I was looking
for love in all the
wrong directions.
From her, from him,
from the world,
from my work,
from the very air…
and I was looking
so far off
for what I thought
was promised,
that my unfocused eyes
missed the mother,
missed the teachers,
missed the friends,
missed the mirror
that was right there.
I thought the love
I wanted could only be
found in distant lands,
but the love I needed
was already in my own hands.
Thinking of songs and stories
and all the came-before-mes,
I realize
that as glorious as those stories be,
all were missing something key…
me…
So whenever I feel lonely,
or sad that my love story
hasn’t been written yet,
I’ll remember it’s being written now
between me
and someone I haven’t met.
He said I would
never find love
because I cared too much
about my career,
as if writing words
and making films
and changing hearts
was a pursuit to be feared.
It hurt at first,
but the more distant
from those words I grow
the more I’m confident
and absolutely know,
that my passion for stories
is the greatest part of my being
and if that’s something the person
I fall in love with can’t see
then they certainly
don’t deserve any part of me.
It should have been bliss.
I remember afterwards thinking Romeo & Juliet didn’t die for this.
It left me wishing I were the star
of Never Been Kissed.
Anything to keep from
remembering those lips.
30 around the corner
and the book of my loves
is still full of empty pages
and crossed out names,
unwritten passions,
and dreams unfulfilled.
I’ve learned to
be okay with the lonely,
but it doesn’t change
that the only
thing I want to do
is feel loved like
the sun loves the moon.
Look at a nebula
and consider its magnificence.
It is no single star,
nor a binary,
it is a cosmic cloud
of interstellar intricacies
and galactic glory
made of billions of
particles of stories.
You, dear queer child,
are like the nebula.
Complex and glowing,
beautifully showing
the universe that you
are marvelously multidimensional
and made from
science, magic, and love.
Guess who’s dropping a new poetry collection this week? 👀
Yep, it me.
As some of you might recall a few months back, I decided to start a new series called elluminations, which I originally planned to release quarterly through Patreon, while the first volume was made available for free.
Well friends, there’s been a change of plans, and this post is Part 1 of 2 explaining why. (Keep an eye out around mid October for the exciting surprise that is Part 2. 😉)
Sooooon…
Part one of said change of plans is that I have decided to make elluminations vol. 1 available for free as well, and I will be releasing the whole collection over the next two weeks via this blog, Medium, and my Instagram page. This new collection is a bit shorter than vol. 0, and is called Love Lessons. The poems included in it are about personal experiences and struggles I’ve had in both finding love, and learning to love myself more. If you read the Love section in Unraveling Light, these poems serve as a nice companion to that.
The first poem in this collection, Seasons, will be released this evening here on Elayna Musings first, and then you can find it elsewhere on the internet tonight!
Huzzah for poetry!
However! As excited as I am to announce this new set of poems, I do have one last part to this update, and that is that after a lot of deliberation over the summer, I’ve decided to phase out my Patreon page. Getting people to subscribe there has been a challenge, and while the people at Patreon are seriously creating something amazing for artists like myself, it just doesn’t seem to be the right fit for me. I’ll be posting an announcement over on there to let patrons know that as of October, that page will be inactive.
October is going to be a big month though, for while I am phasing out Patreon, I do have something new coming for y’all to take it’s place. Till then, I’ll be sharing the new elluminations poems, and finishing up the sending out of the Kickstarter perks for Unraveling Light. (Which if you haven’t ordered one yet, you get get your copy here, here, or here!) Thanks as always friends. Looking forward to sharing more stories with you soon! 😊
Who am I?
The first verse
of my 28th year
is a question,
another ellipsis
with lessons to be
revealed day by day
as I fight and love
onward
to where I’m meant
to go.
I don’t know
the destination
but I know that for it
I am destined.
I’m only human
for now,
but I was a soul
long before,
and my journey
forward
is less about
becoming someone new
and instead about
becoming the someone
I was before I
even knew my name
or what words were.
As I begin around this
system’s star once more,
I hold hope close,
and go forth with faith,
confident and sure…
Hope you all enjoyed this. Rather than the usual writing all the things I’ve been through for my birthday (and especially given what a poetic past year it was for me) I felt it would be more fitting to celebrate the beginning of being 28 with a new poem. Here’s to a new year of being and stuff!
The word evokes in most
Nickelodeon or N*Sync or any of the other trappings
of our childhoods.
But for me, nostalgia has always
emerged in ways that
to the world might seem strange.
Backstage darkness,
the smell of lumber,
the hum of light fixtures.
12 scoop ice cream sundaes
from Friendly’s after
every special occasion,
and lying in the freshly
mown grass of the football field.
Candle wax between my
fingers while lying on the driveway.
Nights looking for meteors,
and cool, rainy mornings
in the shadows of stone history
when we were hoping for a sunrise.
Nostalgia tastes like
Charlie’s greasiest pizza,
smells like sweet incense,
feels like warm pavement,
and looks like starry skies.
No amount of you will ever be enough, the voices say.
I’ve come of age in a cold hard time that has lied to me so much and so well that I’d grown to believe
they were right.
You’re not enough because you weigh too much. You’re not enough because you’re broke too much. You’re not enough because you love too much. You’re not enough because you think too much.
No matter which way they cut me or divided me or tried to summarize me, I was never enough.
But I’ve had enough.
So I’ll become more than they thought I could because I’ve always been more than I thought I was because the secret is I am enough.
• ❇ •
Wanted to share this particular poem from Unraveling Light in honor of World Suicide Prevention Day. May it serve as a reminder that you are enough, that there is hope, and that there is so much more to you than you can ever realize. You are loved. Please keep fighting.
