[x]

Survival of the IllestAre those hints of lemon I detect?
Look, I'm just here to get wasted, don't try
to make it more than that.

I'd drink motor oil if I thought
it could get me high; chase it with a shot
of antifreeze
so
you can keep your survival instincts,
locked up
in that pretty velvet box (along with all
those other things
you thought you could convince yourself
you lived for). Instincts are the bare
bones of the impossibilities we wanted
to believe in,
remember,
those times you tried to tell me that
adrenaline was God's way
of saying
that
we were His chosen ones, we were
special, we were free.
I tried to tell you that instincts an

crystallophonethere is a punchcard sin
like a queen of spades smoldering in an alley.

Engine,
you hear how the gears churn,
singing faster than we did before
back when black magic dropped like a
pair of socks from the sky with supplies
taped to a note that said
(oh, look at you now)
'U.S.A.,
freedom.'

such a beautiful brain:
what
what girl
runs on gasoline?

have a gallon
or we can call it a balloon,
and a new pair of glasses
for your tapered eyes
(you peel the bark back on the logs,
darling,
but you're not sure what you see),
and life says,
either nail jello to a tree,
successfully,

or keep your
icicles hanging from the eaves,
ca

WhitmanI am all that grows from me
and all that grows from me is sacred—
              my hair, dirty roots reaching towards sky,
fed by sky, shifted by its undulating currents
              my fingers, spiders, crescents, twigs,
gaunt, blunt, probing, inquisitive...prurient
              my ears, awkward conch shells jammed on as if by mistake,
rigid and ridged, elven,
innocent like unexplored caves for children to bound gaily into
resounding with echoed cheers of courage wanting
as if a dozen more children waited within, fearless guides;
              my nose, obdurate.
The reach of my eyes knows no bounds;
what walls are there to throw my body against?

plumbumshe has a heart of gold
and she, a heart of lead
and she, a heart of uranium.

and they go walking sometimes, the three of them.

gold is confident in her worth,
untarnishable
bought and sold and bought and sold
the virgin whore

and lead behind,
heart heavy in her chest
guilt from bullets
and pride from pipes
and anxiety from irreparable brain damage

and somewhere off to the side treads uranium,
tumors growing,
white skin glowing,
thin frame for a dense core.

RatsWhen I was a little girl, I went to church. Our church was an illegal one: the building was unregistered.

We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring.

The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages.

One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers."

I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful w

GlassI always laugh when you refer to me as glass.
Not just because of the way you say it,
(glass-as-in-gas).
Or because I know it's a crack at my fragility.

Glass is pure.
I am like granite -
my body nullified from too many clashing traits.

Glass is transparent.
I am like clay -
illegible from all the plastered smiles.

Glass is unyielding.
I am like chalk -
easily broken and scuffed away by meagre things.

Glass is hung up on walls and in great cathedrals,
tinted for enhancement, but only ever painted on by fools.

I am hidden behind keypads and camera lenses,
coated in a thick paste of deceptiveness.

No, my love,
I was never glass. (Despite

despondenti.

"are you sleepy today?"
"yes."
"but you were sleepy yesterday."
"i know."

ii.

she stirs her pomegranate green-tea until it turns from clear to purple
setting it on her bedside table and climbing back into bed again.
her fingers follow the bluer-than-usual constellation veins on her wrists and down
to the freckle on her forearm and then the scar on the inside of her elbow
crossing the tendon as if it were crux.
and then she remembered that God hasn't been with her lately.

iii.

today is long and sunny but when she steps outside the humidity creaks her bones
and her skin starts to inflame.
she assumes that if getting the mail

cliffcliff
e.bojnowski

on velvet roads,
I impale a belated dawn
with my incisors and
shiver with perfect leaves-

I have no qualms
with the dark hills
that slope
and stagger into
a bed of scorched fly husks:

where
the thrum of the ground
melds
with the rapids in
my clairvoyant ears.

WaitingWe are still waiting for the thunder from the distant stars,
The echo of mortality,
the whispers of a storm, half-remembered,
in sepia-coloured hallways in buildings that smell like books.
Time gets slow in waiting,
ghosts are formed from the wanting,
taking shape in the spaces where sunlight,
or moonlight doesn't touch.
The stars shake from the vibration,
and the ghosts shimmer in anticipation,
but we can't hear your voice in the dead of the night.

the day we diedIt started when space imploded
you pulled me back, landed me on the moon,
so we could sit in the vacuum silence
and watch suns spiral down to hell.

You radiated, my minuscule flare,
your worn heat baked my bones brittle,
but it somehow made me stronger.

-

It ended when your eyes slid lateral,
fractured feelings leaking out in tears;
it was the first and last thing
I ever saw again.

This ridiculous happenstance,
simple in its impossibility,
was what broke us apart:

While solar light is beautiful,
it blinds when reflected by
automobile metal.

Whale Songs of the PacificListen, the girls swallowed by whales are the ones that grow up lucky.

Listen, no one will warn you about the little boys with the magpie eyes and the fists swinging splinters of glass. No one will warn you that their smiles are sweeter than their words are sweeter than their souls are sweeter than their intentions. No one will warn you of the sheer weight of the world.

Listen, sometimes girls are fragile. Sometimes girls are frothy. Sometimes girls let boys nuzzle "I love you"s into their necks and sometimes girls drink the wine of believing them.

Listen, sometimes the boys really are sweet, and little girls' tart puckered mouths can't ta

relearning i. stardust scatters with the
direction of my pupils –
maybe secretly i am an
astrology teacher, waiting
for a sign to wink
happily at me.

ii. excuse the rambling
nature of forgotten question
marks, but tell me:
would you like to be the
object of handwritten clichés
would you like to whisper
secrets in my palm
and would you
like to be the possibility

iii. air brushes against my
skin like the torn petals
of a flower still standing.
[ hold your head up high, honey,
and tell tomorrow to wait just
a while,

iv. so you can figure out
the difference between
patience and having all the

sci-fi stories about the end of the world1.

the species invents prophecies
all of which contain terrors

ex;

a beleaguered sun collapses into itself

2.

It's not yet night when the committee interrupts the regularly scheduled programming
and describes the inertia as unforgivable.

Outside the grief, the cardboard:
Every time you teach a computer about distance
the terrorists win.

In every scenario: No colorado left,
and survivors leave messages
for the future.

Before the last people on Earth forgot how to speak,
he thought of that day.

The committee was right
to describe space as an absence.

3.

The more artistic
of the species' prophecies include fields

Some
prese

preludesi.
blue rose into the city backdrop
like balloons, a million for the
morning sun prelude.

ii.
i've not slept a dream
but i have cried a salty face
and letters spilled like beans
into my moleskine,
almost as virgin as i once was
with few stories between my covers.

iii.
the kettle's belly boils
like my head upon a pillow.

iv.
i am guilty for rarely finishing my tea
even when i use the small mugs;
pour, rinse, repeat.

v.
perhaps today i will play dead.

vi.
perched behind my blinds
it dawns on me that i am surrounded
by walled neighbours, strangers,
they're just preludes to lovers
the way i am always
prelude to the one.

001. beginnings.Beginnings are vague things. Quite often you can't pin them down to one event – you have to trawl back further and further through foggy past, peeling apart what ifs and untangling strands of memories.

Eventually one has to go all the way back to the start of the universe, and that's a question even the experts have to shrug their shoulders at. It's not like you can plug it into a calculator and come out with a balanced algorithm. At least, not yet.

But it is true that sometimes you can fasten down an occurrence or a moment or even just a single breath, like sticking a thumbtack through a dead butterfly, and label it as a 'beginning' i

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subliminal eugenicscars go fast

and yes that is obvious
and yes that is derivative
but it's still true...

cars.
go.
fast

far faster than even the above average human is designed to go
even when dressed in the most grandiose rhetoric

so what does that mean?

are there latent effects?

physiological...
psychological.....
chronological.......

it's been proven that extreme environments can induce sudden, radial changes in DNA
so is it not feasible to think that technology could force
the occasionally fickle hand of evolution
acutely shape the way we are processed through the factory of time

sight,
hearing,
perception,
reaction....

all functions

psuedologia fantasticatrust should never be levied on a man
who casts no earthly shadow
demagogue

whose mythomania has become the placebo of choice
the vein by which to disseminate opiated
victory to the masses

severed frenums that flood shallow
ears with sweet deceit
sugar-coated promises from pandora's playbook

the harbinger barks and the sheep
are always quick to seek
the path that leads straightest to slaughter

introvertthere's no obligation to glow
in the dark that is always
trailing the sun
some hands are bred to fortify
while others to pick through the parts

and some minds are molded
to cast the smallest shadows, to keep
the greatest secrets to themselves
knowing the world is not yet prepared
to accept their misgivings

or to feed the leviathan displaced by their swell

extrovertthere is no obligation
to glow in the dark

shrug off the thunder
sweat between sheets

there is no regret
in starting great fires

no stock to be found
in finite empires

but the prophecy spoke
with an absolute tone

vixen flames burning
rise to a cone

our parade hit a dead-end
on the bad side of town

now only skeletons roam
where the ferris wheel went down

tin can novapebbles thrown and pebbles lost

the mantra of the albatross

i sit and watch the sky so blue

pull a useless tooth or two

awful gods and evil deeds

forever twist the masks' of trees

and when the star that shows no fear

meanders into my atmosphere

ill capture it with greedy awe

demand it always keeps me warm

pluck its feathers with no end

to infinity both now and then

time ago"(oh yea, the wind hums
time ago-time ago-
the rafter drums and the walls
see
...and there's a door to that bird
in the sa-a-a-apling sky
time ago by-
Oh yeah the surf giggles
time ago time ago
of under things killed when
bad was banished and all the
doors to the birds vanished
time ago then)"

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darwin's revenge

by *thesquareroot, Jul 20, 2012, 1:47:54 AM
Literature / Poetry / Transgressive / Free Verse

in the embryo of the city
in their cage
they paint their nails not
knowing

that the sun is watching
from his trap door
in the cloud ceiling where
whales can't swim but go

to dream
and drop down their weight in rain
not measured in pints
but lives overflowed

in lost archipelagos full
of automatic islands
that catch the eyes like needles
when viewed from further away

than the end of the world

darwin's revengeby *thesquareroot

Literature / Poetry / Transgressive / Free Verse

©2012-2013 *thesquareroot

we're all evolving in the wrong direction

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Given 2013-01-23

darwin's revenge by ~thesquareroot ( Suggested by *UnspecifiedUnknown and Featured by `thorns )

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*Tuishimi Feb 27, 2013

Very nice, had me in the first stanza. It's like a hazy dream in my mind.

Reply

^neurotype Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Lovely imagery. I found some of the linebreaks awkward, but overall it paints a great picture.

Reply

*thesquareroot Jan 31, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

sorry if it was awkward. i was trying to use the enjambment in hopes of ostensibly paralleling the archipelago image. thanks for the comment

Reply

Mood: Joy

~mhi2x Jan 23, 2013 Student Traditional Artist

i loved this.....

Reply

*thesquareroot Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

thank you

Reply

Mood: Joy

~mhi2x Jan 25, 2013 Student Traditional Artist

your welcome....

Reply

~7GreenRobin7 Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist

I don't usually comment on poetry, but I really enjoyed this ^^

Reply

*thesquareroot Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

thank you very much

Reply

~salum9 Jan 23, 2013

very powerful

Reply

~Gadgetsmith Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist Artisan Crafter

We really are all evolving in the wrong direction, but it seems nobody is willing to change this.

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