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May 2014 · 3.2k
She is Mississippi Sunshine
Ris Howie May 2014
There was sunshine coming off of her
Blues and cream dripping from her lips down the crease of her smile
Pooling in the corners of those cheeks
Neon and tangible
The warmth irradiating from the swirls of her fingers
Southern hues
Her intonations dancing between the half moons between her index and middle fingers
Her skin shines
Mississippi mud runs clear over the rivers that dance beneath her collarbone
You can hear it flutter with the clouds
Her heartbeat
It stills the fields she runs through
There was sunshine coming off of her
Whispering strawberry sweetness
Tingeing the souls we carry on our feet.
Apr 2014 · 770
My Anatomy
Ris Howie Apr 2014
I swear the palms of my hands look far too thin for the
weight of my world.
My fingers too short to count the number of
times I've been unsure how much longer
my legs can go.

But where my body fails my heart will not,
and though sometimes strength dictates that
the words I can't write leave paper cuts beneath my nails,
I swallow every word for safekeeping.

I'd give them back if I had any pounds to lose,
but I don't worry anymore for the safety of
the pages I choke down,
I don't need a bookmark to remember,
thats what bruises are for.
Apr 2014 · 463
Might
Ris Howie Apr 2014
Might;
Your excuse in a word,
The title you give in order to keep your slate clean of saying "no,"
To turn your hat backwards,
Tilt our worlds,
and pretend you are still facing forward.

The word might has no integrity,
and it leaves scuff marks that don't easily polish clean

as would a yes or a no.
Ris Howie Jan 2014
I speak to you in riddles
A mismatch of half formed inflections and watered down complimentary words
I constantly tailor my speech to try and fix the places you need patched
Attempting stitches to fix the pools of pain lingering in the spaces between the freckles spanning your back,
My fingers try to touch them away but my hands cant block the bruising spread beneath the plane of your skin.

You’ve become one of those heartbeats I have to keep my eye on for fear it will scatter down the screen and never return,
Your clothes are brightly colored, meant to weather the wind, but on your thin frame they trap you like wetted wool
Making it impossible for you to leave the form you possessed in the past.


I try different types of talking these days
Leaving maps for you to find the thinly veiled meaning behind the paper kisses
And the gold-leafed print floating inside the swirls of my lips
The pads of my fingers try to score your jaw with reminders
That the only thing hollow is the space between your neck and your chest
And the words I whisper into your void is heavy with inflected subtext.

I want to place your quilting back around your heart,
Make your veins more insular to keep the warmth inside that instead trickles out through your hands and feet that never feel the sun,
Your body temperature is constant and chills my intonations,
I can’t give what you won’t take and every day its 20 degrees.

I hope that in your desperation to forget the words you will better remember their meanings.
When you want to give so much to someone who can't see what there is anything needing to be taken.
Jan 2014 · 462
Museums
Ris Howie Jan 2014
I painted in broad strokes,
I didn't like to see the details and  the darkness hiding in the corners of my brush.
I asked you to take me to a museum,
But you refused, because there they don't allow you to touch the masterpieces and your fingers needed to find mine.

I paint in brighter colors now.
Jan 2014 · 3.2k
Statistical Methods
Ris Howie Jan 2014
True or false, when you stood behind me with your hands on my face and mouth to mine,
I was sitting on the floor, but my feet were no longer on solid ground.
I wonder if the distance between us is not from something as innocuous as miles or hours
but the more discrete variable- past open legs leading to closed hearts.

I'm not asking you to open your front door to me, unwittingly there is no need,
you've already found a spot in the sheets from me- conveniently forgetting you've already let me in.
And while you are speaking in operational terms to create what we are not,
you have quietly defined what we are.

Counting the statistics of it all, if we are the 95th percentile in our sample size of damaged goods,
5 percent is still unaccounted for- I place my hope of you among the population of those still yet to fall.

I can count those invisible scars when my lips are on your neck and you remind me it's too hard,
but when placed elsewhere the rule is no longer valid.
True or false, it is only too much when my breath can trail thoughts closer to  your heart
where my intimacy is harder to un-feel.

True or false, some distances are so deep within our heads they become simply not real.
Jan 2014 · 1.9k
Heal
Ris Howie Jan 2014
My fingernails are ***** from the blackness of the graphite coated words
refusing to come to actualization.

My tongue chokes on the half formed sentences
swimming in the back of my throat.

They fill my mouth with a bitterness
coming only with the acidity known to unrequited thoughts.

Physiological markers of one who has simply too much to feel,
the penance for scar tissue of wounds who too quickly "healed."
Jan 2014 · 239
Untitled
Ris Howie Jan 2014
"Not all words can teach us to heal."
                        -8 word story
Jan 2014 · 262
Saga of a Sick Girl II
Ris Howie Jan 2014
Don't worry, she said, I won't run,

my skin taught me needles mean
the pain is done.
Jan 2014 · 296
Saga of a Sick Girl
Ris Howie Jan 2014
Objectively, my hands are here, in front of my face I can see.
Subjectively**, all my vision allows are the images of what I possess that can no longer carry me.
Jan 2014 · 263
Untitled
Ris Howie Jan 2014
You jump I jump, Jack says she,
all it takes is one leap,
and we all will be free.
Ris Howie Jan 2014
It's been a long time and it's been a day,
the words I want to write are crammed into the front of my mind but I want them to be shadows in the back,
the tiny flecks of brightened skin you left on my hip remind me where you were and where you are now, not with me.

I know to keep you I have to put you far away,
in order to have you I must remain not yours,
the syntax necessary to speak must contain half the warmth of inflection I wish to place within it,
and the heart I wish to give buried beneath the body I allow you to hold.
it's ******, but its what i feel.
Dec 2013 · 421
Vodka for Your Thoughts
Ris Howie Dec 2013
People like to say ***** tastes like love,
I say it tastes like the thoughts we are trying to choke down,
but pushing the poison further into our bodies,
letting it percolate in our bloodstream,
it becomes inevitable it will rise  up again.

You say you're trying to live,
how romantic,
you're really trying to drown.
It's a shame because your life is twenty times more beautiful than your death could ever be.

Less meaning is found in your blood than in your pen,
these days your heart is made of the paper you write on
and under your capable hands,
it is never clean.

I'd like to think the ink crawling across the pages of your book
makes more than one kind of poetry,
and that you unravel the words,
carrying them in your pockets,
instead of hiding them under your skin.

I can see them you know,
the dark fleeting clouds of thought hovering in the stratosphere behind your eyes,
your pupils are swimming in the contents of that bottle,
and the ***** can no longer be found.
Dec 2013 · 394
Poems
Ris Howie Dec 2013
I have poems inside of me that my lips can't form into words,
that my keys can't handle,
that paper would burn.
I have thoughts inside of me that my heart can't hold,
that my fingers can't grasp,
that sentences can't form.
I have pain inside of me that my body doesn't feel,
that my skin can't touch,
that scarves can't cover.
Dec 2013 · 617
Bold
Ris Howie Dec 2013
I can only make myself write about the people who don't hurt, those that don't matter.
I can't wait for the day that I can write about you.
Dec 2013 · 572
Untitled
Ris Howie Dec 2013
September 25th 2012
I was in your bathtub and we were laughing about the fact that we were so close awkward moments didn't exist. I put bubbles on your thigh and you made that squeaky noise I wasn't supposed to tell anyone you could make, it wasn't manly.
October 1st 2012
I was driving on highway 80 and I couldn't really see because the windshield wipers didn't work on water inside of the car. You couldn't tell me what you wanted and I knew that meant it wasn't me you just didn't fully know it yet.
October 2nd 2012
You tried to do it with 180 characters but I wasn't having that and when you called your voice broke before you could say my name. The number of times you said I love you in those twenty minutes outnumbered how many times you had in the past two weeks, by tens.
November 10th 2012
I cried in your sisters arms because yours weren't there and she smelled like your fabric softener.
November 25th 2012
I packaged all your letters in a box with a few of my own and mailed them back. You called me to ask why I would do that to you. I asked you why it mattered and you told me you slept with the blanket we made love on every night. I didn't know why that mattered either.
December 27th 2012
I laid in someone else's arms and they held me while I cried about whether anyone else's arms felt like home. He didn't deserve it, neither did I. This is my apology for trying to move on and bringing him into it.
January 11th 2013
You saw me for the first time and even though you hate tattoos you told me mine was ****. You were drunk and you thought my shirt needed a few more buttons, you didn't like anyone else to see  me when you couldn't. You told me not to tell you I wasn't in love with you anymore. I told you that was what you had wanted.
February 13th 2013
He had cancer and you were the only person I knew how to tell. But you were busy and you said if I was going to pull that **** to take it somewhere else. I learned who you were that night even though you'd always told me.
March 2nd 2013
It wasn't a special day, nothing happened. But I realized I had stopped letting it be about you. I stopped thanking you for letting me go and just let go.
Dec 2013 · 350
Black and Blue
Ris Howie Dec 2013
They said it's too late to die young,
I think you took that as an invitation to grow up, grow old.
What you like to imply is that the scares don't really hurt anymore,
because even though they **** me on the inside,
you live under the impression that your insides have already died.

The poetry in your veins tells you the first time you died was when your mom had better things to do that watch you live,
I think you believe death has engulfed your soul,
I want to tell you to breath that burst says you're alive.

If you can no longer feel your heart allow me to,
and remember if the only way to remember you're still here is to mark it down on you,
remember only live tissue can turn black and blue
Dec 2013 · 1.1k
Unpacking
Ris Howie Dec 2013
My English teacher always said let's unpack the meaning,
sometimes I really wanted to tell her *******- maybe the person who wrote it wanted it to stay packaged nicely in it's box.

We write because we feel
or because we don't.

If the brook is running into the ocean, and the water is flowing fast
why does it need to be symbolic for the tears that flow through the current of our lives and empty us,
let it be a **** brook.

We write because we feel
or because we don't.

If the wallpaper is yellow, it's fading, it's flowers now appear to be dripping off the walls,
why does it need to be a metaphor for the rejection of a lover and the deterioration of a soul,
let it be a **** old house.

We write because we feel
or because we don't.

My English teacher always said let's unpack the meaning,
sometimes I really wanted to tell her *******- because when I wrote my last piece
I let the pieces of me burst because I didn't want the world to see how I was feeling.

We write because we feel
*until we don't.
Dec 2013 · 365
Steps
Ris Howie Dec 2013
I haven't met someone I wanted to be vulnerable to around, really ever.

The intimacy always snuck up on me with quiet and calculated missteps,
or I forced it in.
I never did it right I never took it slow.

But the fact that the only place your hand has ever been is on the top of my thigh, resting carefully palm open, trying to reflect no meaning--
I feel safe.
I hope someday you get to love me,

because for the first time I feel safe to let you
Dec 2013 · 869
Story Tales
Ris Howie Dec 2013
When I dreamt of my future it didn't include the cheap polyester of sterilized hospital gowns.

I didn't envision the white walls of my castle would hold brightly colored doctor's office posters.
They forget to mention the princess pale skin doesn't always come with a crown,
And cherry lips don't always result from a prince.
When you are told at age eight to be the hero of your own story,
It's forgotten to say that some find superhero strength forced upon them as the solitary option.

When I dreamt of my future it didn't include the cheap polyester of sterilized hospital gowns.
But now it's a perk of the gig,
the perpetually ill princess kid.
Dec 2013 · 382
Composition Books
Ris Howie Dec 2013
Composition books are too much of a commitment for me.

An everyday analogy for the girl who sneaks

Across Memphis streets at four a.m.

To keep from staying too long in the sheets above you

And previously below me.
Dec 2013 · 733
Cigarettes
Ris Howie Dec 2013
April of last year I counted in the cigarettes I watched try to pour the light back into your eyes.

The parallel of your embers against the dulled papers of mine,
both poignant with the bitterness emanating from our little metaphors.

We never promised to be careful and no strings attached makes the tying threads easy to find.

The words I never said left paper cuts on my tongue,
replacing where your lips used to be.

It's lucky that my thoughts move too fast for your feel to follow me.

Even luckier still that the only thing left is a tattoo of that cigarette where your mouth used to be.
Dec 2013 · 617
Untitled
Ris Howie Dec 2013
I wish I could tell you it was a Thursday,
Maybe give the beginning of our extra load a concrete date.
But I can't tell you it was Thursday and I
Can't tell you it wasn't.
Sometimes I'm glad the devil is in the details
Because then with me he'll never be found.
Nov 2013 · 1.3k
Coloring
Ris Howie Nov 2013
It’s been highlighted, underlined, written on the side of my shoe: do not awaken love until it so desires.
It is to love then, not to me or to you, that I owe an apology
Because when they told me love hurts— I invited it to knock me down.

I think you try to talk to me because I knew you best and you like that,
But every time I offered you a tissue you took it as a chance to cut into mine,
And I let you to chip away a shade of my hue with every slice,
Changing the gradient and adding cracks to the contour of my soul.

Every time I slid my skin off for you it was under artificial light,
Painting the yellow pigment of my skin shades of black and blue instead of allowing me to stay golden because shiny wasn’t the right color,
You didn’t need to see your reflection the truth wasn’t interesting to you.

You didn’t take my honor you ignored its existence,
I made love to you without making you love me,
That’s why it’s so funny that now you don’t play hard to get,
you play hard to get rid of.

Realizing I deserved better changed everything,
You had nothing to offer but your own confusion and version of the world,
But I have my own now,
And I’ve colored it to be absent of your blacks and blues.
Nov 2013 · 964
Untitled
Ris Howie Nov 2013
people should come with sodium labels
so we can know ahead of time- how much salt one carries to throw in our wounds.
how much of the pounds they count- have the potential
to become water weight from caused tears.

maybe if people came with a nutritional warning
we could better see who had the propensity to be hazardous to our health.
Nov 2013 · 446
Pucker
Ris Howie Nov 2013
You are the scar in the form of a freckle
on my left pinkie,
the one that tells me people don't last forever but marks do.

How ironic that the symbolism of a mis-colored dot
of skin should be the reminder that you are now out of place in my world,
the wrong color, where your pigment discolored mine.

They tell me I wore my heart on my sleeve
but that would imply it's place on my person,
when the place it currently resides is between your fist.

You used to tell me your knuckles were swollen because you were beaten a time or two,
but really the pink puckers show more of your own fights and the matching
color of someone else's scar tissue.

I was told I deserved better than smoke filled hands
but I'm pretty sure what I really deserve is more than alcoholic lips.

They tell me if you have to ask if a story is true, its not.

I'm guessing in terms of a love tale, the same would apply to me and you.
Nov 2013 · 535
rai-sons detre
Ris Howie Nov 2013
I'm not a person to you,
my subtleties are lost in a constellation of tally marks,
the strikes against me in your mental map of our universe.

My buttons can’t be hidden from you you’re the one
who tied them so loosely to the cuffs of my sleeves
and the bulk of my 20 cent words form the change in the linings of your pockets,
where my hands used to be.

The pads of your fingers find the freckles on the nape of my neck but the worn feeling of you thumb prints against my pulse reminds me
the pigmentation is no longer cute to you
just another imperfection for the list..

which is running through the front of my brain
like your hands used to run through the creases
of my smile.

It’s the poetry to the empty screen your face used to fill
that reminds me some pills are better off untaken,
and that sometimes empty yellow bottles are filled with the hope that is left behind by the promise
that sickness requires it to be refilled again.
May 2013 · 764
Leaving
Ris Howie May 2013
When I dreamt of my future it didn't include the cheap polyester of sterilized hospital gowns,
I didn't envision the white walls of my castle would hold brightly colored doctors office posters,
They didn't tell me that some get strength forced upon them as an only option.

So when I told her I wanted to get out of here
And she asked, "the doctors?"
I had to answer her with

I suppose, that too.
May 2013 · 280
Untitled
Ris Howie May 2013
I try to say I loved you
but the words get stuck
behind the memories of your blue black thumb prints
on the corners of my heart.
May 2013 · 307
What We [Didn't] Hear
Ris Howie May 2013
Honey don't you realize
When they say "don't make another your home"
They're speaking directly to you?

Exceptions, is not a word within the vocabulary of the universe.

Baby don't you see
When he says "I will always love you"
He's got fingers crossed behind your heart?

Existential, is not a word within the vocabulary of your love life.
May 2013 · 1.2k
Red Solo Cup
Ris Howie May 2013
I do believe it is safe to say
     your world has changed
Ruled by a red cup.

I wish it'weren't quite so apparent
    your heart has likened
To an ash ember now forgotten in your truck.

Out of the night that covers you
    your person has diminished
Showing it no longer has an unconquerable soul.
May 2013 · 1.2k
Reverence-See
Ris Howie May 2013
I feel, without the findings feel of those hidden-hands, which I cannot see,
The warmth-waking-wishing potency of crawling down-
wards from a state of reverence-see
Seeing! with those eyes of heart; the beauty love of a God of eternity.
I don’t wonder of it: knowing not to know is the
Devotion, a given test of my ability to look and see past visibility
My faith: built, as bones in me, to accept unconditional Truth from thee.
Trying hoping, I love, without alterations finds, true to Your methodology,
Crosses across’d the paths, which He wind Walked,
Speaking to the storied ancients of those miracles-measured
I yet didn’t live to see, but take on faith-
and a measure of reverence-see in the wanting of inspiring a little You in Me.
In the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Mar 2013 · 563
Erasure
Ris Howie Mar 2013
No amount of toothpaste can wash away the taste of who you were last night

The words, foreign lips, and alcoholic tint of 3 a.m. hide in the corners of your smile

I do believe you think the sun rising again causes some rebirth of you and erasure of the night

But though the dark of the world may fade the dark of you may not.
Feb 2013 · 481
Permanence
Ris Howie Feb 2013
The biggest relief after losing someone like you
is realizing I'm smiling just as big in the pictures without you, too.

See this photograph was key
to realizing you weren't a miracle, miracles are free.

Sitting shotgun to this heartbreak scene
it doesn't take a Polaroid to remind me what you no longer mean.

I'm smiling just as big in the pictures without you, too
a reminder all people aren't a permanent tattoo.
Feb 2013 · 515
45
Ris Howie Feb 2013
45
The cold is poetic,
Purposefully forgoing the pleasures of your heat.
It's a mind set,
To sit in the stillness elagiac,
Just minding my own in a numb 45 degrees.
elagiac; lamenting
Feb 2013 · 1.7k
If It's [Not] Love
Ris Howie Feb 2013
The simple answer is they were just stories masquerading as promises:
I love you, misunderstood application
Alcohol, induced honesty
Hands, need no prompting
Making love, choreography
Compliments, grammatical recitation
Place in your heart, the corner lining.
Feb 2013 · 393
[r]
Ris Howie Feb 2013
[r]
When the light turns red I won't be stopping
For my thoughts move too fast than to
Match the slowing staccato of my feet.

What a strange way to be
Moving too fast for your feet to follow
Though I suppose it is how most become over time.
Feb 2013 · 1.8k
Semi-Colon;
Ris Howie Feb 2013
semi-colon;
where a sentence could have ended but did not,
instead adding a rejoinder.
the space between the dot and comma
there hovers the fate of lovers,
the whispers of hope for the hurting,
and the continuance for those
awaiting the now postponed end;

semi-colon;
the tattoo of a writer who has something
left to say, the brand of those
whose adolescent tendencies pull them from delivering
that much needed break, fracture,
ending of the story.

the ghost of where you could,
or perhaps should, have stopped.
Feb 2013 · 684
Experience
Ris Howie Feb 2013
I think of your new hands on my hips,
Only for a second only for a passing,
But when I try to mark and label the feeling flickered in that moment,
Experience veils my mind from the ability to distinguish my emotions.

I think of how a particular cologne no longer lingers,
Of how it no longer holds the poignancy of my young love,
Now I begin to distrust my ability to distinguish adolescent friendship from the once experienced love,
Experience lends me incapable of knowing my hearts intention by that flickering,
As I think of your new hands on my hips.
Once we experience our first love and its loss, how do we once again try to distinguish feelings of friendship from feelings of something more?
Feb 2013 · 1.2k
Acid
Ris Howie Feb 2013
Finally,
but not all at once
the memories faded,
a sigh of relief will be felt
coupled with the acid,
of bitter nostalgia
the pain of remembering,
those things that you
must now forget.
Feb 2013 · 704
Anti-th
Ris Howie Feb 2013
Anti-thesis *******,
when a world is to be
,soon,
irrevocably altered.
Feb 2013 · 844
Untitled
Ris Howie Feb 2013
"You deserve better than smoke filled hands"
uttered from one a.m. alcoholic lips
yet blunt and utterly truth,
this truth, this veritas
released unknowing of just how poignant it was.

Poetry,
from the alcoholic lips
of ex- adolescent lovers.
Feb 2013 · 491
Tinseled
Ris Howie Feb 2013
The blue tinting of your numbered set,
the coloring of such beauty only possible
after facing the, before absent,
present mortality...one needs more
time to become jaded,
so for now I am simply tinseled.
Feb 2013 · 1.2k
Naivety
Ris Howie Feb 2013
There is a naivety in the absence of love,
the need for new affirmation in
the capability of the world to once
again hold onto your heart.

No patience within the presence of pain,
we simply cling to ephemeral half-life
traces of the real emotion we so
desire and therefore cheapen by
embracing tarnish.

— The End —