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Dark n Beautiful Nov 2017
The sizzling sound of the radiator
Waked me up too soon
The cold breeze nibbles at my feet
like the unwanted houseguest

The sunlight come peekaboo to soon,
leaving the darkness behind yesterday sun
The New York cold weather frets me

The Island sunshine, calls out my name
Lying there with my compatriots
The cold and the non-sunshine

I have a long day ahead of me
I refused to be self-pity
NitaAnn Feb 2014
You know what ***** about distraction? When you stop distracting yourself all the crap you were distracting yourself from barges back in, uninvited, slamming the door behind it. It doesn’t really care that I didn’t extend an invitation, and now, once again, I have an unwanted houseguest. And of course it expects to be ‘entertained’, it can’t just sit quietly in a corner, in the farthest room of the house and read a book or something. No way! It’s always right in my face, under my feet, vying for my attention. It’s vile and ugly…I don’t want it here! I can’t stand to look at it, and when it forces me to stare into its craggy, decaying face, cracked and scarred skin.

It displays my past with sober horror as if it’s a cabaret, and I am the audience. I can feel the bile rising in my throat; there is ***** in the back of my mouth, threatening to come forward with powerful force.

It croaks and taunts me, “Come on Nita, let’s have another look at today’s lunch.”

I’m sick to my stomach just being in the same room with it and I know it is only a matter of time before I will be sick. It sits down next to me, I feel my breath quicken in apprehension of what is to come. It smells of liquor and stale cigarette smoke and I gag as I try to slow my breathing down, try to calm myself.

It inches closer to me, touches my thigh, whispers into my ear, “Mind if I sit down, have a glass of wine? I prefer red, but if you don’t have an open bottle, white’s fine. I don’t want to be an inconvenience.”

Yeah right! My leg feels like ice now, my skin crawling from his touch. I begin to shake as I try to move away from it, remove his hand from my upper leg. It won’t let me escape; it knows there is no way to break free. It knows once the film starts I will be unable to look away from the turmoil that is happening in front of me. And not only is the movie in 3-D, I can actually suffer with the star of the show, I feel what she feels, I see what she sees. When she bleeds, I bleed. When she cries, I wipe her tears from my face. I feel her fear and her angst.

As the film starts, it knows I’m unable to shelter myself from the motion picture and it flaunts it in front of me as though it is a screening fit for the Cannes movie festival. Incapable of looking away I see my own eyes looking back at me. I become her, the ******* the screen, I feel his hands on my body and I feel his breath on my skin.

I can feel the filth on my soul like it’s my own skin. I know my worth. I burned it into my existence. I am branded. I am unclean. I can’t wash him off of me. I have dry heaves now, there’s no more vomiting, there’s nothing left inside of me, except filth and shame. I can feel my heart beating in every single inch of my body. My face is hot and my cheeks feel bruised.

I scrub my skin until it’s read and raw but the filth cannot be removed. I ***** until my stomach convulses and there is nothing left but he is still inside of me. I cut my flesh in an effort to bleed him out of me. I watch the blood run down my pale skin and pool onto the floor but I still feel him, he’s still here.

I am nothing. He made me nothing. I am pathetic for struggling with this still, years later. Nita, get over it! Move on!
Ellen Piper Jun 2012
Foul and fowlish woman,
Invite me in and let me see this filth
You speak of. Your den smells
A little like cigarettes. That's good.
You understand the healing power of smoke
And grease, and dirt, and body fluids on the mind.
Savor your time alone in the house
To be gross, to be common and ill-clothed
To wipe whatever you please wherever
And to leave your begging traces
Because your children don't notice,
No matter how much you peck at them.
Your husband is too tired to make faces
Too tired to make love.
And no one else enters the solitude
The real solitude
Of your married life.
I'll stand behind you while you mix eggshells
Into your own birthday cake.
Then let's go out
With red, red mouths -
Let the slithering slime infect the walls
Break the vacuum
Defile.
rebecca lawhorne Feb 2012
frothed innards left unfolded and spilling out-brain slightly bulging
Petals peeling back-unwilling
Souring slowly in the cold fluorescents
Sticky fingers grabbing at the carpet
Crinkling and screaming as I drag it
It keeps company like a booted dog


So many quick hands have pushed
This sad little egg to me feet
Stuffed and stacked into oblong spaces
Why did you come all this way?

Soft, ripening fruit
Borrowed deeper; waiting
like a mad man in alleyways

next to me you sit
tarred edges split
I dug through your filling and I didn’t find a thing worth having
I clutched your heart like a spoon
Red between my fingers

Heard the faint whisper of a destination unseen
One that could never be realized
Because there is no land in a flying dream.
PrttyBrd May 2015
Freedom is removed
The breeze listens with intent
And the walls have eyes
52615
Arlene Corwin Jun 2019
I hope you’re not getting tired of my little inspired inserts.  I love them all (my small children) each one that shows up one after the other.  Sequences that surprise even me, the author, each one a little world, a little microcosmos.

The Houseguest You Never Want To Leave
AE Oct 2023
With a voice that fails me
I aim at the lines between your hope and my despair
With a needle, in an effort to achieve precision
To stitch our thoughts together
They’re so similar, so different
You think of October as a warm home
And I see it as a cold houseguest
And we co-exist in this oblivion
This circle of this or that
I admire your willingness to fill spaces
And you question my fear of being heard
You relish in the colours of fall
And I dread the looming winter
How is it that we left September
Hand-in-hand, wishing for rain...
Lía Sep 2014
i knew better.

they
forewarned me
till they stood before me
blue
in
the
face:
"be careful with what you browse,
be watchful of what your eyes see,
beware of what you accept."

five years later,
i harbor it reluctantly,
the demanding houseguest
who never quite left.
Mirza Lazim May 2018
Hadn't I said that we would abruptly meet?
It was the gift of the cravings I got before.
I felt that life was just only a moment
When I embraced you with my eyes afar.

I got how insanely I yearned for you
As I madly began to shiver so hard.
Even yet I can feel that excitement
Which makes my feelings and mind drift apart

With the eristic lacks which I always had
I could not be consoled, it's my nature.
Before you helped me retrieve my peaceful shelter,
I had been wandering as a homeless creature.

Home is not a place like a cot or as a nest,
Home is where you feel yourself during the day
And you have become my restful, cheerful home
Where you're rarely seen as a houseguest

Just lend an ear to my lovesick missing,
It is inviting you heartily and gently.
I am hospitable, you also feel at home,
Please, pay a visit very frequently.
Pink Taylor Aug 2023
The eggshells started in the sink
But wound up on the floor.
I walked into the room
And they flew at me once more.
Shrinking my provisions
To the ones within this door.
Even taking out the trash
Is not a safe thing anymore.

If I had known, would I have showed?
Or would I have opted to stay home
Where the dishes can be loaded
Anyway I please
And not at me.
Cancer is a houseguest
in an unwelcoming home.
Picking the lock
and making himself comfortable
Sprawling out on a couch
earned by hard working hands that
He mistakes for his own.
Matrona Jun 2017
Pink plastic prickly
Stuck at weird angles
Threaten
To tear out already thin
Brown and gray hair.

Liar!  Or crazy.

A nightmare to the rescue,
A ghost standing right over there,
Don't get in that dryer.  
That's not a safe place to play
Hide and seek.

Liar!  Crazy!

Oh but love and love and
Lovey love.

Liar! Crazy!

*** and coke will make
One run and choke.

Liar.  Crazy.

Mix ketchup with scrambled eggs
Eat, pull hair, look at new baby.
Go through the motions.

It never happened.
Liar! Crazy!

Houseguest to the rescue.
Ghost dressed in
Familiar clothes.

Nakedness, no need to expose.
Garden instead.
fray narte Nov 2021
1
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history
and what remains of its stardust.
my sorrows expand with it; my vastness grows wider,
deeper by the day to accommodate
an uninvited houseguest.

2
i fear the act of going through my bones
like a bundle of endless, wistful letters;
some for burning.
some for throwing away.
some for breaking through
my ashen skin.

how can i be both limited and boundless —
it is no magic — just mundanely human.
the thought descends like poison eating at my backbone
until i am no more than a bygone, spineless caryatid.

3
yet again i take down the cosmos,
pick it apart
and in my hands, manage to turn it
into something distastefully prosaic —
turn it into a disassembled being.

all this wordless sadness has made me ancient. alien. unidentified.

4
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history;
i have long stopped trying to make any sense to myself and
there is no greater joy
than to be a perplexity.

amid it all, i tiptoe back and forth
between the ice-thin parts of celestine silence
and the static ringing of incomprehensible poetry.

the ground where i stand on breaks;
i float with no direction.

5
i am the space expanding endlessly; i grow wider and deeper
to make room for vaster sorrows —
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i tear it all down. tear it all quietly. inward. once and for all.
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i implode in tragic,
breath-taking cosmic colors.

— The End —