Tag: nature

garden(‘butterfly’ + ‘moth’)

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

I think of butterflies the way I think of flowers. Delicate, colorful, beauty unyeilding. Unfading. Paper thin and fragile, the flicker of wings a small miracle on a rough and painful world.

I love the butterfly with the weary eyes. The butterfly with the tiger stripes. The butterfly that looks like an oriental fan. The butterfly that is all black, with pink and red, my favorite colors.

We tend to agree that things like flowers and butterflies are beautiful. Though all have different colors, patterns, shapes, they are beautiful. We don’t always agree that people are beautiful, though all have different colors. Patterns. Shapes.

The flowers that come in mounds of blue, or pink. The tiny petaled flowers that form bunches the size of a fist. The dainy white with the striking aroma; the perky and cheery cactus flowers.

I don’t love many outside myself, and I don’t find myself beautiful. I’m a different color. Pattern. Shape. I am paper thin and fragile. I am delicate. I am not unyeilding. I am a miracle in this rough and painful world.

I don’t love you….

I won’t love you….

I am afraid to love you. You are a different color, pattern, shape. You are perhaps a moth with a massive wing span, weary in color and hard to find. You don’t strike me with the fear of you withering, of your wings being weighed down by the rain.

You are not delicate. You are unyielding. You are a survivor in this rough and painful world.

Together, we are still paper thin, but stronger than separate pages. You love light and I love flowers. You crave the sun, I crave luring fragrance. I float around through life. The wind coaxes me, owns me. You stand, sturdy, unyielding.

I flutter from flower to flower. When does it end for me? When all of the petals fade? When the current pulls me in? When I catch a ride on the wrong lily pad?

Perhaps we’ll let the flutter of the wings of a butterfly decide for both of us.

Why do birds fly?

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

Birds don’t fly to get away

The land and the ocean hold their prey

They seek out trees when it’s time to pray

They seek warm leaves when the skies are grey

Birds don’t fly because they’re free

Beneath the clouds is where they’re made to be

In a flock of geese or a murder of crows

In endless space they huddle close

They migrate in a widespread V

Through cold and ice, they fight fatigue

And finally when it’s time to rest

They nestle their heads within their breasts

The sky is their curse just as ours is the earth

We gaze onward as they gaze below

Knowing here we’ll spend the rest of our lives

Knowing there is where they were made to survive.

Flower Massacre

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

A field of flowers, a plague wrought upon by my insecure thoughts:

Does he love me, or does he not?

I scatter the petals into the wind; they falter, unable to answer my question

A daisy chain is broken with ruthless pain as my fingers commit a massacre

He loves me not, or does he? Why don’t the full blooms answer?

They say a lady should never sleep with a stranger

But his arms felt like freedom to my entangled heart

The blood-thirsty lips of the devil have a taste for foolish girls

And their foolish desires which wholly satiate liars and their sick lusts

Are they any less savage than those of us who lay waste to a field of roses?

Licking the blood the thorns draw from our fingers

The pain of bleeding is far more satisfying than that of a broken heart, constantly wounded and dense in scar tissue

He loves me, he loves me not.

Lagos

~ Lauren Nicole

There is no wind for whispers; just the silence of the sea.

As the waves lap at my feet, I soundlessly weep at the solace the sun has given my soul.

At last, I am whole, together with the sand from which my form was span

And the salt that seasons my tears.

After so much time alone, I’m finally home to a place I’ve never been.

I long to see that blue sea once again.

Lagos, Portugal

I Believe

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

More than any other color, I believe in blue

The widest outstretched arms I’ve ever seen above and below the moon

In bright pastel or tempest grey, she always builds a day anew

With hope of sun or fear of pouring rain, my prayers may still come true

If I were to pick a religion, I believe it would be you

You, the watcher who hides away and watches from a brighter view

The invisible smile of a stranger that I picture in my dreams

I ponder on how you’ll never know how much your unseen smile means to me

More than any time, I believe in midnight

The one second on the clock that an erroneous day is blown away

A flitter of hope in a shivering heart beat leaps awake

Ready to make right this fresh new day

Yes, I believe in this the way I believe in virgin snow

That quietly covers our footsteps and holds our secret close

She wistfully shifts around our frozen trails

And slows the time just enough for us to observe the small details

I suppose it’s hard to not believe in God;

Who else can I find to blame the hardships of life on?

Or where do my prayers go after they fall as weary tears?

What idol can I rely on to placate all of my fears?

But no one can reply to all of the questions, all of the demands

They fall back into the frail fingers of my tired hands

So I believe in magic, the magic that makes up time

Who meticulously grooms the sea and the sky

Patiently healing wounds and removing the iron ball and chain

So the hope in my heart can finally fly.

My Theology.

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

I believe in an attentive ear that seeks the somber sound of crying in a dark and sightless night. The truth in hearing and believing a life beyond one’s own beating heart is a religion of its own. If faith is mandatory, I’d rather believe in the pensive mind that yearns for justice; a law not written by man, but inherited millennia ago from the sky.

As you believe in God, I believe in a love for life so strong that no small flower be set to a flame. My deity is the beauty of an unkempt green valley, and the dandelion seeds that form clouds upon the horizon in a hot summer gust. As you believe in angels, I believe in the mindless creatures that roam the world with hope in their hearts of falling in love – those silly things are so romantic, they brim with more hope than could ever be discovered in a mine filled with diamonds.

Your belief in heaven is comparable to my belief of a sunny afternoon under a pale blue sky, somewhere far away from the city where I can hear the cicadas and the bullfrogs. There are no gates here, just a noisy silence that raptures me in a way that no psalm ever has. I can read catharsis from the cumulus clouds, or hear a chorus in the little things that live in the loam. What we have in common? We both call our heaven our home.

But what about hell? Well, I don’t believe that exists as long as there is another day. For there are days, nights, weeks and months that I lie awake with teary eyes. There are days that I wish I could simply stop my heart-beat on demand. The heat under my skin is comparable to the literature that describes the underworld, I suppose, when I feel this insatiable need for something, for anything to bring a chill to my fiery anger, or my branding sorrow.

Although I know that it won’t be for ever. Each time I watch the clock, and the arrow hits one minute prior midnight, I know that shortly there will be another day. As the seasons shift their way around the cyclical conundrum that life is made of, one spring day I’ll see my deity, one summer day I’ll fill my heart with hope.

Even in the season of the dead things, the fallen leaves remind me of the hearth of a cozy home. Though I may brood alone, I know that 11:59 is the truest worship time. Idle and fatigued I bide the time, the sixty seconds that always drags my atheist heart out and gives it a moment to practice religion – one second at a time.

Never Lie to Me.

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

I don’t need your sympathy, your crocodile tears or tactically rendered remorse

Your woven lies knit of loose details, your poorly conjured fairy tales

I don’t need your empathy, summoned from the deceitful realm of your mind

If your votive is of a malicious motive, I’d rather you never be kind

Contain your sins within your clenched teeth and hide your fallacies from me

Let them die away like an untended flame, lest the sparks of your words maim

What I want is what I need direly; which you anxiously hide from me –

The bright and blue and beautiful truth.

Never lie to me.

Rainbow Rouse

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

Red lipstick makes you think I want you

I wear all black simply to daunt you

With pink flowers to awaken your gaze

And let you imagine my innocent days

Brown eyes to watch you wake

Under heavy lashes, to filter your face

Blue days in a cloudy haze

With white cotton clouds to give us shade

Yellow sun and silver moon

Mixed with the orange and violet late noon

Green grass after the storm

Reminds me that I have no need to mourn

Grey everything; a forecast forlorn

I can’t see your silhouette anymore

Just light and dark shadows in monochrome

And the glistening road where I seek my way home

All of the colors that I know

Couldn’t form a scene where I hold you close

In the damp air, a sunlit rainbow

Promised me the floodgates will close –

I’m still waiting.