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How alike--both born in Bergen County
among mansions and stone-lined yards,
but my childhood had been framed with lace,
yours a light bulb broken before tasting electricity.

My mother called me your “moral compass.”
My sister said I kept you from disappearing--
as if you were born from leftover ashes
smearing the stone hearth black

as the nights we’d lie awake and you’d
asked me what color to repaint your bedroom
and how to talk to that boy from your class.
You insisted I spend every night at your house.

Sometimes, we’d race our fourwheelers wild,
I always lost, far behind you--and further still
when you found that skin-and-bone crowd with
*****-stained clothes, their teeth and eyes

yellow as their cigarette-tarred fingertips
and when they stumbled near, I smelled
breath foul as the stench of a mouse
dead in my car’s engine--slowly burning out.
for Hannah
as i thresh
              and winnow,
           the words of my heart;

anger and scorn,
             become chaff
                         set upon the
                     blustering winds.

and love remains,
                         golden seeds
left,
to nourish
               and grow
                crops of life,
                   love and laughter.
A ghost used to dance in my mirror--
she moved like a picture taken in motion,
though her dress remained still as the background.
But she has since stopped dancing and
grown bruises beneath marigold eyes.

Once, she whispered to me “It’s not your fault,”
but her breath reeked of rotten flowers
left too long in a molding vase--
her skin delicate as dried viscaria petals,
flaking and crumbling ever since

a man’s uninvited touch lingered there.
She stands pretty from across the room,
though her beauty is measured by the distance
I have forced between us--
five feet and counting.
trigger warning: ****.
 Feb 2015 Bruised Orange
bones
scars
 Feb 2015 Bruised Orange
bones
she carries
her stark
naked
beautiful
truth
folded
in finely
spun verse;
but sharp
are the
scars that
push their
way through
her fragile
layers
of words.
in the pleasure of discovering
words rhymes rhythms
i'm a gluttonous poet.

day and night
bite of my growing appetite
makes me sink low

i don't notice
broken pieces
shattered peaces
around me

i breathe in writing
eat and drink
poetry

crazed obsessed stressed
my poetry
like any other debauchery
is an escape ride
someplace to hide

i'm a poet
subservient
to the pleasures of words rhymes rhythms.
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