[x]

swimming, not drowning.when you're waist-deep in a love you know you shouldn't have even dipped your toes into, you spend a lot of time cursing the current. you try to stamp your feet but find the sand's up to your ankles and seaweed is tied in bows around your calves. the waves begin to climb, breaking on your collarbones and splashing your face. breath seems to take up more space in your chest. you bring air into your body in the shortest bursts possible and it spills back out like machine gun fire.

sometimes, though-- mostly in the first hours after sunrise, when you're alone with the space she inhabited on your couch and her perfume on the back of your knees--

The Door of Our Cottage in the Western Night
They began on the beach, and a fire was raging upon the waters. A fire on one side of the world and one around the other. The earth had been unbruised, like an apple on a string, and then two stones had struck within a month, and everything had burned, slagged by deep space arrows. The wind was terrible. Everywhere was a howl with no direction.

*

There were a few lichen-like communities in damp places, where the sky had steamed by but seared little, lifted ravines and streams from the land, unwrinkled it, the dragon braille come growling. There were a few who had been underground, and a few in t

orthography and the right to remain silenti know just how i left you,
and i pray to god,
the same one you do each day,
that you're still as
sore,
stubborn,
and stuck
as you were
when you fled
like floodwater
to georgia.

the pile of unread books
still sit on the righthand side
of the coffee table.

i think,
but i can't be sure.

maybe they're on the left;
or even worse,
maybe they're on the shelf
over your television.

i don't know how fast
you've been sitting here
or how long you've been moving,
but i have places to go
and people to be,
warming the ache
like ringworm
in my stomach.

it's times like these
i pray to the god,
the same one you do each day,
th

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

Ms. Foxrummaging through the night;
I find her buried in a handsome coat.
the darkness softens her
trash-strewn make up
to lay bags under her eyes.

I have always thought to chase
a beauty like that; blow my
hunting-horn like kisses
as I saddle up.
I would wear her around my arm and
discuss the big-game
and the beasts at bay
with boys that brandish
scorecards into the hundreds.

but,
she hid from the canines
lapping her neck with a head
buried in all fours.
I skinned her like a poacher
bearing my ivory smile
for her to unfurl
flushed and screaming
like a new born baby.
caught in my hooves the wrong way.

Unbound TiesYou choke on the meds—
the bitter taste of failure,
the coffee thick in your
indecisive throat.

Downstairs,
a baby howls like
a mistreated coyote
at the vaporizing moon—

the all day affair
of listening to abandonment
thumping in your ears.

Across town,
a man you might have
learned to love
boards a bus
for greener pastures—

the promise of keeping in touch
rolling in your mouth
like a pendulum uncertain
of its true purpose.

& in a tiny town
on the edge of oblivion,
your one-time, for-all-time lover
chokes on the daily defeat—

feeling the chorus
of your blood
burst against her lips,

all the unspoken

Metastasis98.00

Autumn is the season when everything dies.

The leaves shrivel up and your lungs go with them, tiny dejected organs drying out inside your sternum, crinkling under our footsteps. The doctors pronounce their diagnosis as the leaves fall, listing medical terms and percentages and something about medication options.

The disease is metastatic: it has bored its way out of your lungs and into your bones. Dissatisfied, it's going for your organs, your liver, your heart. The prognosis says Christmas is a pipe dream, likely as the sun ceasing to set.

You promise it anyway.

94.00

November comes and I am a fish, breathing through makeshift gi

FFM21: The Dragon Thing For the third time in a week, Joey woke up crying in the middle of the night. It was a behavior that, like most children, he had left behind years prior, along with diapers and pacifiers and Elmo. It was only in the recent months that it had started again, infrequently at first but worse with every passing week. What made this night particularly notable was that, unlike the previous dozen occurrences, he could actually remember what he had been dreaming about.
"I was flying," he groaned into his mother's collarbone, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes. "I was flying over the mountains. I had these big wings, and everything looked reall

The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee

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

The Fat Buddha Smiles At MeThe fat Buddha smiles at me
As I sit in the Vietnamese nail salon,
I wonder if he realizes that
The incense in front of him is electric?

And I, paying money to sit
And have my feet bathed by a lady,
Am bowed to far more often, with
Sacrificial poses, and softly spoken words.

I wonder what it must be like
To be so enlightened that
I could be satisfied with plastic.
While the lady asks if I prefer
The blue or purple polish?

a long awaited return.It was raining when we landed.
A shock
to our sun-drenched systems,
stumbling with snatched-
away sleep.

Another bus, another train
whirring upon endless tracks.
We run, we flee through foreign streets –
disdainful eyes stare on,
watching fugitive

outsiders -
desperate for a taste
of home.

stefanshe stood on your dock
in black pearls,
and nothing more -

wet feet
and the asian dream.

you loved her
but

when the snow fell
on the dock,
the following winter

you couldn't
remember why.

Into a CongoShocks rippled south
realmed a loss and screened a track
stacks strung low and around again

She wanted the feeling of mica between her teeth
like lashes on a chiseled tree
totaled through and ruffled down
up and around again

Court and run south and
sandalwood
wrecked a home, she sat still
her knees knit together
unraveled over and into raw skin, over and into
she bloomed her hair into a Congo

It peeled like rose petals beneath her feet
a sheet strung high and low and around again

She said tell me why, but her fingers curled
around your head, around your neck, slowly
and then her shoulders
loosened

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More from ~nonamepsalmist

unfoldI. unfold

We loved (oh god.) like a diagram-
both withholding and instructional.

There were three lives there.
The first and second were slipping-
the third wasn’t really a life at all.
Lanky, they hinged upon the other and
were triumphantly linked
in their ruin.

It was an attempt
at re-working fate, at recovering
a forgotten meant-to-be thing. We set
the spin of our days
to the different tick
of your pocket watch.

A fault in you
noticed the same
face in me;
and in dark places
we chose the other as delicate and
savage company.

We b

Saints on the PavementI dressed for the rain
in white legs and an umbrella-
a thin, black trophy, a shield I have learned to carry.
The foot traffic is bare, their hair heavy and
wet. The buses are full. This is home.

We are all mad, I imagine, or in
a kind of recovery- be it poverty
or tiny hells we carry close in our pockets.

Later, everyone is a saint
on the dry pavement. We look wrinkly
and alive in the heat.
This is home.

Small DividesYour tiny flesh, your size two
to my body set wide apart,
to my body trying to escape itself with distance
speaks.

I have no delusions.
We are eager and willful.
I know not to confuse this
with magic. We are not reincarnated,
not long-lost someones, no epic, no fable.
Gilgamesh doesn’t hear what we say, or how
we say it in riots, in phone calls, in perfect
Sunday afternoons.

I do not make up stories, pretty lies to
fill in the gaps. I do not cork the holes
with anything at all. Instead, I stick
my fingers in them and poke around. What we lack-
if we lack it- is not a trouble thing, a warning thing.
It is just a t

The Burden of NoFor clean clothes, I forfeit $2.25-
that’s two loads of filth, and one
pinwheel of cotton this and polyester that.

Sitting on the stained couch,
with a small library at my side- a cure
for just sitting and
the danger of thinking-

I give in and imagine
life as a tee-shirt, a button-down, as
denim. Getting clean would be
faster (faster)
and cheaper by far were I
made of cloth.

I give in and imagine
the green plastic razor on the top
shelf of a catch-all cabinet; how I would
use a pen- a friendly thing,
a monster, too-
to pop out a singular blade from a trifecta of precision.

I can hear euphoria calling.

But I l

Stella PolarisThe little dipper is square on
your hip. You always have trouble spotting
the stars, but I am not surprised that they have
made homes in your flesh.

I knew some part of you belonged
in the sky. I had suspicions you were
unnaturally bright.

Which picture are you?
What myth do you have?

ManuscriptI have written us down, typed us up, and sent us out.
they will edit us, and say some parts are no good.

but I want your run-ons, your lack of punctuation; and you are so easy
on my weak binding, my damaged spine.

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Cadaver Hotel

by ~nonamepsalmist, Mar 18, 2012, 11:03:22 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I live inside of your corpse. Stealing
in through the incision
between your ribcage and hipbone, I burrow
myself inside of your embalmed organs and
wrap my fingers around your bones,
clutching until my knuckles turn
the same kind of white.

Though you are dead,
your body sometimes quakes-
spasms and sends a flash-pulse of postmortem waves
over me. For quick sucks of air,
I crawl up and out of your pretty mouth, careful
not to hit your crooked teeth.
To avoid dying inside of you-
oh, how I long to-

I have taken
to gnawing on the insides of your cheeks
and the sinewy parts of your
atrophied muscles.

Yesterday you began to reek
the way dead things do,
while it is sour,
it still smells like you.

Cadaver Hotelby ~nonamepsalmist

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-04-07

Cadaver Hotel by ~nonamepsalmist ( Featured by $wreckling )

love 3 3

~~joy 0 0~~

wow 4 4

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

fear 1 1

~~neutral 0 0~~

~MadeleineArtist Apr 11, 2012 Student General Artist

This is disgustingly beautiful. It us honest and contains a certain kind of grit, but it still shows poise and grace under pressure.
Love.
<3

~jennedy Apr 8, 2012 Writer

Horrible and beautiful.

~Crazyone222 Apr 8, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Guh. Vividly disgusting, yet leaving a craving for more. That's some tasty wordplay you got there. Part of me wants to interpret it literally (as in parasites) but another part knows there's so much more. The beauty of poetry, it can be anything. Ugly things can be beautiful, and vise versa.
Anywho, great work. Evocative and disturbing.