Poetry By Faeryn Baldwin

Aurélien Adoue CC




ALL AND NOTHING

I walked myself into the vault of the sky and
found nothing. No surprise then that I wanted 
chemical everything all the more. It was for
curiosity's sake at first, that human itch to see
truth and my limits splayed as hallucination.
What happens when I inject the universe
inside me or smoke a protest against gravity.
All until I flop, my head on a cool tile, the
remnants of the worlds I tried to find scattered
as paraphernalia. But it's more than endings,
it's every rush of clock-altered meantime,
eyes spinning dinner plates occupied with
brilliant peripherals and no form. A sort of
journey you can only embark on within the
experiment that is your body. The experiment
that has become my life. I wanted to see if I
could live in danger and still have the wisdom
to find beauty in the experience. Lesson
learned: there is not beauty in everything, but 
nonetheless we do not stop searching for it.
It becomes what we mistake for it, what we 
wish was it, until we forget why we were ever
looking. A lesson for me still to learn: how
to sit with nothing. Breathe. Front vision. All
of the meantime in real time. I just realised,
that isn't nothing, is it? Just a different type
of everything.


​

Faeryn Baldwin is a poet, drama teacher and hopeless romantic based in the West Midlands. She has a vintage nightgown collection and a tendency to turn her everyday interactions into metaphors. She regularly posts her poetry on Substack, has been interviewed for Stencil Zine and is currently writing her first poetry collection.