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Tara Marie Oct 2015
I still can hear the drifting cars
and burnouts in my ears.

feels like it was just yesterday
where red lights lasted years

skies were full of rubber--smoked,
sun was cold and hot

a yesterday from months before
I couldn't have forgot

I feel your hand collapsing mine,
the jokes and many laughs

comradery amongst the rain,
perfume, cologne, race gas

I just had slipped up days before
and told you my heart fell

sun set and woke, so many jokes,
cars ran parallel.

a yesterday I won't forget,
you took my hands in yours

the sun hiding behind the clouds
few raindrops on our pores

while pistons move in cylinders
two cars line up somewhere

crankshafts like jacks in boxes,
and wind blows through our hair

you looked at me like time was lost
while friends sat watching speed

my heart beat faster than the
boosted car that I heard lead

surrounded by our favorite things
a few people that we knew

I saw a smile fill your eyes
when you said "I love you."
LSFest 2015
Paul Rousseau Apr 2015
There is red in the forefront of my family crest, I was told
that meant outsiders were not taken lightly. We would pour tar
over castle walls and then many years later down our lungs.
One technique would take longer to die.

Riding a steam engine with a harmonica attached at my chest to make tips
I double-tasked with a guitar while tar burned
on the vestibule. Keeping those who didn’t like the smell out.
The engine burned killing pixie-dust flecks and turning them into cinders.
To Duluth and back
each mouth mimicked.

We used to abide by segregating those who enjoyed torture
and those who didn’t.
RH 78 Feb 2015
I twist and turn your wheel like a man possessed.
Stamping on the brake
Stomping on the gas!
Turn that lever
Honk that horn
Get me there quick!
You growl back at me!
But then comes the affection
I maintain you.
I polish you and give air to your tyres.

Keep going we will get to the finish line together!
Poetic T Nov 2014
A green flamingo
Did land with the flock
Frank said "you ok"
"Yep"
"Air sick once more"
I tried to fly with my eyes
Closed
But I flew in to a
"Tree"
"Bill"
&
More,
I tried to hitch a ride
But the plane engine
"****** me in"
Now my head is bald
And my bottom is
Cold,
&
Soar,
I think next time Ill take the  train
I only hope I don't get motion sickness
I'll be an odd  flamingo if I am green once more.
Fun with silliness try something new
You could know
I jam perpetual engines
when its practical

You shouldn't know
how dreaded the immaterial
at the edge of perception is

You should know
I eat dreams whole
mixed with the tears of children

That observation cant bond
or fix you in this reality
I would know
anony Jun 2014
maybe we are meant to meet the wrong people;
maybe we weren’t mean to be.
maybe we’re just satellites;
maybe reality is just made up of me.
maybe i am the lucky one;
maybe my heart is just numb to you.
maybe we’re nothing and my love is hatred.
maybe you'll leave me alone.
to the previous.
J M Surgent May 2014
One time, when I was ten or eleven years old, for a holiday or something my uncle bought me a model set of a scale V-8 engine. He knew I was into cars, but without kids himself, had no idea that this kind of gift was worlds beyond my preteen intellectual abilities. It fell to the wayside that year, useless in comparison to the easy to open, assemble and operate toys my parents bought me instead.

I had completely forgotten about this model until one night in college when I couldn’t sleep because I was too wrapped up in my own existential crises of the time and too nostalgic looking at all the old car posters in my room. I remembered the V-8 engine, and how even at 21 I couldn’t name a single part in a car engine, let alone assemble one, which was sad because I had been driving them five years at that time. So, with some sort of unexplained sense of unfinished accomplishment, I felt a need to finish it. Or really, to start it.

I got out of bed and started to tear apart my closet, piece by piece, coming across old articles of clothing I never wore, a few aging airsoft guns and even a few smaller models I never assembled, but alas, no V-8 engine. With my labors unyielding, I grabbed a flashlight and headed quietly to the attic, hoping that would be lend a more fruitful search. It took me a little digging and a lot of splinter avoiding in my bare feet, but finally I found it. I blew most of the dust off the box, removing more with my hands, and held the box in my hands like a treasure. It was smaller than I remembered, and the age on the box said 12+, which now looking back on it means I should have been easily able to complete it when I got it.

I worked these thoughts out of my mind, instead turning my attention to the plastic wrap around the box which came off with ease. I pried the color-aged box top off to find a colony of loose parts, of all colors, alongside a small screwdriver, which at that moment gave me a sense of Excalibur in it’s placement. I touched the blue handle lightly, almost afraid to accept its reality at first. Then I just stared at the parts for a good five minutes before I remembered there was an instruction manual. I opened it to page one, and I began to build.

I must have worked on that model for five hours, by the light of my flashlight and the streaks of full moonlight that snuck in through the skylight above. Hours of part maneuvering and placing, losing, then replacing small screws and setting them into place with a tool made for hands half the size of mine word my fingers out. By the time I was finished, my fingers were a little sore and my flashlight was running low on batteries which didn’t matter because the sun was beginning to peer it’s eyes over the horizon. I looked at my creation before me, a lot smaller than I thought it would have been when I first received the box, and felt a sense of nostalgic victory. For years, this project taunted me from the dust piles and cobwebs of my attic, and now, too distant from my childhood to remember anything all too vividly, I completed a milestone that was meant for years prior. I thought about how, at age eleven, I would have proudly shown my father to gain his five minutes of fame for the day, and he’d ask me the name of a few parts of the engine as a quiz before asking me to grab him another beer and I’d feel like I was on top of the world. He’d tell me I could be a mechanic someday, or better year, a car designer. I’d smile and walk away accomplished.

That’s what I would have done then. Now, ten years later, I folded the pieces of the box and put them in the trash can, with the plastic wrap on top. I took my finely tuned engine, my product of nostalgic victory, and brought it back to the confines of the attic. I turned my flashlight back on, moving past splinters and upturned nails to the back, farthest corner, where a lonely black shadow kept all light from entering. I took my prized engine, which seemed even small now in my hands, and wiping away some of the cobwebs, placed it into that dark corner, displacing a slumbering daddy longlegs in the process. I placed the small blue screwdriver next to it, then thought better of it and wedged the sharp end into the wood in between two planks, with the crystalline blue handle glowing in the light of my flashlight, sticking straight out like the tool of Excalibur that it truly was to me.

I took one last look at my creation, then turned and left, knowing that, like my childhood, I’d never return to it. I locked the attic door on my way out and checked the floor for loose parts, covering up any traces of my journey back into one of the aspects of my childhood that I forgot to partake in.
It's really a short story, but I wanted to share it nonetheless, and have no other way to.
Martin Kroyer May 2014
Standing by the riverrun
a lone a last a everything
the mass was floating and unfolding
I was the engine she was the chorus.

Twisting about the bend
One fell one fall one everything
the mess was unfolding and holding
I could only touch her if she was nune.

Looking past the looking-glass
Her nerves her curves her everything
the miss was touching and forever
I be gone and be all by the riverrun.
My opening poem to this site.

— The End —