Tattoo your passion onto my tongue

Give me something to talk about

Brand the heart in your chest

Into my fingertips

So I can write about love

Implant your smile to my eyelids

Then I will dream of reasons to wake

Todays sun felt lonely
Drenched in isolation
Melting for acceptance
Draping light upon empty carcasses
Feeling the gravity of the space between

An embrace no one can fulfill
Without the proper tools
The days will be spent empty
Full of giving solar flares of its former self
Begging for a better understanding
feeling altruism at the core

When voice fails
My purple pen
Embraces
My keening soul

'I never meant to hurt you'

The last words that echoed from her letter.

'I Love you'

Her words lingered in my mind.

'Bang Bang!'

The sound stained my heart.

Send me your suicidal letter and lead me to self harm.

But to commit the crime infront of me, lead me to an asylum

May the words fall from my jowls


Convincing you of the power


I compress inside my lungs


Letting not a single ounce of tomorrow


Pass without your recognition

You may not have been birthed in the soil,
and granted,
you will not blossom
when spring melts winters wake
but inside of you
grows a thousand gardens
full of exploding stars.
You are of the earth
and your ashes
have been constructed with stardust,
and set free with the wind.
So you may not have a pretty face,
and your body may hold stories
of too many moonless nights alone.
But if you reach inside,
you will find a forest
for a ribcage
and a restless ocean heart.
So don't ever let anyone tell you
you are nothing.
You are a galaxy
holding a million different planets,
and my dear,
that is not nothing.

In a world where traumas are written all over our bodies


He has a bipolar jaw line and a suicidal knee cap,

collapsing and shaking

and reverberating his thoughts through his PTSD lip.

It quivers, and she looks away with an autistic eyelid.

See her a deaf cheek?

Their blind foreheads fluctuate, and their arthritic fingers vibrate.

Reynard’s Disease. Or Disorder IV. Perhaps,

one we’ve never heard before consumes the heart that’s about to break.

....

This was read at the University of Kansas in May of 2013: Read more about this event here:

http://shannonathompson.com/2013/05/10/contest-winners-and-poetry-from-my-ku-reading/