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40810If only you were soulless.
If you were mindless, blind,
you and I could make a beautiful disaster.
The press would write of our brief affair;
they'd paint me (the woman in red) as pathetic.
They will not consider how I need your love
or how it pains me so deeply to throw myself at you.
I will not be remembered as a poet warrior.
I'll be the eternal survivor no more.
All who think of me will shake their bowed heads
and tearfully remark;
If only you were soulless.
If you were mindless, blind,
You wouldn't have been such a bloody disaster.

The White ThingsNothing is as far away as a minute ago.
No matter how hard you row against the tide
we can never reach it, never return there.

It's hard to sleep in the light of my regrets
that creeps through curtain and barriers
to rot away and bleach all things white.

It's hard to sleep knowing that no distance
is as far away as sixty small seconds ago.
Immalleable, we rot, and things turn white.

ShockwaveFoetal
Trying to fold the pain up
To trap it between the paper cut limbs.
Curled up
Protective
But the shockwaves come
Pulsing from inside
Destroying cells
Radiocactive
Curled up
To trap it between the paper cut limbs.
Trying to fold the pain up.
Foetal.

Of Nuisance LeavesHear me read it!

Leaves clutch their ropy fingers around the tree's limbs. The zesty leeches bloom, crack open overnight and slip silently up the nearest oak or maple. They pierce the crunch of bark and penetrate deep into the rubbery veins.

They feed. They pauperize plum and peach until they are heavy and brown; heavy laden with the stolen sap.

When at last they reach their fill the tree can finally shake them off emphatically, desperately, until at last it is clean again. The tree reaches its black bones to the sky in praise and as a new year begins vows never again to be the victim of leaves.

Framed[ I met him at the county fair.
It wasn't like the songs predicted;
I had mud up my shins and he
had grass in his hair. What a mess. ]

[ I kissed him at my grandma's house.
He swallowed me and digested me;
I became a part of his simmering self.
We fused together, and I died. ]

[ I married him in a triangular church,
When I turned up in white he grinned
and whispered "what, no muddy knees?".
I put a leaf from my bouquet in his hair. ]

[ He kissed her at my grandma's house.
She had left it to us when she passed.
In the house where I'd learned about love
he taught me all I know about betrayal. ]

[ He left me at the train station.
I'd helped

BuriedUnder the paprika house,
are the bones of my father
and nestled between rib
and reason, is our love.

ScarsSee the sharpness of my tongue-nib
As the metallic taste in my mouth draws out
A barking cough, forced out
By the dirty nicotine lining my lungs.

See the blade of stubbornness
That slices across my cheek bone;
An amalgamation of all the times you pushed me.

See the residue in my eyes,
The remnants of all those times you forced me
And I forced myself not to cry;
Those tears condensed into a thick blinding syrup
That colours all things red.

See the crinkle in my nose,
The wrinkles on my heart
As I remember how you didn't love me. (Don't love me).

See the burns on my psalms
And fingerprints singed off
By all the times you called me nothing

You'll Never DieHear me read it!

They say that if a writer falls in love with you then you never really die.

Instead your body is laid out in its funerial shrouds and moulds are made. Soft impressions of you to be pressed onto the blank faces of future loves.

Every time I write of taking comfort in a safe place in a storm, it will be your forearm. Every half-made smile will be on your lips, and every touch will be constructed from the residue beneath your fingernails.

When I metaphise of trees' blood, the leaves that give the energy so that a willow can provide shade for those in need, it will be your blood, it will be your light drenched kisses.

Every

Mother EarthMy body is the earth;
See how under this bruise
A seed of malcontent sleeps.
See what grows out of each pore
As the pain pours over again.
There is rust in my fingerbeds
That poisons the roots
Of all good that hopes to grow here.
I am the convulsing, revolution
of the convoluted Earth...
I am the tectonic blades that clash
and shout when I curl up and hide.
You will feel me when I tremble,
and fear me when I explode
for under the magmanimous skin
There burns a core of hate
That can't be marred by human hand.

ParchmentI speared you with a   black-ink pen.
I tried to balance    the weight
of our weare-worn shoulders.
Tried to counter   it with beauty
and hopefulness , with my hopes,
persistence &   with my dark love.
They came to see it in hundreds,
Droves, of   similarly seeking
hope and a reason to continue.
Reasons to love, even when it
hurts. Reasons to try when the
vast weight of differences 'tween
us can't be fixed by adding
a single strike of strength
through the middle. Our love
wasn't strong enough for poetry
to save. It crum

In absence of a poem.I chewed my pen to the nib
and swallowed the ink thoughtlessly,
but no matter how long I thought,
I couldn't say what you mean to me.

I tried, I tried and I tested,
every word in my diminutive range,
but I screwed up more pieces of paper
and happened upon something strange;

I noticed words, which have served me,
for all of my formative years,
had no power to convey my gratitude
for the times that you dried my tears.

Whenever I doubt myself (often),
You're the one who tells me I'm wrong
You lift up my chin and remind me, wait
for the good things that will come along.

I can't find a way to express how
you are the saving grace in my head.
So

The Bone CollectorSometimes my breath catches in my throat
and the very stillness of an earth going
a thousand and three miles per hour
gets lodged there.

Sometimes these simple exchanges
leave me breathless, croaking on dust:
the unfiltered pigments of other people's skin
and blood and ash

but with my tarred lungs and itchy eyes
I sit and sift through charcoaled remains,
alphabetising them from c to c. I am lost
in a world charred brazen.

Many things I have loved have turned to ash.
Many people. I was naive enough to think
that there was some perfect nutritional truth
that could outlast hell-fire.

I claw through a world turned ashen
and know those dead

OIt permeates everything
It is the cells. It is the cell
in which I am rotting.

The sheen over my eye,
the flesh I rip from the side of my nail,
the teeth I grind it with.

The tears, blood and sweat.
It is below carbon and hydrogen,
embedded in the air I breathe.

It is sleeping under my fingernails,
It is the undeniable, genetic, atomic truth.
Oh, my oxygen permeates everything.

It is the cell.

TerminalI want to kill you.

I want our love to be terminal,
And for it to be wrapped
around your heart tight when you die.
I want you to be looking
into my eyes when you do,
And I want you to know
what I have done to you,
for you.

I want our love to be terminal,
Or rather; til death do us part.

I meant what I said,
I want our love to last until you die,
Or I die,
Or beyond that.

Or; simply,
I want to spend my life with you.

To contain them...Words are but emotion, finally contained.
~My six word story

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Unfold, Part VIHear me read it

Oh, mother, how I flew.
You should have seen me soar!
No more shroud for me.

My wings are a pale reminder
Of that place, in colour,
You would be so proud of me.

I used to be so afeared
and swamped in my misery -
But now I am bright and bold.

Oh, mother, how I flew!
How I love the sparkling stars.
Mother, just watch me Unfold

Unfold, Part VHear me read it

I unstuck myself from the sticking place,
Where the creeping things like to seethe together.
I gathered up the great heavy folds of my history
and took several crooked steps into the broken world.

Milkiness faded and I saw monstrous friends,
Mine creatrix, I saw friendly monsters there too.
I pulsed and throbbed and digested life all around me,
and sometimes I crawled on my belly with the beasts.

But as I fed on the open veins offered up to me
I found myself substantial again, thick with reality.
I began to look, to enquire, to want, to desire -
I tightened and tensed and I .... flew.

Unfold, Part IVHear me read it

All at once I was felled,
Stranded and panicing under the vehement sun.
I threw a shield over my eyes
and tried to grope my way home.

There was no going back.

Safe haven disintergrated to dust,
I was lost. I am lost.
My crown barely formed,
The babe freshly born, I was lost.

My eyes still milky and new.

Cowering as my body revelled,
Expanded and exulted in the air -
I tried to rip myself from it,
To return to my self-made womb,

Do not go gently into that good night.

I shuddered, I drew long shaky inhales
To gather my wits about me,
I contracted and pulsated, in fear
I almost withered in my anxiety,

but there was no go

Unfold, Part IIIHear me read it

It was not quick, I prayed it was.
My bones grew long and jagged
and ground into the joints with impatience -
Oh and I cried,

As my tendons strummed and bowed
and my muscles throbbed
Until my heart itself wore the bruises -
Oh Gods the pain!

Confined, constricted around my neck,
Drowning in my own distress
And being strangled with the change
Oh how I wished for death then.

Death did not come for me
as my spine wriggled straight
and crack - my head forced through
Oh! Oh the light!

Unfold, Part IIHear me read it

My bones are creaking.
I hear them gossiping while I sleep,
and they talk of me.
They call me maddened.

They say that the blackness,
the ravenous cave, has devoured me.
They talk of me,
as if I am not here. Am I?

This was my safe space,
I, cacooned
In the warmth of my own breath
Now it cages me.

My fingernails grow so long
That they pierce through the paper
and my eyes go wide to see
fragmented light once more.

Unfold, Part IHear me read it

Oh, mother.
I am so weary of this life.
Oh, how tired I am of the shell I have become.
Put your ear to me, you shall hear what I see;
You shall see despair.

Oh, mother,
Mine creatrix, help me.
Oh, won't you lend me some new air to breathe.
I feel I may stew to death in melancholia;
Will I see you there?

Oh, mother -
but the world was cruel.
They dropped cinders on my ashen skin
and how they laughed when I wept.
How I wept.

Oh, Mother.

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Growth

by `KathrynODriscoll, Mar 5, 2013, 3:58:22 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

I remember the day I caught him 'gardening'. His cheeks stained cherry with the brisk wind that trotted beside him up and down the smothered garden path. He dropped a seed as his feet brushed past each other. Up and down he walked, a solemn lieutenant. I asked him what he was doing and those wide sky eyes reflected the ice as he told me he was trying to grow flowers for his mother. I looked at the seeds spilt on the snow and told him that they could never grow in these circumstances. I will never forget the clench in my heart when he responded, with a child's tongue; "I know".

Growthby `KathrynODriscoll

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

©2013 `KathrynODriscoll

About abandoning hope at a young age.

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=Sammur-amat May 3, 2013 General Artist

this sure hit me somewhere deep.

congratulations on the DLD, you lovely, lovely soul!

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=tonepainter Apr 19, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Congrats on the DLD!

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`KathrynODriscoll Apr 19, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you! Goodness

D

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*Hfeather53 Apr 17, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

congratulations on the DLD, darling

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`KathrynODriscoll Apr 18, 2013 Student Writer

!

! Oh my gosh.

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~Pepsiboy81 Apr 17, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Poignant, excellent wording. Great work

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`KathrynODriscoll Apr 18, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you so much!

Gosh!

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*rlkirkland Apr 17, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Congratulations on your DLD.
Peer recognition is such a heartening thing.

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`KathrynODriscoll Apr 18, 2013 Student Writer

It really is, I'm honoured! :']

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*xlntwtch Apr 16, 2013 Writer

Congratulations on your DLD!

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