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Ambita Krkic Jan 2011
“You’re turning eighteen, you know. Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life? Don’t you think it’s time we get you a life?” Recently, I had coffee with a friend. He looked at me from head to foot in mid-conversation, and made this comment. As always, he managed to drive me into deep thought. After much contemplation, I now realize how much I have truly gone through. I also realize the reason for this paper: I want to tell you about my life. I want to prove to you that people like me, who are afflicted with cerebral palsy should not be demeaned, but rather looked up to for how they face the challenges life brings forth.

    I remember that day. I was a baby and my eyes didn’t move. They refused to follow the finger my aunt moved back and forth. I just lay there, unmoving. My family didn’t really give much thought to it until a few months later when I began to be extremely dependent on others when it came to simple things like getting up from a fall. Right then, they knew something was wrong. I was taken to the hospital a few weeks after, and true enough I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition that caused me to walk on tip-toe and my legs to look like sticks due to weak muscles.

   The hospital became my second home. By the time I was three, I had grown immune to the stale smell of disease and death that greeted patients at hospital entrances. I sat in wheelchairs and was a patient to three different doctors and physical therapists. Physical therapy was, and still is to this day a gruesome routine that I didn’t look forward to. Those sessions lasted for three hours, starting off with cold ultrasound gel being smeared slowly on my thigh muscles, slowly progressing into the limb-twisting that drove me into screams of excruciating pain, and then finally ending with attempts at “walking normally” with steel bars for support. Soon after, the doctors discovered that physical therapy alone was not enough, and recommended orthopedic surgery.

   I underwent seven surgeries in three different countries: the Philippines, Thailand, and Greece. Although these surgeries gave me the opportunity to see the world, they were not at all full of pleasantries. To this day, I remember how each surgery went: being laid on the cold operating table, feeling as though my body was a pincushion as needles were forced into me. I shrieked at the sight of blood and nurses tried to calm me down, talking to me in languages I didn’t understand. Soon, my vision blurred, my eyes shut and I couldn’t open them. A tube made its way down my throat, and soon I was going, going, gone. Hours later, I woke up groggy, and the sleepless nights in the children’s ward started. Tears clouded my eyes as I stared at the ceiling or the walls covered with Disney characters grinning annoyingly at me as I was under the mercy of painkillers that didn’t even seem to work.

    As I got older, I began to question why things were the way they were for me. I began to raise questions why a certain child in my class could do things that I couldn’t. My early years of schooling were the most challenging ones to face. Like me, the other children didn’t realize how it was like to be in the situation I was in. Bullying and name-calling was common in the schools I attended. “Slowpoke” and “snail” are only some of the few names I was called by. Sometimes, children would even go as far as “crazy” and “*******”. They mimicked the way I walked and called my attention, asking me who it was they were pretending to be. Often times, I did what I was told to do at home and stood up for myself, firing back with a witty, sharp remark. Other times, I chose to ignore them instead.

    On the first days of all my Physical Education courses, I’d try to blend in with my classmates hoping that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I was incapable of doing the routines. I tried to get away with it, to no avail. As soon as I got found out, I was tasked to watch everyone else’s belongings, clear up scattered basketballs, or score a game I really had no knowledge of each meeting. I remember how it felt like to be a benchwarmer, while all the others were doing warm-ups or playing sports. I didn’t look at their faces much, instead I closed my eyes and listened as their laughs echoed their enjoyment into the air. That, or I looked down at their feet, watching them jump, listening to the thumps as their shoes hit the ground again. They made it look so easy.

   During dance rehearsals, I’d stare down at my own shoes, dirtied and scratched from constant dragging. I’d feel a sharp, imagined pain in my stick-thin legs, and imagine them moving to the music they’d be dancing to. Gently. Tap. Tap. Tap.

   While I admit that I felt a lot of resentment towards this disability in the past, I now find that there isn’t really much to resent about it. I have grown so much as a person through this disability. It has become part of who I am and how others define me. It is true that I have missed out on a lot of the things teenagers my age have gone through, but how this disability has enabled me to see life actually happen, to discover life’s true essence, and most of all, touch the lives of people I have encountered in the past and those I continue to encounter, makes me feel as though I have not missed out on anything at all.

   As I end this essay, I’d like to leave two challenges. If you happen to afflicted with cerebral palsy or any other disability, I challenge you to be proud and fight. Do not let others look down on you. People will demean you, if you choose to demean yourself. Do not wallow in self-pity. Instead, strive to turn your misfortune around. Touch lives of the people you meet. Inspire.

   On the other hand, if you do not have to struggle with any disability at all, I challenge you even more. Do not take your “normalcy” for granted. Do not look down on people with disabilities; instead aim to broaden your understanding of how it’s like to live life in their shoes. Everyday, realize how lucky you are to have what you have. I ask you the same question my friend asked me in the coffee shop that afternoon: Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life?
(an essay I wrote in English class, Sophomore Year College, one of my more personal writings)

11.09.09
Caitlin Edwards Sep 2015
I’m a pincushion.
Every *****,
Every poke,
A pinpoint for survival.
The proof lies on my fingertips and thighs,
These scares are immune to healing.
It haunts the space between my skull, like a catchy song.
I’m told ‘we’ll’ get through this,
Yet I’m fighting alone against this chronic illness within.
No one knows the battle perusing inside of me every second of the day
It’s the tick of a clock, un-wanted and nuisance.
My life was stolen, swept into an unexpected twirl of a storm,
Sweeping me into a whirlwind of emotions
I’m left stranded, taken out of comfort with no direction
I’m hit with these battles to make me stronger,
Yet my strength is stretched so thin.
You won’t define me.
You won’t control me.
My sweet chronic illness,
Diabetes.
eden halo Feb 2014
i like wearing miniskirts and i read marie claire
i like bubblegum pop music and i like to dye my hair
i like rich thick hot pink lipgloss and i like to pretend
i still dress up all the time even though i’m seventeen
and im learning how to defend myself

i pretend my legs are made of silk and i pretend im sleeping beauty
i fake like im a natural blonde and fake like im a cutie
i like having kitten pits and i like kissing girls
i like clothes that show off my **** and i like wearing pearls

i like the way my hair smells of peaches
and i like it even when it reeks of 15 different kinds of bleaches

im a ******* soft girl
im a pincushion queen
a raspberry swirl cheesecake
a pretty little thing with a head full of snakes

deliberately unclean
deliberately obscene
pretty as yesterday’s underwear
pretty as the roots of courtney’s hair

pretty as my favourite les mis scene
when anne hathaway’s fantine dreams a dream
and her nose starts running as she starts to cry
and everything felt real for once in my life

i’m covered in face powder and i’m covered in dirt
and you’ll never know joy if you never know hurt
and that’s why they make disney princess plasters
so when you skin your knees you’ll only feel prettier after

let’s talk about all the junk we like
and re-learn the art of laughter
i’ll be in the kitchen making raspberry tea
whenever you wanna join me
for more basic *** feminism listen to kate nash no really its nice just learn to filter
Casper J Nov 2013
The green combusts, the cherry sclerotized mask dances above
the invisible paper carapace.
Stuffed full with Rotten skunk innards and burning,
tongues of heat sweat away its crystalline hairs.
Aren is hunched and crooked, all teeth and lungs,
under the mixed halogens of suburban porchlight,
being bathed in bluescale waves from the
strobe of the neighbor's telescreen.
Ropes of smog pour from the slats between his picket fence ivories and get frayed.
I drink the filth, choking down the viscera of the vermin.
It doesn't seem to get easier.

Stumbling inside, my feet detach and I throw myself on the door
until I've locked out the sickly tide pool light of dawn,
and I'm rolling toward his bedroom.
Jolting and sputtering, and
grasping at the hands of the clock,
listening for the steady metronome to
count me through.
And then numbness.
I know the feeling, and next come the
pins, digging into my
fingertips and the pads of my
toes, and then I'm all body and silent prayers.
And I'm whispering sick thoughts to Aren -

"Those adrenaline demons
will do me in,
and if only I could relax,
and my dear mother
used to have a stalker,
and I almost got run down
by a car on the highway when I was five,
and asthmatics are five times as likely to have a
generalized anxiety disorder."


The adrenaline demons gather my tendons in pincushion palms,
tugging at the strings,
panicked arthritis and my fingers are
twitching and curling backwards
while I glare on with shallow breaths and cataracts.
The organs moan in the cavern of my body,
with thick wet air pouring from the opening.
I'm standing now,
a fetishized devil doll,
shaking out the pins
and the needles
and the sick splinters of glass
and the long holy skewers
and I'm breathing again
and I sit and
I breathe.
Aisling May 2016
I never thought of fragile as an insult until I saw the way you spat it through clenched teeth
"God you're so ******* fragile"
hissing barbed wire insults like they'd cut your tongue if you held them in any longer
before, I thought of fragile as the ultimate compliment
a sign that my concave stomach was home to fingerprint bruises
that you were afraid to hold me too tight lest I break
but then I heard it dripping slow dark molasses off your tongue
coating every syllable with thick syrupy tar

it didn't make sense to me that your voice,
petal soft and pitched for laughter
accustomed to slurring my name on dizzy nicotine breaths and over crackling long distance calls
could wrap its fingers around my lifeline and
crush it
until long after I chose to stop being your answering machine sounding board yes man lap dog

you never cared about my hollow birdlike bones or the blooming violet footsteps beneath my eyes
you said I was too ******* fragile
that my eyes were leaky taps and you had no plumbing experience
that my heart was a pincushion voodoo doll and you didn't know how to protect its satin softness from daily wear and tear
I got hurt too easily and playing tag with someone else's insecurities isn't fun

I never thought of fragile as an insult until you choked it out from behind your own iron voice box
and I realised it wasn't so much an insult as a burden
now there is leather binding forming around my cotton stuffed heart
and I'm doing my best to tighten the valves in my tear ducts
I'm still fragile
But it's not your job to hold me together anymore
I've been bitter about this comment for 4 years so it's such a ******* relief to get over it. I'm better without you.
Charlie Prince Jul 2012
Love.
The poems of old draw us in with some promise of shelter
from the other. The better half gone stale. And
too often to the common ear
the prose can promise more than safety but
rather a sure fire way to steal that girl with
the long brown hair who listens to good music and has
strange piercings.
The way she shuts him down makes
my stomach sink and my **** rise.
She looks like a good ****.

Love.
A justification for past conquests. A way to
rely on time and my own short comings to
draw a close when a word could set me free from
the bed I made and that bed in which I laid
down countless times beside her. And if our
hearts really beat as one then she too must feel
the lack of one future together.
And sure enough,
her text messages to
skinny indie boys who listen to good music and have
strange piercings justify the repeated recitation of my hatred for her in the bathroom mirror.

Love.
The loss of a prized possession.
If you’ve ever experienced the fear that
your favorite green army man may be buried inside the vacuum cleaner or
if you’ve been weighed by the guilt from breaking your sister’s Barbie doll,
where the head meets the neck,
you know what it means to fall face first into the sandbox of trust that any lover could prepare.
And you don’t know who’s dug for buried treasure in there.
Or who brought their cat.
When the "**** machine" breaks down or your tissues run out,
the annoyance is similar to the feeling of a break up.
Why now?
You could deal before.
Am I really that unbearable?

Love.
Overturned tables and chairs.
The screams echo through the temple as a
man who has had enough of status quo places himself at
the top of the food chain.
Even if only for a little while.
Sure you ****** another but I was thinking of
leaving anyway.
I am the evil one.
I am the wolf.
You are the gypsy.
I am the shower head.
You are the innocent.
I am the gas leaking in from under the floorboards.
You are asleep.
I am the fire. And
when someone else has put your boot heel over the back of their head and
through the curb dared you to be the Übermensch, when
you hold your head under water and swear I put the bucket there, and
when you swear I never loved you enough:
I will believe you.
Or when you poke me over and
over and
over and
over and
over and over:
I’ll strip naked and reveal the casualty of this pincushion’s voodoo magic.
Only then will you know what I know about love.
And if only you listened to wisdom passed down
through books and words
you would have figured it out way earlier.
Tommy Johnson Jun 2014
I feel like God hates me
Or stopped caring
Ceased to provide
Left for good

And now I'm left here to straighten myself out for better or for worse

I've met people who feel the same way
Who surprisingly have the pincushion audacity to put all the blame of their misfortunes in the absence of the omnipotent one  
I just feel abandoned they feel betrayed

Maybe he makes a chump change commission on every life he guides to a certain point then leaves them stark naked at the haunting hour

I know all the preachers and secular teachers lie through their teeth
They win the merit-less hoax award by a landslide
They have no consideration of for the people they mislead or the ramifications their poisoned sermons causes

They use emotionally charged language to increase the parish's numbers
They're terrified of God, they live in fear
And see carpal tunnel as a punishment for ******* and wish blindness upon all those who partake

There is shared consensual hiraeth between those who have been through an invasion of privacy and the trespassing of private property
They want their rights and their guns back
They want their personal space
They retreat to their happy place

Let's go back to the Pantheon of lactose intolerant divine idols
Of epileptic godheads
Who's line of work is about incubated pie pans

Can you make a tutorial that summarizes the resounding reduction of options using nothing but euphemisms?
st64 Apr 2013
1.
Sweet love
Oh, such sweet love.



2.
Stick into the pincushion of hope
Gentle pins of far-off dreams,
Holding wispy threads of desire
For which time (as a heading) is never enough.


Push down and drown all thought
Which beckon expectation -
And trust to want less.... or nothing;
Thus reduced, we get no fails.



3.
All up to the sky
We cry,
Agonising -
That waiting of footfall.

Then.....
Lovely flow.
Yes, let's dare to increase
Irregular patterns of abdicated pain.
To fulfill what is so held back.



4.
Because of you
Three days can last a lifetime
Full of affection and delicious warmth
Within the bearings of your arms.



5.
Dreams in the coffee whorls
Willing spindles now
Turn as they eddy...like happy tidings
All around my head.

Dreamscapes thrive
In dulcet whirls inside our core.



6.
No shipwrecks here,
No abandoning of esperance.

No deserting,
No dereliction of love.

No grief,
No castaways on hopeless coast.

These proffered crumbs on palm
Become sought-after......and precious gifts.



7.
Sweet love garnered over time
Poured slowly.....into sacred cup.
Where phantoms run to hide away
No abode for wicked despair.

Oh, for lovelorn hearts and broken dreams
To find such gladness in a cup
We hold hope, ever bold....so deep in heart
And sink away in woven bliss.

Capsule of infinity.....



8.
Come, let us drink
From our coffee-cup.....
Of love.

Oh, come......



9.
Time to kneel and give thanks
Place forgiving wafer on tongue.
Take none in haste
Accept only when ready.

To....
Drink sweetness of sky's nectar.



10.
Of pastures plain
And meadow green
Swift do echoes fall
As moments slip away....like clouds.



11.
Oh, and....

One sugar....
(No analogy needed, surely :)

Hot.....
(Nor here!)

And BLACK, please.



S T,  11 April 2013
Love in the coffee.....oh, yeah.

Don't spill now, guys!    lol

You never know what marvelous tales and fabulous moments await....all inside that small cup.

Could well be a hopeful taste of some swell luuurrrrve!
He he


A somewhat (semi-facetious) version of a modern Grail-tale......whatevr, man.

And......er, please do keep yer hair on, dear chaps!
Not intended for anyone to be offended, I ask ye on bended knee...

:)

Have a cuppa, then?
Brittany Leigh Feb 2010
You know nearly nothing of my life
beyond the few whens and hows
that have been told to you
small stories that sit comfortably
in the eye of a needle
plucked from the pincushion
of whole existances
you don't know where I come from-
only the stuffy history book pictures
and anecdotes
that have been outlived
you don't know these people
beyond the stacks of stereotypes
you shuffle us in to
And the culture, my culture-
Our beautiful contradictions
and spectacular calamities -
You believe you understand us
but what you know is so much less
than we ever have been
Having arrived at Patmos, on the southeastern ***** of Skalá, Wonthelimar observed that the Seleucid ships were there. Already knowing of the myth of Seleucus and of his Divinity, since her mother Laodice, according to Vernarth's parapsychology parallel account, and aligned with Wonthelimar, that she had presumed that her son Seleucus had been conceived by carnal union with Apollo. These oracular dreams separated them from Vernarth, for a certain Antigone of the imperial Seleucid with the anchor of the ring that Apollo had captivated from the gematological extract, now wading in the quantum of Chauvet, which had been identified from Gaul.

Wonthelimar says: “from such a thigh such as a Vas Auric you will be anchored at your anchor, in a proud fallacy if you have been engendered by Apollo if it is that your mother temporizes in a hallway idyll or Antigone, and not of someone wearing a ring that smells like broken neo-Hellenic dreams in one that anyone believed, born of one being or another like me from a mythological Iberian, but being carried from a very young age on the haunches of a Bucephalus. Here I believe where Laodice would be or would be caught by knowing that creatures like me, spawned in the darkness of a cave, should wear that ring, but in the seventh ring of the horns of my paternal Ibez with its antlers constantly growing, and in my forehead having one of them in the antlers of the female that fed me in the reign of darkness and in the heights of the mountains. Upon leaving Chauvet I embraced her suspended antlers, and when I separated from the sixth ring, my female nurse with her pale neck offered me the seventh so that I would do it with brown illusions to be like her in the maternal ***** of the Rhone that in altitudes Thousands leveled out over seven hundred meters, with each ring being the power of a reign of darkness filled with light and undeserved talent. In the autumn, my female mother would get involved when I timidly approached from my cavern full of aldehyde, eliminating it through my mouth and eyes, creating from them the brave fear of misunderstood symbols..., if you saw it, your Seleucus...? You would abandon your divinity with a single breeze of the elements when you would recover your anchor rings on the roads. On the other hand, I wake up in his ring because of the meager light that intimidates the converted mountain beings, who interpose me in their combats, if an antler was or is torn from one of my attempts of frustration, after not seeing what it is not noticed even in thousands of distant blushes, and not even in the emission of the eyes of a hypothetical Apollo "

Behind the philastic zoomorphic of the exalting from Seleuco's mouth, the bilocated Epidaurus on Patmos was lowered by the steps of an amphitheater, bossed around in the conclusive closing of his story behind bars or horns that splintered his revoked mention of aspiring to a ring, which is not and will be nothing more than a synonym of despair, more than an immortal that is now abbreviated from the stigma of co-founding itself in meaning as a temporary truth of Hellenism, deducing to qualify its origin as a plus part and ascendant servant, but not descendant in shirts that have to transvestite him on the Epidaurus proscenium. Seleucus began to doubt his converted eagerness to lash out the mythological divine lineage for a sanction, in which the lightning bolts of the stunning sky themselves demystified their annoying gales of submission, by dynasties of the proverbial Kleos for the purposes of fame, and politics that open the loaded winds with cots of gold to marry with diligent nebulosity in transliterated and linked tripods in cumulus universes, where the first two abuse the fulcrum of the obverse that falls by gravity on no man's land..., here is the myth of anchoring and not of to aspire to a ring or earring that will drag us to heights where the icy cold wind crowns you on legs of bronze and not of gold "

These coins were carefully observed by those who observed them from a gorge, capturing the humility and infallibility of a being that came from the entrails of Chauvet, interpreting courses that awaited Seleucus. The appendages were detached from the koilones and tiers that jumped over it, to press and narrow the diazomas or corridors that were already deployed like a laser in the cubations of the consciousness of Megarón and the Vas Auric of the Hexagonal Primogeniture, which already was made ubiquitous. It was released from an Alexandrian Greek fire on the jaws of the hecatomb of the ex-generals of Alexander the Great. Here in funeral periphrasis, few prostitutes rusted behind his inheritance, each with their bronze panoplies and banners in favor of Leonatus in the hands of the Satrap Antigonus, Ptolemy, and the most outstanding applicant of his divine inheritance, Seleucus. They all meet outside the Eurydice ship in Skalá to settle decisions and franchises of ancestry, for the purpose of divinizing the destinies of their tasks and interests, to sink them into the first stone under a base of faith, and of those who will come from the return of the Anastásis like Greek resurrection of bread and wine, Psomí kai krasí…; "The Mashiach for being of whoever and whatever"

Seleuco says: "Psomí kai krasí, Bread and Wine for all." We have revived our leader, who in good time should resurrect us all for his mentions of the new future of fallen leaders and heroes. We are not oblivious to your expiration and perhaps your negligence in Babylon, but the steps of a king require other Seleucid measures and their oriental legitimating, being oligarchies that should morally do what is known. Antigonus, Ptolemy, and I appear here with me, preserving periods that leave us of mediumistic notions of the grim, who does not allow us to close our eyes. We confer the denounced ambiguity of previous riches that do not fit in any silo that can contain it, nor what happens to the secondary after diving early in the morning mounted on your Bucephalus, full of its manes swollen with the posterity of a Roman emperor besieging it, without advancing by requirements or where he rides now in steel wastelands, and not through upholstered steppes of the cautious ensign on your guard and in the solemn light of life that the **** leaves behind in your symbolic sarcophagus! We want you to join us, and to be able to banish our distinctions from where Apollo has given his eternal sleeper in the sense of an ephemeral truth, which makes light of flesh colors in the fiery figure of your coat of arms.
We have stolen the traced areas of Judea and from there Maccabees have donated us inscriptions back to my threat to you and Antigonus,... to my enemy debtor, but even so, I come to repair unevenness and want to repair idylls more remote from the Euphrates to settle in the ranks of Ptolemy. We have all sinned to look for you in our slogans, gaining fleeting territory, but we have lost your lux, already well said in my sanctuary in Didyma, but in seconds that continue from the first, already raising flags and heralds that increase your vox, more than a David that defeats a colossus; that from his own death resurrects...! "

All perceptibly dismayed looked at Alexander the Great who was behind a canopy listening to everything with his ear attached to the canvas that separates him from a presumed truth. He draws the curtain and pounces before everyone with stealth and courtesy, incontinenti he speaks to them after inhuman efforts to move away from the stagnant sub-understanding of his former commander.

Alexander the Great says: “The aureoles of sanctity have dislocated my Beelzebub, and the brambles brush against the Scabious flowers like widows that sing in the cenotic lines of my hands from a purgative cathartic in its graceful subfamily that makes my eyes heterochromatic de facto, between the thistles that are spiced between the aromatherapy of the Scabiosa cretica. In their oblong shape with pincushion flowers, they make the basting their nailed pins waiting to be used so that my desolations are not lost even after being just reborn. After the annual Attic calendar in Elaphebolion where they walked on me to resist the deer of Artemis, in attempts to get up and ***** me in the sessile voices of Scabiosa dispelled by Vernarth that have raised me in the involved species, like a chalice of unstitched shreds in seven holes, leaning back to the Aquenio in his fruit tree that is stained with lavender-blue, and the Lepidoptera bringing Vernarth from Gethsemane and the anti-Sarnic clothing that makes him exalted. Now from here, I harangue you, like immaterial troops that do not move their courage, with enemies that are left open to the fear of my walk on them, on rams of the imminent danger of warbling victory with steely Falangists. What a nationalist Faskéloma attribute as obscene fuss and Pashkien that reorders the armies that invade its headless stadiums, in raised nightingales that chirped the sadness of seeing myself fallen on the nose of the common soldiers and full of scabies in Arbela. I have to fly with you my lost flocks ready of Apollo surrendering twilight fire, and of moon-sun between the legs of a colossus forged by greater fires, speaking to me of Macedonian triumph, under the yoke of the crackle of a people that lies taciturn with the satraps in Hercules's cunning conquering in the cheers only after three laps they made debits from my left, while I saw the light of Uriel coming towards me in the Lepidoptera with his sheathing, and entirely of a horse placed Beelzebub, to transmigrate him with me from Cinnabar chains and honor what serves the world also that dies with me in Thrace or Alexandria Bucephalus, after the south of Corinth, regardless of me, who already sensed that he was anti-diadoco..., being at that time a leader of the Sacred League of Delphic Amphibian, after feeling so much pain immediately from dying..., I still had life left in the Scabiosa flask and in bronze vessels that I removed from the swirling wind of the s Thermopylae, leaving me stranded with nothing but chimeras of winning the world, but losing a Life that had just begun "

Meanwhile, at the dawn of Vas Auric was projected at relative height, Syrmus's light and resounding fall were shown when he attacked the back of Macedonia -... here Alexander makes a gesture of modest resilient power... -, after he glimpsed to Saint John the Apostle how he moved with his staff the tricolor clouds transmitted by the troops of the Tribalios and that was crushed by the carnal battery of Macedonian cavalry that immolated them before their knowledge, and then after their three thousand victims..., which according to some outstanding Hypaspists also rushed them far beyond the Danube where they were engulfed in the confinement of the Getas in thousands, and in greater proportion but with leather rafts, the Hellenic troops crossed this same river and with a few thousand they conquered them filling their saddlebags..., not gold... !, but brandy that burned all the pastures where no Bucephalus crossed by fire.
Wonthelimar Dismissed Diadocos
bucky Jun 2014
if you try hard enough you will be able to taste the blood in my lungs
ashtrays bleeding liquor with every breath
don't ******* tell me you've forgotten me don't tell me that i'm worth it don't tell me
exactly what i want to hear
your voice pushes needles into my pincushion conscience,
skinned palms against a chalkboard don't ask me why i never loved you
you're just kidding yourself
i'm not a puzzle you can solve, i'm a ******* human being(i'm worse than that
better start to count your blessings)
don't dedicate your battlecries to me
i won't give you a token of my love i don't give thanks to people who want to skin me alive
if i try hard enough i wonder if i will be able to taste the blood on your gums
have your teeth retracted yet?are you safe?can i sneak out
the back door, maybe, and
hope that you won't sink your vampire smile into the nape of my neck?
don't **** around with me you know exactly who i am
i'm a ******* monster i'm in your nightmares, babe
(as a matter of fact, don't call me babe
it'll only make my skin crawl when i snap your neck)
your skin is a patchwork quilt
let me wear it for a while
let me breathe in when you tell me to, act like a lady
but i'm not a lady, baby i'm a scourge
i'll end you faster than you can blink my poems are dripping red
let me empty them into your throat
or, lessons in anger management.
Michael Alvino Jan 2013
gazing off heady rooftops

at pincushion skies,

buttoned with clouds,

and pierced by Gotham's spires

at the sAw-ToOtH horizon.

oh, on clearer nights,

you blazed through the city,

lighting the stars on fire,

and sowing wild oats

while the moon's gleam dizzied itself,

dancing circles in the beautiful

disarray of your golden curls.

with every bounding step

carpe-ing the whole of the diem,

only to oblige yourself

to the whim of the noctem.

you were my ******(e).

oh, on warmer days,

you took in life at every breath,

then gave back to the world,

expiring something equally elemental-

"air well spent," i'd think,

neither matter nor soul

created or lost, rather,

each enriched by simply

having known the other.
JC Lucas Oct 2013
To walk until this gradual curve gives out-
Or to walk until the point where "up"
is sideways

and jump.

I'd fall for countless hours
pass all the stars and waywards
who, like myself
couldn't walk a straight line in broad daylight
I'm too sober
and too addicted to vice
I'm a pincushion of anxious
and when the tension releases,
explosions shake my achy feeble frame
or just plain mistakes get made
I feel like I can't handle life
I feel like I can't cope
with even the slightest feather's poke
I feel useless
a self-destructive nuisance
who speaks grandiose
and uses words like verbose
but couldn't tie my own shoes
-note that these don't have laces-
or might miss a bus cause
"**** look at those clouds"
or
"man, bees are super weird"
and meanwhile I'm crashing through china shop two.
I'm a bull without horns,
ever bitter, never scorned.

so I'll walk in silly circles
until this curve gives out.
I'll walk until I'm back where I started
and change course
I'll walk until my own head makes sense
I'll walk until I feel like I have enough room in my body
to contain me.
I'll walk until my legs give in
and my shoulders slump forward
from exhaustion or boredom
I'll walk until I figure out there is no
"up"

and jump.
I wrote this while backpacking Europe. I have still not stopped walking.
ConnectHook Apr 2016
☺☻☺☻☺☻

Post-Christian pornstar unsubdued,
My lady—you are too tattooed;
bored, studded, and nearly as cheap
as everyone else tossed on the heap.
You don’t excite, inspire or alarm.
You’re just a big Alterna-Bore. No harm
done to me; baby you’re a pincushion
of piercingly superficial fashion
Neither tribal nor demonic—just silly.
I pity you, pierced like that *****-nilly…

Some conserva-matron with a gun
is edgier, riskier (and way more fun)
Israeli soldiers are hotter than you.
1940’s pinups sexier. It’s true.
That’s why we won. Now they’re losing it.
And so am I…  but thanks for choosing it.

                            (War)
∅⚢☢⚧☯✰⚩✿⚥∅☢⚧☯✰⚢✿⚥☠⚩☯⚧✰

a  poem a day for NaPoWriMo2016
            ✿
www.connecthook.wordpress.com
            ✰
Joe Satkowski Dec 2013
fall symmetrically
like pins in my throat
my pincushion body will not withstand the storm this time
and i will be gone for a long time
belbere Aug 2017
you’ve told me before,
self-loathing is just
a common cliché,
now everybody’s doing it.

that’s not to say
i haven’t seen how
your eyes roam over
your body like you’d been
stitched together with all
the wrong fabrics
i don’t think
i’ve ever seen you
look as dissatisfied as
when you look
at yourself.

you’ve told me before,
self-loathing is just like
an std, everybody’s had it
at some point.

it’s just that some people
were smart enough to
use protection or are abstinent
and they’re the ones
who sleep easy at night
while you’ve always got an itch
to scratch it was never clear
how they toed the line
between their self love
and hate better
than others and you
were their other,
caught them staring
and couldn’t tell the line
between love and hate

(thought you saw it
split the ground open
wanted to dip your toes
into the nothing between
you were scared
you’d fall in).

but you won’t tell
me what it’s like
when you look at yourself,
and your reflection
is rag-doll ragged
the perfect pincushion
and you pinpoint
all the split seams
moth holes your
smile is just a
loose thread you stop
to unravel

and you won’t say
what it’s like
when your reflection is
all pins and points
and you’re not sure
if the rag-doll face
underneath is still
there, at one point
she smiles
like only girls with pins
in their lips can,
her lips unravel

(you don’t smile).

you’ve told me before,
self-loathing is just
a common cliché,
there’s no way you’d
be caught dead
doing it.

i’ve seen the red-capped pins
you keep with your make-up.

they look so much
like my own.



hey.
are you still there?
i can't see you beneath
all those pins.
it is the rule,
now . we try new things.

i have houmus, thought
of you, pat. she bought
rye bread, thirty percent
reduced.

in price.

i bought a mending set,
packed in a tin, like the war,
full of little things.

pincushion, tomato shape,
with pins stuck in.

i bought you a geometry
set. draw shapes, measure
angles.

have you,
tried something new.

recently?

sbm.
Maybe I'm the dark brown eyes you stare into
The ones you see your reflection in

Maybe I'm the hand combing through your jet black hair
Or the voice in the wind on an empty rooftop bar

Maybe I'm the brain you treat lesser than yours
Or the body in the room that tells you that you're not alone

Maybe I'm the throbbing **** you leave red Mac lipstick stains on
Or the stern screams that remind you of your father

Maybe I'm the lips touching your left cheek
Or the fingers that fix your nose ring

Who am I if not for all the times I've been cheated on?
Why should I be more than a pincushion
For all the times your dad didn't tell you he loved you?
Who would I be to all of you if I weren't
eyes,
hands,
barely a brain,
a ****,
and lips
?
Who am I if not a string of traumas
Walking my way through a path paved with eggshells and broken glass?
Who am I?
I'm back. For now.
a pincushion heart
thorns in exchange for a rose
unrequited love
Topher O'Neal Feb 2015
Breathe in the air, come back to life,
The short death of sleep, dreams the real heaven,
Or hell if a nightmare is giving you strife,
I find both of mine of late offer no haven.

If a dream, it just reminds me of what I want,
Things I can't have, doing things I could never do,
Nightmares to me are just life with a slant,
Scenarios, of failure that just seem destined to come true.

My escapes are all gone, and now I can't run,
I have to face my thoughts, like David to the giant,
So difficult, I find comfort in the thought of the gun,
Take it all away, never thinking, emotions running rampant.

But I wish not cause pain, and that takes a lot,
I am the pincushion of life, and take it with grace,
I will either survive, or break, a troublesome thought,
Bridges I will cross, and challenges I will have to face.

Welcome to the day, now go to work,
Wash it down with memories and friends,
Tell all the ways my mind can fork,
Go to sleep, then wake up, it never ends.
a summer bloomer
treats leprosy and scabies
Pincushion Flower
Erin Sep 2017
It’s ironic, huh? How when the small of your back is pressing into beige carpeting with those nail polish stains from that one experiment in the eighth grade, your rib cage suffocating you as your lungs expand like a party balloon animal, that that’s when you are your strongest? Your fingertips are cold and blue, your cheeks flaming as if you had tried to stick the sun under your tongue, but all the while you only feel a slight warmth coursing through your veins and a pleasant breeze on your thighs. Shrapnel and pieces of broken stucco plant themselves in your forehead, tilted up towards the crumbling cerulean ceiling, but it only feels like the light sprinkling of rain you used to try to gulp down for refreshment. It is ironic that when you falter, you lift your shoulders a bit taller. You feel like you are falling apart, limbs numb yet pricked and prodded as the whole world’s pincushion, but you are being rebuilt out of marble. When your mind’s scaffolding is collapsing, your face still keeps that slight smile in the corner of your mouth stained with berry lip shade. Everyone admires your genuine smile while you know that it was carved by Donatello himself, your torment hidden behind layers of compacted stone.
This was a quick jot after a rough afternoon. Sorry for the rant.
Malvika Sep 2017
I may have never been the light of your life but you were mine. Recently when people voice the word ‘therapy’, it elicits in me a feral sort of anger. It's a routine: rage, panic, and exhaustion.

My mother’s quaint china dishes have found a steady home on my sienna wooden floors. Please understand why I taste acid and rancid flesh when I think of your hazel eyes and strong arms. My Tracy Chapman record echoes monotonously out to me, but the blood simmering in the grooves of my brain fills my ears with a sound that displeases my auditory senses. It sounds like static from a broken radio. The wind howls through the cracks of my windows and sometimes it cajoles the door open. Somehow, my penchant for you never fails to disappoint me as my eyes flit up for the briefest second to see if you've arrived. I use my teacups as wine flutes and my heart as a pincushion, but maybe your broad shoulders and firm chest could shelter me from myself. My desk stands proudly in the corner of the room. Enrobed in dust and half-eaten pizza slices, it stands proof of what you've done to me. Mr. Teddy is taking a nap. His cottony, soft, white insides poke out in tufts from under the patchwork.
Another one bites the dust.

The poison seeps through the gaps in between my teeth and panic swallows me like an ocean. If you want, I would clad your feet in my shoes but I have never been one to chase after something so I cannot fathom how to explain to you why they have holes on their soles, much like my soul. The towel pools at my feet as I feel the heat behind my eyelids start to cool. Exhaustion sweeps over me like a summer breeze. I can hear fast cars as the put me to sleep.
It smells like petrichor; wet earth after the storm.
love pain suffering hope panic loss
Kay-Rosa Apr 2019
silence is deadly
never
say
nothing
my back is littered
with knives, glass, arrows, bullets, swords, pens
a pincushion for the hateful
but i stand straight
face up
and i sing
i sing tears
i sing blood
i sing pain
i sing hope
i sing trust
i sing me
and only i can sing
me
and you can sing
you
but together
we sing the
world
sandra wyllie Jul 2021
that once was soft. But now
is spined. Her back is lined
with spiky quills. Every barb that
jabs her is a place a man has

stabbed her. A living pincushion
that when rolled over holds herself up
by the skewers. Now water passes
through her. She doesn't get wet. But she’ll

stick to you if you touch her. And you'll
bleed a gusher for the softness. From the thorns
she's built a fortress.
Timothy Ward Oct 2017
i cannot
stay stuck
when time froze
at 7:07
as my world
came crashing
down and
tear-filled icicles
pierced this
pincushion
heart...
sandra wyllie Apr 2022
I hung my bleeding body
on to dry. At war with myself, I saw
a place to lie.  A satin red
flower erected on a tower of

spines. And fell on a pincushion
of needles and pins that made
my head spin. And ripped a hole
in my side. Torn so wide I split

in two and grew spikes in
my pupils from a man with no
scruples. This, from two stars
colliding. I'm sliding on a fast track

back to earth. Still at war with
myself.  Now the spikes that girth me
are my hands and my knees. And there's
no soft place to lie.
Norbert Tasev May 2020
Now only the puppeted dawn awakens: The flakes that have cooled from the wounded sky are falling and wandering with the changing Time: Nature is still taking a blind spot while still betraying itself and has long sinned! The incessant carrot, broken skinned and cursing wound means no more people to accommodate! There is a petty envy of perpetuating disasters, pointing at each other: Just because the killer-simple blessing came unexpectedly from heaven! The heart: as a wounded pincushion, it still endures the vicissitudes of existence, and the grandiose Order itself believes: It has done everything it used to

imagined and what he designed as fun with vidor-satisfaction! Reality is still whining with its sufferings, - many people do not take part in futile struggles: with loudspeakers and ore sermons, pseudo-speakers reassure the non-existent: "We have done everything with human possibilities!" "Only the hopeful opportunity is overdue!" In recruiting words, trust has long since disappeared!

The brain is forced to listen, and convulsively forgets the gehenna flames of permanence! Human dignity descended into a castable **** — only a lack of eternal fidelity and trust — because we were afraid. We could maniacally dread the uncertain Tomorrow, in which the skeptics deliberately whispered: How can we not help? -

we received the trust and handshakes that remained in the fly with a thousand promises: In the depths of hearts, the shining patrol fire was seldom smoldered: Prickly, murderous daggers rumble on snowdrift battlefields - one cannot know, one cannot stand alone! Would you have lost the eclipse wick? Where did loyalty, the sure appearance of reality for each other, go? -

In the distance, an ever-fading echo is heard on the sufferer and the call for help - maybe no one is listening anymore! Even the last renegades returned to the mountains and show only wounded silence…
Norbert Tasev Dec 2021
Who guards what ?! Illusion of pink syrup cravings, another five-minute fame and career opportunities! Cheat-blind Teasing hope is teasing and advocating for those who bribe themselves at any time! Your purple heart must also be a wounded pincushion; home of dozens of stinging needles! Who guards who ?! Forced democracy among hen cages, a silicone puffed cake miracle, a lurking night that flattens or betrays and betrays everyone!
 
Lust and pain sprout from certain moments! An orbiting planet can only be my wounded, melancholy soul! I can't dictate when to create what! I would like to smuggle a living, karakan will from the kind gaze of a heart-worker as a heart-worker in the depths of conscious labs of consciousness! Greedy Time lends itself to the fat obscurity! He stepped back to the feet of the World as a muttering stake! Everything is repeated with a squeak!
 
I can have no less fear of Life than is absolutely necessary; I can hardly find refuge in running or schooling so far; heaps of desires scattered in the prison of desires lurk while they call upon creation! The Earth is now full of sizzling sniffers everywhere! The confidential crying voices of little men can be challenged in the same way if one considers himself and does not bow his head to the camp of delicate little kings! Anyone who spreads a card with a bribe card can lose at any time!
 
Bubble-lifted minute-blue people with balloon egos and inflatable biceps abound in their exposure! - I still fish in my past and present; among the memories of nebulized glows, who can preserve who, if Memory is already light-hearted?

— The End —