[x]

Londonthe city glows
bright copper, a scandal in
oil colours,
a luminous quivering waste
of fog and smoke.

I feel on my skin
the harsh glare of street lights,
a thick caking of
make-up, the lingering
sting
of a parting kiss.

these streets are a string
of catastrophes,
a bright orgiastic tumbling,
the future glinting red
in a wine glass.

stomachedyou blush and bruise
with sidewalks, stones,
the quiet doorways in your thighs

and the weight of your purple
tongue against mine
(a carnival of teeth)

if you swallowed the moon
with your agate jaws,
you could not be more nacreous
or divine

nothing like the sunit occurs to me
that I do not love you
as much as I should.

your voice is not
musical to me,
is not by far
my favourite sound:
I prefer the skeletal
tones of a harpsichord,
the rustling of the pages
of old books,
the wild clanging
of a projector
winding up its film.

nor do your eyes
hold for me
visions of the stars,
in all their fierce, deranged
intesity: I love the sight
of a massive, gaseous
binary system
more than that of your
primitive lenses.

the touch of your hands
sends me in no quixotic raptures
that the lazy fronds of a lily
or the crushed softness of velvet
could not—
skin is skin, and quite frankly,
I've felt better.

I ha

suckleyou pry me open
like a blood orange:
a scrape of sugar on my tongue,
a taste like sunrise.

you take in
the salt and slick and
split
of my thighs,
the pulped tomato
of my heart,

the fabric and
steel bones
of an artificial ribcage

as you unknot
them all.

I draw my first
deep breath
and it smells of citrus
and coitus and
you

Sonnet XVIVYou are celestial. I tell you this,
not with the romantic veneration
of a Renaissance stargazer, whose bliss
depends on perfection. The cessation
of his quixotic notions, his fervent
belief in the Harmony of the Spheres,
would end altogether his pure content
with the firmament he's worshipped for years.
No—my ardour is more true, if somewhat
less zealous. My telescope has sought out
your craters, your flirtations with moons—but
I love you dearly still. Even without
his blithe ignorance, I see your beauty.
I love and I know you better than he.

coefficient of fictionin the morning
I am monumental.
my body is a half-
dream, a Goliath
of form,
before the sun rises
to dwarf it.

in this bleary light,
I can be anything.

you asked me to write your eulogybut darling, do not ask such things of a poet.
We live with death and feathers
in our bones, and you—

clouds have purpose, and one
is seldom alone in the sky. To
say, smart or handsome or
funny or caring, it is the lid
on the trash, never appreciated
till missing, and you—

undercover smell of well-water
and thick terra cotta clay,
a fallen angel left in smoke-screen
somewhere below the salt, the heart
still beats, and you—

a mythology come-to-life.
Hellion and savior, black-tipped
like raven wings, always more
in the right light
than

clef(t)any violinist
could be a neurosurgeon—

both possess a certain
dexterity of hand,
a delicacy with
(and love for) their
instruments,

a joy in manipulating them
to create form
and beauty.

both can calm nerves,
break hearts
with a swift and decided
twitch of a finger.

Eurydiceyou keep secrets like souvenirs.

your heart is a postage stamp,
your lungs, a pair of dusty
snow globes; I trace

a model Eiffel Tower
in the lines of your neck, an Arc
de Triomphe in the arch
of your back, a collection of
portraits

to rival the Louvre
assembled behind your eyes.

I gather each glimpse,
each fragment, every hint
of the things you've tried to hide

and hoard them
in the galleries of my mind,
curating my love for you
like a dense, Orphic art.

underthis delirium is like
a kiss: momentary,
placid,
and perhaps insidious.

dreams stretch their watery
fingers, listless
and profound, over these
reflections—

they twine in my hair,
thread between my fingers
(like flowers, or maybe hope),
and drench my skirts
with lost longing.

look, pre-Raphaelites, Elizabethans,
Victorian women of all ages:
this is what comes
of daring to desire.

stars burst before my eyes,
flowers sprout
in my lungs,
the last ray of light has gone
and my world is black
and blue.

I am gorged and oversoaked
with sleep.

caring for p(o)etsscribbling down vicious verses on
tissue napkins while seated at
the corner of a sidewalk cafe is
about as romantic, raw and
honest a p(o)et
-outside of the four corners of your bedpost-
can get

if you've got that person dreading over
drafts and dreams on end
-of you, for you-
consider yourself a new owner
it is now time to
tame this p(o)et's perverse mane
you've got your hands on
a fragile purebred
which can be very tricky for
first timers

Euros' InfernoIn a smoke blanket
mistaken for overcast, he
wraps us –
the wind, undoing –

and the old gum tree writhes
against him, but
we sit inside
with our homes on fire.

an open letter to depressionsuicide princess,
I think you're half in love with me:
the way that you
follow me about, grab at my ankles
and tighten the veins
around my ribs

would almost endear me to you.
and in a certain masochistic way,
I nearly welcome your knock on my door,
the steady clink of your

instruments of torture—because
who would I be without this
choking disease
to carry around?

but frankly, dear,
you impose rather too much
upon my peace of mind.

it's all well and good
to write the occasional
woe-is-me
poem, to hold you by the hand

on a Saturday afternoon
when I have nothing better to do
than indulge your little caprices—

bu

thrallyou were two parts of the same thing,
two stars of the same system:
binary, temporal, constrained.

like a sun courting a planet,
you cycled through your phases,
tethered to her by the strength

of a solar flare,
electromagnetic storm.

without her,
you are still ultraviolet and pristine,
your cold, clean light—

but the sparkle has left your surface.

you orbit around
an imaginary object,
a placeholder for her gravity.

syracuseListen to the audio version for the full effect, pretty please.
cloudshot sky like an oil painting and i am watching the
seagulls. i--
darling, i will swim for you
and swallow every whitecap.
i will pluck myself a coat of pelican wings,
sew them up with salt and spray--
become icarus for you.
you are calling me across the waves, love--
but you pull against the ache
in my bones, the hollow--
the clawing out for unseen sunsets and unturned tides.
i hear you, love
give me time.
i will always listen.

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system

by *toxic-nebulae, Oct 25, 2012, 7:05:12 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

he said that one day I,
who have grown accustomed
to accumulating moons,
drawn like moths
to my Venus-brightness,
would meet my match.

he told me I would be
captured by the brilliance
of a star,
a Betelgeuse, a behemoth:
supergiant turned supernova turned
supermassive black hole.

he informed me, peeking out
from under my gravity,
his erratic elliptical orbit,
that one day I would be
swallowed up

and that it would be poetic justice.

systemby *toxic-nebulae

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

an idea that I've had for a while now, but just managed to put voice to
and I think that I quite like the result, though criticism is welcome, as always

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~arsenic-sea Apr 4, 2013 New member Hobbyist Writer

lovely poem

*toxic-nebulae Apr 4, 2013 Student Writer

<3 thank you.

~exquisiteoath Jan 16, 2013

I love the enjambment in the second stanza; though I'm not quit sure about the Muse reference... I know they aren't the *owners* of supermassive black hole as a phrase, but it's a fairly hard link between the phrase and what they have done with it.

*toxic-nebulae Jan 16, 2013 Student Writer

it's not even a phrase, it's a scientific term.

~exquisiteoath Jan 16, 2013

I quite happily stand corrected. (I had always believed it to be an adjective and a noun rather than a proper noun in of itself).

*toxic-nebulae Jan 16, 2013 Student Writer

it's just the largest type of black hole (those commonly found in the centre of galaxies).

~exquisiteoath Jan 16, 2013

Gotcha. I honestly did not know this.

~em-arginated Jan 14, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Very beautiful and clever and lovely to read aloud.

*toxic-nebulae Jan 15, 2013 Student Writer

thank you.

*riparii Jan 13, 2013

Sometimes I get to the end of a poem and smile.
Love poems like that.

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