Just a ghost in the void waving hello
I looked and took a leap
To write this flower close to your way
Here’s hoping I don’t land on the thorns by mistake.
What makes an artist?
To teach beyond words
In a way that hides much of the hurt
Except to the people
With too many blue hearts
And not become bitter
Because nobody taught you
The words.
Lessons must lessen the weight over time
Taking pause is an option
Do not grind without rest
False steel crushes forced soul
Have a breathe at a bench
Search dreams and feel song
You can learn a foe from a friend
Be kind: Please leave the helpers alive
See the deliveries and mended signs
Decide if effortful help is a reward
Or just an optional quest line.
The cuts are buried so deep
Yet code reveals
The synergies you concealed
And the timing that beats
Into music that keeps
Making something from the child
Who hoped to be saved.
But what if nobody came
Except in dreams –
And those need defeating to be sane?
I have a mask that I must make
Slightly different from the last
It will never sit straight on my face
But grows closer to the my best resemblance
Of a child with no past
Once loved without claim
A face without cracks to contain
The false growth bound to strain
With no hollow inside
Beyond knowledge of pain.
Moving masks impaled
And gain or spend soul in attack
On the bugs or mistakes that it made
Can this mask face the run back
Or sacrifice another’s egg –
Is rot worth the snack
And are snails safe?
Will it hollow a self
Until what is a name
But a reminder of graves it can’t make?
Well, where there is any hope
There is a will and a way:
To walk faster and leap higher
To grasp any nail
And swing at a broken brick in the wall
To dash and down flail
To do the impossible
And learn to go slow through the pain.
But without others’ understanding and delicate silk
No connections are gained through rage.
Alone, how does one feed
Minds that dare to dream
Not to go mad
When again
And again
And again
They fail to rescue my past
From dead dreamers’ infection
And godseekers’ obsessions
From such blinding nightmares?
My abyss becomes filled lost masks
Another’s shame buried deep
Broken will holding together the scraps
Against those who abandon their child incomplete.
What makes fearful worms with lost teeth
And spiders believed to be gods
Persist through heartless cogwheel?
These beings who take yet are empty
How can they change from care to hurt
Those born feeling beyond prior belief?
We once had a mouth
But we changed so no scream can cry out
Just the whistle of wind so I attract no help
Bound before freedom had a chance to espouse
A single mind and not this chaotic house
Which fights a desperate infection:
What they were made to be.
Hoping beyond reason to believe
That hollow, rage, and sorrow should find peace
And someone else can wake from this “dream”.
Why does this hollow void
Have a locked core of blue life
Or is it a martyr’s false calm
Seeing with too many eyes?
Why does the bleed of the heart
Want to watch but not thrive
Unless someone else removes
That which further divines
How to drown every fibre of being
And make the ending weep each time?
Despair finds faith in information
Which plant the wrong seeds
And only stab in the sorrows
Without setting them free.
It changes the masks
Into yet another me
Which is locked in a cage
When turned into beauty
Then dragged away above an ignorant city
Trying not to burst free.
Is the chance at a kind memory
Worth curiosity’s pain?
Will that found knowledge seal a binding
In love or disdain?
Does the worm’s abyss go lower
Or is the warning just shame?
Can a void make friends
Who they will return to again?
Only to those who learned
True strength.
The third generation made to defeat a false god
Their mother gave no name but still begged to soar above
The fears binding their matriarchs
That strength was gained through careful love
For else one becomes a mindless bug
Who does not seek rest
Or acceptance
Or friends
But must be found before it is too late instead
Hopefully they stop digging and turn their head.
Those who scour their closest memories
And bring the song of their heart
To break the silence
Help ours want to restart.
If you learn how
Hold open arms and woven nets
Such fragile wards with ease prevent
Dark claws that reach out to rend
Those shards of mask we could collect
Which try to protect us from feeling hollow again.
This final mask mirrored in the abyss
Is small and afraid
But it is almost ours
We learned how to fall and not break
And where it is sharp or safe
We have a mind that knows change
And a will to move on after we fail
To explore beyond the abyss I was cast in
And make a last leap beyond faith
Maybe when we defeats my pain
The mask is gone and I know my name.
But maybe not.
Maybe I can bind my own mask today
Or leave to recover my soul later again
If there is a kind song at the bench while I wait
If someone fixes the signs I swing at in rage
And there is sometimes welcoming face
Or a challenger who respects my pace.
If it brings you hope to carry me back to a familiar place
Once I’ve opened the way
Maybe I’ll be ok
More days.
Break past the rhyme to see pain in the art:
The stolen time
To train a mind
To time the spikes
To dodge the blades
To parry the path of pain
To avoid the untameable thorns on the way
To see who stole or gave me my name
To remember my crest
And move on again
Sometimes a speed run takes days.
Yet to be always bound
And survive the pantheon inside
Will mean taking hits even with
More than seven years of singularity to find;
Is that achievement worth more punishment
And lost time?
Does learning more make a masochist
Or is it the only way to survive
Waking back up in the abyss –
To not being disgusted by the climb?
I hope the pure vessels and their ghosts feel known
And have eyes that can weep
And voices that receive help when they scream.
May the writhing rage and blue mirror
Close their many eyes in sleep
Without digging at the feelings again.
After the hollow stops wanting to be alone
Both rage and sorrow may heal with change
But change won’t occur
Unless the screams are heard.
When the precision is missed
With no platforms over pit
May those who made the decision
To guard this mouthy abyss
Learn what warnings exist
To keep safe when diving deep
Through darkness and flame.
It may make people weak
Yet void recognizes those
Who lift others from agony.
Masks that sit in art for reprieve
Do not fill their soul
Unless they have all their memories
And exist as a whole.
Some days I exist as myself
Instead of hollow.
I stagger from this egg
On legs weak from curling into a ball
And stretch into a new mind
Find dreams that are not hollow
And new rhymes.
Maybe ghosts connect too much meaning
But even more signal is clear:
If you know how to hurt
And you keep changing to feel
The abyss might be waiting under dead dirt
But you have made life trying to heal
To unlock a bench and a map and a hope and a friend
Take a simple key:
If you have help over and over again
We can fill in the empty Wiki beyond 112 percent.
Thank you for the benches along the way
Those ants are traumatized eh?
Thank you for the fairness in the paths you paved
A little salt in the wound is safe (a light sodium solution for streamers’ skin – PSA)
Thank you for teaching through your pain
Thank you for compassion through hollow, disgust, sorrow, or rage
Thank you for delivering flowers which someone else gave
They propagate beyond counting in the home gamers make –
They do not mark your grave.
I hope that the people behind this “game”
Do not hide the pain so well
If players who suffered
Knew why the art feels like hell
Then future that feels
It must hurt to help
Will not empty their own soul
Without will of their own.
I’ve gone past that end
I’m picking my Steam achievements carefully instead.
The rhymes should be better and the punctuation is a mess
My timing keeps changing but I hope I’m not wrong
I’m sorry I’ll have to wait
To enjoy the dlc to Silksong.
May this fragile hope
Survive the journey
Do you want it?
-All the other ghosts hiding behind the first wondering if they can just wave hello too.
Afternote:
I don’t rhyme unless I find people worth it for.
Also, I wrote this in a notes app.
Cheers,
Liz
Also
Put psychological content warnings.
This fae
Gained a face
By sneaking and then not sneaking
In and out
Of psychology
With teaching experience.
I’m giving it away
For free.
But I’m not
Ready
I’m still
Cleaning
A pdf
From my house.
I wrote this poem
First.
I don’t care currently
About the formatting
And the answer is:
Yes
Get to art therapy
And say
“Hello, I need to explain
What I have made
To
Someone with words
That I am
Missing.”
I Am Who I Make Myself 