The Beautiful Weariness of Nothing At All

H. E. Riddleton

 

Sometimes—and it is a secret—I want to burn

all these apartments

down

to start a garden in the ash

 

replenished dirt. Maybe retire

at 24, house hyacinth

& my revolting

cabbage, perhaps, pepper

the earth into placelessness. Untraced,

 

I fear my own evil—what I might do

if it is true there is no order to begin

 

with, just heaven’s loose enclosure

milking itself & maybe me of any remaining

grey. I sit sultry and speculative. I am

 

trampled in the tyranny of my disconnection.

I am told I shouldn’t be out here

alone in the dark asking questions

by a man squashing a cigarette into the concrete

as he climbs into a car. I say, thank you,

but he knows little of my deformity—of what I am

plotting in the pews of this curb. I look up

 

running backwards now, at that sunset.

It reminds me of little things lost.

No, not to fire, but to a spilled

cherry slushie, a lobster boiling,

or structural dehymenation—flesh/ wound

 

of the penetrable, the rockets

we exalt. The stains & screams

split the perilous

above. Maybe it is only precious:

 

a popped pimple letting go,

leaking out across the darkening

landscape, flooding with

the radiance of the inside.

 

Blood & pus is what we are made of.

Blood & pus is what we see through.

And yet, why am I not wholly repulsed?

 

I scratch at my skin until scathed.

I scratch at the stone until my thin skin splinters.

All the while, that red cross on the medicine box

 

streaking through the crossed-out sky

full of aero-plane fumes & felt up

Nightingales each pointing to the blood

congealing. It is cavernous

 

at the site of the first pimpled cherry loved

& tugged open on me.

 

Maybe I won’t burn. Maybe I will wait

to see if there is anything left to do.

I look down past the abandoned

tobacco, unkempt and dancing

on the yellow parking line. An ant

drags a bread crumb, boarded by another,

smaller ant, up the mountainous

curb. I wonder if they are hungry.

I wonder if they pray. I almost

offer my finger as a lift, but,

large and weightless, leave without

interference—making do, making

due, making.­­

 

 

***

H. E. Riddleton is a neurodivergent and mentally ill poetess who, in addition to writing and trying to survive daily life, exists mostly as a wandering, fluttering hippie in search for the prettiest leaf and a better world. She is also a senior English major at the University of Texas in Arlington. Her publications can be found in The Visitant, Not Very Quiet, and No Tokens Journal.