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Emo Hearts and Suicidal PoetryOutcasts they tend to call us,
The wierd ones,
The freaks.
But we like to think of ourselves as the special ones
With our permanent-marker doodles on our converses
Ripped jeans and emo hearts and suicidal poems written in the snow
Novels read beneath the covers 'til dawn by light of a flashlight
[batteries nearly dead we've used it so many times before]
And dancing in the rain
Praying to Beethoven
And tears at dusk
And singing to the stars
At the top of our lungs with the car windows open and the night rushing in
Or on the top floor of a beach house with the sea stretched out before us
"Go home, you lose, good day, sir"
Turn ar
Divination as a Means of Finding a Way Back              1.  I say nothing I am thinking.

For twelve years I have wanted
to do exactly this, but suddenly
pronouncing my own name calls up
the question of who it belongs to
in the same breath Like
Solomon I was born a singer
but in the wrong key and my
chords will not carry me, will not
summon the wolves to me only
packs of hungry dogs
stupid with domestication
but nearly feral And like
a hungry ghost I have learned
not to speak against those
who will give me food

             2. A sketch of myself.

                                 He says I must have been born
in the wrong culture, he says. I got a taste of
the crack
Mermaid SongI have tried to love you.

But you have become
  little more than an evening in pale watercolors—
  the shadow of Monet.
I have decided to leave the lilies as they are.

Perhaps in later years, with desperation,
  fearing the thinness of my thin limbs,
  the creaking of my spider fingers,
I will go to wander those gardens again,
  hoping for the promise of Eden,
  clutching beads in my weary fist.

For now, you are fleeting as mermaid song,
  brief as tall spires in pink and green beneath the sea—
  I can never touch them.
Our connection fades,
  a violet mirage
  disappearing within the swells.

A wave breaks
You've Been Looking at Virtues, All WrongYou've Been Looking at the Virtues of Child, Man, and Woman All Wrong

In the end we're all myths, hermaphroditic deities.
Our names are the most real things about us.

        i. My mother named me for the Virgin
        and I carry her legacy in my blood—

        she is my spirit animal; the creature
        who crawled first across the placenta line
        outside my home. In truth, I imagine all
      
StarЗвезда

i. I was still, once;
a rock amidst constellations that
flapped like birds.

Their spinning gravity wells
have strung me—
a glittering necklace of asteroids.

Madness is only a quiet hunger for those
who do not live within the skull
that is being broken apart by too many stars.

ii.
as a fox kit i will wander ice white russian forests in winter hoping to be taken in
longing for bright red curls but silver furred and searching hungry for the mice beneath the snow
ringed round with chicken wire and caught amongst the hens wishing for the
russet hair that would blend me in

if i were catheri
I Have No Names for all My Teacup BabesI feel always like I am starting over.

As a magpie I gather trinkets under my pillow,
bay leaves and bags of herbs to bring the next lover to me,
to call the next dream-face forward—a picture
painted in the tea leaves.

But truth be told the start-again
is never clean, is never gentle,
and the sweat of all that labour
is a fire on my skin, telling me
I will never resist its wind-cry.

The moon comes when I call, to help me;
midwife, she is, and she carries into being my new selves
like the babes they are, teaches them to
fill long footsteps like hers.

Truth be told, I tire of the destiny
I was given once—I am a teacup
An Ode of Many VoicesThe days fall like golden wheat
from Azrael's sweeping scythe to
soil the lavish harvest of health,
the only thing that is left. For them,
fang hooks sting; the jailbird sings:
Whippoorwill, will 'o' wisp, come to me.

My plea for forgiveness falls on deaf ears,
and autumn leaves fall from trees.
We are the resplendent wreckage left behind in your wake - broken edges jagged, sparkling.

The days are a thin film of ice between you and me—
soon to thicken or to shatter, only time will tell—
that I reach up to touch, but it's too cold, it pushes me away.
I'm left shivering alone, away from your warmth, separated from your lig
Grandmother Spider Bears the Weight of the SunDecember.
The solstice smells of wet soil.

A rising sea of dusk washes over her,
pressing on her mind
like her fingers press the lump of clay in her palm.
Grandmother keeps her hands busy,
forces nervous tremors into the small vessel
emerging like a snake
from the earth.

A bundle of flowers had held the sweat of her hands.
The trip to the hospital bore the scent of old leather,
worn bus seats
and lilies too long without water.
He'd been badly burned, they said.
His fingertips were flame-marked,
smooth and new-pink
when they came to change his bandages.

Grandmother flexes her parchment fingers.
Clay rims her wrinkled knuckles
Meditation on ThoughtBegin the quiet storm of fidgeting,
metronome-pen beating—
a drum, a drum:

Tempestuous—tearing
fingers through hair,
black eyes
crawling along
the insides of my lids.

My mind grows scrublands.
"What do you mean?" and,
"What do I mean?"

I tend slowly toward the abstract.
Pine trees sprout from my hair,
a forest of church steeples.
Whippoorwill am I,
chestnut-child Evangeline,
and my fingers stretch
architectonic
to build me bridges of stone,
a whole cathedral of bone archways.
My Michelangelo eyes sit restless
in a face of white and green marble.

The smallest drop of rain
against the window
and my thoughts co
Oh, Ed: I am not Your Annabel Lee AnymoreYou have learned to move
with the silence of ghosts,
the tense noiselessness
of bricked-up walls
—shut out the night, and
shut out the night.

I, too, have changed.
I am a mausoleum,
my darling Poe—
you curl up inside me like a child.

But there is hardly anything left to hold;
all that is left of me
is a house of moth-eaten lace,
green as arsenic,
collapsing amidst purple lightning flowers,

falling wingless over cliffs
that crash like waves against a dark sea.
SerpienteI have done with St. Augustine.
He would have condemned you, Lilith,
would have sought you out in your cave
to prattle at you.
God claimed that he built you
from the dirt,
and for your disobedience
he crowned you with diamond scales,
with coils to ring the world.
Eve consented to silence and thus
was cursed only with the tunnel of pain that is childbirth.

Lilith, dear—
find comfort in your nest,
in your subterranean womb.
    (Cuentan que hace mucho, mucho tiempo
       en el mundo subterraneo…)
You bear the truth in your heart,
as crumbs in your hands
offered
eucalyptusthey tell me i am writing confessional
poetry and i tell them, no, i am not,
i am writing my world.

i did not burrow in guilt's throat
and choose to spell out the softness,
no, i screamed out my soul and it was then
that i remembered how i used to pray.

i wanted to tell stories
but instead i sat and wrote:

about rain, and sorrow,
and the greek gods,
and pain, and the greek gods,
over and over, and dionysus, dionysus:

i plunged and dived dolphin-beaked.

*

i want you know
that death is a responsibility
and saltwater immersion
a fierce talent we cannot escape

so this is a confession for you:

i am not selfish
i am self only
Santa Fe de BogotaSimón Bolívar found you como una Flor de Mayo.

I know that in your swelling city heart
you long por el mar, por la sal del mar,

but instead you straddle the roads,
hunker down over your landscape and breathe
your car fumes, inspiras las fumas como sombras,
espiras tranquilidad inquieta.

Colombia, madre, you have become
bloated in your old age, have grown your
ankles, pálidos e inflamados;

you should have been a sea lion,
morena y rapida y a la cresta como la espuma.

Mi alma, I will bring you the sea salt to run through your hair,
diamonds with which to crown your mane.
Appetite Comes with the Eating1. The real horror of October
is the winter, the rising darkness.

It's said they caught him weeping,
heard him babbling about the steam in the snow,
the brown mass that had been a person—
his little girl, dead from the cold.

He ate his wife and daughters.
And when the villagers came for him,
he let them take him—to the tree
in the center of the square, where he hung,
discolored with frostbite and gangrene.

They called him Wendigo,
gave him to the spirit of the Dying Season,
and hoped that he would rest.

2. My ancestors had a word for his kind—
Strigoi.
They would have cut out his heart
to stop him from feeding.
Rooibos TeaBreathe deep the chai haze—

Picasso's djinn,
a muse of eggshells and grandma's lace tablecloths,
cradles the tea kettle to her chest
and abandons Latin words and names—
flotsam and jetsam dribbling
irrelevant among the little red tea leaves;
the driftwood of genus and species bumping
against the shores of the South African scrublands.

She hovers orange and indigo,
a quavering flame of dreams
and drained tea dregs—
divination with a soft-spiced voice
at the bottom of the mug,
never quite gone—

a flock of Van Gogh crows
frozen in their hayfields.
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Totems and Godhood

:iconazizriandaoxrak:

i. As a child, confronting giants.

I take the pine tree as my totem,
learn to love the nakedness of its nether-regions
and its northerly fibers stretched and waiting
for the weft to its warp.

Girlhood is still a part of me as the
learning what I am. In the end,
I haven't climbed a tree in a long time;
I am small, and scared, and ringed round with walls,
and I beg the moon to teach me
to use my pine trees as a ladder.

ii. In the way only young love can.

You, sir—
you are pine chips, and I carry you
like a fetish in my mind.

You are the first vampiric sweetness
to suck the breath from my body:
unknowing, the feeling of yearning;
I am fibrous—celery stalk,
pale and clutching my thread self together.

iii. Transmogrification.

Watch as I petrify,
stretch until my bones
will not bend to let me drink.

With age I become a god,
brittle-boned and cackling; with age
the osteoporosis will leech my fibers dry
and my pine sap blood will freeze in my chest
to keep me warm in winter.

My fingers—blue-green and spindly,
and though never-married my insides
are ringed-round with bands.
And I'll settle down with a cuppa,
tinged with the whisky my grandmother loved so much.

iv. The autumn comes to lead me home.

With no god to forgive me my ghosts,
I sink down into November brown,
and let the wood-rot take my roots.

408

22 25 6
:iconazizriandaoxrak:

Totems and Godhoodby =AzizrianDaoXrak

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EDIT: MEEP featured as a DLD on 12/6/2012. Thank you so much to ~SurrealCachinnation for suggesting and =SilverInkblot for featuring!

I dunno how I feel about this one. I was feeling the pine trees, but I also wanted to write something for my 100 Poem Project topic "voodoo," which I've written into a lot of poems, but which I haven't had as the main sort of "theme."

Comments appreciated!

I'd love critique on the following:
1) I'm not entirely sure about the imagery in section 3. I love the giraffe image, and I feel like I can really ONLY say what I mean with that image, but it JUST DOESN'T FIT. Thoughts?
2) How's the flow?
3) I don't normally title my sections, but it felt right, somehow, in this piece. Do they work? Do they help build the story, detract from it, or do they seem meaningless?

Critique for :iconthewrittenrevolution::[link]
Category: Literature / Poetry / Spiritual / Free Verse

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Submitted on
October 6, 2012
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:iconladyofgaerdon:
=LadyofGaerdon Jan 18, 2013  Professional Writer
:wave: Hi! Your piece has been featured as inspiration in #Lit-Visual-Alliance's Seventh Allied Artwork Feature! Please :+fav: the article to bring attention to the feature. Thank you for being a part of the Alliance! :salute:
Reply
:iconazizriandaoxrak:
=AzizrianDaoXrak Jan 19, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Thank you m'dear!
Reply
:icondweckie:
Mood: Love ~dweckie Dec 28, 2012  Student Writer
This is a really beautiful piece, very enjoyable to read (: :heart:
Reply
:iconazizriandaoxrak:
=AzizrianDaoXrak Dec 28, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Aww, thanks :) I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
Reply
:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Dec 7, 2012   General Artist
There are just so many gorgeous lines! :love:
Congratulations on the DLD, darling! :clap:
Reply
:iconazizriandaoxrak:
=AzizrianDaoXrak Dec 7, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
:) Thank you!
Reply
:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Dec 8, 2012   General Artist
Of course, azi darling! :glomp:
Reply
:icon0hgravity:
*0hgravity Dec 5, 2012  Hobbyist General Artist

You are the first vampiric sweetness
to suck the breath from my body:
unknowing, the feeling of yearning;
I am fibrous—celery stalk,
pale and clutching my thread self together.

--quite lovely

a nice piece all around :)
Reply
:iconazizriandaoxrak:
=AzizrianDaoXrak Dec 6, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks so much :)
Reply
:icondailylitdeviations:
=DailyLitDeviations Dec 5, 2012
Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by =DailyLitDeviations in a news article that can be found here: [link]

Be sure to check out the other artists featured and show your support by :+fav:ing the News Article. Keep writing and keep creating.
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