[x]

RestlessI’ve been living in the same breathy dream
for too many days now; I’m bed-ridden and
stale and I reek of those moments that come
full throttle like a car crash on a winter night

   this is evolution where weak hearts
   are afraid of the shadows and where
   everything changes,
   an apologetic wind births no remorse;
   he will move on—anchored ship
   set sail, I am the sunken wreckage
   that never learned how to swim.
   he will move on, Darwin says
   I never had a chance

I wish I were the textbook sadness,
symptom and solution and endurance
but I’ve spent too long sleeping on the

summergirlNow read aloud over here. Do give it a listen, won't you?
i. summergirl,
you are crowthroated and tumbling
through the aspen grove
hair on fire with sunrise, lungs
full of sky.
eyelashes like wildflowers
and every morning brings
a new spray of freckles
and a sharper curve to your collarbones.
the cornfields hold no shadows
for your lighthouse eyes
and there are no endings in that
surefooted smile.
ii. you have grown
so fast.
autumn finds you with broken ankles
leaning on an oak branch
and watching the skies.
crow to sparrow--you are quiet.
summergirl, there is peace in silence,
perched treetop,
fallen antlers in your hands.
you will come to mourn your deer.
keep them close.
iii. by winter you have paled,
and like the streams
your eyes have frosted over.
you feel the chill--
there is no need for sight.
summergirl, th

AffannatoIf my ribs were weighted keys,
I'd play you an ocean song that tips you
right off the edge of the earth,
and clinging to my last phrase, you'd say
'what a tragedy, what a helpless dreamer,
such a beautiful pair of lungs gone to the dust'.

And night would hold us in that distant desperation,
playing our heartstrings so we couldn't keep up,
no, not with that soulful, off-tempo portrait
of who we could have let each other become.

I'll crawl back to bed on my bare boned knees
and when I wake to the black holes you've burned
into the sheets you and I were 'us' on,
I'll write you a desert song
about how I jumped off the edge of the earth
and yo

Cookerymy blender does not understand
smoothies
"Accept My Gift of Pineapple
Thou Foul Beast!"
this is a blood sacrifice
and she is sadly unreceptive

I begin the main course
I have cupboards full of words
See-Jane-Runs
quick brown foxes
I have half a mind (no, three-fourths of a mind)
to sauté them
into
the golden eggs
more difficult to crack
than I had thought they would be
(forge? My stove doesn't get
hot enough,
I think)

I will spice the adjectives with
madness
I will verb these nouns
throw in a voodoo doll or
tulips! Two! Lips!
Crack open a maraca
and sell you some rhythm

Oh you will love this
you will devour th

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

lipstick-stained collars the one-of-a-kind
look you shoot
has been duplicated
far too many
times to count.

your eyes must
be made of glass,
the way they
wander so freely
in your sockets.

it's unimaginable
to think that those
callouses on your palms
are the result of work,
instead of your infidelity.

the sickening
scent of your
scandalous second-life
has stained
our love.

it's ridiculous
to expect honesty
from a snake,
or forgiveness
from a shrew.

starry eyes implodeshe cannot recall all
the things she's
swallowed:
pretty pills, rancid
razor blades and
wasted words coat
her sorry throat

she can't count her
fingers, like she can't
count the days again--
it's zero to zero, in it
to spin it:
time is measured in
lengths of abandonment.

she comes home empty-
handed; defeated,
depleted, repeated:
"I gave up again
I gave up I gave it
away I gave up"
repeated like some
makeshift lullaby

and once more she
apologizes to a
broken window,
shattered, scattered,
just hoping to
know somewhere
better to go

and when she walks,
she holds hands
with the yellowed
skeleton of a
forgo

tense intentionsiv.
you lurk behind my sternum and
lace my uneasy breaths with
doubt and self-deprecation, I

can't breathe. I
guess I didn't need to sleep.

ii.
I am smudged in between the lies,
an asymmetric astrology chart
mapping misguided dreams

when you make a wish on me,
I sell away another piece

(I wish I were my own)

v.
it was always me, it was always
the blood clotting in my heart
and words coagulating on my
tongue – I swallow cyanide to
vomit up my narcissistic tendencies

iii.
it was nothing that ever mattered
when the dust settled and you
could finally remember my name

(and you settled down into my bones
deciding I was

AcquittalWon't you leave me? I will love you
more than if you stay, transfixed

to the point of reference, our bodies
melding a sad, soft sublime, the back

spine of a little universe blown out
like a crafter's hot glass, the growing

moment, the wonder, the expansion
before a chill.

InfernoSeptember is a sultry tangle
of curly hair and corduroy jackets stretched
over broad shoulders that I've been leaning on,
metaphorically.

He won't press for answers
and I won't trouble him with my problems.
So he complains about the weather –
he's never gotten used to these sticky, southern delta summers –
while I hold the door
and press the call button.

The half-lit elevator drops us off above Dante's first layer.
I feel sorry for anyone beneath,
but I've indulgences to buy
and my own hell to return to.

But there's a light in my pocket –
abandon not all hope,
and

smile.

in lieu, lamentwe speak of tragedy, forgetting
we raise the dead with the simple fragility
of our dismantled threnody-
concord our ears to meet the soiled ground
in hopes to hear the stirring strangeness of maternity
brought back to cradling earth, bound.

blue and gold are not just colorsshe had been blue-sighted
since
dawn cracked her forehead.
it was the dress she wore on his funeral
the color of her school flag
the shine in her father's eyes;
she waited in blue and gold.

no, she refused to set a bar
because
life didn't just come to her.
she earned her place
in her mother's womb
when each blood vessel questioned her
each nerve ending, if she could live
and each antibody, if she was worth it.

see, she doesn't need new dresses.
she has a memory
for each of hers in her locked closet.
she may not wear all of them
(and most she cringes at the sight of)
but her heart
jumps enough
every time bits of her old

a lover's observations.when you asked me to define love,
i answered with this.

love is
i. a collection of sighs
strung together
by remembered dreams
and rapid heartbeats

ii. fingertips on knuckles
and the hugging of thumbs

iii. making silverware
on the mattress
in the company of the stars

iv. exchanging dialogue
with our mouths shut
and our eyes open

v. cheekbones and crow's feet

vi. turning every what if
into a reality
when i asked you to describe love,
you took the answer from my mouth
with your lips.

Primevaland I don't smoke, but all my poems talk
of cigarettes and ashes because my father smoked
for forty years and now he can't breathe

and I can't breathe.

the chill from the rain seeps through the glass panes
and feels swollen in the loneliness of a crowded train;
the air is pregnant with an umbilical thread
connecting us to something intangible,
something necessary to our being

yet we don't exist at all.

smoke and vapor crawling out our mouths;
we talk because the silence is sometimes frightening,
and because we're searching the dust visible only
in the places where light bends for words that won't disappear

ScribblesAnd he hated the way her portrait was painted
on the walls of his mind

so the thoughts would come and go
like little men with suitcases,
rushing through in the flurry of ideas,
in the death and birth of a dream, but they

would always
pass by her picture.

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More from ~intricately-ordinary

Undedicatedi
I wrote you a poem.

skeleton smile-- moonbeams
drip from your unharnessed
habilitations; you speak and
ravens tear through your throat
(I will be there) you are
a catalyst whose ghost eyes
died for a better day

ii
unaware promise bearer, take
me away. as you live these
beautiful vanities, take me
away

somewhere refined and romantic
like the lies you languish, where
a heavy heart weighs up to
something nice

iii
primed and pruned, I am
a seedling: an exaltation to
all that is you

we both cry the same kind
of quiet, and whisper the same brand
of please-don’t-listen-close; I
just want to leave before I break
when you [do it firs

(D)elusivesometimes I begin to believe I am not real
and the obligations of the world
are too many to swallow,

when they drop me, I will go (but
please don’t count upon the feathers
bleeding through my back, halos
hang like a noose, I

am a single dawn: do not
count on me to raise again
it wears me out, gossamer
thin and glistening as they wait
for something to explode)

in a month, I will not remember
my name. I will have shed my skin
someplace south of the border and cold,
ice cold where the air is stale
and barely alive; in a month

I will be unable to look back.

but now, these floorboards creak
under the assumption of forgotte

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

Aroseuncompromising; when the tide
comes to take me home,
I won’t say no.

I am the dying rose whose
thorns never helped

(breathe life into me, breathe in
these demons I breed so dearly
and feel the spirit of the bottom
pulse through you)

I was stronger before I slept,
paranoia ate away my bones [I am]
compromised: laying down before
a bleeding night and begging for
the savior to glow before he goes,

(I swear sometimes I get lost in the blur of the moment; falling fast to this dance of ill intentions and
when you look me in the eye I really believe that you see something bigger than us; you promise
the stars and look like the moon, open

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,

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Where Items of Peace are Weapons

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Revenant

by ~intricately-ordinary, Jan 15, 2013, 10:25:14 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

they came like phantoms;

oceanic whispers left me washed out.
those gossamer ghosts that lined
the doorways-- eyes in a constant
state of surprise as they reached for me:

needle fingers pricked, fueling
my addictions. they ached
for my veins, entangled like
the strings of my paper heart

and they stained my skin,
amethyst bruises in the shape
of recognition.

their breaths were the heavy hums
of a forgotten lullaby "one day you
will leave, and you will fade into a
virulent void, like us. you will warm
our icy bones, and we will love you,
like no one else can.

go back to sleep, little girl, we will
come again" with their cerulean
secrets painted on my arms,
they became the empty walls.

I wake up alone, and silence
falls. I only hear the echo of
my hungering heart.

Revenantby ~intricately-ordinary

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

"Just woke up with another fear."

This poem was mostly an excuse for me to do this reading.
_{warning: silly poetic rambles accompany link clicking. danger ahead}