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

earth circuitAnd when the sun sinks, the earth's skin crawls:

I.
I wonder if this awkward creature would notice me the way I notice him.
He's so tragic at his throne
I stare after him longingly.
And yet,
He never realizes that I'm the one
Who forever basks in his brilliant beams.
If only he knew how much brighter he could burn
[with me]
He'd light up the universe.

II.
I heard him speak of thirst, once.
The quenching lust of the stars had run dry.
So that night, I brought along a jar of acid.
(And how it gleamed in his glow).
I handed it to him, wrapped in taffeta ribbons,
screaming
I wish curdling joy
On my gurgling boy

Down By The SchoolyardThere is a rather cliched phrase that states that some people live double lives. I have always found that to be an intensely misleading statement and I guess you can call it a bit of a pet peeve of mine. No one leads "double lives", they just lead fucking lives. That those lives are more complex that the singular one-track existence of lesser creatures shouldn't be a matter of duplicity, but of common sense. No one is exactly who they seem to be.

Julio is one of those who they would later say lived a double life, but it is no more true for him than anyone else. The difference in this case is that there are two of him, rather than one.

Perha

grassy field with rustgrassy field with rust
--------------------------

I'd heard about the old car, three miles out of town and all alone. I just had to see it. It was time. School was over for the summer, my friends were at camp, and I was bored. I set out Thursday morning for a hike, following directions that Uncle Will had given me. As the heat was still growing with the climb of the sun, I found the field and wandered around looking, and looking some more, trying not to be distracted by bees buzzing in the flowers, and butterflies and baby mice. Then it was there, just a bit upslope from the bottom of a natural swale, and just below the sky at th

Liquid Cityhere, at the bottom - lovers.
there are lovers disassembling
themselveslost in and to the
desperate motion in
of - waves.

- did you think the continents
moved themselves? see them slip,

in an open sleep. less go, come.
come and, and - again. trembling

here, at the bottom - their eyes
are lightless. hollow bodies left
restless,

the sea does not sleep.

if she were any more tomato she'd be blueberryxvii.
i want to write about how this world of
absolute truth, knowledge, and solid food—

that which we hold high between two fingers is always
full of watery applesauce and little white half-truths.

and about how utterly strange
it is that all the simple things that people
write about on pages are, in reality,

very few and far between.

xvi.
and i want to write about how there is
peace and war and
poverty and treasure and
cruelty and sometimes,

sometimes,

small and
important
moments
of grace.

xv.
i want to write a poem about why the hell i'm wasting
my time writing poems when i could maybe
actually be doing something produ

if only, if only.i.
we drove nowhere
and we spoke a language
that nobody understood
underneath a foreign sky
blanketed in the scent of pine.

ii.
you told me
my eyes were like envelopes—
because they were always
opening
closing
fluttering to the sound
of breaking seals
and ink stained fingertips.

iii.
i told you
we should run away
to a new land
with new faces
because
i was enamored
with people i had never encountered
and places i had never gone.

iv.
you laughed at me
and said that
if i didn't spend
so much time with my head
buried in world maps
i would realize
that i was living on one.

v.
i remember
it rained that day
and the tea went cold
but the

we should celebratei.
i tried to think of pain as a flower,
first it blossoms

  and then

  it wilts away.

but i won't let myself disappear
along with it,

i won't
give you that.

(it's not the agony that makes
me scream, it's the flavor).

ii.
and you whispered softly
"i'll rip your heart out and replace it

with a song,

it's christmas soon, and
we should celebrate".

  you've always used my scars
  as a calendar,

  as a way to remind yourself

  "today is tuesday

  and i still exist".

iii.
(it's morning now because
i can see
the sunlight

through my eyelids

and imagine

in the seams(a) when I was young I was a robin that stole the eggs from another's nest.
fitted upon my stare there was a warning –
personal's too personal for me, well i
would not use wings if i had 'em.

a child of rye with a silhouette spoiled by the sun, I was, I am.

and sometimes I see some vengeful sparrows still under my fingernails;
their glistening beaks snap melodies that rib a hundred bird-bone cages,
so light you could blow 'em away with a twist of your lungs.

and there are still words jailed between my teeth and my tongue and I do not speak of,
do not think of
them,
but they rattle between bone and flesh and I
drown them s

6.12There are days when I recall the litany of your kisses over my shoulders and I wonder, numbly disconsolate, how I ever maintained my disbelief in god, when your movements over me were so profoundly biblical, when my name filtering between the fog of our joined breaths was so much like a prayer - when I would think, for those minutes or hours or days we spent locked in the grip of fever, unaware of the movement of those heavenly bodies outside the reach of our bed, that there was hope for me after all. That I could be saved.

I remember so clearly the feeling of loving you and I wonder at what point, when it was, the exact moment, when that lo

sunrise, yulethis was the year of traditions begun. the world still dark, the morning still early, i climbed into my uncle's car. we drove out to the ocean, where the rippling sea fuses with the sky. white-headed eagles were perched still in trees. they cocked back their heads, opened their hooked mouths and screamed.

across an empty parking lot where once a cat had followed us. over driftwood pale with frost and sand hardened by the cold, we walked. our breath came out of us in thin plumes. it rose above us and hung there like smoke signals to the gods.

there were gulls on the water, gulls sifting through sand, gulls with their grey backs and fa

free agentwell she
told me
that she'd vanish
into the forest
for four years
to be-
come some secret dream
a si-
lent specter who'd
someday
reappear

to collect
all conscious thought
wanted or not
in the solitude
that shadows
brought

but still
burned bright
this tiny light
who taught my
dark
about her
night

and so I
made her name
the only
whispered word
our time would hear
and I dis-
played
only privately
the images
between my ears

yet the moon
often makes possible
one who
breathes
for two

or

orphans
proper principle
the way
that
lovers sometimes do

and we do
and we do
(we doot-doot-do)

oh! and dreams
can

red leaves and Robert Frost.When I was young, my virginity was sacred. Entire religions pray over it and my father bought a gun so long as it meant protecting it.

We throw away half of our refrigerator each week – meanwhile, 24,000 people die of starvation every day.

Hardest part is, sometimes wasting things can't be helped.

At the bus stop, before I could drive, boys would ask for my phone number while I tugged up the neck of my shirt. Asked me how old I was while I crossed my legs under my skirt.

I told them I had a boyfriend even when it wasn't true, because they'll always respect another man more than my disinterest.

Hearing "I love you" for the first time

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

The Cat on the PorchYou asked me why I do not believe in ghosts,
celestial at four in the morning.
It becomes the common hour,
not a biting static shock in the eye veins like I anticipated
but dangerously vogue and precious
like a real diamond ring or sapphires on your breast.
No wood pecking or oil teasing or misshapen duck bills bleating
just clay, but lighter, lightest
and bright
seductive and crestfallen.

They bled Peter and Pangloss over a river.
I was wearing white for the funeral
humming 'home', the matronly letters
soothe me
clotheshorses and moonlight,
Mayan jewellery in my cabinet
the mother tongue kissing my molars better

But then there

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Ghost TownThe air today has a certain tentative thickness to it,
like the paper straw wrappers and empty phone cards
have stopped breathing.

There is no fiber to this kind of metal memorial,
no roots to weave the gum-stained
sidewalks together,
nothing to beat inside of 67th street but
ragged bridges and a tendency for disaster.

It is as if the clouds themselves have stopped moving.
All of the rain stops and stars with nothing but
red clay, and a will to speak.

The asphalt itself aches for a sort of deliverance
but the ghosts of this city won't rise anymore,
there is something vital missing now,
something New Balance sneakers and Coca-Col

i am a tornadoThree figures stand
ethereal in Central Park,
they landmark the overhung
ghosts of my generation.

If I knew how their hands
worked and if only those same hands were not bathed
in a certain still melancholy
I would become them,
peel off my sopping clothes
and dive into their empty skins,
make them important and brave
and most of all honest.

But I lack a sort of integrity, some
level of life-force which allows us to become who
we are not, some root system
twisting between their toes.

And I lack death and shadow
and I become the circumference of my
own validation,
just a figure in the mist,
half-ghostly,
composed of condensi

binaryI am so bewildered.
I write about this often, how I am
stuck between the fingernails of
zeros and ones,
and how the eulogies go
dim and gray when you want them to,
how the only death I can really mourn
is my own.

I want to find a frequency between
rows of numbers and your breath,
a rhythm in the product of a phosphorescent gasp
or how I once found vibrancy in a painting of
water lilies.
They change as you walk back and forth,
someone once explained to me.
the focus shifts.
far away, an elegant scene is painted in
reflections on water.
but when you get close, it is all brush-strokes and
turbulence and the dissonant symphony

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i want to tell you

by ~Aquarius-Claire, Dec 16, 2011, 12:11:40 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Urban & Spoken Word

imagine a world without gender
a world where we are not confined
to the arbitrary interpretations of
an inexact biology. imagine we could
rise above the places
below our waists, reside instead in
graceful hands, in angled cheekbones
in some deeper conception than this
skewed perception of you.

I strip myself bare of unforgiving flesh,
squinting behind dim caverns of girl parts--
what are girl parts? all we have are beating
hearts.

I sit inside this trembling body, shoulder
to hunched shoulder,
stacks of bones too unsure
to be brave enough to tell you that
my gender will never fit on the plastic sign
above a bathroom door.

and I've never filled out a single
form where they didn't ask me for
me to choose one or the other,
sister or brother, father or
mother, i want to tell you but
I'm slipping between sidewalk cracks

walking down the street hearing wolf whistles and
I want to tell you please don't read between
the lines, erase the goddamn
lines, this has nothing to do with
lines.

and I want to tell you how
when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut,
because in space breasts do not matter
in space pink and blue don't matter, space suits
are white. but here alone, between the bathroom
doors I need to make a choice.
I want to tell you but instead I will
hide here a little longer,
paint my shoulder blades pink,
let my heart beat
girl into my veins,
even though I don't believe
it, even though I want to tell you.

4,122

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i want to tell youby ~Aquarius-Claire

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Daily Deviation

Given 2012-12-22

i want to tell you by ~Aquarius-Claire is an emotionally driven spoken word piece that leaves a taste of the writer's frustration in the mouth when read aloud and puts a sensitive subject to many into perspective. ( Featured by ^NicSwaner )

love 3 3

joy 1 1

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

sad 1 1

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~Nagneto Apr 9, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Personally I find this concept frightening, as we would trade individuality for unity. The only thing one can really can their own is their own body, and that alone transcends gender barriers. It's enough for me.

~Aquarius-Claire Apr 10, 2013 Student Writer

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. What concept do you find frightening?

~Nagneto May 31, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

The idea of everyone being the same. It's maddening.

Good poem though.

~linxinpei Dec 28, 2012 Student Writer

The sense of defeat at the end. I love this beautiful poem - it's so accessible! Some parts of the poem (personally), I find, stumble a bit. Your beginning is strong, starting with an imperative, 'imagine'. In the course of the line I find 'arbitrary interpretations' a bit too direct. 'interpretation' in itself does suggest some uncertainty, and by adding 'arbitrary'... Perhaps it is that sense of bitterness you want to convey here on behalf of the speaker, in which case, it works. But in comparison to the lovely wordplay on an 'inexact biology', I can't help but feel that you're striking a bit too strong in 'arbitrary interpretation'. Perhaps 'we are not confined/ to a certain determination of' would be better? then there's a homophone on 'a certain'/ 'ascertain', and wordplay on 'determination': fate choosing one's sex, as well as biological judgement of sex. That's just me though :/

The ending of the second stanza - 'what girl parts? all we have are beating/ hearts', it felt like you're coming on a little too strong in terms of melodrama. Forgive me for saying this, but this phrase feels quite unsubtle and threatens to drag the beautiful poem down in maudlin sentimentality. Taste is subjecive, though, so perhaps I'm being nitpicky.

I liked how you formatted the poem, particularly the break between the fourth and fifth stanza - lovely! Splendid use of breaks to convey that sense of things breaking off, where the poem '(slips) between sidewalk cracks'.

All in all I love this poem and I wish to congratulate you on your well-deserved dd. I apologise if I come off as too strong or too blunt and offend you in any way. I'm off to check out more of your poems

Good day to you!

~Fuko666 Dec 23, 2012

True. Beautiful. Sad.
<3

~KMJ716 Dec 22, 2012 Hobbyist Filmographer

i like it

~ItalyxGermanyLUV Dec 22, 2012 Student Writer

This is...touching. I think I may share this with my LGBT lunch support group. I think they may enjoy it. <3

~Gracienoo Dec 22, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

*Nods head in approvel and hands over a huge box marked 'Box Containes: 50,000 kittens* Use them wisely

~Aquarius-Claire Dec 23, 2012 Student Writer

have traded them all away in poker. sry (referencing buffy if you don't know)

~Gracienoo Dec 23, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

*crosses arms over chest* I am disappointed in you young one

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