Will Never Hurt Me

The fight escalates until we no longer care
if the words we say hurt, if the words we say tear.

We vent our frustrations through insults and blame
without ever considering our guilt of the same.

Razor-edged stones hurled with hateful speed
don’t give what we want, don’t get what we need.

They say, “Only weapons can harm us, only blows break our bones.
Words, they are useless, mere toothpick sticks, cotton ball stones.”

But words burn much hotter when spoken in rage.
They lie and deceive; they wound, and they cage.

They package suppressed pain, their poison seeps over time.
Their effects run much deeper than this one simple rhyme.

Consider the impact of a tongue on the loose,
with no thought taken for others or how it will bruise.

Then think of the mouth shut tight with restraint,
and the sound of forgiveness callous word did not taint.

©T.Lynn Smith 2009

Desolate Temptation

She calls to me with ice blue lips,
a breath’s caress against my cheek.
At the edge of sight, shadows creep.
I plunge into sapphire silence.
Drifting now, descending,
drowning in the cobalt bruise.
Glancing back, my eyes skip
across frigid shafts of light, translucent,
feeble under the press of this cerulean gloom.
Just one exhale, one raw gasp,
and I slip, numb, into her callous embrace.

©T.Lynn Smith 2009

"Feast On Me"

Their eyes hold me, steel and glass,

Captive in the suffocating color-wash.

Flat right angles box my eternity.

Fallen, my failures shine bright;

I hide from their dead light

Behind hands, hair, an imperfect veil.

Over me carrion beasts hover, savage, ravenous.

They illuminate my defeat with malicious glee,

Dissect my brokenness. Inflicting shallow wounds,

They segment my pain into delicate morsels.

I am a caged artist, empty.

An animal on display, injured and alone.

©T.Lynn Smith 2009

This was written in response to "Moscas," a digital art piece by Abigail M. Hernandez. After writing descriptive paragraphs detailing artwork on display around campus, my creative writing teacher challenged the class to convert the images and language used in our paragraphs into a poem. What follows is the paragraph I began with.

Scattered throughout the halls of the Tarrant Community College student-created art is on display. One such piece is “Moscas,” a digital art piece by Abigail M. Hernandez. The color-washed image shows a girl sitting in a dull room high in an industrial building. Shades of black, gray, and beige compose the concrete floor, steel struts, and overhead ducts give a suffocating feel to the flat expanse and right angles of the room. In the center of the room, the girl is positioned amid a chaotic pile of empty canvases. They shine as bright failures around her. She is broken, head in her hands, face hidden behind dark hair. The sky outside the sprawling rectangular windows, a dirty gray that hints toward pollution and neglect, projects dead light into the room. It also serves to illuminate the creatures that hover just outside the windows, two colossal flies. The flies, for which the piece in named, peer in upon the girl’s defeated state. Their red eyes and metallic green exoskeletons gleam maliciously. They signify a deadline, unpaid bills, a lost muse. She sits amid her failures while these beasts press in. Their cold, alien gaze dissects her brokenness. She is caged, an injured animal, an empty artist, alone.