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brooke  Oct 2017
pyrite
brooke Oct 2017
love a girl like pyrite
when you found me in the mines
shook me from your baskets
saw me glint in the sunlight
said my  irises shifted like tiger's eye
i was never what you thought

love a girl like pyrite
if she's your gold then i'm a
shade of amber, a copper quarter
if I was hard then she is soft and
quick in your hands like a gardner snake
faint and without teeth, tangling through
the grass and you love the silent chase
the girls that flip belly up and
kiss your corners, kiss your
borders, rub away the ash
and lay themselves over your grenades
your sticks of dynamite you blew
me away with

love a girl like pyrite
because I was a fool's gold,
the normal luster of something
grand, sieved through your tables
back into the river, the unspoken
daughters of not-good-enough
lying in wait, picked up by farmers
by men who sell, who hock, who
pawn, washed down in Vindicator Valley
run between thumbs, turned up amongst
rocks the ordinary, run-of-the-mill
we can only be imitators of
the greatest


love a girl, who's fool's gold
would you find her?
would you keep her?
(c) Brooke Otto 2017


a phrase that's been on my my mind for a weekq
Pyrrha  Aug 2018
Fool's gold
Pyrrha Aug 2018
You don't know me
The places I wanna see
The things I want to know
What I want to be told
No, you don't know me

You can't hold me
Or tell me everything's alright
When I know you hold her
Like you used to hold me

You tell her she's made of gold
You know her favorite food, her favorite dress
And all the other things
That you don't know about me

I know you've memorized
Her face, Her voice
Yet when you turn around
Can you even remember my name?

I guess it's too much to ask
For redamancy these days
As loyalty has gone out the window
A word of the past

But you used to tell me
That I was made of gold
And that in your arms
I was only yours to hold
But your hands have roamed
So far away from me

And it's not fair
To make me watch
As you do with her
All you did with me

We used to talk about the future
But in a single heartbeat
You have changed our destiny

All those words of yours
Come back and haunt me
Everytime you called me beautiful,
Was it just practice for telling her?

Well you were right about one thing
I am made of gold
And that girl of yours
No matter how much you try
To mold her into me
She will only ever be pyrite
Just a cheap imitation
Of the treasure you will never hold
Pyrite is a very common mineral that is called fool's gold as many mistake it for gold.
Third Eye Candy May 2013
don't understand me. this is not for you. It's for you.
my Gemini shin splints are pirates. hopeless Romans, romantically dismantling
the things you Undo. the things you You.
I Doctor in your Seuss canal.
with a frontal lobe, more Job
than a postage stamp -
in this Day and Age.
It's grey and rage -
with the tooth torn
out !

Out
through the probable snout
of the next mummified god-king
of our interlocking rot...
our chamber pots
spotting the oft begot good
of our evil
Mummenschanz

we are crepes' rue; yet we roulette best
in Typhoons
from murk
placid.

with 2.8 kids

and damp
matches.

we are
struck in a gale
of flaccid

dumb as a Belle of the Ball
that Squares
a Rube

with an Ism.... from Ix.

sometimes.
Meagan Moore Jan 2014
In the divet between mountains
Resides a wooden cabin – ostensibly an amalgamation of the scape
Adroitly - I - quondam female warrior flit
Down massive (ancient) hand-laid, hand-cut carved stone steps
Bounding from contingent step onto the dense pad of turned soil
Tacit compliance between gravity and soil holds footprints bound
A compressed deflating crescendo as pace ignites with bounds

Cadences of protuberant wildflowers and grasses erupt from swollen terra
A winsome chromatic menagerie, dispersed in ecstatic fistfuls
A venerably ancient ritual

My nascent clandestine vocation
Personally meted out - a beatification for my provisional sanctuary

Along glacier-fed stream
Lissome fingers shadow inert stalks –plucking dormant beginnings from their desiccated ligaments

I am austere and unadorned save for a festoon of pyrite flecks trailing my semblance
Residual gilding from my ante-meridian swim taken after requisite gathering of wild blackberries, goose berries, and rhubarb along oft-tamped path

The sun, nestling into its requisite apex endorsed my completion
I reclined into the hassock of soil, feeling the elements settle about with an embossment of my form
Imposing verdure arched subtly as compressed soil beckoned hyperbolic flux

As I lay within the basilica of opulent living columns replete with comestible bounty
Lingering dew honed inflections of sacrosanct petrichor in unison with piquant clover
Wild purple clover buds saccharinely tinted and inundated nestled nerves in mine cribriform plate

Birds pitched and galloped through the frond tips and beyond in the lapis expanse
Frequently snatching damselfly’s and assemblages of midges from their ephemeral drift

Auspicious rays transcended stippled diaphanous gravid clouds
Light inundated ether entered humbly into the cathedral oculus
Pyrite speckled terrain beneath, and my bare gilded form above
Cast a refracted aura about my sanctuary

Precipitously the elusive vaporous embankment distended further
Ashen atmospheric correspondence inaugurated liquescent sustenance to my mountain abode

And I -
Lingered beneath the descending gobbets, curls furled in a puddle
Fresh topsoil cupping my corporal topographic contours
Pressing blackberries into my mouth between smiles
I seem to prefer the cold
As if to sooth my bruised heart
So it freezes and no longer bleeds
Frozen around and between the parts
Because a cold heart is still whole
Even if it can no longer feel
When the warmth has been lost
Losing its attraction to appeal
Only a fool would fall in love
Having the intention to steal
This fool's gold of a heart away
One that has been shut and sealed
cps Sep 2015
You told me I had a heart of gold
And I thought you were King Midas himself.
It turns out all you touch turns to ****,
And your heart is nothing but pyrite.
I guess that makes me the fool.
And who shall care for that o'er which you weep
Or share the burden of this world's foredoom
Seen starkly? Behold, a haunting specter creeps
Among the binding fates spun on life's loom.
You’ll wake them not to that great misery
Which emptiness of pride has reckless wove
But pluck the web for loss and trembling
Of idols in the soul for which they strove.
Put off your glossy youth and early oaths
Devout nativity; raise up your cup
To ***** Lethe and thunder with the strokes
Of fury, treading out the ripened sup!
They will not bear to flay their sacred cows
But shades of death endure and prostrate bow.

Ages in their veins, more raging, whirl
As titanic potentials’ dreadful might
Turns girl to boy, conversely boy to girl
Unlimbing reason for unreason's fright.
That once gone right, here deftly ventures left
As self-conception staggers to its doom
Bursting the bonds of day and night, distressed
With desperate grasping measures, late and soon.
So set on generation's awesome curve
Of ageless heart and mind, how shall they bear
The die they cast at first when madly swerved
Into contesting congresses of care?
Dividing parts, dissolving in the same
The common wealth, no part the whole maintains.

Boast of the times and gilded privilege
Are these pretended guardians of State
Whose politics of power have sought to bank
Their future 'gainst dissenting arguments.
With rhetoric to foist a brave new age
They come as chaos mages on the brink
Of all disposing will, all ends betrayed
To serve their corporations’ nod and wink.
Auctioning the world, their goods are sold
Commercially with avaricious might
That sanctions lust, in quest of pyrite gold
And pirate earnings, staked upon deceit.
At last, the men of mock integrity
Luring the world to covert slavery!

Hurrah, the master men and lords of time-
From time brought forth, they are the world's latest
Whose overweening strut is in the best
Of culminating age, the mind refined!
Now to and fro they go, their lists increased
With every tally; line for line computes
Their beads of enterprise, the while relieved
Of tribulation, fate of hapless dupes.
Learning is theirs, precepts are theirs to bend;
Lawyers, clerics, politicians rest
Upon this pillar; they can split or mend
The finest lines; no guile their thoughts distress.
Step by step they round the universe
And finite lies to infinite converse!

What pride of theirs that strains for fleeting fame
Seeking to wrest from time the wasting plaque
Of recognition, host to every hack
That postures on the stage of the obscene!
Pretending worth, their practiced scripts dispose
In mocking light an empty dignity
While darkening intents; witless disclosed
On lips and brow their self-important glee.
As if full-wrought by truth's heroic wing
Their pride aspires; on vain conceits they soar
Up through the mist while private songs they sing
In self-made praise for deeds of phantom lore.
From belfries of the schools, in broken flight
They shriek away, hell's banshees of the night!

These timely wise, entranced of mind, decree-
Hear all you simple what we shall disclose
Which craft of our discernment is repose
Of wealth in understanding mastery.
A gift to all, these rich-invested beings
Pretending to resolve profundities
Decoct the world with learned fluency
Of torture ways, all gnostic knots untied.
A flair for comedy, their gelded self
Mounts every snorting bore of certainty
Then armchair resting, pants to yet indulge
Another ******* idol’s reckless scheme.
Some stowaways upon the open seas
And polished sextants of academe!

Here is their derogation, born from creeds
Of judgment in self-righteous confidence
That proves for nothing to the innocent
But swamps life's refugees with cruel conceit.
With ages they have built the edifice
Of dogma; every pit and lion’s maw
Is their contraption, set in consciousness
Of the condemning letter of their laws.
Cunning serpents, masquerading doves
They fashion argument, more vicious wrought
With rationales to blacklist those who strove
To flee their institutions’ heinous plot.
Enamored with a fascist benefit
The systems of the world they implement!

Fanatic men, how bold they tempt the fates
That meet to each the fruits of brutish will
Redoubled, which they’ve spent in kind to date
Upon their brothers, sisters…other self.
They make an estimation, rule the span
Between men; lord over equity
With zero tolerance and brazen hand
To smash upon their consanguinity.
Such is the wicked priesthood’s confidence
In its own judgment, ever owning not
The wrong condemned in others, deep dispensed
To every heart, from roots of life begot.
More wretched they, and haunted with the shame
Of hypocrites, bedeviled by the same!

O law of learning, sum of thinkers' best
Now magnified, ensconced upon the power
Of natal worth and privileged social dower;
Once ruled by you, the Earth pleads for redress.
No scruple sought, no reservation found
To staunch against your certifying will
Which point of iron stylus now furrows
The world at large as object for the ****.
So cart away your pleading victim, mired
In ****** wallows of concupiscence
And grace deny, self-dubbed the doubtless squire-
Errant usurper of the human quest.
How dignified, the rake of your ambition
That promises continual division!
Kurt Schneider  Jan 2015
pyrite
Kurt Schneider Jan 2015
So you say you been searchin’ for a heart of gold,
 
Cliché,
 
You’ll never find one with a heart so cold,
 
The mine’s filled with water and the troops gone home,
 
And you’ll be left with nuthin but piles of stone,
 
Pyrite,
 
You’ll be laughin til the fool’s go home,
 
I’m right,
 
And you know it cause the truth’s been sown,
 
Put your fingers on the button but there’s no dial tone,
 
It goes 920-68 oh
 
Go head,
 
Think about it til your mind gets blown,
 
And grab ahold of someone so you don’t feel alone,
 
Ozone,
 
I said it cause your heads in the clouds,
 
And the rains burnin’ holes in your **** stained house,
 
Listen close ,
 
let me til you what its all about,
 
its no secret what goes on when the lights go out.
Aaron McDaniel  Jan 2013
Pyrite
Aaron McDaniel Jan 2013
I shine out loud
At midst of all the crowd
You can see me from your balcony
Everyone saw me as precious metal
You could see the fools gold
Making sure I was aware
That I am
Fools Gold
She was like the iron pyrite
The teacher asked them to examine, and describe;
Cold, dense and prickly,
Difficult to love.
Given the right light
And a gentle handling,
Oh, how she'd sparkle,
But in that place, expectations and sensory overload
rendered her lumpen, and resistant.
Removed from her books and her inner world - all she needed -
And placed in a maelstrom,
She was bewildered and forlorn.
Un-cooperative, they called her,
And the teachers loved the other gems instead,
Pretty little nuggets; Ruby, Jasper, Jade.

Two years of discouragement and dislike
And even the tentative sparkles had darkened.
The other gems enjoyed each other
And moved away from her magnetic pull,
sensing difference.
No outright meanness, not yet,
But hints were brewing, whispers had started
And she wandered alone, in the playground,
Talking to the seagulls, and singing to herself.
The teachers only wanted conformity
And called her parents to voice concern
about her lack of friends.
Had they asked her, allowed her to have a say
She would have told them it didn't matter
But they were determined that it did, to them, if not to her,
And her parents were added to the burden of people
Worried and disappointed, watching.
She knew now, she was different, she had always known but never minded,
Now it was a problem. She didn't fit,
Like that scratchy purple uniform, around her chubby waist
Food didn't judge, dislike or condemn.

That life ended, and a new struggle, in a new school, began.
This was harder; the meanness was apparent now,
Difference wasn't tolerated
And someone wandering alone was a target.
She found a place to hide, behind a staircase, with a book,
But they found her, removed her and patrolled her only refuge
Forcing her to submit to the torture.
Every day was a war zone,
So she found another way, and embraced ill-health, stealthily
Spraying deodorant directly into her own face
induced asthma attacks; and not all those  ear infections were real,
She was an accomplished actress.

She got through it, millions do.
She found her own place, her own friends in her own time.
Among Onyx, Jet and Tigers Eye
Her darkness didn't mark her out as different,
And all that fake illness
Was great prep for theatre,
Where she was able to return to her inner world,
And no-one cared if you feigned madness
Or embraced the real thing.
Difference was celebrated,
The whispers now, were that she had a great stage presence,
And a talent to be nurtured,
Not a difference to be despised.
Brad Lambert  Nov 2012
A Knot
Brad Lambert Nov 2012
My heart's so *******
I can hardly breathe.

It seems, to me, that every scent is yours
every sight or sound,
song lyric or strip of poetry
relates back to you and the knot in my chest.

I best recruit a young sailor
to untie and bend these cravings.

These faint and vague desires
not to kiss you
nor to *******
but to see you, lay with you, be with you.

That is what I crave daily,
what I need to loosen this knot.

But
the knot
just
tightens.


I crave to see you alone on a walk
or you with others
or you with me.
I especially crave to see you with me.

O' that which I'd give
to see you with me.

It must have been the grass
or the beers
or the LSD
because no natural occasion could make me feel this way.

I first heard you before I saw,
singing across the fence.

Your voice was like cream in hot coffee
scintillating, mesmerizing
fascinating, and light;
a drop of sweet in the dark, dark bitter.

I never knew that drinking coffee black
would soon become impossible.

Everything is
bitter
when you've tasted
sweet.


It's something in the way you visibly think
about the world and
others actions and
everything I say and do; something in the way you care.

It's something in the way you spit,
claiming the concrete as your own, a primal beast.

You are an incarnadine being,
a vastly deep creature whose
curls I can be lost in for
hours and days if not for those eyes.

Those eyes steal me with every glance,
dark mines of copper and fool's gold.

But pyrite is the sheen to which my mind melts,
and Scorpio sun signs
paint the mystique
that keeps me awake and alert all through the night

You keep me awake and alert,
waiting for the next move.

Yes, I'd be a liar if I said I felt friendship for you
and a heretic if I
dared to touch you.
But you dare to touch me. Every day,

you brush your hand 'gainst my leg,
grab my shoulder and hold,
knock your knee upon mine,
you push me gently,
but I die when you grab my thigh,
grab my thigh and squeeze it tightly
reassuring me that you're there
you're real
you're caring for me
and when the goodbyes come
**** the goodbyes
you hug me so closely and so tightly
that my heart,
knotted as it is,
beats faster than it ever has.

I swear that it beats
faster than it ever could.

And in this speed, this conflagration of emotion,
I feel how the knot
only tightens to where
even the youngest sailor lacks the nimbility to loosen it.

I swear that it's much
tighter than it ever was;

that no one has stressed my mind so,
kept my heart strained to where it
beats
faster than it ever could,

it beats faster yet, than the
rush of a train upon steel.
Third Eye Candy Jun 2013
in the east
a dry man stumbled through the lush panacea of a dessicated prayer
his faith moved mustard gas. gasping for clarity, he spoke a thing no god could answer.
he languished in the Eden of empirical Dodos
a succulent squab in the oasis of fables. he joined the throng. his shackles were mended.
his bonds, repaired.

in the west -
a rye bread crumbles along a path to a candy house -
to a furnace of blank stares.
it waits moonlit and rustic, alas - it's mad and verily cloaked in a thing no ' nothing ' would ask for.
it leads to a breach.
weary of  " who knows ? "
a truculent husk of a drought mislabeled. an actual flood.
it rankles the vision...
it plots despair.

in the north, a gunga din fumbles through the arid Earnest of our Importance. There -
we play crude brass. Profundo. at last, we nearly...

and even though we wide spark the char of our scorched affair
we vanquish any Southland
and the warm sun
frosts a glass eye
like pyrite.

and polly wants a lacquer, dark enough to maroon...
Amande Gall Aug 2011
I have used up all my tokens
and squandered all my pardons;
all that’s left is tarnished pyrite
and a jewellery box for two.
For I will tear your heart out
and feed it to the coyotes;
you may be the one for me,
but I’m no good for you.

As the field runs crimson
I’ll proceed to crack your spirit.
I know that this is foolish,
but love - this is all I know.
If the moon would make a bargain
on the dust that seals up fractures,
I would strip my backbone
reaching out to make it so;

I would mend each tiny crevice
- plant hydrangeas in the darkness,
but without a new foundation
it is all still frail and makeshift;
and each compounding weight is
all crushed-guts and shattered-statements.
Again we’re set a whirling;
we can’t recognize our faces.

The strongest tree is only paper
and my convoluted nature
is just a fallacy I’ve built to house,
my fear of what is true.
So, we’ll dance until our knees split,
you’ll repeat that we’re a unit
and as I kick the chair out
choke a final, “i love You.”

. . .  .  .   .   .    .    .     .     .     .      .      .       .       .        .         .          .           .                 .

Amidst staggered breaths
my fragile frame converts to dust.
Oak entombs the ashen ruins
of a long awaited  
Us.

— The End —