[x]

Poets Always Lieambrosial fabrications are
easier to swallow down when
incandescence is a blessing bestowed
only upon those with silky tongues.

deceptions are beautiful
in the right words

because they are salvation, like a
rapture, they save the sickly,
self-indulgent souls from those
tragedies they used to write on the insides
of childhood notebooks about who
they could never be [themselves]

they rescue them from tremulous
corners and closets, hideaways
where they've grown too akin to
the demons they nurse; and drag
them into a land beautiful enough
to wear light as a second skin

(where lies are never discussed
but always shared)

cl

Fervid AwakeningThere's a fire beneath my feet,
but not the kind that burns
mountains and ruins girls
made of papier-mâché—no,

these are the sparks that
drive the insane to dance in
the rain; the flames that
gave birth to a million voices
itching to be heard, too.

It's spreading, settling, somewhere deep
beneath my sternum, like an anticipatory
story, waiting to be told, giving
my heart the ardor to beat.
-
No one ever says happiness
is like a butterfly: beautiful,
flighty, and fleeting.

If you let it slip through your
fingers—you are left
alone, palms full of feathery dust
which soon fades and leads to the scary

appropriately appallingi
the flies are in the food, again.
festering, feeding- because i sewed
shut my lips when you warned me
they were a gaping wound.

silence is the best kind of infection;
you can't know what's kept inside

ii
i carry little girl dreams
of dying and coming back
diseased, depraved, an atrocity;
at least then I'd be something
worth writing home about

i deserve more than what
i am- i am selfish and
greedy, but not strong
enough
to steal a life worth living

(look at me now, mom
i'm growing into the
ugly thoughts i birthed.
i think this is what it must feel like
to finally follow through)

iii
there are things you never say:

Staying for the Seasonyou were born
of a broken cradle
where no one taught you
how to breathe

you need the stars
like nourishment, but
they just don't feel
the same

you live like a heart attack,
an insufferable shuddering,
a socially aware illness without
the will to pull through

it's a sad truth when we
look up in the mirror, and
only see ourselves-

but it's okay.
write it on the walls, it's
okay, you just need a
little more sleep.

(wake up. it's nearly
December and you're
already dead.)

Deliverancean angel drifts at the edge of the sky
with dwindling wings, she murmurs 'genesis'
and extends her fingers to try
and catch the pieces of a broken world

"sometimes we just need to burn
to have a way to light up the night"

the ground collapses upwards, and the
clouds come tumbling down-- the stars
awake and smile, they set fire to
desiccate all blinded faith

the masses watch on; glazed eyes,
broken spines, excised tongues-- they
are seduced by the twinkling lights

"destruction breeds beauty and
it seems to go both ways"

as the day decays, their time shatters
until those knuckle-dragging fools
find broken moment shrapnel
dee

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

Spotlessone day you'll fly a little too close to the sun
and you'll remember the boy who told you
gas station trinkets were worth more than
the heart you wore on your sleeve.

disillusionment will take you home, and
it will not leave your bed in the morning.
(you will remember he called you loose, too.)

you are the one who believes in smoke
smiles and candid cadavers. no ones'
nose grows, so everyone must be
undeniably true (except

you lie to yourself, too)

a few lifetimes ago you fell in love
with your own reflection, but as you
stripped away layers of common mis-
conceptions, you realized you are not

virtuous and radiant and hung o

Sleeping Souls Never Liethey buried you
with stars in your palms, because
they thought it was a crime
you'd never made a wish in your life

the dirt and darkness
was enough to extinguish
their dying lights

(it's okay, your silent skin
said, softly, I always wanted
the sky to bring me to sleep)

the priest begged, believing you
might rise from the hole
you'd dug for yourself

he wanted to let you know
there was something bigger than all of us,
someplace farther than 6 feet under

(I'm alright, your stony eyes
swore, sometimes falling
feels enough like flying)

their voices all filled with tears
even though you said you weren't worth
their worries, the

Nostalgiashe fell in love with the sound of
dying storms, and lost herself in
the blind spots accompanying her
every furtive glance

her downturned spine labeled her:
pitiful,
and her relentless divulging to
overcast skies defined her as
needy; but still she offered the
seeds of her pomegranate heart
to anyone willing to settle down
inside the breeze

and she was abandoned, long ago,
(once upon a time, no one cried)
by wolves with insipid fangs
and human eyes (her glittery irises
never quite belonged)
they discarded her when she asked if
self-delusions were a state of mind

and
she is poorly veiled, so see-through under
our cracke

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

and He believedalong the road to change, you decide:
you lack a heart. your voice will
tear the world asunder. you
wreak havoc on the unassuming,
because you stopped trusting in
institutional stability the day
God poured over you.

He cleansed you in his tears, He said
He built you strong- it was
an obligation with weighted
requirements. He drove nails into
your flesh to test your faith,
you were pained and you were
perfect.

you were a prize, a person to
swallow lechery and lead our world
into redemption; you would tempt us
from our questions why

everyone needs a Hero
(but who do you have?)

-

I cared about you, once, when
you were unb

catch a falling star, put in your pocketthere's something about those little broken
dreamer girls with misproportionate promises
and lingering whispers,
who walk like angels, lost, and trying
to find a way back home;
whose hearts bleed abnormally loud
and resonant- those girls with
shadows like ghosts [dead and haunting],
that make them a flavor
to taint your tongue.

if you listen close, you can hear the
unraveling words that once knit the hollow space
between their bones,
you can hear their shallow sighs like
sun sets for a final time.
you can hear their ticking time bomb lungs

and you can touch their secrets, because they
wear them on their skin. not like wounds

The FallingThe Falling

Upon malodorous rapture of orphaned darkness,
eternal melancholy becomes twisted and hollow
In the severed reflections of sanguine shadows,
we will drown in ruby tears of pain and sorrow

Whispers of odium seep gently into my dreams...
The Raven lingers in solemn clouds dark as coal
My blood surges like a chorus of bitter requiem
And my lips — the anathema of your dying soul

Dark lust hums like a cold tide of weeping voices
Perfumed in ash & bone, hallucinations imbue —
Blood soaked robes hang from my slender bride,
shimmering like scarlet threads under ebon skies
After sable petals fall upon my beloved's gra

Silence Never Suited Youliving in the dark
won't let you go blind

there's more to life than getting through

they say
there's a reason, somewhere
deep beneath the [depression,
deceit, doubt, dissonance, despair,
devastation and] dying
time-- piling up like unwanted
wreckage in waves, wasting
away at your feet

believe there's a reason, somewhere,
that was written just for you

try, it's so close to succeeding,
to remember the day
when death was something
less than a comfort
when a smile was something simple

life can't be choked down, those
thoughts weren't meant to be swallowed

you're so desperate not to be heard
quiet is a disguise for those
a

diluted evanescencebreezes are fickle things, you said
when your eyes were somewhere far away

the wind danced in the narrow expanse
of all our waning hopes and desires,
and something about the way the air grew static
made me remember a time when
inexperience was still a virtue.

sparks go out, you said
as the discord dimmed
(glossy eyes weren't always
made of glass, but they became
along the line of desperation)

I truly believed the world pulsed somewhere
in the cadence of your voice,
because in your breath- earthquakes would
break and oceans would crash and I always
came up short.

we're living a borrowed life, you said
but no one ever taught u

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More from *intricately-ordinary

The Art of Detachmentdehumanized:
I am a stirring in the breath
of an unswept sky, an itch
in the throat, a tear in
the lining of the sleeve you
keep fingering- like reminiscence
will repair loose strands

(I woke up this morning
in a new carcass, trapped,
by fleshed out flaws and
dismal dreams and the
hush hush thrum ,steady,
[pulsations are riddled with
intent] of my veins)

I am the dents in the floorboard
where boxes of I-can-never-forgets
lay, I am the aching cold of walls
untouched, I am the callouses
of your fingers forgetting
how to work.

(my voice will melt the icecaps,
it will draw all salt from
the ocean and carve a careful
coffin

Scratcheswe're dancing in that narrow expanse where the only sound
is the contraction of a writhing unwilling heart;
we're finding our way back to the surface through
layers like paper ceilings and puppet strings

and we're tied out by our own shortcomings- snaked
like a noose, fangs nip at our heels and

we've lost control, and we've lost direction
and we've lost ourselves in the people that mean
nothing. we curl up like a tapeworm deep inside
esophagus' and promise we'll never leave
(oh please promise me you'll share my heart
when the anemic night comes)

leaden feet and feather eyes, I can't see what
you mean but I found an answer betw

Ashes to Asheswhen they peel back her skin they
find a feeble layer of stringent
exigency saved up for the people who
would lend her a light on her path
to gossamer fabrications, she's

lost herself in fairytales like
the crumbs that don't lead home
and the girl who needs to sleep off
a few decades before things can
fall into place-

she dug her own grave but
it turned out to be a rabbit hole,
she's sea sick- she lulls
it's
a little disarming when the waves reflect
your mirrored malignance and the
only way out is
down
(her siren song sounds like
a martyr's last motive)

she sighs and p

Skeletal Foundationsit's the city that makes you,
she says when her industrialized eyes
start to flicker. her heart rushes
like a subway falling late and
the patterns in her skin remind you of
striated architecture (reminds you of how
everything's human in its own way)

we're precarious concrete skeletons
crafted by men praying we won't fall,
and we yearn- you know- we ache
for a sense of vitality and being to
enter us and make us more than a
pale ghost of an engineer's dreams and

maybe we have our own shadowy corners,
too.

commotion exists betwixt her ears and
she's a destination, a place to rest and
catch your breath but not to settle
down b

reservethe walls gasp as
recognition-stained hallucinations
take the covers and defile
the windows with their
presence. the doors are stripped
free, because they never felt open.
tonight, i am the wilted flower's
last cry.

(your name burns my skin) we are only
the weakest we have ever been and
i am an ugly duckling of paper
and poignant prayers.

i'm tied to a summer's day
almost real enough to lose myself in, of
white minds and placid trees, swaying
as though leaves would never fall;
this was months before i changed and
before my skin flaked and i was left
a metallic form of undone want-
before you cringed from the hiss
o

Keepers of My Hearti.
you are in love with being in love
like you're caught on the train tracks,
tied down by want, waiting for that
insistent collision to
steal you away into the land
of concussions and self-medication
and hearts that barely heal

ii.
and stories confessing the notches
in your bedpost, the lines in
your smile. the sour note in your
liberally dissonant melody.

iii.
you did not want tangibility

cotton trees cascading and butterfly
innards, serenading clouds and
fluorescent lips
(until the sky came crashing down
and you reoriented the earth)

iv.
you did not want me

v.
I am solid and as notable as
the ghosts sleeping in y

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Submitted: October 19, 2012
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Sorry Then Safe

by *intricately-ordinary, Oct 19, 2012, 9:21:02 PM
Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

i
we like to play with fire.
as it eats away at our
insipid nature, and licks the
desolate consistency of our bones,
our inner cold is warmed.

you say that it reminds you
of my fevered eyes.

ii.
we make scarecrows into humans
into saviors, then tear them down again
for not cleansing out our wounds.
we forget they were only born
to keep the birds from
devouring us further.

and they watch, feebly, as we
fall face-first into our fate

iii.
you looked me dead in the eye
"we are all walking ghosts
waiting to die so we can live"

and your whitened hands became
a symbol of achievement

iv
we write our epitaphs the day we're conceived,
like a taunt to something greater to come
and steal us away in the middle of the night
from the livelihood we were promised.

but it's less than that, we're erasing
all definitions of chance. we're
marking the path we never want to follow.

v
we drift in and out of self-awareness,
human consciousness, competing philosophies,
delusions of grandeur and deeper
relevance until the day
something tells us

[something being a tear in the cloth,
an unwanted abnormality to send you
down a hole of questionable regrets]

we played out our whole lives wrong

vi
but our destiny's already been scrawled
into the history books

we like to play with fire
to know that we're alive

Sorry Then Safeby *intricately-ordinary

Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

My little brother kept repeating “Better sorry than safe.”
There’s an idea that our whole life is planned out before we live it, all our choices are predetermined based on the laws of the universe.

Isn’t that sort of scary?
We want to be in control.

~~love 0 0~~

~~joy 0 0~~

wow 1 1

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~MozartsNemesis Nov 5, 2012

Stunning. I love the way you looped back around to close with the opening thought. It gives the poem a sense of completeness.. closure.
And these lines spoke volumes to me.

"we make scarecrows into humans
into saviors, then tear them down again
for not cleansing out our wounds.
we forget they were only born
to keep the birds from
devouring us further. "

*intricately-ordinary Nov 5, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I think that was my favorite part to write. We, as humans, put so much weight on unalterable aspects of life. We take objects and try and humanize them to get through the day, but that just never works.
Thank you so much

*Hfeather53 Oct 23, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Haha.. I feel silly I read the title last for some reason XD

That last stanza is me in a nutshell.

*intricately-ordinary Oct 23, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I read the titles out of order, too!
I think we all flirt with peril just to see if it feels the same.

*Hfeather53 Oct 23, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Only some. Like yours. I read all yours then usually read the title last going DERP...

=slowslicksnails Oct 21, 2012 Student Writer

I think this is my favorite poem of yours!

we make scarecrows into humans
into saviors, then tear them down again
for not cleansing out our wounds.
we forget they were only born
to keep the birds from
devouring us further.

AND

we played out our whole lives wrong

AND

but our destiny's already been scrawled
into the history books

(although, I think "written" would work better than "scrawled" in my opinion)

and I really like the last two lines, although they aren't too original (I've read them somewhere before a few times), they fit perfectly. LOVELY POEM.

*intricately-ordinary Oct 21, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Thank you so much!
I think those lines have probably been used before. I wanted to write them in, because I wanted to emphasize the fact we go through pain to feel like we are really alive.
Thank you, again!

=slowslicksnails Oct 21, 2012 Student Writer

You're very welcome!
I guessed why you would include them in the poem and it was smart to include them because it fits so well.

*0hgravity Oct 20, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

hooking first lines.

I liked:
we write our epitaphs the day we're conceived,
like a taunt to something greater to come

some days I think it is scary. other days I think believing in something like that would be a relief.
perhaps because too much control placed in my hands scares me.

*intricately-ordinary Oct 20, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I know what you mean. It's almost a reassurance, like when people say, "if it's meant to work out, it will." A safety net. Often the people who rebel the most against the idea are the ones who like to believe anything can happen, and that they can do what they want in their own lives.
But I'm so weird. I think it's scary because I like to think I'm special, I am not only a byproduct of living; and if everything were planned out, it would at least be done better than this.

Thank you so much for the comment

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