[x]

The FountainThere were sixteen tall windows. She'd counted them over and over when she was small, her chubby finger outstretched as she spun in tiny circles. Eight walls, sixteen windows, thirty-two black curtains—the arithmetic of her childhood.

"Eight window seats, Daddy. Eight buttons on each—sixty-four. I counted."

The fountain stood dry and dead-center in the middle of the black and white tiles. Eight sides, eight lion-mouth spouts. Sixteen limestone mermaids poised gracefully around the edge. Four thousand and ninety-six blue tiles. Five hundred and twelve white.

And two doors. Always the two doors, huge and solid and radiating a sense

TeatimeIn January, Elsa got new neighbors. She greeted them with apple cinnamon tea.

It gets so cold, here, they told her, shivering in overstuffed parkas. Snow had turned to mud in their front hall—an unavoidable side-effect of moving in winter. Elsa nodded along to their complaints and observations, silently brewing the tea in their kitchen. They were young; they had big plans. Allison and Steve, newlyweds, just starting out. They sat on the cold floor together, sipping with chapped lips. The house filled with cinnamon.

In April, Allison knocked on Elsa's door.

The EarthenI have a wooden heart.
Slowly carved from the crevice
of the poison oak
twined around the holly and ivy
hawthorne, birch, beech,
brittle aspen and whispering pine--
I am what the earth has made me.

Cut open my flesh and sow the seeds
that drift free of the veins like snow;
each dandelion tuft or seedpod remnant
swishing off with each sweep
of the wind's own broom,
spilling words and stories as they go;
growing as they fall,
dying as they wane.

I have bones comprised of iron.
They stand rigid to attention, militant
against the flaking igneous tissue
and the congealing rocky muscle,
layers of fossilized concepts
drilled

02:22 AMi.

Like drops of water we fall

yet

I must be
of
a different
drop

you might think that
you want to be different yourself
but

you do not

you want to be special

I am not special

everyone wants to be special
although
not so special
that

they're different.

ii.

Some girls
want to seduce me

because I'm different

I don't mind, but
I've never really liked those girls

I don't really like girls at all

I like sex though, so..
I let them

even though
some will fall

(plip.)

in love with me.

iii.

Some boys
want to beat me up

show me my
true
face

also because I'm different

and because they grew up with a strong father

Just a ManI was cold, you made a fire.
The logs crackled like applause
while you played your guitar
and sang to me songs of love
of broken roads and crossed stars;
with every note I loved you more.

You brought me flowers-
no, in my mind you did,
and that was all that really mattered.
I kept them pressed neatly
between Byron, Keats, and Shelly
and the lines that made up you.

You said that you had always loved me
and that I was the only one,
but I didn't really listen,
I only heard what I wanted
instead of what was important,
your use of past tense regarding me.

I was wrong, I was wrong,
I made you grander than what you are.
I built y

Searching for the SunI.

The day everything ended, she was standing in a parking lot, weary from a long day of departures and destinations, staring up at the sky. Clouds strolled west, their armfuls of grey dripping out of their grasp and spattering onto the asphalt, onto her upturned face. They rolled and crashed into one another, piling up high in the stratosphere like mountains of cottony stone. Once, they had been at war, and their arguments had sliced across the countryside with the recklessness of a summer fire. Now, though, something had calmed them. Perhaps they were tired from their travel like her, or perhaps it was the sun, gently wedging them apart wi

Tomb Worldbuy the war bonds to my body
buy tickets to the air raid of my soul
trenches on my wrists
fight the somme across my stomach
machine gun pock marks
bombs, my flesh shakes

no land,
only lines to cross
and three miles of blood and barbed wire marshes

protect the soldiers
but there are no defenses
the western front is failing

TO ARMS!

shells that are empty
(I am empty)

the skies
(my eyes)
lighting up with flares
there's only smoke left
up there
(clouds my mind)

we left our masks behind and now we'll all go blind

packed in here, piled in
like cattle
like corpses

where is the axis?
we've been in here three days.
is t

GrandfatherGrandfather, I've heard that there's a little lump of cancer
lying in your bed, resting its head
between the bed sheets, where it curls
against your side like a bloated alley cat; close enough
to finger every heartbeat
that races through your pale blue veins. I've heard
that it comes a-knocking in the night like a stranger,
wandering door to door along your ribcage
and running its hand down the thin paper walls
as it looks for a quiet place to sleep away the stars.

I've heard that it comes into your bed
and peels your eyelids apart
and roots itself inside your dreams, silent
as a secret. The tumors grew within your pancreas
like

The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee

Desolateif you are parched tonight,
the pale of your lips cracked
with thirst for that which
will not claim you;

if you hunger -
the deep and shallow collapsing
into slivered vibrations;

if blindness rejects you, says
no, watch now.
this is the way of it;

if you are breathing the world
into cinders, inhaling each poison
on purpose, striving
toward an apocalypse
because that is chaos
we can categorize,

then you may understand.

Girl, Fifteen, To A Lover She'll Never MeetThursday nights are silver screened.
At nine, it's time once again to air
the prelude to a dream.
I wait, eyes square, for the immaculate
contours of your face to appear:
the features of a lover I'll never meet.

It seems strange to say
(a kind of admission of defeat),
but to be honest I'm OK
with the pause, rewind, replay
that makes up our relationship.
You have to admit,
knowing I'd never flip
channels or walk out when
you're in a scene
is a devotion, of sorts.
I expect nothing in return.
I know you know nothing of me.

But I can't help but love you;
your close-ups, your scripted smile,
the way you lean towards the screen

We're all just Meat and BonesHolly,

I'm going to die.

No, I'm going to change…into them. I should probably write this down directly, quickly, and to the point. In about an hour I will cease to be Ryan, English major at Lander University in Greenwood SC, and I will start my life anew as a zombie. Yea, an undead corpse that stumbles around all day searching for human flesh. I will be nameless…just one undead among thousands.

Which is exactly why I'm writing this letter on this stack of blank receipts. I'm holed up in The Dixie, a local burger joint. Ironically, I always thought the old-timey and weathered neon sign out front would make a perfect apocalypse bac

beta physicsi.
the rain wrapped impatience around your roof,
bored through the wood like a thousand million termites
(or one you-sized termite, blind, breathless)
and seeped from the cold clockwork like battery acid.

ii.
you lived in a widow's closet -

a house swarmed with antiques
that collapsed in their own gravity
and combusted -

and then you lived in widow's charcoal.

iii.
"galaxies are either lovers or termites," she mused.

(earlier, her fingernails bored into my back
Hubble's thousand million stars, all drops of acid
branding my spine.)

"they are drawn to each other for years
and in an instant, once together,
eat themselves alive.

The Broken WallMilo woke up one morning in a different bed than the one he had gone to sleep in. Even so, the bed he was in now was still his own. He looked up at the ceiling and saw patterns there that he had never seen before and yet he knew they would be there. Sunlight slanted through the window in a line different from what he had expected.

He spent the rest of the late morning wandering through the house. It was full of knick-knacks from places he was sure he had been. Every thing that he found there was his. Every thing that he found there was new to him.

In a daze, he sat down at the kitchen table. His mind was running, but it was buzzing, too. He

the less i knowsomething new: my breath hitched but the words meant nothing.
i owed the light peserverent flattery in the form of prose,
stories of what could have been.

the gloom in which i slept was a system altogether unable to measure up to the new universe;
to exist together in perfect cognition is first to understand that i never wish to be better.
how pitiable this impure form to which we all succumb
littered with stars. i am temporary like them, almost, always and never.

I have forgotten how to live. it is late mornings during which i upturn my lazy eyes to the sky
against it's will. there, like you, live millions- and my mind is reborn.

t

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New MindsWhen I was created and attached to the Surgery ceiling of New Minds Cybernetics, I did not dream of freedom, precisely because I did not know what freedom was.
In fact, I did not think of anything at all except the mission at hand: growing in size and skill, learning about the intricate workings of the human body inside and out, particularly the mastermind of it all—brain.
Ah, the brain. Digging through its complex folds to create places for my electrodes and the Cy-friends was an honor, to say the least. Nonetheless, my mind was not like yours. You may compare it to the mental state of a fetus nestled in the organic incubat

New Minds Chapter 2 For many days and nights on end the Melder watched them, exquisitely complex optical sensors focusing on the small patch of wilderness where the humans had fled and made camp in order to escape imagined oppression.
This area was called Forestwaste due to its reputation as a dirty, polluted wasteland where crops would not grow and trees were burnt and dead. This was only a half-truth, but still the Melder did not like this place.
The human refugees however, did. Other than the tougher, more prepared Militia, they were most likely the only specimens of their kind left who knew how to live in "the wild" for long periods of time.

New Minds Chapter 3To an outsider, the room might have looked like an ordinary shrink's office, adorned with succulent potted plants, abstract art mounted on the earthy-toned walls, and a teak desk right across from the leather sofa where Alexis Prichard sat, silent and uncomfortable.
The shrink was referred to only as Doc, and the shiny black camera lenses that were its eyes narrowed to dots with a barely audible whir as it zoomed in and studied her.
Everyone called Doc a he. Alexis refused to attribute gender to this thing, even if it was practically as smart as any human.
For one thing, it looked sort of like an animated skeleton. Whoever had designed it

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[x]

Clocks For Eyes

by ~Crazyone222, Mar 30, 2012, 3:05:17 PM
Literature / Poetry / Horror / Free Verse

The creature with clocks for eyes
Swallows the years as it prowls our garden
Thin and gangly but with dignified grace
It sees the time on everyone's face

One clock is the present
And one clock is the future
There is no past and
You can never go back

The creature with clocks for eyes
Doesn't tell you when its hungry
It never goes without
Because all it could ever need
Is given without question

It has two faces, four hands
An eternity of deadly conscience
Nothing to reconcile with
Nothing to apologize to
It doesn't hear you
When the jaws snap shut for the final time
You'll know the gateway to the past is closed
There is no third clock

Avert your eyes from those hateful numerals
If you can
And don't pretend you owe nothing
To your fellow man

'Cause the creature with clocks for eyes is ambling
Nearer and nearer
Paws scratching, tick-tick-ticking
Begging to be let in

Glimpsing nothing but the end
Hearing nothing but those pleading words
More time, just a little more time
To make things right
Just a few more days
To say what needed to be said

Just another day in the sunlight
Before I fall through the floor
And impale myself on the upturned hands
Of abandoned bodies and souls

Clocks For Eyesby ~Crazyone222

Literature / Poetry / Horror / Free Verse

I got the idea of a creature with clocks where it eyes should be a long time ago and decided to turn it into a poem.
I see this creature as a reflection of time and death, or rather, what it means to us, our fear and fascination.
Its appearance is somewhat quadrupedal yet also weirdly insectlike, with dark purplish skin, strange-looking jaws like a deep sea lantern fish, and of course, an enormous pair of clocks for eyes. I may draw it sometime.

Edit: OMFG. A DD? Thanks so much to everyone who has perused and enjoyed my work! It truly means a lot!

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-05-24

Clocks For Eyes by ~Crazyone222 ( Suggested by ^SylwiaTelari and Featured by `thorns )

love 5 5

joy 1 1

wow 2 2

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~SurrealGrotesque77 Oct 13, 2012 Student Artist

YOu still wanted your poetry in the magazine right? Why don't you send like four of your favorites and I can run them in next issue: SurrealGrotesque77@hotmail.com. Also send a short bio.

~Crazyone222 Oct 14, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Sure, that would be great! Sorry for the late reply; I haven't checked my Deviantart in awhile due to lack of internet. So I will send you some soon. Thanks!

~brookiet77 May 25, 2012

This is an awsome. I loved it.

~vonPipkin May 25, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Great poem! I really felt captivated reading this little piece of work

*laWls-inkD May 24, 2012

The way you wrote this line was perfect:

there is no past and
you can never go back

the "and" leaves you dangling for a few seconds but puts emphasis on "you can never go back". awesome.

~Theus1989 May 24, 2012 Student Writer

crazy goooooood!!!

~E404Corruption May 24, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

this is a very well written poem. i love it, to put it simply.

*ZtarDaze May 24, 2012 Student Photographer

I Love this poem. I could actually see it playing out in my head like a silent story, although I think my version of what I saw may have been a little more Goth meets wicked translation of Alice in Wonderland! I see a lot of meanings in it, but it may just be the things I am going through that seem to reflect on this. Thank you for sharing!!

~Luckysweep May 24, 2012

I can see this creature as a kind of feline. A giant cat who keeps the time of all.

~Luckysweep May 24, 2012

If you see the future, improve on it. The future is uncertain, for it is always changing.

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