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she sold seashellsfrancesca sits at the sill with swarthy legs dangling seaward. their holiday home cliffs off to the heaving ocean and together they sigh in a breathy unison. wind gushes around her, quieting her with a 'shhhhh' and gently suggesting a fall. she licks dry lips and almost succumbs to the wind's murmurs. how easy it would be for her to slip and fall weightlessly into the warm sea that held her as a child.

every april they come here and every may they leave once more. francesca leaves the city behind- and with bottles of sand and broken shells she tries to bring the sea back with her. but inspiring smoke and exhaling city air will never really b
oh the little thingsIt’d be nice if he'd let me breathe. Just inhale a little air to keep my teeth company- maybe even exhale again when they grow tired of one another. You really don’t notice how wonderful it is to breathe until you’re lying stomach down with empty lungs and the creepy man from the corner store sitting on your back.

But what can I say? Not- ‘please get off of my back, I can feel my spine against my stomach and I don’t like it.’ Because I really can feel my spine against my stomach and am breathless to say such. My cheek makes like feet against the wooden floorboards. This man has a whole forest of trees in here! A
sickDeath slouches over the edge of her bed, licking his lips as he caresses her thighs. He sings the noise of wind and rain crashing all around and her head throbs with the sound. Her head is hot. Her forehead is on fire and her cheeks catch alight with it. She burns silently and sees red, red, black.

Tiny insects have crawled beneath her fingernails and they dig with tiny claws and teeth until they are swarming beneath her skin, biting outward at her flesh. Each vertebrae carries bruises and as she tosses her body about the bed they ache loudly and sharply.

All the heat has rushed to her face, her body shakes like a leaf in wind and goosebump
you can't feel through fabrictonight the rain becomes the earth
falling from hidden spaces in the sky and swollen clouds
i hear it make mud of dirt, and lovers of friends
and ask, quiet, where are you going but down?

i’m not all there in the head
you’re not all there in the head, my mother says
i’m not all there in the head i repeat
sometimes i’m there in my toes and fingers and heart as well

and now - in this downpour moment- i lie on the street
so warm that i think well that’s where love’s gotten to
but where is your shirt n? oh someplace else
and is that a light flickering in the house across the road? hide!

i rush in soaken w
dear diary, today i diedshe's a ghost of a girl in the mirror. dark hair tangles like weeds below her shoulders and cuts at grey eyes. harsh shadows don't leave her with a skeleton like she sometimes hopes, but she feels it in her mind. feels the sharp edges and the trembled fragility, the silent cry for another's flesh and that outward plea of don't break me. cold fingers make love to cold glass while the sky cries over and over for sun.

this afternoon death made to kiss her lips but missed. he'd come so close she now knows what nothing doesn't feel like and she cannot fear it. it's a blankness so removed from consciousness she cannot reach it with thought- but sh
this aprilThe moonlight falls through squinting blinds, bowing softly to hug the arc of his naked body. The blankets are strewn about his toes as a girl, no more than sixteen, lays wide-eyed and  warm-bodied beside him.

She silently watches the dreams come and go beneath his eyelids, she quietly feels his chest rise, rise then fall and she listens to the heavy breathing that accompanies it. Beautiful breathing, she thinks, tracing generous lips with fingertips.

The air is cool but she is alight.

Everything in this room bathes in blue shade. She watches the alarm clock beside the bed, numbers coming and going out of fashion before her eyes.
flesh puzzlesIn the beginning it was enough. I’d be wide-eyed, quietly watching her through the windows. Limbs and torso like a slender tree; bowing in wind and always shooting up toward the sun. She’d wear summer skin in the middle of winter with freckles spoiling her shoulders and cheekbones. Her birthmark was a dull red stain at her collarbone and she had a mole beneath her left breast. She was thirteen and I thirty, but my, oh my, did I ache to see her insides.

The house next door they called the sea house because it was two stories of cerulean blue. Through my bedroom window I could see naught but an empty bedroom. But late September the P
leavemedon'tleaveme.you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh.

you made me do this.  you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did.

i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.
picture death.I couldn’t bring myself to bury her.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine.

They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic.

In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks
exhalation.Sixteen. Sixteen years since she was the size of a deflated lung beneath her mothers ribcage- now she has her own mass beneath her ribcage. Thumping sometimes to the outside, treating the skin of Laylla's stomach like a door. It will open in 3 months, it will be sliced open because her flesh is meat and they'll bring Sophie to air and she'll swallow until all she tastes is that dull white of the hospital. And then she'll cry and the music will drone in Laylla's ears until she tastes vomit and she is numb in all the aching places.

She doesn't know the father. She thinks Michael but she tells herself it is Louis. She repeats his name over and
the fluttered- a collectioni

Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring.

I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs.

It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear
colour blind.She saw him at the park once. He was the colour of dirt; with bird eyes and white, mapped palms. Her little forehead lined as she felt the bile force its way up until her saliva was acid. She counted her toes and bit the inside of her cheek, should she run? Are they fast runners? She figured this one must be if he kept himself out of jail. The dark man flashed a mouthful of pebbles and held out his hand- which would have swallowed hers.

'Don't touch me.'

Her hands were all knuckles and her baby eyes tore into his. He faltered and stepped away, a half mouthed sorry. He looked upset, a grin spread like fire between her dimples.

Suddenly she
strings of pearls and breathunderwater they are mermaids. patterns of poolwater-caught sunshine dancing in soft-edged white upon their long legs (tails). red hair like ocean fire and fingers ever reaching for the bubbles, like pearls but from out their mouths. darting up between their fingers.

there are places here, beneath here, beneath the sound of their mother yelling at their father and the loud rough of the neighbour’s dog’s bark, where they can breathe. breathe the dead leaves in water whirlpools beneath their feet and breathe the chlorine, leaving eyes red and hair green at the tips. breathe the quiet of their bodies and their imagined underwater world
why didn't you say goodbye?Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed.

It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.

I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses.

You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a
owl boyLight spills like milk from the window. It drips bright upon his face. He is naked, he is the milk spilt from the window to the floor. He is sleeping now.

Sun whistles her breeze in the trees this late August and the birds are drunk with birdsong. He sleeps on through the sound. A quiet, dreaming boy. She kneels and kisses his fingers, soft.

Sun dances, warm and alight, across the sky until she is weary, disappearing with sleep herself. Calling, ‘Moon! Moon! I’m so tired my love, I will fall a moment and sleep’ And he will become her in the sky, following after her until sleep becomes of he, too. And the chase will continue i
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of storms and sky

:iconpretty-as-a-picture:

see my hair dance wild as wind-strings jerk it about//hear the ocean-wind heave itself against us all- crashing into our eyes and mouth//feel the winter-wind brush our skins in summer//then inhale the heaviness of air and sink through the dirt- because darling, you don’t deserve god’s beautiful violence.

(it drags the tree by its leaves saying kiss your trunk, kiss it and it does; releasing with a snap. the other trees flitter-flutter violently, crying within the cacophony of rain on concrete. white stars fall where light exists, and only sound where it disappears. the sky -the colour of sunburnt skin- watches it all with hunger. and then a moment we are swallowed. gumtrees, rain, earth; we are all night sky now. but our eyes open and the rain is no more, dew on grass. and the wind is no more, only breath.)
:iconpretty-as-a-picture:
i let the storm soak through until it ran down in rivers down my skin. never leave, i ached, the world is ours in moments like this. then the wind made promises it wouldn't keep in my ears.
and the storm was no more, only me.
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:iconkaeldra-1:
~Kaeldra-1 Mar 7, 2009
:heart:
Reply
:iconkittifer:
~kittifer Jan 30, 2009
Your poetry is like your photographs - stunning.
Reply
:icontherealluke90:
~therealluke90 Jan 21, 2009
Hey there u are like my hero ur pics are like magic and the wrds u put up are jus as beautiful LOL email me luckyace7129@aol.com
Reply
:iconmylovebattlefield09:
!mylovebattlefield09 Jan 18, 2009
The imagery in this is superb. Everything is spoken in angry, hushed words that can rise to a scream, then fall down to no more of a breath.
I favorite this for the sound.
Reply
:iconavolatilecalm:
~AVolatileCalm Jan 17, 2009
because darling, you don’t deserve god’s beautiful violence. wow...
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:icondancingtrees:
~dancingtrees Jan 17, 2009
wow, that was exhillarating to read!
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:iconohrealite:
~OHrealite Jan 16, 2009
how do you do it?
your gifted, you know that?
I've never met anyone- still haven't- that is about as talented as you.

your gonna go places, darling.
Reply
:iconwiccalaura:
Mood: dA Love *wiccalaura Jan 15, 2009  Hobbyist General Artist
amazing... it can picture the exact feeling of a storm, and it's so poetic...
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:iconpaintingwithwords:
~PaintingWithWords Jan 14, 2009
You're too talented dude! everything you do is beyond beautiful. Your photography is breathtaking and your prose and poems are just... insanely gorgeous. stay amazing :]
Reply
:icondarnfancylettuce:
~darnfancylettuce Jan 14, 2009
Ha I never read anything posted on Deviantart. Your stuff is the only stuff I read. One time a piece showed up in my messages and I read the first line and was hooked. Now I get excited whenever I see a photo or a piece of writing posted by you.

I mean damn, your writing gives me chills. I envy you in so many ways.
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