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A Pocket Full of SkyWhen I was young, my father would take me to the highest tower of Notre Dame precisely once a year. It would be cold. Freezing. But we'd stand there, and take deep breaths of air, and peer down, towards the tiny ants of people below. Down, towards the sprawling city beneath us. It was always winter, when we'd go. Always cold. Freezing, freezing. But however cold it was, and however dull and bleary the weather, my father would ask one thing, and one thing only: that we adhered to tradition.

"Lucie," he would say, with the fond smile and kind eyes I always remember. "Lucie, my peach. Whatever you become, and wherever your heart and mind leads

To Write of HorrorTo paint a scene of mythic horrors
Take dim lit room and darkest corners
Find a child huddled there, cradled tight in his despair
Silent here for not his murmurs,
murmuring out a prayer

He asks the keeper keep to keeping
While all his guardians tucked in sleeping
Ignorant of the shadows creeping
Slow across the hallway floor, standing now outside his door
Somewhere near the sound of breathing,
breaths too heavy to ignore

Then just outside there raised a howl
A distant boom and monstrous growl
Envisions he a ghostly cowl
Afloat across the yard in prowl
Come to steal his soul away, curtains hold the fiend at bay
With scrapes acr

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

hindsightAt one time, we followed
the fires of July like fools in love
with heat smothered on our raw anatomy--
but fall has wrought our kindling into cinders,
carried it away on the earth's currents and sighs.

Here we see the girls with pressed skirts and
polished Mary Janes catch drifts of oak leaves,
pale-downed arms reaching for the bleached clouds
of late September,

and when the boys with all their chivalry abandoned
come searching for pig tails and rounded thighs,
we watch the snow eat an old world
from our separate park benches.
Cigarettes lay crumpled on the ground,
dead soldiers from our last war.

But when I open my eyes again,

Souls and SparklesTo write something that is meaningful to someone else, you must first write something that is meaningful to yourself.

There are a thousand rooms in each person's mind, and each mind is a maze because it has been tangled. The hallways are criss-crossing and clumping, like long hair in the wind. Society has made it so.

We all have impure thoughts. Things that would make us "bad", unequal, or imperfect. Thoughts that make us different in gloriously unusual ways. We are born into the world unashamed, but then we are taught the unspoken words. Words that are rules. Words like normal, like good and bad, ugly and pretty. We are taught that if we d

Russian RouletteThey take her on her honeymoon.

The wedding was lovely, or as lovely as it could have been with a couple that were more polite acquaintances than anything else and two sets of in-laws as stuffy as a dusty pile of money. They grab her when she sneaks out for a walk one night, two men, beefy, not even bothered to arm themselves. Her last thought before the bag is shoved over her eyes is to wonder how much this would ruin her parents' plans.

She comes to in a small brick room on a sallow mattress, windowless and lit by a cool yellow lamp. There's a man there, standing just outside the barred door.

"Kelly Shale," he says, voice nasally, greasy

the Chandler's Around the WayThe hose slipped out again. Chan cursed, and shoved it back into the incision he'd made, adjusted his mask, and bent over the pump. He yanked the cord, and the pump started to life with a cough of biodiesel. It bounced on the sand as it grumbled away. Chan kept one hand on it and held the hose in place with the other.
If fucking Fathers would spend the bone on a new one, I wouldn't be all night at this, Chan grumbled. He ached for a smoke, but didn't have the hands to spare. Plenty of hands here, he thought as he glanced at the riverbank. Some of them even had a pulse.
"Hey," he said to whoever was closest.
It was a sunbather. A walker who drew enough bone to slot time on the beach without having to fight for it. She had each arm draped around a man, both of them tattooed in the same place with the same sigil. Chan was jealous. Someday he'd have his own numbers, but they'd be women. All of them. He was old-fashioned like that.
The walker answered without raising her sungl

The Substitution ParadigmThe Substitution Paradigm

Ramu came up to our table. Glaring at me, he said, “You either order something or get out.”
I glanced away from the threat, and turned to Raghav. A single drop of sweat was running down his brow. Ramu saw that too and identifying his prey, he sprung.

Swinging around, he faced Raghav, “Order something or get out.”

Then Ramu just stood there. It was not as if we had rehearsed it before hand, but he knew. He knew that my co-occupants generally folded in the first round. Only the stout made it to second level, but they too buckled under Ramu’s relentless gaze.

I always had a policy of n

The Order of Sublime Simulacra Kamon woke to the sound of bells and saws. The ceremony must have started hours ago; there was invigorating yellow sunlight outside the gauzy curtains. Kamon's Self was intoning eight o'clock, eight o'clock with all the insistence of a song looping in his head.

Flesh brain, he thought, you should have caught that alarm. Sometimes the flesh was louder than the devices supposed to make it properly quiet. The flesh insisted on the persistence of the Real. This was exactly the type of lesson that the brothers were supposed to learn, and Kamon hoped that relaying to the abbot how thoroughly he had learned it might lighten the inevitable punishm

Sforzando Magnificent, imposing shadows towered over the winking lights of the city; even in the late twilight hours, the noises of the bustling metro exploded into the colourful night. Patches of light from streetlamps and back-lighted signs broke up the shadows haunting the streets. Amid the luminous message boards advertising new brands of deodorant, Diamond Shreddies, and fast food chains, a woman with a mask of cold beauty gazed impassively across the city, her long dark hair seeming to sway in the wind. Her unmoving gaze fixed itself upon the silhouettes moving below, small nothings in an immense world.
Down in the heart of the city, people se

ManifestAh, me leg,
I shall miss ye,
Latest of the lost.
Aye, ye be Davy
Jones' lass now,
Me pretty, me foot.

Gone
Fer a chain shot
While I were topgallant.
With me left hand
Now,
And me parrot Jim,
And much o'
The lee side o' me face.

I list a bit now,
An' I've lost me sea leg,
So I'm thinkin' now's time
To leave the Pirate
Round an' head for Barbary Coast
With me coffers t' find the
pretty lass I knew when I was
But a wee thing.
If she'll still take me,
Perhaps I won't even miss the sea.

When your hands can mimic birdsWhen your hands can mimic birds,
you lose the need for sound.
A flight of words that bear no chirp
are none the less profound.

They don't perch on a pitch.
They don't possess the need .
They fly until you've seen their song,
then silently recede.

No one could find more freedom than
the freedom granted flight.
No one can see more beauty than in
words passed left to right.

Harvest MoonThree a.m. moonlight
across lazy dust motes; a
tree scrapes the window.
Your arm weighs on my hip like
whispered promises of love.

The IdolI once saw a man on the television who was so afraid of fruits that when presented with a bowl of them, he fled the stage, knocking over the host and several other guests. Though I openly pitied the man for his obvious malady of the mind, inside, the small bit of sadism buried within all humans laughed at his bizarre affliction. How can one not find cruel amusement in the cowering of a grown man who has been confronted by nothing more than a bowl of peaches? But now I understand fear like no other. I now no longer find amusement in the terror of others, no matter how illogical.

Now, let me tell you the story of why the sound of wind whis

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

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More from ~burningmarshmallows

Winter WindsThe October after
I flew away
I sped back to the
hilly heart of
ol’ Ohiuh.

Back to hollow
industrial husks
and empty imaginations
land of the Appalachian
migration and
bus routes that end
at the spots where
withered heroine-addicted
wenches watch the
fiery smoke stacks
of yesteryear.

The lurch of metallic
toxins massages
the unwilling heavens
and clouds will cry
tomorrow and after
tomorrow and
after that
tomorrow too.

The January after
I sat in a room
not meant for me.
I wept away the
abandoned ashes of
another American.

I was away
from the wind turbines,
castrated cattle, and a
superficial suburbia;
the mental disturbia

MotherMother, who's mind is full,
who's eyes are distant and cool,
who's breath is grim
and smile thin.

I sing to you,
words of the numb sun.

Your cheek bones are high
and whisper the hauntings
of a thousand dead Cherokee
warriors before you.

Mother, who married the
monster from Birmingham.
Mother, who worked three jobs.
Mother, who echoed
in the absence of the alcoholic
grandmama.

Your voice is quiet.
The lord's prayer is quiet.
The hiss of the rosary
in your gentle grip is fiery and
full of an enigmatic depth.

Mama, forgetter of the past.
Mama, the first and the last.
Mama, the drinker of merlot.
Mama, who's eyes are like the crow,
dark, s

Alienation of the Paper MachineThe rumble and bumble
sends black dust in the air,
throws sultry lust of dispair
into the pressing ink,
of the paper's machine.

Now, it's sistine,
pure-white, dyn-o-mite.
Computer clicks, programmer ticks
writing shock until 12'o'clock
when you hear the humble mumble
of the paper's machine.

A war map that once
brought community together
is like a fallen feather
gathering crust in
an archive or dump.
A writer quotes the revolution of Trump
and the wail becomes a moan.
The voice of
the paper's machine.

We have become a nation
of alienation.
Cold, scared, shattering.
Fragmentation. Elimination
of honesty, joy, herois

Golden Arched Nugget FactoryIf you want to know what
annoys me,
look at the creases in my forehead,
look at the bags underneath my eyes.
If you look hard enough,
you may even see the uneven aching
in my head.

They always tell me
to stop smoking.

"It's bad for your health,"
they say.
I say, "yeah, yeah yeah."
Like I didn't see the same advertisements?
Like I didn't see people get lung cancer and die?
Like I give a crap what they say about my health
when THEY make me want to smoke
for stressing me out about smoking?

You know what's bad for your health?
Childhood obesity caused
by chicken nuggets and other bizarre
clown creations
from certain yello

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The People of the Hubby ~burningmarshmallows

Literature / Poetry / Sociopolitical / Urban & Spoken Word

Mature Content

A poem about people I see everyday downtown at the bus hub.

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Given 2012-10-24

The People of the Hub by ~burningmarshmallows ( Suggested by *SeanRobertCook and Featured by `thorns )

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*DEAL--WITH--IT Nov 4, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

I read this as a song. It was very interesting.

*edibility Oct 29, 2012 Hobbyist

Reminds me of Ginsberg. <3

~mommaj57 Oct 26, 2012

Like I've said before, I love your writing.

*SeanRobertCook Oct 26, 2012 Student Traditional Artist

Major congratulation! Reading 'The People of the Hub' again, along with your collection of other published works reiterates what a unique and amazing talent you really are. I can't wait to see what you create next!

~burningmarshmallows Oct 25, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you! thank you! thank you!

I'm so glad to see my stuff being read. Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback. It's been a rough time lately and seeing all of the love comments really lifted my spirits.

~burningmarshmallows Oct 25, 2012 Student Writer

lovely*

~illusivereality Oct 25, 2012

Poems like these are often draining, but not this one. Strong energy and clear communication. So, thank you very much.

~burningmarshmallows Oct 25, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you for your comment. I really appreciate it!

*glossolalias Oct 24, 2012

this would be a perfect slam poem.

~burningmarshmallows Oct 25, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you! I hope to give it a try at a slam!

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