The Shadows on Your Skin

[ZombiePenguin12]

There’s a place in all hearts where our troubles reside,
Where the light and the dark spin side by side,
And they dance to a music that internally plays
On heart strings and daydreams to pass the time away.
Our hearts are, in fact, funny little things
Where entire worlds are tucked into crevices,
Where nothing-beasts hide and the great tides sing
Of all words and all lines and all promises.

But picture if instead this world were not in, but out,
And you were lost inside it.
Would it not be incredible, from the echoes that shout
To the lake like a mirror, so infinite?
And little lions would play every chance they could play
With mice the size of small dogs,
And the sky would change from blood-rust to gray
And birds would nest in roses with stems thick as logs!

And if you found a mirror, some glass,
You would be frightened I think of the scene.
For the shadows and light of your feathery past
Would dance on your skin like some lively tattoo wanting to scream.
-ZP12

Hope you all liked this, and some of the world I described will be created into a better light and story soon!

[Chaosmagik]

Absolutely love it!! Love your use of rhyming. I can't rhyme for the life of me, so whenever I read someone else's work who can rhrym I'm completely star struck!!

[ZombiePenguin12]

Thanks ^^ I've been working on a story that I want to be done completely in this sort of writing, or at least feature a lot of it ^^ There will be more of this to come, in the meantime, I'll leave you with this:

The dust in the wind is blowing past me,
And the sun has begun to forget me.
The night starts to fade in slowly
And the sky is awash with the silhouettes of trees,
And at times like these,
I forget I’m not really just a memory.

It takes a minute or two then,
To let the night fleet about and do what it will tend to do.
Odd sounds trickle past my ears
And the shadows begin to consume
The very land until it’s something that I only once knew.

From there I’m in a puppet show
Full of bizarre and improbable sights,
Where flowers bloom with an iridescent glow
And alavants dance in mock fights.

Oh you’ve never heard of an alavant?
Let me tell you then what I see,
Picture a man’s shadow
And then stretch it tall by three.
Now paint it sharp in reds and whites,
Like some holiday decoration,
But each marking is riddled with more fright
Than any kind of celebration.

If you’re not careful, they might just bite
With their bitter-smelling teeth,
And the shadows will consume you too,
But in a different way than they’ve taken me.

But never mind the mindless alavants
With their gallivanting dance,
I’ve only just begun to tell my tale
In its wholesome vast expanse.

So I ask you now, in my quiet way,
Have you ever truly wondered
About the world beneath your very feet
That all shadows take to plunder?

[Chaosmagik]

Ooooh very dark and mysterious. In a good enchanting way of course.^^

[Cnor]

Nice. ^^ I'll definitely be watching for more.

[ZombiePenguin12]

Another update from me. Woo! It's a bit odd, so let me know what you think.

I live in a place of no places
A negative space, a blank you might say,
In a world that's busy with the things life chases.
And this place is filled with a great shouting nothing,
Volatile and dangerous in comparison to the docile nothing it used to be.
It has become like an angry nothing-beast
With ink for blood and shadows for teeth,
And the nothing-beast rips at the walls and the floors
And wastes all its time trying to crash through the doors.
But if this place were a cage in which it rages and roars
Then I know from experience the nothing-beast will never be free.

Because I am not either.
If I were to turn into naught but ashes and rust none would be all the wiser.
I am the only thing out of place, out of line,
And it's deceptive because here where I live
There is no space and there is no time,
So to think I might actually have a place somewhere is but some strange notion that simply is.

So to speak, my place is out of place.
My name lost just like my forgotten face.
I have not seen my reflection in longer than an age
For I smashed all the mirrors long ago, but for what I can't really say.
My memories are cobwebs locked in a box
That I left to be left long ago.
I'm sure that I've lost it along with my socks,
But I wear these old boots to cover my soles.

The food here I fetch from the garden out back;
Red apples, pink pears, and these grapes that grow black.
But the food all tastes sort of tangy and strange,
Not quite like copper, and a little too vague
To really enjoy what ought to be good,
But the grapes at least make a strong wine
So the food is overlooked with the taste of somewhat bloody burnt wood.

Okay I won't lie, I hate it here, but I have nowhere I can go.
When I try to leave it follows me; claims me as its home.
So I live beside a nothing-beast and think about the time.
I haven't seen a clock in ages and gone even longer without its chime.
I wonder if I'll roar and rage myself one day in here,
But it's too strange to think the nothing-beast could have once been someone so dear.

[ZombiePenguin12]

This has nothing to do with my mental wanderings, so sorry. Just a random piece.

My life is a string fraying at the edges.
My life is the fire burning the string.
My life is the ends of the earth and its ledges,
And my life is the lost and found box for all unwanted things.
My life is a chessboard with a thousand sides
And a thousand kings playing the game.
My life is a journey through empty tides
Lugged through with a body gone lame.
My life is a thing made of paper and ice,
And may it be seen that both are quite thin.
But as I stack up one the other complies
And sinks me below once again.
My life you can probably guess isn't great,
But would I trade it for yours? Not a chance.
For in misery come with it a wisdom and grace
That wizens the more that you dance.

[ZombiePenguin12]

After two years, here's an update of some writing for you. I've not stopped, no worries aha

Some highlights from the past from my DA journal:
Night Fighter
Bleary whispers are running through my head.
There are shadows wreathed in icicles climbing in my bed.
The dripping of the faucet is driving me insane
Simply because the sound is so mundane.
Tick tock tick
I wish the clock was deathly sick
So it would finally compose its own death certificate.
The walls are all but taunting me,
Playing stoic games
And projecting out my memories
In flashes through my brain.
Say stop and it stops so still I cannot breathe,
And I can feel the inky creatures as they start tugging on my sleeves.
They keep goading me, crying out, snapping at my hands;
Clinging to my hair and climbing up my pants.
Back and forth, back and forth
I just can’t shake ‘em.
The night’s declared war
With a dicey ultimatum.
I’m fighting with wisps dancing on my desk,
Attacking with my pencil; pest after endless pest.
I’m wearing armor made of words,
But it’s quickly wearing thin
As the stinging starts to hurt
And sheer exhaustion kicks in.
The carpet feels cool as it rests beneath my cheek,
At last I’m too tired to hear what the shadows speak.
I’m clutching to my knees which are clutching to my chest,
And I’ll fall asleep gasping, alone and out of breath.

~~~

Fearing Nothing
Running for a decade, I've been running the same mile,
Looking at the road ahead,
My mind in single file.
Snip-snap, patter-clack,
Tick-tock-tick;
It's the sound of cricking fingers as the waiting makes me sick.
Scratching out the memories of another fevered dream,
I keep tearing out the pages' threads
And ripping at my seams.
Days have passed me by again for the many nights I've lived
And I'm livid at the thought
Of all the things I never did.
This endless pointless waiting is just the waiting of us all
Holding our breaths and closing our eyes
As private realities start to fall.
Blinking, constant blinking so I can find the right emotion
So nobody around me knows
I've stopped my endless going.
What are you afraid of? What of they? What of I?
What will make us stronger
When we will pass each other by?
I keep myself awake at night, pacing--nonstop pacing
So the daytime reveries won't die
And the nightmares stop their chasing.
I push the fork so that it pulls, and the pulls keep them convinced
That I can keep on pushing after all
When inside I fight to cringe.
What are you afraid of? What of they? What of I?
How can I ever know my fear
When my fear is numb inside?
Running for a decade, I've been running the same mile,
Looking at the road ahead,
My mind to numb to change the aisle.

~~~

[b'Night Reasoning[/b]
Insomnia’s the shaking of the shades inside your head;
It’s the belligerent treason of the words under your bed.
It’s eating up the clocks and then teaching them to fight
Where then, it spits them out, and they chase you through the night.
You berate yourself and pace yourself and seek a means to end
But in the ending of it all, yours eyelids are pinned into your head.
No matter what you do, you cannot close them, and you don’t dare
For the pins are just a way around the ravenous nightmares.
In fact, if you look there, in the corner of your eyes,
You can see them waiting for you, under the pillows, telling lies.
What is it that they whisper?
You lean closer.
Tell me more.
For you think if you only knew then you would be able to explore.
Yet the snippets of the sounds you catch riddle you to bits
And so all night in the corner, with Insomnia, you sit.

~~~

And lastly:
Sleepless
I can’t make myself stop but I can’t bring myself to start
For all the shadows in my head and all the screaming in my heart.
I paced a trail in the carpet at half-past-two
And by half-past-three I had nothing left to do
So I sat on the floor and stared up at the ceiling
To make shapes into friends that didn’t have any feelings.
We talked for awhile only to disagree
For they claimed I was lost and I argued I was free,
But when I think back I think they might just be the same
For they’re really just excuses to keep from going insane.
Am I insane? I wondered at half-past-four
But the thought was too much to, on my own, implore
So I crawled away from that to watch dust swirl in the lamp light
Reaching speckled fingers out before disappearing out of sight.
Maybe it was frightened off by what it saw of me.
Maybe dusty eyes looked in and didn’t like what it had seen
And so like my own reflection’s gaze, it had to turn away
Before it too was lost, confused, and broken just the same.
I heaved a heavy sigh at half-past-five
A little too exhausted to keep from asking why
And that little, pointless word swam around in my head
Beating me down into my pillow’s grasp to crumble in my bed.
At half-past six I gave up my weary fight
And let the sheets around me drag me in to smother me another night
And as I suffocated underneath a nightmare’s baleful stare
I wondered if at half-past-two I was already running out air.

[Paradoxic]

Oh dang, you're skilled with rhymes! The title for Night's Reasoning got messed up though. Looking forward to see more!

[ZombiePenguin12]

Updating after some time <.< >.> prepare for a huge writing dump

The Medication Situation
Depression, anxiety, sickness, aggravation,
And every skin-tickling, bitter-tasting, cold sensation
Are flashing through my head with a sense of desperation
As the pleading emotions of a nameless vexation.
Medication, medication,
What a fascinating fixation
To see what you do with your caustic vocation
As you spill down my throat with a sense of desolation--
Fixing up my body but leaving my head for wreckless deterioration.
Medication, medication,
Can you really fix this
Or is my head just as lost as my body is sick?
Get a grip, get a grip;
You don't want to slide
Into the pit waiting there to eat your from the inside.
Medication, medication,
If we could have a conversation--
But we couldn't anyway with all these convulsive sensations.
Don't break--no we're breaking
But like bones we'll heal stronger
And when we break again
The medication will take longer.
Medication, medication,
Can you really fix this
Or is this just a bandage before I really start to slip?
Don't take a fit, there's no point in it
Just take your pills. Relax and sit.
Its better if we do it quick and get it over with,
But the loneliness is eating me, and you're keeping me at bay
From finding a way out of this in any other way.
Medication, medication.
When you get too much
They'll give me some more of you and say it's just enough.
Soon I'll have an army of pills before I sleep
Until the pills spit and hiss and rage in full-on mutiny.
Then sleep will keep escaping me until I get some more
Of those shiny white pills that drown me in heavy snores
Whilst the other medications keep on whittling away
Trying to get me going on through another day.
~ZP12

Don't Fade
Words these days grow heavier on my hands
Which can't hold the weight of them like my eyes can
And my eyes, which once were full of so much to say
Have grown empty...sort of...catatonic in their own way.
It somehow changes the colors you see
Because you don't really see anything at all.
All that you watch are bittersweet daydreams
Only to finally give way to sleep's heady call.
You grow listless in this effortless despair
That you bury beneath these bright colors
And it's almost funny because only you know it's there
Whereas you can't see those same colors like the others.
Often I ask myself when it went gray,
How did it all go so awry?
I never noticed the hollowness as I faded away...
It just seemed as though it suddenly arrived.
Once I did notice...well I pretended I didn't quite frankly
Even though it was all too evident.
I suppose it was my way of trying to get by on the daily
But instead all I did was make myself insomnia's residence.
By all means, I still have good days and awful ones
And I even smile a real smile now and then.
I just am also all too tiringly aware that when it's all said and done,
Most of my smiles are pretend.
Now look, I'm not saying I want to be down all the time;
I'm not the bring-you-down type really.
It's not really a choice or a wanted state of mind,
It's more like...just how I tend to be.
I'll admit I grow tired of always being tired
And that exhaustion is a constant in all of my limbs
As I drag on fighting the urge to retire,
Constantly on sleep's teetering brim,
But aside from that, it almost doesn't bother me for the most part
And I can get by feeling relatively okay.
Just sometimes it's hard to even try and start
And sometimes...I'm afraid I'm fading away.
~D.J.

Office Visit
Tick-tack-tick
My head's about to split
From all the words inside that don't like to just sit.
They riddle and trickle and stomp and spit
As the seconds slip by in an idiosyncratic fit.
I've checked the clock twice and paced the floor thrice
And have already contemplated every lackluster vice
Only to conclude that none of them would really suffice
In ridding me of the sounds of these literary lice.
They grow impatient fast and start pacing even faster
As they look for a way to escape another idle-timed disaster,
Trying to climb out my ears and out through my eyes
And closing up my throat as they claw up from inside.
I hear my name get called and escape is suddenly impossible
As I step up and retrieve my paper packet obstacle
But the boxes won't check and the ink will only smear
And it causes my companions is snip and snap and sneer.
If I don't feed them soon, they'll end me surely for good
But I can't find a pen to do what I know I should
As my foot taps nervous words away back into my shadow
And they hiss and make hollow noises full of echoes that are shallow.
The television sitting there is too quiet to drown them out
And the pictures on the screen only rile up the words which start to shout
But their shouts get lost to a silence which is almost repressive here
Which I discovered when distracting myself with the atmosphere.
It makes it near impossible to even take a noisy breath
Much less let out the words that are riddling me half to death
And thus my anxiety wakes up to the present situation
And it flails and kicks me in the ribs with a troubling sensation.
I glance up a couple times and contemplate my company
But the tapping of the keyboard sounds just a little bit too mean
As I berate myself for not walking out the second I got in
And I twirl my useless floral piece in another nervous spin.
The white walls peer down at me and the cleaners fill my nose
As I listen to names get called and people get up to go
Oblivious to my plight as I'm left waiting once again,
Full of words to spell but not so much as a working pen.
~D.J.

Ember Flowers <--this one's sort of a ramble
Show me the beauty of an imaginary flower
Which sits there, refined, though it might wilt within the hour
And while there shows more grace in the face of death
Than any of us do as we take our many thousands of breaths.
Show me where it grows in the wild, unafraid
And unconcerned if it is ever even noticed or praised
As it blooms in the dark and makes its soft silhouette
In the empty spaces of a daydream that has neither reason nor regret.
Let it sit there, and etch itself into such a design
That its glass and amber petals twist round and round a crimson vine
That shimmer with the nectar of its golden reveries
As it waits for time to come to make its image a memory,
Thus showing me the oddity of imagination's ways
As it creates something from nothing which then follows me for days,
Spinning about my mind in a leisurely sort of haunt
That makes me wish for things that aren't there to possibly even want.
Show me the sharp edges of imagination's fierce desire
Which climbs up inside our heads to light itself a heartless fire
That remains such if only because it burns before it even asks
And riddles us to pieces as our hearts turn slowly into ash.
Then show me where to find among that ash an ember's glow
Born of something real that is barely even known
Which can grow with bleeding thorns and a constricting hold
But blossoms into something far more beautiful to behold.
Show me the beauty of how an imaginary flower
Can sit there and wilt and fade away within the hour
Only to leave behind the vines that can still survive
And blossom again and again until the end of time.
~D.J.