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Rose L Jan 2018
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Those bells of the sirens! A lullaby, distant
ringing so deep within my heart, quelling the valves
and commanding me outside! Further!
Into the warm earth.

Off he climbs
Into that thick outside! The air resistant against his legs
that hushes my ears, soft hands that soft my ears
down, down, tiptoes on the ground,
gliding in waves...
Rose L Oct 2018
Memory is false.
We didn’t used to breathe the same air as everyone else.
I don’t feel the hurt of what I felt
And the rain outside your window was warm
I like the art of your absence
I like feeling torn
And the rain outside your window was warm
Rose L Aug 2018
Cut close, to the chaste, and hold fast.
I always have been tired, and I've lost the energy to ask
In roundabout ways if you too feel pain -
You are the ice that all at once numbed my fingers
and made me feel again.
I go to bed to digress.
I've lived, and given, and breathed so deep,
all I can do now is think of you, and sleep.

I'm bleeding through, quite viscerally.
And I'd hate to beg of you a hand to staunch the wound,
but I'll barter with the you I once knew -
to take these bits of me you touched and chewed
and pull the skin right off.
Because although the taste of it is tough
A wound of you is still by you,
and its company will have to do.
Rose L Jul 2014
I want a room with you.
I want a house with a garden and paintings on eggshell walls
and to silence ourselves with birds on the lawn and a washing machine carrying its tempo
All I want is wildflowers in terracotta and linen all for us
sun drifting over carpets in the late afternoon and heavy cream curtains
I want your freshly washed hair and the pile of books you haven't read yet
cold drinks and heartbeats, trees that whisper in the wind and a peach mattress for the stars to watch us.
i love him so much. i love him so much
Rose L May 2017
Evening's over, feel alone.
Cold seeping in, through my bones.
Sunday morning, 10 o'clock, waking up
Heart racing, head hurting, throwing up.
Feeling empty, Monday morning,
how'd it go?
Posting pictures, looking awful, just for show
Still can't help myself, telling everyone -
I love nights like these, honestly, so much fun
Can't wait for the next one.
Rose L Jan 2017
This day, as winter dies -
cold, and heartless, and exposed - a December which lingers
and feels no shame in subduing me.
It was in January that I was bad; slipping back to ghostly fingers
spectres in the eyes of him, me, you -
others around us that let their busy laughter sit on the roads like mist.
The lonely chattering of teeth under scarves, hot conversations wet with breath dew
Quick thoughts. Openly sad. Feelings persist.
A layer of sleep coated my fingers, my hair. My cold feet.
And beneath my gloved hands danced anothers' thoughts I struggled to know.
Slipping quietly into a slower body; sleeping under a layer of snow.
Soon, I promise, I will get better again. As winter dies.
In the winter I get cold and reluctant. And I wake up easily in the night.
Rose L Jul 2018
Girl, your life shines
but sad poetry (probably) is all you will make.
what thousand or two did you forget?
Don't - get it all in your head.
Swallow that salavous moon ache.
When friends let shots of honey
cut black like hot wax and eat the kids -
Worship yet;
you have cool, bitter unrest
and sturdy shoes to play drunk like death.
Rose L Nov 2018
Rising heat
and the
various plastics, and metal. And cold
The cold that spreads and burns.
I can't see
but I know your form
and prise it from your hands,
Sweating.
The drip of the loosening end
and the fray
and the cut -
the cut that I make,
She mote it be that
indulgences rot in your palms if held for too long.
I think of berries all through winter
but fruits left in the mouth taste bitter
and the sugars burn.
Night passes, and heals me.
and the wheel turns.
Rose L Mar 2018
"For the moment, she soaks up all that she can."

Fragile, unaligned, bristling flesh.
Thoughts that stutter and repeat, breaking upon release
Fully human. Organic. Vegetative.
I touch grass and uncut daffodils,
And feel no fear at expression. No fear of wrong turns.
Merely a desire to grow towards the sun -
A sun gaining warmth with each day.
Rose L May 2018
The wet soil beneath the grass vibrates
with the same unending tension as the walls of my veins.
the Earth, my hypostasis. Shaking
and these soft, strengthless hands
can only do what they can, and pull you close.
Unfortunate, to find a man that
sends birds that whip, and buzz, and sting
laying secrets and carnal whispers in my ears
beating scars where you’ve been;
- I know only one form. A form I have not seen
but feel at that chord from the neck to my jaw, taught
with lips that web my nerves like threads
many have my body, but only you command my thoughts.
Those birds outside my window keep me awake
breathless and waiting – did you miss it?
And in how many words can I say
stop this fever, cold friend, or if I am for the axe
just – swing it.
Lying in jasmine, pale, blue-veined,
Playing in the dark, I don’t take breath
and you ask me yet…
I know you find it hard to believe that human lungs can't breathe
when drowned, when wet.
Arch your back. And feel as if you feel him
half-way across the earth but his cheek presses into you
and he always knows what to say.
Come, my love, feel this earth with me.
Feel the bridle and the shank and the strap around the ankles
- those hands of yours untie knots like God.
Rose L Jul 2018
Fast, please, and let that heart ache
just for a moment, the sun's in today.
Recall like chocolate that thick blood and all that ugly love.
After all this time, you whisper to me still,
an echo in a chamber filled with words and lines that make me cry.
I won't be bitter -
being bitter merely begs the roses up next spring,
pushing through the lawn, pale with over-watering.
The only difference now -
I have forgotten your smell.
Hard to be in love with a personality you have so clearly discarded,
his love.
perhaps, I will grow old, begging for return.
luckily, as the sun sets I keep him somewhere
between my pulmonary artery and the base of my vagus nerve,
a heartful love urge,
the lake of tears.
Rose L Jun 2016
I can smell it now. The smell of thick dripping sap -
bitter ****** dirt that rots at the corners of humanity
at our fingertips,
in our news headlines...
The smell of **** stifling the air, like the stench of death -
like burning pine needles -
It pervades, and never moves with the wind,
Heavy in the clouds, soot on our faces and inside our lungs
Don't inhale.
A piece of paper is nothing when it rots away in the dirt in an alley
It's words crumble and disappear in days
A letter does nothing when thrown at the wind
A letter does not begin to explain the complete destruction of a somebody,
The evisceration of a person.
The silent decay of someone's body -
Words can't explain the slow, bleeding out of America.
Hemorrhage is swept away from the streets but if you look in the gutters
In the corners, behind the bins you'll find gore,
guts, viscera that rots away and feeds the dirt.
It will only end when we hunt it down,
dig it out, scrape it out from underneath our skin like cancer -
Burn out anguish and pestilence and scorch the earth
these men walk on
Is that the cure?
Rose L Mar 2015
One morning, I met and ate with Sappho, and
as we watched the baited ducklets come and go
described to her a calming Violet i had found
within where seeded crops of crocuses grow
who strapped the sunlight as its belle bijou
and subtle symmetry that provided words
to break the heart and warm the blush skin of you
I told her of broken morning birds
simple songs robbed by her brushed deviled tips
I cried of endless pages cast in ink
to describe her perfect purple lips
of desperate letters to help me understand how her love thinks
All other stem of Violetta fail to me
to remind of the shadow cast over flowers then
or to undermine those bright pink cheeks i could see
in its petal hues - usual rhythm couldn't convey to pen
this wild moss of a creature that heavn's sink....
a smile, and she replied
"a picked and pressed flower
for a Violet of my own", said the Girl.
Alternative title: "When I Met and Ate with Sappho in the Night"
Rose L Jan 2018
I feel the old gods in me breathe.
Subtle hands, contracting intercostals,
feminine fingers that scream and wail when I let men with ill intent come near me -
feminine fingers that announce themselves as Athena, Diana.
Do you have a legacy?
I feel Nefertiti, Osiris, Iris, clench their fists in my gut when I cry in my sleep and wake up angry -
Hecate spits and twitches her paws when my undulating heart lacks the oil that flourished during her reign.
Wings over me, the contorted body of Nike. Protective but irate.
A shout, and a burst blood vessel in the corner of my eye -
by the aging moon this tumult of Dido's wild ichor inside me grows...
Have you ever used your voice?
Athena's words in my head telling me to scream -
Roar of the old gods telling me to run -
Their tongues in the sand and in the grass blades.
Child of flesh and hard times.
An unknown voice from the mouth of my mother commands me - 'take firm grasp of the magic within you'
Perhaps I am too afraid to reply.
Rose L Feb 2022
wood and stone bolted down to protect us all from rain.
and then with singing hearts, some of us start building shrines that rival the sky.

tonight I am walking towards where all the candles are burning.
If you sit beneath her closely, the cathedral stands taller than the sky -
and if you touch the stone, you know, my Mum always said
think of all those other hands!
Look how the cobbles are worn from pilgrim-feet, here years ago.
Dead now. That's what these buildings used to be,
yards full of the pious dead, palms up to the earth.
and when I went to Canterbury, the entry-way limestone
was worn smooth like marble, and I touched it too,
because I knew there must be something good in all this,
such a big building, so many hands and feet.


a great warm shivering heart
that sits like a bird perched in the middle of my city.
Two big eyes that face out, casting light
back to when everything was young, and she was
Rose L Feb 2015
I see you in colors no one else can see
As if the light had split and lay you down for me -
painfully so -
arrogantly pursuing a spectrum so elaborate...
golden and gleaming...
God, do i try to keep up:
I see you as the red green blue black that resides under our protective layer of peach
Crimson cheeks and crimson thoughts
Ivy trailing hair of such unexplainality
mundanity fails to carry your weight -
But green seemed so innocently subtle to contain those veins
that stick out like a spill against ivory eyelids
sheltering yet more purple, bronze, a bouquet of vessels -- -
oh, god-ridden terracotta of your tips
red just doesn't cut it for me and blue leaves a sticky trail in the tongue when you're just so
unashamedly golden, apricotted, sparks of whatever next that i find in your eyes
colours i couldn't mix
no matter how hard i tried.
I can't stop writing about you in full colour. I don't know what that means.
(Yeah most of the words i write aren't real words thats purposeful :/ )
Rose L Dec 2014
I could never work out why my cheeks went so greedily red when you showed your teeth.
Heather says it's because I get nervous too easily - anxiety, she said
I think it's the opposite
your white lies have a familiar milky hue
And I like contrast.
******* and your perfect teeth
Rose L Aug 2016
Fourteen years ago, I planted a rose in my garden.
It grows twisted, against the fence, and bursts into bloom come June -
From my window I feel it glowing
soft pink in the light of the waxing and waning moon
It is my August nymph. And stuns me in brimming scarlet.
But the moon rises like the tide in wet ochre
And my body reeks of iron and emptiness -
The end of the lunar cycle draws closer
And petals fall apart, loose from the bud -
I must learn to accept that my body yearns to spit back blood.
Like crimson. Velvet crimson roses.

I've come to recognize the scent of dying flowers
almost to the hours - Sweet honeyed rotting from within
The decay of rosy innards and floral resin
God punishes all things beautiful with transience.
What a thing to leave a rose to chance...
But all flowers must die in order to grow again!

You would not think that porcelain could rot
But girls and roses share a lot;
And for summer flowers to be sweet and fresh
Blossoms bleed more than you thought.
I wish I could have used any other flower than a Rose as it carries too much linkage to my name but theres nothing quite like a rose is there?
Rose L Apr 2014
let me tell you boys and girls
how it feels to drag a beating nicotine heart from your ribs
and drain the blood from your pink and purple fingertips
let me tell you how i cried when I pulled a slice from my wrist and told myself I was beautiful
time and time again I told myself i was beautiful -
tell me how it feels to rot inside
and kiss the very thing your mama feared with ruby red lips
i've got time on this earth to spare, kids -
nail paint over blood and bones showing
hoarse throats and his own special kind of poison in my guts -
red eyeliner and a black death in tear ducts.
Lets see how many gore metaphors I can fit into one poem
Rose L Apr 2018
People look at me as if they don't know who I am
and I concede, I know not them likewise.
However, I am confident in the things I know all too well -
The view from my window, the sound of my own voice
in my head - disturbingly silent. But it
speaks a language others do not ...
unexpectedly, for I thought I knew of others.
I now believe it is the only voice I can translate as of late.

My mother tells me I speak eloquently, my father,
and I, share voices. But these people, I wrestle to find
humanity in them.
I count myself as not with friends. I count myself with art
and with great minds, that speak a language too complex,
but what's an artist without a human voice?
It is not healthy, to dream of yourself
but it is all one can do when you know no one else.
Rose L Apr 2018
Quiet, now. This night might be waning, but
we're all out. and not so loud, although some of us
(while desperate to get home) are also desperate to get something out of this.
perhaps meet someone. Where are all the buses?
and underground, footsteps are loud, where we tread. Bzzz-kt.

Wake up, the day is day. Night's another thing. Don't let the cold get you down.
Rose L Jan 2019
i fear long a certain caged-up growl
fingers left of the heartbeat of another
struggle to confirm their own circulation...
self-preservation, yes, much to my upset I must
face the ripping theft and rough lips of God
uncontrolled but perfectly placed, face God
and the skin that scrubs me clean
with long seconds. days and hours,
never forgotten, once seen.
When I face others, I find it a waste
to not see the prettiest parts of them.
Whites of their eyes, cheeks bruised up with rising blood
fingertips turned purple, then white
interior parts. expanding pupils that splinter outwards and fray to black
tears in the mouth - or is that?
opalescent sweat glands, red around the mouth
wet-washed skin, spit-stained lips, broken colours,
once seen, forever reflected in shadows of others.
Back to hands I know well
and a body that demands
tear me again from this heavy earth
and bite the air from my mouth. Force a betrayal
teach me how to come
break my skin and eat my mind
remind me I'm alive.
Rose L Mar 2016
28.1.2016
The sun sets with me every night.
And yet, each of these nights I find a cannot quite
Translate that fade from day to grey;
in oils or ink I can never paint her -
She's gone too soon and the nights resume
and I'm left in darkness with empty paper.
Tomorrow afternoon will be strewn with half-lines -
poetry dripping drowsily from my tired mind
sketches on my sheets and sun-faded carpet
God help that empty-headed artist!
And I wonder if I'll ever draw again...
There can be no art compared to my bedroom window when
My own small framed sun sets again.
Forever watching the sun. Watching it watch me
pages sliding off my windowsill, in dreary ennui
Navy draws my curtains closed on time
But she lingers still, in watercolour lines
And people wonder why I paint the sun
As small as I have done;
I wish I could find apt words to say -
I am getting further from my sun each day.
Rose L Feb 2017
I feel much heavier these days
I sleep a lot, and I paint with browns
Light ochre and soft greys
You tell me that's what you've noticed, anyway.
I forget to do my nails, and leave my hair up
Let it grow out and longer than it suits me.
Sometimes you tell me things have changed and tightly hold my hands -
I laugh and pretend I don't understand.
I used to read a lot, read to you -
Anything I found, poetry and song lyrics
And books I'd bought, or old ones that i'd suddenly see anew
when I'm seeing you,
over the top of the pages
Sitting opposite me crossed legged
Mimicking my voice
Laughing till we're both lightheaded.
Years ago you used to replace the flowers in my bedroom every morning
I told you to stop and that lilies were getting boring.
Today I got up extra early and painted my nails fuschia-pink
And cut big handfuls of daisies for the vase above the kitchen sink
When you came down from bed I looked at you over the pages of my book and said
"Remember this?
Rose L Sep 2014
Secrets lap at the edge of pouted lips
Pooling below the tongue, it sits all wrong
Fistfuls of curls in red polished fingers and a cracked bottle grazing at the wayside
Silence so soaked in sweat it hardly admits it's guilt
Cough drops held at the back of throats and little pinched baby thumbs pressed in balled up fists
Rough cotton, cool linen
Heaven coiled around flesh, around flesh, around flesh
Around breath, after breath, after breath.
Rose L Dec 2018
the peach-grey behind the clouds. those opalescent seconds
don't you remember that day
when we held hands and it felt okay
and I cried because it stormed and
Neoprene vastness of vision. I watched you sleep and you didn't feel human
I'm not free this evenin g and I'm sorry
Those hours in the morning where early birds speak and tell me
go to sleep
Hands hot and bristling
And forced to
- 'and she painted throughout her life-'
And we have to talk?
Because I feel like I've lied
but when you're not here I feel
Cold. The Cold that spreads and burns
and tell me h-
"I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived."
She sat across from me, on the other side
of the room
A gentle flood of blood that felt to me like drowning
and agreed that I'd reached Inner Peace.
on the way home it stormed, and I cried.
Rose L Sep 2016
I am sad stones, and shells-
All crumbling up between these weathered ribs
All broken up rocks, and sad cells.
You'll find me on wet beaches, during low tides
Big blue eyes and pallid flint hands
Softened by darkness on all sides.

I sit in sand and wait for the moon,  
Tides push me out and back
I hoped you'd come inshore soon.
I tell the sea what I like about you,
Pull on weeds that pull back, too -
In a world of headaches and the blinding moon
You are soft. I hope to see you soon.
I hope to see you again soon.
Rose L Dec 2015
It lies, turgid.
Beneath the seedy mass of microscopy
lit fluorescent, breathing.
Bloated cellulose bricks in syrup
Conjunctive in an extracellular mess,
Ripped mesh and tiny sculpturettes
Freshly bleeding.
Chloroplastic green and iron red
slivers of nucleic endoscopy
A secret glimpse framed by my eyelashes.
I just love writing about unusual subjects. Science can definitely be poetic.
Rose L Oct 2014
Scraped knees from lying on the cold concrete
Play acting love online with a camera in the dark
I'm okay just knowing someone out there came for me
But truthfully what the hell did you expect me to be?
In the end what she did just made one more mark
Still, I'll let you take out that frustration on me
She's got a girlfriend already - daddy told me he sees them in the park
Tough ******* match to his rough voice and endless nights
Watch me scrape my knees and bury the cuts in fistfuls of grass
And oh god, pretend you care
pretend you care
:/
Rose L Jul 2018
still beneath, but rising.
The cooling wind and I swapped faces
but now my friends don't recognise me
and I panic through summer.
I think I prefer to imagine your touch
than to feel the burn and sweat of human skin
and struggle with the ways you've changed.
In my head, you're God.
I've given myself free access to the divine
and now this brain of mine is eaten through like Swiss cheese,
flea-ridden, moth-bitten.
Good thing I know my way around the holes,
rarely do I trip.
Rose L Feb 2018
Oh, son
lost boy
neck crack
eyes dry and
diverted
look at me!
your skin seems to shiver
to shimmer
are you cold?
Or do my eyes wish
a touch of life
- a kiss!
Or do my eyes wish?
I wonder if the years have hardened your lips.
Rose L Jan 2017
I believe you've got to me.
You - lazy hands ! Struggling up in the morning
Sleepy eyes and half replies
Tired smile - you!
It appears you've got to me.
Months of haphazard hapless work on your behalf
Crept up on me like February
And suddenly daffodils are blooming too early.
What bulb did you plant in my heart, I'd love to know -
What plant can grow with so little watering!?
You, sleepy-head, always undercover
Accidental lover -
Better be asleep right now, either that or you're ignoring me but I'll allow-
Lazy kid. Always busy doing nothing
Always busy, but I find your twice-monthly concern touching.
Really ****** got to me.
Rose L Mar 2015
duckling
in return for pity i offer you these
meagre meals:
my heart, substantial not to breathe from my chest but the offer will suffice.
bitten down nails -
stained confectionery colors, a brittle bone penance
stuffed thick cartilage
watery canthus
pure blood and guts that once held me upright.
I can only pray you'll forgive that I know
these choice cuts are not enough.
Rose L Dec 2016
Morning. Freshly breathing, wet lungs.
I catch a glimpse of you through frosted windows
Shoulders, hair, in profile. Wearing white.
Those hours - just before sunrise, half awake, lucid in the grey;
in those dreams you shy away from my touch,
and stare at me with tawny eyes.
I wish I knew what you were thinking
I wish I could stop checking you're still there.

I linger in our fragility. Knitted cotton hearts.
You're fresh blood in me, you glitter under my skin
Breaking apart in my eyesight  -
Yet I knit poetry out of your lingering fingertips.
God help me !
Rose L Jun 2014
There's been a shooting in North London today -
Ugly girls with nothing but ****** to their name
"You shouldn't be outside," she said to me
But there are stars in my eyes and I can't ******* see
like blood down my throat and I called myself to act
a Monster's actions is what makes a Monster that-
So his gun, his knife, my razor, my prayers
Too many diamonds in these suburban stares
this world is a poison and to **** is to cure
That'd teach ******* like me what it means to be impure -
I have a world in my mind where the skies are mine
and now I wouldn't have to leave it, not this time
Quickly now, you'll be pretty once you're dead
you looked a bit like a boy from the book he'd read
brushing doll hair with tobacco stained fingers
the one thing you knew was the stench of smoke lingers.
Just to clarify - i'm not actually going to **** anyone. Don't call 911. XD
Rose L Jan 2017
Get me a boat
And let me discard my shoes and float soundlessly away from loneliness.
Amidst these dark waters I do not believe I can capsize -
Because I ride this endless sea in search of half-remembered blue eyes.
I fall in love all at once, and much much too quickly.
I patrol the beaches, heart heavy with glances from strangers in dark rooms and corridors.
Get me this boat, and god, let me leave quietly, as the red Margate sun comes up.
I want to search for someone else to love -
I want so desperately to love !
If I find beneath the sea another boat of strangers waiting for me
Then I shall be on New Land again.
Populated with glances on trains, soft greetings, beginningless romances -
Rushed smiles and other couple's dances.
I am lost, lost, lost to this sea...
The silent sea, creaking mass of serenity -
Oh god - If only I weren't so in love with humanity.
This poem is about when you see someone across the street or in a bar or in a dream that you fall haplessly in love with for a few moments. It's been happening more and more lately.
Rose L Jun 2017
God! Bring me down a trail of violets -
Bright violets for my love who drinks too much.
For we felt no fault in evenings spent dancing to old songs,
writhing, primordial dancers, our shadows burnt onto the rocks behind by fire
the air gliding around us like water in a stream.
We are heavy things. Our bones are filled with blood
and when we grasp eachother we rip the stems apart
And oily petals seep from underthings.
Dionysus!
Red, thick hot oily petals
Rose petals, broken from the bud
That weep for us, and die for us, as we lie
Clasped together like thorns
Elpenor!
Too late to continue our travels together
I will come back and bury you, I promise.
Rose L Mar 2017
Sludge and blood. The smell of deep red iron
filtering through the rocks and bodies bruised to the touch.
Grotesque collections of pills and broken skin;
infections and secretions and violent affections -
Spit stained fingers and dilated pupils at thoughts thick with resin.
Waking up with sickness in your stomach and bite marks on your neck
The pull of clutching hands at strands of hair and bitten lips and sweat
Pulling deeper, sharp inhale of self-done stitches
Ripped open insides and the moment his breath hitches -
aches forever. Pulsing, swollen, bleeding on the brain
Sweet and sickly, gorgeous and gorged veins
Momentary singularity in pain.
I tried to create a parallel in this between illness and ***. I hope it shows!
Rose L May 2018
Taught to dream of blank-faced others.
Inescapably, months and weeks all waste hours in lone company -
same Sundays, same self,
so bury yourself in someone else.

But, don't pretend
This won't end like the rest.
Back down that track you'd once walked so boldly -
healthier for all as one, only.
Rose L May 2018
Enfoldings; picturesque enfoldings of memories.
Grey, hazy sights. Night brings desire to know someone again, deeply.
Fitting into sheets, blessed, breath, hot, sweat
dreamy or needy, blessed or
cold. How so cold?
Corporeal pulsings that used to quell and now do not
Now love swells, then it did not -
How did I ever sleep with a heart so hot?
Day break, forgetting - May days bring no mind ache.
A bare witness. One, alone, bedroom
soulless, mornings act, forgetting morning and
focusing on who I am now, bed plans
*** pangs
focusing on picturesque foldings of hands.
What I must remember is that nostalgia is pink and the present is colourless.
Rose L Apr 2014
There's something missing in this heap of hearts.
i'd happily admit he'd fall apart
without his special taste of what was to come
after every horror night he'd slept,
beauty truthful, I wish i'd seen
his glory days, our glory days
we breathe as one, and there's music to come -
but an unstrung guitar would yearn for it.
Something like diamonds or vague metaphors
like years of friends and friendly enemies that struck a bone like a tattooed hand a chord
something like that which fills the soul of rueful smiles and before they left -
he knew that was where he took his breath.
One day I'll come to understand why deprivation is my vice and virtue
and why good things come to those who forget -
but for now its grief for ghosts and phantom hands left unheld
that keeps us both waking during the night.
The anniversary of My Chemical Romance's breakup just passed can you tell I was ****** up over it? Anyway I guess this is meant to be switching from me/the fan to Gerard Ways perspective but who cares it was 1am
Rose L Oct 2018
Blue skies, that fade to cream, that fade to a navy ache.
The sun and moon are poetry that only I awake -
What solitude.
Back home, I'm bleeding out
like rivulets to the sea
the sun and moon are a verse that only I can read
silent and soft, the touch of god
that bleeds down to the sea.
Rose L Mar 2018
My, my
Beautiful mornings. And wet grass -
Oh, hello you lot! You fabulous lot!
Lying in 'til noon in your soot-washed townhouses
Tall, pumping chimney smog and fruit stained letters into the London sky,
I see you - Miss Vanessa, Miss Woolf, Forster, Fry!
How we all swarm about this little town now!
Look how I eat pomegranates and write prose in your name.
Look how I put on sturdy boots, and totter from square to square -
Admiring this honeyed writer's air.
Oh, evening all, lights of London, subdued spring-time!
Eucalyptus suburbs, just a short walk from bedlam and grime.
Rose L Dec 2017
We are so few and far between.
And for a few years every woman has been
Boring and bored, tired with no drive.
I am doing well. But within a circle of empowered women, we thrive.
Me, no exception. And I'd hate to lose my fragile perception
that you and I can change the world.
Others called it loneliness, we called it hard work -
Without your affirmation and kindred conversation
I'm finding it hard to call it anything other than a 'personal quirk'.
Lately, even, I find myself hiding. An action we used to find worthy of deriding -
A mark of lesser minds.
I still desire to change the world, and I miss that spark, that look in your eye
That told me to defy sexist expectations.
Now I'm in a sea of people and I struggle to find a grip, an ally.
But my heart still thuds like it did then.
The knowledge that women like you are out there
and that we will always be friends,
Gives me confidence
that together we can.
Rose L Apr 2018
We are creatures made ill;
by the decision to remember or forget our many exhausted selves,
Those familiar faces
Worn from the weight of self birth.
I do often see
See sight of familiar eyes ….
A memory fresh in your palms
Appearing most often at night,
When the barriers to duality falter and
momentarily, our hearts align.
Most likely it is just the pulsing of flesh that feels to us like presence.

So young to have the misfortune of a rot.
A sepsis caught from the spit of the past,
Asked falsely back by laments,
Cast into your own ether at self expense.
Hence, it appears worthy of thanks,
that the one with whom I shared a skull no longer gives me fear.
Anxiety, sheer dried flesh that brought me close to death,
For years, I have not tasted her iron on my breath.
Retrospective thanks, perhaps, that bring a memory back?
Easy. Wonder, where that shade hides,
For it’s true — we grow and shed, but keep our baby eyes.
I didn’t perform my own last rites,
So then perhaps it is my own shadow, cast by two lights.
It’s important, not to forget to worry.
Worry of your own mimesis, flesh imitation
Poetry’s invitation, in this developing obituary,
with each memory dragged from stale dirt with wary hands,
Serving to marry that past and present —
The act of burying that younger girl I cannot see —
Forming a shadow of its own, and killing my Eurydice!
I know the danger of Calliope’s hyperbole.

How worthy I am now, of love and life.
Tangible hours, warm and empty nights,
dripped in February sun, October ice.
Fresh and scented air.
Now these days, they pass with eloquence,
Joy exists, and this is evidence.
What’s strong in me, force that fills my once cold thighs and stomach,
Fruit and wine, yes — but most of all, the years of age gained living with death as a child.
Exiled from my own body, only to return old, but carrying the capacity,
the ability to be unrelentingly happy.
There are some things you never gain again after being lost.
Innocence —  those snowdrops don't return after a frost.
Innocence, something I'm not sure I wanted anyway.
Unlike Orpheus, my dead Eurydice had a single life.
My glance is as his, far from pulling her from the Underworld,
That old and broken lover is kept inside by hindsight.
But I offer to the Underworld, that blinding grey I now have so happily forgot,
That blinding grey haunted, I imagine, by the shade I share a name with,
This final lament to the lost years.
I know now to not flee fears that surround my own myth.
A confession and a celebration, my own libation —
dedicated to a prayer that they stay dead, forever.
Rose L Jun 2018
the slow encroach
stinging so, it broke the choke
and rough, coarse femininity once kept in check with wine and herbs
now slips away, and hurts.

Recalling is like
dreams of forests heaving milk and music,
an ancient memory whose dew pools in your mouth with distaste
and tulip'd sap leaks at sordid urge.
what we want is still at sea, so let the spray bite your face
taste the past in those ever-watching waters
and burn hair on the pyres for your grandaughters, and grandaughters' daughters.
Inspired by the women of ancient Greek mythology
Rose L Jul 2016
Warm evenings bring a slow haze of conversation.
The moon, rolling on the waves,
has pulled the tide right back to the horizon
Exposing wet flatlands of sand and a rocky skeleton
That crawls in the darkness, like figures on the beach below.
Rosé wine and boredom
Keeps me checking my phone for you to tell me you've arrived.
Rose L Mar 2015
The storms have set in fast this year
The wet skies a little sticky to the ear
Chalk fizzing in the water but it doesn't affect us in town
and again the leaves have skipped amber to brown;
the ships dock faster every September that rolls around
and the captain keeps telling us he's found less, and less-
by now we've all been wearing the same stuff for years
- Bar sodden coats and lipstick smears
but the word with my friends is since that summer on the shore
We've never come this far inland before.
It's the last term now and the older years that are closest
tell us that the new kids catch on faster, they've noticed
but that's something we're not supposed to discuss
soaking up heavy sunlight like a dusty curtain letting its motes spin
And in the backrooms - new fashion is emerging
and again we're handling with faux grandiose -
the kids at the bottom of the class need this stuff most.
we're not likely to forget.
and that moment when the girl in the pink stood and told us
she wasn't convinced she needed us anymore
and lunch was silent.

All the men at school act like they care
But cold chairs and icy fingers forced their hand
and god knows I'm not quiet anymore -
but I don't think i'll miss the school gore.
Does this make sense to anyone except me? That feeling of being a team at school?
Rose L Nov 2016
I think myself a Venus. Standing glittering
mirror reflecting in peach pink
Opalescent in hip bones, soft thighs,
A love good and gold.
Self love. So pure!
Run my long fingers through cotton sheets
And soft hair
Reckless in my own body.
Comfortable here, thanks.
Rose L Jan 2017
Do not forsake me the need to ascend.
We, in our platinum form
Do not require mothers, teachers, peers to remind us that one day the red soils will be left bereft of us.
We don’t require reminding.
Look down at yourself and consider your own outline.
We are shaped just so our eyes can compile us as human –
but not so that we require shaping still.
In the end, you can simplify.
Simplify yourself down. Until you are just circles, squares.
What is special about your own edge?
A human line, a form so easily replicated
It can be done by children in crayon.
A human line.
Allow yourself to ascend to your platinum form.
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