[x]

gratitudewinter:

he slides you a coffee across the table and says
the ladders in your tights look like rollercoasters
and the bottom of your stomach drops and you smile
because he has nice eyes and he bought you coffee
and you want to be a girl that wants these things, you want to be
a rollercoaster, and you take a sip of your new drink
even though he ordered one with everything you hate and you say
thank you
and you hope he doesn't notice that you touch the cup again

spring:

he hands you a picked daffodil from just down the road and says
your smile isn't half as bright as this
and you take it in your hand and you snap the stem gently near the bot

loving you nowloving you the way i do now is like a revolution
bodies swarming back into the streets
flags and hand signs and guns thrown into the air
loving you now is thick ropes with sharp hooks
necked around the bright marble statues of you,
pulling and pulling and shattering,
loving you now is fallen idols in the streets
and the smell of sweet breads, and the sound of
hammers and nails and wood skeletons going back up;

loving you now is like rebuilding a city i nearly bulldozed
(loving you as a friend is easier than loving you as a god)

loving you now is so much better than loving you then

fox skinthe heat is rolling in like a bad omen
and i will be waiting on the doorstep
with my arms open wide as if for the rain
one day you will come home and i will
fit you into my palms like you were built
to cradle between my lifelines and crooked thumbs
to tuck into the folds of my too-tight skin,

like your lungs held air
even when i wasn't breathing into them.

summer means three things:
i. my fingers tangle like headphones in your pocket and i drop letters and don't care
ii. i would hook my hands into my neck with fishhook fingers if i could pull you out of me
iii. i choke on my own tongue trying to summon the words that will summon you.

romance! death! i don't even know if i like you!nothing good lasts forever - so that's okay
we'll be holding hands right into the apocalypse

cloudhandedthey tell you that you're strong and you
imagine them handing atlas the skies
and whispering the same thing;

you only wanted to put everything down for a few moments:
it is not weak to need to breathe in again, it is
not weak if your lungs cannot hold down saltwater

it is not weak
it is not weak
it is not weak

you not are a battlefield but i am a gunyou stare solemnly out of the window,
telling me that you just feel empty:

i think of the months i have spent
levering chunks of myself out,
chipping off pieces and pressing them
into the jigsaw shaped holes of you
like a nurse on a battlefield pressing the bandage down

you have buttoned your jacket up tight
to keep your wounds in and the doctors out,
you are a veteran in your own right and yet
i want nothing more than to bite your scars open
and hang your swords over the fire
like two curved metal cadavers.

i want to sew your pain into history,
and amputate you from it. (you are not a jigsaw,
or a soldier, but i am holding a hacksaw.)

peaches and cherries and usthere will be other girls,
with bloody nails shorter than their tempers
who
in the lazy hours of the evening will compare you
and the creases of your stomach and the lines on your face
to the beach and the sea and the onslaught of a wave,
there will be other girls who will love you
like they are punishing themselves for something :

but they won't be me. if you are a beach,
then i will be landlocked; i am burying my past at
the bottom of my garden, six feet deep,
with a stake through her bitter little seed of a heart.

i am growing a tree through her throat, and eating
of the fruit, and i will never cast my eyes seawards again -
no matter ho

you're crumblingyou are a writer and you want to tell me a story but you
are the worst kind of writer because you're too busy
scribing as you go to feel your heels catch the air.
you are a tailor walking down the street
and unpicking seams just to prove you know how.

i thought you were writing a romance,
until i noticed that you were writing a tragedy.
or maybe just a horror.

i thought i was the vampire in your
universe, i thought you'd take your inky fingers
and put me down as interesting and sharp
carve me out of cobwebs and silently
fall in love with me

i thought you were writing about me. well,
it's too late now. i'm writing about me, and

My mistake.I am
so sorry.
I love you, you see? I love you so very, very much.
And I will love you inside and out, through every hole and break and
hastily-patched addiction, and through every triumph and every
single
hurt.

I will hurt you. I will love you and so to me, I will think
that I want you to love me back. That pretty smiles and
laughter and words well spoken are not enough, that I must tear myself down
for you to really see me. For you to love me.

I will put my hands in my hands, peel back the skin and pluck the nerves
and sever each touch. You will say
look at me, see how it hurts
and I will tear out my eyes and will not see you

weathervane"I would like to kiss you,
very slowly on the mouth
as soft as a sunrise."

I have a pen between my teeth
and this is all I have written to you
in shaking letters. I have plasters on my fingers
like my goal is to keep my claws in,
when they are really there to keep my teeth out
and I have not washed my hair in days.
I am the parody of the beast and my letters to you
are fumbled and dropped and bitter peeling
behind my teeth. jammed into the gums, and I
cannot write anything that does not growl with a lie.

I want, I want to kiss you, just once,
just one single time to know what your face feels like
under my hands, I wa

we will live longer than i will(it's winter and that means that
all the trees are hard and sharp
like flint, like spears growing up at the sky,
ready for war, built to shatter.
it's winter and i cut the fingers
off of my gloves to make room for you.
it's winter and
i already wish it was over.)

(it's winter and i'm burning my fingers
on cardbord coffee cups,
shuffling foot to foot in the show
with my bus money in my hand,
pulling the curtains closed and
sleeping with shoes on. it's winter
here and it's winter where you are and
i don't know how i feel about that.)

(i want to be warm beside you.)

(i want to see you shivering first.
i want to see if t

throati am breathing in smoke and breathing out letters,
hands claw-bent around a cigarette
i am breathing in snow and breathing out hurt
holding my hands out like a sacrifice

our bodies are brick, our bodies are mortar,
our hands are spead out and utterly hollow
human dams, pushing back the rainwater,
fighting against the first shivers of ice

everyone thinks their pain is the first,
that they alone have been hit by the swirling waters
that their fingers are the only ones crooked with cold

i do not care if i am predictable:
i miss you

et tuYou are the second hand on all of the clocks, and
you are the first.
I hold this pen and I reach for words when all I want
is to curl my fingers into yours.

I left, yes, but I came back.
If you prefer, I can dress it up and break it down,
a play-by of our lives, but that is, in the end
all there is.

If you wanted, now, I would
scissor and incision myself open, break my ribs
like a flower opening, and you could sit
in my chest
forever.

Is that odd? I'm never sure, with you. I would walk
over hot coals and broken glass for you, but
I don't think you'd like that.
I think you'd prefer me to stay with you, and not
hurt you,
and k

oh darling, oh darling, oh darlingThey say take a long hot bath and open your wrists
- yes, this is going to be one of
those
poems-
but isn't it easier to take a quick shower
and bite your nails until the edges bleed?

They say three boxes of painkillers
and a bottle of vodka, but isn't it easier
crying in the kitchen with your feet bare
to take two more pills than you would for a headache
and knock it back with a fizzy drink -

they told me practice made perfect
long before they told me the rules of wanting to lay down
and die. So you stand in the doorway,
hair wet and curling water down your back,
always two more pills in your fist than last time,
always a

papier-macheDear you;
I fall asleep and dream about you. The same one,
every time. I am at an airport,
tucked up against one wall with coffee and everything
is bright and cold and boring. The cup is
slotting cardboard crinkles into my palms
because I will not let it go.

Your plane touches down.

-

Dear you;
I have this dream, I keep having it. Your plane touches down
and I wake up. My hands are smooth.
But tonight I fell asleep on the sofa,
humming french songs because I don't speak anything
but english and every word reminds me of you.
I fell asleep tucked up and humming sleepily and your plane
touched down, and there you were.

-

Dear

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More from ~wish-sticks

Callister, or Risk Of FallingI smoke my pen like a cigar.
I mean it - the flame takes too long to catch
while the smoke chars up my ceiling and
scrubs the back of my throat greasy raw.
The plastic lid plops on the wooden table
like leeches, a grub birth
it tastes like black and tang and then the end
of the ink is burned away. A black tide coats
my metal gums; I smile.

Dedication to my art, my poetry is measured
counted and click clacked and
my heart is always somewhen else.

I yearn to meet boys on street corners,
scuffed up against the moon -
pale as white, not as skin is white;
grey and creased like a bandage. His eyes
the colour of a new lit

celtic knots on my finger topsthe sun is shining on my feet and i am thinking
about the curls of my hair and reflections and water.
the washing machine grumbles away,
and i hide from the fresh breaths of newborn season
behind these flimsy walls of bricks and duty.
how i long to steal some bread from the bread bin
and find a lake somewhere. to walk in the light, of my own vocation.

water ripples and dances and catches the light
to and fro, back and forth -
can you catch the light without sinking?
i can. my heart was born to beat in the summer,
with muddy feet and green stained joints
(grassburn is the coolest flame you can touch)
quenched with dew and the wi

day thirteenthe moon; ohio
anywhere with sunlight, and
anywhere not here.

country of hopethis girl, she's held together with plasters
and paint and not much else.
her eyes glint with musical notes and
i swear to god, if i cut her

she'd bleed.

i was going to say something plithy and cute about rainbows,
but a picture is worth a thousand words
so how about i sing you to sleep, instead?
you're the goblin queen;

the golden child of a generation that hates anything precious.
fuck the future, this is the now
and in the now you're not quite good enough-
am i right, love?

now they climb up your back, wordbeasts and unthoughts.
unfeelings.
they push down on your temples and the plaster over
your plasters with lies and bile

day twelve- woke up still asleep
- fed, watered and existed
- finally. night time.

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block/head

by ~wish-sticks, Jan 20, 2013, 2:10:46 PM
Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

I don't write,
- any more

I don't think I remember how to
or how to take my dry-throat swallows and let them be birds
how to turn words into things that matter, or how you
wrap up your heart like a four-cornered blanket
like a bundle on a stick before you leave town.

I don't remember how to start a sentence with "you are"
and end it in anything besides "drifting away from me".

I don't write, any more. Not even to you,
I just sit cross-legged in front of a thousand screens
and I touch my palms to the keyboard like you'll feel the heat of them,
and I

I don't write.

block/headby ~wish-sticks

Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

©2013 ~wish-sticks

you you you you you you you you
you
y o u
it seems all i ever do it churn out goodbyes to a never-ending line of you

*imaginative-lioness Apr 18, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

I seriously want to hug you, this piece is awesome

Reply

~wish-sticks Apr 21, 2013

screeches <3

Reply

~em-arginated Feb 23, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

I don't remember how to start a sentence with "you are"
and end it in anything besides "drifting away from me".

Reply

~ellathepirate Jan 21, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

I adore you

Reply

~kaelamae Jan 20, 2013 Student Writer

This actually perfect! Love it

Reply

~drinkingteainagarden Jan 20, 2013

I really love this. It's simple, and it's short, but it says all it needs to say and it describes it all perfectly. I wish I wrote like this when I was writing about not being able to write (or at all, really!)

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