[x]

inhalethe cavalry have forgotten
their men in the mud
and i fear we are
running out of ammunition,
ambition,
i mean
we never had much
to begin with
we've not got the fire of a
thousand horses but maybe
two.
sometimes
two will do.

starspunobserving the romanticism
of hooded cemetery kids,
smoking cigarettes pretending
they are not dead.

you were always so sure
about my uncertainty,
you watched
all my pick up lines
drop things.

we built the heat
of the evening from the solidity
of starlight,

pretended
that two teens at the park
at midnight
is the stuff of teen novels
(cliches dim on
our leaf-gold horizon)

your eyes darted
from the gray expanse
of the churchyard & wandered
in thoughtful
paths.

i wanted to ask you
if i could follow. shove
the words aside &
remember that i came here alone.

i remember our innocence
in the static b e t w e e n
stars

The Cat on the PorchYou asked me why I do not believe in ghosts,
celestial at four in the morning.
It becomes the common hour,
not a biting static shock in the eye veins like I anticipated
but dangerously vogue and precious
like a real diamond ring or sapphires on your breast.
No wood pecking or oil teasing or misshapen duck bills bleating
just clay, but lighter, lightest
and bright
seductive and crestfallen.

They bled Peter and Pangloss over a river.
I was wearing white for the funeral
humming 'home', the matronly letters
soothe me
clotheshorses and moonlight,
Mayan jewellery in my cabinet
the mother tongue kissing my molars better

But then there

terminali.

we landed in oklahoma
and drank cheap martinis in the terminal;
you carried my guitar and fell in love
with my voice but not my tongue,
not my hands.

ii.

there's a man with a garage
that looks like a plane because nothing
meant more to him. will you make a model
of that bar? will you make a model
of my red cheeks? or will you live in a townhome
with her and three children?

iii.

the problem was you're not gay.
the problem was there was feeling
but it wasn't for us. i had you but
it wasn't for us.

iv.

i'm not sure if i resent you,
but i remember that bar and every pockmark
on the stool you sat on while i played
the song that parted yo

Escape VelocityF = G(m1m2)/r2

Black – true black – is the absence of light. Darkness is defined by what it is not, by the lack of something else. When we say a black hole, we truly mean that; black. Blacker than black. An absence of not only light, but of time, distance, anything.

The night was scary when I was little. I hated the dark, but couldn’t bear to sleep so long as the light was on, any light, burning on the other side of my eyelids. I used to have nightmares about dark things in dark corners, shadowy figures with shadowy fingers trailing along my spine. I always woke up cold and fumbling frantically for the lamp, but the aura o

a ribcage drenched in dust i have your ribcage, you said.
what should i put in it?

i told you i'd always wanted a fire,
the kind that would fill my eyes with starlight
and pump my blood full of passion, but

you're made of wildflowers, you said.
a fire would burn you to ash.

you wanted to fill my chest with
the sound of a train, whistling
far away in the night;
with the sound of rain smacking leaves;
with the sound the wind makes
when it seems like it's trying to speak

and you wanted to throw in the
smell of midnight in august
and the feeling of sand being
sucked out from under your feet
when the ocean inhales,
and the strange little moment of
bitter

sea featherin the breaking of the morning we tore apart our ivory shells
our blood-red hearts are saturated in spume & sea spells
with the ache from the brine gathering around you
your ankles slippery, your mouth
moving liquid through
mine
i had never seen a more beautiful shoreline

gunmetal breaths
on shivering, silver shores

you were ebbing to my flowing
you were coming; i was going

i wrote in the sand that i was yours

on the coast i could feel
salt on my tongue - dew from the
ocean in my lungs
& i was your pearl
latched from the inside to keep everyone out
speaking in rhymes, & cotton tides

this is when you pull my body fro

Counting the Ringsi

near my sick bed
he murmurs of how he's crumbling
but I'm still here
I've fought so long, I'm here
for a while I trust
I believe this, I must
even when it's bad, because
his faith alone is not enough

my random thoughts of how long
I have, and his thoughts of
"will she be able to outlive me" -
even at moments like this
it happens that
we hold on and speak of a future

ii

rolling restless this early morn'
you exhausted and I
drying up from a virus

spying through the shredding
of 250-thread count bedding,
between the hillocks of your shoulders

we never can sleep
in anticipation for what's to come

to plant the seed and watch it grow

Five Seasons (Alternate) There was this moment, early last May, when I could have glanced up from the book I was reading at the breakfast table.
I could look out my window and see you standing on my lawn, this waif in a windbreaker grinning at a daydream you're probably too old for. I could bring you an umbrella. I could invite you in for coffee, and we could lose the whole day debating questionable Scrabble plays. We could take to the streets after dark and try to find an all-night diner that will feed us both for less than fifteen dollars. I could fall in love with you.
But I don't.
...spring
You go home with nothing but a story about how springtime leaves you feeling lonely. Your roommate blows off a dinner date to take you out for drinks. You send a Chardonnay up to the stage between sets and the singer takes you home.
The new girl at work works up the nerve to ask me out.
I don't have a reason to say no.
Your

SolsticeOnce upon a time, when you were still sunlighthouses and shimmering existence wherever you were needed most, you found him. He was November, shaky on his first last legs, and you saw through the mind-twistings he feigned to the mind-twistings that were really there, knotted up in his dreams.

You were still birdsong then, and thunderstorms, and your bodyheat melted the frost claws that held him tight. You held onto him as his November deepened. When he howled, you howled with him, and the wind played with your voices and pressed the softness of your lungs against your cageribs—and then against each other's.

November became solstice, and

SaturdayWe slept on the floor when you drank.

– Like worried puppies
too small to reach the bed,
and sat with our backs to the wall
by the bathroom while you showered,
we hid car keys,
and telephones.

Peering over ledges,
I watched your listless eyes
wander to windows
thinking of your mother and marriage,
toes curled around the coffee table corner,
and we begged you to sleep.

Zach cleaned the sinks,
the rugs and the ashtrays,
capped the bottles and placed them
high on the shelves.
You woke to cartoons,
a headache, a fresh
pack of cigarettes. –

We never talked on Sunday mornings.

The Solipsist's LotThere's something about yourself that you don't know. You probably don't remember the circumstances very well, but I do. If you enjoy things the way they are, if you revel in even the smallest speck of ignorance, you need not read ahead. I won't force you. But from what I know of you, you don't like secrets. Especially not when they are about you.

You see, when you were born, so at once was everyone else. Your mother, she sprang into existence, just like that, the instant your tiny infant brain achieved the smallest semblance of self-awareness. Woven out of the ethe

tiger sharksYou take what you can get. You always find a way to make do. Your mother taught you that. Your mother drank wine through a straw. When you were fifteen, you watched her take down your father's hunting rifle from above the fireplace and shoot your dog, your best friend, that had got run over by your neighbour's truck and had to be put down. When you were fifteen your mother held you as you cried about your dog, your best friend, that had got run over by your neighbour's truck and had to be put down. She didn't say a word as you did but when you were fifteen, you caught her weeping in the middle of the night to your father, who apologized that

SuperimposeHe doesn't look like a gymnast. He's all button down shirts and frazzled grey hair framing wire spectacles, a picture perfect professorial archetype down to the very tips of his frayed shoelaces. But he was a gymnast once, or so he tells us, and I believe him because he smiles like he knows something while he's chatting before class.

It's strange to see that image superimposed over the current one – the distinguished professor in pressed khaki slacks and a jacket, worn brown loafers exuding a faintly courteous manner (you can always tell them by their shoes), and a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand – versus the athletic ki

IfWe can
draw lines and give them names
like elements
as they are discovered

Or etch into our skins
this soloecal desire
until it is impossible to tell
where words stop
and life begins.

I would

Find a common rhythm that includes
you in my arms, my hands
and lungs and thoughts
tracing the outline of you
entangled with me
colliding like two lost particles
locked in a shared gravity
drifting through the vacuum
of space.

I could.

Exhale, and
remember
sentence structure.

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More from ~MisfitableGrae

taller people, shorter expectations
i.
she thinks that if her heart
were any bigger, all her blood would pool
at the bottom and drown out the pictures
of Mark
she's been too heartbroken exhausted to throw out.
and she thinks that maybe then when she makes
pretty words in her skin,
it'd make the mess a lot easier to clean up.
she's practical like that.

ii.
sometimes she gets lost in the sky
and calls it the ocean, because whenever
she looks at the clouds, she always sees
seahorses and pollution.
if she wishes any harder, her star will implode
please god, make me beautiful.

iii.
when she was young, she ued to think that
infinity was eight years, because if s

lights like it's godshe wants her veins to be bigger
so they can hug the room when it starts spinning.
she wants a time machine and more storms.
she doesn't want an 'It's Gonna Be Okay'.
she wants an end.

except i'm not sure i know what you
want anymore, sister.
i think you want to sleep it away.
i think you want to stop the yelling.

i surrounded our old childhood playground
with real world problems, sister.
then doused it in too-expensive gasoline
and lit the whole damn thing on fire
so no one can touch those ours my memories.

is that what you want?

memories from the days when your problems were
so simple you didn't need a knife or needle to so

the most honest poem i've ever writtenI keep a bible by my bed and tell myself
One day, I'll read it.

I'm that jigsaw puzzle your grandmother gives you
That you never really wanted.
I'm a shipwreck you just know will happen, and yet
You're still standing on the shore, waving
Good-bye to your loved ones.

I like rain and you and breathing
And only one of those is optional.
I think horrible things are funny,
and cry when I lose something I thought
I'd have forever.

For what it's worth, I can't
Imagine next year without you
And I've always wanted a friend with ground eyes
'Cause I've spent too long in the sky,
I'm sick of 'flying'.

If I had a god, I'd call her Mom.

things i'll tell her somedayher eyes are still closed
when i meet my daughter for the first time.
she's pressed against my stomach
unknowingly touching
2, 4, 6, 8, 10 scars.
she's scradled with spray-tanned wrists that
don't really hide the complete truth.
i think of laughing- how could something so
ugly hold something so beautiful?
but i just clutch her closer and promise
that the same things will not happen to her.

in a world that will treat her wrong,
i swear i will raise her right.

i will form her hand into the shape of a gun,
just so i can show her the peace sign.
i'll teach how to forget to breathe,
but only for things she thinks are worth it-
lik

Beautiful SkeletonWhen I grow up, I'm going to plant
Dandelion seeds in front of my house.
I know they're weeds; I don't care.
I'm tired of the beautiful.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall,
Who's the thinnest fairest of them all?
She can count her ribs, she's almost dead
And yet she's still fat inside her head.

Did you know there's enough spray-tan in America to
Paint the snow in Alaska a mile deep?
Did you know that the lip-stick in California alone
Could cover the Hollywood Walk of Fame with the word 'ugly'- twice?

I'm sick of saying 'beautiful'
And 'ugly' is the harshest four-letter word I know.
If I hear 'starved' one more time, I'm going to throw

iktsuarpoki.
The mug's still warm in my hand, with imprints
Of two pairs of lips on either side.
I look down at the hot chocolate and think of your eyes.
Brok-broke-broken.
I toy with the idea of throwing the cheap San Fran mug at the wall-
Play with the idea of dropping it on the stone floor- But that
Wouldn't bring you back.
Nothing will,
And hot chocolate is as hard to get out of the carpet as blood is,
And heaven knows if you taught me one thing it was to be practical.
(And that love does not exist,
And that I'm a B- student, not a princess,
And that nothing's prettier than a kicked over dandelion.)

ii.
I threw away the book you gave

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no wonder it took him 1455 pages

by ~MisfitableGrae, Feb 13, 2013, 9:15:03 PM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Emotional

_{when i was seven years old, a group of kids in my grade threw rocks at me for liking neopets more than webkinz. from then on, i was convinced i knew what hatred meant. but i don’t know how to describe it to the little girl who sits in the corner of my womb and in ten years might call me mommy and ask for help on dividing the world into black and white.

would i point to the churches with their bigotry? to the cotton fields of the south in the 1800s? to the classrooms of modern day america? would i tell her about how the jews stood in straight lines, waiting to die, with fear in their eyes and faith in their hearts? or would i try and describe the sound tyler clementi’s body made when it hit the water of the hudson river after he jumped from the george washington bridge?

would i point to myself and say, “i am hatred, i am hatred to others. i am lying and cheating and stealing and coveting and jealousy and hubris. i am the idea of every time someone wants to kill someone, or a cop beats up a pedestrian. i am street brawls and blown up bombs. i am closed coffins and suicide victims. i am bullet-proof belief, and bullet–proved belief. self hatred is my redemption because even monsters have mirrors, and there is a balance that exists everywhere.”

and if she turned her head and asked me to describe peace to her?

would i say the opposite of war or maybe the imaginary goal we all sing songs about around campfires but go back to shooting spitballs at the backs of each other’s heads? would i say kumbaya my lord, kumbaya? would i say that time of autumn where there are no more chaotic falling leaves because all of them are already dead? would i point to the time before humans were intelligent enough to fight? The time of australopithecines and few IQ points, and no weapons of mass destruction? would i tell her about the time the hittites and the egyptians signed the first ever peace treaty?

would i say, “my name’s grace and that means gift from god, but i will never be a gift from god, ask anyone who knows me. i’ve messed them up so bad, i must be some kind of punishment. that amazing grace song gives us graces a bad name. sometimes we’re not amazing. we’re just wretches who live their whole life blind, afraid to see. and i’m definitely not amazingly, joyously, god’s gift to the people in my life. you know what’s an awesome name? clementine. because she drowned and I’ve never gotten the hang of breathing and swimming at the same time, so some days i think my head’s not gonna break the surface before i run out of air. that was a metaphor, sweetie. you want to know what peace means? wait a few years—they’ll have peace when I’m dead.”}

no wonder it took him 1455 pagesby ~MisfitableGrae

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Emotional

_{the day after i hid in the plastic tunnel to get away from the pebbles and the kids, i made my mother go pick up a webkinz stuffed cat. i can’t describe the feeling i got when i first logged onto the website and found out that their chat rooms were so censored you had to hold conversations with a list of phrases they gave you.

that feeling wasn’t hatred or peace. i think it was fear.

did...i just write some kind of prose? what? oh god, i'm sorry.
the title is talking about Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace which is over a thousand pages long.
i'm going to be submitting a love poem in a few hours, just had to get this out of my head. it's better if you read it out loud, fast and like you're kind of ashamed of saying it.}

Daily Deviation

Given 2013-03-09

~MisfitableGrae asks some important questions for which there are no easy answers. no wonder it took him 1455 pages is a bit of introspection beautifully expressed. ( Suggested by *leyghan and Featured by ^NicSwaner )

love 2 2

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wow 4 4

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~~sad 0 0~~

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~~neutral 0 0~~

=Sammur-amat Apr 9, 2013 General Artist

Hello there, dear heart.

I've used this piece's title in my title poem over HERE: [link]

I hope you enjoy the read!

~Grimlock13 Mar 29, 2013

..........

(...I seriously can't find the right word to say...)

=CrematedMan Mar 10, 2013 Student Writer

Disarmingly beautiful. Highly deserved DD.

~Adeldee Mar 10, 2013 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Alright, that's it! I have had it up to here with ~~shit~~ stuff like--THAT! What is it with prose not having proper capitalization getting such acclaim? I've been looking at DD's on the literature category for two weeks and it's always in lower-case. It's so "un-special"! And overrated! Too lazy to press the shift button or is it broken? Who bloody knows!!?!?

Well, congratulations, anyway. I'm sure that none of my crap can compare to this. But if I have to say anything positive, it also moved me. It was well-written and had such feelings and deep thought. You did deserved it. You FUCKING deserved it.

I didn't call it un-special for nothing, you know. This looks like a work that could make you a sell-out the minute you earn some sort of reward for it.

*DamonWakes Mar 10, 2013 Writer

Tiny text pot, meet no caps kettle.

~Adeldee Mar 10, 2013 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Indubitably!

~CaniPretend Mar 10, 2013

I, myself completely agree with you... I had the same thing happen with stuffed toy also but under different circumstances, I never bought the toy. it shows that I would bow down if I had, but hatred being hated that's real and how peace really isn't out there is the brutal truth.. bravo I loved it

~Indigo-Serenade Mar 9, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

This is indescribably amazing. I could feel every word resonating with truth and meaning beyond even my comprehension... you've done perfectly. Bravo!
Grats on the DD; it's completely well-deserved!

~pacman10101 Mar 9, 2013 Hobbyist Digital Artist

wow. not much else to say, but wow.

~Please-Not-Last Mar 9, 2013 Student General Artist

Sad, powerful, and thought-provoking. As someone who tries to see the good in people and has seen what true peace looks like, I was fighting the urge to punch the computer during the last two paragraphs. I can't say I loved this piece for its contents, but I definitely love it for its literary value and its different POV.

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no wonder it took him 1455 pages

no wonder it took him 1455 pagesby ~MisfitableGrae

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