Buttered Toast
on strange luck
I told myself I’d never use the word butterfly in a poem because of clichés or whatever but here I am, writing butterfly butterfly butterfly they say if you say a word quickly enough and so many times on repeat it eventually stops meaning anything if it ever did at all and so butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly butterfly until it’s just butter and fly and maybe not even that a butterfly can live and die without ever an eye around to see it doesn’t that just butter your toast? fly your fountain red into a bird’s throat and unthink yourself ordinary because today you might just be the sole witness to the living.
Thanks for being.
© p.ryan
this was beautiful! ❤️
Hello, Ryan. Your poem reads like someone thinking out loud, letting a single word crumble in their hands until it becomes something else entirely. There’s a quiet honesty in her admission that “butterfly” felt too cliché, and an even greater honesty in the way she gives in to it anyway. As the word repeats, it loses its shape, its meaning, almost its innocence — and that small collapse feels strangely familiar, like watching a thought dissolve when we stare at it for too long.
What lingers, though, is the idea that a butterfly can live and die without anyone noticing. There’s something both tender and unsettling in that. It reminds us how much of life happens beyond our gaze, how much beauty and strangeness unfold without witness. And then the poem turns, almost imperceptibly, into something more visceral, more alive.
By the end, Ryan leaves us with a quiet, humbling thought: that simply being present, simply noticing, is a kind of miracle. That today, without realising it, we might be the only ones who saw something living, fleeting, and real.