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zeroi swore
i would never number the poems
i wrote about myself because that
would be like ticking off the days
until my breakdown;

i was a moth, unapologetically throwing myself
at any gleam of hope; wasting my wings
on industrial promises

colors always felt much more
appropriate for the purple boiling
beneath my heart and the pallid
purposelessness of my head,

but i was born into a colorless world--

no one sees me behind the metallic scars
of my skin and iron grating of my voice against
the grain; no one sees me as more than
gray regret or monochrome mistakes,
no one sees me but

all i ever wanted was for a
fallen god with feathered he
Lovebirds' Sorrowshe was the girl with cat
eyes: broad and judging and
carnal; he was the doe
with a broken collarbone,
yet she found herself lost in
the warmth of his sighs and
asked simply for a set
of sweeter lies

[because it's only after you
sell yourself to the earth that
you learn love is not a
chemical reaction anticipating
every ignited glance and soured
word; no, it is a thing
of obligation that sleeps upon
your doorstep, knowing you
will always come back,
knowing you could never forget
its name]

he called to her on hollow
nights, and she found his
voice when she had nowhere
left to go

he was the cereal box savior;
she only needed a place
to bur
Progressionshe fell to the earth in a stream of shrapnel
and stardust in holy proportions; born
of silence and unfulfillment, tumulting
through that narrow area between
expectations and reality where
the pink glaze marred her romantic,

(blurry: a photograph held by careless hands;
a memory outdated and forgotten
and beautiful, once, before
the future fell in pace)

she landed with a deafening crack--
ribcage split and spilling secrets,
gasping for air beneath the surface of a pond
so stagnant that even the lilies withered away:
bubbles rose slowly (she began the process
of forgetting to breathe)

and she was not made for
our atmosphere; the air po
Pestilenceall of God’s children sleep
together and count the falling sheep,
stars nestled in their eyes as they
prey upon the crumbling walls;
God loves all his children and I am
the orphan with an asphalt blanket;
clouds scorn me and I mourn
their wasted hatred

(my eyes, my broken plastic
looking glasses; my hands,
termite ridden and frost bitten;
my heart, worm holed and
seeking absolvance)

what’s there behind these echoed
words? divisions of another  from
a better time, I have begun to live
and lie with no consequence

because that little toxic feeling
floating in my chest likes to
poison everyone I’ve ever met,
and I&rsqu
scraps and sacramentsyou,
beautiful siren girl with melodies
entangled in her hair: you are
shell-shocked and sea-struck
even though you cannot stand
the sensation of sand beneath
your toes.

you have fingers for prying, picking,
pulling at your skin and nesting
in that hollow space between
your bones. and if anyone asks,
you will swear there are monsters
sleeping in the concaves of your ribs;
there are ghosts beneath your tongue,
embittered, and you are not the words
you speak.

they say there is an answer, little girl
(sometimes you begin to believe you are
a scarecrow on the border of reality
begging people to turn the other way;
and the mirror will agree)
In Piecesrum-lust lips make gentle friends,
words slurred in hands blurred,
burning in between the lines to find
some
drunken concoction of wilted laughs
and heavy sighs, scented sultry
with desperation.

you are that
rasping in my throat when my voice
deteriorates and I am left breathless
and hopeless and raw, my
muscles ache in memory of the
motions to forget-
we do not let go.

and cold beds call, stability,
metal frames and sunken heads –
rest now, rest with
a prayer on your lips you don't
care to share, a dream in
your mind you'll never get back;
rest and the earth will lend you peace
and

you will stop. the rivers will cle
caring for p(o)etsscribbling down vicious verses on
tissue napkins while seated at
the corner of a sidewalk cafe is
about as romantic, raw and
honest a p(o)et
  -outside of the four corners of your bedpost-
can get

if you've got that person dreading over
drafts and dreams on end
  -of you, for you-
consider yourself a new owner
it is now time to
tame this p(o)et's perverse mane
you've got your hands on
a fragile purebred
which can be very tricky for
first timers
expired warningsI hate to break it to you but we're all betting on the day when
your nightmares will swallow you whole and you won't
remember how to open your eyes. we forget your voice,
it broke and no one buried the pieces. we're giving you up:
secessions (your ribcage is a civil war, your heart is the victim.
there will be no memorial; there are only red flags)
obsessions pick your bones dry, vulture needs, vulgar
mortality argues at least you're not alive

at least you can't see us anymore, counting the knots
in your neck and catastrophes in your mouth. in
your summer cage you were a soggy butterfly bearing
a cumbersome cross. now, we leave yo
Storybook AddictionsI want you to love me as much as you do
the thorns in your side; seeds planted and
forgotten and bleeding cyclically.
when the swallowed night drowns and
drains darkness like a trickled lullaby, I want
to be the last thing in your dreams.

I want to be your mistake East of Eden, your lack
of redemption; when they tear apart your paper
flesh with metal claws, I want to be the one you
come crawling back to with bloodied knees.

[right now I am an empty vessel, unfulfilled
and metaphorically obsolete. I want to clear
my throat for once, without seeing the ashes
of my disease.]

I want to love you like a swansong;
breezes make your bones ach
the leper and the lambbaby boy grew up and
the thorns left his crown;
his sides cry red,

it scares me to hear the
same stories in his sighs.

he is the kind of poetic violent whose
words are like calculated anvils; he
dissipates between my bones and

my heart will burst, I swear it. I am
afraid of balloons and the imminent
explosion of my delicate monstrosity
rising through my throat and suffocating--
but it’s really beautiful

when he turns over and rubs the galaxies
congested within his eyes. I believe in
shooting stars and intoxicated nights and the
prickled promises intertwined between our
fingers, as I miscalculate how fragile I really am

it&rsquo
What's That in Your Heart?months later and I'm still pulling pieces of you from my wounds;
memories are salt and you were the ocean that never dried out.
selfishness is the wear of the weary – I wonder, now, how much life
can you steal from a ghost?

my stomach still sinks, I've swallowed too many words. you were
the anchor that allowed me to drown. you were the siren that never
sounded sweet. when the noxious night comes I don't know who's in
the mirror (or what hollowed eyes mean.) am I the one or the nothing
that died out?

I tried so hard, I tried so hard to lose my shadow and forget myself
somewhere dark. I'm trapped between hell and a hard place,
try
Almost Perfectthe sun is melting away,
we call it romantic when
all good things die quietly;

I feel like I’m always transitioning
through different levels of sobriety:
spent up on the people in my life
like the girl who doesn’t remember
my name and the boy who thought
I was joking.

(I will care for myself, and
then the world will stop and
spin in the right direction;
the mirror will blur and
I will finally see me,
unfiltered and beautiful)

I just want to believe
that somewhere there’s a boy
ready to sing my bleeding ears
to sleep

with a cinnamon voice, he
will tell me I couldn’t
possibly be human:  something
otherworldly,
embeddeda sunset blister[pops] overhead, dripping
security. she kisses her lover and leaves
with splinters in lips. there are moments
when she swears she can hear a breath
rattling somewhere within his
reciprocating chest
she swears in vain

and sometimes it's like they recycled
an old day, it fits the same and that
is an alarming halt to progression-
she says, we have to move on

but she doesn't ever leave, feet buried
under years of promises and plans and
anxieties. she's had a bird cage by her bed
since she was a little girl (begging wounded
blue jays to escape)

the day won't break, he watches
her sleep uneasily, respiring
like
Epilogues like EpitaphsOnce upon a vapid day in
a town full of glazed-eyed murmurs
ultimately amounting to nothing, she
met a boy who said he'd calculated the
probabilities of wishes and knew what it felt like
to breathe a dream. He told her he'd write
her the world, he'd tell of the promises the
oceans kept and the way the stars never
quite compared to her eyes

but he lied.
And she figured love fancied
narcissism the same way she believed herself
deliquescent. (because we're always looking
for the prettiest ways to say we're
dying inside.)

Then on a broken night that tasted of
lucid intoxication and blind reminiscing,
she met a boy built of big words
whose h
crystal catastrophies bottled upv
her shaky hands couldn't hold a pen
or a promise
"my fingers have broken
trying to rewrite clichés-
believe me when I say, I'm special"
hollow laughs glossed over her
tempered smile

as she waited for the day
when that might actually mean
something

i
there was an eve long before dawn
ever tainted the starry night sky and
inflicted vision on those who preferred
to stay in the dark, where a girl
crooned quietly to herself
"what if when we meet,
I've run out of I love you's?"

this was before the sun whispered in her ears
that they'd never mattered, anyway

iv
hopelessness descends
on wearied souls
who couldn't lear
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More from ~intricately-ordinary

thresholddivided dreams stand,
carelessly unarticulated and
lacking purpose in this season
of waiting

where summergirl buries
her mistakes under
untouched snow and leaves
like the dessicated trees:

I'm waiting to be the all-
consuming narcissist I can
feel boiling up inside of me,
I want for once to lay guilt
to rest and lose myself in
the underside of a rainbow
and

I'm just waiting to leave;
somewhere transcending reality
where walking on eggshells
won't feel so mundane

and I won't be cold, like
the bones I sold to a
stormy night a few fairytales ago.
Almost Perfectthe sun is melting away,
we call it romantic when
all good things die quietly;

I feel like I’m always transitioning
through different levels of sobriety:
spent up on the people in my life
like the girl who doesn’t remember
my name and the boy who thought
I was joking.

(I will care for myself, and
then the world will stop and
spin in the right direction;
the mirror will blur and
I will finally see me,
unfiltered and beautiful)

I just want to believe
that somewhere there’s a boy
ready to sing my bleeding ears
to sleep

with a cinnamon voice, he
will tell me I couldn’t
possibly be human:  something
otherworldly,
CountedI am a number.
twenty times I broke, fourteen times I lied, six pieces of my heart lent
goodbye, two times I didn't want to make it, one failure          
and            countless           broken things;
infinite words abandoned trembling and lonely and cold.

I'm so cold and it's spring and the ground is alive to make up
for the mistakes I bury; the cherry blossoms are wilting
black, drooping so low to the ground that it is a blanket
as far as the eye can see:
fallen flowers die like starsick soldiers, begging please, oh,
please    take    me    home  so

I can leave on my own threshold and kiss the walls of
my own making and see my wife
zeroi swore
i would never number the poems
i wrote about myself because that
would be like ticking off the days
until my breakdown;

i was a moth, unapologetically throwing myself
at any gleam of hope; wasting my wings
on industrial promises

colors always felt much more
appropriate for the purple boiling
beneath my heart and the pallid
purposelessness of my head,

but i was born into a colorless world--

no one sees me behind the metallic scars
of my skin and iron grating of my voice against
the grain; no one sees me as more than
gray regret or monochrome mistakes,
no one sees me but

all i ever wanted was for a
fallen god with feathered he
Progressionshe fell to the earth in a stream of shrapnel
and stardust in holy proportions; born
of silence and unfulfillment, tumulting
through that narrow area between
expectations and reality where
the pink glaze marred her romantic,

(blurry: a photograph held by careless hands;
a memory outdated and forgotten
and beautiful, once, before
the future fell in pace)

she landed with a deafening crack--
ribcage split and spilling secrets,
gasping for air beneath the surface of a pond
so stagnant that even the lilies withered away:
bubbles rose slowly (she began the process
of forgetting to breathe)

and she was not made for
our atmosphere; the air po
Subliminalthere was something about the way his whispers
entwined around the vertebrae of her neck
and caught in her ragged throat
that was reminiscent of nights long ago:

a heavy sky incensed with fears
forgotten, and a boy with full moon
eyes. she blamed her starry stomach
when she gagged on innards, unaware that
she herself was actually

undigestible.
stale and forgotten,
lingering like a smoke cloud off the lips
of someone with nothing better to say.

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[x]

I am the wayward child

:iconintricately-ordinary:

I wish I had something more to offer
when your joints ached and your bones creaked
and you wept dust; (the cobwebs around
your tongue were a comfort once)

but I am three times screwed
over backwards and turned right around,
breathing in gravel and praying on
the only consistencies I know like
on Sun-day we are in the house of God
and it won’t rain and dad won’t speak
and mom will sit with pursed lips counting
all the times we didn’t kiss her goodbye
and everyone will call it normal,

everyone will look at the way I write words
on cracked pavement and get glassy-eyed
when they speak softly and forget the sound
of my own voice when I’m afraid; all those times I
tripped over my own feet and walked away
with wounded knees, and they will call me normal.

I’m at it again, building barricades
from ashes and calling them friends
(this here is fear, he visits me nightly;
and that stale stain in the corner
is actually anxiety, recuperating
from the moment it caught a glimpse of itself)

If I squint sideways, things begin to look straight. past
becomes an honest mistake and North is no longer
buried below a murky sea;

but I forget that, and fall back to
the sapphire saturation of your voice,
color of confusion, coaxing--
    drowning me
         (I choke and die in two inches
              of misguidance,  baptized in
                     defeat)
:iconintricately-ordinary:
This is abnormal, but I am too.

Trying something new.
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:iconwinterkate:
Critique by ~winterkate Mar 2, 2013, 6:09:20 PM
Wow. First off, wow. I love the way you describe things especially much in this piece - how you personify anxiety and perfectly capture things that are 'normal'. They are relatable and brilliant at the same time. The parentheses and line breaks work well in this poem. The emotions are amazing and the clarity, the clarity is golden. The only part that I'm sketchy about in this work is the end. I feel like that one last verse almost invalidates the first ones. I don't think you could end it at the second-to-last verse, I get that, but...I don't know. It seems that you present this poem as such the work of someone in recovery and acceptance, and then there's this unforeshadowed relapse that invalidates a lot of what you've talked about. I feel like if you want to keep that, you should expand on it further.
What do you think?
Fair Unfair
The Artist thought this was FAIR
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:iconperfling:
*Perfling Feb 27, 2013  Student General Artist
Beautiful :)
Reply
:iconintricately-ordinary:
~intricately-ordinary Feb 27, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
thank you so much :love:
Reply
:iconperfling:
*Perfling Feb 27, 2013  Student General Artist
You're quite welcome :)
Reply
:icon0hgravity:
*0hgravity Feb 15, 2013  Hobbyist General Artist
you've been featured here: [link]

:thumbsup:
Reply
:iconintricately-ordinary:
~intricately-ordinary Feb 16, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
:love:
Reply
:icondisrhythmic:
*disrhythmic Feb 10, 2013
I love the sort of breathless pace of this, and "the sapphire saturation of your voice" is just... gah. :love:
Reply
:iconintricately-ordinary:
~intricately-ordinary Feb 10, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
You're so lovely :love: thank you!
Reply
:iconmozartsnemesis:
Mood: Wow! ~MozartsNemesis Feb 6, 2013
Oh. hot. damn.

This is perfect...I want to sit here and read it for the next hour. I love the up-tempo rhythm. ( at least, when I read it in my head, it seemed quick.)

so many awesome lines, I cant choose from among them. The ending is wonderful as always, the second and fourth stanzas are brilliant.

"If I squint sideways, things begin to look straight. past
becomes an honest mistake and North is no longer
buried below a murky sea;"

I love the concept there. All in all.. outstanding. 124343455342345 stars. :)
Reply
:iconintricately-ordinary:
~intricately-ordinary Feb 6, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
I'd hoped it would be like that, fast-paced and quick. As always, thank you so much for your kind words :heart: This is such a lovely comment. I'm honored to know you enjoyed it.

Thank you!
Reply
:iconcontradictory55:
~Contradictory55 Feb 5, 2013  Student Writer
Normality, frankly, never seems to exist because to every person it is differently defined.

It feels like I should be holding back tears, because I'm still standing strong. That's the sort of feeling I get ^^;
Reply
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