I like the fog during the night
To smell the ice cold and feel the cold
To see that white cloud between my skin
Tangling my brown hair
I like to smell the fog and how he makes a sinister air
To look and feel that breeze covering the old trees and autumm leaves
I like the fog and to feel the cold entering my troat
To say that it reminds me of winter
I like the contrast between the foggy white and the city's light
But I love the scent of fog

- d.a

There are no limits within a dream
Insanity at its most extreme
Imagination aged the child
It made me strong, it made me wild

I have ocean secrets growing deep
They're mine to ponder, mine to keep
Creativity taught and raised the kid
It gave me hopes in the places I hid

©

i can still feel his hands around my neck.
the fingers like words and “i don’t love you” and it stings although he wasn’t the first to say it, i can’t breathe.
she haunts our hallways, our floorboards are cracking
beneath our feet, our home is crumbling
between our fingertips and
i can feel her weight on my chest. sometimes
i think that she should just go by the way that her footsteps echo after she’s gone. i remember
a wall full of holes from where his fists
kissed ever so gently.
i think that wall is what my heart might look like but lately
i’ve had trouble finding my pulse.
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
does he know
why i can’t look him in the eye? does he
know
the blue makes me feel like I’ve swallowed too much water, does he know i can’t breathe?
i think I’m still trying to understand why
beautiful things die in my fingertips and why he stomps on every rooting bulb my wilting body tries to plant, why he ripped my roots from beneath my feet and why my hair started to fall out why
he put his hands on my throat and how i still feel them there.
has he figured it out?
does he know that lemon scented bleach would taste better than
her on his lips and the *******
they splatter?
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
i was born into light, into pain, into love and
he wasn’t the first man to leave a mark on my body and i feel like he is the works with the universe to watch me fall
things fall and shatter without you touching them, things break while you’re sleeping and
everything about him and her stings like saltwater and everything about me
bends for him like light.
i can still feel his hands around my ******* neck.
he crashed into her hips like his hands to my bones, like fists to walls, the walls
rattled, my ribcage
rattled, he was
rattled and i can still feel his hands around my neck,
pushing, like me trying to ******* make this work.
what is this?
his hands are like ghosts around my throat,
the memory of her wrapped around his body instead of me
wrapping, holding in place
icanstillfeelhisfuckinghandsaroundmyfuckingneck
i am not stupid you know.
i can only see that he moves like these words write themselves, and he
speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
i swear, i am still cracked
though i still have tattoos left from the tips of his fingers from those heavy-handed nights,
i swear, they didn’t even sting.

You taught me
the most effective disguise
for a treacherous beast
is beauty

Why do poets and photographers love fleeting things?
Angled shafts of sunlight piercing a mass
of clouds. A rainbow flashing from dragonfly wings.
Water drops beading like shards of glass.

The fluttering shape of a sycamore’s shade.
The sun sinking into its reflection
In a purple bay.  Smoke’s shadow. The rayed
Curve of a finger reaching for perfection.

Whatever churns, bursts, rocks, flies,
Foams, flickers, roils, evades
In pigments of impermanent dyes
We try to fix before it fades

Once I mourned the endless dying  
Of here and now, the present always past
Elegized each moment, sighing
Beauty is loss and can never last.

But now I think I had it wrong.  In fact
(I learned this from an artist’s eye)
Fleeting beauty reappears faster than we react,
At the speed of a daydream flashing by.

All around, light coalesces into form,
Form explodes into light,
And we live lavishly inside this storm
If we can learn to see it right.

Beauty multiplies, tapering, swelling:
Reshaping, reforming, now familiar, now strange.
This gaudy blur in which we’re dwelling
Is the permanence of change.