Poets-and-Warriors

nearly dear i caught a butterfly in a nosedive there underneath a pink cannonball off-guard flying close by sunrise heard a moth sigh i climbed on a serenade to hear something new i colorized a mixtape with a stunning view but lost my ticket so i painted a route in pearls of dew with angels’ tears the day’s end is near for us sinners i found my way home right in time for dinner

If    the pen                is mightier and knowledge                        is power, then         truth in verse              is telling and words                 may cost us much.

I buried my words under my tongue & turned my teeth into tombstones. Here lies hello, too shy to be uttered, just left to wither while my fingers tapped out its letters, & here lies goodbye, so scared of being alone, it left the roads between me and we empty. Love died the day my heart started beating, when it pumped out too much sense & not enough courage. Sorry was found murdered, its meaning stolen, the day it would have been relevant. I smothered help with my claims that I didn’t need it, then I forgot how to breathe & no one could see it. My mouth became a cemetery, & I chewed on petals to keep the smell away, but no matter

I. My prison is one of carved trees and dead photographs. Splinters play paper cuts along the strings of my sanity and shred them one-by-one in a countdown to my sentence. Breathing in black and white, I wonder what it means to suffocate. II. He placed fingerprints inside of my flesh and lysed me like a disease. With sternum on vertebrae and rib cage sprawled to match the pelvic girdle, my heart cannot withstand the atmospheric pressure. I have no stomach for the sight of blood. III. Butterfly, you are the only color that I have left. Fairy dust stains my irises with rainbows and dread, leaving a moth's corpse from his destruction. Did i

Her name is Stitches and I love her. She doesn't believe that - she says it is an improbability. She doesn't say impossibility and that gives me hope. No one but me knows why she's called Stitches. I've run my hands over her soft white skin, Flushed with the fevers of midnight. I've touched it. I've let my fingertips explore the hitches in her skin, Where her body couldn't quite heal itself. Old memories of gaping holes and vicious lies. From her shoulder to her wrist, From her knee to her ankle, Any where she can negotiate a knife - she is Stitches. It makes her cry sometimes. She says she doesn't like being a rag doll any more. They

Where the Jabberwock walks, walk not I, for he doth walk where four winds sigh. At the edge of the world, where the drop is nigh. he waits and watches with all-seeing eye. His fated alliance to the night, renders him a threat to light, Jabberwock, I fear your might, to loosen sleep swathed blankets tight. Beware the Jabberwock, my child, his spirit roams within a wild chaotic dream – appearing mild, at first magic! Be not beguiled! Fire and blood course thro his veins to take our sorrows, our fears, our pains: eternal food with wondrous gains give him strength to light his flames. He lives by claw, by sharpened teeth, A conscience d

“Oh Lancelot, Lancelot,” wept the lady of Shalott, “dearest knight, I cannot  go on.” “On I go to Camelot  to meet you, my Lancelot.” Now the lady of Shallot is gone.

to you i am only me beneath sun shadows & "pretty" little stereotypes. you hang my insecurities from my neck like a sex thief - stealing me from myself. were you that hungry - starved out from the frostbitten world between your own thighs? aroused & f r u s t r a t e d - you are a bruise - purple & ugly - there is nothing "pretty" about you. no inch of the cosmos rests like a fever beneath your skin. You: a dead wasteland of - cold. i am uncategorized space, a body of seared rose petals & thorns. like a burning kiln - phoenix feathers, i am the eye of Jupiter's hurricane, raging for centuries. -DP

The rice was louder than the bells: how they fell (unceremoniously and anticlimactically) from moderate heights to unswept, well-trodden ground; time capsules wrapped in white, crushed and covered with dirt -- soon to be bombshells.

By the time Kim Reed realized that she was getting used to losing people, it was too late for her to do much about it, except perhaps find herself a therapist. Nobody dead, of course – no one could possibly become truly accustomed to death. But they were all leaving, one by one, drifting out of her life as she drifted out of theirs. A father she hadn’t seen in over a decade, an aunt dying of Alzheimer’s in a nursing home, a mother and grandfather who were abroad more often than not, best friends who had lives of their own and couldn’t wait around for her family to decide what to do with her. And one almost-friend, one