[x]

the things they should have told ussee, no one really warns us about growing up.
they leave out things like heartbreak and gossip and broken people you could have saved but didn't.

it is this: the girl who holds her wrists and sits alone and tells me no child should ever grow up being afraid of someone who should love them. Her eyes are fierce, and something inside me is screaming but the clock ticks and the moment is past. i pretend i can't hear the pieces of her shatter as they hit the floor.

the next time we speak there are new shadows beneath her eyes and her shoulders hunch as if somehow she could fold into herself and disappear. maybe it would be better for us both if

a long awaited return.It was raining when we landed.
A shock
to our sun-drenched systems,
stumbling with snatched-
away sleep.

Another bus, another train
whirring upon endless tracks.
We run, we flee through foreign streets –
disdainful eyes stare on,
watching fugitive

outsiders -
desperate for a taste
of home.

The EarthenI have a wooden heart.
Slowly carved from the crevice
of the poison oak
twined around the holly and ivy
hawthorne, birch, beech,
brittle aspen and whispering pine--
I am what the earth has made me.

Cut open my flesh and sow the seeds
that drift free of the veins like snow;
each dandelion tuft or seedpod remnant
swishing off with each sweep
of the wind's own broom,
spilling words and stories as they go;
growing as they fall,
dying as they wane.

I have bones comprised of iron.
They stand rigid to attention, militant
against the flaking igneous tissue
and the congealing rocky muscle,
layers of fossilized concepts
drilled

the less i knowsomething new: my breath hitched but the words meant nothing.
i owed the light peserverent flattery in the form of prose,
stories of what could have been.

the gloom in which i slept was a system altogether unable to measure up to the new universe;
to exist together in perfect cognition is first to understand that i never wish to be better.
how pitiable this impure form to which we all succumb
littered with stars. i am temporary like them, almost, always and never.

I have forgotten how to live. it is late mornings during which i upturn my lazy eyes to the sky
against it's will. there, like you, live millions- and my mind is reborn.

t

Nuclear Winter'Mother, tell me again about the sun.'
She pauses scraping the stretched hide,
thinks. So many images she could give, in words
he wouldn't understand – golden, sunrise, light.
Her son was born to cold darkness, has never seen
the sun, animals in clouds, gods in the midnight sky.

Some days, what she misses most is the sky,
more than electricity, than fresh tomatoes, than sun-
shine. The white tails of planes created scenes
of foreign adventure, when only thunderheads could hide
the horizon and the day produced its own light.
Now the horizon chokes on ash and she on useless words.

She never lets him see her cry when her words

Alzheimer'sHis house is made of crumbling slats
    of rotted knotted oak
  peeling paint
and weakened joints.

  The wind blows unfettered
through unshuttered apertures
   dragging fresh sunlight in
      and memories away.

Even on the clearest days
       he visits the front porch
    less and less often.

        He prefers to explore
    those rooms further in
where tide and time have yet to reach.

Searching for the SunI.

The day everything ended, she was standing in a parking lot, weary from a long day of departures and destinations, staring up at the sky. Clouds strolled west, their armfuls of grey dripping out of their grasp and spattering onto the asphalt, onto her upturned face. They rolled and crashed into one another, piling up high in the stratosphere like mountains of cottony stone. Once, they had been at war, and their arguments had sliced across the countryside with the recklessness of a summer fire. Now, though, something had calmed them. Perhaps they were tired from their travel like her, or perhaps it was the sun, gently wedging them apart wi

Exhume and InhaleI have tasted God, he tasted of sweet wine
and sandalwood, the deep forest you lay down

in the moss and twigs, scattered like finger-bones,
your spine ripped out, curved like a bow.

I couldn't find your heart, trembling
against the opened cage of your ribs,

under the gently speaking rustle,
leaves unfurling, the dance of sunlight

slinking between your vertebrae:
piccolo skims and birchskin shaves.

I fled. Your right shoulder blade beckoned still,
unfolding like the slow feathers of a wing,

your wrist flung out, palm
up, gasped my name,

but I could not stay, only
strained your skin with oleander tea,

drifted, drifted with the t

another notch on the wall. 1.
a while now,
a while now has passed
with bruises crying jagged from your voice
and pretty little nicks upon
your memory.

( tricky partners dancing
stiffly
within your hands cupped around a flame,

for artists draw and
writers scream

another curse at the bleeding night
snipping stitches and
weaving nightmares into weary minds.
)

dragging bottles of paint behind you
like they were clanging and
swishing the secrets of life into
your ears,
oh, your ears bled with screams

the hanged manThis little red book you call the human body:
take it up and shake it. Shake the flaking pages
out of it, shake it from endpaper to endpaper
until the last of the phrases are gone; shake it
until it's aching and empty, the soul of a bird.

I will give you new words.

WaitingWaiting

Pale willow girls wait by the river, brides of the water,
Guppies swim through their veins, silver darts of bright pain.
Their names are hieroglyphs of mist, frost and rain.
They walk barefoot in the snow, leaving tracks so they know the way back,
A tracery of breadcrumbs that the ravens will never eat.

Twelve princesses slip underground,
Dance in slippers of tattered frayed silk,
Corkscrews of ribbon, stiff with blood and melted tallow.
They inject themselves with music until their eyes hum like bumble bees.
Then they sleepwalk through the day in a haze of yearning
For fierce wet stone beneath their frenzy of feet, of bon

Alive Like Dirt-

Winter vanished, a dream
Minutes after having woken;
The imprint and the lines
Still crisscrossing the edges
Of thought, retreating at my
Touch. It was important.
           I think.
                      I thought.
Though, I've lost it now.
           Am reeling now.

I reached out, five distinct
Points forming a living symbol.
           A tool.
&

02:22 AMi.

Like drops of water we fall

yet

I must be
of
a different
drop

you might think that
you want to be different yourself
but

you do not

you want to be special

I am not special

everyone wants to be special
although
not so special
that

they're different.

ii.

Some girls
want to seduce me

because I'm different

I don't mind, but
I've never really liked those girls

I don't really like girls at all

I like sex though, so..
I let them

even though
some will fall

(plip.)

in love with me.

iii.

Some boys
want to beat me up

show me my
true
face

also because I'm different

and because they grew up with a strong father

GrapefruitI hold a microcosm in this globe,
heavy on the palm of my hand,
full of regret and heat.

it is heft and heady smell,
the unexpected roundness discovered on the ground
after the season's first rain, a secret shielded
by shining leaves pulled open like wet, wide eyes.

The skin blushes with nervous goose-flesh,
fragrant as a summer promise.
It is the dark light behind your iris,
lemonade on the green porch,
hair stripped by the sun until it is soft and wild.

It holds the flesh of the hot season
tightly beneath its puckered skin
and I knock on the door of its fullness
with my teeth.

We are sharing this summer secret together,
in

Metastasis98.00

Autumn is the season when everything dies.

The leaves shrivel up and your lungs go with them, tiny dejected organs drying out inside your sternum, crinkling under our footsteps. The doctors pronounce their diagnosis as the leaves fall, listing medical terms and percentages and something about medication options.

The disease is metastatic: it has bored its way out of your lungs and into your bones. Dissatisfied, it's going for your organs, your liver, your heart. The prognosis says Christmas is a pipe dream, likely as the sun ceasing to set.

You promise it anyway.

94.00

November comes and I am a fish, breathing through makeshift gi

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walking homeor empty like a cavern soft
and lonesome how the snowflakes lie still
like they’ve nothing left to live, waiting with their silence
as the sky pours over, as it snows and it snows
and i could go run like some madman in some movie but
life is neither black nor white, her

beauty neither black nor white her
nature neither black nor white – nor any shade of soft
mourning grey but
kind and caring etc yet still
brittle with brown mixed in like how the gorgeous snow
settles in the soil and grass silent

as she is silent.
i think so much of her
yet my heart’s body is statue with the earth the snow
strewn in my hair the sunlight sof

doctorsso she looks at me like i’m bloody nothing to nobody
and she says to me, she says to me
“what’s making you feel like this then andrew?”
not even a glimmer in her eye, not even a glimmer
– although there is neither one in mine –
and so i tell her, anyway. i tell her about the stress,
about the sickliness of it all,
about the feelings of being strewn like
being strewn in a valley by some cold black
claws in some cold black
clouds where beyond there’s nothing at all. nothing.
but she gets this everyday. everyday in her chair in her office
and she’s never felt it, has she?
she’s never felt

quiet lilac, chapt. iiI don’t know what it is about ambition that makes you so unlikeable. I guess it’s a problem that I’ve always had. Something I’ve always wondered, I guess. I guess, maybe people think that you’re screaming to be better than them, that you’re going out of your way to make them look like idiots. Maybe that’s what it is. People don’t like that sort of stuff, when you make them look like idiots. They get all self-preservative and whatever. Thinking about it, maybe that’s what it is.

Funny, really, because you never really try and come across like that. You just do. Ambitious, I mean, sorry; yo

quiet lilac, chapt. iI’m not really sure how to start this or how to word this or anything. I– I guess, if you really wanna know – it’s been a long time since I’ve really introduced myself to anybody or anything. I don’t even know what people even say to say hello, to be honest with you. People always seem to be so confident but you never know when they’re putting on a face. I mean, maybe they don’t know how to start things either. Maybe it all comes easy to them.

...You know, I’ve tried this starting part about fifty thousand times, you know? I can’t get it right. I’m such a bloody idiot. I mean,

never mindI guess it’s kind of funny, if you think about it. You always see in the movies – in the TV shows – people running and screaming and praying and stuff. That’s what Hollywood always thought it would be like. Some sort of ‘death cloud’ or something – or like an asteroid or something like that – that just happened: that just totally hit everybody by surprise.

People have known about it for months. It’s not like in the movies. The word ‘inevitability’ comes to mind: and hey, guess what? Nobody cares to run from the inevitable. It’s pretty stupid – isn’t it, if yo

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Submitted: March 12, 2012
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moth wings

by =andrewpom, Mar 12, 2012, 1:50:14 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

with no alarm
she dances through the bony air,
eyes like a hungry child
slobbering at the first scent of knowledge.
glistening off of those eyes
– the very sight of it –
the taste that all greedy minds crave.
she flutters towards it,
light peaks through her delicate wings
like how it flickers under the water's surface,
an angel ascending into heaven

easily and swiftly crushed
by the capital hand
that shadowed behind such heavenly light
– with all intention of crushing the wings of innocence –
and with a clear conscience,
as a moth is to a hand as what a person is to the universe.

isn't it painless for a hand to swat forth
and drop a bomb from a plane thundering over a burning city
because it can't see the suffering it causes?

wouldn't it be immaterial, then,
for a puissant hand
to drop one from heaven?

moths that are dazed by the beauty of light
are not seldom blind
to the torment that it's agent to.

moth wingsby =andrewpom

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

thank you to ^Beccalicious for the dd.

especially, i owe a big thank you to everyone for all the positive support you've given me. i think people sometimes shy away from saying "i love it!" or whatever on a piece of artwork because they think it seems unintelligent. but i don't think they truly know, or truly realise, how some simple words like that can really lift a person.

reading is the greatest gift to writing. thank you.

~ andrew

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-05-30

Moth Wings by *AndrewPom ( Featured by ^Beccalicious )

Critique by !ConnorwithtwoNs Mar 20, 2012, 7:20:35 PM

I'll start of my answering your questions. I personally would have preferred the word 'Slobbering' in the first stanza. I don't think it would have taken away from the aesthetically pleasing side of it, in fact despite the negative connotations of slobbering I think it would have enhanced it. Yearning is quite a worn-out-word in poetry, and I think slobbering would serve to better demonstrate your point.

The structure for me was appropriate. What I got from the poem upon my reading it was the moth's attempt at gleaning knowledge had been thwarted, so the interruption of and changing of the tempo helped to illustrate that. The shorter, faster paced stanza's helped to create the sense of suffocation.

I took the poem quite literally when I read it. I think the angle you were going for is a sort of "The man putting down the small people" kind of vibe. The "Capital Hand" that thwarted the moth's wings of innocence may be some oppressive higher power, or the central characters own limitations.

Over all though I'm very impressed. What I enjoyed most was that you have metaphor and description placed parallel to each other throughout. The one I enjoyed most was the "bony air" followed by "eyes like a hungry child". It set the tone very well and you maintained the standard.

The imagery had quality. It for me came across as so simple, but effective. For example, the shadow of the moth under some light (maybe even just a table lamp) and then suddenly the dark shadow of a hand. It was very enjoyable and encouraged me to read on.

I have only one criticism, and that's about the theme, because I can't fault your writing. In my opinion I think it's a bit of a tired theme at times. It's quite linear, as in: Hope - optimism - denial - pessimism. I think you've demonstrated an ability to create flourishing imagery, and so with a slightly different theme this poem could have been one abundant with joy, beauty and optimism, without the sour taste at the end. (However that is hypocritical as it's what I've done in this critique. haha)

Overall, excellent job.

What do you think?

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15 out of 15 deviants thought this was fair.

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love 8 8

~~joy 0 0~~

wow 4 4

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~tawakitsune Apr 7, 2013

oh my god this is so cool!! i love the thought behind it and everything!!

=andrewpom Apr 7, 2013 Student Writer

~brokenfragilethings Apr 4, 2013 New member

_{What a well deserved DD!

I don't think there's anything else I could say that hasn't been said in the comments and critiques, but I really enjoyed the vocabulary in this! Your formatting is very simple, nothing really visual on it, but it has a lovely flow just the way it is. Wonderful job, and congratulations, again, on the DD! x}

=andrewpom Apr 4, 2013 Student Writer

thank you

and i totally forgot to welcome you to deviantart! where are my manners?! i am such a good example...

~brokenfragilethings Apr 4, 2013 New member

_{Bahaha, it's completely alright! This is actually sort of a side account that's kind of morphing into a main one x:
The object of many of my poems has my other dA link, and I don't really want them connecting the dots, if they read the poems.

So, I made a more personal one, which happens to be this.

But thank you for the welcome, regardless! x}

=andrewpom Apr 4, 2013 Student Writer

i am totally confused but ok.

~brokenfragilethings Apr 4, 2013 New member

_{Haha, sorry.
I ramble, and word vomit, and it's kind of a problem.

This is a second dA account. I have another one.}

=andrewpom Apr 4, 2013 Student Writer

sorry... why not stick to your old one? unless that is a touchy question.

~brokenfragilethings Apr 4, 2013 New member

_{Well I kind of vaguely said it before, but I think I said it with so much rambling it didn't even make sense LOL once again, sorry.

Most of my pieces on here have to do with a certain person. They have a link to my old dA, and I didn't want them to make the connection. And, well, I didn't want to see that they managed to get under my skin.

It's nothing too serious. Bit of a broken heart, it happens, ahaha.}

=andrewpom Apr 4, 2013 Student Writer

awh i'm sorry... things get better, that's all i can say. you'll meet a sweet prince and then forget about all the frogs. poetry is a really good form of catharsis when dealing with a breakup, anyway - or anything upsetting, for that matter. some of the greatest poems have been birthed out of pain.

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