Kristen Darling Poetry
Hi, I'm Kristen. When I reread all of my childhood journals as a therapy exercise, I found my first
27/12/2023
21 The World
On that day when you arrive
precisely where your feet have taken you,
when you step foot onto the elevated terrain
of space and thought that is your life
and recognize that though this is where
you meant to go, it is nowhere you meant to be.
What next?
Do you bray at the sun?
Tabulate the sunk costs of your journey,
or howl into the wind?
You could.
You could curse the versions of yourself that carried you here.
You could beg for absolution or a time machine,
redeemable for a currency you have already spent.
But perhaps you should sit down awhile instead.
Survey what you could not see until
you had some distance from it.
Grieve what you must leave behind.
Let time and dirt and snow embalm it.
Lay it to rest in the graveyard of your mind.
Do not let your body become an empty tomb.
You are not a final resting place for doubts and regrets.
Let them go.
Allow your scars to teach you wisdom:
Your body remembers what your brain forgets.
When you have sung your own eulogy
to the tired bones of the life you thought you had,
pick up your broken heart
and keep walking.
(image and poem, mine)
05
Hierophant
The face of God
is a butch woman
who pays the price
of remaining soft.
(video and poem, mine)
The Emperor
His hairy arms
bear-hugging me while
I laughed and laughed;
he held me while I wriggled,
little fish that waved
in the hoary seagrass of his arms
One cloudy day in Hawaii, the volcanic leg
of a bay, we kayaked together,
dipped the oars and set out towards
a pod of dolphins, their pewtery backs
flashing in the cold, dark deep
I plunged in after them
watched them swim down
until one swirled back up
skimmed my fingers with its bubbles
and it was gone
He steadied the kayak
I flopped back in
breathless and shivering,
changed
(video and poem, mine)
03
The Empress
My stretch marks are wise.
They set an extra plate at the table.
There’s always room for me.
My skin is magic like that.
(video and poem, mine)
02
The High Priestess
I whispered to my body
I believe you
that’s all I needed to know
(video and poem, mine)
23/09/2023
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01
The Magician
my first trick, motherhood:
a disappearing act
i craft leaky mosaics
from the broken pieces
i balance on knives
i bleed on white carpets
i eat my own fire until i burn
from the inside out
i fold myself into myself
until only creases remain
i keep a chair between them
and me
having made a bed of nails,
now i sleep in it
(video and poem, mine)
0
The Fool
The girl I killed trails after me.
I cast the usual prayers and incantations,
but this is a stubborn haunting.
I can’t exorcize my own soul.
She possesses me with her thirst—
she will not go quietly.
The chains that bind us
scrape across the stones.
Her sticky hands in my hair,
the urgent fingers at my throat—
she sprinkles me with her burnt offering
so I never forget her scent.
I used to think that loving someone
meant never letting them go,
but it isn't love that whispers to me at night.
She compels me to remember what I beg to forget.
I don't know how to start over
when I can't leave myself behind.
(poem and video, mine)
09/04/2023
Eostre
She is risen.
new life a reflection of Her glory,
She, the peaceweaver
rebukes death and destruction
with Her healer's hands
touched the scorched earth and said "It is finished."
She whispered the words of life to Her Son's body,
She is despised and rejected of men.
She is risen,
the velvet bloom of the flowers Her handiwork.
She speaks peace to the raindrops,
life upon life, everlasting.
She feathers the wings of the thrush,
teaches the robin its songs.
She is the sunlight and the starlight,
the rust of the Blue Ridge Mountains
and the swell of the oceans.
She is risen.
(poem and image, mine)
07/04/2023
it takes a village to raise kids
hey, even raising jesus took two dads
i have a big wide crush on the world
it's the bravest most audacious choice i keep making
i'm hooked on sunsets
aren't you
don't you always want phở to exist
don't you want to keep meeting summer
bravely believing that it
will come around
again
loves i can't quit you
please remember that the lilacs
only bloom once a year
the rest is just memory
and recollection
let's bloom so bright this year
we remember when we wither away
what flowers we once
were
(poem and image, mine)
29/03/2023
Belonging as Choice
In the fourth grade,
my idea of being cool
was oversized t-shirts of wolf prints
and memorizing Bible verses with clinical accuracy
at my small Baptist school,
a gawky Mormon kid writing counterfeit essays I didn't understand
about "being saved."
That year, we moved states, schools,
Stephanie Edwards called me a geek.
In ninth grade, she would ask me
Why are you such a bitch?
while we froze on the soccer field in P.E.
In retrospect, I haven't truly belonged anywhere.
I made best friends with books
and a small but plucky band of misfits.
My affinity for hats started with some truly frightening hairstyles.
I relate to children more often than I do
other adults.
Without knowing it,
I gather up the other neurodivergents and qu**rs.
It's been such a very long time
of quietly declaring
I belong here
by stubbornly existing in places that are not welcoming to me,
holding my nursling infant to my breast
everywhere I found myself
and he found himself hungry;
the churches and law offices and tattoo parlors
I do not really belong.
I have given myself permission to flourish
in places I am actively antagonized,
over and over and simply fu***ng over again
until dandelion bursting through unfavorable concrete
I have found my patch of sun.
I belong because I have declared my body
belongable, made my brain a place I generally like to be.
I may seem at ease,
but make no mistake:
each centimeter,
each postage stamp of territory has been hard-disputed,
hard-won.
I still feel the catch of loneliness in my throat
when I am forget that I am where I meant to be.
I am expansive by choice—
my taking up space
and taming a favorable breeze
has given others freedom to expand.
I have created every ounce of belonging
I have found—
so instead, I give you both my hands,
both cheeks kissed,
and whisper
You belong here,
too.
(image and poem, mine)
27/03/2023
Seasonal Depression
The lake is drying up.
We're discussing how quickly arsenic-laced winds
will drive us from our suburban home,
if it's possible to remain and how long,
how old will our child be,
the impact of endocrine disruptors on his growing body.
I do not want this cup of sorrows.
I often wonder if bad people worry about being
good people,
or if that's a burden reserved for the goodly
and traumatized among us,
those of us raised in doomsday cults
looking to the sky for God's reentry,
God's reclamation of the Earth we borrowed
and a detailed accounting of how hard we fu**ed up the transaction.
I cannot say if good people corner the market
on environmental anxiety,
or how guilty I ought to feel
when slurping yet another plastic straw.
I do not want this cup of sorrows.
It's spring, but a cold and wild one,
ground still frozen,
we wake to fresh flurries of snow.
I don't believe in God,
but I pray for the lake.
May it flow.
May it rise.
May my seasonal depression find vindication
in snowpack thick and wooly
against future arsenic storms.
I do not want this cup of sorrows,
but neither do the black-capped chickadees
feathering their nest
in the neighbor's dryer vent.
I hear the parents cheeping brightly in the thick morning cold,
so I run out to catch papa bird's solemn crown
peeping from the building;
he heard me and flew away so swiftly,
dipped and breaststroked
because I am fear to him,
and he is so very small,
small enough to raise up a whole family
in a dryer vent.
What is this chickadee's cup of sorrows?
This year, our cups overflow
so much so I am shoring up for floods,
when winter thaws, spring unfurls
hot and bright and floral,
I pray the earth ready to receive
what it has forgotten how to hold,
what we have taken from her,
what we have forgotten.
I do not want this cup of sorrows,
so I am drizzling in nectar,
spreading petals across the surface,
parting my chapped lips to welcome in
everything I have been denied
by this long, cruel winter,
preparing myself to bloom.
(poem and image, mine)
A poem performance
21/03/2023
Bathrobe Mom
I am many things I swore I'd never become.
I am an atheist q***r with an extra hole in my nostril.
My legs are hairy by choice;
my armpits, too.
My shoes are practical.
Today I stood defiantly at the gas pump,
with my exposed hairy legs and ankle socks, in my finest bathrobe.
I am that bathrobe mom now—
I welcome someone laughing at me,
because I am laughing at myself
but in a friendly way,
as I feel the cringe from the younger woman
who lives inside me
leaning away from the hirsute hobgoblin
in stout shoes and wool socks
pumping midgrade in the stiff March morning.
I'm kinder, too, now—
to myself,
to others:
less rigid, more broken—
more whole, more healed.
I am capable of actions once unthinkable.
This year, I threw away my first dead mouse.
I felt fear, then pity, then sorrow,
then nothing.
I apologized to the tiny life I had taken,
a life that had wanted to eat peanut butter
and met death by steel spring instead.
I am more grey and nuanced
than ever before,
softer and less ashamed.
I am a messy bathrobe mom,
but mostly just a woman in her thirties,
rounder and more raw,
sculpting a life out of the dust
to which I will return.
(image and poem, mine)
17/03/2023
Holding Space
It’s painful to see the ones you love struggling,
and know you are useless and impotent to relieve the suffering
you see squeezing tears from your beloved’s downcast eyes.
Of course you rally all your best feedback and constructs,
only natural to diagnose the suffering
and prescribe a remedy.
Have you tried doing nothing instead?
Not a stolid, unfeeling nothing of neglect—
no, rather the expansive white space of nothing—
“I cannot alter this suffering,
but I can hold it.”
Have you done the work of leaning into your own helplessness
and not shrinking from it?
I understand your discomfort.
I perceive you want to be strong and knowledgeable,
and most of all,
helpful!
My loves, I do not need you to be strong for me.
I beseech you instead to be a little bit broken with me,
curious and brave with me
that our hearts keep beating
in this ocean of sorrow.
I need the tender, human emptiness of grief,
acknowledged and named again,
and again.
When I point to where it hurts,
when I identify the gods-sized holes in my heart,
I am not asking you to fill it up.
No, my loves.
I am asking for you to see
that I am in agony
and for you not to turn away
because my naked pain
discomforts you.
I only ask for you to hold this space with me,
to witness and to tell me
that you are unafraid of this suffering
and that you will remain faithful to it
until I no longer need it.
And I will love you infinity squared upon itself,
and return the love
when you find yourselves in need
of space held
instead of solutions.
(poem and image, mine)
07/03/2023
No, Thank You
They’ll call me ungrateful
when I say No, thank you.
I don’t need free shipping
or a discount code
for International Women’s Day.
It’s just a new angle for the same old thing.
Give me an apology from the first boy who made me cry.
I want my virginity back.
Pry open the doors of my voice that slam shut
when men on the train grab my ass.
Prop open the closed doors
to the rooms where middle-aged men
interrogated me about my s*x life.
Sit with me in the darkness with a screaming infant
while my ni***es bled.
Stand with me on the corner of 200 S and Main Street
when a man sneered at me and muttered
What’s in the cup? I bet it’s hot and wet.
Hold my shame for me.
It’s too heavy for me to hold alone anymore.
I’ve been holding together for so long
that I drilled clear through the other side, straight to stars.
Don’t tell me I’m strong for a woman.
No, thank you.
I don’t want to be celebrated your way.
(words and image, mine)
Falling In Love with My Aging Body
Different phases of my body's life have felt like betrayal.
The first time my chest hurt because I ran into something shocked me.
I didn't want hips and b***s,
or the ritual monthly bloodletting.
The transition to each new phase
has mostly been marked by pain,
new kinds of it,
the dull thrum of lengthening bones
and menstrual cramps so severe there's a special name for it,
dysmenorrhea.
I don't need to speak dead tongues to know
that conditions that start with dys
are not ones I really want to have—
dysfunctional families and
disregulation and disintegration
wear what they are in their names.
I thought I was going to die when I was 31.
Dingdong, it's trauma calling.
I knew with my brain but not with my body
that I almost certainly wasn't going to die
die at the same age my mom did.
When I didn't die after years of just trying to live as much life
as I possibly could,
my body threw a I'm Not Dead Yet party
and stopped walking for the summer of 2018.
What can I say?
My body and I both have a flair for the dramatic.
Listen,
I had to go backwards to go forwards
because healing trauma works like that—
even as I've excavated the old s**t to make way
there's new s**t waiting in the wings
because I've kept living
and living is traumatic.
It turns out that my body and I are
life partners now,
a fully-committed relationship.
We're all in.
My body spent a long time being afraid of me
because I yelled at her for having human limitations,
for having needs,
for her exhaustion.
It took me a long time to earn back her trust,
and it only started when I began talking to her like a precious baby
(which she likes to remind me, she used to be).
You darling,
oh, you poor tired sweetheart,
dear achy, lovely heartstar
you are hurting so much today,
I hear your struggle.
These stairs are hard,
your cute little feet are crying.
I have found that calling each new change
absolutely adorable makes it hurt less.
I tell my newly gray hairs
that they are completely gorgeous.
I have chosen to tell my neck wrinkles
that they are entirely lovely.
I say proudly that I love my aging body
that keeps living and wearing her life
right on her skin,
and funny enough,
it turns out
I do,
I do love her.
(video and poem, mine)
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self as art
I am most often
my own canvas and muse.
It's great.
You might try it.
It feels easier to take risks
and make mistakes with my own skin.
Because I'm pragmatic like that,
and because I wash off easily,
there's nothing wasted.
I can take too many pictures of myself
without vanity or hatred.
I'm just always experimenting
and trying something new
but there's a lot of duds in the process
that range from hilarious to first draft
and it's ok.
I can perform moon rituals
and s*x magic on the temple altar of my body.
I paint in period blood.
I get messy.
I fall in love with women
to the tune of Sister Sparrow
and John Denver,
whiskey sour laced with lust.
I tick tock my hips in three-quarter time.
I silver tambourine my way through this cruel world,
because otherwise I am quiet and colorless,
drained of joy.
I am the universe speaking back to itself.
I am three parts woman and one part sword.
I write like I feel,
impetuous and full of shards.
the bleeding needles of song
I carry in my arms.
Poets bleed out in every direction at once,
so we construct dams of words
to hold some of it in.
(poem and video, mine)
On this day, I walked bright and virginal
in a white dress with crispy add-on sleeves,
a veil and apron of fig leaves to cover my nakedness—
the temple matron was terse with me;
we were late,
because my stepmom kept re-curling her hair.
I apologized so much.
You don't have to go through with it if you don't want,
she kept telling me.
Kristen might change her mind,
she had told everybody at the rehearsal dinner the night before.
I did want to marry him.
They were so convinced that I was going to have s*x
before my wedding night
they made me bunk up with my grandma in the hotel.
I just wanted to be alone,
to think, to dream of what my life was going to be.
The foam curlers stuck straight into my brain
and I wandered the hotel corridors,
swirling myself tepid hot cocoa
while I made uncomfortable small talk with the front desk.
"I'm getting married tomorrow and I can't sleep."
Marriages don't unravel all at once.
First they sag.
They get soggy from all the things
you said you'd do
and never did.
Marriages don't burn all at once.
You can smell the smoke for years sometimes.
Sometimes it's not even terrible.
Sometimes marriages had a great deal of love.
Marriages don't just vanish.
They fade.
I was one person 15 years ago
and while she is still there in me,
I barely recognize myself.
And some stories I keep on grieving
when they are long past their expiration,
my stillborn marriage that did not survive the night,
the marriage that never gets older.
(video and poem, mine)
20/02/2023
"It looks like zebra stripes,"
she lifted a lock of the ruby red highlights
in my hair, painstakingly chosen
that made me happy—
she was angry I was dating someone
she didn't approve,
and punished me by
by criticizing my appearance.
"I don't like your orange lipstick,"
she said another winter
when it was cold and icy
and we'd driven through a blizzard
to see them.
I had stopped believing in their church,
and it made her so angry,
so she hated my lipstick.
She spit me out like I am an acquired taste,
made me think that I am brash, garish, hard to love—
offensive to the senses.
But now I keep Montana between her and me
to keep myself safe.
and I know I go down softly
like muddled herbs in summer drinks.
I only catch in throats
that can't hold rainbows.
(image and poem and fiber arts, mine)
Bless the Imperfection
Bless your imperfect life.
Bless the things you'll never finish.
Find the holiness in dirty dishes
and torn trousers.
Pray over lost buttons,
misplaced house keys and undelivered letters.
Praise gravity, praise time—
praise their hands on your body.
You don't need to throw sticks and stones
into the river of life trying to dam it up;
it won't listen or behave, darling,
it will just keep flowing,
laugh and gurgle away.
Embrace the shadows that ache the edges of your vision.
Expect delays, disappointment, heartbreak.
Expect your health to fail you.
There's nothing surprising about grief—
grieve everything and everyone you love
now, forever.
Losing everything
is the most natural thing on earth.
You're on loan from the universe, darlings.
Bless your imperfection.
Bless your impermanence.
It's all you have, my love,
and it's enough just the way it is.
(video and poem, mine)
Lonely Prayers
I miss praying.
I miss prayer.
I miss believing God was on the other end of the line,
attentive and invested in the outcome
of the mundanities to which I called out for aid—
I spent one summer praying for 10 minutes each night,
trying to spend at least half of it on what I was grateful;
I thank thee, Heavenly Father,
that I was born into thy church,
I thank thee
for blessings too large to even name,
for books, for life—
and then I’d try to listen
for God to speak back
because I thought he did,
that he lived in rooms with floor to ceiling
ears that could hear
and a dresser bigger than creation with my picture on it,
among the jillion childrens he sired,
just like me—
but being a child of God was special kind of lonely,
as I learned to hate my skinhome for being hungry,
to despise the natural, sinful world for all its vices.
I burrowed through to the other side of faith
and I believe in nothing.
So it’s curious to miss praying and to miss prayer,
to believing God was on the other end,
attentive and invested,
but instead I believe in nothing and stardust,
and Truth.
(video and poem, mine)
17/02/2023
I miss praying.
I miss prayer.
I miss believing God was on the other end of the line,
attentive and invested in the outcome
of the mundanities to which I called out for aid—
I spent one summer praying for 10 minutes each night,
trying to spend at least half of it on what I was grateful;
I thank thee, Heavenly Father,
that I was born into thy church,
I thank thee
for blessings too large to even name,
for bookies, for life—
and then I’d try to listen
for God to speak back
because I thought he did,
that he lived in rooms with floor to ceiling
ears that could hear
and a dresser bigger than creation with my picture on it,
among the jillion childrens he sired,
just like me—
but being a child of God was special kind of lonely,
as I learned to hate my skinhome for being hungry,
to despise the natural, sinful world for all its vices.
I burrowed through to the other side of faith
and I believe in nothing.
So it’s curious to miss praying and to miss prayer,
to believing God was on the other end,
attentive and invested,
but instead I believe in nothing and stardust,
and Truth.
(image and poem, mine)
15/02/2023
New public-facing Patreon post with TT performance
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14/02/2023
Public Patreon post, American the Brutal, with TT performance!
America the Brutal | My Darlings, My Beloveds on Patreon Official Post from My Darlings, My Beloveds
Shout-out to my newest Patron, Eve Golding! 😘😘
13/02/2023
Public Patreon post with TT performance!
I don't hate men, I'm afraid of them | My Darlings, My Beloveds on Patreon Official Post from My Darlings, My Beloveds
11/02/2023
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