[x]

everything on my tonguethere are ghosts on my lips-

sweet smelling, they are
like sugar. a vulgar, sweet
sugar.

not really kisses, i know,
but bitter as kisses, i think,
coffee and eyes on eyes
trailing like cities,

caffeine on the folding sheets
rapping to our corneas,
dilating. craving to skin.

but sweet they are

like drifting fingers
on sailing nails.

but this lying- it brings
bitter salts under my tongue
and the inner folds of my lips
when i speak.
it puts the saltiest of oceans
to shame.

i know, i say. i know.
her, she says, no. no.

they are only ghosts.

'queer' for the skinfinger-tipped cigarettes,

please don't touch me.

i am only the girl next door
with coal eyes and pale lips-
the blankest of blankest lips.

i am only i am, i am only me,
i am only the sickest me without being
too much of me, the sickest me
of you and me,

i am not a god-complex with legs.
i am not the her with lying, buckled knees,
with all those smiles cutting into her skin,
i am not her- the her
with closets poison on her lips.

she is just a skin-cratered dream.

ephemeralthere's something about the
quiet mortality
of people-

the way we keep
to a sleepless night
with the tap of a train
under our feet.

the way we end
with the close of day,
the oranges and reds lingering
while the sleep
tickles our eyelids.

the way we hold each other
in our hands, knuckles tingling
and skin pounding
with each new touch and breath.

the kind of thing that lives
with everything in the way we speak, the careful whispers
in the crooks of our shoulders,
quick in patters of rain, but crawling in droplets,
a haunting reminder of what we are-

human.

the girl with love in her bonesHer lips are a smoky color—the type of chapped things with paled, cracked edges and words hanging off, clothed by the least incessant whines and the most liberating cries. They're somewhat extended and exemplified through the cigarette in her mouth—a thin figure held between the sticks of her fingers with filtered lips of its own, ashing edge, a paled body, and a slow burning with every breath. The grayed portions fall off in a dirty, snow rubble on the sidewalk, burning into it, leaving small holes by her feet.

"I don't understand," I say.

She sighs, breath coming out white, warm in the icy air. "It's a human thing." Her eyes are

i'd rather die than live not knowingeven in the early morning,
his eyes are the shape of dusk-
the type of thing that is
half asleep, yet so awake
in the perfection of blues
oranges and whites.

i tell him they're pretty things,
the thing i'd love to wake up to
everyday, but he sighs, and tells me
they're not the type of thing
worth remembering.

i ask why, and his lips tweak
in this sort of paled, half-mooned
shape, letting out a deep, tired sigh.
i feel them with my fingertips, i watch
the confection of his eyes moving
back and forth to the shape of my face-
the sort of dance that is done in the midst
of thinking- the kind of thoughts that are
the most worth

honey, we're a couple wars spenti met a girl once
who told me she had a boy
with a war set in the crooks of his lungs
and vocal cords, the perfect mix between
a hippie and a marxist,

with fire in his eyes the size of hammers
and coal, a manifesto of cold stares and
the distant histories of hiroshimas, nagasakis
and normandys-

words stuck on the thickest
parts of his lips, sealed in the cracks
with democracy and deity, hitlers
and stalins and mussolinis,
the pawn of the highest pedigree.

but he had his own soviets, americans
and europeans, she said:
the calluses, muscles, of his own skin-
the finest of cells of the working class,

the bone and the brittl

perfect eyes
i have the perfect woman, he said,
glass bodies all shown in her eyes
shining, oh shining.

she doesn't even see me, he said,
she only sees blues and pales and fats,
and sex and sex and oh, sex.

she tells me
i wanna be like barbie,
i just want to be like barbie.
i don't care if i'm made of plastics
or silicones and fakes and fakes and fakes,

i just want eyes.

no, not bodied eyes. not flesh eyes.
perfect eyes.

TorchesI met my best friend in the hospital where

he told me that the most dangerous illusion is that freedom
can come back screaming once
it's lost & as we got older our Fugazi mornings became claustrophobic midnights willing each other manic under the pining
of the carbon monoxide detector, pretty lushly taking
the humanest cancers, the causal
parallaxes our identical allergens, his god being bigger than
my god since he could pay the beats off in this cosmic experiment, where Lazarus became the first
fascist for making death real on the corollary,
taking me for a spin in religion's Ferrari with the post-hardcore dawn

a fever spreads to your lipsoh, play me that song you love, the one that falsifies your only breath and sends you spinning through dizzy trees and cold sweats. play the one where the sun despises your constant breathing, where it doesn't rise for days, so you close your eyes, and imagine its mouth on your throat. i'd play it over and over in my head, under my tongue, the notes speaking through every cigarette and falling dead as ashes as the next note rises, appears, ignites, floats to death.

you told me on the phone you were so in love you'd walk the world. but you wouldn't tell me whose name breaks your string of dreams, sends beads spinning on the floor, into corner

mornings in slow verseat nine a.m., the morning air is cold and damp, the sky a faint blue-gray. she can feel his breathing on the back of her neck, the slight movement of his chest and shoulders; she can feel the collapse, release, the gentle movements over her hips and back. it reminds her of nothing but the mornings before, the nights when she lay awake, the times he just wasn't there and she'd pretend to feel fingers tracing down her spine, counting each vertebrae, one by one.

one, two, three...

the coffee tastes like ash, the lips of a faint nicotine, dry and chapped skin. his arms feel brash, nothing rudimentary, as they encircle her waist, then shoulders,

tomorrowbreathing.

binding ropes, pointed sheets
and careful skies- i have all the oceans,
new days, richest nights and brightest
mornings

when i have the feeling
of the roughest rocks
under the soles of my feet-
the wood and splinters in my toes,
the cold metal to my arms,
the most frozen of fingers
pressed to my back.

arms are poison when they're numb;
ever is different when you can feel.

leaning, i have the air against my skin,
the deepest of skies breathing down my neck,
the poison of cradling eyes.

maybe being human is knowing how to feel alive;
maybe being human is knowing when to be alive.

black and white, knight eyes,

don't make me writein a world where
the world is but wind

i am the writer,
my fingers eating at
the words,

and you are the paperweight
holding my drunk hands down

helplesswhen we kiss, you breathe
nostalgia through the cracks
and i find myself empty

the girl who didn't get shoti am all aches and pains and coffee stains--
am i the smell before rain, the blood in your veins?
my life is composed of memories and scraped-up knees,
failed attempts at surgeries
of my mind and of my heart, of whatever stops me
when i'm trying to start.

i am all the shores they never graze, that haze
when the sun burns rainwater on roads.
i may feel warm but know this--i get cold,
i get frozen stiff and when i'm bent i won't fold.
the marrow of my bones hold blue-grey skies,
murkier than the rampant clouds in your eyes
but when i'm rib-caged i still have someplace to fly.

i am all the forlorn poets, for i've lungs and a tongu

break me purpleyou are the drunken waves
to the earthen ocean
under my soles,
the sick backbone-ache
for the weak

the cage
and the unshed shell
for safe eyes, shattered dams

as i weep

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breathing when you can't breathei am warm but
i think i'm naked and my clothes are at my feet
like colored, cotton, dead skin, and my breath is there, but not,
in that sick way where i know i can breath but i can't, and i feel
like i may suffocate and i will break in the same way cans do
when all their contents are sucked out and they are crushed,
in that same way you drown in the hands of billowing water, below ice,
and it's just there, i think, my breath, hanging at the mouth,
just dangling off my lips by the thread of my lungs,
almost as useless as air without oxygen,

and i am that dead little girl again, a doll,
waiting at the foot of the bed
with a wrangled

salutations, my spring.in the common we are
in each other's arms,
the widows of our eyes
closed, lashes to the
brine of our shoulders

albeit the dust of lastnights
and the mornings of our ghosting bones
the size of graying tree arms,
a forest outside the forest awash
our window

we exist in the world of me & you,
you & me, i & you,
you & i

a silence decor only with
your breath on mine, a slow, slow,
forthcoming rain.

if this were true,i did not hear the wet-sounding sobs
in the bathroom while i sat
by the crack between the floor
and the door, watching the dimmed light
that spill into the wooden panels, a girl
drowning under her own drowning knees.

i did not see a face
of a girl under that same dimmed light,
saturated eyes the color of half-relinquished suns,
lashes metallic chains of black saltwater
over cheeks of snow-parlor-- breathing lips
drawn chapped and in a thin, pink o.
not like oh, my god. but oh.

that type of face you made
when you were a child who traveled a bit too far
into the deep end of your aunt's pool,
and the floor disappears from your to

he is here.where i sleep
there is the shoulder-scent
of your body deep
in teenage sorrow,

pillow lips hugging my temple,
feathers running through hair
estranged fingers-

there is a dusk under my eyelids
dampening my joints, a cold blue

and frozen air to the skin,
making it rise with little moons
over the halves of nails, with the slow fall
of the dawn outside bleeding red
into the own blues of the sky

and the cobalt rain a tap on the glass
of my window

a transparent whisper.

there are galaxies in the morose of his skin.sometimes, before i go to sleep, i let myself lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling.

when i was five, i'd look up and see my mother staring back, her voice dropping to a whisper on my cheek, low enough to be swallowed by the breath of night around us: the cars speeding down the highway, the crickets in the neighbor's brush, the crying of the baby next door, april's distant violin i close my eyes to. it tickles my eyelashes, and i drift.

when i turn eleven, there's an emptiness about me. i hear nothing but my own breath, a thing i cling to in the darkness of night, the winter calm of snow falling outside my window. the blankets i have are

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[x]

in general anaesthetics

by =back-bones, Oct 9, 2011, 11:59:19 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

you are the you i want with hipster lips,
the type with snakes in her bones and
crystalline between all the pinks of her tongue,
the type with all the right secrets in
the crooks of her pockets and neck,
the type with the golden weights
creeping up the sides of her thighs
and back.

there's something about injustice that makes me want.

there's something about
the type of bitter sex on the radio tunes stuck
in all the right parts of her dilated corneas,
the type with short eyes and far ears and
a liberal face, filled with all the best rat-hands
and poor words that makes us bold in all the right places.

and i know there's something about the sweet smell
of democracy stuck under the swearing parts of her tongue,
something about all the confections of carnival eyes
that provoke anarchy and makes us spin.

there's something about the dystrophy in her muscles
that allows all the right tyrants in her hipster lips.

and the deviation is so enticing, it makes us sick.
it makes us sick with the freedom frozen to our hips.

in general anaestheticsby =back-bones

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

~Wattzon Jan 14, 2012

This really is such a wonderful poem. It's raw, enticing, and flows as it's read. Really quite beautiful.

=TwilightPoetess Jan 13, 2012

I agree with everyone above me, this piece is particularly lovely in a sort of "reality I don't really want to face" way. Seeing as other people have already posted up the lines that were also my favorite, I won't reiterate them again, as you wrote them and know them well enough already. But I agree--those last two lines are excruciatingly beautiful, the rest of this piece lovely. Nice work on this!

Also, it's those pieces we wouldn't want our parents reading, I think, that are often the most down-to-earth. Often the most real. Often the most beautiful, as they carry within them our deepest secrets.

!silverfleckedlullaby Oct 20, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

there's something about
the type of bitter sex on the radio tunes stuck
in all the right parts of her dilated corneas

Startlingly life-like for such original-to-the-point-of-being-odd imagery

=back-bones Oct 20, 2011 Student Writer

thank you

!proudeyesneverlie Oct 9, 2011

and the deviation is so enticing, it makes us sick.
it makes us sick with the freedom frozen to our hips.

god, yes. ♥

=back-bones Oct 9, 2011 Student Writer

~Vexxie Oct 9, 2011

You're work, I don't know. I always want to comment on it, just because it's so great, but I doubt you want another "It's amazing!". Sometimes, I wish I could just say I get it. I don't, but it doesn't make it any less beautiful. I just enjoy your word choices and line breaks, and hope that one day I can have a way of thinking similar to your's, because your thoughts are quite poetic.

=back-bones Oct 9, 2011 Student Writer

thank you very much. <3 it's just... when i write poetry, i don't like to be straightforward. it has a meaning to me, yes, but i think it's best for the reader to interpret it any way you'd like. (:

~Vexxie Oct 9, 2011

You're welcome, and I understand. That's the point. I've taken a few poetry classes actually, just I've never had the courage to post my poems anywhere. They just sit in boxes and bags around my room.

And yeah, I understand that. (: Thanks for just writing. Your poems are amazing, and I like just enjoying them the way they are, even without straightforward meaning to me.

=back-bones Oct 9, 2011 Student Writer

aw, thank you. i hope you keep creating as well, and share at least a little. <3 poetry is brilliant, i think, but also constantly underrated. i don't think any other writing is able to provide the same raw emotion as it does.

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