[x]

Street Rats Dont Curse Like They Used ToWe fell down so many times even the concrete was bruised,
monotony at it's finest. we scraped our knees getting up and painted the sidewalks red. our mouths honey and gravel.

we're liars, with clever tongues who whisper death threats and endearments in the same breath.
we don't know when to stop dreaming
because someone has been lacing our bedtime tea with opium.
so we're fucking in lonely porn theaters,
sharing diseases with the upholstery,
and only the unimportant things hurt.

we're stealing strangers hearts
through stab wounds signed with a fountain pen
because we lost ours long ago by wearing them on our sleeves.

we'll tell

pulsesfear another scratch for whatever sketch
abstraction can be made about our passage:
in some ways it's a statistical imperative
that my shade tickle yours in this sacred accident
universe: illumined my child holds the ramifications
of permanence: crepuscule flowerbuds blossoming
through your green life-giving hands & glossily
pinching the source of the seasons for a fountain
penny & the sunset of wishes: another fatigue:
love's another fatigue: underneath the ecstatic
trembling of this eternal waterfall planet: let us
save it: underneath the lattice language of thousands
of wayward mornings scrambling toward their brightness:
be

.h u s h e d

this is the sound
of angels suffocating

it is summer
and we laugh at
the tender-sweet
suicides
with guns
to their lover's heads

the stars are bleeding
across the sky
.you make
wishes

&
liars who stop
dreaming
won't
forgive themselves

you are consummate
as you slip in
choke on your own tongue
murmur sweet-nothings
it doesn't mean
as much as you think

because your lover-boy
is a liar-boy

these
arsenic kisses
will poison; you
eventually.

i'm so sorry{i} you can't sleep so you chew your fingernails until they bleed. they'll be sting-me pink in the morning, like a fawning school-girl getting fucked by her teacher. &oh, darling, you are no lolita.

{ii} there's this boy and he ate your heart, turned you into one of the living-dead. and there's only one thing you want, but his body is hallowed-ground.

{iii} your drug dealer is off chasing trickster-gods,

{iv} its raining sparrow-bones....and the alley-cats are still starving.

ObjectiveI had never sustained a feeling of anger for so long
that it threatened to make disintegrate
my natural order; so oversensitive to criticism
and apt to take it personally. I know, you're trying to help me
and I'm sure, it's in my best
and vested interests. I can't help but give a fuck;
I still believe there's a real and noble purpose
to our enterprise that doesn't go together
so long as you're standing over me.
I can't support my words, can't make heard my laughs,
can't say what I mean with charm, can't make you
fall in love with the paper version of me
as well as I can carry out your orders
with eagerness and flourishes. At leas

are you still breathing? pyromania.your skin is petrol and my skin is a lit cigarette. your skin might be with some stupid teenagers tonight, getting high off your fumes, killing themselves. and my skin might be pressed up against a pretty girls lips as she inhales and tries to forget. but i say lets get together and start a fire. fuck 'em all and watch the world burn. this girl with her lips to me--, she doesn't have enough scars for someone her age. it makes me wonder if she's even lived a day in her life. but she breathes my poison into her lungs. those teenagers, dizzy with you and out of their minds, they have death in their veins already. lets set their blood on fire. ta

canopymy mother stands
a tall wide person
perfecting the art of being short.
her hair is a nest,
snarls pulled and discarded,
the ever changing patterns wiped.

my grandmother
deals with abuse in secret ways
then tells me about it
thirty years too late.
she dabs at her lipstick,
folds the napkin and
creases it firmly.

my other grandmother lives alone
in a building of people,
wax, soap, and flesh.
she sleeps in a room filled
with the fantasies of a lonely wife,
the thoughts of a woman long gone.

my third grandmother
lives with another woman
and her family
has forgotten her.

my aunt crooked her back,
sometime in a summer unrem

New FaithOf course it would be foolish to assume that the relationship between us is linear:

I touch your skin.
Memories re-align
to meet the meaning in your eyes.

Of course it would be foolish to resume the old ways of believing:

There is no pain
that this moment
cannot bend into beauty.

dream thoughts the sheets are crinkly between my
toes, and
your shoulder blades stick out
like fairy wings
and your freckles make pretty shapes
across your nose
and moonlight is splashed across you
like milk
and your mouth is open
and you're drooling
and your face is kind of squished

and i wonder if i've ever told you
that you're beautiful when you sleep.

TorchesI met my best friend in the hospital where

he told me that the most dangerous illusion is that freedom
can come back screaming once
it's lost & as we got older our Fugazi mornings became claustrophobic midnights willing each other manic under the pining
of the carbon monoxide detector, pretty lushly taking
the humanest cancers, the causal
parallaxes our identical allergens, his god being bigger than
my god since he could pay the beats off in this cosmic experiment, where Lazarus became the first
fascist for making death real on the corollary,
taking me for a spin in religion's Ferrari with the post-hardcore dawn

i take splenda in my coffee these daysthis ain't a love poem
sweet heart
but i thought you ought to know
you have cancer eyes
,lips
,tongue
,lungs- oh, and ribcage, heart- if you have one
,its nesting in your collarbones
,shoulder blades
,darling its in you elbows to the knees

and i'd light up 50-a-day
i'd huff and puff like a a chimney, a steam-train, the big bad wolf
just to make you mine.

Valley of the Dry BonesYou give me a look to sink an iceberg,
Whisper in my ear like aerosol.

You want to play my ribs like a macabre xylophone.

You want my collar bones to crumble
Into chalk under your teeth.
And you want to race your bitdown fingernails
Down the blackboard of my hip bones.

You want to spot weld wings
To the sharpest parts of my shoulder blades.
To take the edge off.

I have a question.

Why is it every single compliment
Pertains to my skeleton?

To the deadest part of me

Polished but broken
From a freebasejumping accident.

Your lust is a taxidermy.
You smile with scalpels.
You smile with two rows of teeth.
You smile like you're re

PeriwinklePeriwinkle
is a patch of open sky,
a gingham plaid skirt,
the slate of your eyes.
It chimes tiny bells when you speak
and startles birds into flight and runs
thick like heavy syrup
on cottony pancakes
that taste lighter than air
and leave my mouth dry,
empty,
hungry,
for a flash of pale blue in summer.

one with othersit's been a week
only since the grey & white bramble-
ing winter tree branches made us a temple
in a high-contrast morning, mechanical songbirds
such metronomical solidarity that it's incomprehensible,

if the men and women
who mean soul to me now could have known
or would know about this would it have changed
you love me because I'm always spinning,
the sunlight's in the pit of my stomach,
the ocean in the wisps of my hair you know that

if fate means it has been said—
that there can be such radiance within a bursting shell
I find it somewhat clarifying, reaffirming

Dearly Deceased DameAnd I apologize for these neurotic abrasions,
this mercury printed skin. I digress:

I have kept your favorite black scarf
(of a thousand minute dying bells), squirreled
away from the face of these lingering years,
to live by and breathe your sweet scent: my ether.

And I apologize for such relapsed memories,
for neglecting to ingrain your tastes in my insipid psyche
apart from the shrill of your voice, apart from
your last, soul-piercing scream.

But every time I lose a tooth, trace
trailing fingers on live green vines, smooth
my voice to sing alongside divine, orphaned birds, lick
the remnants of a 2L box of vanilla ice-cream

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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?
--

voyeurismmidnight-
i drew up writhing girls
all lit on fire
just where it
burns good
with acid washed
eyes
i wonder why i'm
so obsessed
with self inflicted
disease of the mind

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we are not ghosts

by ~iwasearnestonce, Mar 27, 2012, 7:57:28 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

we are uninhabited

slip into your gypsy skin
and
run rabbit, run
because
they own you
but you own nothing.

and everyone you know
is gagging on these pills
{these fucking pills}
as they hang themselves with their
business ties.

wild boy
liar boy
you have holes in your
socks
mama told me
don't talk to strangers
and you have holes
in your socks.

and you're kicking up
moonbeams,
now.
are you dancing with
the moonlight
or trying to
murder it?

are you a sun god,
wild boy, liar boy?
has the moon
done you harm?
are you after my
heart?

do you want to watch
the world burn
or just me?

they say you'll slit your wrists
they say you think you'll bleed poetry.

we are not ghostsby ~iwasearnestonce

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

_{does this make me a bad person?}

~Megilar Apr 4, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

This make you a human-being.

Raise your teacup,

Alexis

~iwasearnestonce Apr 7, 2012

_{oh, i had hoped that was something you could stop being if you wished hard enough and hurt badly enough. i suppose not. we're odd little things aren't we?

i adore tea.<3}

~Megilar Apr 7, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Yeah, but that's okay, really..

Alexis

~infidel-absence Apr 4, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

This does make you a pretty good poet. Then it doesn't matter wether you're good or bad.

~iwasearnestonce Apr 7, 2012

_{good, morality has nothing to do with it then! thank you, sweet.}

*Kagehahen Mar 29, 2012

Stanzas one and five--gems.

The comparisons between stanza two and three are excellent.

You lose me a bit between having holes in his socks and what 'mama told' the writer about strangers, but all in all, my attention was caught and held, and that was a good thing.

~iwasearnestonce Apr 7, 2012

_{oh wow, dear, thank you. i love it when people give me feed-back like this.

ah, i thought i'd lose quite a few people with that, but the poem is trying to run away from you there so never mind. theres a story behind it, and i'll write it because i think it would like to be written; im sorry if you bother to read it.

when i was a little thing, my mama was crazy, and she used to tell me lots of crazy things, and not talking to strangers was probably one of the least crazy things she said, but the extremes she would take it to were probably the most. when i was also a little thing, my papa used to come home drunk and rouse me from bed, and we'd go out and dance as he sung yankee songs. i forget how the songs went, but one of them was about dancing under the moonlight with holes in your socks or stockings. at the same time, someone with holes in their socks or stockings, seems to me to be quite often seen as lower class, because otherwise why would you clothes be like that? street kids, or the poor, im thinking. and those people are often strangers to a lot of people. strangers that shouldn't be talked to. but if you do, they often have stories to tell.

anyhow, thank you so much, sorry for the ramble <3}

*dietcocaine Mar 28, 2012 Writer

_{Only human.}

~iwasearnestonce Apr 7, 2012

_{i'm afraid so...}

*yesilm Mar 28, 2012

"slip into your gypsy skin
and
run rabbit, run"

excellent

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