[x]

l'hiver.(you can't tell the birds and the snow apart in the sky:
the grand church of dizzying space - )

and the trees are yellowed in cowardice, raking the sky
to the ground and around and around.

listen to your organs: the almost grand piano of the
churches i'd never attend.

and never mistake the courage of the sky for the cowardice
of the ground. never frown, never frown.

listen to your palms: the salty swing of the old snow
burning up on silk and splendor.

and visit the dying snow birds in their graves of the
ground, and they drown and drown.

(you can't tell the birds and the snow apart in the sky:
a grand church of dizzying space w

Romancing CottonSomeone told me that the balled-up almost was growing inside her like
a sapling, that soon the girl would be all swell and wet. What she said
was, "don't leave". Her ego was a white sheet caught on a branch, the
type of fabric my mother treated with contempt. Frippery, beautiful
but impractical: keeping it alive was like trying to catch a bubble with
dry hands.

The wind carried the sickly smell of opium and morning sickness,
signals of a spring in which fingers like white spiders cradled
the beginning of bloom. Hope seemed at once skin-near and star-far.

What I offered her was not a marriage proposal, it was a murder
o

HubrisThe world is not a skeleton. It does not ache bone-deep with our atrocities, nor is it fragile and ready for the breaking. It knows nothing so human, except perhaps to forgive our pride. Let me explain:

Young, I am a bright star with small, pudgy hands for guiltless flower-crushing. Before even that, I am a wispy squall for food, unused to knowing anything but myself, and warmth, and hunger.

The concept of a hero is a natural progression from understanding speech. I am Me. I am the one all the stories talk about, born special, to whom both innocence and wisdom are possible. I am so great a part of my own self that I do not know it can be de

Self portrait-

by the time he arrived home
dinner was over.
tomorrow had eaten today
and it was yesterday again.

he crawled into an unmade bed
and slept.

when he was new
they told him he could be anything.

oh, how he grew so small.

-

SalemI.

the bright scarlet egg of dawn
nests in my head.

when it is time, it will crack my
skull like a shell
and be born.

II.

I have a witch's fingers and a
witch's eyes, rough pewter lenses
through which I see the world.

I have sabotaged their crops,
I have plagued their children,
I have eaten their livestock in the night
(so they say)
and I hear the whispers in the streets.

they will be willing to kill
for their conviction, though
I am not willing to die for it.

III.

I am no longer human.
I've been branded
with an ugly mark
of fear and desperation,

one terse syllable that cuts
like a switch.

IV.

a thin reddish line

petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.

plainlook

see how the brittle grass bends
as though bowing at the knee
and the wooden fencepost
with its halo of rusted iron
stands
still longing for the lost days
when it too
could move with the wind

surely our old gods slumber
in the womb of this land

where clouds ceaselessly tumble
toward a stark horizon
and the dirt roads
are sewn
on an altar of earth

and there
in the distance
a brown sparrow
pauses
his tail feathers braced against
the bitter autumn frost
his mirrored eye flashing
with the steady hymn
of sorrow

how lilies weepobstacles
are a kind of faith,
bleeding through
intention
as if through some
amorphous skin,
red silk,
a bruised clock
covered in
veins and cloaked
with skin,
timed to burst.

i am nothing
if i am not a dream
of yours, waking
from the geometric light
of my window
into a shimmering cup,
poured full of your words
my hips dripping
their tiny mechanisms,
whirring impatiently
my mouth
made raw,
swirling in incense,
growing new teeth,
finding ulcers
to bleed through.
i drip and cough
and sleep and bleed
and hope
that i am strong enough
for someone like you.

i am taped
and bandaged
and covered up

As yet, untitledI swept out the corners of my mind today
In short shallow strokes
Not knowing if the dust disturbed my life
Or if my life disturbed the dust.

Memory1.
I will take one flower a day.
I do not know their names
but they are brighter than anything

else I found under the sheets
of conifers. The clotted colours
sit dubious, dew collecting on stems

I hate to fracture. I love
the tenuous ease, an entire plant
ascending from thin soil. An excavation

uncovers roots like fishbones
with their message, an infinitesimal
howl. In frantic pulse of tattoo they plea:

"Remembering is destroying"
But still,
I wallow.

2
One quiescent shriek of warning before
the compulsion of alveolar
collapse [my lungs, my thorax,
undone and tightening]
My breath is a bomb.

I am e

The Death of VenusIf there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against,
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid--
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.

Witches MarketMidnight fell like an old black bird;
I meant to wait for you.

There were tables rich with
amethyst and pearls,
and fragrance by the fistful,
mint and petrichor.
I meant to wait for you.

You were gliding through the haze
with your knotted bag half full-
shadows flicked their tongues
above your knees;
you meant to look for me.

Moments ran like mice;
a silver pot, a cup of tea.

She stank of vinegar and thyme-
the hand was hers, the heart was mine.
Her iron eyes reflected flame;
she took my lungs, she took my name,
though you had meant to look for me,
and I had to meant to wait for you
amid the black salt and the brew.

Ash

leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
ful of careless farewells, spin and sway

de la bellei have been told that
my cheeks seem to slender
like the stars.

truth be told i

inhaled until my bones
bloomed through my skin
and i sunk;

licked my kisses chapped
'til they reddened
like the roses;

contracted so i'd esvaniss.

i had once hoped to find
it there, the beauty

but instead i
always found space.

Of Half-Filled WordsShe is not a flutterbird.
Her fingers are skittish,
her smile is not.
Do not fear that you will
drive it away.

Sadness is her fumbling limb.
It is unwanted, yet
necessary.

When it is January
she will tell you,
"I am still struggling.
And I am becoming so many people
all at once.

A conglomeration of beauty that
I have managed to mangle.
Please, do not be sad for me."

Sometimes her sorrow is
meant for you. But mostly her.

Those specks and spots
of ocean storm lulls
reveal her truths:
ones she does not want
to extract from herself.

Her heart is not a rabbit.

When it beats
faster, faster, faster,
you need not
run harder

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ruins, or you on repeatYour name speaks softly to me
in the passenger seat, riding shotgun
and I think if you can't wind
your fingers through my hair and tell
me that you'll never leave, not

without me (which makes life the
liar, not you), at least the
curling syllables of your memory

will touch the needy, the disoriented, the
tactile part of me which does
nothing but wander the corridors
of our friendship, of our brevity,

with restless ink-stained fingers
and tired purple aching and a sore
throat from calling over and over,

hoarse but stubborn,

your name.

on the cuspit lies sleeping, so quiet and
harmless and its scales a dark
smear in the tunnels of my need

and all the ways I want you to
touch me are filthy and faint;
at once as innocent as they are
deadly and please, please,

please,

give into the suggestion of my
eyelashes and my subtle hands before
the beast lifts its heavy head

and eats us alive.

surrounded by barbed wireI tell myself that I am ice, I am
cruel, I am cold and I can leave
you whenever and however I want to,

not a stitch of kindness to
remember me by, just the sort
of rejection that makes a nightmare

and I tell myself that nothing
can touch me, a queen of snow and
turned cheeks, whose domain traps
the weak at the borders and

tosses them out into warmer temperatures
where a chance of survival is not so
laughable.

wolf sparrow gaspHow can you deny that I
am an animal, a thing of
thick hair and a thin cotton
voice, dark as the garnets
hidden in your closet and a
testament of your life-

that which sparkles and that
which seems to grow harder
over time, like your memories
and your knees and your refusal

to see what I am. What I am is
an animal and I belong to the
heavy perfume of gardenias and
the euphoria of weeds and I belong

in a forest, densedensedense, and
if you struggle for breath at the
entrance of such lush foliage, such
weighty flora and fauna and the

disregard of language, high and low
like my moods, you will see the lie
of a life outside

shocked, shaken, sugarMy pillow has softened, more
than usual, lately and it might
have to do with the absence of

you, the quail feathers, the
purple dots of wanting which
spread across my vision whenever

I close my eyes or how my mother
is horrified as I cut into her
speech about the beauty of death,

the release, the exhale, the last
line of a novel, the elicit of a

a sigh, and I tell her how the
only thing about death that matters

to me is that it hurts.

peacock feathers and things1

A shower for breakfast and a
Clementine to clear me out of
all of the things I cannot tell you:

that I am enchanted with the pockets
of air in my knees, that your proximity
is a gift unwrapped more easily than
camellia buds, that I wait until

I hear your easy breathing and light
candles and coat myself in water
until steam rises from my palms like

warm rocks, that I want you to
throw your arms around my stiff

shoulders and say, "I've found
you.

I've found you."

2

If the shape of my body matched
the curve of my wit, would

you be satisfied? You feed me pearls
and rubies and topaz and opals, make
me a gem-deprived monst

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tetherhooked

by *sleepysheepdog, Dec 7, 2011, 10:33:31 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

You shift around me, bejeweled
with currency which cannot be
exchanged because detaching your eyes
would be like hollowing a lighthouse,
would be smashing a rare beacon
with stubby fingers and because

trading your mouth would be like
silencing shellsongs and symphonies
and the cinders of your sentences,
the embers of your exhales would
welcome ash where once was warmth

and because your callouses catch on
clothes too well and your shoulders
are the base of a sturdy cradle
and every time you blink, I wake up
and I am uncovered and I am new

and because you would have to
watch the demolition of your
features, the thieving of your
mosaic mounted in the hall of
a hidden villa and

because pain is priceless, but
it is not worth the expense.

tetherhookedby *sleepysheepdog

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone.
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon.

Fazzuh and C and Scotty and Flaura and CSB and my Hera and and and.

Daily Deviation

Given 2011-12-21

tetherhooked by *sleepysheepdog ( Suggested by =angelStained and Featured by $wreckling )

~~love 0 0~~

joy 1 1

wow 1 1

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*James-R-MacAdie Dec 30, 2011 Professional Writer

Astonishingly written!

And congrats on the Daily.

~machmaste Dec 21, 2011 Student Writer

Very awesome

*sleepysheepdog Dec 24, 2011

Well, thank you.

Best two words you could have given me : ).

~machmaste Dec 25, 2011 Student Writer

Because theres to many good ones to choose.
And your welcome ]:*)

~sumitoes Dec 21, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

wow this is so beautiful it kinda made me choke up and tear a little(: very talented and poetic <3333

*sleepysheepdog Dec 24, 2011

Thank you so much, Miss Toes.

It means a lot to me that you would feel choked up about something I've written. Means we've connected, given each other a nice electric shock in passing.

The things I felt most in writing this were humility and gratitude; I think that's what got to you because that's what got to me.

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Dec 21, 2011 Student Writer

"and every time you blink, I wake up
and I am uncovered and I am new"

this is absolutely fabulous. you really play the alliteration perfectly in this piece..

*sleepysheepdog Dec 24, 2011

Pretty much every poem is, for me, an opportunity to pay tribute to alliteration. I am certainly happy to hear that you like it.

There's something very pure in writing a poem whose heart is an unblemished love. Not to say that the people involved aren't flawed (both myself and the ones I've written of), but that the feeling is so unselfconscious and bright.

I'm not talking about romantic love, but one that is quiet and steady, a reflection of the people who have always been there.

Thank you.

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Dec 25, 2011 Student Writer

definitely. love is not as binary of a thing as people seem to discuss.

*Lit-Twitter Dec 21, 2011

Chirp, congrats on the DD, it's been twittered. [link]

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