everything shipshape.
    I hope everything’s going to be right as rain,
    and there’ll be only sunshine – no more pain. 

    I hope things go better than we could perceive –
    but sometimes hope is just make-believe.

    Happy new year. I’m a very happy and optimistic person, really… promise! Poetry just digs out the darker parts. I like to think of this simply as a realistic start to 2015.

  • Leelah

    Some days I am just so upset and disappointed with humanity. Today is one of those days. I was going to write a poem or something but all I have to offer is questions like, why can’t we just accept each other for all our differences, even if we don’t completely understand them? Why should a person have to suffer so terribly because another person doesn’t agree with who they are? Why are the people who are supposed to protect us sometimes the people we need to be protected from? And why the fuck haven’t we evolved faster than this?

    (more…)