Miriam Joy > Quotes

“In the darkness and the snow, the street is empty
and it is just the night, the ice and me.”
― Miriam Joy, Crossroads Poetry

“But nobody writes fairy tales
about the ugly and poems
are not there for the broken
and I will never find myself
in the words of a hymn
nor will any whispered prayer
ever say my name
(which name, which me
am I looking for?)
because I am shouting
at a cross splintered into pieces
by my angry fists, and crying
at the stained glass falling
like killing rain around me.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“I want her sinful arms wrapped around me,
bloodied and angry and triumphant in shame.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“In my mind he is a demon and a god
and I blame him, I blame him, I blame him
for the world I created on my own
as much as the one he built around me.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“I want to feel them against my bare skin.
I want their colourful touch to burn itself into my body
and set my blood on fire with chemicals and fury,
to drag me from a place of retreat and smothered tears
into destruction and gloriously bright fire falling.”
― Miriam Joy, Crossroads Poetry

“I throw myself away so no one,
not even you, can have me.
Taste that on your lips, eat
the bitter fruit of my parting:
I am already too far away.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“Her eyes are like bruises, as though 2am
punches her in the face every time they meet
amid the faded glow of alarm-clock hands
and the crumpled sheets of a sleepless night.”
― Miriam Joy, Crossroads Poetry

“In July I think
about the idea of being cursed
(because it’s not strange to me;
when I look in mirrors I’m
not there, blank walls gleaming
with bloody condensation,
and my shadow behind me
mocking me with his persistence
when I keep telling him
to leave just to leave to let me be).”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“It’s voyeuristic the way you search
for answers in these cries for help,
and how you see Death’s fingers
but always think they’re paintbrushes.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“You have constellations
growing under your skin.
starlight in the blood spilled
when they stole your feathers”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“In May I keep count.
Two and a half more days of school;
five between exams.
Twenty thousand words of a novel
and four poems and six borrowed books.
More numbers to add to counting my pills
and trying to work out how to stay awake.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“There are, in places, fallen angels
who in their iniquity and desolation
linger like a stranger on a foggy night,
sustained by the misdeeds of city-dwellers
and spurred on by bitter hatred
for their bright kin moving past them.”
― Miriam Joy, Crossroads Poetry

“I cut off all my hair, cut away
at the soft curves of my clothing
until I have edges once again,
using my body like broken glass
to slice at the world around me.

I have to take something back,
because I have nothing more to give.

Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“And then, as I got older,
I left the woods and looked
at fading stars, dying stars,
eternal stars in their heavens,
with lips that would kiss and words
shaped through love songs,
a life of journeys to some place
far from home, unfamiliar,
(a wild weird western shore)
until sunset across limestone
prompts us to make these,
our plagiarised prayers
to broken stone.”
― Miriam Joy, Fleeting Ink

“I walk with my lady reaper
to visit Love
whose letters char and turn black
and drop as ashes
to join the cast-down bunch
of flowered kissing stems.”
― Miriam Joy, Crossroads Poetry

“They are black heart’s blood on white pure lips;
Oscillation of lines formed of your images;
Emotion pinned in place by the words you use:
Shattered into paper, glass on wood – and blood.

Blood ink in the pen of a heart that cannot speak,
Bound to another by these words I begged from you.
Now held like shallow treasure in my hands.
Hide this knot of indecision, in my eyes, my lips.”
― Miriam Joy, Fleeting Ink

“Some people unfold into a thousand words
and others never speak to me at all,
never take the blame at all,
never look at me at all – I wonder why
he never looks at me at all (perhaps
he cannot bear to meet my eyes).”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“Words do not come back to me easily,
so I pull out my heart and wrap it
in a thin sheet of paper, let the blood
seep across in stanzas of honesty
and hand it to anyone who will take it
so that the still-beating heart can tell them
all my secrets, all my weaknesses,
because if they are not hidden
they cannot be taken and used against me.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“I am still trying and trying to exorcise you
but you cling to me like mud or bloodstains,
like a battlefield fought in my imagination
every day that I raise my pen against the sword
you used to slice my heart into small, bitter pieces.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“When I wake from my nightmares
I’m more afraid of the breath in my lungs
than whatever might be chasing me.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“I cannot love my neighbour as myself
because you bid me do him no harm,
and I cannot love my enemies
because they keep crawling inside me
and tearing out all my emotions:
if I am made in your image then you
are not somebody I want to see
because why believe in the broken,
why depend on the weak,
why seek the lost and bewildered
whose only answer is “please”?”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“I felt happier yesterday.
I do not feel happy today – I feel
abandoned and godless and broken
in a church built for the damned
with artificial light through stained glass
and warped wooden doors.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“But you are a god here in brokenness,
a bloody Eden born at your feet.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart

“maybe you dismiss me as a nightmare
as I dismiss myself as broken, falling
into a thousand pieces that I gather up
and try in vain to fit together, but
I have no skin, I have no skin.”
― Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart