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kain Dec 2019
Sometimes
I wish one of us would die
Just to end this mess
To let my hair grow out
To become someone else
Again
Well. Things are. Happening. I guess.
Delia Grace Dec 2019
The apocalypse,
I think, will smell
like peppermint
essential oils,

a lover’s
deodorant,
and organic
lemon soap.

It will smell fearful,
a bluff for
gentle, winding fingers
in a flurry of youth.

It will smell strong,
a stench that you
breathed in slowly when
your neck was buried in it.

It will smell filthy,
accompanied with the
crunch of insect shells
that sends the others running.

The apocalypse,
I think, will smell
fresh and clean and
as if it’s only yours.
12/9/19
Delia Grace Dec 2019
So how is it,
do you think,
that after time has passed,
however long that
“x”
stands for,
that we will be?
That you will be?

That I will be?

Because darling
I’m afraid of what
will change
from all of this.
From us.
From you.

From me.

Change is important
and beautiful
sometimes.
I know this.
But I am allowed
to fear the unknown
and I am more than
expected
to fear nothingness.

Are you sure?
You may want to
reconsider your
response.
I hope you used pencil,
and I am standing by
with an eraser.
12/9/19
Delia Grace Dec 2019
I am a menace.
Scuttling between paper leaves
and doors. I can’t tell
which ones are unlocked.
My clattering legs will
skitter across your countertop,
and I have felt so small.
I have been out of sight
longer than I’ve been alive
and I knock your dishes
onto the under-grown floor.
The tinkling of porcelain
is my alarm clock.
I bounce off the fine china,
my arms stretched around me,
and I wonder how
you could miss all these pieces.
My hands are too small
to cause such destruction.
But my hands can reach
much further than yours.
So I slide myself between cracks.
I become a line,
another crack,
and I bring you the slivers.
Wedged between the tiles
and glittering from termite holes.
I bring you the glue
and my sickly face blushes
from embarrassment
and apologies.
I am learning what good
my hands can do
as I bandage and kiss
your poor, ****** fingertips.
11/8/19
Delia Grace Dec 2019
In my hopeless fantasies,
we’d run into each other
on the street somewhere
with a bar in walking distance, maybe,
but I can’t. Really, I can’t.
It’s nothing against you,
really it’s not.
I’d love to find you one day
sitting across from me
on the late train home
or inside my box of
sugar-free cereal that will
help my heart or whatever.
They say a watched *** never boils
and I’m not sure I’ve taken my eyes off you.
It’s not fair to you. Really, it’s not.
Maybe you’ll get this when we meet
in however many years
when the puddles are too small
to drown in. And maybe you
learned how to swim.
Can you teach me?
Can you tell me where you’ve been?
Who you’ve loved?
Tell me the stories you never were able to.
I’ll know them by heart, better than my own.
Tell them without a microphone.
Without an earpiece.
Without your audience listening.
An empty theater clinging to your life,
a raft they never were sent.
A new memory to crave.
A chaser to a burning shot.
The shot itself.
Are you a performer or a teacher?
Standing in front of a tuplet crowd,
the audience whispering answers to questions
that the back of the room
hasn’t even reached yet.
Those chapters were ripped from their books.
10/28/19
Delia Grace Dec 2019
We sunk into barrels that smelled
almost too strongly of wine
that was almost too old. The grapes
they were made of sat squished
between our toes.
We weren’t wrong anymore.
Nobody was wrong anymore
and it was being right
in the thick of it that made us so strong.
Our car used to be blue, we think.
It’s turned into a sickly orange
but at least it matches the sky.
We look for pictures in the cloudy
bumps of the metal.
There’s never anything left in the stores
except Scrub Daddy brand sponges
and glimpses of Mr. Clean’s face.
Nobody needs to bleach their bathtub anymore.
They’re all yellow. We try to guess
what kind of fruit lies beneath that
shivering hunk of mold.
I’d always wondered if something that was burnt
could burn more. “I think that
it depends on how burnt it got the first time,”
you say as you peel off the charred top layer,
“and on how you try to shake it off.”
We’re both nodding as the minnows
nip our toes, and prove to us that maybe
we aren’t the only ones with too many mouths.
10/21/19

After Jennifer Elise Foerster
Colm Dec 2019
I miss you like the December earth
      Misses the sunlit rays on a cloudy day
Cold for you I yearn each dawn
      And churn and burn as the aching Pacific waves
A crashing hope upon wishes bent
      At 11:12 my world set straight  
And all that a man can do is wish
      That this will be the fated day
You walk into my life
      And stay
A storybook demands this stop. As Hollywood would guide me down the inevitable plot. But as for me and my house, I wait and burn for a deeper love.

Ick, screens are so shallow. LOL.
Poetic T Dec 2019
It was void less on the dead tree branch,
or what was once something reaching
for the heavens but now it is rootless.

Digging into the earth, like a tombstone
of remembrance entwined in razor wire
                                                            ­   woes.

It was cur once, now it is cut upon even in
death, every breath of life the world temps
                           it with just cuts deeper.

And the onyx crow, just perches on it.
             silent, it just gazes at the others
neatly put into shallow graves of despair.

They are naked for all to see, for all to gaze upon.
     stripped of decency. Shallow graves tease as though
they wish to flourish, roots are dismembered.


But where the branch fell, where the dismembered
remanence ****** of self horizontal.
           When a tree falls no one hears it...

When the now guillotined life falls,
        it fell upon its executioner..
   In the woods now one hears you fall..

They bleed into the wood, the egg that hadn't
hatched now cracked open, a chick will no longer
             fly high but sit on this deathly stripped void.

Every now and then, when I look out my window,
         I see the field, and a crow with gapping vision.
And a silhouette of someone....

There neck arched and a smile crocked,
                 as if to say this is a coffin above ground..
And there slowly rotting in the earth that took
                                       them all...

When a tree falls, when the leaves are stripped bare,
             only the bones show, and it like those before
are just images of what fell when they decendedly silenlty.
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