I am the age at which you died
no comely pictures immortalize me,
though I am not washed white with time
like you

a lone silver streak stripes my chin

many would say
you were too sensitive for this world
thus rushing your years
and guiding the barrel to your mouth

I would pit my pain
against your Nobel torments any day
if such things be a contest,
what is not, though
a rabid race to the grave?

but who would really win?
for your mother’s madness did not leave you
skittering around like a cat on a hot tin roof
and your father’s anvil hands
did not leave scarlet letters
on your skinny legs

excuse me then, if I don’t
grant you a capital letter in your name
excuse me if I don’t applaud your time in the ring
or say bravo to the iconoclast
for your sparse use of words
(though, “for sale, baby shoes, never worn” was…perfect)
excuse me if I don’t think your readable feasts
should be on everyman’s menu

you were but a man
who drank and ate and fought and ******
until you could no more and decided there was nothing left
I respect your triggered choice and do not call it craven
but janitors aren’t made legends
they just clean your brains
from the floor

I'm frightened when the phone rings for the very first time,
And every ring after that makes me just as nervous
And angry
As if I want to yell for silence
But no one is there

There's one good thing about the house phone ringing,
If they leave a voicemail, they get to hear my dad's voice
I haven't heard my dad speak in fifty days
He was fifty when he died,
fifty days ago
fifty doesn't seem so old to me now

There are nights that I get to see him,
But only with my eyes closed
While I sleep on his pillow
Because it still smells like him
Sometimes I hear his voice
And my stomach drops and I grin
Until I realize...

I'm frightened
And every ring after that makes me just as nervous
And angry
As if I want to yell at someone
But no one is there

There's one good thing about depression,
After you leave a voicemail on your mother's phone, you'll be put to sleep
In fifty different ways,
with fifty different pills
because fifty doesn't seem like so many to me now

Fifty just doesn't feel like anything to me now
I just don't feel anything now

My lips have never known the taste of yours.
My nails have never scraped down your chest.
My legs haven’t wrapped around your waist.
No my body has never had the pleasure of being pleasured by you.

You haven’t slipped off my dress to caress.
You haven’t pulled my hair just to kiss down my neck.
You haven’t ****** me until I’m left screaming.
No your body doesn’t know the heat of mine.

But here we are covered with guilt,
Wearing that scarlet letter for this emotional affair.

© 2013-2014 Peach

i want a messy eyed boy to
drag his tongue upon my sun filtered skin
and lay me out in a field of wildflowers with
wide fingers and veined arms
wandering all over my aching body.

i want him to whisper things to me
in a light voice as wavering and deep
as trickling water
and windblown leaves.

i want him to feed me vines and fungi,
psychedelic plants,
and watch me trip into the
winking sky,
a wandering abyss.

i want him to growl all over me,
holding my bare body in his arms,
fitting his skin in every crevice that is possible
in these mundane bodies.

i want sweat sliding off me,
and the feel of bodies in motion. i want
him to
stroke my skin and paint it lavender
with crushed flowers and
put soil in my hair, while i
wiggle my naked feet
in the air.

i want him to swallow me
like i am overfilling liquor
in a crystal bottle,
desperate and excited.
i want him to leave
pink bite marks on the waiting flesh of
my collar bones,
and breathe into me;

i want him to write on my skin
in the fire of the dwelling night,
my soul is enigmatic and
it draws him in
like art.

i crave hands around my waist,
colors on my tongue,
the earth in between my toes,
and somebody to kiss me under
the lightning storms.

To allow myself to be
Weaker than one
When I need to.

we smoke hand-rolled cigarettes just to be awash in the splendor of it all, but i don’t tell you i like to feel the disintegration of my organs in a thick cloud of menthol & formaldehyde.  i don’t tell you i still press fingers to the back of my raw-skinned throat, just to know i haven’t lost the courage.  without new scars healing on my delicate wrists & sweet-sour pills dancing in my blood, i am nothing worth remembering.  every night, i fall asleep with my cat snuggled warm against my clattering bones & measure my stomach with trembling palms, afraid that i have suddenly erupted from my wispy shape into something breathing.  a girl of no substance, dark matter where flesh once lived, hollowed perfection in the stiff arrangement of limbs on a crooked frame.  you kiss my knees goodnight; we don’t mention you are sad again or that i am becoming a skeleton.  your teeth are serrated, sweet against my neck.  your hips are songbirds, dipping into my belly, begging with a lust i can’t feel anymore.  your body is heavy & all i want is sleep, the sweetness of a pillow beneath my icy cheek, the passage of time without the constant obsession over infinite sins.  i never promised you a rose garden, so welcome in the monster.

One day, under layers of earth
Where forgotten men sleep
And the rest of history are kept
You'll be worth more than gems and gold
Your memories will make the roses bloom
And grow a field of dancing daffodils
Or be a home to lonely birds
On the warm arms of your sycamore tree

And so if it comes
That time has to deny your breath
Do not be afraid.
Remember my love,
Even if you're six feet under
In all ways and always,
You are significant.

In 2005 The Piano Man was found wandering the streets of Sheerness in a soaking wet suit and tie
he didn't say a word.
When presented with pad and pen he simply drew a grand piano.
His nurses sat him in front of a beat up old upright
he played for four hours straight;
for four months his hands were the only things to break his silence.

Alexandre Dumas said "man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy."
Do you ever think about how Beethoven hacked the legs off his piano so he could feel the sounds he couldn't hear in his head, through his chest?
And Van Gogh heard the sounds his paintings made but kept going until his sanity
was just a memory floating on a distant river under a tired Milky Way.
And you see, like a Gaelic folk song blindness runs red through my family,
so I know it's not much but I'm here, still trying to mould my hands to say the right form of 'I love you'.

And did you know that the human heart beats over 30 million times a year, but we still have a hard time keeping our feet on the ground?
And did you know that the act of breaking in a horse is actually the act of breaking it's back?
Like we can't sit without sitting on broken things.
And did you know that every time a mobile phone sends out a GPS signal a bee loses it's way home, and every bee that doesn't reach it's hive dies?

So on nights when your pulse matches the beat of my favourite song
you don't have to wonder if it's me matching the syncopation of your silence --
and I wonder if you ever found what you were looking for.
And I wonder if you realise that on days you're not here I roll up my sleeves,
count the beats without you,
sit on the backseat and miss you.
And somewhere The Piano Man rolls up his sleeves
creates the Big Bang under his fingertips.
And in 2005 on an April morning in Sheerness, a suited piano man walks straight into the ocean,
begs the current to take him.

I send you a message
a bee loses it's way home.
I send you another
another bee dies.
My chest cavity is a bumble bee crypt,
my tongue a honeyed graveyard.

Another message.
The Big Bang.
The hive.
A suit.
That ocean.
Another back is broken.
Another message is sent.
I fear I am more honeycomb than heart.

To create is to destroy. To destroy is to succeed.
And would you just look at what these piano hands have finally done.

1 ***** your finger, describe it,
but never use the words,
red, flow, blood, dead.
Post to HP as My Finger Pricked:___

2. Post an Elizabethan Sonnet to HP

3. Think of a sad thing to make yourself cry, write what it was, how it felt, and are you now afraid/unafraid to admit it was so hard/easy to stain your face.
Post to HP as Cry Myself to:___

4. Get a stopwatch, pick your time limit, (max 7 minutes), write a poem, stopping when your time is up and post to HP as Seven Minutes:_____

5.  Pick a poem of mine and why you don't like it. I am not an idiot, send it to me in a private message.  No penalty for being right (or wrong)

Each question worth 20 points.

Winner gets a pizza with any topping delivered to his residence any where in the world (or the local equivalent).  Or, if in NYC, dinner!

i wake up when the skies dark eyes
are still asleep.
i walk alone in the cold breeze,
tongue searching for something cool,
freezing to coat my throat
make things less dry.

my eyes droop when people talk to me here,
not passionate enough
i like when people scream
and shout with crumbling lungs,
slanting houses inside of them, falling off-kilter.
i like when eyes are alive,
and skin is burning,
glowing.

i like sweat,
on shaky musicians, red lights outlining their spitting lips with
ferocity.
i like human flaw, when they run into things and don't think;
just let go
let go
i like people who swear a lot,
who let me kiss them and let me feel the
moving dawn
of "****"
in their mouths.

for the first time in a while,
i looked up at the sky,
and emptied my mind.
all i said was
wow
this
is
so
*******
beautiful
to the slowly illuminated sky.
and i almost broke down because for the first time in a while,
i'm seeing the beauty in the simplest things of life.