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2.2k · Jul 2013
Ode to an Artist
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
Poets go blind from writing by moonlight,
But my artist smites the moon with her luminance,
I write by her subtle, cyan, rays
And would gladly go blind for, with her, my eyes find their fill quickly,

She is the unexpected wind bouncing off the water’s surface,
And my chest is the sail,
Lifted, pushed, expanded and fulfilled to its most righteous purpose,

If the world is a stage than she is the red velvet curtain,
Commanding a sway so slight and savory
That other rags rent and burn,

No matter how mesmerizing the performance is,
A sudden hush or vibrant ovation is demanded in her wake,
A sultry swirl of goddess and girl,
Too precious to be stored with other jewels,

Elegance with every hinting glance, every rowdy inhale,
And every placement of those sinister legs,
That rams would think twice to scale,

The bend in her back is the stroke of my oils,
The pout of her lips is scarlet meat to the lions,
And the feel of her hips sum up my surreptitious desires,

Like good jazz things seem to pull back
Before the cathartic crescendos,
But to put it bluntly dear, the next time you’re here,
It may pay to freshen up with a Mentos.
1.4k · Jul 2013
Mudcrab Love
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
A spontaneous late night poem for my brothers and sisters in nerdom.....

I am a mudcrab,
Strangely out of place,
Where is my mudcrab love?

My sweet and perfect crustacean,
Come with me to a cozy inn by solitude,
Or down a warm, golden, path to a city of talented thieves,
Lets chase foxes,
Make fun of guards,
And get away with ******,

Lets think we are clever by cutting through the marked path,
Only to be blocked by snowed on mountains sprouting,
Lets hug the left wall to find our way back,
And scare away monsters with words we hear dragons shouting,

Lets laugh at how the Jarl sits like a lady,
Lets gripe about how the Agonians don't look as cool as they should,
Lets say that all the Stormcloaks are crazy,
And hope that one day they make a Star Wars game this good,

But in the end,
My hard shelled friend,
Lets return to our beloved swamp,
Where the giants and their mammoths don't stomp,

Lets gaze up at a sky that's not our own,
And count up our perks to show each other how much we've grown,
Since Helgen fell, and life was hell,

Lets share this road,
And be happy to note,
That at least we're no longer alone.

~Dovahkiin
1.3k · Jul 2013
Herald
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
How would I know it was her if she tried to hide in disguise?

As clever as she may think herself to be,
With a mustache as thick as a Redwood Tree,
I would hardly need wits to peg her identity,
Because I have learned a few truths that require her to be,
And they are as follows:

She is a herald,
Of inspiration and joy,
Moments merely mundane made miraculous by her being,
Make me write and smile.

She, a vision, floats again into mine,
Simultaneously sitting beside me she turns every jagged edge in the world into soft colorful things with all the warmth of a sparkling room filled full of familiar faces and old piano songs,
A girl whose eyes talk more than her lips and say things like, not so fast,
So just try and say that to me.

Thinking back now,
I have never seen her walk,
She seems to glide, to float, to hover, like she does in my mind,

And I would consider myself a fool,
A green, spontaneous, pup of pitiful perceptions,
A flight of short stairs without poignant reflections,
If not for the wild burning inside,
Caused by my dredging artist bathed in light,


I lose my heart from time to time because she gently leaves it for me to find at the bottom of the ocean,
A place where distance has not yet been conquered so nearness is still cherished,

In these depths I often see cankerous beasts swimming slowly among me,
Orbiting lazily like planets in space,
But I do not writhe in the deep,

And the beasts swim away, always onward to other prey,
So in the dwelling that I feared, I now want to stay,
Until I remember not to leave myself in such a dark place,
Without the presence of my perched herald there to say,
That even though the push and pull of the tides above are much to bear every day,

There is still the moon to calm the Seas,
And to light the thoughts of the men who will dream,
Of her.
Derik M Smith Aug 2013
I speak sensibly,
Wonder often about what they see,
Mark perfection only as a nominee,
Find a way to make everything out for me,

The older I get the more confusion I achieve,
Like a fledgling, green, senseless thing,
Who are these people wheeling and dealing in well-being,
Refuge, degrees, friends and family,
These are the things that are supposed to be comforting,

But I am in the cellar,
Looking too closely through wide open glass,
Squinting at the lights of the self-proclaimed insane,
Effected for a second giving myself away,
Oh what I would give to have more art up on display,

I would let it be the only thing I want each day,
Let it change how I behave,
Let it live without a frame,
Find the way it likes to hang,
Handle it until it caves,
And colors confined by lines are freed,
In the lair of the fauvist fiend.
1.1k · Jul 2013
Games
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
She liked to play games,
Not in the malicious way,
And not in a way that didn’t make me want to stay,

She played like the way people feel the need to light up the night’s sky in the cities that she loved,
To make what is there different,
To shine a comforting, milky, glow over the natural state of sky that is known well by those
Whose veins pump a wealth of that dense black nothing into their chests until their hearts are heavy,
And their fun loving games are just an actor’s play,
Complete with a weekly Sunday matinee,
Featuring scenes from the girl who they think about too much during their day to day;
So just let it be what it is.

Let the sky at night make you feel small,
Like a strand of hair lost in a shifting pit of snakes,

Let your fear be too overwhelmed by awe,
To speak about things like you were on a hazy carrousel,
A fun up and down ride with no real need to dwell,
Because we are young and still have many coins left in our pockets to feed the machine,

Things do look funny when you pass by them quickly,
But if you would stop the ride,
And take the time,
To focus fully on the things outside,
You may still find yourself spinning.

The truth is, is that the truth is, as direct and striking as a visit with the night’s sky without the comfort of our own lights,
With a black that’s not broadcast,
Like the sleek coats of dark and powerful horses buried by the overwhelming snow of a crashing roof,
Trapped and still for an untold amount of time,
Because the memory of the image is too emotional to be measured by things as precise as seconds, minutes, hours.

They were poetry from a beautiful girl,
Who liked to play games,

She made my week by stepping off her carrousel,
And ridding on mine,
Until the golden sun fell,
And I ran out of time,
Too bad she died.
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
She came with a timble to my lumish critch
Through borms
and grups
and a large, lectish, dish

‘Don’t bore me with your seminoad you Satin-Sir said she
‘So        cobble twibe! I replied for a gal as vimbly as thee.

‘Crickets are my namesake as they grift and leem with ease
Out in the plimmelday
                         where    
  ahoppybug                  should be.


The Plimmelday with sun       and gaype
A simplement of shine and life
Forever twibe on the high and narrow
A place where burdeves fear to bite


A gate surrounds the plimmelday
But Miss Cricket will be safe
A hareth ***** and Mr. Crick

A goodfar ways away.
931 · Jul 2013
The Chase
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
I chase.
Not because I’m sick of this dark place,
Not because living with more screens than people leaves me with a bitter taste,

Not because my legs feel well rehearsed,
As if not in motion they will be burdened by a lonely man’s curse,

Not because I have any sort of plans,
Not to make myself feel more like a man,
Not even to prove it to myself that I can,

I chase because if life is what we make it,
Then I have made you beautiful.

Because the sky gets soft and bleeds orange, red, and pink sometimes and it makes me wonder about what you’re doing.  

So even after I choke on the horrific taste of my own shoe’s lace, I take a break, listen to The Beatles, and get back to my chase.

I get back to trying too hard to impress,
Back to tapping out words on a phone that have never left my lips,
Because my thumbs are jealous of my other fingers who get to fly away on musical trips,
And say all I would want to say without feeling the need to draft phony Hollywood scripts,
So this is how my thumbs get back at me; with a swing and a miss!

There is a man, whose face is a furious shade that works inside my thumbs all day,
He works with steam and machines and monitors and screens and his windows see the same things through his altered bleeds of orange, red, pink, plus grey.
And the only good about him I can say,
Is that he tragically, always, clocks in on time.

Unlike me.

But luckily, there is only one of him and two of us,
You go for the legs, I will tackle his bust,
And I know our encounters have only been a simple brush,
But I think that we would have fun,
Using them to paint up something warm like the sun,

Whose rays I have missed but finally welcomed back,
And have forced me to think about living,
So I wrote you this poem.
769 · Jul 2013
A Simple Fire
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
A simple fire,

Dowsed in the flammable decisions of a simple man,

Even the act of putting his words onto paper gives him the narcissistic relief of being closer called an artist, to himself, by himself,

He sees faces daily that are like ghosts now to the simple man whose mind meanders and thoughts get foggy,

Hours go by like seconds in his catatonic state,
Everything he does is a simple man’s choice where input is minimized and outcomes are swiftly forgotten,

Where memories from years ago bleed into what happened yesterday or the day before,
Each experience becomes an island,
Waking up with no connections,
Just an oceans worth of uncertainty,

Like a composer who hears the music of his orchestra for the first time and, oblivious, leads them into crescendo with a simple man’s insincere talents,

Absent, in many things, he tries to live as comfortably as he can with routine becoming a safety blanket that itches like hell in the middle of the night but still he manages to sleep most of his days away,

Every regret for everything he could be doing but isn’t,
Everything he shouldn’t be doing but is,
Lives on his scalp and the insides of his decaying cheeks,

Maybe it’s all just the summer heat getting to him.
701 · Jul 2013
Wild, Whirled Pies
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
Every ounce,
Every inch,
Of everything I could ever give to someone,
I would give to her.

Throughout nights,
I flinch,
At the dark craters left swiftly in my chest,
By a wild, Whirled Pie, tempest,

Out of time or memory,
Moments stolen with my emitting sunshine love,
Stain my heart with streaks of gold and green,
Granting gazes into gaping places,
Where I pine to be,
With her.
674 · Jul 2013
Erin
Derik M Smith Jul 2013
I would try and describe her,

But the air around me gets colder as my heart moves further away from its purposeful place,
My prelude, oh muse, my dearest darling dancing in my thoughts,
Like Ebenezer’s ghosts she flies with me through places I’ve been,
And shares with me the places I have always wanted to find.

I would try and describe her,

But I only looked on her once,
Of all the time that I allowed,
I stole only one part of one second to fully fill my eyes,
Too narrow of slits to take in all the things I saw in front of them,

Like heat emits from the sun beauty pours from this woman,
Naturally there, overwhelmingly there, endlessly there,
As if beauty swiftly leapt from every cherished thing in this world,
To rest effortlessly within the eyes, the voice, and the smile of this woman,

I would try and describe her,

But description is impossible,
As she belongs in Plato’s cave,
Where perfection is bland and pleasure is boring,
Where merely the thought,
Of another stolen part,
Of another stolen second,
With my emitting sunshine love,
Is painted in rich oils on every surface.
354 · Sep 2014
Carried Away
Derik M Smith Sep 2014
Desperate, reaching up from my pedestal,
Strange, lazy only to keep me cool,
Mad at me for seeing only madness too,
Trapped in thought, allusions of me and you,

You feel like my own history,
Eerily familiar to me,
I'm feeling the same old things,
Regretting what fear did bring,
And it gets me...

Carried away, my God its not right for me to be,
Carried away, but I want to run back to you and stay,
Carried away, when you wake up next to me we get,
Carried away, carried away, carried away.

Please don't feel the need
To give or take a thing,
Just let me sing to you
Like you sing to me,

In the dark green trees and the wind in their leaves,
That gust wakes me up, and settles in me, 
Like the birds in the sky and the love in your eyes,
Or the way that you feel, when it's too dark to see,
And it gets me...

Carried away, my God its not right for me to be,
Carried away, but I want to run back to you and stay,
Carried away, when you wake up next to me we get,
Carried away, carried away, carried away.

Mistakes that I make I made to escape
A vexatious place, of less happiness,
But more than enough love.
For Little Bird.
319 · Feb 2016
Huckabee's Own
Derik M Smith Feb 2016
A friend of mine stopped by,
A girl I thought long since dead,
Comes back in the flesh to find some rest,
But there never is any for her,

Black and white pictures now pass me by,
Of a girl who has yet to find,
Her shade of grey in all the tone,
Huckabee's own,

But we've both found ourselves grown,
In different ways neither of us could ever show,
But put us in a room together and watch it go,
Because we now know more about the great unknowns,
And things seemed better when we didn't.

But how smart can we be?
I still have a heart that plays like an American movie,
Many men you know do it just like me,
A circle of nonsense that sets us free,

From feeling okay,
From finding our way,
From seeing eyes with honest thoughts,
In friends like you.

You care about both her and me,
But the real trick for us three,
Is to care about ourselves enough,
To care for each other,
For once.

— The End —