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 May 2016 E Townsend
S S
The topography of my mind
Maps the beach at changing tide.

From low to high it's all washed clean
Footprints, castles and trails alike
Unetched slate of flat leveled sand
Grains aligned by blessed wave strike.

From high to low it's all exposed
Fragments, jetsam, seaweed entwined
Littered, scattered on shore amuck
The sting of empty shells combined.

Yes, the topography of my mind
Maps the beach at changing tide
From low to high and high to low
A gloriously exhausting ride.
 Apr 2016 E Townsend
Chris Thomas
Denouement.
Make me believe.
Believe I was more than a whisper.

Intermission.
Take a fading breath.
Breathe and release, the rift will close.

Prologue.
We are born.
Into tragedy and the sound of her smile.

Now we're back at where it always ends.
The beginning.
 Apr 2016 E Townsend
JR Potts
The coffee had settled to a temperature few could drink with any pleasure. The cursor impatiently blinked against the empty word document as he sat defeated by the previous one hundred attempts to write a single sentence.  He could not be a writer, he thought, writers do not spend hours in front of blank screens, staring blankly and drawing blanks. They are full of original stories which overflow from the gray matter of their brains, spilling out from the tips of their fingers as they beat atop plastic keys like Mozart realizing symphonies as he glide across the ivory teeth of a fortepiano. He was right; he was no writer, not yet. In this instance of doubt like Schrödinger’s cat, both men, the writer and the not-writer inhabited the same chair, the same space in time waiting to be woke by a single decision. If he decided he was not a writer than all potential realities collapse into one and the writer dies in that chair. I'm no Edward Lorenz and I don't know much about butterfly effects but what if this is one of those microscopic events that changes the initial conditions and forever alters the data set? What if a masterpiece is lost on a whim? I so badly want to communicate all of this to him but I can't, because I am remembering a distant memory of the moment I lost the man I was suppose to be.
 Apr 2016 E Townsend
Akemi
Everyone’s faces are folded under the surface of the concrete
I can’t make sense of any of this

There’s a barrier to the plaza
Air blows through
Too fat to fit
So little pieces peel away and litter the ground like skin
Everyone just goes around it

They said it’d be 18 degrees today
But I think it’s going to rain
1:19pm, April 4th 2016

i want to go home
In Florida sometimes it rains so hard
that you believe that it can't possibly stop,
that it will just rain and rain forever.

Sometimes I'd wake to a storm late at night,
and I'd sit out on the porch.

You could smell the lightning, and the coolness of the storm would
make your hair stand;
I'd feel so alive.

Some nights I'd go out, and my father
would be sitting on the porch already.
Lost in the storm
or maybe
called to it.
We wouldn't talk,
but we'd be lost together
in the rain and thunder.

Sometimes I wonder what of him
is left in me.
I am not sure
if I am more afraid of there being
very little
or of there being a great deal,
but when it rains
I think about him on that porch;
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