Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
We felt as if we’d been born in the desert
Passing shoelace factory prostitutes
Veering memories of Crab Nebula up-skirts
& Slowly obtained convoluted attitudes

“(In our sleep) We let the lizards lick our teeth”:
The grackle chatter from Four Hand Weaver
Met the ears of Guest, who’d arrived in Portsmeth
Riding on deep banjo drones from within the ether

What else can words be but propellants?
They are TLC to mad minds of the 90’s
Coaxing the Guest out of hell with mad chants
& we, the kids, following blindly

“He tried to get me to turn off the electricity
Chanting Southeast Asian Countries with Four Hands
Somehow part of an insane Sun/Moon allegory”
Cries Morgie Saturday morning &

We saw a vision: the Guest up in a crescent
Cast down from the sky and into the sea
Cascading over into a flooding depressant
& cut open the fat man who whispered of banshees

As his steaming intestines float down by the riverside
The boys were passing jolly jokes & joints
“They’ll never figure out how to catch a bride
When they’ve forgotten how to find the celestial point!”

Screeched the Guest with his candle strap
Attached to his banjofrigerator filled with Game Fuel
“It’s in my veins, it’s in my blood like a death cap!”
No longer just a Kentucky Gentleman covered in drool

All in all, a teacher, a preacher, a joke
A gravel eater, unlike the lizards underground
“I don’t eat dirt!  That’s a lie I’d never invoke
Lizards eat dirt & I ain’t like that crowd!”

Men are lizards & lizards are men
“& I ain’t a lizard no way, no how!
That’s the truest fact there ever has been
Aside from something being seriously wrong with me"
http://www.zackkouns.com/
For a year and 5 months they were in love,
a love quite odd but was suited so well
they formed a bond no one ever thought would quell.

All the hushed whispers and sneaky sleepovers.
Stolen kisses with pins to the bed and playful fights all over.
The warmth of their bodies slowly merging together.
The rise and fall of a chest with a racing heart in tune forever.
A head sat resting on ones breast moves in rhythm to the sway of slight breaths.
Soon the butterflies within awakened and infest them like death.

Love was their medication that they had diagnosed,
A treatment of her to pick up the pieces and put in their place
and a prescription for him to mend all the empty black space.

Their love was never perfect like how everyone wants,
but it was such a sight it made others feel daunt,
their downs were extremely low and the ups were so very high.
But they were intoxicated with their childish love times.

And like all love stories an end soon approached.
She'd detached herself from him, losing all hope,
and just sat and watched while he engrossed into dope,
Both of them forgetting their plans to elope.

Their fights lasted longer and their words grew harsher with anger and resentment.
Their ups soon drowned in hate while memories faded lost in the moment.
She started to long for attention of other people and freedom of her own life
while he immersed himself in his own pity blaming her for all the world's nasty rife.
The facade of perfect love was slowly combusting, filling their skies
with ashes of scorched memories that gathered down by.

On the night of a year and 5 months he just split,
said she made him feel like nothing and treated him like ****.
She sat in her bed crying typing *******,
As soon as she pressed send she knew what she had to do.
She held up her phone and texted him one line.
And in that moment it was over on the stop of a dime.

A year and 5 months was so quickly thrown away,
all of the time had just been tossed into disarray.
It was a year and 5 months that I broke his heart,
and its been a month in a half that I live to regret that part.

-Alicia Hubert
Hear the symphony of the room you surround yourself with.
Have you already heard this song?

Sip your current State.
Do you like it?

How now a brown cow.
Are you even listening?

Pass your homework to the front of the class.
Were you daydreaming again?
inter vivos razorwire
                                  tumbling
            ­                                     through leaves
contact lenses never found
                                            bending
       ­                                                  sunlight
nobody cares about strife
                                          bleeding
       ­                                                 alone
plastic avalanche screaming
                                               frozen
                                                          ­   starving
dampened crisis calls us home
                                                  beating
  ­                                                            nowhe­re
I Hear All The Outlawed World

                        I

I hear all the outlawed world in harmony,
The marshling stalks the green and gaunt
Destroyers who heed not sparkling deserts
Charged to the gill, nor candles pitching down
Like doom.  I note the scale of fossils
In cloud covered peaks, record
The seemly count of bodies by square root
And irrational number, I am witness
Bound to bounty to all who blaze in gray
And shallow grooves seeding their ends
In strikes on the ripe and smoldering fields.

                        II

I see all the outlawed world in harmony,
Barking wood bracing by the bud,
Where runs of blue, bury in vain
Down slash of mountain forest, cascading
Into august, rising after the fall,
As do kind-killers blasting from shells
To die as snails creeping under flower,
Who saw the past wasting away
In filed futures, slipping by blades in neck
Of wood, sightless as gallows of trees
Try ****** each time they make their leaves.


                        III

I know all the outlawed world in harmony,
By seamless song of stuttering gulls,
As in conches, waves of providence,
Cell from the center, beating musseled shoals,
Where wailing ghosts and wing-tips point
Printed nails to the silent capes,
And bumble hairs comb round the broken yokes
Stirring streams of babble baited
By flowering psalms, engaging arms to prey
On tales told by the rood and drown
In eyes turning like sands on the sea.
if you'd like,
we could play pretend-
i'd be sylvia plath, if you'd
be my modern-day
cummings;

we can meet in
the coffee shop on
forty-eighth and first
and talk about suicide
over tall cups of coffee
that taste like your grandfather's cigars

and when neither of us are
up for walking
we'll go out to the park
and sit
on the bench by the pond
and hold hands

(i won't really feel your fingers by mine
until they become
sticky with sweat; we'll look at each other
and realize it doesn't mean a thing
to either
except for maybe the first attempt on both parts
to not feel so alone)

when the sun sets,
i'll cry
and not have an answer
when you ask for one.
elliot & plath & cummings, ohmy
Because we both know the sound of gunfire
Except I, didn’t grow up in a war zone
It was a different kind from yours
Our bullets were words
Sounds of breaking glass
And the shards of which made it into my cheerios the next day
Chewed them anyway to spite
The sound that
Breaking makes

You,
you know the sound of falling bodies too readily
  you can mimic them in your footsteps
The smell of rotting corpses
What kind of scars shrapnel really leaves

What the color of blood really looks like
I see that shade of red every time you speak
  The way you keep it hidden in those paintings
In the drawer that I sneak into when you sleep
Know too well what evil looks like

I can find a place for all the words buried in my chest
inside your bullet wounds easily

If I were not a coward

Staring into the dark irises of men in uniforms dirtier than their conscience,
Find it easier to look into a barrel of a gun
Only one of them holds salvation
  
No, you are not afraid of guns
Nor the sound that breaking makes


But I still remove the safety pin
Just in case
Funny how we woke up in the morning
and pretended that tomorrow never happened—
strutted naked in mirrors celebrating our youth,
laughing, knowing suns and moons couldn’t do the same.

We borrowed our arms from the fridge
and peddled bicycles with bad breath—
trading war stories ‘cause we knew
if we came back alive
life would still be the death of us.
Raspberry melody;
strikes rock and air
What I would do for mermaid hair
Saucy sweet
You must breathe gold
as you speak in crimson tones
And we’re all a little insecure,
but you’re eclectic mixed with willow,
in all I’ve seen from over there.
Next page