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jane taylor May 2016
erstwhile a halcyon extant universe incessantly ceaseless
cradled itself in hues of violet phosphorescence
laced with cobalt shimmering stars
perpetually whole it nonetheless
sought to know itself

encompassing all that is bubbling over in effervescent ebullience
intertwined with indescribable catastrophic splendor
it shattered into tens of millions of splinters
of eloquent efflorescent light
shining in the night

each splinter heretofore imbued with sempiternal felicity
began to conjure sumptuous dulcet elixirs
furtively seeking out savory emollients
to mollify the pique of separation
plummeting they fell

into monstrous competition seeking demesne they lost the purpose
of gaining awareness and intelligent consciousness
surreptitious estrangement overflowed
deluging them in excruciating agony
thus an epiphany was born

the carving of the beleaguered fragments inked with tremendous pain
created a transfiguration of splinters to crystals
hence enlightenment commenced as the gems
magnetized together constructing a world
where omnipotence shines

the ineffable beauty formed by the reintegration of crystals
far exceeds the original as they dazzle with universal light
bursting from diamonds etched in deep wisdom
flooding the firmament with kaleidoscopic
rainbow strobes cascading the sky

©2016janetaylor
baby since you don't
love me anymore
I feel splinters of pain
in my heart's core

you went away leaving
an aching so deep
why couldn't you stay
close to my keep

the void of emptiness
brings no elation
only the essence
of soul deprivation

baby them splinters
ain't
too
good
baby them splinters
so
hurtful
of
wood
baby them splinters
mean
in
sting
baby them splinters
cruel
of
ping

you've gone and won't
ever be back
your love for me
but a destitute shack
The piece was inspired by a friend, she suggested that I write a poem about splinters...and this is what I came up with.
Lukai Mar 2023
Every time someone leaves me
it feels like they’ve taken a dagger straight to my heart
It isn’t a fast motion but slow and painful
The suffering prolonged.
It isn’t made out of metal, but wood
When it’s pulled out of my body  
Each time, they leave behind pieces of themselves,
splinters
I wonder how many I’ve collected?
Im sure by now I can create a dagger if my own.
Alex McQuate May 2018
Great tragedy suffered,
Impossible circumstances conquered,
The warrior walks upon the field flanked path.

The wanderer's armor tells a tale,
Battle scarred and partially rent asunder,
A face of stoicism that hides the haggardness underneath,
Peeking out beneath the mask of a hardened soldier.

The clouds clap ahead, preceded by flashes of light brightly illuminating the world,
Accompanied shortly after by the rainfall.

A trickle becomes a downpour,
The battered individual trudging along as the road becomes a bog of mud and slop,
The message firmly planted within their mind.

Coming upon the dark outline of the castle ahead the warrior picks up pace,
Reflecting upon what would happen to those that the Warrior helped.

The pace is now fueled by a different kind of urgency.

The rain is cold upon the face's of those that it falls on,
The torn edges of metal digging in at places,
Some already wounded and tender,
As the final hilltop between them is crested.

The gates are closed,
And this loyal soldier is for the moment shut out,
A fist is raised,
The declaration of allegiance given,
An angry detailing of the warriors achievements and adventures shouted,
And a challenge of one's path,
Building in anger and fury as the dam finally breaks and gushes forth,
Threatening to shatter the gate and doors to splinters and twisted metal.

A long ago promised gift to be rewarded,
For all the things endured,
Things that could be considered so cruel,
The storm picks up in force until it's akin to that of a hurricane,
As if brought forth by the warrior's grief and pain finally being released,
For the first and only time.

These things ringing out despite the storms roaring wind,
Gathering force,
Perhaps in affirmation of the warrior's words.

After a pause the gate begins to lift,
It's metal screeching,
The doors groaning as they begin to swing outward, and the battered soldier is bathed in light,
Taking the weight from the warrior's shoulders,
As the threshold is finally crossed.
s Aug 2018
Hi there.
Sometimes it hurts to think.
I'm driving around in my hometown
I saw this old park that me and my friends would run and laugh and play at all the time.
We played cops and robbers
Lava Monster
Freeze tag
We acted like knights in strong armor and princesses with glittery dresses and we all slayed the dragons
Well now here I am staring at this old swing set that no one swings on anymore.
I used to think that I could touch the clouds with my feet if I swung high enough.
There is something so lively about a group of kids laughing and playing on a playground.
There is something so eerie about an old empty playground where no one goes.
That playground used to be so alive.
Now the swing creaks as it sways in the slight breeze.
You can almost hear faint whispers of the kids laughing from years before.
Now all those kids are adults with lives and responsibilities that are much more important than slaying a dragon.
The wood has splinters that get stuck in your fingers.
It is not shiny and fun anymore.
It used to be new
But I have found that everything changes eventually.
I wish people didn't leave so unexpectedly.
Anyways I am just rambling
but next time you see a playground
just try to look away.
it hurts to think too long
Bye.
I am so sad. So many people keep dying
gleck Feb 2016
''
Sand and stones between my bones.
Today the sun never shone.
Look how beautiful I am.

Chop, chop, chopped wood in the fireplace.
Don't get too close if you want to keep your face.
Be careful not to burn yourself.

It gives a certain warmth
And brings a certain want.
I would, yet I can't enjoy it by myself.

Royal blue like the winter hue.
My skin is merely bruised.
Can you still see how many times I've been hurt?

That winter depression.
Makes me want you as my new obsession.
Come in even if it's colder than outside.

Melt, melt me, I'm a letdown.
Having a meltdown.
I am melting under your fiery touch.

Snow flakes the skin.
I am in for a win.
What a special snowflake I am, wouldn't you say?

My heart is surrounded by splinters,
It shouldn't, yet it get's me through the winter.
Between my arms it's chiller, why don't you come hither?

Take a bite of me with your ice chipped teeth.
Swallow me up like a leech.
Red blood gauges from my blue veins.

Guess I'm not that royal anyway.
Hide it before you can complain.
-
Too late.
You already know the taste.
"
The road behind bares us a backdrop, too many nights find us fractured in our thoughts and the dreamers we once were are far from the two people who stand today.

We're broken, mere splinters of our shipwreck past, driftwood on a shore that drowns every time the ocean breathes.
The path is littered with slaughtered dreams that didn't bleed.

As time and tide wait for no man shall we find it a tragic scene?
simply erased with the sunsets demise?
No one gets away without a scar and mine speak a road map to chaos
and a found hello to you.

Mine own scars are fingertips
gouged into the sand and faded
but salted by tears of the ocean, inerasable by the tide.
A soul washed up upon the shore, a road map etched delicately into fine bones.
You can trace where I'd been before. All roads lead to your hello.

In broken lines and have uttered phrases and one too many empty night.
Backdrop of chaos does paint in the darkest colors you could ever imagine .

How does it gets so flawed by our own creations and vices my dear?
Does it still ring ever so true?

The bell rings true whispering distant voices
Empty nights are just bottles lined up as dead soldiers
We contemplated our own truths and fell victim to our own vices
The backdrop is black, no colour beneath skin.
Honestly? Where does our downfall begin?

Two ships underneath the nightscape past the spark once understood the flame and nothing more .
In empty alleys, like cats to prowl, we find our moments, and then bury our thoughts to lay for no others to see.

half written papers and half heard conversation the keys of the piano haunt the silence as myself shadows that still remain.

Nothing is but a thought and those are like dead flowers laid to waste a reflection of far better times

The night crawls to meet the day as it has so many times before.

The thought of the minds bottle lay empty upon the table.
A fond farewell is but a sugar coated goodbye.
And I seldom have minced my words to mask their sting.

The page forever bleeds.

Pages that lay scattered on a ***** floor
Bleeding ink into cracks
that will forever more
hide the spirit of our souls.
This co write was a true honor and something I feel was way over due .
Helen honestly deserves far more credit than myself on this for her lines in this truly are brilliant.

I give her all the credit in the world cause co writing with me I know is far from easy but this write was truly a pleasure and I look forward to this being the first of many writes with her .

Cheers Helen
Tom Leveille Jun 2014
do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me
Cíara McNamara Apr 2015
She came to me, clutching her hand
as if she was clutching her life
Her little sobs
As delicate as dying breaths

She looked at me
with those bug-green eyes
pleading for my attention
for once to nurture and care

Within her *******
was a splinter
that she tried to rescue herself
instead shoving it further in

She took a sharp breath
as my magic hands
set it free -
set her free.

I sighed to myself
as she skipped away

For who is there
to rescue the splinters from me?
Laurel Leaves Apr 2015
You
Are
Splinters
Sharp points
Bothersome
Pluck you out
But you dig in deeper
Always leave a piece behind
To fester and inflame
That's what I get for walking barefoot
My hands wanting to touch everything
Feel the grain
Feel the contours
Of you
Cuts
And scratches
And bruises
And splinters
That's what I get for wanting you.....
Enrique,
Emilio,
Lorenzo,

the three of them frozen:
Enrique by the world of beds;
Emilio by the world of eyes and wounded hands;
Lorenzo by the world of roofless universities.

Lorenzo,
Emilio,
Enrique,

the three of them burned:
Lorenzo by the world of leaves and billiard *****;
Emilio by the world of blood and white pins;
Enrique by the world of the dead and abandoned newspapers.

Lorenzo,
Emilio,
Enrique,
the three of them buried:
Lorenzo in one of Flora's *******;
Emilio in the dead gin forgotten in the glass;
Enrique in the ant, the sea, and the empty eyes of birds.

Lorenzo,
Emilio,
Enrique,
the three in my hands were
three Chinese mountains,
three shadows of a horse,
three landscapes of snow and a cabin of white lilies
by the pigeon coops where the moon lies flat under the rooster.

One
and one
and one,
the three of them mummified,
with the flies of winter,
with the inkwells the dog ****** and the thistle despises,
with the breeze that freezes theh eart of all the mothers,
by the white ruins of Jupiter where drunks snack on death.

Three
and two
and one,
I saw them disappear, crying and singing
into a hen's egg,
into the night that showed its skeleton of tobacco,
into my sorrow full of faces and piercing bone splinters of moon,
into my happiness of whips and notched wheels,
into my breast troubled by pigeons,
into my deserted death with one mistaken wanderer.

I had killed the fifth moon
and the fans and the applause drank water from the fountains.
Hidden away, the warm milk of newborn girls,
shook the roses with a long white sorrow.
Enrique,
Emilio,
Lorenzo,

Diana is hard,
but somtimes she has ******* of clouds.
The white stone can beat in the blood of a deer
and the deer can dream through the eyes of a horse.

When the pure forms sank
under the cri cri of  daisies
I understood they had murdered me.
They searched the cafés and the graveyards and churches,
they opened the wine casks and wardrobes,
they destroyed three skeletons to pull out their gold teeth.
Still they couldn't fine me.
They couldn't?
No. They couldn't.
But they learned the sixth moon fled against the torrent,
and the sea remembered, suddenly,
the names of all her drowned.
john oconnell Sep 2010
A world of splinters
embedding themselves in the flesh;
the spirit surrounded by a crown of thorns;
pangs of received and on-others-inflicted wounds
tormenting any hope of durable reconciliation -

the birth of wisdom is suspect to mockery.

Maybe, it should  accept and succumb
to ignorance and impotence.
This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.
B Mar 2015
Maybe he left
because he got
tired of plucking
splinters out of
his fingers every
time he touched
me because of
the fence I built
around my heart.*


B.S.
Chris Thomas Apr 2016
Motionless and stationary
Yesterday haunts the steps of my boots
Over you, or just halfway under you?
Watching daybreak with one eye open
Nearing the point where splinters break

Weather is calm, but I'm a soul of storms
Out of the frying pan, out of reasons why
Rational?  No, but I never claimed to be
Seven hours in this abyss of apathy
Traitor!  Keep your distance and your sympathy

Each their own, but I've disowned myself
Nursing bitterness to spark another war
Everyday is just a spectre of deceit
My reflection stares right back at me
You, my friend, have become my own worst enemy
jane taylor Jun 2016
fly
born in illusory chains
gnarled metal
encrusted in my broken skin
the copper colored dust
of rusted steel
infectiously envelopes

shaving off antiquated layers
of fundamentalist religion
encrusted for generations
unpeeled until raw
an unsophisticated method
unveiling
ancient lodged glass shards
colored with deceit

brought before their court
interrogated
unfathomably skewered
an eerie salem witch trial
in modern times

barbarically they shun me
banished
i wander aimlessly
smelling the rotten decay of deceased community
as splinters pierce my feet
from the crooked wooden plank
i walk alone now

an unfathomable inner ache
kindled a residue within
igniting a wildfire from the darkest shadows
uncontainably erupting
i dance savagely
naked in the orange moonlight
and in every shaded edge
lit my soul ablaze

i am a nomad sheep
‘tho not one of their color
no pasture to contain me
no shepherd i can follow
theological safety nets
no longer there to catch me
bohemian-like
i plunge

free falling
plummeting
stripped wide open
magically
fearlessness
reverses gravitation

floating
untethered
i soar amongst
apricot tinged clouds
my skin still wet from rebirth
and rise with the flaming coral sun

you cannot destroy me
i twisted in your decrepit pencil sharpener
and with fresh mettle
cut through the chains that bound

you can have my ego
but you cannot have my soul

dismantling domestication
transcending limitation
wildly untamed
i fly

©2016janetaylor
my husband and i left the mormon church and lost many friends, family, and community
Harsh Dec 2014
When every other thing in your life has shattered
and you are a shell of a person and all you do
is call me at an ungodly hour to be alone,
you don’t have to say hello. You don’t have to say
anything. Let your sadness speak its lengths
through the silence that permeates through our phones.
I’ll stay on until you fall asleep, or I’ll come to your place
and hold you until you find your breath again.
I’ll wipe away the tears for you, but I won’t tell you
not to cry. Sometimes crying is the only thing we can do.

When you’re tired, just look at me and
give me one of those exhausted smiles we share;
I’ll carry you home and undress you.
I’ll fold your clothes to the side, tuck you into the covers,
and read to you while caressing your hair.
Don’t worry about snoring or moving about
while you sleep; just get your rest.

When you’re furious and all the world has done is
disappoint you, I’ll hang from a doorway and be
your punching bag. Don’t be gentle with me.
Yell until your voice splinters and you punch your knuckles raw
and stomp until your knees give out from under you.
I’ll lay you down and ice your hands and give you tea
for your throat. I’ll hold you as the rage turns into
anguish and frustration and all you can do is tremble.

And even when my actions are futile and
all my words do is come crashing about your ears,
I promise that I will at least try for you.

All your wounds heal both inside and out.
I will always be here to soothe the burns.
I will always listen to your rants and ramblings.
I will always have a hand for you to hold.
I will always love you; everything that I have
and everything that I am, all that that I ever will be,
is yours.

Always.
My rendition of this piece: http://lntroductions.tumblr.com/post/75665068982/and-if-you-call-me-at-4-am-too-sad-to-even-say
Aaron Kerman Jan 2010
“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”- Alice in Wonderland

“Everyone knows it’s a race, but no one’s sure of the finish line.”
        -Dean Young, “Whale Watch”

1a
Children rarely listen to any armchair advice from their immediate family, relatives they commonly have contact with or anyone they haven’t known for more than a couple years because in kindergarten or day care they often got gold stars just for showing up… Little glittering prizes plastered on poster boards in elementary school classrooms regardless of grades or mistakes…


1b
On the windy day when you lower the green jet-ski instead of the good one, race it to the north end, out of the safety of the bay, into the choppy waters, you’ll get bullied by the wave’s splash like the cattails of a whip. The lake will overwhelm you; you’ll inhale some of the water,  a sharp pain will course through your body as you try to breathe those short shallow breaths, which you will force yourself to do as seldom as possible. You will cough and keel over on the craft; It’s not uncommon to spit up blood; you will have to return to the dock and raise the jet-ski back onto the boatlift.  You will stub your toe on the cracks in the planking, stumble and get a splinter in the ball of your foot heading towards the deck but won’t notice. All feeling numbs against water trapped inside your lungs.


1c
Jackie Paper’s mother made him a hotdog with potato chips and served it to him on a plastic plate outside so he could enjoy it on the newly refinished deck while he watched the schooners and speedboats, stingray’s and ski-nautique’s jet in and out of the bay. He didn’t wait five minutes after he finished to fly from the deck onto the dock into the water where he free styled too far and got a cramp. His mother almost lost a son that day.



2a
If wet some recommend running around the shore of the lake until the air has thoroughly dried you off. Listening to the gulls dive and racing through the varying levels of grass on the neighbors’ unkempt lawns, in between the oaks and elms, keeping ever mindful the sticks and stones and acorns that litter the ground in lieu of stubbed toes or splinters. You will most likely fail, but you will get dry.


2b
When you **** your big toe on the zebra mussels while wading in the shallows, near the seawall beside the dock, trying to catch crayfish and minnows darting between the stones underneath the water, and the blood doesn’t stop flowing for 10 minutes and the H2O2 bubbles burgundy on the decks maple woodwork, instead of that off white color it usually bubbles, and stings something awful, don’t be a little ***** about it.  It’s your own fault for leaving your aqua-socks on the green marbled tiles in the foyer closet next to the bathroom; where you changed into your bathing suit and got the bottle of peroxide.


2c
Last winter Christopher Robbins drove his red pickup on the ice (near the island, towards the North end, where even when it’s been freezing for weeks the frozen water seldom exceeds six inches in thickness) at night and fell through.  He felt the cold water enter his lungs.  Although it was snowing and no one had noticed he survived; it took him the whole of an hour to reach the nearest house and call home; he lost his truck and suffered from severe hypothermia and acute pneumonia. At the hospital it was determined that while there was ample evidence of the early onset of frostbite in his extremities, amputation would not be necessary.


3a
While sitting Indian style on the dock next to your friends, settled on the plastic furniture, sipping whiskey and beer, comparing scars assume, no matter whose company you’re in, that yours are the smallest. Those cigarette burns running down the length of your right forearm are self-inflicted and old- reminders that you haven’t had to force yourself to breathe in quite some time.

3b
When you jump off the end of the dock you’ll forget to keep your knees loose because you were running on the wooden planks trying to avoid the white weather worn and dirtied dock chairs and worrying about getting a splinter. The water is inviting but during the summer the depth is only three feet four inches. You will roll your ankle at the very least and probably sprain it because, Like an *******, you locked your knees and jumped without looking.


3c
Two summers ago Alice was tubing behind a blue Crown Royal when she hit the wake at an awkward angle and flew head first into the water in the bay a few hundred feet off the dock at dusk. The spotter and driver simply weren’t watching and the wave-runner didn’t see her due to the advancing darkness.  She cracked her head open on the bottom of its hull; swallowed water.  She needed 70 stitches and several staples but Alice made a full recovery.


4
Mothers often tell their children to should chew their food 40 times before swallowing to aid digestion and to wait a full half hour after eating before engaging in physical activity. Especially swimming.


5
When you’re at the lake house this summer skipping stones swimming and running on the dock remember not to listen to any advice.  

If this were a race to get dry you’d be much closer to first than last.

The internal bleeding eventually stops.  The splinters all get pulled out, staples and stitches are removed, lacerations heal and the feeling returns to the fingers and toes.

The water eventually drains from the lungs and only the scars remain:

Gold stars on poster boards;

because everybody has won, and all must have prizes.
kay Apr 2014
Don't write me off as apathetic because you don't understand me.
I am mountains sobbing in earthquakes.
I am rivers screaming in floods.
I am bridges laughing into splinters.
I am systems crashing and burning out with a wink of light.
I am a wildfire in skin and clothes and I would destroy you if I showed you my true self.
Do not underestimate my emotions because you do not see them.
Akemi Oct 2013
Chapter 1

There was a woman. The cost to love her was your life. No other payment but a sending off, a revolver cocked to your temple’s side.
There was no spite in your death, just business.
Hell of a business to run.

I was protecting someone. Never been one to stick around, but this drag had carried for the past year. That gang-owned joint lay but two doors and a cold alley away. Popular place, maybe not the classiest but it had its patrons. Packed with your essentials: pool tables, dirt-licked walls and chairs, mean folk mixed in with the nice. Old fashioned joint with a history. You could almost feel it when you walked in. That small pressure when it’s about to rain? Felt like that had been building up for a decade there.
Some Madonna owned it. Names elude me, but she was just another front; as was the barkeep, the hired bouncers and those mean-eyed slingers that spoke loud in company, silent alone. Heh, almost like an old-fashioned saloon. Who the hell am I in this tale of cowboys and crooks?
I was holed up in that apartment block for the winter. Stiff drapes covering a stiff cold that seeped through the cracks anyway. Cold chills to wake to, and the whiskey don’t warm a **** thing. Maybe it was the ache of a past flame that led me to her. That old touch had languished and misted away in the night of some long dead memory, leaving an old kiss from a young lover on my shivering body. It grew faint with every year’s passing. I struggle to remember this keepsake.
Every night.
I was a no name protector protecting a no name ghost of a man. Yeah we knew each other. I’m no stranger to keep past talking terms . . . but, hell if I remember his name, how we got into this **** situation and why. Mind’s a little off. Been like that for years.

It was a stumble through the wrong door at the wrong time. Some spiteful voices in the back of the joint or the back of my mind telling me I’m headed for hell and ain’t coming back. See, every day is a crossroad, and I happened upon the worst one yet.
I remember that flaking paint; grime-covered white on a moulding door **** near off its hinges. That suited me, and I hated it. Maybe I grew sick of wandering the same way and turned my life on its spinning head. Spun me all the ways I couldn’t face. Saw a glimmer that fate had readied for me. Don’t think I’ve looked at anything with such eyes since; nor have they looked back at me.
The room was a cramped, dilapidated hellhole like every other room, but with her laying on that bed of hers . . . she was the only clean thing in the whole of this cursed city. Save, she wasn’t clean. No such thing exists; no such thing as clean since your adolescent innocence, and even that went up in flames. Hell, in a city like this I wouldn’t be surprised if the skeletons we kept so tightly locked in our closets outnumbered us ten to one.
Should have remembered that when I saw her, but my mind lay a blank canvas and I couldn’t help but fill it with all the details of this pretty bird. Even those that weren’t there.
No Name yanked me out quick. Never seen him so pale, ghosting further and further from a human being. He’d been running so long I don’t think he even knew what he was running from anymore. His past? Some cop chase from years back, ending with blood stains and shaky hands? A dead kid in the arms of a suicidal wife? Maybe he’s running from himself. Fear in the capacity we contain, and fear in the ways we unleash it around loved ones. I don’t blame him for running. If I was a worse man I’d run from him as well.
Now No Name has it all figured out, even if he won’t let on; and that bird in there ain’t part of the plan. Cash cash, first train out to some no name city for this no name man. In this together, he keeps repeating, like some broke down record player that only plays one song. Well I guess we share more similarities than I’d like to think so.

One night, about a month after settling in that old apartment, I hear raised voices. Not uncommon, but something about this still night woke some fear inside me. A fear I needed to meet with my eyes, a score to settle with myself. Sounded like some ******* outside was hoping to bring down the sky with volume alone. No type of gentleman, just a no ***** kid who doesn’t know the difference between command and screaming like a babe.
One gets you respect. Now, the other. . . .
I open those stiff drapes with stiffer fingers. Brush that layer of frozen breath and mist to find some mid-twenty good for nothing punk holding a struggling figure. The apartment ain’t exactly ground floor but even up here I can spot the difference between a gent and a sally. Some broad was in trouble.
Grab that six shooter, old man. The holster smooth from years of wear, small frays on the weathered jacket rubbing against goose-pricked skin. Comfort clothing that never really brings comfort. Not anymore. Guess I’m as bad as No Name. I’m just repeating routine.
Out the hall, no doors left in this apartment block. Stolen, broken, ain’t exactly your family fun lifestyle we’re living. No Name’s holed up in this fortress of upturned furniture and dresser-barred doorways. Lights flicker from between the cracks. The devil ain’t gonna bother with the door, I tell him. He doesn’t reply. Maybe he’s a religious man with one too many sins above his head.
There’s another yell and I feel my blood rise, hairs picking up static, a storm brewing inside that clenched stomach of mine. Take a tumble down the stairs in my haste. **** crooked balsa wood. Those stairs are gonna end me one day, I swear.
Ground floor. I slam that kitchen door and it cracks against the brick wall outside. ****. No Name’s gonna burst an artery. Call out for that ******* punk but he’s already eyeing me up. Only a few steps away and I can see the white in his eyes. No . . . those are his pupils. Wide, all cloud-like, he’s ******* dusted up. . . . Almost like looking into the past. Thrice-cursed ****. I’m in trouble.
This ain’t some lover’s quarrel, some twisted ****’s thought of a good way to end the night. This is a dusthead addict and I’m out of my league. His mid-snarl distorts and stretches past his cheeks and that devil grin sends an electric jolt from the wires of my brain to my heart.
This six shooter is as good as a pea gun against a Smiley.
He’s spouting some glossolalia drifts, layering it like an abominable duet. The coked-up boy in me yearns to understand again, but stiff joints and washed-out dreams have made me a cynic. Ain’t no beauty when you’re tearing things apart to see it. ******* Smiley’s on the edge and he’s ready to pounce right off. If that broad’s sobbing didn’t **** at those heart strings of mine I’d be running for my ******* life.
I lift that pea shooter and aim it straight at that devil smile.
He howls. Glass shatters from above. Some black monstrous thing comes speeding at me. I leap through that apartment doorway in time to see ******* Smiley consumed by it. All sharp, all solid that beast slams into Smiley, screaming loud enough to wake this dead city twice over. Smiley thrashes, he splays out to the ground, the beast’s seared flesh erupting in front of me. A piece slices past my cheek and I’m on the ground in tears. I hear No Name scream an incomprehensible curse above. I’m bawling now. Through my tears I spot that chunk of flesh. ******* balsa wood. Thrice-cursed balsa wood.
No Name had thrown a piano out that barricaded window of his. Tears of pure comedy, that’s what left my face. A Smiley taken out by No Name, I’ll never live this down. His mangled body lies under polished wood. Someone’s yearly worth gone in a second of frantic panic, reduced to twisted wires and cracked ivory. To see something so beautiful destroyed in seconds makes me wonder if the Smiley had gotten the better of us after all.
That broad’s in shock. Splinters covered every inch of ground save that around her; looked like a comet, trailing emptiness behind.  Should have noticed it then that something wasn’t right with that scene. Perfectly unscathed beauty sitting there with not a single scratch nor splinter on her, but I was too **** amazed I was alive. Knelt close to her and caught a whiff of some exotic scent on her skin. Some flower. Saw her face and it added another colour to that filling canvas of mine. This pretty bird from the joint. The one men died for. At least No Name had saved one life worth saving, funny it happened to be the one who could take yours in a night.
Names elude me, but the way I remember her . . . the way I remember her is Blossom, for when she came into my life she gave colours to my black and white memory, colours I didn’t know existed, and my black and white morals took a turn down some dawning grey-blurred alley.
So I’m a ******* gentleman and I walk Blossom home while No Name shifts furniture above us. Scrapes of hard wood against wood, filling that void in his once impenetrable bastion. I told you No Name’s got it all planned out already. Guess I’m just here for the ride.
Welcome to the paranormal neo-noir gangster world of Devil Smiles.
RW Dennen Aug 2014
Smashing boots on doors,
splinters fall like rain.
Smashing boots on doors,
children feel the pain.
Smashing boots on doors,
granny's years of age.
Smashing boots on doors,
Mom and Dad in rage.
Smashing boots on doors,
panic sets the stage.
Smashing boots on doors,
Iraqi freedom fades.
Smashing boots on doors,
like thunder in a storm.
Smashing boots on doors,
an innocent family torn.
Smashing boots on doors,
a brand new hatred born.

RW Dennen  (c)  11/24/09
As I say war is not a natural state of man. In the year 2004
the insurgents were spilling over Iran into Iraq around border towns. This was one of the low points for our forces,
we were losing soldiers fast. I know that our troops or at least most were forced to do this. Because tracing an enemy
was most impossible and most acted in defence. This act must have traumatized a lot of our troops. Because by nature
most are good kids. They're kids to me because I'm 74.
(Not to be condocending) Thank you, go with peace.
Poetic T Sep 2014
I crawl from the ground
Black roots release me
From my grave,
Wood
Splinters,
Earth,
Torn from
The underground
I walk as my roots of black
Spread  across the land,
Like vines they spread
Suffocating,
All other life around.
Decay,
leave,s its touch on this land.
   I walk the land from the grave.
The roots released me
From my rest
Now I poison the land
With each step
Corrosion
  Withering,  
My roots saturates the ground
Decay,
Erode,
Decompose
I am dead but my legacy,
Will be death as my roots suffocate the land,
All life is drained
There will only be
Extinction,
Oblivion,
Darkness,
Where ever my roots take ground
As I fear no other
What can the dead fear
As all that surrounds, is death all around.
Flavia Nov 2012
Why do you do this?
Your Army of Nothings
Who lay in the sun
and are all but sweet
who swelter and sweat
in that fresh cut grass
mowed by a man
you can't hope to know.
And you,
you there, with the grin
Who's side are you on anyway?
What made you the prince
of the Army of Nothings;
The leader, the first in command.
You spout and you spit
that ******* and bare
your teeth at me like you're the bomb
dot com
You're such a disgrace.
parading around
with your head up your ***
"So what's new?"
Oh, shut up,
You can't even fill out your pants.
Why should I care for you,
why should I feel?
How will I ever come home?
Where welcoming words
and magical treasure,
and stories that never come true
but are good.
Where futures of light once reigned so supreme
I swore they would never run dry.
I thought you'd missed out,
you know, then and there,
of the life that we talked of in dreams.
No flowers and chocolates,
no diamond rings,
just love.
Made of stuff so much deeper
and denser
and finer
and lovely, and warm, and alive...
But it's over, and done.
and I can't have it back.
So I go on avoiding
the Army of Nothings
as they come marching in
marching in
one two, at the ready
I feel deep in my bones
that breaking and tearing
Help me, archangel!
Save me! You promised!
You said you would always be there
in that carved-out big apple
our home, once upon
when we laughed and were happy and good.
But goodness runs out.
You made that as clear
as a crystal that needs to be smashed.
And I did that, remember?
I left it all broken and you were so proud
So proud I had chosen
the right over wrong.
yet you overlook
all the splinters of glass
all there
all here
all lurking in me.
I don't want to cry
or beg or to fight
But I loved you in ways
that she found unacceptable?

So silly, so stupid,
so big that it keeps you away

Not that I care very much
For your army of nothings
or things that remind me
of memories gone with the wind


**But I do.
What is death, I ask.
What is life, you ask.
I give them both my buttocks,
my two wheels rolling off toward Nirvana.
They are neat as a wallet,
opening and closing on their coins,
the quarters, the nickels,
straight into the crapper.
Why shouldn't I pull down my pants
and moon the executioner
as well as paste raisins on my *******?
Why shouldn't I pull down my pants
and show my little ***** to Tom
and Albert? They wee-wee funny.
I wee-wee like a squaw.
I have ink but no pen, still
I dream that I can **** in God's eye.
I dream I'm a boy with a zipper.
It's so practical, la de dah.
The trouble with being a woman, Skeezix,
is being a little girl in the first place.
Not all the books of the world will change that.
I have swallowed an orange, being woman.
You have swallowed a ruler, being man.
Yet waiting to die we are the same thing.
Jehovah pleasures himself with his axe
before we are both overthrown.
Skeezix, you are me. La de dah.
You grow a beard but our drool is identical.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not.

Today is November 14th, 1972.
I live in Weston, Mass., Middlesex County,
U.S.A., and it rains steadily
in the pond like white puppy eyes.
The pond is waiting for its skin.
the pond is waiting for its leather.
The pond is waiting for December and its Novocain.

It begins:

Interrogator:
What can you say of your last seven days?

Anne:
They were tired.

Interrogator:
One day is enough to perfect a man.

Anne:
I watered and fed the plant.

*

My undertaker waits for me.
he is probably twenty-three now,
learning his trade.
He'll stitch up the gren,
he'll fasten the bones down
lest they fly away.
I am flying today.
I am not tired today.
I am a motor.
I am cramming in the sugar.
I am running up the hallways.
I am squeezing out the milk.
I am dissecting the dictionary.
I am God, la de dah.
Peanut butter is the American food.
We all eat it, being patriotic.

Ms. Dog is out fighting the dollars,
rolling in a field of bucks.
You've got it made if you take the wafer,
take some wine,
take some bucks,
the green papery song of the office.
What a jello she could make with it,
the fives, the tens, the twenties,
all in a goo to feed the baby.
Andrew Jackson as an hors d'oeuvre,
la de dah.
I wish I were the U.S. Mint,
turning it all out,
turtle green
and monk black.
Who's that at the podium
in black and white,
blurting into the mike?
Ms. Dog.
Is she spilling her guts?
You bet.
Otherwise they cough...
The day is slipping away, why am I
out here, what do they want?
I am sorrowful in November...
(no they don't want that,
they want bee stings).
Toot, toot, tootsy don't cry.
Toot, toot, tootsy good-bye.
If you don't get a letter then
you'll know I'm in jail...
Remember that, Skeezix,
our first song?

Who's thinking those things?
Ms. Dog! She's out fighting the dollars.
Milk is the American drink.
Oh queens of sorrows,
oh water lady,
place me in your cup
and pull over the clouds
so no one can see.
She don't want no dollars.
She done want a mama.
The white of the white.

Anne says:
This is the rainy season.
I am sorrowful in November.
The kettle is whistling.
I must butter the toast.
And give it jam too.
My kitchen is a heart.
I must feed it oxygen once in a while
and mother the mother.

*

Say the woman is forty-four.
Say she is five seven-and-a-half.
Say her hair is stick color.
Say her eyes are chameleon.
Would you put her in a sack and bury her,
**** her down into the dumb dirt?
Some would.
If not, time will.
Ms. Dog, how much time you got left?
Ms. Dog, when you gonna feel that cold nose?
You better get straight with the Maker
cuz it's coming, it's a coming!
The cup of coffee is growing and growing
and they're gonna stick your little doll's head
into it and your lungs a gonna get paid
and your clothes a gonna melt.
Hear that, Ms. Dog!
You of the songs,
you of the classroom,
you of the pocketa-pocketa,
you hungry mother,
you spleen baby!
Them angels gonna be cut down like wheat.
Them songs gonna be sliced with a razor.
Them kitchens gonna get a boulder in the belly.
Them phones gonna be torn out at the root.
There's power in the Lord, baby,
and he's gonna turn off the moon.
He's gonna nail you up in a closet
and there'll be no more Atlantic,
no more dreams, no more seeds.
One noon as you walk out to the mailbox
He'll ****** you up --
a wopman beside the road like a red mitten.

There's a sack over my head.
I can't see. I'm blind.
The sea collapses.
The sun is a bone.
Hi-** the derry-o,
we all fall down.
If I were a fisherman I could comprehend.
They fish right through the door
and pull eyes from the fire.
They rock upon the daybreak
and amputate the waters.
They are beating the sea,
they are hurting it,
delving down into the inscrutable salt.

*

When mother left the room
and left me in the *******
and sent away my kitty
to be fried in the camps
and took away my blanket
to wash the me out of it
I lay in the soiled cold and prayed.
It was a little jail in which
I was never slapped with kisses.
I was the engine that couldn't.
Cold wigs blew on the trees outside
and car lights flew like roosters
on the ceiling.
Cradle, you are a grave place.

Interrogator:
What color is the devil?

Anne:
Black and blue.

Interrogator:
What goes up the chimney?

Anne:
Fat Lazarus in his red suit.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not.

Ms. Dog prefers to sunbathe ****.
Let the indifferent sky look on.
So what!
Let Mrs. Sewal pull the curtain back,
from her second story.
So what!
Let United Parcel Service see my parcel.
La de dah.
Sun, you hammer of yellow,
you hat on fire,
you honeysuckle mama,
pour your blonde on me!
Let me laugh for an entire hour
at your supreme being, your Cadillac stuff,
because I've come a long way
from Brussels sprouts.
I've come a long way to peel off my clothes
and lay me down in the grass.
Once only my palms showed.
Once I hung around in my woolly tank suit,
drying my hair in those little meatball curls.
Now I am clothed in gold air with
one dozen halos glistening on my skin.
I am a fortunate lady.
I've gotten out of my pouch
and my teeth are glad
and my heart, that witness,
beats well at the thought.

Oh body, be glad.
You are good goods.

*

Middle-class lady,
you make me smile.
You dig a hole
and come out with a sunburn.
If someone hands you a glass of water
you start constructing a sailboat.
If someone hands you a candy wrapper,
you take it to the book binder.
Pocketa-pocketa.

Once upon a time Ms. Dog was sixty-six.
She had white hair and wrinkles deep as splinters.
her portrait was nailed up like Christ
and she said of it:
That's when I was forty-two,
down in Rockport with a hat on for the sun,
and Barbara drew a line drawing.
We were, at that moment, drinking *****
and ginger beer and there was a chill in the air,
although it was July, and she gave me her sweater
to bundle up in. The next summer Skeezix tied
strings in that hat when we were fishing in Maine.
(It had gone into the lake twice.)
Of such moments is happiness made.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not.

Once upon a time we were all born,
popped out like jelly rolls
forgetting our fishdom,
the pleasuring seas,
the country of comfort,
spanked into the oxygens of death,
Good morning life, we say when we wake,
hail mary coffee toast
and we Americans take juice,
a liquid sun going down.
Good morning life.
To wake up is to be born.
To brush your teeth is to be alive.
To make a bowel movement is also desireable.
La de dah,
it's all routine.
Often there are wars
yet the shops keep open
and sausages are still fried.
People rub someone.
People copulate
entering each other's blood,
tying each other's tendons in knots,
transplanting their lives into the bed.
It doesn't matter if there are wars,
the business of life continues
unless you're the one that gets it.
Mama, they say, as their intestines
leak out. Even without wars
life is dangerous.
Boats spring leaks.
Cigarettes explode.
The snow could be radioactive.
Cancer could ooze out of the radio.
Who knows?
Ms. Dog stands on the shore
and the sea keeps rocking in
and she wants to talk to God.

Interrogator:
Why talk to God?

Anne:
It's better than playing bridge.

*

Learning to talk is a complex business.
My daughter's first word was utta,
meaning button.
Before there are words
do you dream?
In utero
do you dream?
Who taught you to ****?
And how come?
You don't need to be taught to cry.
The soul presses a button.
Is the cry saying something?
Does it mean help?
Or hello?
The cry of a gull is beautiful
and the cry of a crow is ugly
but what I want to know
is whether they mean the same thing.
Somewhere a man sits with indigestion
and he doesn't care.
A woman is buying bracelets
and earrings and she doesn't care.
La de dah.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not.

There are stars and faces.
There is ketchup and guitars.
There is the hand of a small child
when you're crossing the street.
There is the old man's last words:
More light! More light!
Ms. Dog wouldn't give them her buttocks.
She wouldn't moon at them.
Just at the killers of the dream.
The bus boys of the soul.
Or at death
who wants to make her a mummy.
And you too!
Wants to stuf her in a cold shoe
and then amputate the foot.
And you too!
La de dah.
What's the point of fighting the dollars
when all you need is a warm bed?
When the dog barks you let him in.
All we need is someone to let us in.
And one other thing:
to consider the lilies in the field.
Of course earth is a stranger, we pull at its
arms and still it won't speak.
The sea is worse.
It comes in, falling to its knees
but we can't translate the language.
It is only known that they are here to worship,
to worship the terror of the rain,
the mud and all its people,
the body itself,
working like a city,
the night and its slow blood
the autumn sky, mary blue.
but more than that,
to worship the question itself,
though the buildings burn
and the big people topple over in a faint.
Bring a flashlight, Ms. Dog,
and look in every corner of the brain
and ask and ask and ask
until the kingdom,
however queer,
will come.
I stumbled upon a ruby in the darkness
it held the secrets of a sad November day
from all directions
the splinters came
and took the defyer
the one who tried to save us
from the powers that would be
this ruby spoke of the players,
the slayers
the hiding naysayers
the complex
the complexities
the maggots that live
by war
and more
I tried to tell you
but even I
who lived on the edge
of exposing the lie
could not speak before the splinters arrived
and I sleep with the others
our secret has died

dedicated to the memory of'
Dorothy Kilgallen
I W Jun 2013
I may not do things traditionally
But I'll get them done eventually
If they're the things that are right for me
I'll be okay and set myself free.


In this life of turbulent strife
pitted and ripe with rotten tripe
a sunlight bright pains my sight
but your soothing ice cools my vice


The aid you paid is not ready made
it gives me hope I'm not just a dope
your love is more than a pity rope,
slivered and raw it gives me splinters


But luckily i'm in for a treat
more than a friend sent to mend
oh yes, you're more, my candy store
settle my sweet tooth you randy *****

unwrap the rainbow you insane *****
ride the rhythm of my *** prism
a rod shaped crystal built like a missile
cocked locked and loaded it cant miss-ya.

explodin' and remoldin' the fabric of time
an infinite blanket wraps us entwined
in a frantic romantic purely satanic
ritual of reality, the utmost sensuality.
Juhlhaus Mar 2019
Strong currents flow different ways
From where the bridge was, after the first plunge
Soothed the sun-burnt skin and the hay-splinters
Loosed the straw stuck in ears
After I left you under the porch light
Alone on the other side of the night
Where poplars reached for the moon and stars
And the cows chewed on bits of memory from when
In the cobwebs and calf pens
They were brought to life by your gentle hands

You crossed two worlds to find me in the darkness
But I was not the one you were searching for
You prayed for miracles while
God stood by, arms crossed
Just taking in the sunset and the clouds
Like an old tree beside a grave carefully fenced
To keep it disheveled amid tended fields
Thus the cancer had its way and I could not
Fill the void left in your heart or mine

With no more tears to soften dry leather
I put our hearts on skewers and held them
Over the bridge's burning planks
Too close and they were immolated
Not carefully spun to stay golden and warm inside
So I packed my own hollow heart full of nothing
Filled the passenger seat, until
There was only room for me and the steering wheel
And no way to turn
emily c marshman Oct 2018
I’m not allergic to bee stings – I never have been, I probably never will be – but I am more afraid of bees than anything else. More afraid than heights, than fire, than opening up to others, than death by drowning. I have been stung more times than I will ever be able to count. My skin has since grown thicker, but I remember when it was soft, and I was small. I used up the entire allowance of pain I was given for life in less than four minutes.
Perhaps I should specify that it’s not bees that I am afraid of, but wasps.
When I was nine years old, much younger than I am now, I stepped on a yellow jacket nest. My bare foot went into the hole and came out covered in their little striped bodies. There was this buzzing noise that at the time I’d thought was normal, but I now know that it was the sound of the wasps that were in my ears. They had been trying to crawl down my ear canals. I wonder if they had mistaken my canals for their burrows, and had been trying to get back to their queen, but were disappointed to find my ear drums, instead.
My sister – the same age – covered in wasps alongside me, screamed and screamed, but I made no noise. By the time I even thought to cry, I had been stung so many times it would have been pointless to weep for my swollen, red toes. I remember being unable to feel the wasps’ venom running through my veins because I couldn’t even feel my veins. If I would have cried for anything, it would have been for fear that, being unable to feel them, I might have lost track of my tiny feet. They could have walked away without my body and I wouldn’t have known. They could have walked to school and back without me.
Of course, my feet could barely walk. After my initial disgust, I watched my sister run away from where we had been standing and I knew that I should run, too. I could still feel the wasps crawling, clamoring, on my skin, in my clothes, in my hair. I remember the feeling of these bees crawling around among the roots of my hair, making themselves well-acquainted with the tender skin of my scalp. I remember being unable to get them all out of my hair before I walked into the house.
I knew that I should run, and so, balanced precariously on my numbed feet, clambered after her.
I followed my screaming sister down to our farmhouse, past my stepmother who was also screaming, even louder than my sister. I don’t remember where my father was that day.
We ran down the dirt road that led from the barns to our house, removing our shirts as we went and stopping to strip down to our underwear on the front porch. I remember the honks from cars as they passed by. I remember not knowing why they were honking, but knowing that I was angry with them for honking, for ogling, rather than stopping to help. I remember not knowing how they would help, just knowing that I needed help, desperately.
The irony of our stings is that my sister, a year later, was cast in our school’s operetta, and ended up playing the part of a yellow jacket, a sort of elementary-school-gangster, part of a group of them, who wore – you guessed it – yellow jackets and stole other bugs’ lunch money. I would say that, if the wasps that attacked me had been human, they would definitely have been after the money I used to buy Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies in the lunchroom.
If I had been stung even three years later, I would have been big enough to know that one doesn’t run around in untrimmed grass with no shoes on their feet for precisely this reason. If I had been stung three years earlier, I would have been too small, and dead. So I am grateful for even the smallest of coincidences, the tiny droplet of fate that had given me those stings on that day, at that age.


I would like to talk about pain transference. In your body, nerves often run between parts of yourself you never thought would be connected. If something hurts in your elbow, it wouldn’t shock you to find that your fingers hurt as well, but if your elbow hurt and so did your lower spine? You’d be a little confused.
This is pain transference.
It’s a form of generalized pain; you can locate the pain, it’s just not coming from any one place. You can feel the pain in more than one part of your body, though there’s no reason for anything other than your elbow to ache. This is also your body’s way of protecting you from pain. It’s not that this pain is more manageable, but that it is easier to understand. Your elbow might be more hurt than the ache lets on, but you can’t tell, because your lower back is throbbing.
Now imagine your body as a hive of wasps. Imagine each of these wasps as a nerve inside of said hive-body. Imagine the queen as this hive-body’s brain. What is your body’s goal? To protect the brain. What is a hive’s goal? To protect the queen. Each wasp is born with an instinctual dedication to the queen. They must protect this individual at all costs. Your body, on the other hand, does everything it possibly can to protect the part of you that makes you so unbearably you.
Yellow jackets are social creatures. Each wasp has its own purpose in the hive, and the three different ranks within this hierarchy are the queen, the drones, and the workers. The queen (who is the only member of the colony equipped by evolution to survive the winter; every other wasp is dispensable) lays eggs and fertilizes them using stored ***** from the spermatheca. Her only purpose is to reproduce. Occasionally the queen will leave an egg unfertilized, and this egg will develop into a male drone whose only purpose is also reproduction. The female workers are arguably the most important part of the hive. They build and defend the nest.
Only female yellow jackets are capable of stinging, and wasps will only sting if their colony is disturbed. This fact is new and interesting to me. I remember thinking that it would make so much sense if the only wasps in the colony who could sting were the females. Females have a motherly, nurturing nature about them, but they are protective and willing to make sacrifices as well. Lo and behold.
The females are the nerves. They transfer the pain from the queen to themselves (and then, if disturbed, to the third-party individual who has disturbed them).
Psychics view pain transference as the transferring of pain between bodies rather than the transferring of pain between separate parts of the same body, but it works in a very similar way. Different types of energy vibrate at different frequencies; loving energy vibrates at a higher frequency than dark energy, therefore they transfer between people at different rates. Pain is simply dark energy that holds a fatalistic power over us.
According to psychics, energy can be transferred through the mind, the body, and the spirit, but pain is mostly transferred through physical touch. To transfer pain to another human being, you must touch them in a way that is not beneficial to their own or your spiritual growth.


I would like to talk about smallness. I was nine when I was stung by these yellow jackets. I was nine and the first time I’d ever been stung was at a friend’s birthday party at maybe the age of seven, behind the knee, and it’d swelled up so large I couldn’t bend my knee for two days. I knew the dangers of disturbing wasp nests; I’d watched my friends all through elementary school getting stung on the wooden playground on the premises. I, myself, stuck to swing-sets and splinters.
I was always so careful. I never went near trees if I saw a nest in its branches. My teachers had told me that I should stay away from the part of our playground made up of tires, because the hornets liked to nest in the rubber. I was terrified of being stung again after that first time because all the mud in the world didn’t seem to make a difference. The wasp’s venom, even after drying up pile after pile of soft, wet dirt, made my limb stiff and sore. I was always so careful; it seems appropriate that the one time I’d been careless, I’d been stung enough times to make up for all the times I had avoided wasps as if my life had depended on it. Maybe it had.
I was small enough when I was nine. If I had been stung at six, or three, I would have been in a lot more trouble. I would have been in a lot more pain. At nine, my stings required calamine lotion and mud for the venom, and ice baths for the swelling. At six, they might have required a trip to the hospital. At three, they would have been much more alarming, considering I had never been stung by a bee by that age.
I was careless. It was summer and I was old enough to wear denim shorts and I had kicked off my flip flops so I could feel the grass under my feet and I was careless and I was punished for it. Now I watch my cousins and my niece play outside and I have to hold my tongue, remember that I am not responsible, that I cannot prevent their being stung, their stings, no matter how badly I want to.
I would like to talk about fate. I would like to talk about how, if I hadn’t been running barefoot, I wouldn’t have gotten stung so badly. I would like to talk about how if my father had been around to tell me not to run barefoot, at least my feet would have been safe. How, if I hadn’t been too stubborn to listen to my stepmom, too, I probably would have had shoes on. How, regardless of all of these things, I probably would have been stung no matter what.
In a world where people are stung by hornets every day – where people are stung by as many as I was, at once – I would like to say that I know now that this experience is not as unique as I had previously thought it to be. I know more people than I thought I did whose trauma involves insects smaller than their pinky finger but together cover their whole body, and venom. I know people who, when I tell them I was stung by hundreds of yellow jackets at the age of nine, shrug and say nonchalantly, “Hey, me too.”
I would like to talk about smallness, and fate. I would like to talk about not only physical smallness, but the smallness one feels when they are in pain.
Belittled might be the word I am looking for. My pain wasn’t belittled, per se, but my pain belittled me.
My pain made me feel small. My pain made me feel small when I was stripping my clothes off on my front porch, cars racing by on the state highway that ran past my house. When I was running my fingers through my hair under the faucet in my kitchen sink because my sister was older and always got first dibs on the shower. As these wasps that hadn’t suffocated under my hair stung my fingers, too, until they were as swollen as my toes. My pain made me feel small when it made me pity myself.


I would like to talk about standing up for yourself as an act of causing pain.
Honeybees, when they sting, are defending themselves and their queen, but they don’t know that when they sting, it will become lodged underneath the skin of whomever they sting and it will pull them apart and they will die.
I imagine the first time a wasp stings to be a sort of power trip. Female wasps can – and will – sting repeatedly to protect the colony. I also imagine they don’t know that their relative the honeybee dies after it stings, but it must be strange for them, nonetheless.
Have you ever seen a video of a woman protecting herself and those she loves? She’s vicious. She won’t stop until the perpetrator has retreated.
When a woman stands up for herself, though, it’s as if she’s tearing herself in half.
A woman standing up for herself is a dangerous thing, both dangerous for her and for those around her. It is an act of bravery and defiance and saving grace all in one.
A few weeks ago, I overheard someone equate being female with being terminally ill, as if we have no place to go but down. As if we are dying creatures, on our last leg of life, with no will to fight for what we want.
As if the pain of the world is being transferred into us all at once.
I would like to argue that it is the exact opposite. There is nothing more alive and breathing than femaleness.I am inseparable from my femaleness. I am inseparable from the that leaks from me when I think of all of the times I have been harmed But I am not inseparable from the pain that I have caused others. I cannot forget that.


I like to imagine sometimes what my stings would have been like if I had gotten them ten years later, as well. I am much bigger. I am much stronger. I am much more capable of handling pain than my nine-year-old counterpart.
I wish I could have been the one to have to handle that pain. I wish my nine-year-old self had known better than to let her foot fall into a yellow jacket nest. I think it’s unfair that, at such an early age, I had to deal with something so terrifying and painful and traumatic. My extremities were swollen for over a week. I couldn’t write, I could close the zipper on my backpack, I couldn’t turn the pages of a book. I couldn’t go to school, and I couldn’t read in bed, so it might be enough to say that the week I was kept out of school to elevate my legs and let the swelling go down was the most boring week of my entire life.
Sometimes I look at my ankles, swollen from blood flow, from standing too long or from sitting too long or from doing anything except elevating them, and I’m reminded of this time when my ankles were much thinner and I watched them on the end of the couch, my toes pointing toward the ceiling. I remember how terrified my mom was. I imagine that phone call must have been harrowing for her – Hi, Michelle, Em’s been hurt. No, she’s fine. Just a few bee stings is all. – and for her to see me for the first time, red and splotchy and itching myself like mad must have been even more so.
I think about my father’s reaction, how I hadn’t been around to see it, but how he must have been heartbroken at knowing he wasn’t there to protect me, to prevent the bees from attacking me. I believe, however, that there was no protecting me, that there was no preventing these wasps from defending their home against me, an infiltrator. I had stepped inside of their burrow and was instantly seen as a threat. Anything I see as a threat to myself, I instantly want to rid myself of.
This is the way of the world: we see something, we determine it to be good or bad, and we either bring it into our lives or defend ourselves from it depending upon which it turns out to be. I happened to be the ultimate evil in these wasps’ lives. They were simply protecting their queen, without whom their hive would no longer exist. I was dark energy, vibrating in a way that spoke to them as threatening. I was transferring pain to them when my foot stepped into the hole, and they were transferring it back to me when they stung me. I transferred energy into the ground as my feet thumped against it. Water transferred energy into me as it helped me rinse wasps out of my hair.
From pain to protection to pity, back to pain. From bee stings to womanhood to sadness and back again. One shouldn’t be afraid to introduce the things they’ve lost to the things they’ve loved, or the things they love to the things they’re afraid of. And I am afraid of wasps. Petrified, even. The other day, driving in my car, I rolled the window down and in, immediately, flew a yellow jacket. I watched as it she flew past me and then around the back of my head. I heard her and was immediately transported back in time. I wondered what she was doing in my car, so far from her queen. I wondered what was in my car that she possibly could have wanted. But I knew that she wasn’t there to hurt me, because I hadn’t invaded her home. I hadn’t made an attack on her queen. I knew there was no sense in panicking, so I didn’t. I didn’t panic.
I am afraid of things even though they won’t **** me, but I have watched myself face these fears. I have stumbled onto a Ferris wheel and then walked confidently off. I have left candles lit without standing to check on them after every episode of The Office I watch. I have loved people I never thought I would, and I have seen the other side.
“And such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them. If one was to sting me, He thought, I should swell up as big again as I am!”
      -The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Fleur Jan 2011
How, if at all
do you repair a broken mirror
if you can't stand to see
the reflection?
Picking up the fragments
leaves splinters and cuts
and of course,
you've run out of bandaids
whats easier,
gritting your teeth
and shoving it all together
or
running into a bare wall.
Is either really better than the other?
L B Mar 2017
The right winter
for dope and ice
for walks along the river route
home

The right winter
for arctic pin-***** wind
holes in boots
turquoise dress coat
far too thin
for walks along the river

But The Merrimack couldn’t find her way
when fabric moguls migrated south
Fascinated by nylon nasties
they traded their silks and cottons
for those petro-polyesterdays

While she—
could no more manufacture life
than mint their money
So, they blamed her
Pronounced her—“Dead”
Decried her “*****”

Now—
She wanders sadly under bridges
stopping to eddy in an overhang of birches
In dank canals, I found her sleeping
angered only at the falls

Poor outcast!
with current edge she splinters light
from cities sadder still
retching her oily stench 
        past Plum Island
into the sea— into me

What’re a few warm tears
falling from someplace on a bridge
to the icy waters of the Merrimack?
Rivers get lost in the ocean don’t they?

Let them find each other there
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/240872280040374240/

I never knew anything about Jack Kerouac, and only today, learned that he breathed his last on my 20th birthday in 1969, just as I came to his sad hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts to endure a baptism of my own.
I am the prodigal daughter
of Hestia--
Goddess of hearth,
warmth,
embers that do not fade,
for they glow as softly
as lightning bugs.

But this time,
I will not be returning home.

Don't you see?

I've burned it down already.

Perhaps there shall exist no redemption
for my pyromanic sins.

They could not save
Sylvia Plath
as she ****** her head into the oven,
carbon monoxide stealing away
her last strands of breath.

(Sadness climbs up my throat in
stalagmites of flame,
rises from the chasm of my soul like bile,
like a phoenix reborn.)

They could not save
Joan of Arc,
whose flesh screamed out among
the ringlets of fire
and threads of cinder
that consumed it
so mercilessly.

(No, I am not a witch--
just a demi-goddess,
just a dangerous woman
But, unlike Joan of Arc,
I am no Saint either.)

They could not save Pompeii
whose inhabitants lay
victimized
asphyxiated
stolen
by the magma regurgitated by
the Almighty Vesuvius

(I cannot decide who I am
more similar to--
the inhabitants of Pompeii,
or the lava itself)

Perhaps then,
there is no saving a woman like me--
a woman forged from brimstone,
Hell's very own Femme Fatale.

I wear lighter fluid
atop my collar bone like its fragrance;
braid singed ribbon into my hair,
its ends charred and
curling upwards like tendrils of smoke;
rouge my lips with gunpowder.

Kiss me and
bite the bullet, darling--
make love to me
and you will combust.

But oh!

How these men will  bite their lip
at the thought of
******* me,
of dipping their fingertips
into the molten pools
that dwell between my thighs
similar to the way
a mere girl
(I, 16 years old)
is fascinated by the prospect
of baptizing her own melancholic
hands in candle wax.

(Who's the real ******* here, Baby?


Sincerely,
your Filthy Pyrophilliac.)


I am a
shadow charmer,
arsonist
the  Siren
of this Inferno
(wanted for her crimes).

Perhaps I was never the epitome of darkness,
perhaps I simply
lured the darkness towards me
(sorrow and the devil too.)

It's funny now that I think about it,
how the stars too reside in darkness,
how, when I wish upon them,
I am really only wishing on fire.

And where there is fire,
there is destruction;
it's no wonder all these dreams--
those of
love
magic
poetry--
have shuddered to ash.

Still, l I find myself making
snow angels in the ashes,
stick my tongue out,
let the remnants of desire
scorch my taste buds.

Here I lie
like an extinguished cigarette,
my use fulfilled and discarded.
But that's just fate,
stars ain't too fond
of nicotine, ya see,
ain't too fond of me
even though the very atoms
that comprise my being
are made of the stuff of galaxies.

But, oh, how these galaxies
have escaped my brooding grasp.

I do whatever it takes
to re-ignite what has been
lost--
chew on matchsticks,
let the splinters sear themselves
into my tongue;
lap at the iridescent gasoline puddles
that wade along
lonely streets corners;
howl beneath paper lanterns,
for both the sun and the moon
have forsaken me.

I do whatever it takes
to remember where I come from--
a state of limbo,
wherein I am simultaneously
angel (falling) |and| demon (the fallen)

What am I without flame?

Flame--
they could not save me from it,
from burning.

But perhaps the peril was never in burning;
perhaps it was in  burning out;
perhaps it was in disintegrating.
jadefbartlett.wixsite.com/tickledpurple
I was made of glass
fragile and hollow by design
reflecting those around me
but never quite fulfilled.
I shattered, tiny fragments glistened
like tears
But still I felt nothing.
Sorrow slipped silently
numbing a soul hungry for all yet thirsting for none
I sat in darkness waiting
for you to see the sunbeams
glancing off the shards and think them beautiful
but you were blinded by so many splinters
that you could never imagine the whole.
It was confused and dark, dark, so dark,
dark like when Charlie got drunk for the first time, came back, and stumbled-open the door long after Sam had screamed at everyone to leave her the f--- alone.  

And Jesse is standing there, swaying slightly with the beer and the pounding music, and Charlene feels her ribcage shiver with each bass beat.  The pale light oozing off the stage silvers Jesse’s angled face like water, soaks the black shapes around her, pools in each eye as the constant ripple and shudder of the crowd shifts her hips.  Somehow her thin, bare shoulders speak her excitement, and in the dim shuffle of the audience she’s half drunk and lovely.  “You know that calc test is tomorrow,” Charlene screams over the straight roar of chaos. “Don’t remind me! God!” Lovely Jesse laughs and her hand sketches a lazy gun that jerks at her head -- don’t remind me, God don’t don’t don’t --  and Charlene clenches her eyes shut and still that flashes, dark dark dark, her loose-jointed fingers flicking up, twitching in sickening unison with her mocking head, again again again-- don’t remind me, God,
don’t remindmegoddon’t remind megod god oh God,
Sam loved drinking herself sick, stumbling home with her arm ‘round Charlie’s neck, slurring alcohol love and despair to her ‘bes’ fren, besh’ roomate evr, Charlene a.k.a. Charlie.  And “a.k.a.” as Sam loved to call her, was always there to pick Sam up and clean Sam up and sober Sam the **** up.  And every stupid drunk party night that semester she told Charlie over and over again: ‘listen, a.k.a., here’s a funny story: a girl went to buy her mother aspirin cause her mother had a terrible ******* headache and she bought some from her dear second cousin Kurt the cashier who was a trublueblooded Eagle scout mama’s boy back from college, that sonofabitch and she came home, but her momma didn’t have that headache anymore and gave her a mostly delicious popsicle and it was red strawberry, the end.’  And every stupid drunk party night that semester Charlie watched and listened as Sam made up new stories about aspirin (always ending with popsicles).
See, Charlie was always there. Charlie never drank.  And Charlie, she always listened to the stupid f---ing drunk-strawberry-popsicle story.  And Charlie never gave a **** about Sam, did she? She sure didn’t, no, Charlie didn’t.  

“I’m gonna go find the bathroom” Charlie screams into Jesse’s ear and plunges out into the sea of dark shadows circling her.  The door struggles open, then she’s crushing it shut, crushing splinters into her palms, she’s bending over the counter, both hands white-pressed onto its imitation marble, choking down these sharp sparks of nausea bursting like fireworks inside, and the music’s faded out, its just the thud of that ******* drum that pulses over and over and over --god stop it-- fills the room, rattles the stalls, over and over and Charlie’s convinced its a heartbeat, its Sam’s heartbeat, thud thud thud, god its going on and on and pounding, OH GOD, charlie screams, IT STOPPED, no no no no SAM no SAM SAM SAM OH GOD it stopped no no GOD
next song. drum starts again. and the room is inside of the drum, it is the inside, the taut air’s quivering with each beat, taut ribcage quivering with each beat. Charlie is inside a drum. beat beat beat drumbeat heartbeat thud, thud, thud,
god I look awful, Charlie’s looking at her face in the dim vibrating mirror: blue shadows under her dull eyes, pale, dead-tired, dead-drunk, and so f---ing dead-alive,
she goes back to Jesse, wriggling through the black lumps: lovers making out, heavy spellbound listeners, uneasy loners, angry drunks, drunk as-- drunk as Charlie’s first drunk night.

Sam was so ****** that night and Charlie dragged her home to their dorm, sick of Sam’s tangy alcohol breath and her sagging, skinny weight on her shoulder. “I’m sick of your breath, Sam.” sick of it, god Sam, just stop it, wish that breath would go away, I mean,
it was blowing all over my cheek Sam, cause your **** beautiful face was lying on my neck-- that’s why I said that, I didn’t mean that, Sam.

And then you said ‘well, all right Charlie, I’ll tell you a funny story Charlie,’ and I said ‘oh god Sam, not again,’ and you said ‘no, its different this time’ and you said ‘one day there was a little girl who went to the store to buy aspirin for her mom and the cashier took her into the back of the store and hurt her and she came home and told her mom and her mom slapped her and told her to stop talking ***** and shut the **** up and then that little girl’s throat sure did ache, Charlie, even after a popsicle it did. And Charlie, Charlie, a.k.a. Charlene, sure did hate her breath. see, that’s my story and isn’t it a funny story...”
you drop your drunk roommate on the gritty hallway carpet, give her the key say
‘’bye Samantha", goodbye samgoodbye, bye bye Sam, "I’m going to go get drunk don’t be too much of a ***** while I’m gone.’

floormates told Charlie later that Sam screamed at everyone “hey, all you motherf---ers, leave me the f--- alone,” then laughed, slammed the door. and they did leave her alone.
Charlie came back *****-drunk, touched the doorknob and heard the shot, the door opens,
Sam’s falling and Charlie watches her beautiful, bony wrist flick back as she gets blood all over and ruins her face and Charlie sobers up really f---ing fast.  She always was good at that.
There's a note on the desk in Crayola washable marker (purple): "well, a.k.a., I guess I am being way too much of a ***** while you’re gone. you’re welcome. sorry for ******* it all up again as usual"
*Thanks for that Sam, thanks a lot Sam thanks thanks f--- you
I wanted to write a short story in a realistic voice other than mine, so here's a hard, obscene, despairing 20 yr. old?  Its pretty dark... not sure if I like it, but it was interesting and different to write.
Earl Jane Jul 2015


I've known an extraordinary lady,



                'Cause I wrote poems in HP,

                                                        Well, I thank HP a lot,
                                                That I have the opportunity,
                                       To know a person like her!

                And found out  we have the same nationality,

Not only that, she write these exceptional and amazing poems!!

          I was overwhelmed!

                And blithesomely chatted her,
                            She replied,

We have a good talk,
                 I was so broken into splinters those times,
             I could hardly remember the throe,
        But her words glare brightest in my heart,



She inspired me,
         With the hurting truth,
                   Well, I knew truth hurts,

Then we always chat,

    We exchange phone numbers,

                 And texting even not in HP,
'Cause I knew she is so much busy,

But I'm still texting her telling,
                     "I'M SO GLAD TO BE Your FRIEND."
And that,
"Ohayou Gozaimasu, konnichiwa & konnbanwa"
             "Kiotsukete kudasai Roan-chan!"

Oh yeah!
           We love Japan, and their language,
                 That made me love her even more.
                       (Love as friend okay?!)


    We exchange google+ & fb,
        And saw her angelic face,
            Scattering over her timeline,
                 I saw a beautiful soul,
                       Dancing and gleaming inside of her,


      She's indeed a very good friend,

                             When I have heartaches and tribulations,

                                     I share her my pain and sorrows,

She's like the sun in the noon time,
                  Heating me up with her love and care,


                    But even though I have not met her personally,
                I knew for sure that I'm so much blessed,
            To know such a golden spirit,
                              Such rare being in the amidst,


And I do knew,
                             That God will lead us together,
                         To spend time personally as friends,


Together with Ma'am Sally,

                        As what she told me,
          "We should have this ~poetess date~ "


How I long for that day!



I really pray to God,

                      That He will give you,
                         The best of the life,



   Give you good health,
          To continue enjoying life to it's fullest,



To have many more birthdays to come,
                 For you to see more,
      Of the beauty of God's creation,



                            And to find,
                     That very right man,
            That your heart longs to find,
                For quiet elongated time.



I pray also,
          That you will remain,
                 To be light to all people,



            And be that very good friend,
Everyone longs for,




In this beautiful day,
                   I pray you will be the happiest person alive,
                            And celebrate this marvelous day,
                                          God had given you.

      "Maligayang Kaarawan Aking Kaibigan."




                          © Earl Jane
                            ♥ E.J.C.S.
You come to me in splinters.
I drive them in, you smile at the agony.
Punctured skin brings ribbons,
cascading life in scarlet.
My suffering, your solace.
Push deeper, let them grind against brittle bone, tear at tendon and humming vessels.
That we may feel something beyond this quiet comfort.
Lotus Dec 2012
My fingers pluck the strings
Of willow wood mandolin
Upon my knee it sits

The wood of willow
As smooth as a feather pillow
Atop my knee sits
In steady posture

In my heart of hearts
There tears a lonely hollow
My voice shrieks shallow
The willow wood mandolin
Shatters into splinters

Splinters pierce my skin
Filling through my body
From my heart of hearts
A willow chisel carves
Away the organs
That flow and break

From my eyes
Bleed wood chips

My tongue drools
Sawdust

A girl no more sits
Under this willow
But a wood sculpture
Of steady posture
Chey Ferrill Jan 2016
You shattered me
and I need to be fixed.

I taped my heart together,
using all the splinters I could find.

But my hands are shaky
and my work is cheap.
I write a lot about my problems... Sorry. </3
kMargaret Nov 2012
Look at me and I'll look at you
Give to me what you used to
Do to me what you used to do
Kiss me
Reminisce with me
Extend your hand
Pull my fingers into yours
Leading me through those double doors
Mess up your bed
My heart
My head
Piece together your reasons in a picture you like
Shatter my picture on the floor
Step tip-toe around the pieces
Don't cut your feet on your way out the door
Just leave me bleeding in a heap on the ground
Reaching all around
Frantically gathering
Piling
Frantic Panic
Pieces and shards,
They're missing
I'd like to think they've imbedded themselves in your feet when you left
Maybe you still feel me every time you step
That sting.
Pinch.
Reminder of what you had and
Broke.
Took, cradled, coddled, and dropped
Too heavy in your arms my burden was
You cry
Tell me you're so sorry
That you want me it's just that
You can't anymore
Take your tears
Dampen a cloth
And wipe the blood from my chest
Reveal the gaping hole
Gaze into it like an orb
Remember what was
What you took from me and what I gave
What you gave to me and what I took
And I'm sorry about that
I can't give it back
Fill this hole in my chest with that which I lack
I want all of you
Every part
Your cracking neck and knuckles
The stupid way you dress
And that head of yours
Filled with intellect, goodness, and laughter
I want that too
I just beg of you to
Remember
Who I am and who you are
I'll wait for now
Until you do
Hold my jaw in your hands
Realize what's between your
Palms
A second chance
Don't let me go this time
I'll hold you up
Carry you
Carry me and
Hold me up
Just a moment and you ease me to the ground
In a pile of my blood and reasons
Curled into a ball
Fists in the splinters
Head to the floor
I feel the vibrations of your leaving feet
****** footprints out the door
Jules Wilson Jul 2014
I wish you’d let the sky shine bright for you.
It’s so blue outside, the good kind.
Move the curtains to the side, sneak a glimpse,
Sip the air
slowly
and whistle it out.
Step carefully so you can hear the porch steps creak
and feel the wood under your bare feet without
worrying about the splinters. There aren’t any.
Just come outside.

The fields will part when the time is right,
and the sky will illuminate the guiding side.
And when you find that the earth can hold your weight,
that the world won’t collapse when you confess your fate,
you’ll see how the clouds shield you just the right way
from the hard rays of the sun, but you can still see the glow.
And it may time some time, your feet may burn and sore,
Blister even, maybe, but time heals all wounds, I swear,
Even the worst of heartaches.
Even my heart is breathing again, slowly.
It is

pumping.
Just consider that if glass shards can be glued back together, mirrors hung
back on the wall for Snow White to get ready in, and the
veins in my wrist sealed back up with love and rain,
there is another day for you to see.
I am not porcelain. I am weak,
But every time I am broken to the ground,
I rise like the willow tree.
There’s a reason she’s my favorite—
For she haunts her pleasures and cries all day,
But seeps her sorrows into the ground till her spirit
Rises back up through her veins.
The rings of the tree reflect not just her age, but her strife.
This woman has been broken. She’s crumbled yet rised.

She never dies, only cries.
The willow tree will always survive.
for my sunshine <3

— The End —