[x]

lukewarmshe had the kind of voice
that seemed to be stuck
in the hour of four o'clock
in the morning - soft
and tired and luring,
mumbling her way through
subways and tunnel lights
all pale yellow with noise.

there was tea and long baths
and longer absences,
hiccups of breath
the best
she could do.
long springs and
longer falls,
one equinox to the next
and still the bad
was never that bad
and the good
was never that
good,
and she continues to hum
the birds continue to sing
the apples continue to
grow and
sour and
fall,

and bury themselves
again.

Wildflowers, Imperfect BirdsI breathed your name like wildflowers under vast broken skies, in wide-open spaces. The wind blowing through them spoke of dew and dirt and petrichor, and there was sunlight on the ground like a mosaic patterned by god's own hands.

I said it like a monarch claiming new land: a declaration, a butterfly breath over old earth; like it was coffee on a warm morning with the sun in my eyes, interlacing with my lashes; like it was a dream; like it was a prayer like it was a miracle wrought of air and bone and body: you, in, out, in, out, in and in and in.

I cried it out like an earthquake between lip and lip, continents that don't quite fit: your

and I still keep running into parked carsMama,
your baby girl's swimming
in dead of the night
hair, scarred knees,
overgrown weeds, and
countless pairs
of shoes-
with those
orange and yellow wheels
that hug my toes
and heels

I'm running into
parked cars
trying to get
my kite to fly
and hiding under
dashboards
listening to you
fight

I'm rummaging through
boxes of secrets
that Daddy tried
to hide-
solving puzzles with pieces
I'll never uncover
in these thoughts
of you

astronomerswhen we're together
dusk is containable; the moon in my palms
and the stars on your ceiling.

we lull the city to sleep
with our theories of life; my tongue curling
into speech.

do you remember,
when Jupiter was a silver wick, lighting its countless moons?

that night,
you balanced a cigarette off your lips,
and I watched the vermillion flame burn life
as a newborn sun;

stars forming,
planets moulding and constellations snaked
above our eyes.

i imagined
what it would be like to be curled
inside the embers – creator and destroyer
of worlds,
so close to your lips.

virginity is like an envelopemy mother said her mother knew.
i wonder if she stumbled home like i did,
fifteen and beer-loose
tied to the door like a thunderstorm with black lips
and i wrote a story about disaster,
a quiet two sleds long.
a box full of beads, i swallowed
fifteen needles, mommy. don’t
tell me i’m not sorry.
don’t call me a whore you bag of bones
you lock-loose suitcase do you even
recognize me look at my face my toothache skin
i am not the one with the knife.

my mother never slept with a boy
who didn’t love her never let a boy
sleep on her while she lay awake beneath
the shroud of his skin breathing only
when her voice-box gathere

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

Vishnui. (matsya - fish)
in the beginning, there was silver;
mercury inscribing cuneiform
beneath the bloodwork of your skewed scales,
scrawling preserver
throughout salt-drenched lungs.

and you laced clear planets into your slipstream,
wrapped solar systems in translucence.
ignoring all the shattered galaxies. ignoring
how easily their frail orbits
broke.

ii. (kurma - turtle)
your ribcage screamed a shattered warcry
of not-quite-god and less-than-human;
a shark's-tooth carapace crushed in.

forgotten names clawed out your sternum.
your spine fused into your biting back.

iii. (varaha - boar)
razor-wireless shrieked of true ta

lovesong for sailorboyRead aloud and explained (somewhat) here.
i have always loved words as you love the sea
but i have grown to hate
prepositions
because i have always had words
about you
with you
to you--
but never for you.
words for everything
except you.
but i have words for this, so
i'll take them
one by one.
about.
the ocean was your first love and
i could always see it in your eyes.
most would call them blue--just
blue
like a swell over a sandbar
blue like the spring sky over a poppy field.
but i don't think anyone
got as close as i did and they're not blue
not shorebound and
safe--
they're gray like the steelbellied sea itself
like the horizon at dawn as it
encircles you
hems you into an impossibly vast canvas
like a demarcation line
or a promise.
one you always chased.
with.
maybe i had a streak of ocea

syracuseListen to the audio version for the full effect, pretty please.
cloudshot sky like an oil painting and i am watching the
seagulls. i--
darling, i will swim for you
and swallow every whitecap.
i will pluck myself a coat of pelican wings,
sew them up with salt and spray--
become icarus for you.
you are calling me across the waves, love--
but you pull against the ache
in my bones, the hollow--
the clawing out for unseen sunsets and unturned tides.
i hear you, love
give me time.
i will always listen.

001 i am a whirlwind of
bruised knees
(purple)

an aching heart
(dark blue)

twisted guts
(red)

&
a regret that could
crumble mountains.
(green-green-green)

Stay Dreamingyou are pale in the half-light;

all the fire you carry with you in the waking world is doused in the sweetness of your hair across the pillow & your frame insinuating itself in the sheets, in pockets of weight & pools of shadow that say "i am a body", "i am a girl"

(vulnerable yet terrifying)

& in life you are larger than you seem, thunder & lightning inside colored glass. you are cruel-mouthed but soft-eyed, & brittle queen (you would rather break than bend for me), you are all the lovelier for your frail-boned pride.

it is strange how much i see of you when you are not looking back, how i feel as though it is only in moments like these

SehnsuchtOctober again;
and the curtains billow
with broken glass echoes and
Mendelssohn's bride waltzing
to better times

(ein
zwei
drei)

She becomes the rain,
and breaks her own heart as
the sound
drips
right through us.

To LondonGypsy hopefuls once told me,
there are flights leaving for
any destination
at any given instant

Upon sizing up our town with
a fingernail
did you realise how little
our frustrations were?

I spoke about this ineffable feeling
of stepping out of one tub
and into new water.

The hotel was done up nicely,
chandeliers and polished English accents.
Labels aside they still mixed
milk into their coffee
and had toast with jam and butter.

I was living under the impression
that most of the Internet
came from my same slice of city pie,
conveniently forgetting about
the undersea cables.

I loathed the lack of vernacular
sentence s

Astronauti.238,900 miles away
the Earth gleams in the darkness.
A cat's eye, opalescent blue
flecked with terra verdant,
fifty-two cream colors
of cloud.

Under a heavy lid of night,
it glares. Angry.
Baleful.

As if to say to the Sun:
I was dreaming
of all the fish
in my seas.
As if to ask why
it had to be woken.

ii.
Thoughts are protozoan here;
with glass-thin skin
transparent as the first lie
he ever told as a child.
No,

I didn't steal that candy bar.

He can see the mechanics,
the workings,
the insides.
They divide like dreams,
impossibly smoothly,
Whole and unbroken
as they tear apart. If
he could stretch far e

Here in springIf fatigue could grind down
cosmic energy in the center
of the universe
and in your center

like you are
grinding nutmeg and cinnamon
onto your cappuccino,

stirring
the little cup of storm
with your bent spoon

and eating raw walnuts
with the poet
tumbling

out of the person
in sportive vapors,

this is
what has mesmerized you
to me: being wrapped up

entirely
by the silhouette of your
coming and going,

nurturing the pearl
you have broken off of
a universal necklace,

your button picked off
of the universal sweater
draped around my shoulders

when we tour the little towns
that stand over the Hudson
like haloed hallucinations.

I would h

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nightmarethe foxes are at your bedside and singing--
feversongs,
songs of boiling thoughts
and broken muscles.
their lullabyes.
they sneak so quiet, and
somehow,
you can't quite
dream
anymore.

with thanks to frosttwo roads diverged in a soulless dawn
and you pull over,
idling on the shoulder of route 50.
it's a polaroid morning and
the world is as grainy
and sleep-heavy
as your eyes,
and one million miles
is not far enough.
it plays back, filmstrip,
blurred along the length of
optic nerves,
and here you are:
facing a choice between
on
and
out.
and this?
this loosejointed, hollowbodied
weightless ache--
this is what
gone
feels like.

rapid eye movementi am jealous
of my birdwinged half-sister.
later, birdwinged reapers--black,
looming quiet in every doorway. they
followed me from my hemmed-in waking terror
to the free reign of my subconscious.
far better suited to their purposes.
thunderstorms like supernovae out at sea, and
empty little boats tossed on emptier shores.
it rains, and the sea advances,
cresting the saguaros. someone is lost.
i don't know who. i don't know why i
care so much.
cliffs and skyscrapers. tightropes. sometimes
i am afraid of heights, and sometimes
afraid for those who are not.
the skinny girl
with the long dark hair is
always worth dying for.
sex. i am in turn
bemused, and indifferent, and bored, and
frustrated, more often than anything.
i like that i still remember how it felt to hug my dog,
right down to the cool wirecoat
and the warm fluff beneath,
and his immense
patience.
sometimes i wake up with misty
recollections and the overwhelming thought:
i wish it could be like this.
jungles with ancient

sun worshipand we, the broken-winged disciples
thrum closer, closer--
seeking warmth on our dust-drenched backs,
and reflections,
and a landmark in the wide and open
dark.
we breathe,
together
(closer)--
moths among the fireflies.

dance party of oneever the same, rob thomas
there's a bonfire in the drum
of a washing machine by the lake and
bottles tied to trees with sparks
glancing off like so many
fireflies.
the a la menthe, nikkfurie
most
get lost among the cobblestone
rabbit warrens or
take to the sea but our road
is lit by midnight cameraflash
and the neon,
with our tracks scuffed out among
the hush and rumble of
a city
where no one
knows our names.
travelin' on, norah jones
shoulders just broad enough
for six strings and a hollow body
and the weight of
all those words yet to be--down the
train tracks and through the
blue dawn, with that
crossroads rumble
in his bones.
don't let go, weezer
and the irony is
that they were always right
but we never cared.
are you happy now, by somebody whose name escapes me and i'm too lazy to look up (and covered by cassadee pope)
pretty little thing with a pretty little gun
and a smile like the devil on a
monday morning...
breathing, lifehouse<

three dogs in the churchyardThe chain link around the graveyard runs straight through an oak tree. The bark looks crippled where it passed through the wire--mutilated in a faint diamond pattern--but you can see around the edges where it's fusing together smooth again.
The kids with the distant eyes always come here to smoke. You've never seen eyes like that. Distant, but not glazed, like they're looking into eternity and watching the threads of livewire possibility arc and writhe before them. The embers at the ends of their smokes cast cherry-red reflections on their irises.
The top of the fence is buckling where it enters the tree. You wonder if they'll have to cut it loose if they ever take it down. You wonder how far the roots have crept.
You wonder why the kids with the forever eyes never stand, vulpine, by the churchyard with its stray dogs and subterranean hum of faith--of vulnerable hope. Maybe all the life drowns out the eternity.
On winter mornings, they exist only in the pinpricks of light from the ends

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Submitted: December 28, 2012
Submitted with: Sta.sh Writer

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summergirl

by ~disrhythmic, Dec 28, 2012, 5:34:48 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Now 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, the snow is deep.
the river is hungry.

iv. you fall with the spring
and the wolves grieve
for their bright-eyed
summergirl.

v. the grass grows on.

summergirlby ~disrhythmic

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

There. I think I like this one better. Forgive the WIPspam.

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`cality May 5, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

The images in this poem are so, so lovely. My favourites are i and ii, and I love how each section gets shorter towards the end of the poem. <3

~disrhythmic May 5, 2013

Thank you!

`cality May 6, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

You're welcome!

*LightningIdle Apr 20, 2013 Student Traditional Artist

You have an excellent way of putting words together.

~disrhythmic Apr 23, 2013

Thank you so much!

*lombregrise Apr 5, 2013 Professional Writer

great piece... very nice reading...

~disrhythmic Apr 6, 2013

Thank you, darling.

=AzizrianDaoXrak Apr 5, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

This is just a friendly little note to let you know this piece has been featured!: [link]

Please consider taking a peek at the other featured pieces and faving the article to help support the other artists ^^

~disrhythmic Apr 6, 2013

Thank you so much!

=AzizrianDaoXrak Apr 6, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

You're so welcome! ^^

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