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Accidentat the corner of boone trails and owen
she learned the brevity of flight:
glinting bumper for launch pad
trajectory approximately 5 feet
across the median.

she pirouetted
as proud, as swift
as any prima ballerina
but the landing
proved rough.

this I keep for her -
the listless weight of limbs
defying gravity, the beastly beauty
of a body bouyant before
its death.
b. 1954He was born to Elvis' first dreamy hit
& a mother who preferred it to the soft
thumpthump heartbeat of her infant.

He was born to a world suffering
the high-pitched paranoia of racism,
the tight lows of war ad nauseam,
the slow slaps of McCarthyism.

He was born to a family familiar
with the thrilling thwack of ringed
fingers on flesh, to a father
who fled the frenzy in favor
of that mellow bass at death.

He was born the first son
and assumed the lead, progressed
from child to man at percussive speed;
Papa was a father long before me,
playing mother as well for siblings in need.

But seventeen came swiftly, and brought a new
Shyi. You say that there's nothing to see, no story behind your walls of whitewash. You tell me everything without saying anything, because we never speak.

ii. You never stop running, and your floor will never be my ceiling. Anyway, you'd never fall through. (They say I'm a little too good at this. I mean, I'm terrible at letting go. Maybe it's best I'll never catch you.) It's such a shame, seeing as I've been practicing.

iii. This is simple, unadulterated observation. I watch, you move. My gaze is objective; you're a work of art. (Or is it piece of work?)

iv. They say you're scarred but you hardly seem the broken type. They say you'd let me
Achromatic Dreamstoday, god gave me present.

-
i.

stilted windows, white bones
decaying lungs and my mind races
at the rate of a lone moth's jaded wings

we taste better alone

ii.

clemency is earned
by the damned, by the damned
arbitrary sacrifices

we belong to nobody

iii.

and she bowed with artless grace
kissed the sky, shed stardust tears
choked on angelic moonshine

we draw our own constellations
-

today, i gave god presence.
Let the Sparrows InI.

Blackbirds are resting on the power lines,
Their silhouettes form the notation to
A dawn song set on the sheet music of
Telephone poles contrasted by the sun.

Curled leaves are land mines littered
On the lawn where imprints of twigs
And a nurturing robin's tracks collect.

Branchlets and leaflets stem from
Porch step railings and mailboxes;
The numbers read even on the
East side of the asphalt:

Seven-seven-thirty-six.
The engraved letters on
The siding reads, "Davis."
This house is home to family

So let the sparrows in.

The house,
With its branching hallways
And
Overhanging décor
And
Furniture rooted to the floor
Sightless BluesWe have found new ways to address light
And the answer was not 42.

There used to be a story
-Do you remember?-
About the propagation of sounds she made in silence
And the music that they play when people are dying.
A soundtrack composed of a spectrum of all blues,
Dripping with ultramarine and violins.

There was something about broken bones too,
But that never seems to convey pain the way it used to.

It's a pity really;
That we can't see what we hear
Without tearing our eyes out;
Begging for an end to the melody you made in Autumn,
When guns sang about blood.

And it's sad too,
That this is always about you.
The words slipping
ash wounds like air i have done it yet again.

these dark eye pits -
why won't they speak and be free?

-

once in every fifteen empty dawns
do my hands cease to claw at each other:
a glimmering hiatus;
a half breath.

i have fire hair and
i have eaten a beautiful man's jasper love.

silence never settles;
round and round goes the chained-up mind
as i grow into fear forever.

the nights smell of dying poppies. think

of such a poppy field - the beauty of
lying and effortlessly
being
the only living one.

eyes are no windows. they are your reflection.
do not walk, do not walk;
see your own flesh in there? yes, stay still.

remove my clothes.
w
Bitlet 09 - PoliticsWhen I speak of Carolina, cicadas sing in my memory
and I want to shout so you, little sister, might understand
the way a creature smaller than my hand can stand
with its brethren and shake my arrogance, how each
of their voices alone are just the sliver of a whisper -
but singing together they become thunder.
HalfI learned about flowers
by splitting apart their stems
with precision and an Exacto knife;

but I learned about fractions
from the boy who kept one half of a red chrysanthemum
and gave me the other.
SuffocationI found a vintage denim jacket
in the bottom of my mother's closet,
underneath a black-and-white montage
of shoebox photographs with burned edges.
Like she had been trying to asphyxiate
the memory of my father
but kept coming up for air.
Our FaithOur Faith is the ironic nonbeliever
in anything beyond this earthly flesh.
She writes about the future as a lost bohemian utopia,
a place her starving readers need,
we who have known
in our deepest parts a feeling
like forgetting how to climb stairs
mid-step,
we who have dreamt of mattresses
on deflated inflatable beds, weekend eyes gummy,
mouths sticky and full of a taste we can't spit out
while we wait for more time
and for the train to arrive, finally.

Our Faith writes a someday like cheesecake in our mouths,
thick and real as childhood dreams of flying,
and when we're waiting for nights of humid neon freedom,
waiting to r
Hokkaido at NightThe Betula trees have ossified again
that the wild dogs may take to their bases
with delight
ring-barking them in the winter-night
all mad-eyed, saliva-jawed and rabid.

The mottled coats of the hounds
shimmer under a waning moon
that has petrified
in the black-snowed feckless sky
a distant, wood-grained-stony bowl of ginko, sluiced
and facular.

Saru River is whispering her stories
in Epicurean logic
or Pagan shorthand,
tales of being a widow
all her particles run diligent and singular
and the riverbed
runs short of breath
flowing low on jutted memories,

above, in the wash, nocturnal catfish are seized
in spasms of pure being
spotted
the girl who lost her feet.she is the type of girl to bleed a number of different colours
instead of the too-common red; to dress the stars up in smiles
so they'd stop crying starlight on the earth;
to clean her mind with the dustpan and brush she hides beneath her
bed sheets when the sunlight disappoints her, and the
sparkles of the water don't look like anything but water anymore.
she knows the secrets of those who'd long ago stitched their
lips shut with lies of insubstantial beauty and inferiority,
because she's been around the block a few times and can identify
Mrs Nosy from Ms Heartbroken right down to
Mr Loneliness –
and she is the kind of girl
The Phoenix Man1.
After my bird died,
we sent him off to
the kind of mortician
who knows how to turn
bodies into bonfires,
the same guy who I imagine
can turn anyone into a phoenix--
the winged and the four-legged,
the bubblers and the breathers,
the feral and the friendly.
Once he's through, he slips each soul
through a doggie door, back to God
or to science or someone.

He returned my bird to me
in a box that looks as dignified
as a pyre. I never got to see the smolder
that had been there, the dismissal of feathers,
but the Phoenix Man left me a slab of cement
that remembered my bird's footsteps
before drying over.

You have to have a
Off TopicIt takes twelve minutes
to assemble sixteen desks
in a perfect circle.
Or as perfect as I can get it.

Then it takes another hour
for the first stragglers to wander in, seating themselves.
The professor always arrives seven
minutes before class begins.

He sits on the left side
while discourse flows easily among
the discordant voices.
The exchange rate on ideas
is ten seconds of silence for a halting opinion,
unsure of itself,
but backed up with a quoted passage
from page one twenty-three, read aloud then cut off -
contradicted by a second opinion.

The first voice breathes easy;
the spotlight eyes are elsewhere.

In the
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More from `LiliWrites

things i am getting better atmeandering.

comparatively caressing the curvature
of broken bodies and flower petals. an elbow,
I have learned, is not so different from a tulip.

speaking contemplatively
& creating similarly.

recognizing your hands
as life preserving devices;
grasping with intent.

purposefulness.
For Beauty's Sake?Is it for vanity's sake we remake
ourselves in the next generation's face?
Do eyes and lips and hair a full soul make,
or do conscience and mores also share place?
The legacy left behind lies ahead:
not in DNA strands, replicated
rather in kindnesses easily shed
and big ideas, praising words quickly said.
The world weeps with children aplenty,
hungry, enslaved, pitiful in the streets.
What use to them, rigid identity,
who, in seeking food, often find defeat?
Beauty resides not in a comely face
but in our ardor for this human race.
What's LeftThey found him hung like meat
waiting to be salted.

Accidental suicide the paper read.
Thirty-two and drunk, foolish
and wasted: A portrait strangers
might examine for poems about life
and death and the unsubstantiated
point to everything.

And we are wordless, mindless,
awed by the severity of grief;
               each alone in a cavity
               of communal questions.
_Un_Expected& it broke my heart so
I chose boiled broccoli
over apples, preferring
a sulfurous stench
to the perfume
of your favored fruit.

Between swallows,
I contemplated clichés.
BoyMany women will write poetry
from you. They will translate
your nose into an apostrophe
your smile to the front side
of a parentheses, the back
to tears only once admitted.

They will filter your father's ashes
into adverbs that define your fingers
quaking along skin and sin
toward fibrous paper. 
 
They will dismiss your flaws
as improperly placed commas
or periods born before their time.
They will inspect, perfect
& infect you with emotions
you never learned to muster.

But none of them will know
you as I did: a boy, bent
beneath the waves of love
and glad for it.
Death to the ConspiratorI harbor a foolish hope that sensation might flee my body, though I know it cannot be so.

The guards surround me and make an awful commotion - boots clicking sharply against cobblestone floors, guns and belts rattling with each stride. I feel the vibrations in my teeth. A minister walking just ahead snorts loudly every third or fourth step, as though trying to clear his nostrils of the prison's stench.

I had forgotten the scent of a warm summer morning. We leave the gates and stone walls behind and step into the sun. It washes my vision in creamy white. Someone unfolds a black umbrella. My vision returns. There is green grass - rich, moist,

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June 1, 2012
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:iconliliwrites:
An oldie that I dusted off and revised slightly. I'd love some critique.

:iconthewrittenrevolution::iconcritique-it:

1. How does the flow feel? Is it too stilted? Should I revise some line breaks?
2. Does the imagery feel appropriate? I wrote this a long time ago in a different state of mind and I can't decide whether it feels too dramatic. :P
3. Is the Ra/Aphrodite mention too much, or does it tie into the title well?

Critique for #theWrittenRevolution: [link]

Thank you in advance. :heart:
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:iconfuzzyhoser:
`FuzzyHoser Oct 1, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Oh, this is beautiful... :heart:
I can tell I'm gonna have a dandy time going through your gallery more closely soon enough. (:
Reply
:iconliliwrites:
`LiliWrites Oct 1, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Ditto! :D
Reply
:iconpseudovanity:
!pseudovanity Jun 25, 2012
"I didn't mention worshiping
the cracks in you."

your words are impeccable. :heart:
Reply
:iconliliwrites:
`LiliWrites Jun 30, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks very much. :heart:
Reply
:iconkitanahasanobi:
~KitanaHasanobi Jun 20, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
1) I rather like the flow myself. It isn't rhyming obviously but the flow is really nice and well put together.
2)The imagery is amazing, I can see these two bantering. I can see what she envisions and how in one simple moment shes day dreaming and thinking about all these things while the other is clueless.
3)I like the mention of Ra/Aphrodite. It gives a good amount of drama to the poem. It gives good imagery and it helps us see just how deep the speakers feelings go.

I really like this poem. You did a great job.
Reply
:iconliliwrites:
`LiliWrites Jun 30, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks very much! :heart:
Reply
:iconkersee9:
=kersee9 Jun 14, 2012  Professional Writer
"...whisper depletion
into each others' irises."

omg this is one of the most beautiful lines ever written--you are the bomb, lady. :)
Reply
:iconliliwrites:
`LiliWrites Jun 30, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Aww, thanks Lisa! :heart:
Reply
:iconpoelee:
~Poelee Jun 11, 2012
I love the lines: "I didn't mention that I wake / to damp laughter thinking / madness could be attractive if it meant having you." It was very thought provoking. However, I was confused by the strophe about "depletion." Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't quite figure out what this meant, and how it related to the larger poem. The beginning worked very well, with the dialogue and the tone was very evocative. Overall, I like this poem a lot. Great job!
Reply
:iconliliwrites:
`LiliWrites Jun 30, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks for your thoughts! :heart:
Reply
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