Standing in front of the mirror I see the wounds. Tell tale lines striped along the curve of my back. I stare …perplexed that I have come so far without ever noticing.
Her back, once as smooth and unblemished as a fresh canvas, was awash in brutal stripes of rose and scarlet. The intermixed and overlapping welts and slashes – all of which bore the distinctive origins of a whip – stained her skin countless times over while bruises, some dark, some light, lined the areas beneath and between, turning her once alabastrine features into a veritable portrait of pain and suffering.
“Oh, Elsa…” she whispered, her voice breaking as her fingers hovered, trembling, above her.
“Big brother! Big brother! Look at that animal!” Sam shouted excitedly, big green eyes glowing with excitement.
“Ya like the striped zebra, hm?” Alan asked as he looked down to his twelve-year-old sibling. It was a nice day, for once, between the two. Usually they’d argue over something stupid and end up having a pure hatred for each other that lasted for up to a week.
Blue and black stripes. That was the tie he wore on our first date.
Pink polka dots on a black background. My dress for the second date.
We never matched in clothes.
We always laughed at the same things, though.
Bekah Joan
I parked the bowl of popcorn between me and David as he turned on the DVD player. We were going to watch my favorite movie, “The Boy With The Striped Pajamas”; David’s never been too fond of it but it was my turn to choose this week. The credits began to roll and then the doorbell rang. I sighed and went to go see who it was.
When the door flew open I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. I could feel my legs buckle and I hit the ground. I looked up, trying to get a glimpse at my attacker but he or she had already darted away. Lifting my hand to my face, I was horrified to see it covered in blood.
AJ Kenobi
His striped shirt fluttered in the breeze as he stood on the hill looking at me. I couldn’t move as his eyes bore into my soul.
I found the barber shop with the typical striped pole which name I couldn’t remember, and I found Mister Shambly sitting in the same corner, snipping the edges off of an old man’s receding hairline. His stylist partner, a young woman with a cattledog puppy named Rascal, was sweeping off the long, red locks of the hippie-ish man who had just sauntered out the door.
“Usual?” asked Mister Shambly as I reached for a magazine.
Belinda Roddie
Different colors. Different personalities. Different personas. We have different stripes depending on our surroundings, our circumstances. To be striped is to camouflage, to blend in. Having the wrong stripes, is disaster.
Jennifer
He seemed a straight up person when you met him,
open, warm, a good listener.
He had a wild side, though,
a side that knew no boundaries,
no shame
He was at times ruthless and self indulgent,
malicious and scheming,
his outer veneer a temporary illusion,
a tool for managing social situations
but knowing him longer, better, closer,
he never really changed his stripes,
just masked them when it suited him
to get his foot in the door.
It lay across his forehead
Braille, Morse, hieroglyphic, all in one
A burning, frozen sketch
from that special friday night/saturday morning
Where the noun glass, emptied and argued over
became a verb
its slivers in the slipstream
that the contents made in the blood
striped like a zebra
tiger
tabby cat
or fancy pajamas made of silk
I would love to sleep in fancy pajamas
in a big feather bed
with a soft tabby cat
and samoa cookies
Jamilyn Morris
Everything was striped in the picture. The ball being thrown. The man in the red and white shirt, muscles bulging on the toss. The dog was striped. That’s what the trick was. There were no striped dogs, were there? Striped cats sure, but dogs? The whole painting was done in stripes. It was ‘abstract reflections on perception.’ It was bullshit.
He was stripped of everything he had, all his clothes and belongings. He no longer felt like himself standing there in the pale grey uniform as every other man in the endless line of broken souls who no longer seemed like real men. They were all the same empty gray coevals.
Renee Halusla
Her shirt was striped with blood and torn in all pieces. I couldn’t believe I did this to her.
“I’m… I don’t even know.” I muttered. Her face was scratched from where my paws were.
She whimpered and sobbed, trying to cat
Rebecca
Her pants were striped and her heart was cold. She longed for life away from here.
Avery
Reconsiderations
{4th stanza}
But the pattern isn’t this appearance,
that hail happens the same way* every time.
{6th stanza}
Hard ripples, fast ripples,
ripples that cross mathematically into a new ripple, this new complexity crossing with other ripples. A pattern of beauty etched on my iris.
She stared at the full length mirror just before heading out to accept her Nobel Prize. Her contributions to mankind are muted by a nagging voice telling her the striped gown makes her look fat.
All money is here
All money is in my wallet
All money is not lost
but its striped.
Justin
his hands were worn with the faded lines that spoke of hauling yards and yards of rope. his brow bore the lines that come with squinting at the sun across an open sea. he was full of sailor’s lines, and while on anyone else they would have aged poorly, his only made him look stronger
(This is mine, just re-posting it now that I have an actual account!)
his hands were worn with the faded lines that spoke of hauling yards and yards of rope. his brow bore the lines that come with squinting at the sun across an open sea. he was full of sailor’s lines, and while on anyone else they would have aged poorly, his only made him look stronger
Maya
Today’s Oneword: Patterns
I need to write about patterns.
I need to write about patterns.
The ones that distract your eyes for the
moment it takes to consume your thoughts eternally.
And not pattern’s appearance, but the “why not?” ‘s the
“Why doesn’t every driver slow down at a yellow light?” or the
“Why don’t people wake different ways each day?”
The kind of patterns that mesh thirteen stripes with the heart of this nation, the kind of patterns that reveal alliteration’s weakness, and the kind of patterns that bear repeating “the kind of patterns.” Our country ’tis of thee.
Today, the sky feeds me my own thoughts.
Hail’s genesis is hintless. It begins.
Metal clinks like BB bullets relentless in beat, scratchy in pitch.
The thump-thump-thumping on asphalt and concrete together?
Sky’s iced dreams fucking their dreamcatcher.
Skin welts. Shocking coldness soothes, then skin shivers. The hail
ends. Dreams, no longer icy, continue falling with apologetic kindness.
But the pattern isn’t this appearance,
that hail happens the same why every time.
It’s the, “Why doesn’t hail do something else? Resound differently, or happen
asynchronously?”
It’s the “Will hail never stop?”
Not a pleading to cease, but an earnest longing
for the eternal.
The pattern is these questions and their answer
“Because. Because when those dreams melt their iced armor,
their destructive capacity becomes beauty’s creator. Cross ripples, slow ripples, hard ones, slow ones. Prophetic waves in the puddles of your path.
Because every drop, each dream, becomes a reminder that the microscopic mimics the universal, that reality is a reflection of dreams.”
{ongoing thoughts for poetryslam}
Patterns of hypocrisy, abuse, and lies.
And patterns of bad things:
In the morning, the sun slants through the blinds, making a striped pattern on your sleeping face. I wake you by tracing the lines with my fingertips, leaning in for a kiss. And before you even open your eyes, you begin to recite your dreams.
The sit covers in his sisters car were striped. He opened the door for me, like a true gentleman. The door shut with a click, and I settled in over the striped seat covers. He looked at me and asked where I wanted to go. With a tug at several bobby pins my hair fell out of the fancy bun. I wiped a tear away, and sucked in some air. “The grand canyon” I sighed, he listened to me talk, and just drove. I didn’t know why he was being so nice, or why I was crying. Something about big momentous occasions made me upset. Like the passage of time itself makes me angry, so prom night was bound to be bad. I tried to explain that, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he focused on the road. I knew he didn’t understand, but he was trying, and I had a lot on my mind, and to talk about, and the words just keep spilling, and it felt right, and… And… I didn’t know where to go… And my thoughts scrambled around him, but he listened….
Brooke Tuinei
There it lay, his body, striped and torn. Sinews of skin hanging from deep torn wounds. The scent of warm blood filling the air. The depth of the wounds deeper beyond comprehension. For in every wound lay our every sin. Our every sin leaving deep, burning, searing wounds. There he lay, a king, striped and torn.
Jose
“What do you think? Striped or dots?” my sister asks me about her tight selection, one dangling on each leg.
“They both look fine.”
“Fine isn’t enough!”
stuttered thoughts between the positive and negative…to which neither is the prominent reaching for something of the unknown. I lunge hoping to fall. prepared to open the wound that exists..engaging a moment determined to accept either black or white…stripes.
lorissa
your stubbornness. and your striped shirt. and your never calling me now. wrapped in prison bared pattern shadows we were friends, we were friends or more, i don’t recall. now my puppy is crying i think he misses you maybe even a little more than me but no. no, infinity isn’t that much and forever wasn’t that long after all, was it.
juliar
Striped. That’s what it looked like a really big striped zebra. And my mother wanted me to wear this dress to prom? Was she insane?
“Mom, it’s so not happening. No freaking way.”
Mom frowned. “Don’t use that word, Jasmine. It’s not for young ladies.”
“Mom this isn’t the 18th century. And there are worse words to use.”
“Doesn’t mean you should be using that no one. Now come on. Try it on! I think it’s beautiful.”
I rolled my eyes, drew in a deep breath, and let it out through my mouth. Well, if it would make her happy… then I could come up with some kind of convenient (and reasonable, in her opinion) excuse for why I simply couldn’t wear it later.
Alexa
the tigers hid behind their striped pelts, morphing into the wilderness
rastriped, reminds me of a zebra. wild and free. striped is also some sort of casing system like how many strips you have…….the more you have the higher you are on the command! it also makes me think of red strip beer, jamacia and my honeymoon. Many good memories, but some not so good as well! all lessions….all lesson’s……this is an intersting process and one that I am just starting…..
nora
The suit was striped. It hung around the thin boy like a garish costume. Petunia rolled her eyes at the absurd nature of it. What were these people thinking? A skinny boy in a suit was not going to convince anyone. Neither was the elephant sized hat adorning her head. These people were all insane. But so was she. If she wasn’t she would be somewhere else right now.
Bethany
her colors were striped. her clothes were stripped. she was stripped of her ability to care about being so bare. Her skin stripped from her bones. her muscles stripped from her heart.
from the welts laid down by the lash, the goad those nine-armed hindu goddesses wield. pay attention, not to what you think, but what your heart throbs out
lara
I stared down at the striped ground before me. I could not have told you why it was striped. This was all new to me, everything. The travelling, the strangely harsher sunlight, and the oddly striped ground. What was this place anyway?
Zebra cakes are silly names for the delicious striped delicacies on my pantry shelf. They aren’t black and white. They are just covered in love. Smooth creamy frosting on a beautiful white cake makes eating them a wonderful experience.
Sabrina
Sunlight striped her face in strange, golden bars.
My heart is striped:
one red stripe for the pain;
one blue stripe for the joyful gaze
– sunk into the sky;
one green stripe for the wide field
in front of my eyes;
one black stripe for fears, sorrow
and the shadows inside;
one golden stripe for my mute love,
you can’t hear:
it’s echoing around us.
Pay attention;
do you feel my waves of emotion?
Standing in front of the mirror I see the wounds. Tell tale lines striped along the curve of my back. I stare …perplexed that I have come so far without ever noticing.
Her back, once as smooth and unblemished as a fresh canvas, was awash in brutal stripes of rose and scarlet. The intermixed and overlapping welts and slashes – all of which bore the distinctive origins of a whip – stained her skin countless times over while bruises, some dark, some light, lined the areas beneath and between, turning her once alabastrine features into a veritable portrait of pain and suffering.
“Oh, Elsa…” she whispered, her voice breaking as her fingers hovered, trembling, above her.
“Big brother! Big brother! Look at that animal!” Sam shouted excitedly, big green eyes glowing with excitement.
“Ya like the striped zebra, hm?” Alan asked as he looked down to his twelve-year-old sibling. It was a nice day, for once, between the two. Usually they’d argue over something stupid and end up having a pure hatred for each other that lasted for up to a week.
Blue and black stripes. That was the tie he wore on our first date.
Pink polka dots on a black background. My dress for the second date.
We never matched in clothes.
We always laughed at the same things, though.
I parked the bowl of popcorn between me and David as he turned on the DVD player. We were going to watch my favorite movie, “The Boy With The Striped Pajamas”; David’s never been too fond of it but it was my turn to choose this week. The credits began to roll and then the doorbell rang. I sighed and went to go see who it was.
When the door flew open I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. I could feel my legs buckle and I hit the ground. I looked up, trying to get a glimpse at my attacker but he or she had already darted away. Lifting my hand to my face, I was horrified to see it covered in blood.
His striped shirt fluttered in the breeze as he stood on the hill looking at me. I couldn’t move as his eyes bore into my soul.
I found the barber shop with the typical striped pole which name I couldn’t remember, and I found Mister Shambly sitting in the same corner, snipping the edges off of an old man’s receding hairline. His stylist partner, a young woman with a cattledog puppy named Rascal, was sweeping off the long, red locks of the hippie-ish man who had just sauntered out the door.
“Usual?” asked Mister Shambly as I reached for a magazine.
Different colors. Different personalities. Different personas. We have different stripes depending on our surroundings, our circumstances. To be striped is to camouflage, to blend in. Having the wrong stripes, is disaster.
He seemed a straight up person when you met him,
open, warm, a good listener.
He had a wild side, though,
a side that knew no boundaries,
no shame
He was at times ruthless and self indulgent,
malicious and scheming,
his outer veneer a temporary illusion,
a tool for managing social situations
but knowing him longer, better, closer,
he never really changed his stripes,
just masked them when it suited him
to get his foot in the door.
It lay across his forehead
Braille, Morse, hieroglyphic, all in one
A burning, frozen sketch
from that special friday night/saturday morning
Where the noun glass, emptied and argued over
became a verb
its slivers in the slipstream
that the contents made in the blood
striped like a zebra
tiger
tabby cat
or fancy pajamas made of silk
I would love to sleep in fancy pajamas
in a big feather bed
with a soft tabby cat
and samoa cookies
Everything was striped in the picture. The ball being thrown. The man in the red and white shirt, muscles bulging on the toss. The dog was striped. That’s what the trick was. There were no striped dogs, were there? Striped cats sure, but dogs? The whole painting was done in stripes. It was ‘abstract reflections on perception.’ It was bullshit.
He was stripped of everything he had, all his clothes and belongings. He no longer felt like himself standing there in the pale grey uniform as every other man in the endless line of broken souls who no longer seemed like real men. They were all the same empty gray coevals.
Her shirt was striped with blood and torn in all pieces. I couldn’t believe I did this to her.
“I’m… I don’t even know.” I muttered. Her face was scratched from where my paws were.
She whimpered and sobbed, trying to cat
Her pants were striped and her heart was cold. She longed for life away from here.
Reconsiderations
{4th stanza}
But the pattern isn’t this appearance,
that hail happens the same way* every time.
{6th stanza}
Hard ripples, fast ripples,
ripples that cross mathematically into a new ripple, this new complexity crossing with other ripples. A pattern of beauty etched on my iris.
She stared at the full length mirror just before heading out to accept her Nobel Prize. Her contributions to mankind are muted by a nagging voice telling her the striped gown makes her look fat.
All money is here
All money is in my wallet
All money is not lost
but its striped.
his hands were worn with the faded lines that spoke of hauling yards and yards of rope. his brow bore the lines that come with squinting at the sun across an open sea. he was full of sailor’s lines, and while on anyone else they would have aged poorly, his only made him look stronger
(This is mine, just re-posting it now that I have an actual account!)
his hands were worn with the faded lines that spoke of hauling yards and yards of rope. his brow bore the lines that come with squinting at the sun across an open sea. he was full of sailor’s lines, and while on anyone else they would have aged poorly, his only made him look stronger
Today’s Oneword: Patterns
I need to write about patterns.
I need to write about patterns.
The ones that distract your eyes for the
moment it takes to consume your thoughts eternally.
And not pattern’s appearance, but the “why not?” ‘s the
“Why doesn’t every driver slow down at a yellow light?” or the
“Why don’t people wake different ways each day?”
The kind of patterns that mesh thirteen stripes with the heart of this nation, the kind of patterns that reveal alliteration’s weakness, and the kind of patterns that bear repeating “the kind of patterns.” Our country ’tis of thee.
Today, the sky feeds me my own thoughts.
Hail’s genesis is hintless. It begins.
Metal clinks like BB bullets relentless in beat, scratchy in pitch.
The thump-thump-thumping on asphalt and concrete together?
Sky’s iced dreams fucking their dreamcatcher.
Skin welts. Shocking coldness soothes, then skin shivers. The hail
ends. Dreams, no longer icy, continue falling with apologetic kindness.
But the pattern isn’t this appearance,
that hail happens the same why every time.
It’s the, “Why doesn’t hail do something else? Resound differently, or happen
asynchronously?”
It’s the “Will hail never stop?”
Not a pleading to cease, but an earnest longing
for the eternal.
The pattern is these questions and their answer
“Because. Because when those dreams melt their iced armor,
their destructive capacity becomes beauty’s creator. Cross ripples, slow ripples, hard ones, slow ones. Prophetic waves in the puddles of your path.
Because every drop, each dream, becomes a reminder that the microscopic mimics the universal, that reality is a reflection of dreams.”
{ongoing thoughts for poetryslam}
Patterns of hypocrisy, abuse, and lies.
And patterns of bad things:
In the morning, the sun slants through the blinds, making a striped pattern on your sleeping face. I wake you by tracing the lines with my fingertips, leaning in for a kiss. And before you even open your eyes, you begin to recite your dreams.
Crossing patterns, diagonal, vertical, up, down, across. Rigid, boundaries kept.
The sit covers in his sisters car were striped. He opened the door for me, like a true gentleman. The door shut with a click, and I settled in over the striped seat covers. He looked at me and asked where I wanted to go. With a tug at several bobby pins my hair fell out of the fancy bun. I wiped a tear away, and sucked in some air. “The grand canyon” I sighed, he listened to me talk, and just drove. I didn’t know why he was being so nice, or why I was crying. Something about big momentous occasions made me upset. Like the passage of time itself makes me angry, so prom night was bound to be bad. I tried to explain that, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he focused on the road. I knew he didn’t understand, but he was trying, and I had a lot on my mind, and to talk about, and the words just keep spilling, and it felt right, and… And… I didn’t know where to go… And my thoughts scrambled around him, but he listened….
There it lay, his body, striped and torn. Sinews of skin hanging from deep torn wounds. The scent of warm blood filling the air. The depth of the wounds deeper beyond comprehension. For in every wound lay our every sin. Our every sin leaving deep, burning, searing wounds. There he lay, a king, striped and torn.
“What do you think? Striped or dots?” my sister asks me about her tight selection, one dangling on each leg.
“They both look fine.”
“Fine isn’t enough!”
Striped shadows cast by the prison bars upon the floor just inches away… I see them daily, a representation of all that was taken from me.
stuttered thoughts between the positive and negative…to which neither is the prominent reaching for something of the unknown. I lunge hoping to fall. prepared to open the wound that exists..engaging a moment determined to accept either black or white…stripes.
your stubbornness. and your striped shirt. and your never calling me now. wrapped in prison bared pattern shadows we were friends, we were friends or more, i don’t recall. now my puppy is crying i think he misses you maybe even a little more than me but no. no, infinity isn’t that much and forever wasn’t that long after all, was it.
Striped. That’s what it looked like a really big striped zebra. And my mother wanted me to wear this dress to prom? Was she insane?
“Mom, it’s so not happening. No freaking way.”
Mom frowned. “Don’t use that word, Jasmine. It’s not for young ladies.”
“Mom this isn’t the 18th century. And there are worse words to use.”
“Doesn’t mean you should be using that no one. Now come on. Try it on! I think it’s beautiful.”
I rolled my eyes, drew in a deep breath, and let it out through my mouth. Well, if it would make her happy… then I could come up with some kind of convenient (and reasonable, in her opinion) excuse for why I simply couldn’t wear it later.
the tigers hid behind their striped pelts, morphing into the wilderness
the pattern seemed to dazzle her to start with until the animal ahead came into focus
rastriped, reminds me of a zebra. wild and free. striped is also some sort of casing system like how many strips you have…….the more you have the higher you are on the command! it also makes me think of red strip beer, jamacia and my honeymoon. Many good memories, but some not so good as well! all lessions….all lesson’s……this is an intersting process and one that I am just starting…..
The suit was striped. It hung around the thin boy like a garish costume. Petunia rolled her eyes at the absurd nature of it. What were these people thinking? A skinny boy in a suit was not going to convince anyone. Neither was the elephant sized hat adorning her head. These people were all insane. But so was she. If she wasn’t she would be somewhere else right now.
her colors were striped. her clothes were stripped. she was stripped of her ability to care about being so bare. Her skin stripped from her bones. her muscles stripped from her heart.
from the welts laid down by the lash, the goad those nine-armed hindu goddesses wield. pay attention, not to what you think, but what your heart throbs out
I stared down at the striped ground before me. I could not have told you why it was striped. This was all new to me, everything. The travelling, the strangely harsher sunlight, and the oddly striped ground. What was this place anyway?
Zebra cakes are silly names for the delicious striped delicacies on my pantry shelf. They aren’t black and white. They are just covered in love. Smooth creamy frosting on a beautiful white cake makes eating them a wonderful experience.
Sunlight striped her face in strange, golden bars.
My heart is striped:
one red stripe for the pain;
one blue stripe for the joyful gaze
– sunk into the sky;
one green stripe for the wide field
in front of my eyes;
one black stripe for fears, sorrow
and the shadows inside;
one golden stripe for my mute love,
you can’t hear:
it’s echoing around us.
Pay attention;
do you feel my waves of emotion?