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 Jun 2014 Niko Walsh
Ynika Aron
They say when you think about someone you “like,” you get butterflies in your stomach.
When I first heard that, I laughed.
I don’t feel butterflies with you.
I feel a wildfire.          
Every word you spit is kindling to the scalding embers in my throat,        
welding my words into bars too heavy for my tongue to lift.                    
I scream fire yet you wouldn’t **** to put me out.
Sweet suffering;
The sickness in my stomach
Like eating too much ice cream at once        
And your heat is inescapable.
Why?
I don’t know
Why?
I don’t know.        
Why?
I don’t know!
Why?
I can’t!
Because the truth is: you could burn away every string of flesh in my body and I would still find 206 reasons to stay carved into the marrow of my bones.
You are not the exhilaration of the fall,
You are the sweat in my palms before I jump.
You are not the volume in my voice,
You are the way I bite my lip before I speak.
You are the finish line on a hot mid-day
And I am the last runner to finish.
If you are a wildfire,              
Then time is a pile of dead Autumn leaves
And we didn’t know any better.
One day I hope you look back and see all that you’ve burned.
There will be people who are rivers and streams and men in yellow
Who will drown you with words and water                
Because they’ve never seen red
And you will always be the only force in existence they cannot touch.
I think you will always be a wildfire
Even when I become a storm-cloud
And you are a timid flame.
For the boy who will never stop burning.
My performance of this poem is on YouTube. Channel name: Ynika Yuag
 May 2014 Niko Walsh
Miriam
500 days
 May 2014 Niko Walsh
Miriam
love ruins things
it leaves us all destitute
and hungry for something else
greater than ourselves

it all ends
it all breaks
we all give up

what's the point of letting someone
who will eventually leave
see your bare soul?

i don't know i don't know i don't know

i just felt like i didn't belong

it just didn't feel right
and i didn't feel secure

his heart was made of broken eggshells
and i got tired of tiptoeing in his presence

i knew it was bound to break

"it's just love," he said

and that's exactly the reason why i left.
 May 2013 Niko Walsh
Tim Knight
AND?
 May 2013 Niko Walsh
Tim Knight
And we rang along those river banks
against the light cast as shadows,
fleeting past mournful dark windows-
timid in the evening's morning.

And you whispered into my eyes
the words you wanted me to see,
and showed them to idle ears
who waited for something else appear.
coffeeshoppoems.com
timknightpoetry >> Facebook
8
8
When I was eight years old,
I overlooked a moment of compassion
And challenged the will of a fellow third grader
Compelled by my ignorance
She gave the most astute summary of my life ever uttered.

When I was eight years old,
A frizzy haired girl asked me an impudent question
A question of infinite importance:
How do you sleep?
How do you sleep at night, since you know yourself?

When I was eight years old, my arrogant mind brimmed with resentment
Reaffirming that I,
I, apart from my arrogance,
Was the best person I knew.

I was eight years old, and a prophet had spoken.

Eight years later,
I long to be swallowed by the sheets
Eyes stare mockingly at the dormant ceiling
Clinging to the handrails
As my train of thought
Careens off the tracks
Exploding in a cloud of terror and regret

Eight years later,
I long for the simple arrogance of my eight year old mind
I long to close my eyes
And remember nothing

Because today,
Today I am sixteen
And tomorrow I will be twenty-four
And the next day I shall be eighty

When I'm eighty,
I'll stare at the bleached walls
Succumbing to the force of the past
As it consumes the present.

When I turn eighty-eight,
I'll look to the end of my starched bed
And He shall smile
Saying, "Well done!"

I hope I lie, when I'm eighty-eight,
Because If I am honest
If I tell the truth
I do not know who he is
And I never have
I will be cast away
because, eighty years before,

When I was eight years old,
I was arrogant
But still innocent
eighty years from death
and eighty years from shame
I could have heeded those words
The words of the frizzy haired girl

When I was eight years old,
I could have decided
I could have had him sing me to sleep
I could have died entirely unlike myself.

Now that I'm sixteen,
I still do nothing.
It's meant to be yelled at an audience, not read.
That girl wouldn't dare see
Wouldn't dare know
The fate of another girl
Half-way across the world
Who tried to see

Despite all her misgivings
She did
She tried, she leant over
Bent backwards
And did her best
Stayed up all night
Unraveling those tangled threads

But she fell
She fell
She fell
She fell
You won't ever know how hard

She pretends to not see
Sometimes
But they come back
And they wave in crimson-tainted,
Guts splattered, dreams
They kick her
They wish she wasn't there

And sometimes.
Sometimes, she imagines giving up
Imagines living a life
Where she could hide

Hide
Behind her laptop screen her whole life
A life where she could sleep
Sleep at a time when everyone went to bed
Or if just a bit before,
Then nothing better

She wished she could hide.

Those falls left her lonely
Gut-clenchingly lonely
That girl is me.
Response to 'The Girl Who Hid'.
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/the-girl-who-hid/#after-reading

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