[x]

Your Breath (A Little Bird Told Me)I buried a tiny bird today, in the rocky patch
out back, just beyond the gate,
where weeds grow near the garden and
the shade of a young tree hangs
over the sunken hole

and as I buried that little bird,
who was black with white belly
who had white spots, pokadots
trailing up black back and feathered
wings, I watched the wind gently
move those ruffled feathers,
ever so slightly, like flight without
movement

it is funny, for I thought this is
how your breath must be, cigarette and
coffee smell, as you blow smoke out
with a smile, fragile, like porcelain,
so easily broken, like the little body
now buried in the backyard

but st

I Mean to Get You AloneYou have sharp
pulse-elevating teeth
the stuff I imagine heart attacks
are made of

I'm bent on selling you a handful of smiles
specifically crafted
to distract you from the fact that
I have almost nothing to say

and now you're steering this conversation
in a direction that suggests you've

forgotten that I
don't watch movies or do much of
anything but work which maybe

explains why one glass of wine gets me
wrapped around you
car to streetlight
crash style
mangled limbs
breeding curious onlookers and my insurance has
expired

you're leaning in and all I can think is
I don't have insurance

if she were any more tomato she'd be blueberryxvii.
i want to write about how this world of
absolute truth, knowledge, and solid food—

that which we hold high between two fingers is always
full of watery applesauce and little white half-truths.

and about how utterly strange
it is that all the simple things that people
write about on pages are, in reality,

very few and far between.

xvi.
and i want to write about how there is
peace and war and
poverty and treasure and
cruelty and sometimes,

sometimes,

small and
important
moments
of grace.

xv.
i want to write a poem about why the hell i'm wasting
my time writing poems when i could maybe
actually be doing something produ

don't get tired of elephants yetI've had my crippling moments.
They'd either start in my stomach
with an ache like broken glass
or stab me right in the catharsis,
somewhere near my heart or breath
or maybe my left foot.

I wouldn't know how it feels
to hurt to walk, but I imagine
with a destination like farther,
it's no pilgrimage.
So take the burden off your back.
Life is not a sandstorm
and your lungs are only a mirage
if you expect to see your breath
every time you breathe.
So take a breath

back, just one step

and listen with your smoke signals.
Help is on the way.
I just can't promise
it knows much about this lifetime.
It's the same way I could never promise
elephan

SolsticeOnce upon a time, when you were still sunlighthouses and shimmering existence wherever you were needed most, you found him. He was November, shaky on his first last legs, and you saw through the mind-twistings he feigned to the mind-twistings that were really there, knotted up in his dreams.

You were still birdsong then, and thunderstorms, and your bodyheat melted the frost claws that held him tight. You held onto him as his November deepened. When he howled, you howled with him, and the wind played with your voices and pressed the softness of your lungs against your cageribs—and then against each other's.

November became solstice, and

Send Me the Raintoday, they're all talking about the fires.
the people on TV, the voices on the radio,
the mouths that open and whisper
and softly touch tongues. even the sky is

revealing black plumes of smoke,
flaunting shameless and seductive curves.
the rain's been too dry and the lightning
isn't wet enough, panic is
rising out of control in this
burning city. that's

not all;
we have a crisis on
our hands- the balloons are
running out of air and even

the experts don't really know why,
and on top of those sinking rubber toys

my soul is losing moisture
faster than the crackling grass under the duress of flame.
i'm sta

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.

Hubris.today
we're younger
than we're ever gonna
be.

i. and we finally did it,
drove to the mountains
watched meteors
and let the mattress
grow damp
under our love
under the stars

ii. there are things to
be reconciled

iii. my eyes sting like
chlorine, but from
crying,

I finally disappointed
them;
the highest order of shame

iv. but you cannot put
people into pockets;
good, bad
don't mix
with them

v. and I cannot choose
who I love

vi. your lenses are straight,
elite and proud
mine, open and accumulating
filth

vii. maybe
I should run away more often,
we never talk like this

viii. and you have to realise
that I live in

Va'eiraThis was a lesson in just how quiet it can be
when you don't make enough noise.

Me, holding a toy gun to a stranger's head
"Remember when things stopped being ridiculous?"

You, eating dandelions in a midnight field
"About the same time things stopped making sense."

A boy in church camp carved a small crucifix
for his arts and crafts project. He won the blue
ribbon and a brand new Bible. The next morning
I found it hanging over our cabin door.
A toad was nailed to the cross.
Still breathing.
Still breathing.

Sometimes we wake up early enough to hide the evil from our world.
Still breathing.

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

A Dancing GirlA girl stubs busted toes
across cigarette sidewalks
and rippled parking lots,
shatters her music box,
her mother's dying swan,
to dance with vagaries
for the dawn of her city.

She dances violently
for every chaired cripple
and the politically corrected,
handicapped by society.

She weeps in corners
with the coroners who
uncover bodies under bridges,
every vagrant of her city.

She sets fire to roof tops
where falling stars nestle,
runs rusted fire escapes
that lead to dead end allies,
and turns over dumpsters,
raging for a way out.

The Substitution ParadigmThe Substitution Paradigm

Ramu came up to our table. Glaring at me, he said, “You either order something or get out.”
I glanced away from the threat, and turned to Raghav. A single drop of sweat was running down his brow. Ramu saw that too and identifying his prey, he sprung.

Swinging around, he faced Raghav, “Order something or get out.”

Then Ramu just stood there. It was not as if we had rehearsed it before hand, but he knew. He knew that my co-occupants generally folded in the first round. Only the stout made it to second level, but they too buckled under Ramu’s relentless gaze.

I always had a policy of n

Souls and SparklesTo write something that is meaningful to someone else, you must first write something that is meaningful to yourself.

There are a thousand rooms in each person's mind, and each mind is a maze because it has been tangled. The hallways are criss-crossing and clumping, like long hair in the wind. Society has made it so.

We all have impure thoughts. Things that would make us "bad", unequal, or imperfect. Thoughts that make us different in gloriously unusual ways. We are born into the world unashamed, but then we are taught the unspoken words. Words that are rules. Words like normal, like good and bad, ugly and pretty. We are taught that if we d

Like petals and leavesWhen she thinks of him, she thinks of tree branches:
spindly fingers spread out, stretching
in angles wide for handfuls of sky.

And she thinks of him.

She thinks of him digging his toes
into soft, damp sand,
wading in shallow depths before
being carried by crescents of the sea.

She thinks of him in a blur of curls, in the
warmth on her waist and the coolness on her lips,

pressing the memories and the maybes
like petals and leaves
to paper.

And she thinks of him.

October EyesSuch gentle colors drip across your freckled shoulder blades.
A quilt of puddled watercolors soaked in auburn shades.

Spun of golden rivulets and rinsed in autumn skies,
So many endless currents swimming through your lonesome eyes.

Brushing under fingertips and over shattered songs,
Unraveling like morning glaze against my paling palms.

With beauty like October hills and hollow as the skies,
The water drops against the earth will be our lullaby.

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More from `secondmagpie

tuesday smiles

tuesday jones
wraps his fingers
round the roots
of all bad dreams

smooths them with
his wrinkled palms
and folds them
into morning doves

with paper wings
and paper hearts

they fly around
his hollow skull
make nests below
his hat and coo

behind the sad
disease of
honest eyes
days are longer
older still

but his fingers
fold the paper into
origami spring

the camera smiles

kodak moment:
picket fence and green lawn
a girl made of nerve gas
in stockings and mary janes;

her boy with perfectly parted hair
and a kosher smile.
the arm disappearing behind
her waist suggests childish fingers
have found the back of her pleated skirt
to touch a fine-haired thigh.

another box of sepia photography.
the boy without his softer edges,
traded for faded fatigues.
he hunches alongside a dark korean woman;
it feels like the mute tones have sucked
the life from him but the smile
is still kosher.

the camera forgets his face
for months, years
distracted by a baby boy
who will grow up homosexual
and a girl that w

hind sight twenty-twenty

At one time, we followed
the fires of July like fools in summer
with heat smothered on our raw anatomy--
but fall has wrought out kindling into ash,
carried it away on the earth's currents and sighs.

The girls with perfect pleats and polished mary janes
catch the oak's abandoned children
and pale-downed arms reach for the sun-bleached clouds
of late September

and when the boys with all their false antiquity
come searching for pig tails and rounded thighs,
we watch the snow eat an old world.
From our seperate parch benches,
cigarettes lay crumpled on the ground;
dead soldiers from our last war.

But when I open my eyes,
I see th

A, A, a, a.

eating sweetbread
in the afternoon reminds
me of humid mornings
in my grandmother's kitchen

she, washing dishes in cold water
I, practicing my cursive
on blue-lined paper,
with long lines of

A, A, a, a

through twenty-six letters
that felt hundreds longer
when waiting for sweetbread,
cooling on the stove

shower poemI see the subtle curves of you, my muse,
blurred by the transparent fish which
swim across my shower curtain
(i promise, my beloved,
i watched with idle admiration
and nothing more).

Past the smell of steam
(and o! the gentle sound
of water down your form)
I hear the despondent love-call
of a foghorn at midnight
(never has love blinded me more
to hear its clumsy goose-honk
as cupid's song).

"I'm terribly in love," I tell you.

You step past my shower curtain,
past the mist, nothing more than words
(beautiful words in my bathtub)
and I see love in more languages
than I was

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hindsight

by `secondmagpie, Aug 25, 2011, 12:39:49 AM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

At one time, we followed
the fires of July like fools in love
with heat smothered on our raw anatomy--
but fall has wrought our kindling into cinders,
carried it away on the earth's currents and sighs.

Here we see the girls with pressed skirts and
polished Mary Janes catch drifts of oak leaves,
pale-downed arms reaching for the bleached clouds
of late September,

and when the boys with all their chivalry abandoned
come searching for pig tails and rounded thighs,
we watch the snow eat an old world
from our separate park benches.
Cigarettes lay crumpled on the ground,
dead soldiers from our last war.

But when I open my eyes again,
I see the red glare of crackling embers
over my shoulder in the naked past.
The snow, shapeless in the winter air, catches
against my mouth and tastes of ash.

hindsightby `secondmagpie

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

old thing, refound and rehashed.

edited, since, hello, this got a DD while i was gone and had some things i was still displeased about.

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-10-04

hindsight by `youthculture
( Featured by ^neurotype )

love 3 3

~~joy 0 0~~

wow 1 1

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

fear 1 1

~~neutral 0 0~~

~Ateendra Dec 26, 2012

Reminds me of Schism. <3

~oceanmemories Nov 1, 2012

I swear I used to be able to write like this. But no. My writing is always more disjointed. I'll fav this even though it had a DD and has been fav'd a million times by others. I'll do it just to remind myself to push myself to focus and cut and parse and trim and simplify.
Always in hindsight.
Thank you.