[x]

drawingThat drawing I did of me when I was young
has been erased
and drawn again
so many times
It's become quite smeared now
and indistinct
A mishmash of ideas once clear
blurred now
With experiences too many
too confusing
I've given up on philosophy now
And all religion
Thrown it all away
Quite away
It's useless
Useless

I can make nothing of anything
Can make nothing every thing

I burn the drawing of my youth

Prepared to die
Intestate

The Daily Sentence ProjectShe shifts her thighs to the same angles
where tectonic plates exchange glances.
The infant in her arms coos in haiku,
the phone crouching on her shoulder
barking in blank verse and bank terms;

where has the affection been displaced?

Perhaps the both of them are three full-
time jobs past romance and two cases
of chickenpox past the seven-year-itch

to be able to tell that dishwater softens
and oatmeal baths becalm their hands.

The kitchen tile is a haphazardous haven
for cloven shoes. She prefers slip-ons.

I took offMy day off.
I stand in sunlight
without asking.
I can watch it being day.

The mud is soft and cool at home.
I'd bury well without a casket,
I’ll be a naked pill for earth.

I build a garden box from wood,
smash my thumb.
Red bell
peppers;
too late for lettuce.

I had a premonition
I would live like this.
No one will remember me.
I’ll forget by Tuesday.

The Growing Seasoni.
we slipped between each other's flesh,
intoxicated on the nectar—
never careful enough
to avoid the bitter seeds
of a previous commitment.

ii.
each night the pregnant ache coaxes
wicked acts to replay
along my nerve endings and synapses;
each night, the gardener's
tending hands
rooting deep.

iii.
were I to untether myself,
to prune the growing stillborn
from my chest,
you'd have no secrets
conceived of sin;
no reason to carry my face,
my voice, my touch,
in a painful miscarriage
of our unprotected actions—

were I
less than a weed.

iv.
each morning my stomach rejects
the early hour
into my utilitarian b

endingNora,

I understand now

why you held your secret alone.

Death is huge and grasping,
it rocks you, catches the end

of your laugh, turns it inside out.

Death is always secret and always
alone, though

your cello wept with your raging grief
and my words tear themselves

from my throat.

But I know now, you must learn to forgive yourself
your own simple, ugly,

inexplicable human
death,

and let go of dignity
to find peace.

Film NoirPaint me greyscale.
Words hang thick like
cigarette smoke and slow jazz.
Turn your collar to the rain
and follow me into a 3 AM cab.

Give me your gritty romance,
Eyes flickering like
neon-signs
half past the red-light district.
Oh, you can touch,
my dear detective--
just don't leave any fingerprints.

In Riposte, Jswallow god's sense of humor, and tell me how it feels
to send gravity crawling on all fours- stir the remnants
of this violet collapse; ardent attachment:
muscular dystrophy.

play the accretion of your dilatory heartstrings for our silent mute
who raise a glass in toast to coalesce our beloved earth,
who study hagiography as a means of beautiful suicide
on lingering, listless oceans emptying unto itself.

and maybe your ascension was predetermined, perhaps
drawn in apologetic ink on the eyelids of our graceful blind,
who invented the word ugly to describe the fallacy of lost smiles
painted in shadow on your claustrophobic sighs.

virginity is like an envelopemy mother said her mother knew.
i wonder if she stumbled home like i did,
fifteen and beer-loose
tied to the door like a thunderstorm with black lips
and i wrote a story about disaster,
a quiet two sleds long.
a box full of beads, i swallowed
fifteen needles, mommy. don’t
tell me i’m not sorry.
don’t call me a whore you bag of bones
you lock-loose suitcase do you even
recognize me look at my face my toothache skin
i am not the one with the knife.

my mother never slept with a boy
who didn’t love her never let a boy
sleep on her while she lay awake beneath
the shroud of his skin breathing only
when her voice-box gathere

One-Way StreetI always thought
we would both leave,
but as you grew older
I wondered whether
one of us would be
left behind.

Our friendship failed
as strangers became neighbours
and you left the town
I’ve come to realize
is equal in spite and beauty.

And so I stayed
until eighteen
but return regularly,
through the fields
I walked in as a child
drinking the wine and champagne
I found in hedgerows.
I cracked them open
and swallowed both
the alcohol and broken glass.

I took a stone from the byway
to my new home
and in time
I threw it
into the wetlands
I discovered.

I’m reminded of the scar line
after I ripped my bicep open
on the barbed wire

The swerveI tore my flesh on the corner of the lake & bled in cubes

and my best friend knew the weight of my green eyes and tried to sell them
and the spring left me heavy in my skin and the air she breathed me
tasted of umami and B12 and water. I drank it all in just like water

and began the aviary process of collecting budding groves and early springs.
you came to me with eyes like empty jars begging for sparks

and the hundred scraps of paper of pretty lies in pretty cursives,
the firefly wings and peonies and ocean salts and river rocks
and you were the first one capable of rustling the dead leaves
at the creek floor, so those went in, too.

Bad Mouth Habitsi.
I carry God around in my lip like he's chew,
spitting his name out in poems like potholes,
I make everything a simile
for the hold he has on me.

ii.
When it comes to men,
I've the appetite of a Roman housewife,
I take, I taste, I tear,
swallow and then then toss up
for the next course.

iii.
I don't kiss anyone so dearly
as the glass pipe bridged between lips
and fist.

iv.
Jameson, you're an Irish Lad,
a young ram of bucking proportions,
I let you rattle around my mouth
til I herd you in
and down.

v.
Sometimes there's nothing so sweet
as the jack-hammer of angry words
or the steel trap clamp of silence.

I exercise m

Phoenixshe was
crimson epiphanies, molten elegies
enveloped by dirges of the dead, chanting:

when in god's world, sweet child
pray at the altars of silence

oceans bowed before the grace
of earth-worn eyes, reminders:
serendipity's lost cause.

gravitas and
freedom-- absorbed

absolving rays of enlightenment
shedding stardust skin, peeling
layers of reminiscence from
immolated bones

self-sequestered
flames

she is
sanctified white flags-
divine serenades of rebirth.

The First Thunder of JuneI could tell from the way
the truck barreled down the road,
how its motor revved and caught on the air,
that a storm was coming.

The dog shook,
his twelve-year hips aching with the effort
of tucking his tail between his legs
in the hope that such displays of submission
would appease the weather.
They did not.

The sky turned feral and spat on the house.
While my old-hound panted
with his panic-wide eyes,
mine filled with awe and lightning.

When Intending Permanence

When one intends "permanence",
one must write it with
a well-crafted ampersand.

Bellwether Curve--C.The handwritten footnotes
on either of my palms reads:
'our mouths are exits;
our ears are entrances.'

Dog-mark the pages
and highlight the words;
this lesson is rigged
and I have yet to learn
the grading curve
on a heart.

When we speak together
we listen separate
for where each other
is on the learning curve
and lean with the gradation
when we're inclined
to let ourselves
not know better.

Let's connect the dots
and plot the angle between us
before the curve gets too steep
and I find myself stuck
where x and y meet.

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A good (impression under the) influenceSo hard to prove your innocence

or competence, for that matter

while passing out in court
in front of juveniles
who hardly know the truth.

For that matter it is especially damaging
if said case is based upon the assumption

that you are not entirely sober.

The ridiculous nature of nomenclature Drunk PoemWhy is a flock of crows called a murder?
I think god became entirely too distracted
with a bottle of gin while making up language.

Who ever pointed to a puddle of brains
and said "crow?"

The idea of a homicide being likened to a bird is loquacious.

Any explanation of how this occurred
would be entirely too punctilious

Manhattan vs. New England Clam ChowderOh Manhattan Clam Chowder,

art thou not
the same as New England?

For you art
a very close neighbor;

perhaps not quite the girl next door,
a little dirtier
after being dragged from the sound;

you know how to get around,

like a boring skanky white girl
who pretends she's into hip hop

sort of the Lana Del Rey
of the soup aisle

The Drunk Project Poem 2That fishyface you make is so charming.

Oh
so
sweetly
kiss kiss kiss

making that face

until I dunk your head into the toilet.

Flush.

The Drunk Project Poem 1The best thing about parachute pants
is they won't
save your enemy

when you push him out of an airplane
for his lack of fashion sense

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[x]

Cleave

by *crossing-ariel, May 28, 2012, 9:56:45 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I could lay my head down
and sleep like the mad;
I could unglue every thought of you
ensnared
or inferred
if I must.
The way you unfurl at me, unfurl and unfurl
like a thick houseplant choking my room;
I can't dream in here, with you, there is no air. You speak;
your words
have gorged themselves on me.

The audacity of you
to see me in your light,
this is
incandescence of a different kind.
Spots left on my forearm
from your white-hot grip, they fade
like awareness...
again, I've been overcome.

....Have I stared too long
into the light? Everywhere I look,
you are an after-image.
I hate how I mimic
the swing of your arm when you're drunk,
all your elated moments stretched over me like
the skin of a balloon, tight and bloodless.

I am itching to burst;
I can not look at your image
without hesitation.

But wait--

You mustn't leave me
to this...
...this ritual of examination
of the pupils on the other side.

Tenderfooting, I scrape the fragments
of you
of me
from my heels
when we break.

I have grit the danger to dust.
Looking, is it glass or salt?
My tongue bleeds
one shade of salty red.

You back into your hiding place,
and wait.

Cleaveby *crossing-ariel

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

©2012-2013 *crossing-ariel

Finally (shame on me) reposting a collab I did with *FuzzyHoser ...I've put some in italics and left the rest alone to differentiate between the authors...won't say who was who.

Of course, this went so smoothly that I almost have forgotten who wrote what! *lmao* So Rachel, correct me if I'm wrong.

*Captain-BlackHeart 1 day ago Hobbyist General Artist

The rare moment where I just smile after reading something so good.

Reply

*crossing-ariel 1 day ago

I'm sure you can thank my Fuzzy for that.

Thank you!

Reply

*Captain-BlackHeart 1 day ago Hobbyist General Artist

....quite welcome, and I would thank her...but she would just slap me with whatever is at hand.

Reply

~schriftsteller Jan 19, 2013 Writer

Whoever is in italics sounds like Plath. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not, but it's lovely. The entire thing is lovely.

Reply

*crossing-ariel Jan 19, 2013

Thank you so much.

Reply

~schriftsteller Jan 26, 2013 Writer

You're quite welcome.

Reply

*Hfeather53 Sep 6, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Wonderful work you two!

Reply

*crossing-ariel Sep 6, 2012

Thank you.

This was the first of two collabs we did together.

Reply

~pomohippie7 Aug 2, 2012 Writer

Your wonderful work has been showcased here: [link]

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*crossing-ariel Aug 6, 2012

Thank you so much!

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