[x]

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".

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

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

United, We WriteHear me read it

0hgravity, if by some divine fortune you should decide that today is the day you will fail me, then let me soar through the ChemicalSkyline. Grant me a-lovely-anxiety that raises a storm InTheStarryNightSky for me to riseandbe above all else. Let me soar.

How I long to be the frail rider-on-the-storm and not a victim of the RoamingShadow, Rogue-Of-The-Night, that BlackVelvetNightmare of my nights and days. I long for awaytobefree, won't you grant it to me?

I desire to be great, to feel greatness, to be more than one of many Sad-Writers spinning Sacred-Literature into SanguineEpitaph after saturninesweetness. scarletwave of

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.

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

MatterIt is only a matter of time
until the stone lays down with the sheep
and sleeps.
Rested firmly above the holes
where our eyes used to be.

It is only a matter of matter
until epitaph and eulogy diminish to dust
and sleep
becomes the eternal home,
not where our souls used to be.

It is only a matter of fact
that our words will become reductionist, redundant,
and sleepily
the world will forget
where our words used to be.

MaybeJust give me one dream that isn't see-through.
One substantiated claim to reality,
that I might hold onto life with.
Every quivering cell, mid-osmosis, begs you
for a shred of dignity with my tea.
Just one chance for something heavy,
something hard and room temperature. Real.
I don't want to look through my day dreams
and see someone else's face there.
I don't want to dream of those people
who may make, or break me, in the future tense.
I am tired of milky white and reflective black.
It is time for a life of colour and hope -
and not looking back to see if the past
matches up with the jigsaw map to the end game.
I want to be in the game, part

How Do You Like Your Eggs In The Morning?Sunnyside up.
The pan was still warm when I dropped it into the sink. We had eggs. You had them sunnyside up, but I couldn't bear runny egg whites and so I had scrambled. Just in case. You found your right shoe and left. I sat at the kitchen table drumming my fingers against the buttercup plastic cloth and thought about Life with a capital L. What was it all about?

I started to think of breakfast as a metaphor for us. You had it all together. Sunnyside up. I was scrambled. A convoluted tick of a person. I started to consider my life as being thoroughly forked. I watched the birds outside the kitchen window for a while and did not relate the

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

The RingsHear me read it

Almost everything about my funeral was perfect. My body rested, awaiting its captive audience, in the church hall over night. A Catholic tradition only afforded to true believers of the faith.

My entire family gathered and told stories of my better days. They remembered my contagious laughter, my love for them, and how I would cheat at cards to help my grandchildren win. They remembered the best parts of me, and my suffering fell into nothing.

I'd always loved flowers, and so there was no shortage of them that day. There were more flower heads in the church than there were people, but then, most of those I loved were waitin

Hard.On days like this it is hard to move
It is hard to dress myself.
Blouse a chest plate; dress me in chain mail.
- with the helmet on it is hard to see
it is hard to open my eyes, or lift my chin.
On days like this, it is hard to be human.

It is hard to raise my hands, to button
or to brush my mangy hair.
It is hard to construct the image of a person
out of these destitute materials.
it is hard to pump clotted, crumbling blood.
On days like this, it is hard to be human.

KonjukuYou think you are a pebble.

That's not the most romantic thing to say to someone, so you'll have to forgive my clumsiness. You think you are a pebble. That you have been worn down and eroded to the point where all corners have been smoothed out. That you have allowed the awkward elbows and ankle bones, the stutter and the scars, to be rubbed out. That you've let them wear you down until you are no longer abrasive when you come into direct contact with what they expect you to be.

You are not a pebble.

You are not small or part of a greater pattern. You are not disposable, at the mercy of Poisedon's temperate shifts. You are not the sum of t

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More from `KathrynODriscoll

Childish Literary GamesAll my life I have dreamt of love. I repeated scenarios in my mind until they sang pitch perfect a vibrato across an otherwise empty stage. Two particular fancies stayed in my mind often, lingering long after closing time to comfort me. I would dream of a man's confettied confession of love. He would cough it out and the blood of it, the reality of it, would slide down his chin and onto his shirt. It would be a palpable, palpitable love. He would say it to someone else and not know I was listening, and in turning our eyes would meet and the world would drain away, as a body prepped for fire.

My other dream was better. I would dream of a comp

This is nowWe stayed up all night talking about suicide and philosophy, and as the sun shrugged the night off, she said; "I know I'm still alive because when I inhale it tastes like glass". That was then.

Undying LoveShe screams, pain holding her, hands holding her hair and pulling tight, each strand reins to her conscious will. The drugs running through her system become a geas, an imposition stemming from the necessity in her soul.

The tetter barked and shouted it's way down her arms, her misery congealing in her wrists and at her throat, forming a lump that pressed down weightily on her trachea until clawing a breath in was more effort than she had energy for. She choked on a sob and the angular bite of the sound released some of the tension. She fell.

The beige, tiled floor rose to greet her decrepit, falling form. Undone, as if a string on her soul

Thy lips are warmOf all the words that mouth at love
and soften it with tongue and tooth
None will ever justify this breakage.
Never will there be diction enough
To make a heart salve, or tears unwept.

There will never be a word of woe
That suits to the shape of the thing.
Though many mouths may speak
of love and all her many expressions
airs, graces and confabulations.

None will correlate the meaning truly
how I loved for him, and he not for me.

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You'll Never Die

by `KathrynODriscoll, Feb 23, 2013, 1:39:04 PM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

Hear 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 tear on every face will taste of the sweat that you put into keeping me happy. Every soaring song of love will be played through your windpipe, your trachea my instrument of choice.

For every time that a hero has the strength to walk on, I will use your feet. I will weld them to my own and walk a mile. Walk a while. I will know them, and I will lend them to others as my own.

Every time I write of a man kissing the crown of a woman's head to relieve her pain, I will use your liver. It will filter out poisons and allow love to be pure again. For every route, your fingertips will guide me. They will be the map of the city in my mind.

I will borrow your parts, unasked, as my templates of perfection.

Because when a writer falls in love with you, you never really die.

You'll Never Dieby `KathrynODriscoll

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

When the time comes to say goodbye, whether it be tomorrow or a million kisses from now, I need you to know that I won't, shan't, can't forget you, and you will never die in my heart.

funerial: something with qualities resemblant to a funeral or related to a funeral.
metaphise: making of a metaphor

love 16 16

joy 3 3

wow 3 3

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~RushAndRuleIt 1 day ago

This reminds me of a saying that goes something like this, "Nothing truly dies until the last person who remembers it forgets." Do you by chance remember who said it?

`KathrynODriscoll 1 day ago Student Writer

I don't I'm afraid! Sorry <3

~RafeZweigun Apr 26, 2013 Professional Writer

Oh my god... Did what I just read really come from a pommy? 0_o

But you are quite correct, those I love will be preserved forever in the annals of my work.
Kinda fitting you used a tree too, I describe writing a book a lot like making an intellectual tree.

Thanks for sharing!