lilneenzmakeswords

Posts tagged creative writing

summer anthems
your closed mouth smile
our thighs touching in the back seat
a forbidden forest
your humble sadness
the sun beating hard on my bronzing back
subtle advances
submerging in yellows
the rain on the window and the roof
stranger’s bedrooms
your steady breathing
the truths i can’t tell myself

your face, my hands
how beautiful that crooked stance
i can still taste the salty skin on my mouth

and our worn spirits, i still feel them
crowding in that empty house,
we dreamt up but couldn’t fill with anything now

so many nights crying out in our sleep
you can’t get your arms wrapped around me
we never thought
that we’d ever have to wander out so far

   The grass made a soft bed upon the warm earth where I lay watching leaves wispily fall to my sides.  Autumn was sweeping through Lupa subtly this year. The leaves had begun to slip into their tuxedos of red and orange and sneak fluidly from the trees’ thinning branches. I watched their delicate cracking skins scratch against one another as they gathered in little piles beneath the forest’s family of trees. I admired their grace, tiny dancers pirouetting until they reached the earth. But more so, I admired their courage. Once, these newly dressed leaves were only working parts of one large entity, but now so effortlessly they’ve reinvented themselves. They’ve fearlessly constructed a new path and purpose, unescorted by the branches that bore them.
    I spend much of my time here, accompanied by these trees, the earth and sky. Life has grown so much quieter since my father left early last year. He set off in such a hurry and with so little explanation, it’s hard to say when and if he will ever return to us. I remember so vividly the last moments we shared near the edge of one of the forests that surrounded the vast emerald plains of our district. I remember the way his hands shook and the eerie paleness that hung over his caramel colored skin. My father’s dark hair flared slightly over his ears and swayed backwards to reveal the long wrinkles that stretched across his forehead. They creased as the urgent words rolled off of his guarded tongue.
    “You must never forget the words we spoke in this same forest on the afternoon of your twelfth year. You must remember Feather, who you are but never be bound by it. I will be back as soon as the sun allows. I will return Feather. This, I promise.”

This is a draft from a novel I was really interested in writing sometime early last year. I still think about the characters a ton. They’ve stuck with me so I think it really is my duty to write their story.

 

and those are things we wish we would have realized
when we were all kids and all the knowing was learning how
and all the being was finding out
when all the heartache was building boundaries
and all the sunshine in life would come and go so quickly
as we created entire landscapes and oceans in spite of one hour, tiny fleeting sparks of inspiration
and how we tore them down without ever thinking
as our bodies were pulled in and under the waves or laid quietly in the prairie grasses
we didn’t know it then but we know now
we were all kids building empires and pyramids in our own backyards, in the backs of cars and in basements
when there existed no wrongs, no rights, no God
just experiences
the whole world was ours to build and destroy