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cannibalistic cityit will eat your brain first.
you will wait for your coffee in orderly queues.
you will smile at the fake blonde receptionist at the orthodontist.
you will talk to your neighbor about the serious problem the management has with the cat infestation problem and you will agree to write a bitchy letter if something isn't done soon.

then, it will take your limbs.
your arms and legs will disintegrate into a melange of taxis and buses and metros
and your bike tires will go flat and you won't even notice.
your arms and legs will become so weak that you won't be able to hold yourself up anymore.

it will devour your eyes.
it will suck all the
pacificher longbow mouth is un-
strung; loose bottom
lip with a cocked
jaw -
.
she
births into him like
a womb
In Riposte, Jswallow god's sense of humor, and tell me how it feels
to send gravity crawling on all fours- stir the remnants
of this violet collapse; ardent attachment:
muscular dystrophy.

play the accretion of your dilatory heartstrings for our silent mute
who raise a glass in toast to coalesce our beloved earth,
who study hagiography as a means of beautiful suicide
on lingering, listless oceans emptying unto itself.

and maybe your ascension was predetermined, perhaps
drawn in apologetic ink on the eyelids of our graceful blind,
who invented the word ugly to describe the fallacy of lost smiles
painted in shadow on your claustrophobic sighs.
lukewarmshe had the kind of voice
that seemed to be stuck
in the hour of four o'clock
in the morning - soft
and tired and luring,
mumbling her way through
subways and tunnel lights
all pale yellow with noise.

there was tea and long baths
and longer absences,
hiccups of breath
the best
she could do.
long springs and
longer falls,
one equinox to the next
and still the bad
was never that bad
and the good
was never that
good,
and she continues to hum
the birds continue to sing
the apples continue to
grow  and
sour and
fall,

and bury themselves
again.
astronomerswhen we're together
dusk is containable; the moon in my palms
and the stars on your ceiling.

we lull the city to sleep
with our theories of life; my tongue curling
into speech.

do you remember,
when Jupiter was a silver wick, lighting its countless moons?

that night,
you balanced a cigarette off your lips,
and I watched the vermillion flame burn life
as a newborn sun;

stars forming,
planets moulding and constellations snaked
above our eyes.

i imagined
what it would be like to be curled
inside the embers – creator and destroyer
of worlds,
so close to your lips.
virginity is like an envelopemy mother said her mother knew.
i wonder if she stumbled home like i did,
fifteen and beer-loose
tied to the door like a thunderstorm with black lips
and i wrote a story about disaster,
a quiet two sleds long.
a box full of beads, i swallowed
fifteen needles, mommy. don’t
tell me i’m not sorry.
don’t call me a whore you bag of bones
you lock-loose suitcase do you even
recognize me look at my face my toothache skin
i am not the one with the knife.

my mother never slept with a boy
who didn’t love her never let a boy
sleep on her while she lay awake beneath
the shroud of his skin breathing only
when her voice-box gathere
imaginaryoh darling, we will never be the same. in seven months i lost my jar of butterflies & glitter dust. now, i am rinsed in acid rain. in the wild i wore my antlered frame with pride beside the minnow lakes; i forced my legs to run with the wolves, but god, did i miscalculate.
we are never coming back, so let's put our formers to rest. i unveiled my baby flesh with liquor & sex sweat. i hear someone sing to me, & fall to me knees. beeswax & honey lifting me through the trees. my skin will never taste like saltwater. you'll never press your ear to me & hear the sea. i was your enigma, & you were my favorite mystery. but we are never returning, so
time-spared drawers of dreamsi. someday the sight-starved
will find more than just the moon -
that i promise you.
we've seen all of what happiness
will never be and
like liquid stars in the milky way,
smiles will seep down
into the oceans of your laughter.
never mind what they said
about shady equilibrium;
it's only man's insecurity.
truth is, there is no
karma -
no rule, no eyes
watching over you;
just the forgotten remains of the
god that falls on us
every time it rains.
ii. someday, my dear,
those cranes won't just be
an exhibition of folded paper -
and those tears you cry now?
[which you hate so much?]
will leak into my arterial walls
and tell me they only tell stories of ecstasy;
we just have yet to realize.
love, it won't be long
till autumn will not be as forgotten
and between these
multiple shades of grey, will rest
the emptiness within yo[us]
and the broken smiles
of a shattered yesterday.
iii. grieve not, sweet traveler -
our draining journey has just begun.
and though you have been without comfort for s
summergirlNow read aloud over here. Do give it a listen, won't you?
     i. summergirl,
you are crowthroated and tumbling
through the aspen grove
hair on fire with sunrise, lungs
full of sky.
eyelashes like wildflowers
and every morning brings
a new spray of freckles
and a sharper curve to your collarbones.
the cornfields hold no shadows
for your lighthouse eyes
and there are no endings in that
surefooted smile.
     ii. you have grown
so fast.
autumn finds you with broken ankles
leaning on an oak branch
and watching the skies.
crow to sparrow--you are quiet.
summergirl, there is peace in silence,
perched treetop,
fallen antlers in your hands.
you will come to mourn your deer.
keep them close.
     iii. by winter you have paled,
and like the streams 
your eyes have frosted over.
you feel the chill--
there is no need for sight.
summergirl, th
hyperdontiasometimes it feels as if
I have too many milk teeth,
too many parts of me that belong
to a time when I climbed trees to touch the sky
and I swam in sunflowers
and fireflies -
to a time I have long since
painted in sepia tones,
long since pushed
to the back of my mind
with hands so tired
of being filled with splinters
- too many seeds
and not enough light.

there are too many parts of me
that I have placed underneath pillows,
that I have kept behind closed lashes,
that I have slept upon, waiting
for the morning to arrive and them
to be g o n e ,
replaced with coins that I could place
underneath the tongues of the dreams
that I could not fer
Remnant of a RequiemI. I don’t want to dream anymore.

II. There’s the distortion of stardust and twilight spreading inside downtrodden lungs.

Somehow, the sky had learned my secrets, and it has forced me to bury its body in my system like a funeral despite the fact that these hands have scratched its constellations back when they were bare remnants of dust and gods and ice.

But all these brittle bird bones could do was nothing but fracture an expanse of glass and grind the fragments through broken teeth

[and I couldn’t weep openly.]

Who knew I could drown in my own ocean?

III.

IV. Maybe I’m still sober, or maybe I’ve learned
Polaroiddo not tell me
the caveman sought
his chilled rock cave
alone

that he
without language
passed snapshots by

no

tell me he
shouted in his thickets
crushed his silken fruit
colored red the broken birds

and grass and sky and sea
dismantled pygmalionwhen the sun collapses unto itself
and empty wombs grace the palms of this earth
heavy with child, bearing the soft progeny of chance, abandoned
to cover the land-

you will teach me how to reverse this network
of clockwork dreams, how simple mathematics can be
when calculating the degree of loneliness in countered white
virgin affairs- crippled calligraphy. show me the distance within these  

isolated cells, obsolete- reflect the solar ticks
of all that is and was you and me. oh stranger of these quiet tides,
project all that is within, and sear your star-death breath bright into these
tragic north pacific atmospheres: release. give
they can't be takentheir bleach skin caught my eye
albino white against the wild
hair like bright sky electric in the briars

haloed sister gods shot down like fawn
because the ones who came before had weaponsi eat insults like grapes, a burst of
flavor a pop of green. i am supposed to
zip up the sagging gape of my grievances.

i should look at a man and see a man, not
the target he might notice on my forehead.

a long livid line of men and none of them
gentle; ones who could brand an animal, but
not nurse it through december or earlybirth;

who have looked bullets through me and
seared their marks puckerugly. when they talk
to me, i pretend i am someone clean because

i imagine they consider me dirty. the eyes
of them are hot wax poured smartly over
the puncturous holes on my face. and so you

shock me aghast as a pearlplucked oyster
with your r
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More from ~emilygolightly

reasons to be cheerfulone! rain falls in June on parking-lot
tarmac sometimes, if you are patient. read greek
mythology and grow your fingernails. wait like
a sweet black dog at the door for a heavenly
downpour, and when it comes, shut your eyes
and kick off your shoes. you are Cleopatra,
wading in warm milk.

two! if you are a thirty two year-old single
brunette woman living alone in a high rise, you
are in someone's thoughts. if you once saw
bungee jumping in Berlin streets but did not
join in, you are in someone's thoughts. if the
person you love wears spectacles with a broken
arm and frowns in the night, you are in
someone's thoughts. every day yo
madeline, and-1-

she should have been a madeline

maddy, an entity with his kind eyes
and my downy duckling fluff and
her favourite flower would have been
hyacinths

i mourn for maddy, the entity that
died and i watch my hands run across
the ceiling. i pull teeth, roll twenty
dollar bills, forget to eat supper
after its allocated thirty
minutes. it trickles downwards
everything trickles downwards

and
i am a horse in limbo, torn between
what my heart says and the
cardiovascular

-2-

the diary of a year ago today says
that this is the day
that there was red everywhere and
then there was nothing.

i wish you'd married me
at six AM in tha
a motherdarling (she said) you
and i are lined with different
constellations from other
girls (she put her soapy
heart on the draining
board)

darling, my lonely glass of
water (her teeth and
stare were indigo and
starry) there will be those
that you meet whose skylines will
be blue and unfamiliar, whose
love will be missionary, whose life-
lines will not be broken. (she said)

i can almost taste the mauve
balloons and saffrons reds peonies
that you will awake to tomorrow my
love my only (she put out her
eyes and wandered away)
he bought her rabbitshe bought her rabbits:
soft trembling bodies of fur to suffer her
six year old tears, fearful feet on foreign
soil, the dank quiet of wet wood and
hay. in the spring, april showers softly
danced across joyful grass, in summer they
ran like dogs in a yard; in winter, they lay
cold and forgotten in the sulk of a december
frost. all year round the house stayed
golden and warm. the stove was always
threateningly bubbling with the promise of a
stew, the broken glass lay unswept on the
cellar floor, and at night he became a
Minotaur; pacing the boards of his maze-home,
broken and drunk with madness, her little body
shrinking at his
swan lake, at dawnit is your life, your repeat
prescription. it is your stolen costume
jewellery, your carpet stained with the coffee
of a loved one; it is your white shirt
now, and your bloated pink wasteland of a
body. you used to have a
laugh that jangled like skeleton keys
and rattled the cages of his blind, kind
spirit. sometimes, you still think
of the neat pile of fawn-bones that was
the boy who'd loved you, and these are the
times when exhaust fumes and needles pour
from your chest. it is a new kind of appararition,
the little bird-girl dry-eyed and propped up at the
sink, alone with her bubbling thoughts. when he'd
said goodbye to you,
weedsat dusk the tiny phantoms of my
blind silver babies thud and scrape against
the walls of the house. in the heat i hear them
thumpthumping beneath the stern milkbowl
floor; the doors shake the bee-corpses in my
windowbox shake the teacups shake i
shake at their chilly arrival in my summer
shirt and blonde prickly legs. the world is as red as
rivers and they will come; they will
rain from my merciless ceiling and i will already know
the lonely recognition in their filmy white
eyes. i wonder, at the strange age of fifteen, if i
know how to speak of anything but the familiar
green-bellied death rattle of my own selfish
heart..

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[x]

In my bathroom again

:iconemilygolightly:

God's in my bathroom again,

he's shaving the patches of his
beard and pulling clown-faces
at the soap. Last night

he held me as I lay in a fever,
made little screams, kept
the hot tongues from my face,
the mushrooms from my
spine.

He says his old girlfriend
tried to drink his blood, that
it messed him up
for a while. He says
it's been a long time.

God looks sad, jingling his
teeth at me like loose
change. The clicks of my
heart make me sick;
folding his pyjamas

would be
the kind thing
to do.
:iconemilygolightly:
all i can say is that i've had a fever for the last 24 hours, plus seasonal affective disorder and i ran out my citalopram script about a week ago

i was just listening to "oh yoko" and the thought of john lennon sitting unshaven in the bath suddenly brought me to tears
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:iconschriftsteller:
~schriftsteller May 6, 2013   Writer
This makes me sad. I read the artist's comments first and the entire time I imagined god as John Lennon. Very good work.
Reply
:iconslowslicksnails:
Mood: Speechless =slowslicksnails Apr 17, 2013  Student Writer
This is brilliant. Definitely worth the DLD. Amazing job on this poem. Wow.
Reply
:iconkoram852:
Mood: Love ~KoraM852 Feb 18, 2013
i love your imagery... fever, little screams, hot tongues... the entire tried to drink his blood stanza - i really love your work!
Reply
:iconcalin-4:
~Calin-4 Jan 15, 2013  Hobbyist Traditional Artist
brilliant writing
wonderful emotion
perfect


nice song too
Reply
:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Jan 1, 2013   General Artist
Congratulations on teh DLD, lovely lady. Astounding :heart:
Reply
:icontonepainter:
=tonepainter Dec 26, 2012  Hobbyist General Artist
Absolutely brilliant... congrats on the DLD!
Reply
:iconnotensmsk:
~NotenSMSK Dec 26, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Congrats on the DLD! I will comment on this work a bit later :D
Reply
:iconi-am-a-bridgewalker:
*i-am-a-bridgewalker Dec 25, 2012  Student Writer
this has a sort of tender surrealism to it that's at once comforting and horrifying.

wonderful blend of effects and images.
Reply
:icondailylitdeviations:
=DailyLitDeviations Dec 25, 2012
Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by =DailyLitDeviations in a news article that can be found here: [link]

Be sure to check out the other artists featured and show your support by :+fav:ing the News Article. Keep writing and keep creating.
Reply
:icontouristeyes:
~touristEYES Dec 22, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
'kept
the hot tongues from my face,
the mushrooms from my
spine.'

'He says his old girlfriend
tried to drink his blood, that
it messed him up
for a while.'

holy shit. just, so good. i read it so many times.
Reply
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