[x]

Imagine a religionFor Erin L. S.

imagine a religion
where words
are scripture
and we only speak to pray

this is how she and I communicate
each word with salvation on its edges
the sounds of angels in our speech
and god in our sentences

I never want to open my mouth
let sound spill from my lips faithlessly
I want each word to move believers
in the way I have been moved

I want believers to quote my prose
knowing that faith is in the understanding of language
I want them to take vows of silence
except with speaking sincerely

no tone or breath should leave lips
without a purpose
except to shatter shackles
or build homes for those less fortuna

Her brothers cried and cried."If you can swear to whomever you swear to at night, tell me right now."

He can't.

"Move those lips - tell me what I want to hear. It's there on the curve of your mouth."

He just can't.

"I can taste the words. Your speech is so haunting."

It really isn't.

"Tell me, Love. Spill all your blood before my eyes. Let me know. Let me in."

He's nailing the boards shut.

"I won't tell a fucking soul if you just kiss your words to my lips."

No.

"Engrave the walls of my chest to surround my heart with the ink of chisel of your teeth."

He doesn't want to; He won't do it.

"Love, get on with it. You can whisper it, if you feel the demons will st

heaven It seems like every man's always been looking for heaven.
Like a kid playing hide-and-seek with someone they've never seen.
From Zoroaster to Nostradamus to Hinde… And I'm sitting here, it's two o' clock AM and I'm sitting here, watching this evangelical show on television.

I have a secret.

Delilah said she wanted at least a day with me. That my being gone at the hospital every day was leaving her lonely- and that she'd die of loneliness.
She swore it as she tugged on my sleeve the morning before, grinning and stepping back.
She says she just happened to realize that it was a rather sunny summer, and that the country side surro

How Cliche

How cliche am I
Sitting outside
At a beatnik Coffeehaus
On the Northwest side
Clothes all of black
Smoking my lights
Writing a poem
On the meaning of life
How cliche is that?
how cliche am I?

I have Nietzsche himself
Sitting at my side
Reading the "weekly"
Striped suit-no tie
Red Scarf 'round his neck
Dark look in his eye
How cliche is he?
How cliche am I?

How cliche are we
to bicker the whys
of the soul
of the mind
of who's more divine?
Of our own petty egos
written in the sky?
How cliche are we?
How cliche am I?

Individuality
Dies with these lines
In the foam of my latte,
The closed door of your mind
How clic

Beginning with BSitting by the window, knees tucked up, I hear her reciting her "BCs."

No one can tell her that 'B' is not the first letter of the alphabet. She has always been confident about her knowledge of the universe, and in that universe, it is uncertain whether 'A' belongs in the alphabet at all. It certainly does not initiate the entire procession.

She does not stumble in her delivery. Where other children waver at 'LMNO," she wraps her tongue around the entire cluster of syllables. In the solar system as she knows it, ell-uh-minnow swims peaceful circles around stars with wobbly smiles.

Later she'll be taller, still wearing her undiminished stre

i write like a five year old.as we were driving, a satellite sent me urgent messages to be a home for you. they were hidden in commercials for new houses. the messages said they needed to be sold now now now and filled with people eating and loving and sleeping and leaving it and coming back. everyone needs a home. i turned off my radio because i don't want you to be reminded of what you don't have.

it was quiet then. i liked the silence, because i can listen to you breathing. if we were silent long enough, i can imagine your warm breath filling up the car, mixing with mine, until what was inside of me could be inside of you. i think you would find that creepy, so i pro

War and the Singles TableBelieve it or not, but weddings were not made for single people. This is why most receptions employ a “singles table” strategy; not in hopes that they will mingle and hopefully spark something—although that would certainly be nice—but to make them easier to corral should any of them suddenly and inevitably realize where they are and feel their shot clock on finding happiness has dwindled down to half a second, causing a crazed attempt to score from the other end of the loveball court or, sometimes, across the street from the arena.

The placement of such a potentially volatile table can be essential to the success of the

A Crab Eyeing A Tourist

Find out what you are,
Where you are headed.
Find your own moon and land on it.

*

A chair scraped across a vinyl floor and made an embarrassing sound.

"My name is Alex and I have a problem."

Someone waved their hands. "Does this problem involve an actual child actually being raped?"

Alex thought about this. "No," he decided.

"Then continue," the group leader said, bowing her head.

"But this child who was definitely not raped, and not by me, his name was Thomas."

All around the circle, a gentle ripple of applause broke out.

"Thank you, Alex," smiled the group leader, "that was very brave. You can sit down."

Alex sat, being careful

windowbreath

i am not in pain
because i am
heartbroken
i am in pain
because i am
in love

i am not in pain
because of memories
that ring in my head
of happier days
gone by
i am in pain
because of memories
not created
in my mind
of happier days
yet to come.

where we walk
along our own
beaches and sidewalks
to our own shelter
under sheets
as we tangle in knots
and try (not) to find our way out.

memories yet to come
where we talk
all night
and your voice is music
flowing into my ears
instead of letters
followed by blinking cursor
blinding my eyes.

memories yet to come
where we welcome the same sunrise
in the same time zone

PallorI cried myself sane and then
moved on. How strange, that a man
can split open like a rotten peach and find,
at last, nothingness. How strange to realize:
only then can sunlight enter his veins.

Death dissolves us. Nothing has changed
but everything is different. I spend an hour
pressing my fingers against a wall, the skin
whitening as blood retreats.

There is no regret, no fear. Only a man
who whitens against his final four walls,
the empty chair, the selfish and wandering grief.
Only a man whose face slowly unravels and the way
I wash my face, make dinner, let myself forget.

"Poeticks: On Angst" 1 of 2

1: Introduction

Angst. People admire and despise, protest and support, immerse in and shun, indifferently yawn, while holding very firm opinions as their respective buttons are pressed when they hear the word "angst." As a starting point of Poeticks, we have decided to take up the differing opinions from inside DeviantArt, to lay out those arguments for all of you to read. Please keep in mind that these are "your" thoughts, as they are, and you are completely free to agree or disagree. Our objective is not to push forth an ultimate commandment, but rather to present to you the many (and often times conflicting) opinions we have rec

Freezing

I’ve heard it said that freezing to death is not actually a bad way to die. Well, I think I’ve been slowly freezing to death every winter for the past ten years, and it’s not a pleasant way to die either. I wonder how anyone came to that conclusion, since nobody who’s been through the whole process is really in a condition to speak about it. I think it’s maybe just supposed to be the late stages of it that aren’t bad, and maybe I haven’t been that far, but it still seems to me that if it’s bad for a while it doesn’t really matter if it’s not that bad right at the end.

Anyway, my opinion su

In Progress: Help Wanted

My scientist friend tells me that if there was a giant room filled with monkeys banging away on typewriters for all time, one of them would eventually write a novel. I don't bother asking her if typos are allowed or not, because this conversation has nothing to do with novels—she is explaining LIFE to me. A typewriter has twenty-six letters, ten numbers and all that punctuation, but this really isn't much to choose from. She tells me, the building blocks of LIFE are pretty simple, too. I remember 8th grade science. I don't think there's anything simple about endoplasmic reticulum, and I bet the spelling is the least complicated bit about

Maurice Eugene DobsonMaurice Eugene Dobson, aged forty-three years and two months, is standing in the middle of a car of the A train, on his way home. He is not holding onto the pole: he stands off to its side, swaying slightly with the movements of the train, but balanced perfectly and seemingly without effort. He never holds onto the poles. He takes pride in being able to maintain his balance like this, although he knows it’s not the sort of quality anyone else will appreciate, and it’s not really something you can put on your résumé. Too bad.

He is a small man, though he prefers the word diminutive. He is five feet, four and a half inches

22-23-22

1.

A loud rumble pushes its way in among my turned up radio. It doesn't complement the music well, so I pull off the side of the road. Sure enough, my right rear tire is shredded; a mile and a half from the school board meeting I need to cover, too. And my cell phone? Taking the day off at home, because it knew today would be the one day it'd be needed.

I limp the car to a nearby house, where thankfully the woman there knows me. As she goes to find me her phone, two little girls--I'm assuming granddaughters--run straight up to me. Haven't they learned not to trust strange men in slacks?

"What are you doing here?" one asks straight-out,

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HIT ME RUNNING

by ~foxthepoet, Feb 2, 2004, 1:07:17 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Urban & Spoken Word

Don’t sell me funeral plots
on late night television
if the end is already in sight

am I supposed to pull the sheets up to my neck,
count to zero,
smile, and cease?

no

keep your pills, in all their pretty colors:
celebrex, propecia, allegra, lipitor, zanex, viagra
keep them for scrabble
keep your rogaine, your facelifts
keep your death insurance
keep your graveyard reservations

hit me running.

let me go down swinging

make it a sport:

give me a ten-minute head start
and an obstacle course.

place a beautiful girl on the far side of a mine field
and whisper, “she wants to kiss you”

target me on my feet
dodging doomsday’s in slow-mo bullet time

let me duel the grim reaper in a poetry slam

but let me lay where i fall
let the buzzards and coyotes
pick apart my bones
don’t stuff me and sew me up
waste my estate on alcohol for my wake
not formaldehyde
instead of wood for a coffin,
build me a funeral pyre
and set me ablaze like a pagan-warrior-king
sing songs,
roast marshmallows,
get drunk,
and recite your poetry
by the time we’re done
the grim reaper will beg for a vacation

i don’t have to win,
but let me believe I have a chance at immortality
even if the probability is one a billion.
those are good odds
if I’m the one

those who believe in death will die first

if I believe I’m going to live forever,
if I believe I can fly
I just might

so from the chickens before me,
sucking in their pot-bellies,
grooming their comb-overs,
I’ll craft wings from their plucked feathers
reach cruising altitude alongside Icarus
but outrace the sun

light doesn’t have the speed to catch me

these lungs won’t stop breathing,
these cells will break open replacements
this heart will beat out of sheer will
to last longer than timex or twinkies
and endure eternity
just to see how this story ends
and whether
the hero gets the girl
or a bullet to the brain

I will hold onto immortality
by my fingernails and the skin of my teeth
past the all epochs and ages and armageddons
so I can see if the end
begins the beginning all over again
or does the whole thing backwards
or upside down with inverted colors
or just stops
like in the Twilight Zone,
one second before the apocalypse

but my bet is that i
will finally sober up
take my medication
set the alarm
roll over
and turn the television off

HIT ME RUNNINGby ~foxthepoet

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Urban & Spoken Word

2:00AM television offers life insurance, motorized scooters, insulin, body wraps, work out routines, diet plans, medications, hairwaxing, and plastic surgery. I want reruns of the Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and cartoons. Just let us grow old and die naturally.

Daily Deviation

Given 2004-07-03

HIT ME RUNNING by ~foxthepoetis the new anthem for culture zombies everywhere. It’s the hard-hitting, fast-paced tale of a man who’s ready to take on anything from the grim reaper to the apocalypse to the ever-intimidating opposite sex – and he’ll do it all from the couch in front of his television set. Hey, man, lay off the meds. You’ll wear yourself out. ( Suggested by `wildoats and Featured by °euphoria )

love 1 1

joy 2 2

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~xXMusic-MuseXx Oct 20, 2011 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

Absolute genius, I have to say.

~oviedomedina Oct 8, 2011

Blew me and my mind apart.
You earned yourself a fav, a watch, and a helicopter engine-like applause.
Bravo.

~Vivifyingly Aug 3, 2011

+Watch
+Fav
+<3

~Dancing-Naked Feb 16, 2011 General Artist

I'd love to post parts of this (with full credit to you, and your brilliance) over at [link] if you don't mind.

~foxthepoet Feb 28, 2011 Professional Writer

Go for it. You can link to my blog, too, if you want. I post poetry and poetry commentary, critique and other bits there.
[link]

~miserabel Oct 30, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

Woah. Really nice read, I couldn't let go of it once I started reading

~Illusion-Factory Apr 27, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

that was a rush and I loved every second of it.

On a slightly related note this reminded me that my friends and I have a standing pact to go to each other's funerals and turn them into parties. Let's celebrate the life and not mourn the death.

~MusicalAlchemy Mar 24, 2010 Hobbyist

There are no real words for a poem that can make you feel so much in such a short space of time, oter than - Thank You. It flows, and the sentiments behind it i can believe in whole-heartedly. Truth in a sentence:

Those who believe in death with die first

~katypi Mar 10, 2009

_{those who believe in death will die first
perfect.}

~orange-sheep Oct 4, 2008 Writer

light doesn’t have the speed to catch me

my favorite line. that poem was... wow. I can;t describe it. really, really amazing.

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