EXCERPTS OF MOVEMENT IN COTTON CANDY TAR
This article is an instalment of MUSE Magazine’s Mental Health Theme week, taking place from October 25th to October 30th, 2021.
Trigger Warning: This article contains discussions of mental health, mental illness, and suicide, which may be a trigger for some readers.
Disclaimer: The author wants to acknowledge and make it known that these are their personal experiences. The author would like to recognize that other people have other experiences and that no two people are the same.
The following poems are excerpts from Sarah Towers' poetry collection Movements in Cotton Candy Tar
Stunning
If I was screaming,I would take pleasure in my lonely ears,in the reality I live,that is so far from grounded.If I am surrounding people,I can wail like a dove,I can sing like a banshee,and I keep them stunned.I shriek in desire,deepening pulls toward notice,and it is stunning.April 17th, 2021
Real
People, persons, my selves each passingwith my skin both pasty and plastic,And questionable sensationsthat doubt pain and calmness.Raising one,and lowering the other,with tasteless food that provesoverarchingand people,so flat and underdeveloped,interacting sporadically with predictions,hammering into my head,all of it,how done and tragic my state is.Though underfed and in terror,fuzzy and thick and wrapped in cellophane,this is the world as it is presented to me.Meaning it is real,in one way.July 27th, 2021
Genevieve
She always knows what to wear,and does not accept the feelingsof one’s self-deprivation,that can halt the invitations of new energies.Shut up and be her.Empty but so whole presenting,lapse into her.She is affecting and ineffective.The anger, indifference,strut.I am her.I have been twice.She is decisive.March 2020
Adipocere
Like a corpseI have been carrying this body,this person,heavily along with me.I am wearing my own corpseand wonder,where my connection to this realityhas gone.The sun breaks through clouds,and I do not want to see those frommy past life,as they interact with a girl long dead.I was killed last yearin that moment,as he took the life from me,as he tread my body like it was his.Civilizer, he killed me.He infected me.Nationalized himself,I left with a dead body,and it keeps dragginglike a blanket on the dirt,attached to my lungs,getting caught on rocks, rootsbranches stick at it,start to tear away her.Civilizer, I escaped you,but you kept your tabs.I retreated, and you took landI once danced on.Fuck that,I sat confined.Handcuffed to a corpse,dragging a lifeless being through mud,over hills,trying to prove to othersthat what I towed,Was still who they knew.I don’t want to be withthose who knew my corpse.This weight, I see it decomposingand spring struggles to pull it into the ground.Am I to breathe it back in,as pollen?Hurt my lungs in a new way,have it enter my bloodstream again,this time forcefully,painfully?I pray on a four leaf clover,for the green of spring to pullmy body into the ground.Unlock me from this false character,do not let me breathe in the dustof a body once alive and well.Let me feel sun on fresh skin,in new eyes,love in a new soul.And my ancestors will shade me fromburns, and rain, with a four leaf clover,as I walk delicately,light,into a world that hasn’t met me yet.March 2020