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Painting NightsDear Emma,

The truth is I'm not a painter.

The truth is I followed you here from that flower shop on Whitmore Street, two and a half months ago. Please, keep reading.

You actually took my breath away when I glimpsed you holding a bunch of lilies in your slender hands at the flower shop counter. You stunned me. That's never happened to me before. I was watching you turning the bouquet left to right, you seemed in awe of the flowers' beauty. Your eyes, your perfect smile, the way you held yourself. It was not a conscious decision to follow you here. I think I was in a trance. I know how it looks; I know it sounds like a

Leopold Runs So SlowArms out like a flying squirrel, Leopold's Sketchers crunched across the gravel. He felt like he was in one of those comic books his older brother, Chris, was always reading, the ones with the girls in bright, skintight costumes, and the men with bulging muscles and red capes. Leo swooped around his driveway, his lips blubbering together to make the noise of a helicopter's propeller, then making the vehicle go down in flames, exploding in a shower of spittle.

"Look at Leo!" Casey from next door exclaimed, pointing to him from the kitchen window. "He can't even catch up with that leaf!" The said leaf skittered along the pavement, Leo trundlin

How To RememberI have no advice that was handed down to me from sage lips, or dying maternal grandparents. I don't know how to deal with neurotic night time episodes where if I listen closely, I swear I can hear farmers in their fields after midnight, shooting gophers when I don't live anywhere near a field. My window is a cavernous maw, opened wide to swallow my tousled head and suck the garbage of dreams from my soul. On those evenings, I can not look outside.

Insomnia has always wrapped its icy fingers around my limbs and tugged at me, one way, then another, ever since I can recall the need for sleep. It is like breathing, or eating, to me. It is common

The Power of RejectionA chasm opens between the dream of success and the fear of rejection. It can be impassible, the Grand Canyon of risk deterrents. And so many choose to never cross it, deciding it is much better to stay on the dream side than to hazard having hopes dashed against the cavern floor below.

The fear paralyzes. It rockets hearts into throats, becomes a mountain, elicits a high-pitched shriek of terror at the very thought of trying to take on the possibility of rejection. It keeps drawings secreted away in sketchbooks or songs buried five folders deep on a desktop – creations labored over and loved but never given the chance to be loved by oth

ParricideChris loves his new doll.

Its china face, with delicate hand-painted features, is framed by curling golden locks. He likes to trace its face with careful fingers. He can see his murky reflection in its glistening shoes and its dress is so soft he can't stop running his hand over the sapphire blue cloth. His parents aren't sure who gave him the doll, but six-year-old Chris can't be parted from it.

When he asks for black patent leather shoes, his dad glances up from the bills spread on his desk and his mom starts looking for her Caravan's keys.

When he asks for his chestnut hair to be bleached, his dad's head tilts and his mom takes him to

Love Poem for a Man Who Doesn't Get PoetryI buy milk as if it is the
most important
thing I have ever done; come home and
lay the bag on the floor
at your feet.

The meaning is lost
on you, a man

who is a snap of clean linen;
no, you prefer strait-line
talk, full-throttle motion.

Not wavering semaphore.

I feel silly with my quiet twist of metaphor,
Darling, Buttercup, My Angry Little Arsonist,
saying your name is the breath between
the waves, your heart
the hungry mouth of the bay.

There is a curve between the me and the you
We waited too long, hoping the pause
would not last forever, but just in case,
we hold hands in the dark.

I had forgotten how to give

Time Traveller's EngagementExactly ten years from tomorrow, we'll be married here. My wife doesn't know that, of course. In a certain sense, neither do I.

It's a beautiful spot, now. Now meaning today, when the sunlight is still pure, and the sky is still blue. The ivy still climbs in green snakes up the side of her father's chateau, the pennants of the House of Renard are snapping gaily over the towers.

I hear a lilting laugh that even now sends my heart into my throat. Euryale Renard. She is only a girl today, no older than my little sister is in the days I left behind. Even at twelve, my Ury's curls catch the sun like molten amber, with a flower basket flung wide

mn'teys wallI.

Nékti sat on the floor of his home, putting the finishing touches on his late wife's totem. He worked slowly, using a set of sticks he had been gathering since before the last full moon. He lovingly contoured the breasts, and scratched thin symmetrical patterns into the legs and body, leaving a fine spray of clay dust on the floor. His drawing-sticks were green-gray and hard, in a variety of thicknesses and oddly-shaped tips. One of the sticks had a curled tip—he had found it laying in the mud by the river to the south of town—and he hoped to use it later to draw the hair on her head. Not the way it looked at the end, he th

WantsI want the time to write about
the beauty, the newness in nature

I want to share with you. I want to
catch each individual snowflake

with shutter snaps and take them home
to decorate the windows. I want to watch

the river don its icy finger-gloves, to consider
lines and angles shifting, indifferent, softening

under winter's lofty load. I want to snowshoe
on some not-too-frigid night with a full moon

illuminating night to noon-like with blue-
white light or when there is no moon, only

innumerable stars, impeccably brilliant,
impossibly far away against the ebony

of New England midnights- I want to know you
see these things tha

A Rough Guide to SemicolonsIt is a simple symbol. Some say deceptively so. Incorrectly used, it is the scourge of prose and the ravager of innocent sentences. Amongst all the punctuation marks of the English language, it is perhaps the most abused of all. Many writers fear to touch it at all. It is, the semicolon.

But all this doom, gloom and terror is, in fact, quite unnecessary. The semicolon has just two major uses, both of which are quite easy to identify. Let's have a look at them.

1. To Connect Two Independent Clauses

For those who aren't sure, a clause is a series of words that could stand alone as a complete sentence. Clauses are often connected together wit

GlassJordan knew something was wrong the moment he turned the key.

"Lily?" he called out as he slipped into the dark house.

It was only around 6pm, but it was the middle of January, so the sun must have been down for at least an hour. She would have turned on the lights by now.

Maybe she's out, Jordan tried to convince himself to no avail. Lily had scarcely left the house in weeks.

He was still barely a step away from the door. Going any further meant making this real.

Jordan decided he'd have to make it real sooner or later and kicked off his shoes, but didn't bother to strip himself of his winter coat. The chill in the air was far too heavy

but here and now i am aliveI was three years old when we moved there, when the wall in my room that moved and the drunken woman next door and the grey grey hight of the flats could not contain my first chubby steps to identity. My parents packed us up for the jumble sale of moving, pricing up our lives and our possessions with tape and cardboard and memories. The grass on the show house became our grass, became our house, while I slept in a new room under old sheets and dreamed of darkness.

I was five and nobody else was five and nobody else was a girl and I was so alone. The cats that roamed were my friends, the weeping willow and the squeak in the wheels of my scoot

The HolidayMr. and Mrs. Gupta killed rats for a living.

Theirs was a small company, just the two of them. Once the call came through, both of them would put their heads together and plan out the entire thing. Mrs. Gupta would handle the front end of the operations, the billings and other things, while Mr. Gupta would be the back-end, the one who got the job done.

This arrangement had worked well for the past forty years. Acquaintances would claim the two had never taken off a day off all these years; something Mrs. Gupta quietly reminded Mr. Gupta every time they went to bed. We would do something someday, Mr. Gupta would kindly reassure her, and the

12.30.it still hurts -

that place deep inside where my children have grown to shadows of dervishes and died, bled and brutalized and sucked away; wrapped up and discarded in worn old cotton sheets and the sterile blank wastelands of hospital hazard containers.

i never wanted to have children. when most girls are young, i suppose they relish the chance at a pee-wee sally, a goo-goo gretta, cabbage patch pre-emptives to the dreams of womanhood always lurking behind their wide, beautiful eyes. for most girls, i suppose there's nothing more wonderful than sitting down to tea and potty with plasticine versions of what they themselves once were in the

RJGreta oto. They are found down in Venezuela all the way to Panama. A member of the brush-footed butterfly family. Only two inches long in wingspan. They're my favorite insect.

I met a man once and he wanted to leave everything. He had a bottle in his hand and I was afraid he was going to inhale it all and let his light go out like I'd seen so many go before.

I told him he couldn't leave, because then he would never get to see these fascinating and beautiful butterflies from down south. The butterflies with glass wings that are only two inches wide with tiny bodies.

He asked me if that was my only reason to still be here, a tiny little inse

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I thought I knew my death.I thought I knew my death. He grabbed my heart one day and squeezed tightly, banded fear wrapping its way around my body and terrorizing the air from my lungs. "Not..Like..This.." I would gasp, thinking that there must be some better way out. I would start to beg but it would soon be over. He'd release me and my body would give up. There would be nothing left to say.

I thought I knew my death. She would slip into the shadows some months before I thought my time was up. She would slowly take my memories for my own, replacing them with child's talk and nonsensical things. "Oh please, won't somebody help me." It would be a rhetoric, although I

MemoryBecause there is only one of you;
in all of time
there is a need to preserve like a pickle;
the things that I love.

Sea Glass and SandThe only day she could recall that they lived without fear, was a trip to the beach when the children were small. It was late September and an Autumnal breeze whipped skirts and peeled their long blonde hair back from their heads without mercy. Nobody complained though. They spread blankets on the fine sand and despite the chill the sun warmed them briefly - just enough to get by. That was all she ever would ask for. They drank hot chocolate from the cafe and didn't eat the grainy sandwiches that she had lovingly packed that morning. Instead they bought fish and chips and shared a carton of mushy peas, warm and sweet. The children swam in waves that gently caressed the shore. Whilst she pretended to read but really kept two well trained eyes on the bobbing heads, they hunted sea glass and sand dollars. When they finally heeded her calls to the beach they were shivering and salty, their hair knotted and woven with the ocean. She enveloped them in bright blue towels and instantly the sme

InsomniaFrom the day they had met until the day she died he had always known she was an insomniac. Her most entertaining emails and their deepest conversations were exchanged across many late night hours. So when they told him she had died peacefully in her sleep, it was only natural that he questioned his very existence and everything else on this earth that he had thought to be true.
Grief came and became increasingly difficult to shake off when the day came to a close and he wanted to sleep. He could only think of life, of the life in her. He could only think about how touching her was like wading into a lake in the Summer and bending forward to capture the ripples as they danced across the surface of the water. Impossible in your thoughts - but achievable when you put your mind to it.
Yet alone at night without her body alive with energy and aching to write beside him, he felt empty. It was during these times that he understood they

Seven days in AutumnEarl Carlton died in a tree-house of vines, twisted boughs and Autumn leaves surrounded by the scent of earth and vanilla musk. His wife cried for him at the foot of his rope ladder and begged him to come to bed each night as the mercury dropped and the storm clouds rolled in.
"I can't" He eventually responded on the 3rd night and by that time, people had gathered in earnest to witness the man's downfall.
"Why not?"demanded his wife, shivering in wool with her hair whipped behind her by the prevailing winds.
He thought about this for another four nights and the crowds grew bigger and each time his wife begged him to come down and be amongst the people once more. He beckoned her closer on the seventh night and she unsteadily stepped onto the lowest rung of the ladder, tottering precariously.
"I can't come down," He shouted across the high winds, "Because if I do, nobody will ask for me anymore."
A murmur of admi

And then there was oneThey didn't sound like gunshots. That's all she remembered thinking at the time. The bitter noise slicing through the hazy summer evening started off like a gunshot but ended up as something sharp. Perhaps somebody had dropped something on a building site across the Valley. That's what she allowed herself to think the first three times she heard it. Then the traffic on the distant motorway stopped, the echoing vibrations of cars racing home abruptly finished. Noise stopped traveling down through the trees and across the length of the river. The sky, which had begun the day as a cobalt blue had morphed into slate grey. The sound came again, but this time it wasn't alone. It didn't sound like gunshots. That's all she could think of, when the door splintered and there they were.

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Submitted: November 21, 2012
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The Death of Language

by ^Kaz-D, Nov 21, 2012, 2:06:04 AM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Editorial

They say that every fourteen days, a language dies. The statistic isn't alarming, after all there are supposedly seven thousand languages in the world. That a language dies every two weeks, is just a statistic. The concern comes with the knowledge that a language dies because it has been forgotten. Thus it dies without recognition, without farewell and without acknowledgment. It was merely there before, a communication bridge once upon a literary dream - now a nothing. This fascinating tool that we use to interact with our fellow human beings is lost. And we don't care. The Eskimos, they say, had a hundred words for snow.

That favourite pair of shoes that you love all the holes and splits into because they are so perfect and fit you so well - gets a better send off than a language. That coat that's become too small or too big, or too much last years fashion and too little of this years craze gets more of a farewell than a language. The things that break, stop working or are just no longer needed are at least acknowledged in their passing. When a language dies, nobody realises it. We like to pretend that we are overloaded with words. The Egyptians, they say, had fifty words for sand.

A language dies every fourteen days. It dies alone. It dies inside the last person alive to speak that language, to sing the songs that only they know, the words that only they can understand. If we stop remembering the things that have happened, is it because they never were? Or is it because we never really knew?

The Death of Languageby ^Kaz-D

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Editorial

©2012-2013 ^Kaz-D

I was trying to work with the age old saying that 'The Eskimos had 100 words for snow' and such and such. But it didn't flow properly. Then I stumbled across the National Geographic Article Enduring Voices and the lengths the project is going to, to try and highlight the language hotspots across the world where words are fast dying out, soon to be lost. If you're interested the hotspot map can be found here: [link] _{“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
~John Greenleaf Whittier}

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~The-Quirky-Banana May 8, 2013 Student Writer

This is absolutely intriguing and thought-provoking, great!

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^Kaz-D May 12, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Thank you

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*alexsky0 Apr 13, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

You gave me something to think about today!

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^Kaz-D Apr 14, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Glad to inspire

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^cakecrumbs Apr 9, 2013

This is both beautiful and thought-provoking at the same time. Lovely piece.

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^Kaz-D Apr 10, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Thank you

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~Bizartistique Mar 27, 2013

It's very interesting. Well done. One comment... this sentence:

That favourite pair of shoes that you love all the holes and splits into because they are so perfect and fit you so well

I'm pretty sure something is grammatically wrong here...

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^Kaz-D Mar 28, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Hmmm...any idea what?
Thank you

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~Bizartistique Mar 31, 2013

Well... what do you mean by "splits into"? I don't understand that choice of word combination much

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`Kneeling-Glory Feb 18, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Hello!

I have used your beautiful deviation as part of my title poem project entry, found here: [link]

Have a great day!

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