[x]

NaPoWriMo: Day 8I was told
to slice through the thickest
of scar tissue this evening.

Let all my inner demons
fall to the floor
& write them out
in my own black blood.

It’s not red anymore,
even though needles
& the bruises
laid out like war-lands
on my arms
say otherwise.
I don’t think it ever was,
honestly.

Therapeutic,
they said.

My mind is a mess
of free versed insecurities,
cat’s eye marbles,
& untamed forest fires-

but,
I still don’t have the nerve
to slice open my skin
& bleed for her.

RosesYou love too much, I am told by a man with a briar heart, thorny sinews and collapsed ventricles bearing down on him, hardly beating in his tight chest. He looks at me with flat, slate eyes, chipping and eroding. His hands are dark with cigarette burns and rough with calluses; I feel them on my shoulders as he looks down at me, face collapsing in at his eyes like a dead man's.

For the first time, I realize he is dead. His briar heart dried up when winter killed his rose; my father, he is all thorns.

He squeezes my shoulders, too tight. You look like your mother, you know, he whispers, eyes shifting to the garden, to the yellow rose I plante

I'm talking myself in circles,I screamed,

"There is nothing
wrong with me, not a damn
thing.”

I wanted to believe
the big dipper on my arm
meant something more
than sun marks & kisses.

But, how can I trust words
that slip through my teeth
as easy as breathing
when this star
has only ever learned
how to f
a
l
l
?

NaPoWriMo- Day 5She used to try and catch butterflies
until she realized their beauty
rubbed off on her fingers;
but she will always be loving you
with those digits.

20 years from now
when even the love on her arms
is unrecognizable.

FrostI am devouring chaos,
chasing it down with winter's chill.
Spare me your fingerprints,
summer's lovechild. Those knowing owl eyes
have me second guessing the wild churning
in my bones. You are the sleep that sweeps
my eyelashes, drowning me in my own daydreams.

When was it...
that you plastered yourself to my ribcage?

Humanityi. Creator

Flicking through yellowed pages,
The crinkles smelling of dust and tears.

A human-induced God complex - authorial authority.

ii. Photographer

At parties, she hides behind her camera, just so
Someone gives her a smile once in a while.

Too bad she only sneaks candid photos.

iii. Conspirator

Vindictive whispers cloy behind closed
Hands and hardened hearts. They vent.

An immunity to gossip; a cathartic release.

iv. Voyeur

Peeping toms on laptop screens and
DVDs - it's only natural, apparently.

What is normal anyway?

He Said He Would Paint A World.But disappeared when Fate brought rain.

dry-erase i exhale in long, unbroken paragraphs.

the sky is never symmetrical on nights like these. the stars don't align perfectly on earth's axis, and you don't hesitate to point it out.

you examined the celestial bulbs, and screamed. you curse the sky & i string out each of my hopes on a winter breeze, and the wind stirs my bones. my skeleton freezes over & you notice. you reach out for my hand.

"no."

indifferently you sigh, and i inscribe my worries on my skin, pen scrawling over the expanse of flesh.

you lean in & smile. with the intimacy of tapeworms you breathe hot tiger-breath down my spine and try to exhale the hypergraphia from my flesh

Crayon SoulmatesDear Stars,

I have a bone to pick with you. You see, when I was six, I called myself the nowhere girl... and I coloured myself a soulmate. I made him on crumpled sheets, with broken pieces of crayon, on a playground that was too busy wondering whether growing up entailed stealing your mother's cigarettes and your father's dirty magazines (I suppose I was already wise enough to know that growing up meant choosing one of the many ways of breaking yourself in two.)

I hope you remember him, stars...he was important to me (My mother threw that drawing away on my seventh birthday and told me that girls are not supposed to have such dreams.).

He

Once Upon a NightmareOnce upon a mystery
Once upon a crime
Once upon a lullaby
Once upon a rhyme
Once upon a thunderstorm
Once upon a lie
Because every nightmare tends to start
With once upon a time.

Cerberusthe Gods abandoned you
the day you tore into poetic flesh.
slithering serpent, cold blooded-
blue blood society reject.
you left awkward love bites
along the edges of these ribs.
marked for today,
yesterday is mocking you-
6 trillion miles away.
i spend my forevers counting
your heartbeats with each
intake of breath as
somewhere, far off
Hades has you by the collar,
a hungry dog
standing alone in a bone-yard.
strange, how even still
with all your self built
p h i l o s o p h i e s
you became one with the earth,
devouring it whole with chunks
still stuck in your teeth.

Why I Don'tWe are too permanent
for the transience of poetry,
each brief line speeding on toward
the next at breakneck speed.
And I have never been one for writing
epics, you know that.

The Bone CollectorSometimes my breath catches in my throat
and the very stillness of an earth going
a thousand and three miles per hour
gets lodged there.

Sometimes these simple exchanges
leave me breathless, croaking on dust:
the unfiltered pigments of other people's skin
and blood and ash

but with my tarred lungs and itchy eyes
I sit and sift through charcoaled remains,
alphabetising them from c to c. I am lost
in a world charred brazen.

Many things I have loved have turned to ash.
Many people. I was naive enough to think
that there was some perfect nutritional truth
that could outlast hell-fire.

I claw through a world turned ashen
and know those dead

Front page...Liquid chains cling to my ankles
Feathers of a bird tickle my nose.
Haunted by the voices in this cold dark cell
Longing for the scent of a light pink rose.

Ocean waves beat upon a sandy shore
A sea of hatred and rage.
Dragonflies swim through air so light

...
But this stuff never gets to the front page.

Perfect on PaperWe cut hearts
into paper to make streams
of love.
That was my impression of it.
That you ripped
off
the pieces you didn't want
until you got something that was
pretty.
It's no wonder
that I can't believe that someone
would think I was paper-perfect,
or loved.

~♥~♥~

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More from ~iwasearnestonce

2:16my head feels like the walls werent goddamn sound proofed right, and it hurts.
but if you really wanna know.... and our narrator goes on to sound much like holden caulfield... lets be holden caulfield.
when what everyone came to see was a vampire writing lolita.

i thought i knew who i was oncewe exist in small sparse breaths
and it will be the death of you

because existing- is not enough
and trying to save your own soul
is like that moment
when you think you could jump in front of
the train
but you don't
so instead you board
and sigh in your seat
licking up mock adrenaline
like honey
honey laced with cocaine.

oh yes,
we are all about the drugs
when we're slipping through the cracks
like puke down a drain.

but this is not about drugs
or any of the stigma
mind altering intoxication entails-
i was an addict
before the chemicals
you know,
it was the shaking in the bedroom,
the bloodying of the walls,
scrapes and scars,
fingers down

.lick your wounds if you have to, it's not my job to stop you.

grin and bear it, your grandmother said. but you've fallen time and time again, it's bitten through the flesh. since when did you take advice, from the likes of them?

if you had ten dollars and a packet of pills, you'd be afraid of not coming back. you lie in the wreckage, the mess you've made- why the hell would you act like that?

tell me your life is a movie frame, tell me you've lost your claim to fame. tell me you've given up hope. tell me your room is filthy. blame it on the stress, forget to mention the dope.

if you have died so many times
what do you have to lose?

Untitledhere you go,
spitting between life's eyes
again
and claiming yourself blind.
-- the affliction of disenchanted escapists
who major in suspension of disbelief
and get lost when the wool unravels and
the costumes and skins
slip off.
bare.
exaggerating
now sordid lips
tired tongues.

sometimes i don't know
if i have forgotten how to write
or if its only that
i have nothing to say--

i am an amnesiac.

{and i always want to pick up dead things}

losing instinct
with reality taming,
and eating inspiration
demurely, after all,
who could be ravenous
here?

{-tell me my words aren't just jumping off your spindly ears like they're highrise buildings

fracturedthis is the part where i
grow back my worn out
spine, and knuckle bones

and it hurts like
trembling, and pins and needles.

catharsis, they would say
if they had only known
where i had

been, wasting all
that time in some
sick catatonia,

fuck- let me go to an opium den
like any normal anachronism.

{ your heart is an opium den your heart is an opium den your heart
is }

i was an alien and
he wanted to fuck me and

at three in the morning
i went looking for UFOs
- i wanted to go home and
outer space was as good a place
as any

{ i regret i regret i regret i regret, t

Untitledpick a fight,
any fight,
tell me: is this the dirt under your nails?
--

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Submitted: November 6, 2012
Submitted with: Sta.sh Writer

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Views: 3,185 (1 today)

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think youre a slam poet now

by ~iwasearnestonce, Nov 6, 2012, 8:07:39 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

well, my father
he thought he was a cowboy,
he thought he was a yank
he thought everyone he met was his partner in crime
and life was an all end all shoot-em-up
he told stories
and he taught me how to dance with drunks.

well my mother,
she thought i was a changeling,
she thought the world was out to get her
she taught me
well she taught me that innocence is fragile
and that what is sweet often sours,
that madness is not the kind of disease we think it is.

and i grew up
wanting to create something beautiful
or hideous
or both at the same time
with my little hands, and big eyes
and that used to scare me
terrify me,
cause contradictions in my head
at night, when i dream't
with my hand against my ear
thinking the pounding of blood vessels
was the pounding of the big bad wolf coming to get me
and i would dream of the world
ending
with the trampling of a flower,

no sir,
these eyes
they are not haunted
but they are inhabited,
because
i have a soul sir,
and i won't sell it
not for your pennies and packs of gum
not for the world
not for the end of it
not for your trampled flowers.

think youre a slam poet nowby ~iwasearnestonce

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

_{oh. i remember...

--edit---
thank you so much for the DD and all the comments, +favs and views.
honestly, i couldn't believe it. it made me happy to know perhaps i reached some people, and that perhaps also they got something from these things im bleeding out onto my keyboard.
much love.}

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-12-10

think youre a slam poet now by ~iwasearnestonce ( Suggested by =futilitarian and Featured by ^neurotype )

love 5 5

~~joy 0 0~~

wow 3 3

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*wei-en 5 hours ago

This is truly wonderful! I love the emotion that runs through it strongly!

Did you know that I found this when I went to submit and I was selecting the emotional/free verse gallery and there was this thumbnail and I think that's pretty cool-

~hi2b2 3 days ago Hobbyist General Artist

Hmmmmmmmm, seems like there's many ideas sprung off of this poem.
- goods of life
- bads of life
- pushing through
- standing strong
- and some others I'll Have to dig for that I know are there.

quite the nice free verse poem I'd say. Splendid job, might inspire me too make more poems. I have yet to make poems with such messages as this and I think that'd be cool.

Ps: not trying to sound self centered but, could you by any chance read my poems?

~onehalfbowkind May 22, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Would you mind telling me what the meaning behind the title was?

~EclipseWolf64 Apr 18, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Wow... this is amazing... The grammar might not be the best, but the content is what matters. These words are inspiring. Write more! I love this!

~zakaroh Apr 3, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

I don't know what you did right here, but you did it. Saw this on the "free verse examples" page while submitting (here's the poem in question... [link]) and had to check it out. And don't knock bleeding onto the keyboard - a lot of rich stuff in that blood.

~onehalfbowkind Mar 18, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Would you mind if I did a dramatic reading of this at one point? I can't right now because I would have to use my boyfriend's recording equipment which he hasn't set up yet but I would really like to when I can. I'll link to this and give credit and send you a link to it if you want :3

~Fairyblush Dec 11, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

This is simply beautiful and makes me feel strangely nostalgic and distanced at the same time.

~Ask-Cry Dec 10, 2012

Th!s poem g!ves me the strength to tell my step dad my TRUE fr!ggen feel!ngs about h!m.

~iwasearnestonce Dec 14, 2012

_{if you drew strength from something i wrote, that means the world to me. i hope you're doing well, dear.}

~Ask-Cry Dec 14, 2012

Okay, what th!ng do you want me to draw?
Or p!ece of wr!t!ng?

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think youre a slam poet now

think youre a slam poet nowby ~iwasearnestonce

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