[x]

petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.

The SiegeThe first mile is always the easiest.
—Kyle Lynn to me, circa 2006

Tell that to the ghosts,
men soaked in sand and blood spray,
storming the shores of Normandy.

First Infantry's sprint through coastal
trenches, up bluffs, under ruptured drays.
Tell that to the ghosts

huddled in half-channeled holes,
a captain's dash through shrapnel, gray
storm on the shores of Normandy.

A German boy adrift in the compost
of his legs, his elbows' grand flail.
Tell that to the ghosts

ripped in four by mortars posted
over Omaha. Dawn's evenly keeled decay
storming the shores of Normandy

ConfessionLips met in clumsy haiku,
against each other, pressed,
the way the earth touches the sky,
soft and whimsy as the dusk.

Tongues painted passion-
          sunset colors,
          halcyon atmosphere, infused,
-upon every awaiting space offered.

Metaphors dotted the hallows of limbs and tasted like the seasons-
          a bursting and vibrant spring,
          a hot and passionate summer,

leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
ful of careless farewells, spin and sway

The Death of VenusIf there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against,
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid--
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.

ersatzyour wake is the warm
languid whorl of a sachet-latté
morning after,
gone when six a.m. rain swirls
pavement scents of whiskeysmoke
& a careless caress away
under cinnamon-sugar grace --
and it was only ever this:
you were lovely
by trembled halflight, when you almost had
my summer-boy's eyes.

the hanged manThis little red book you call the human body:
take it up and shake it. Shake the flaking pages
out of it, shake it from endpaper to endpaper
until the last of the phrases are gone; shake it
until it's aching and empty, the soul of a bird.

I will give you new words.

hypergraphiashe writes in the empty spaces between the words
between the world,
world-weary fingers and toes and pengrips, knives
letter-opener swords, typewriter machetes

arm-wrestling with fate and the universe on a piece of paper,
computer screens painting faces with colors
stained-glass hyphenated hue-tint-shade glory
she waits.

she is patient.
she's their patient, doctors and nurses
emergency room, operating room, clinical study
stethoscope children

they wish fervently to cut her open.
her insides will be beautiful, they say,
beautiful and pink and full of words.
unwords, she says.

she writes on her skin, on napkins and paper bags
i

7.34mmA simple measurement
can make a man
lose himself; a blurring, no more
than a grainy smudge

a scant 7.34mm long
this rice-grain, seven weeks old
with one hundred and twenty nine
heartbeats per minute

—all this, from a mere sesame-seed of a heart

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.

city drowned cleanbirds fly bluer before a hurricane,
wings sharper, the bricks neater.
one train is always longer than the
other. i cried about it. the saturated
city, droplets of colour caught on
tape & rewinding, cups me in its
palms, i am a bug on its window,
imagining all of it underwater &
people clapping in a silent film,
the last dying bubbles curtsying
on their lips, for their marble town
the white skied & terrible atlantis.

blue sluicecast off care like blue
snowfields into rigid water,
and wash with mud the thrust
of earth, our skin soft as salt mines.
built you are
of bitch and buttercream,
of soured elements in the blue
dot of a pin-prick spotlight
and windowed skull.

we can watch the fire fade
into a black rat canvas,
into blue gates that tumble up
and loose finger grooves,
smear eyes across your face like warpaint,
faster and faster,
momentum in the race to nowhere.

and once done, we turn,
we go aground and push
up the lines of blue backs
orbiting the moons of that
rising ass, around corners,
a shattered life in starshine,
the masks
beneath the

Harvest MoonThree a.m. moonlight
across lazy dust motes; a
tree scrapes the window.
Your arm weighs on my hip like
whispered promises of love.

a memoryI remembered the afternoon I called you,
curled on my bed with someone's good book
in my palm, nestled softly in the waning light

and under my gently roaming fingers
the baby moved – not to my hand-touch,
but inside, an insistent flutter,

not like the swiftly beating heart
on the doctor's monitor, not like the slow
appearance of a plus-sign on a drugstore test.

I called you, my gently rolling daughter's
mother's mother. I called you like the woman
standing at my back while I held the kite string

on a pushy spring day, the diagonal shape so
far above us I could only feel the jerk of the
cord around my fingers, holding us t

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

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Your Eyes Are UnafraidI'm unsure of my fractured pendulum (time is now vague).
I watched you laugh up dust mites and bathe in lies.
Day-old saliva drowns your words--but not your heart.

Your mouth is frayed edges of the dark
phrases that seep from your stormy lips.
Typhoons of mistaken love (you wanted to believe I was her)
are lasting in the single digits
I'm unsure of my fractured pendulum (time is now vague).

Android fingers lurch from underneath the bed,
I scream, expecting her, but it's the Bogeyman.
She happens to be hiding there, deep inside his skin
It wasn't just my imagination because
I watched you laugh up dust mites and bathe in lies.

"One

Beneath the SmogShe wears moonbeams and a silky, white star
letting brilliant ideas foam at her lips,
never believing she'd go that far.

Dreams gone wrong by defiled hips
answering with a mandatory moan;
trading filthy words for better tips,.

When his words slip from the phone
Thoughts spring back to whispered promises.
Her heart beats to the dial-tone.

Daisy Chain-GangsI find myself ashamed
of my tumbleweed language
and the mountain-esque sea creatures
I drew on my notebooks.

[we’re vivid flashings
of the nightmares
you made me live]

You carved their marble faces into granite rocks
and washed their sorrows
in the words of your deceitful kings.

[now that we’ve made paper hearts
out of flesh and bone
I can die healthy and young]

Sparks of the truth crept
from underneath your pressed lips
as you whispered with snakes
tucked into your cheeks.

We are never alone.

WakiyaYour wing beats are folding clouds;
wire-wrapping feathers into coats
[and I’ll be]
peeling back weather-worn layers,
only to watch you fall.

When your dented beak
finally floated to the ground
It sent shockwaves of despair,
and I named you “She Sings To The Sky”
Because you’d always squawk about thunder
and how you missed it.
But mostly because you sang me lies
about a love you never had.

You were just a kid when I laid
out purples and pinks among the leaves
trying to ensnare you from the sky.
I was scared of you, once
only because every time those blackened
eyelashes fluttered I saw your l

Heart Stutter I struggled to breathe in the frigid air as we raced onto the upper-deck, the cold ripping at us as we wove through the crowd. Mama never let go of my hand, though I pleaded with her, “Ma, I’m 17. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“I will not lose you again, Andre,” she turned on her heel so that her crooked nose was nearly pressing against mine. She paid no heed to the shoulders bludgeoning her as people frantically brushed past us; I saw little Marie’s eyes sparkle with that youthful confusion.

“You never lost me Ma,” I said, biting my lip, “I wanted to stay.”

“Jeannette?&#

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Of Half-Filled Words

by `IrrevocableFate, Nov 28, 2011, 9:15:17 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

She 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 to catch it.

Of Half-Filled Wordsby `IrrevocableFate

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Personal.

It feels like it is missing something. I'm not sure how to explain it or if I wrote it that way. [It's been lingering in my massive document of unfinished and unedited works for a few weeks and I am suddenly in a poetry mood.]

^{^{Sometimes I feel like I don't know how to write anymore.}}

I am sorry for deciding to take over your inbox in pretty much every single area.

You always have my love you guys. Seriously.

I support #dALinkSystem!

lion skinned, rabbit hearted. i am awoken by a light tapping on my door and a kiss on my forehead. the stars still rest outside of my window; it is midnight and you are a hurricane. you have this stone wall around you; when we're entwined, i still feel canyons between us. when we're together, i feel we are apart. the cold air separates flesh and shows just how different we are.

you keep me 'til dawn, telling stories old and new. it is cold and my knees are to my chest, trying to fight off the chill. you pull the covers over my body, and somehow i feel even colder. the blankets are woolen, but not warm; the fibers scrape like daggers to my skin. i've never felt this fragi &

lion skinned, rabbit hearted i am awoken by a light tapping on my door and a kiss on my forehead. the stars still rest outside of my window; it is midnight and you are a hurricane. you have this stone wall around you; when we're entwined, i still feel canyons between us. when we're together, i feel we are apart. the cold air separates flesh and shows just how different we are.

you keep me 'til dawn, telling stories old and new. it is cold and my knees are to my chest, trying to fight off the chill. you pull the covers over my body, and somehow i feel even colder. the blankets are woolen, but not warm; the fibers scrape like daggers to my skin. i've never felt this fragi
'lion skinned, rabbit hearted' by =meganbreukelman and =ohsparrowsong

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-02-17

While it is personal writing, *IrrevocableFate's Of Half-Filled Words tackles the matter of sadness in a way that is both honest and engaging in its wording and imagery. ( Featured by $wreckling )

~~mad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

=LadyofGaerdon Oct 12, 2012 Professional Writer

Hi! Your piece has been featured in #Lit-Visual-Alliance's Fifth Allied Artwork Feature! Please

the article to bring attention to the feature. Thank you for being a part of the Alliance!

`IrrevocableFate Oct 16, 2012 Writer

Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh, thank you!

=LadyofGaerdon Oct 18, 2012 Professional Writer

~Erlebnisse Jul 7, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Ohmygoodness, I love this so much.
Your metaphors are absolutely perfect - obvious without being overdone, subtle without being esoteric.
Your writing impresses me so.