Rec | "MAPLE TREE" (A POEM)

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I am rotting. I am haunted by an echoing pulse of once verdant requiems, morbidly veiling my vision with whispering fungal blooms. They chatter and chit, until withering into skeletal thorns that sink beneath my skin and burrow into my cadaverous tissue. I am overgrown with lingering epitaphs, as if they were carved into me, the memory of those I loved secluded in my vessel of a body, nestled between my tendons and sinew, Nervebound. There is a rift between the seraphic nature of the dead and beloved, and the morbid and discordant kiss of death that blesses me even in life. Though I yearn in my anguished turmoil to either blossom or wilt for a final time, the will for my fractured heart to return it's abyssal pieces from the void is a pointless, forsaken task. For all my decomposing pieces have been exiled into the earth, distant and estranged from the Sun. I will soon be bound by roots, and I only hope my sap will be bountiful. A solitary tree, hollowed by silence and a chambered wildfire. My bark shall ossify into marrow and cartilage, and a volatile mix of dendral viscera, wood and resin and pine. I am fated to decay, until I embrace the sky, resurging into a cathartic rebirth. My crimson liquor within my veins will become liquid amber, feeding you with sweetness and the phantom flavor of my flesh.

@living_casper

Jun 28, 2025

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TRANSLATE

They said ink was forever, but no one told me how it would feel to wear history under your skin, how it brands you not as a person, but as a relic. I want it out. Carve it from me, slice the memory from flesh, gouge each symbol until there is nothing left but blood and the sound of breathing through gritted teeth. Translate every line, every curve and cruel little mark, into agony, a night of reckoning beneath a sky that doesn’t look away. Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering. And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage. So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.

@baixwar

5d ago

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A MOMENT IN THE WOODS THE OTHER DAY

a couple months ago I'm out behind the gabled house with dregs of home still seeping through its edges, a sharp sort of newness ripping the seams of who I am & who I was, sweaty fingers slipping from between each other with the bloodied grasp of desperation - it is a spring day, and I am here again. the leaves are new and the blinking infant furled in the strands of my chest takes a breath and every time I trudge through these vine-ridden woods I feel her grubby hands trace the creases in my ribcage. there are ghosts here, the soulmate-friend across the ocean and I and the way we'd take axes to the already-fallen trees like our anger was spraying away with the bark and we were left with only breeze. there are the phantoms of our hands stuck in the mud, ripped leaves beneath our fingernails as we unclogged the flow of the creek and watched the water dig its trenches deeper, and now i'm watching it capture the light of a new year in my hometown alone. through the leaves and over the tinny chorus of water-on-rock I hear the echoes of a mother calling to her children in a game of hide-and-seek, her children laughing, the clamor of it like a memory captured on tape and played back. there is a hole here, radio waves rippling through years folded back and punched through, I a bystander to the reminiscence of a stranger years down the line when some part of that laughter will be lost. it is here. it is here now, in the backyard of a house I sometimes call home.

@rain-soup

May 5, 2025

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Bambi, a life in the woods — felix salten

I read it in first grade and it accelerated the development of a profound sense of consciousness and independent thinking and fortified my existing love for animals/nature/the environment. I was already an overly existential child and it helped me learn to focus on beauty and joy in the face of death and suffering! — The leaves were falling from the great oak at the meadow's edge. They were falling from all the trees. One branch of the oak reached high above the others and stretched far out over the meadow. Two leaves clung to its very tip. "It isn't the way it used to be," said one leaf to the other. "No," the other leaf answered. "So many of us have fallen off tonight we're almost the only ones left on our branch." "You never know who's going to go next," said the first leaf. "Even when it was warm and the sun shone, a storm or a cloudburst would come sometimes, and many leaves were torn off, though they were still young. You never know who's going to go next." "The sun seldom shines now," sighed the second leaf, "and when it does it gives no warmth. We must have warmth again." "Can it be true," said the first leaf, "can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we're gone and after them still others, and more and more?" "It is really true," whispered the second leaf. "We can't even begin to imagine it, it's beyond our powers." "It makes me very sad," added the first leaf. They were silent a while. Then the first leaf said quietly to herself, "Why must we fall? ..." The second leaf asked, "What happens to us when we have fallen?" "We sink down. ..." "What is under us?" The first leaf answered, "I don't know, some say one thing, some another, but nobody knows." The second leaf asked, "Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we're down there?" The first leaf answered, "Who knows? Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it." They were silent again. Then the first leaf said tenderly to the other, "Don't worry so much about it, you're trembling." "That's nothing," the second leaf answered, "I tremble at the least thing now. I don't feel so sure of my hold as I used to." "Let's not talk any more about such things," said the first leaf. The other replied, "No, we'll let be. But—what else shall we talk about?" She was silent, but went on after a little while. "Which of us will go first?" "There's still plenty of time to worry about that," the other leaf assured her. "Let's remember how beautiful it was, how wonderful, when the sun came out and shone so warmly that we thought we'd burst with life. Do you remember? And the morning dew, and the mild and splendid things..." "Now the nights are dreadful," the second leaf complained, "and there is no end to them." "We shouldn't complain," said the first leaf gently. "We've outlived many, many others." "Have I changed much?" asked the second leaf shyly but determinedly. "Not in the least," the first leaf assured her. "You only think so because I've got to be so yellow and ugly. But it's different in your case." "You're fooling me," the second leaf said. "No, really," the first leaf exclaimed eagerly, "believe me, you're as lovely as the day you were born. Here and there may be a little yellow spot but it's hardly noticeable and only makes you handsomer, believe me." "Thanks," whispered the second leaf, quite touched. "I don't believe you, not altogether, but I thank you because you're so kind, you've always been so kind to me. I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are." "Hush," said the other leaf, and kept silent herself for she was too troubled to talk any more. Then they were both silent. Hours passed. A moist wind blew, cold and hostile, through the treetops. "Ah, now," said the second leaf, "I..." Then her voice broke off. She was torn from her place and spun down. Winter had come.