Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
 Dec 2013 Ellen Bee
JC Lucas
How could you have ever called what we had love?
When we communicated through text
And over phone lines
Phone lines that stretched across
Boundless expanses of desert
A string
Three states long
With a tin can on either end.

So I made you feel something.
Okay.
Well let's be honest,
Love
Is not an emotion.
Love is not a mood you can be in
(Although you certainly made it seem that way).
Love is lying naked
Trapped in one another's embrace
And shutting out all the noise.

Don't tell me you loved me.
Don't tell me that's what you call whatever that was.

What it was was sickness
Manifested in two teenagers
Saying "**** the world,
I just want you."

It was just teenagers being teenagers
Loners being sick
Together.

Do not confuse,
You made me feel worlds better
But don't call it love
'Cause love is not an emotion.
Love is souls dancing
And the space between two bodies
Touching
Don't even for a second tell me that's what you think that was.
Because it couldn't have been.

I didn't fall out of love.
I figured out what love wasn't.
 Dec 2013 Ellen Bee
JC Lucas
The first frost fell forcefully this morning.
December’s icy tendrils are splaying themselves fractally across the grass of my front lawn
its fingers are playing coyly with November’s hair.
Winter is anxious to begin
and December is chomping at the
bit
to get started
with its twisted work.

It would take off early if the calendar allowed it.

This year, the big sleep will be deep
and wide
and all-consuming.

Plains of crystalline water and
steamy breath and
frost in grass.

Today marks our embarkment on the slow descent into a colossal valley,
a valley that we will not emerge from for four or five months,
Well into next year.

I am peering down the ***** of this basin,
which I am fully aware is far above my powers to control,
and I cannot help but feel
daunted
by the enormity of it.

and this house!
with its cracks about the windows
and age-old insulation
creaks and groans in the night.
This shelter
may just be the death of me.

So
batten down the hatches.
We are on the brink of something
destructively
beautiful.
 Dec 2013 Ellen Bee
JC Lucas
Madeline had visions of you falling down the stairs this afternoon. She was sipping her coffee and reading a scrap of paper that had materialized on her table from some article about a meteor somewhere and it hit her like a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks.

Doesn't really matter which.

She gasped back into the present and fell out of her chair spilling the tar-black grog she had been pawing at to the oaken hardwood and sat staring at her hands there for a minute or more.

They were pink against the tan-ish floor.

Pushing against it she regained her footing and reached for the home phone her friends chided her for owning and called me crying you won't believe what I just saw I can't believe what I just saw I think we need to call her do you think she's alright?

I had just gotten off my flight.

I don't know I said I don't know who you mean where are you are you alright I just got back into town I was going to grab my bags and catch a taxi do you need me to pick you up

She finally noticed the fallen cup.

Catching her breath he slowed her pace and started to stammer how she didn't know it didn't matter never mind I need to go and make a call I'll let you know when I get out.

I still had no idea what she was talking about.

She hung up the phone and placed another call after a half hour no six hours no six weeks of ringing someone picked up the line she had dialed and she wept and laughed and asked if everything was okay and if she needed to go and if so how far she was a primed cartridge in a loaded gun

Everything was silent and the room spun

A voice replied something inaudible and Madeline laughed and cried not cried and laughed and wondered how she could have been so rash to believe a daydream like this

She rose and gathered all her bits

And together they walked her down the hall from her sun room to the kitchen down the stairwell-

And she fell.

And for two point five one two three seconds everything stood still but her and the world stopped turning she couldn't hear her own gasp or whether she screamed or laughed or cried she just hung in the balance she hung from gods fingers she hung above a pool of sharks and a pit of lava and everything she had never done she fell far and fast and hit the ground

An no one knows whether that made a sound.
 Dec 2013 Ellen Bee
JC Lucas
I am riding through the old-time suburbs.
The city of salt pillars
I pass a bike or three
A jeep
A van with a six-inch lift and chipped orange paint
I round a corner
And suddenly all is quiet
Except for the squeaking of my old bicycle chain.
And I ex-
Hale

If you were here you would ask me why I sighed
And I would reply
"It's not a sigh, I just forgot to breathe"

I just forgot to breathe.

And I'm breathing now
My shoulders are at ease
And my bike is squeaking.
I wonder how often pockets of silence bubble up in the city
For a moment-
In this one spot-
It is still-
And then a car drives by and we resume.
I found myself in a pocket of silence in the center of a beehive this afternoon
And I sighed
Because the silence made me realize that I was holding my breath
So I exhaled
And relaxed

And then a car drove by
And we resumed.
it is a dangerous thing to do
to still in silence
alone with nothing but thoughts
and feelings
belonging only
to me.
how risky it is
to cut the world away
snap the string connecting everything
to draw the curtain down
left with my shadow
a
poisonous
companion
giving life
to sorrow
an unwise
circumstance
to be with me and me
and just me--
and suicide,
she purrs
along the window's rim
peeping in
at me and me and
lonesome me
 Dec 2013 Ellen Bee
Emily XXXXX
You're just like me
Like a mirror reflection
Touch our hands to the glass
We look so different

But I like what you like
You think how I think
You speak as I do

And I loved who you love

The difference in our identical reflections
Is that he is no longer on my side of the glass
and now stands behind you on yours

Identical in every way

Save for the heartache

I can only hope that he keeps these reflections dissimilar

At least for your sake
 Nov 2013 Ellen Bee
Morgan
drought
 Nov 2013 Ellen Bee
Morgan
he wasn’t just an other ship that sank in my sea
he was the drought that left the whole thing empty
 Nov 2013 Ellen Bee
Daniel Magner
I'm a
merry-go-man
stand in one spot
I'll appear again
my gallant steed is just
a plastic stallion
sowing seeds of lust
and self depreciation
my feet are tied
to his stirrups
I can't be loose of them
for I am knifeless
just let me fly
from this merry-go-life
again
Daniel Magner 2013
Next page