Prue Paimon

Painting of a woman’s fingers sliding into pages of a book. Painting is red letter no 8 by Jen Mazza

Her spine is wellworn from my caress, I open her, slow at first, then greedy. I slide into her, fingers sinking between tight, waiting pages, her paper rustles at my touch as I spread her wider. The voice inside drags me deeper, a pulse I feel in my chest as I stroke her open. She is a lover who gives until I tremble, then withholds just enough to make me beg.

Her spine is wellworn
from my caress,
I open her,
slow at first,
then greedy.
I slide into her,
fingers sinking between
tight, waiting pages,
her paper rustles at my touch
as I spread her wider…

#poetry

All of me is there, poured out on the floor.
Someone please—grab a mop,
tidy what’s left of me,
offer a little dignity
to the mess I’ve become.

#poetry

Kindness, it seems, is a trick they never taught yet I’m punished for performing it anyway. I offer softness and get the the thwack of how dare you for nothing more than caring. I anticipate the snap, the tug of a too-short leash pulling me back into shape. The lesson breathe small, don’t pull, don’t reach for anything that isn’t offered. Because this is what happens when gentleness is a crime, we circle the same battered hope hoping we will be remembered as good.

Life is a Rolled Up Newspaper

Kindness, it seems,
is a trick they never taught
yet I’m punished for performing it anyway.
I offer softness
and get the the thwack of how dare you
for nothing more
than caring.
#poetry

Just like that, you forgot
years of history
stolen by sickness, disease, injury.
If anyone wants to know hell,
look into the eyes of the one who’s gone
but still breathing,
and the faces around them
clutching memories
that no longer have a place to land.

#poetry

All my ghosts have bones
they have sharpened into spikes
memory learning how to weaponize itself,
how to haunt with an edge.
They linger in doorways,
chiseling old hurts into new shapes,
turning silence into shrapnel
with every breath I take.
#MPPrompt #poetryprompt #poetry

For all my almosts
and not-quite’s,
a constant tape drags,
taking inventory
of every way
I fail to fit.
But maybe my math is wrong
maybe I was never meant
to be tallied or totaled,
never meant to be measured,
only met.

#poetry

Softer Ink Sometimes I do things just to hurt myself as if the pain I choose is somehow more palatable than the pain inflicted. I scroll endlessly through conversations for facts. Memory edits itself like propaganda, turning heartbreak into history, and I, the unreliable narrator, keep rewriting my own crimes in softer ink.

Softer Ink

Sometimes I do things just to hurt myself
as if the pain I choose is somehow
more palatable than the pain inflicted.
I scroll endlessly through conversations for facts.
#poetry

Erasure Comes Dressed as Explanation

He calls it clarity,
but it’s conquest.

Each word a hand
smoothing me out
until I vanish
politely.
#poetry

Unicorn

A hostage note written in lipstick
a tale of sharing,
that forgot what choice means.
#poetry #unicorns

Fine Line There’s a fine line between eccentric and crazy, I ride that line like a circus animal on a unicycle, balancing teacups of logic on my head, wearing a grin stitched from yesterday’s confessions. Spectators clap politely, unsure if it’s art or accident. The ringmaster calls it living, but I call it survival spinning plates of memory, juggling apologies, and smiling through the wobble as if it’s intentional. Not inevitable.

Fine Line
There’s a fine line between eccentric and crazy,
I ride that line like a circus animal on a unicycle,
balancing teacups of logic on my head,
wearing a grin stitched from yesterday’s confessions.
#poetry

After So Many Deaths After so many deaths maybe I’m numb, like waiting for the next one a phone call I don’t want to answer. Grief comes wearing my father’s shoes, tracking mud across the floor. I stopped trying to clean it I just rearrange the furniture so the stains look intentional. I talk to his photograph. He answers in silence that feels heavier than words. The dead are polite that way, always waiting their turn to speak. I don’t light candles nonsense never staved off the inevitable. Now I keep the dark as a pet. It follows me from room to room, I pretend I’m fine.

After So Many Deaths

After so many deaths maybe I’m numb,
like waiting for the next one
a phone call I don’t want to answer.
Grief comes wearing my father’s shoes,
tracking mud across the floor.
#poetry #death

Snow arrives like a new beginning, softening the world’s sharp edges. It hushes the arguments of color, turns fences into suggestions, and lays a cool hand on everything that hurts. Under its careful touch, trash becomes sculpture, rooftops dusted with purity, and even the scars of the road are smoothed into forgiveness. It is not callous, this forgetting only pause, a clean page left open overnight. In the morning, we wake to find the world in white.

Snow dusted rosemary photograph.

Snow.

Snow arrives like a new beginning,
softening the world’s sharp edges.
It hushes the arguments of color,
turns fences into suggestions,
and lays a cool hand on everything that hurts.
#poetry #snow

Pockets.

Pockets are small mouths
holding purpose,
terrified of being turned inside out
their secrets exposed,
and ultimately,
their emptiness confessed.

#poetry

Simply beautiful.

The Machine Insert coin flashes warning the slot is stuck in refusal through years of force, demands, and expectations jamming the gears. Once, bright buttons pressed for sweetness, for comfort, for anything that feeds. Now the lights flicker, the inventory mislabeled desire dispensed as duty, affection in wrappers of fatigue. They shake it hoping the threat will revive its mechanism, bang the glass, whisper please, as though prayer might restore what has ultimately given up. But the codes no longer work. The selections blink error, and behind the fogged pane something weeps, refusing to vend.

The Machine
Insert coin flashes warning
the slot is stuck in refusal
through years of force,
demands, and expectations
jamming the gears.
#poetry

The Fall They say Satan fell when his burden grew too heavy or so the story goes. But maybe he jumped, escaping responsibility and rhetoric, taking the only exit left open. And like women, he was vilified his refusal called rebellion, his freedom named sin. Perhaps the fall wasn’t a failure at all, but the first act of courage ever written wrong.

The Fall

They say Satan fell
when his burden grew too heavy
or so the story goes.
But maybe he jumped,
escaping responsibility and rhetoric,
taking the only exit left open.
#poetry #satan #feminism

And to think I almost—
well, it doesn’t matter now.
The moment rushed past me
like a train and I late to the platform,
Silence took what words could not hold,
and left me killing what remained.
#poetry

The Place No One Steps Foot

There is a field I never go
grass grown high with hesitation,
roots tangled in apologies,
the soil damp with memory.
No one steps there anymore.
Not even I,
though I dream of its scent,
the caress of the wind.
#poetry #MPprompt

Something unsaid
Leaves something undone,
A silence #acidic beneath the skin,
Where words should have cauterized,
But erasure took hold instead.
#horrorprompt #poetry

Thank you for the reposts.

Flakes posture Falling in their failing, Uniquely determined to control the narrative. Because behind the curtain Is chaos before the performance. And I am not interested In bad actors And uncomfortable seats. The script keeps changing anyway lines crossed out mid-breath, motives rewritten under harsher lights. Applause becomes accusation, the stage a mirror of confusion, and every gesture rehearsed to death. Let the curtain fall, let the dust rise I’d rather face the silence than play pretend.

Flakes Fall Uniquely

Flakes posture
Falling in their failing,
Uniquely determined to control the narrative.
Because behind the curtain
Is chaos before the performance.
And I am not interested
In bad actors
And uncomfortable seats.
#foxprose #prompt

The Trouble with Being Literal I take people like paperbacks face value and fragile spines. You say, turn the page, and I do, expecting plot, but there’s only subtext and coffee stains that don’t explain a thing. You speak in metaphors, I start indexing for meaning alphabetized, cross-referenced, hoping for a glossary of intent. But your tone shifts like editions, and I’m still on the first print run, dog-eared in confusion. You tell me I’m reading too deeply, as if there’s any other way to read. I underline everything you say, not because I’m obsessive, but because I’m astonished by how easily you improvise language, how you make sense without ever needing the footnote.

The Trouble with Being Literal
I take people like paperbacks
face value and fragile spines.
You say, turn the page,
and I do, expecting plot,
but there’s only subtext
and coffee stains that don’t explain a thing.
#poetry #writerscomunity #literal

Domestic There’s nothing domestic about it. No home in the house, no safety in the shelter. It’s dishes smashed like punctuation, doors slammed into silence. It’s the smell of dinner gone cold while apologies simmer on low. It’s the bruise hiding beneath the polite word “argument”. There’s nothing domestic about it. It’s a war fought in whispers, occupation of the everyday.

Domestic
There’s nothing domestic about it.
No home in the house,
no safety in the shelter.
It’s dishes smashed like punctuation,
doors slammed into silence.
It’s the smell of dinner gone cold
while apologies simmer on low.

#vss365 #domestic

The ground exhaled
a low, growl from its belly,
something buried too long
somehow remembered itself.
As if all it’s thinking were for naught,
as if it could reach an answer
without disturbing the magma
of what lies beneath.
#BlueskyRelay #poetry #thegroundexhaled

I don’t compartmentalize I can’t separate It all bleeds together And I become fragile. Monday is just as manic as every other day. Another kid, another catastrophe my real job is to care. But care is a currency that never replenishes, and I spend it like riches I haven’t earned yet, without thinking, until I’m dizzy with the cost. I try to shelve my sorrow between paperwork and patience, but empathy seeps through every folder’s edge. By evening, I am nothing but open wounds in sensible shoes, still trying to save whatever can be held.

Manic Monday

I don’t compartmentalize
I can’t separate
It all bleeds together
And I become fragile.
Monday is just as manic
as every other day.
Another kid, another catastrophe
my real job is to care.
#bedroomeyes
#poetry

Creature
Let me spin you a fantastical tale
of the creature that lived
between want and need
in the thin slip of time
where light forgot.
#poetry #vss365 #creature

?

Creature
Let me spin you a fantastical tale
of the creature that lived
between want and need
in the thin slip of time
where light forgot.
#poetry #vss365 #creature

Negotiating with Dignity

It’s never about the lack of money
that’s what the wealthy don’t see.
It’s the constant negotiation with dignity,
the quiet, exhausting labor
of preserving self-respect
in a world that treats you as disposable.
#poetry

I want someone who calls madness beautiful, who kisses the edges of disaster and says, my—how exquisite. I want hands that know how to hold a ghost, lips that reassure like a mantra that never tires, eyes that gleam like candlelight and spark like an ignition when I enter. I want the kind of devotion that sees my demons and asks for a dance instead of an exorcist. I want someone who doesn’t flinch when I bloom in strange directions. I simply want someone who would burn down heaven just to keep me warm.

I want someone who calls madness beautiful,
who kisses the edges of disaster
and says, my—how exquisite.
#poetry