[x]

Survival of the IllestAre those hints of lemon I detect?
Look, I'm just here to get wasted, don't try
to make it more than that.

I'd drink motor oil if I thought
it could get me high; chase it with a shot
of antifreeze
so
you can keep your survival instincts,
locked up
in that pretty velvet box (along with all
those other things
you thought you could convince yourself
you lived for). Instincts are the bare
bones of the impossibilities we wanted
to believe in,
remember,
those times you tried to tell me that
adrenaline was God's way
of saying
that
we were His chosen ones, we were
special, we were free.
I tried to tell you that instincts an

tree, fiddler crabIt took days to hollow out the soft parts
of the trunk, dig out the tree-flesh and sap,
polish the raw wood so that when he sat,
there would be no splinters. He carved his name
into the side, like a blessing, a declaration
of good fortune, and stowed his forest inside.

PlowIt's finally snowing again,
blankets of peace falling
with a freshness that lacks innocence.

Nearly forgotten, they're here as expected,
clearing the streets,
trying to push aside all the worry
that makes things unsafe, but

the steel mouth askew grates against my heart;
its thick bass scrape pushing more than piles of white aside,
it pushes my blood aside too,
piling it up in the corner of this pumping vessel that falters,
ice-caked and bitten, stiffened,
and keeps faltering,
again,
and again,
and again,
until the air is silent
and the street no longer shivers in torture.

The only evidence is the blanket of white
that keeps

the hungry look...the hungry look,

the wolves
weaving through
and around
the gully of your throat like wraiths,

we can feel you rusting, lost one;

i know that drainpipes and fenders
begin to crackle after winter wet

and that there’s a touch of snow
in all of us,

but no one,
no one could hold you as tightly as you do,
your whole body, bloodless in this arrest,

and if you will not let your fetters show
i will show you
there’s a place for going, and you haven’t gone there yet;

where quantum particles, once in contact, can retain a connection
even when separated

where you
wander up to a stranger
with your shirt inside-out
and say &lsq

What I Know of MadridI dream of Madrid
Because I know nearly nothing about it

Except that the heat is tangible
And sits in a layer beneath the skin
And the sweat of the heat is silk
I imagine it tastes of honey and wine

Except that the churches are tall
And God still has a fist of gold
Just as he has a palm of silver
Shaded in the vaulted arches of another age
The cheekbones of giants holding up the world
There the air smells of musk and incense
That has long since been swept away
By the wings of the doves that dance where the choirs sang.

Except that the nights are long
And the golden lights filter across the water
Like a sunset sleeps on the sil

preludesi.
blue rose into the city backdrop
like balloons, a million for the
morning sun prelude.

ii.
i've not slept a dream
but i have cried a salty face
and letters spilled like beans
into my moleskine,
almost as virgin as i once was
with few stories between my covers.

iii.
the kettle's belly boils
like my head upon a pillow.

iv.
i am guilty for rarely finishing my tea
even when i use the small mugs;
pour, rinse, repeat.

v.
perhaps today i will play dead.

vi.
perched behind my blinds
it dawns on me that i am surrounded
by walled neighbours, strangers,
they're just preludes to lovers
the way i am always
prelude to the one.

on commuting with no hurrythere you go
lighting matches in the rain,
walking with two feet
that the gods gave you
because they cannot walk,

heading home as if with news
of some miraculous disaster,

counting the steps between yourself
and the clouds that disappeared
behind the grey veil of October.

thunder and lightning unfold
so close above

and you dream of a destination
somewhere in the south

where birds and stormy weather coexist.

behind you there is nothing,
running water will erase
every footprint you have left
on the dark sand of this metropolis.

before you there is distance,
enough to live your life
in a constant state of travel,

but not n

ich liebe dichdaylight wakes me up and i turn into the green moth on the windshield.
a few months ago i would have died to be someone with the same kind of pulse
as you. i wanted to know what it felt like to breathe your same
air and listen to the fabrication of your words, your lies like lists of things
you wanted me to hear, essays crafted to the palaces of my mind.
you knew what i wanted because you know the architecture of so many women—
not seeing my poisonous nature, the blisteringly sweet aftertaste that crumples
you into me again, again, again, each hit better than the last. together
we chase the dragon, needing more and more of each o

cosmic background radiationThey say that the big bang was not an actual "bang". It was really just static. Static, like the interference of radio waves. Of course, the universe did not happen instantaneously. The big bang took 760,000 years to happen. 760,000 years of static, and bang, the universe happened.

I get myself together and actually go out. I go to see the New York Philharmonic perform the works of John Cage at Lincoln Center. I walk out during the second movement of 4'33". There's a very small difference between life and death. I walk home, my chin pulled down against my neck. I hum a constant note, providing myself with my own tinnitus.

I focus on this no

red leaves and Robert Frost.When I was young, my virginity was sacred. Entire religions pray over it and my father bought a gun so long as it meant protecting it.

We throw away half of our refrigerator each week – meanwhile, 24,000 people die of starvation every day.

Hardest part is, sometimes wasting things can't be helped.

At the bus stop, before I could drive, boys would ask for my phone number while I tugged up the neck of my shirt. Asked me how old I was while I crossed my legs under my skirt.

I told them I had a boyfriend even when it wasn't true, because they'll always respect another man more than my disinterest.

Hearing "I love you" for the first time

crystallophonethere is a punchcard sin
like a queen of spades smoldering in an alley.

Engine,
you hear how the gears churn,
singing faster than we did before
back when black magic dropped like a
pair of socks from the sky with supplies
taped to a note that said
(oh, look at you now)
'U.S.A.,
freedom.'

such a beautiful brain:
what
what girl
runs on gasoline?

have a gallon
or we can call it a balloon,
and a new pair of glasses
for your tapered eyes
(you peel the bark back on the logs,
darling,
but you're not sure what you see),
and life says,
either nail jello to a tree,
successfully,

or keep your
icicles hanging from the eaves,
ca

IfWe can
draw lines and give them names
like elements
as they are discovered

Or etch into our skins
this soloecal desire
until it is impossible to tell
where words stop
and life begins.

I would

Find a common rhythm that includes
you in my arms, my hands
and lungs and thoughts
tracing the outline of you
entangled with me
colliding like two lost particles
locked in a shared gravity
drifting through the vacuum
of space.

I could.

Exhale, and
remember
sentence structure.

KnowledgeIn a fever dream, black dooms descending

He lies rapt in stupor.
The windows tilt from his halo, the dry
heat ticking, each death rattle measures light into
reflections- form a periscope. One eye is all
that is needed to see. People

stutter along streets, gloom draped. Voices
soften and stretch, heard through memory and dreaming-
one hundred shadowy watchers meld to tarmac. Only one enters.

Yard lights convulse, scald twilit moments, birds
settling on flares. He blinks,
old as time- skin a coral of waxes, leather from his own glow. Eyes,
molten yolks still glimmer beneath lids, fat sunken. She watches,

notes of orange blossom

i want to tell youimagine a world without gender
a world where we are not confined
to the arbitrary interpretations of
an inexact biology. imagine we could
rise above the places
below our waists, reside instead in
graceful hands, in angled cheekbones
in some deeper conception than this
skewed perception of you.

I strip myself bare of unforgiving flesh,
squinting behind dim caverns of girl parts--
what are girl parts? all we have are beating
hearts.

I sit inside this trembling body, shoulder
to hunched shoulder,
stacks of bones too unsure
to be brave enough to tell you that
my gender will never fit on the plastic sign
above a bathroom door.

a

sunrise, yulethis was the year of traditions begun. the world still dark, the morning still early, i climbed into my uncle's car. we drove out to the ocean, where the rippling sea fuses with the sky. white-headed eagles were perched still in trees. they cocked back their heads, opened their hooked mouths and screamed.

across an empty parking lot where once a cat had followed us. over driftwood pale with frost and sand hardened by the cold, we walked. our breath came out of us in thin plumes. it rose above us and hung there like smoke signals to the gods.

there were gulls on the water, gulls sifting through sand, gulls with their grey backs and fa

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babylike a soft
cancer

a medicine
without a cure

a message
without feeling

promises
without truth

like the softness
of quicksand

like music

lunatic
hearbeats

without measure
colliding
like a soft cancer that keeps
dividing
as
infinite doubt
spreading from
lips to eyes

baby
like
you're a cradle without
warmth
and death-tremors
shake the
hallways
with growth and pain
and you're defiled
like a climax
eroding

shiver baby
please
i'll make you
make me
corrode
sliver
pinch
exclaim
symphony
mince
slice
repeat
pe
ra

pink filmcut

dust
gold
ambrosia
a naked infinity
cut

the corona
of the soul
explicitly
nude
phallic
raging and bemoaned
a bound leatherette
cut

the pure untamed wilderness of her
she's the
entrance
the
passage
a
night
comer
coming
cut

blood like wine
skin like cocaine
smooth
yes
i love you
cut

it drips
and whirls
and toils
and splashes
and look-
she's
undyingly
cut
cut

i made her
bleed
roses
i embellished her
with thorns
cut

cut
down
cut

rust
splintered floors
dust
this is
open heart
surgery
cut

what
happended
cut

the melancholy
of her laughter
makes me
curl up
and wrings my organs
and
an

calamity's intentcomeonman
are you so stifled
in your
revolution
barring the notion
we are soldiers of for-
tune
singing
songs of
human trust
i bar the lust
of betraying you

commonman
friend, foe
friendly i may
know what the general
goal is
to know what joy is
in dreams of cages
rapt
brain-lapsed
in suits of
armor, strapped on since
birth;
fathermother
decided life's
worth

we are soldiers of
soon soon soon soon
blooming and to bloom
and never soon enough
and the bastard end
of a gross national product

our fortune is
calamitous
intent
the pages in our story
books are written
with pain
and repentance
and piss poor divide

the aspects of livingpart one: beverages

the devil in the angel's
teacup
with some
milk and honeykeeps her
strong, going
resistant, as by introducing
slightly
a bacteria
over millennia

two-percent evil
never did anyone
any harm
did it?devils don't
have the
time for tea

on a diet,
Lucifer sips
on a cold glass
of water
and nibbles
on a
salad

God drinks
straight vodka 'cause
there's nothing in-
herently evil
about
vodka

most
humans don't give
a damn
about what they
slurp up.

(Jesus lights a fat
cigar
and says "go on...")

whiskey is
like
used holy water
filtered
through a nasty
case of the blues

and sometimes
cool jaz

womanizedshe is
not an object
nor a slave
does not lie in wait mindlessly for
her master to come home
she has no master, but
oh, she does have a home
turned into a cage
man
what have you done?
she withers in this
stereotype gender pigeonholed
if you stopped talking
then you could listen
even for a little bit
a mind filled with worries
a soul burning away
tick-tocking and yearning
like a
little
clockwork
fire of love

impossibly untouchableevery inch of
space around her breathes
and crawls
closer, swirling
and hovering and perfumed

every notion says
"soon"
and never soon enough
for she's gone
before any move
is, and could be
taken

and the area
and the perimeter I wander
in, i'm wrangled into
heartattacks
into cocktail, silk-skirt deathtraps
to the evening i abide
she's wrapped within
this impermeable grin

she's not insufferable, just
impossibly untouchable
so i laugh, all i can
because she's still
at the very least
a friend

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silkworm

by ~83rd-Dream, Jul 27, 2012, 9:19:03 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

the morning brazen with
work, clambering from our beds
still pulling out of dreamtime
hypnosis; the shiver, backbone rumble
leaden work of unintellectual nature
how do you dream without success?
cream molding coffee groaning
jerking out of stasis
work a lifetime away
every monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday

all my diplomas are unwritten
murmuring lullabies of grand grab bags
sickening amounts of cash
spindles in the head of massive
debt consolidation one fucking big weight
chest exhaling invisible depressive
napalm of a meta-catastrophy
sunken into little corners
of an apartment disorder

little silk threads are falling all around
showering in memory mess
sands of dreams filling pits
living indifferent
to clamber or forget
a legacy to be groomed away
verbose shuddering in a
fatalist machine

silk winds through dream after
sunrise into embraces shrieking
lividity cursing infinity
endless explosive majesty
hard earned money sweet jelly
consume consume
tornados of televison and fornication
lost my vision
imagination optimism

a silkworm landed in my brain
a cocooon of tenement living
a diaspora of worthless paychecks
a myriad of poor man's lust
a mayhem of clouded judgement
a soothing coating of firewater
a puff of addition here
a stifling claustrophobic choking there

as night time drips
brews and busts
i'll be boiled from my husk
unjust unjust
nothing is
i must i must
dream harder
nothing
is harder

silkwormby ~83rd-Dream

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

Inspired by: [link]

Featured in Daily Lit Deviations for August 26th, 2012: [link]

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-12-29

The suggester writes, if this were a novel, I wouldn't be able to put it down. silkworm is by ~83rd-Dream ( Suggested by `OfOneSoul and Featured by ^NicSwaner )

love 2 2

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~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~v-espertine Mar 24, 2013 New member

i want to get lost in and live in this poem <3

~kartiksharma Jan 5, 2013 Student General Artist

Beautiful! ♥
Love this piece

~Karinta Dec 29, 2012 Student General Artist

It's like a tone poem. Beautiful, splendidly written.

~83rd-Dream Dec 30, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Thank you very much

~Karinta Dec 30, 2012 Student General Artist

You're welcome, dear.

=CrematedMan Dec 29, 2012 Student Writer

Wonderful experimentation with sound, imagery, alliteration, rhetorical questions and repetition. The enjambment structure seems intentionally disjointed, not to my taste, but certainly well done. It builds strongly to a satisfying conclusion, and though the ambiguous meaning and rapid imagery builds a kind of chaos and a distressed voice that the title doesn't really reflect, the whole piece comes together very well and you deserve the DD more than most, congratulations.