"How to Survive" - Writers Block Poetry Contest Week 3

How to Survive

There’s a reason
they’ve always told you to
never get trapped.
After many foolish heartbreaks,
you’ve learned that you don’t really have much,
you are all that you have. And even so,
you have learned things beyond your years.
Like, mostly, of course, how we 'lay' and how we 'lie'--
these are hugely two different words, but
oftentimes interchanged.
Like, when you say,
“He lays beside me and he lies behind me,”--
they almost always sound pretty much the same.
Habitually though-- 'laying' and 'lying'--
they’ve always gotten you nowhere,
when all you’ve ever really wanted was either this--
an advance or a retreat;
nothing in between. And yet,
there will be days you’ll get stuck
and accustomed to sadness
that people will come after you pleading,
“Tell me how to survive a heartbreak”,
not knowing that you haven’t even properly eulogized
for the other hundred failures in the past 8 years.
Then again, you will learn more of it the hard way
that some forms of deception
can be dizzying,
that even if you ask, “Where are we, really?”
they will respond, “Elsewhere”,
and as volatile as it gets,
remember that it’s just a spin off of “Where else?”
and this is the part where you will learn when to leave.
If it’s true that our faces are reflections of what we’ve been through,
Then yours have gone from innocent to untranslatable.
But years from now, you’ll see,
you’d still be that girl
hungry and feverish for
a bigger kind of love.
That when someone comes up to you again
and asks, how did you survive?
You tell,
"Take your map out and orient to a new route"--
this is how we never get trapped.

This poem is an emulation of one of my favorite contemporary poets, Marty McConnell, in which this also serves as an ode to her survival poems, all of which helped me pulled through some trying times of my life (--Thank you, Marty!). Her signature line breaks, metaphors, and relationship with magic is just exceptionally charismatic.

Here's to hoping I did justice. Art and words by, yours truly. :)