Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Please fight for me.
Please.
I am literally begging for you to walk up to this room and make me stop crying.
This isn't poetry, Mom.
This isn't hard to understand.
This is your daughter begging you to please fight for me.
I don't remember the kisses goodnight or the
gentle hugs when I scraped my knee.
What I do remember is waiting in the closet,
scared and alone,
learning for the first time that the
only person who can really be
there for me, is me.
I waited
I listened for you.
I hoped for you.
Did you get that?
I said,
I hoped for you.
we like hearing the sounds of our own voices
we like reassurance, and
to imagine that unlike what everyone might think,
we are the next best thing.
that's why this is so confusing.
these people are the next best thing
so why aren't they acting like it?
why aren't they acting like the brave,
insightful,
sometimes introspective,
people that i know they are.
This is our year.
This is our time to be what the songs drone on about.
The ones that our parents pretend to despise, then secretly reflect on the uplifting lyrics,
transporting their minds to a time less worrisome then their own.
The skinny dipping,  the toxins, the sweet tastes ever- present on our tongues,
our gentle fingertips searching in the dark for more.
We mark the time with countless lyrics,
hold sacred the memories with sporadic pictures.
No one can take this from us.
Our steps will get a little lighter,
until we can no longer feel the hard ground; watching afar from the tops of the branches.
you can only dwell on the past for so long.
those memories that keep your head above water,
only seemingly keep you breathing.
the foreboding presence is always in the back of your mind,
tingling on your fingertips and
trembling on your tongue.
sitting in bed for hours,
thinking about those times,
that one night,
with that one person.
those feelings dissipate eventually.
hopefully to be replaced by new,
wonderful ones,
sometime soon
There was a girl who’s favorite bedtime story was Rapunzel.
The mother's definite betrayal of her only daughter, casting her away into a lonely tower for a mere cabbage, fascinated her.
The witch intrigued her and the story was read countless times by a girl too young to understand. And yet, pain seemed to seep from her eyelashes
and whisper small words.
Her face radiated an ember light that was visibly diminishing.
The lines in her forehead and blue under her eyes held a pain no girl should know.
She’s leaving and she’s not coming back.
She’ll leave this world, and the fairy tale she so desperately clung to, hoping to lay down somewhere warm.
Where the blue above her cheekbones will drip off into a river so crystal it made her eyes sting a little.
Shes making a happy ending by making an ending.
I can't wait for you anymore.
I want to take on the world.
I want to be so in love with the world, myself, and possibly another human- I can't see straight.
I want to touch every corner with a fierce passion.
I want to look in my lovers eyes and see the world.
To look in their eyes when were 80 and gray and see the gleam I fell in love with as a kid.
To gaze in their eyes and remember the world we took on as our own.
I want to experience every emotion a thousand times and feel heartache when I have to.
I want to lay down somewhere next to the people I love…
and not give two ***** about the next day.
I want whomever I lay next to, to know I care about them…
whether I take them in my arms and kiss them with every part of my being,
or simply hold their hand and make them feel safe.
I want to feel the extent of loving someone and never knowing the limits.
I want to be alive for as long as I live.
When you read something beautiful
and every letter seeps into your being
every curve and straight edge makes its way through the grooves on your fingertips:
that is a truly remarkable thing.
When twenty six letters can make you feel each and every emotion,
to the point where these twenty six enemies, lovers, and friends
swim before your eyes into a swirly puddle . . .
There is no purer feeling than this.
 Dec 2013 Roni Shelley
LET
Courier
 Dec 2013 Roni Shelley
LET
A Courier boy is filling my head
with thoughts and words untyped and unsaid
And I'm just a girl who's Helvetica Neue
and all I want is to be with you
 Dec 2013 Roni Shelley
Ann Beaver
Finger on the trigger
A decapitated appetite
ears pricked
I listen for your smell
of freshly sliced apples
like the ones mom used to give us
your gaze is a hungry wolf
and I wonder if I've turned into father.
Next page