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Hannah P Jun 2018
Skin,
Our protection.
A guardian we take for granted.
I was taught in
Science class how
 The skin is our
Barrier and protects us
From countless enemies.
A shield that is responsible
For keeping us healthy and safe.
But yet we abuse it,
We show it no gratitude.

When I was a kid
I allowed myself
To go roller skating without my
Knee pads,
Despite the infinite reprimands
My mother provided.
A scraped knee
Wasn’t anything a Band-Aid
And some time
Couldn’t fix.
I thought the band-aids in
The bathroom cupboard
Held some type of magic in the box
That I could not fathom
That patched up my skin
As if nothing ever happened.

But then I was taught in science class that
It was my skin performing
These magic tricks.
I remember those scolding hot
Summer days
Spent on the beach with my friends
Where the waves absorbed
Any sunscreen I had massaged on my body
And my face turned
Crimson from soaking in the rays.
But the burn always tempered
Down into a glowing tan
After the aloe soothed
The stinging.
In science class
I constantly overlooked
How our own flesh
Performed these illusions
To shield us from harms.

In science class
I studied how our skin
Interacted with the outside world.
How sensations were
Directed to the tips of my fingers
And goose bumps rose on
My arms.

But I was never taught
How to experience them.
I never questioned it though;
Unitl I met him.
Everything I was taught

Got lost,
As I had in his presence.
The way he gazed at me,
The way he talked to me,
The way he stroked my skin.
It gave me all those sensations
They had talked about in science class.

Everything happened so fast,
Everything happened too fast.
Intoxicated hands held me too close
And my intoxicated heart let them.

I forgot what science class burned
Into my brain and
I gave him my skin.
I let him become my armor.
I let him corrupt my flesh
Just as I had so many times before.
His finger nails
And teeth
Sunk deep into me
Leaving patters of desire in each layer
That soon soaked into my veins.
Our rib cages pressed together,
Both our hearts rattling
Within our chests,
Stimulating our brains to send signals
Allowing serotonin and oxytocin
To spill out,
Premising his lips to outline my body.

No science class ever
Taught me how to react
To my blood pressure rising,
To my sweat glands heating up.
No science class ever taught me
Why I wanted more,
Why the marks he left on my skin
Didn’t ache like a
Sunburn or scraped knee.

I trusted him,
With his hands full
Of my skin,
And the way that he
Made me feel;
I felt safe.

No science class taught me
That I could feel so
Alive,
And I loved it.

But when he was done with me,
My skin felt wrinkled
And used.
When he gave it back,
It was no longer mine,
He took it with him.
My skin cells lingered
Next to his nail beds
As he dressed himself.

No science class taught me
Why I felt so desolate
As he walked out the door,
With simple goodbyes,
That did not need to be spoken,
And no amenity in his eyes.
No science class taught me
The feeling of numbness found
As my heart rate decomposed
In my hallow chest,
Knowing I let him take my
Shield and watched him destroy it
Right in front of me.
No science class taught me
The bite marks and scratches he left
Would always be sore
Even after they have healed.

No Band-Aid or magic trick
Could fix the damage
He left for me to patch up
By myself.
No science class taught me
I would feel
The sensations of
Love and loss
Aching through my bones.
No amount of horomones
Could change his mind,
Or tug on his heart strings.
So why I thought I was
Invincible when I was with him,
I can’t understand.

But it is my fault
For not memorizing my
Notes from science class and
Sticking to the known facts
Of my own anatomy.
But I do know
After years and years of
Being lectured in school,
No science class could teach me
What my own damaged skin could.

Love and science will never coincide
And love cannot be found
In the physicality of
A one night stand.
Lauren Oct 2012
invisible is air
invisible is me
nobody cares
they see only half of me
will they ever see me whole
will i ever be whole
is half all thats willing to show
if i dont know my whole me
how will they see more than half of me
half of me is all that will be
unitl i learn the whole of me
until i find the invisible me
J B Moore Nov 2015
A broken heart and shattered dreams
Left this man wandering,

Trudging through the ice, left out in the cold,
Having just lost the only one he loved to hold.

Tears fell from his face like pouring rain
But he knew he was the one to blame.

He held on to the one thing he still had
An old music box he opened when sad.

In it were peices of his heart and shattered dreams,
Mixed with broken memories of beautiful things.

In the midst of a storm, while his fire still burned,
He kept the box close and would to it often return.

Opening it up when he'd begin to forget
He'd use the old dreams to keep the fire lit.

He looked at a picture from the very beginning,
In which they were both from ear to ear grinning.

With an oversized shirt and his arm around her shoulder,
Compared to then, he felt so much older.

Pictures like these reminded him of being home
At a time when he never had to think of being alone.

With so many to look at, his fire would burn a while,
The smoke made him cry, though his face showed a smile.

With no pictures left he moved on to the songs,
When everything was right before it went wrong.

Their first dance seemed to last a thousand years,
What he would have given for a hundred more with her near.

By the everglow from the candlelight,
He couldn't help but think he must've done something right.

He always thought that this was the best thing,
Until that night he found himself awakening.

On the brink of disaster, falling asleep at the wheel
Having paid too much mind on how she made him feel.

When a twist in his story came out of nowhere
And he was forced to live out his own worst nightmare.

And overnight he was expected to suddenly move on
For it took just one fight before she was gone. 

He did his best to find peace,
But he could only do so in his sleep.

'Don't wake me,' he thought, 'From my favorite dream,
It seems I'm forever and always awakening.'

'Suppose I reached out, and with my thumb wiped your tears
And suppose this fight just magically disappeared

'Could it help bring you home, would it be worth the try,
Or is it all just one foolishly stupid lie.'

So caught up in not wanting to become a stranger,
He put his friendship in very real danger.

He didn't want to love somebody else
But there was nothing left to remind himself.

As the last song played it danced away
Their memories fading, not able to stay.

Looking into the box there was left one thing,
And it would have the most memories to bring.

Last, was their story, from when they first became friends,
Which they spoke of a lot but only wrote now and then.

It had helped them to grow into what they'd become,
Built on friendship, laughter, and a whole lot of fun.

It still wasn't finished when they had got in that fight
But even now, once in a while, he still liked to write.

With so many memories, the fired Would burn on,
Unitl finally light reached him from the coming new dawn.

He sat in the cold, with no more tears left to cry,
No longer afraid that alone he would die.

And with no more memories left to remember 
He set down the box and put out the embers.

He had nothing left now, it was time to move on
A new day was here, it was already dawn.

By the strength from the sun, he left behind his sorrows,
Sick of searching for hope in a better tomorrow.

For tomorrow is always coming, and there it will stay
So instead, choose to find hope in the here and now of today.

That's what he did and that's what he does
Until today becomes the day he truly falls in love.

Never will he see that music box again
But the memories will return, now and then.

They will be sweet ones of things long past
While he sits in the arms of a love that will last.

4/19/14
Dennis Meeker Mar 2019
It's easier to be angry
I don't need to try
I feel the fire all around me
Burning through everything

The world is a wasteland
The water rises
The wind roars
The air is cold

Trees are falling
Buildings crumble
Everything falls apart
Unitl nothing is left

Remembering what everything was
Watching as it dies
Seeing the nightmare
Waiting to be taken
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
lieutenant sticks, that's what they called him,
kij denotes a stick, without confusion
the emphasis of an olé (diacritical marks
are punctuations in punctuation) -
russians love to read, so you begin writing for
russians... a bit simple...
               i know they will one day approve
diacritical marks for the j, and depose the dot
above it like a halo...
  so i then get to say: key-jay....
           unitl that day happens i won't be found
playing the piano, able to read the notes
of a composition...
          nor draw blood from my fingers when
allowing myself the second thought of chess...
but some day along this carpe diem expansion
i will say: that day i took l.s.d.,
          and also that memory of 1950s
technicolor films made all the more sense...
       and it really was that saturation of colour,
the original saturation of colour translated onto screen...
like fake-tan orange of essex,
                  i'm about to juggle watermelons: wee!
productive sarcasm or even counter-productive sarcasm
never really sticks to a frying-pan of salivated over
pancakes readied for breakfast or some hereafter...
slobber gusto is not exactly a case of Pavlov's...
nor is reading a sunday newspaper...
               i can only think of a "metaphor" of walking
the dog in an english park and picking up
its ****... so much so for agonising myself reading
a newspaper... so i guess i now get to write the word
similie, in italics preceded by the colon heresy and not
reaching for the b, i.e.: italics.
when did i become so twitchy and double pardon
a concern for appreciating the comment?
last time i read jane eyre and started thinking about
that madwoman in the attic, that was rochester's
first wife... about that time...
      unlike that case of being a "poet" and writing
a scenario, i feel no guilt over these compositions,
   why did bukowski have the c.i.a. onto him and not
the f.b.i.?
                could you tell me if he was a spy?
oh look... a tumbleweed moment...
                             so i was talking to these two drunks
in this shady place at night
  and just blah blah blah later we exchanged
ethnic content, and one said he lived in
birmingham for a while, that place where ozzy
came from... and it's not like they even call
that city a "venice of the west", or a "st. petersburg of the west",
just as well... they twinned the town of
grimsby to chernobyl...
        they have edinburgh the "athens of the north",
they have amsterdam, the "venice of the north"...
and then you get birmingham,
and it could apply for a romance from somone,
like the venice of north-west... north by north west...
i'm not ignorant because of copernicus:
just a little bit disorientated trying to translate
sign-language from chinese ideograms...
   the idea was: ching chang walla(h)...
               extend that and you have imitations of dolly,
oh... finding dory...
   or... when in suffering, make a comedy...
like that pain adoolf hihi-tler felt watching a charlie
chaplin movie and saying: that moustache gig
is going to conquer the world.
   so where was i?
                   if you build a labyrinth you're bound
to ask the question of where you are?
     ah right, heading for the mortality exit...
concentrating on some word that would make no sense
to the average cognitive tactic of narration...
                 kije! - yep, sticks, that's the plural
version of kij, which just means stick...
    i really want to put a macron over that j
      so people don't confuse yahweh with jesus
   or add fractions to the concept...
or what the ancient greeks did, i.e. doing the dumbest
thing possible of sub-humanising the jews...
             suddenly Y                              is very far
from
                                                                             J
via gamma...       was that me trying to
  turn the tongue into a saxophone of cool?
  is that word even as half relevant these days as disco?
or is that when good becomes "evil"
   and evil becomes "good" and we call
                          a nightclub a slaughterhouse?
"   " aside... you don't get to play the existentialists
when it comes to words like list from
   the thesaurus (rex) beginning with the word red...
  the book states the "ambiguity"
                     via its synonym basis: crimson, burgundy...
red... rose...
or as kant would put it: we need the categorical
imperative, not to be "good", but to make
clear distinctions...
               and what a sad sad affair that has become,
when having looked for all the facts,
we became stunted and now argue with
what is the chiral (evidently opposite of facts) statements;
so they had genes and so they came up with memes...
facts need the opposite unit for them to be
the much needed resource...
              i guess i can't "coin a phrase" working
on this angle... because a word already exists to counter
factual expressions... you posit the chiral version
of facts on the word...                 factoid.
Pauvel Jétha Feb 2022
I hear your name in the whispers of the ocean;
The winds from the heavens carry it to me.
I hear it as a lullaby sung by the night,
But I do not understand it.

I smell your perfume in wistful memories.
I imagine the gentleness in your eyes.
I desire the warmth of your naked embrace,
But you are not real...yet.

My aching heart calls out your name.
My lips declare my love for you.
My soul livens up thinking of you,
And I understand without understanding

That though you are not here yet,
Though I cannot hold you close to me,
Though i cannot press my face into your tresses,
You are real to me.

As real as the rainbow is to the parched earth,
As real as heaven is to the broken sinner.
As the embrace is to the lonely heart,
As the hearth to the bedraggled soul.

As the dreams of romance lay dying
Among the embers of my youth,
I grasp at the will-o'-the-wisps in the night
And wait for you.

Will you come to me as I have imagined,
Clad in a beauty glorified by my dreams?
Or will you come as a soft caress,
Unnoticed at first, but lasting till the end?

Forgive me if I remain silent when you stand before me;
For the unspoken words of a lifetime are like an ocean within me,
And looking upon you, they will seep through my eyes
Or evaporate in the furnace of my heart's anguish.

Unitl then, I will keep thinking of you
Clutching close to my breast a pain that feels real.
I whisper with longing, your nameless name
Hoping the winds will carry it back to you.
Ella Dec 2017
I didn't see how toxic he was unitl someone showed me love and it wasn't him.
hah hes gone now
Henry Love Feb 2020
What is hell a lonely place with angry people who have no face who loss they lives they have no pride you hear their pain you hear their cries now what is hell a place that burns and ignorant people who haven't learned they were ungrateful and were so hateful and so demeaning and so unthankful now what is hell a place of worship with angry people who have no purpose the have no eyes they have no nose they have no teeth they have no soul now what is hell a place we live because some people abort their kids so much corruption and the destruction so many backstabbers it's hard to trust them now what is hell it is the mental so many sickening things that we have been through because it hurts it's like you're cursed you've been through homelessness and at your worse now what is hell locked in a cell you have no visitation receive no mail grown men are crying people are dying so many men they fight for freedom they keep trying now what is hell it is disaster where evil human beings they have been captured you're overwhelmed you're life's expelled your soul it burns eternally unitl you're pale now what is hell
Sin

— The End —