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A chance secondI lie awake, staring at the cornices.
3AM: my fingers worry at the corners of my sheet.
My anxiety worries at the corners of my rib.
I bite and tug and huff out my misery
As the silence keeps me awake.
I lay with pressure of your absence
Pressing down over my nose and mouth.
A soft asphixiation of the heart, of the sanity.
It is a hot grey night in London.

You are awake, startled by the sunlight.
7AM: you can't lift your weighty skull from the sheet.
The day sirens, but you stay, settled,
Under the weight of your shroud, your loss,
Only the silence keeps you awake.
Unknowingly, for the first time in weeks
We are unintentionally in sync;
Laid
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
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.
HAIKUWRIMOCOMPLETE 2013

February 28th, 2013

Dire desperation
A feeble whimper for help;
roar of these raw times.

February 27th, 2013

Gluttonous ash cloud
sucks the moon's blood
and swallows the night.

February 26th, 2013

Bark! An explosion!
Angry bodies escape the
network of lung cells.

February 25th, 2013

Silently cloning,
multiplying, honing in,
determined to kill.

February 24th, 2013

Tea and sympathy
readily available
for my dear sister.

February 23rd, 2013

I will hold my breath
as the north wind does the same
waiting for your love.

February 22nd, 2013

He hovers behind;
Hamletian apparition.
Always following.

February 21st, 2013

A lo
Finding Neverlove - Draft OneHear me read it

I have never loved you.
I did not love you since the day we met,
I did not love you the moment
I looked into your beautiful eyes.

I have never loved your soft voice
As it whispers my name in adoration
And I have never loved the look in your eyes
When you look at me.

I don't love your hair,
Or the way you look in the morning,
Half asleep and vulnerable and shy.
I do not love you.

I did not love you at the first touch,
At the first kiss.
I did not love you the first time,
Or the second time,
Or the last time;
Not even then.

Listen to me carefully -
I have never loved you.
I will never love you.
I will not love you until my
Never The Gold.I want my silver back,
I need to melt it down and forge a new connection
With someone else.
I want all the precious bits of myself
that I so willingly quarried for you.
I want my silver back.
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.
Sometimes, it's the little things.He always told me I was deep.
An unfiltered distillation of a humanitarian ocean.

He accepted me, gills and all -
  He knew that I needed my eccentricities to breathe
         under the seascrapers of pollution
               that hung over my head.
 Or he said he did.

At the end of it all,
he tugged the gills open to expose me;
    my innards trailed across the coral reef
       as I swam trustingly forward, hoping for the best.
 I tried to believe.

I believed him, gills and all -
But eventually, he left me, with holes in my sides
   Where he had spooned out my intestines
      To tether them to a boulder.
 I tried to breath
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.
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
At Least Your Body Doesn't LieClandestine kisses, of peaches and pearls
with half written romance by half witted girls.
Your tongue tells a tale as strong as the liquor
each passing heartbeat taints my heart bitter.

Your inaccurate adaption of saccharine truth,
whispered affections with the afflictions of youth.
You lie with your eyes and deceive with your hips;
I die in your arms and taste death on your lips.

Liar boy, lover boy, whom I love the most,
lift up your glass for a seraphim toast.
You lie when you speak but can't lie what you feel,
I know what you moan to my teeth is all real.
Sea SaltI walked along the bracket of the beach with a pocketful of salt that the sea no longer wanted. I had originally intended on returning it (one day), I didn't mean to keep it. Technically, because it wasn't mine, I stole that salt. I sifted the crystals out of the water and rolled them between my fingers until they were eroded smooth by the ridges in my fingerprint. Fingerprints embedded in the evidence. Salt embedded in my identity.

They never caught me. I was never reprimanded for stealing from the earth. I should have been. I should have been.
AfterIt follows me.
My silver skeined ghost.

An almost imperceptible thread;
only visible when you shine light
    directly upon it.
It follows me.

It rides the underground.
It hides under bridges,
Under trains.
It is woven into the spools of tar
         that form the roads between.

Inevitably if I walk too fast
it reminds me -
Like the tug of stitches in your cheek
that reminds you; you have lost your wisdom.
It reminds me.

It trips me in doorways,
when my mind is elsewhere.
If I look away from it -
           - it slips round my neck.
Another knot to throw over the beams
it mauls me without a fair chance.

I tried to sever it. I can't.
GrowthI 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".
Sleeping soundlyHe's talking in his sleep again
And I can't help wondering
If he's saying all the things he feels he can't say
When I'm (not) listening in the day.
Browse More Like This

More from `KathrynODriscoll

MSJames' Fashionable Furs - Draft One /MSJames' Fashionable Furs

They wrapped her up in diamonds
They parcelled her as a package
To sell her to the industry
For her to sell their baggage

Their shoes and their bracelets,
Their watches and their wraps,
Draped in the finest fox furs
On the shoot, a rabbit claps!
Moving On - Draft One /Moving On

I dated this girl for 5 months once,
She wrote the most beautiful poetry...
Twisted, but resonating, through the cut-throat anger,
That hid in the violent words she used about me.

I wanted to step into her lukewarm dreams,
Become part of the words she molded into her fashion.
When I watched her cry I wanted to know how she would describe it;
The sparkling in her tears, the deadness in her eyes.

We dated, although we barely went on dates.
We lived hidden in the spaces in between dates.
The uncomfortable silences and the recriminations.
She was my modern day Juliet - I longed to die for her.

We dated, once, and I longed t
Miss Understanding - Draft One /Mistake my charity,
For eyes being closed,
I'll still give you my promises,
You can have all of those.

Mistake my compassion,
For pure stupidity,
I'll still give you forgiveness,
And eventual humility.

Mistake my sadness,
For talent not despair,
I'll fashion your fairytales,
Out of thin air.

But don't you mistake me,
Me and my sweetness,
Don't mistake my little smiles,
For simple weakness.

If I'm always there for you,
It's just 'cos I care.
It's not so you'll use me,
Or you're a burden to bear.

But if one day you need me,
And I'm not around,
When you call out for me,
I don't make a sound.

You better come running,
And

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The Food Chain

:iconkathrynodriscoll:

Cherish swam through the ocean sleepily, her eyelids bobbing over the dark orbs on either side of her narrow face. She exhaled bodily, her fins expanding and then slowly contracting in time with the water rushing in through the minute slashes that ran down her sides. Her fingernail sized heart trembled vivaciously, on the edge of a violent flurry as she skirted past a Dorado unnoticed. Her mind was elsewhere, circling, circling, like a Sprat in a see-through spherical piece of coral. She slipped down through the seams holding the ocean together, down to the ocean floor. Here, far from the noise of the surface dwellers, she could forget. She could get lost in the opiate beauty of the aquanine seascape. What Cherish needed now, more than anything, was to get lost-- a bite, a snare! A fragment of crystal caught her and slid its sharp brutality in a clean slice through her paper body. In less than one minuscule flutter of her already blue heart the water coloured red. In the last moment of her life, as she prepared to be devoured amid the glass littering the ocean floor, she idly thought - oh well, plenty more fish in the sea, and died.

184

20 19 5
:iconkathrynodriscoll:

The Food Chainby `KathrynODriscoll

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I was thinking about how when people leave, and they say theres plenty more fish in the sea... and you might try to look and not even realise that all those people in the past have left minefields in your head, in your heart. Like glass littering the sea. Unseen, unexpected, fatal things that mean that just because they've left, doesn't mean you can move on.

Poor Cherish the fish.
©2013 `KathrynODriscoll
Category: Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

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:iconstory-of-a-mind:
~Story-of-a-Mind Apr 18, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Like Sea Salt this could also be read as a message to protect the environment, both, the natural environment and the social one. To make sure not to let any agressive messages lay around that someone might get hurt from.
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:iconkathrynodriscoll:
`KathrynODriscoll Apr 19, 2013  Student Writer
Nods, that was in my mind a little too, like as a kid I used to take pebbles from the beach but I always felt bad and shook them out of my pockets before I got into the car
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:iconstory-of-a-mind:
~Story-of-a-Mind Apr 20, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
We tended to bring home buckets full of collected seashells from beach holidays. But to be honest, I never regretted that. ;)
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:iconathazagoraphobias:
~Athazagoraphobias Mar 9, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
The ending was quite unexpected!

A lovely picture of just how unhelpful that little phrase can be.
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:iconkathrynodriscoll:
`KathrynODriscoll Mar 10, 2013  Student Writer
:giggle: Thank you. I love to surprise people!
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:iconkazul9:
~Kazul9 Feb 18, 2013   Writer
Oh, wow, I can't say I expected that ending. Definitely hit me where it hurt -- in a brilliant writing sort of way. X'D
Still, it's a beautiful concept. I agree, poor Cherish the fish. v_v
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:iconkathrynodriscoll:
`KathrynODriscoll Feb 19, 2013  Student Writer
Smiles, thank you! and I'm really glad you enjoyed it / kinda. :D
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:iconkazul9:
~Kazul9 Feb 20, 2013   Writer
Oh, I definitely enjoyed it! :D I'm one of those odd types that really appreciate a goo tragedy; especially with great writing. :)
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:iconkathrynodriscoll:
`KathrynODriscoll Feb 21, 2013  Student Writer
haha good :}
Reply
:icondonutmonk:
~donutmonk Feb 13, 2013
;A; *dashes forward in a hug tackle*
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