[x]

Cochineal and Beetle WingsI don’t love you
anymore.

I was going to lead up to this. Maybe claim
there was something caught in my throat
about beetle wings, cochineal – you know,
they make that stuff out of flight. Lipstick, I mean.
I mean the truth is

I can only smile like an inferno because
something else isn’t going to be flying away.
And I was going to say I’m sorry but I’m not.

I was going to lie to you like you needed me to,
but pray tell me how to grace through three weeks I hoped
for some kind(ness) of hurricane, so we could recalculate
in the aftermath, and nobody would blame me then for judging
that we came up empty.

CurlsI   brushed my hair this
morning like always three
heart-attack strokes jerking
strands into place trekked
to school after and dreamed
through class nightmares
all shot   through with gaps
like this poem which you
thought had a point but is
too sick stuffed with    holy
to be worth anything at    all.

Stephanie - Collab(I wrote us in free verse over every inch
of your tattered surface ).

you were the beatific grin
of a kindergartener high off oxygen,
mouth stretched wide as the entrance to hell,
black tongue bleeding virtuous sin like ichor.

(You taught me praying was for the weak
as I fell for your gypsum nails,
white teeth scrabbling over my chalkboard frame).

scribbled flesh tells no love story
but three layers of skin
worn thin along the length of our feverish bones.

(Garden flowers tucked away worms and dirt,
my ribs hoarded misspellings of my mother's name).

dipping your origami limbs into my ink

The poem tips nothing.The poem tips nothing. Perfectly
balanced,
it nods with curt politeness at
me,

the waitress with the emblazoned
name tag reading I
am just trying to get out of here too,
and it does
not pick at my bones (polite).

The poem tips nothing. When it gets up
and leaves,
it leaves exact change, stacked silver
balanced on the blank plate,
enough to rework my lungs
and pewter heart

for when it comes back
again.

MEi. I fell in love with a girl who catalogued darkness,
sat in her room with the blinds closed and wrote down
187 ways it felt
in all of the different times she couldn't see.
My name was one of them,
#143, ash velvet, and I didn't know what she meant at the time
but the only description she wrote beneath it
was good night for stuffed animals
bad night for worn pillows.

And I'm sorry I made you dream of the rivers.

ii. I fell in love with a girl who never looked in the mirror
but dressed to perfection, somehow
in her blue skirt and black socks
white tennis shoes
and a smile crooked as the bottom side of Indiana –
yeah, I

shhhwe are lurking too close to jesus,
on the empty edge of a lightless stage,
curved nails digging into the skin of our pale palms.

he asks as an afterthought
do you believe in something holy? and i think yes,
i think this is what i believe in.

Sad is such a small word.Sad
is such
a small word.

Pedants try to
expand it. To
puff
up
their
sadness
with crammed letters; lugubrious,
melancholy.

But sad
is such
a small word.
You
could slip it
in your pocket.
You
could slip me
in your pocket too,
something else
to be
forgotten.

caring for p(o)etsscribbling down vicious verses on
tissue napkins while seated at
the corner of a sidewalk cafe is
about as romantic, raw and
honest a p(o)et
-outside of the four corners of your bedpost-
can get

if you've got that person dreading over
drafts and dreams on end
-of you, for you-
consider yourself a new owner
it is now time to
tame this p(o)et's perverse mane
you've got your hands on
a fragile purebred
which can be very tricky for
first timers

soul meets bodyyou'll see

the sea in

your eyes the

day you are

born - crush

flowers in

your mother's

books & rest

in the cor

ners of

empty rooms right

where the light from

the blinds shines

through

i'm overlapping my

history with heart-shaped

sighs & candle lights

you're so beautiful on

the inside

when i first

started hiding

verses & poems inside

journals when i was little

i did it for no one at all -

i am not so different, i

fall into place with every

sentiment

you're poetry hiding

in my fingertips

tracing my spine like

i'm read like a book

you wrapped around me

& i shook

Clichei. true love

& you were that one famous line
of a love poem – 1863 sonnet
scripted down your spine, verses
of sternum & shuddering heartbeat.

i remember the sheets twisted blue
as the eventide, your eyes like thelassia,
that species of ocean grass. we swayed
to the music of galaxies colliding.
our song was the day the tides
finally curled round the moon's face.

ii. cancer

eventides, thelassia eyes, moon
great and heavy as that one lucky coin
that refused to land, to grant a wish
or let luck decide for us. there were
star crabs scuttling under your
oragami skin. & i never realized
all the ways that you folded
until t

untitledseducing the writer
is pointless;
he'll seduce himself
if you're silent.

Vishnui. (matsya - fish)
in the beginning, there was silver;
mercury inscribing cuneiform
beneath the bloodwork of your skewed scales,
scrawling preserver
throughout salt-drenched lungs.

and you laced clear planets into your slipstream,
wrapped solar systems in translucence.
ignoring all the shattered galaxies. ignoring
how easily their frail orbits
broke.

ii. (kurma - turtle)
your ribcage screamed a shattered warcry
of not-quite-god and less-than-human;
a shark's-tooth carapace crushed in.

forgotten names clawed out your sternum.
your spine fused into your biting back.

iii. (varaha - boar)
razor-wireless shrieked of true ta

on wet roadsv. She wasn't meant to be helped. We are all wrung from the same breaded soil, bound by our virginal ties to bareback earth. And so maybe it's okay to be a beggar, then, cradling this age-old fatigue.

xcvi. "Here, try this."

Nothing had ever sensitized me more than the smell of green, carried heavily on gusts of crisp oceanic air. The world slowly began to fade around me, and I let my head drop to my knees while the gentle rush of sea teemed humble volumes of vibrant aural stimulation.

"I don't really care who it is, you know. All I want is someone real."
An hour passed in silence. "Lift up your head." It's too heavy for me to carry, plea

syracuseListen to the audio version for the full effect, pretty please.
cloudshot sky like an oil painting and i am watching the
seagulls. i--
darling, i will swim for you
and swallow every whitecap.
i will pluck myself a coat of pelican wings,
sew them up with salt and spray--
become icarus for you.
you are calling me across the waves, love--
but you pull against the ache
in my bones, the hollow--
the clawing out for unseen sunsets and unturned tides.
i hear you, love
give me time.
i will always listen.

Browse More Like This

Download File
HTML, 425 bytes more ▶

More from ~winterkate

Astronauti.238,900 miles away
the Earth gleams in the darkness.
A cat's eye, opalescent blue
flecked with terra verdant,
fifty-two cream colors
of cloud.

Under a heavy lid of night,
it glares. Angry.
Baleful.

As if to say to the Sun:
I was dreaming
of all the fish
in my seas.
As if to ask why
it had to be woken.

ii.
Thoughts are protozoan here;
with glass-thin skin
transparent as the first lie
he ever told as a child.
No,

I didn't steal that candy bar.

He can see the mechanics,
the workings,
the insides.
They divide like dreams,
impossibly smoothly,
Whole and unbroken
as they tear apart. If
he could stretch far e

THAT POEM (Writer's Block)I sat down at my computer last Thursday night
with the full intention of writing THAT POEM. Oh, don't
play dumb. You know what THAT POEM is. We all know
what THAT POEM is. You with the cigarette train-tracks
charting your eternal drift to nowhere
on the insides of your arms, you
with the sludge of alcohol dripping thick & brown through
veins swollen & slow & pussy as zombies, you
with the eight children whose faces you can't remember
& the husband in the Hamptons whose name you sometimes forget
& the lover who never seems to come around as much as you pay him to – you
all know what THAT POEM

is. It's the rhythm beating a dull

Poem for the TransgenderedAnd I am not one of you, but
I know what it's like
to want to crawl out of your own skin.

I am not one of you, but
I want to shed this 173.2-pound body, I want
to hear the smack, the boom, the crash
as it hits the floor and moulds gray, I want to see
the bruise flowers write blue and purple obituaries across my white skin
before it dissolves into garden soil, I want
my body to, for once, create something beautiful.

And I am not one of you but
sometimes I have wanted to cut off all my hair.
To lop off this shit stream that's coursing down my back,
to bury it in the back and become some
pixie/lesbian/dyke/whore/boy
I have ne

View Gallery · View Prints

Featured in Groups:

#poetry-book

#Insomnia-Artists
For art made by moonlight

#PoeticalCondition
A safe place to express yourself

#Paint-with-words

#Poets-and-Warriors
Memory Tattoos & Scar Tissue

#PoetryFeedsOurSouls
Feeding Souls With Writing

#Youthful-Poets

#EliteLiterature
Elite Literature Collective

Show all (10)

Details

Submitted: November 23, 2012
File Size: 425 bytes

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 36
Favourites: 33 [who?]
Views: 470 (0 today)
Downloads: 3 (0 today)

[x]

Whistle

by ~winterkate, Nov 23, 2012, 6:58:36 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

+++
i am the wicked edge of ricochet,
the asphyxiation of dust
in a hummingbird's bones. skeleton,
i am silver, grass torn hollow
by a child's breath. corkscrewing,
my veins etch true reflections
on time's skin:

a cardigan crumpled
like a child. Blue
and torn in half.
---

Whistleby ~winterkate

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

©2012-2013 ~winterkate

Formatting and imagery play, yay!
Inspired by Flo Rida, because I'm kidnapping Top 50 song titles.

UPDATE (oooh I feel special!)
[link]

A link! A link! Mystery!

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*sApPH1repo3t Jan 13, 2013

Excellent imagery good job!

Reply

~winterkate Jan 14, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you so much

Reply

*sApPH1repo3t Jan 14, 2013

ur welcome!

Reply

*scatteredwords Dec 18, 2012

skeleton,
i am silver, grass torn hollow
by a child's breath.

Love that.

Reply

~winterkate Jan 1, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you so much

Reply

!randomlyinspired-21 Dec 5, 2012 Student Writer

a cardigan crumpled
like a child. Blue
and torn in half. :,,>

I always love what you write; it's so elegant in its simplest way

Reply

~winterkate Jan 1, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you so very much

Reply

~DamagedHomewrecker Nov 29, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

i really love how this reads, and all the imagery is breath taking

Reply

~winterkate Dec 3, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you so very much

Reply

*disrhythmic Nov 27, 2012

Hi.

I'm a reader for #Elocutionists and I read this out loud. I'd love to put it up on our blog ([link]), if that's alright with you. You can listen to my reading here: [link]

Let me know if you like it. <3 I loved reading it.

Reply