#flashlight
if i lie in bed
at night with the phone
flashlight on
so i can see the careful night
staring back at me
will i remember the taste
of summer
though late winter stings like california
will i watch a squinting sun
look at me like a black hole
though the night stays calm beside me
to find something
to know it
if i lie in bed
the dotting black of my room is the universe the flashlight is on
and i am the sun
Feb 11, 2025
Feb 11, 2025 at 5:38 PM UTC
She's feeling so lonely this Monday night,
Wish someone could hold her so tight.
She's sitting in the darkness with the flashlight,
God wasn't right, she's tired of keeping fight.
She doesn't want to wake up tomorrow morning,
She doesn't want to go somewhere, she doesn't want to go,
It feels like your own soul is burning,
And you are sick of sinking in flow.
My dark queen,
My darlin',
Just lay yourself down,
Don't care about anything around,
Close your eyes and feel the skies,
You need to get some rest,
You know you did your best.
My dark queen,
My darlin'.
Even when the marble statues will come to life,
She won't want to go out her room to the light,
'Cause she was made to create strife,
She knows that and she is dead inside.
May 7, 2021
May 7, 2021 at 10:31 PM UTC
I am a fire ant
having an epiphany
in a flashlight beam
🔎
Feb 23, 2021
Feb 23, 2021 at 2:24 AM UTC
Ah! Drop your prejudice and hear
I lost my love, fortnights ago
My weeping tears dried-up
Searching for my last name.
With solo flashlight wandering
Among scattered droplets of war.
May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020 at 1:48 AM UTC
The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch
How sweet the endeavors of lips—to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...
Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...
"O, let down your hair!"—we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...
was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.
Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Eclectic Muse (Canada). Keywords/Tags: Childhood, children, bed, bedtime, story, flashlight, kiss, goodnight, dreams, pleasures, lips, fantasy, illusion
Mar 21, 2020
Mar 21, 2020 at 10:52 PM UTC
what is fear?
there can be many definitions
a hard word to define
fear is
falling into the abyss
falling into depression
worrying that you'll never fly back up to
the clouds labeled
"happiness"
fear is
rain
sprinkling off
a car
as the lights
reflect off a
young girl
lying in the
road
fear is
not knowing what lies
in the shadows
as your flashlight
only spreads
out a small part
of the land
and a shriek
fills the air
fear is
many things
not a singular item
but a million miniscule thoughts
and people
not just people but
everyone feels
fear
one thing they
wonder
is if
they will ever feel
relief
or never feel again
Oct 29, 2018
Oct 29, 2018 at 3:29 PM UTC
"Toda la noche hago la noche. Toda la noche escribo. Palabra por palabra yo escribo la noche"
-Extracción de la piedra de la locura, de Alejandra Pizarnik
La luna riela en las olas de los gemidos de mi viento.
La noche se torna amarga en el nacer del día
pues su muerte llena al corazón solitario de alegría.
Alejandra y yo escribimos mejor por la noche,
para la noche,
en la noche.
Alejandra ya no está con nosotros pero su noche es eterna en mi dicha.
Podríamos haber sido amigas,
compartir alguna noche;
pero la muerte nos separa,
su muerte,
su noche.
Este es un canto a las almas perdidas en la noche.
En nuestra noche.
La noche mía y de Pizarnik y de tantos otros.
Espero verte
al
nacer
el día.
//
"All night I make the night. All night I write it. Word for word I write the night."
-Extracting the stone of madness, by Alejandra Pizarnik.
The moon shimmers on the waves of the moans of mi wind.
The night is turned bitter at the birth of day
for its death fills the lonely heart with joy.
Alejandra and I write better at night,
for the night,
in the night.
Alejandra is no longer with us but her night is endless in my joy.
We could have been friends,
sharing some night;
but death does us part,
her death,
her night.
This is a song for the souls lost in the night.
In our night.
This my night, and Pizarnik's and son many others'.
I hope to see you
at
the birth
of day.
Jun 17, 2018
Jun 17, 2018 at 1:41 PM UTC
carry a flashlight in my heart.
The kind I light when dark days ascend
into my waking moment.
Lucky for me...
battery-like pulsations
of a conscious mind
never run out.
Feb 6, 2018
Feb 6, 2018 at 1:42 PM UTC
The bickering sunlight at my door
I am feverish, this crazy flare,
Like flashlight, poignant flashlight pointing at me,
Never been so queasy
Disgruntled, displeased.
There is more to this
More than the glare
The bickering sunlight never goes away
And it has reached my door.
My head is hung down
Upside-down for that
I guess that turns a frown to a smile
I could get used to it.
The sun I defeat,
He is too tired for today
One step back at a time it takes, slow
Promises to be even bolder tomorrow.
I look at it
Maybe he will
I smile till then, may be a smirk;
A smirk from my upturned frown.
Jul 4, 2017
Jul 4, 2017 at 11:24 AM UTC
I feel safer when it's dark
just knowing your nearby
that I might have within my reach
a little piece of sky
you light my way when I get lost
brighten up my day without a cost
the dark would overtake me
if ever we should part
you are my flashlight
you light up my heart
Oct 6, 2015
Oct 6, 2015 at 9:30 AM UTC
You were my flashlight, but I am no longer afraid of the dark.
Aug 10, 2015
Aug 10, 2015 at 9:45 PM UTC
I want to wash it all away
Give them a glimpse of hope
But it’s already too dark for any flashlight to help
For I am lost in this sea of sorrow
And all anyone can do is
Drown
May 23, 2015
May 23, 2015 at 2:02 AM UTC
I loved the color of your eyes
How they sparkled in the night
We used to sneak out and meet
Guided by a flashlight
We shared secrets and stories
Underneath the silver moon
I miss those days of innocence
But now our love has met it's doom
Apr 8, 2015
Apr 8, 2015 at 10:27 PM UTC
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.
May 19, 2014
May 19, 2014 at 8:24 PM UTC