kezia cole

author, artist, poet, and occasional designer of things. find my stuff on amazon, payhip, etsy, society6, deviantART, inprnt, and ravelry. // @ziacoro for follow backs, reblogs, and personal. A beautiful sight. We lay down inside. My head it never believed the tide.

[skyskimming-blog]

where the brush grows and gorse blazes yellow bearing blooms on thorny crowns, there are paths that traverse the cracked dirt.

parched mud or humid jungle, where the swelter bursts blisters

and swells the pricking bites of a hundred flies, every way forward filled with obstacles is the same. whether by blade, torch, or trench

you have to tear the undergrowth asunder, cut down the coppice

and rip up the brushwood by its roots to make a new road to travel.

it’s ugly horticulture, this scorched earth slash-and-burn, but some plants grow better for the ashes;

- from burning the bushes // kezia cole

[skyskimming-blog]

i make nests of my mistakes charnel houses with trophy skulls i daub paint on the door and wash the windows from inside

i hold the sticks, the stones and briars to pad my bed

bones crack where i lie white rib cathedral of hands makes brittle fingers on my throat and stops my tongue from tattling.

- from ‘fall away’ // kezia cole

[keziacole]

stray girls and second-hand clothes the occasional street corner scattering I want to have confidence in this juvenile trailer-camp trash, but the money in my pocket is theirs, it isn’t mine.

blackout poem from Go Now by Richard Hell // kezia cole

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[keziacole]

Kings flickered like moths, and countries shed their names like snakes’ skins, their boundaries writhing with the wildness of a pit full of vipers. Painters and poets tried to pin their eyes to the world, to press it between the pages of books, or trap it on canvas and plaster, but time betrayed them and, for every vital and inalienable truth they uncovered, a dozen more meanings were lost or altered.

from ‘Light Spilled like Fire’ // kezia cole

[skyskimming-blog]

the smallest sounds echo longest; half-heard things catch the attention the way a clock can stun by sudden silence or a reply be dimmed by shadowed eyes.

from ‘small voice’ //  kezia cole (via ziacoro)

[keziacole]

words don’t come easy to invisible people, where the little ghosts crowd my teeth and my throat is stiff on speaking, i am frightened of exposing the unseemly things that send everyone away. goodbye lost its surprises long ago; who wants to swallow somebody else’s problems when they’re already full of their own?

from ‘caught throat’ // kezia cole

[keziacole]

our summers were consumed by fire a baptism of bones picked clean in the ashes we augured our futures in the flames of tea lights that sparkled against colored glass. at the boundary of sunset, when the night stocks were waking with yawning petals in purple pink white that smelled so sickly sweet like velvet and old candy stores, chalky palma violets smothering tongues with nostalgia, the bricks held the heat still reluctant to yield the way memories stick to the roof of your mouth a thousand days after you taste them.

from elastic days, available in party glass. amazon | payhip

[keziacole]

our summers were consumed in fire a baptism of bones picked clean in the ashes we augured our futures in the flames of tea lights that sparkled against coloured glass 

My poetry chapbook, party glass, is out now! 

amazon | payhip

Long summer evenings lit by candles in colored glass; red brick still warm from the heat of the day; soft nights and rain puddles splashed with neon; the tangles of friends, lovers, and changing hearts captured in one strange, small, breathless snapshot that seems to last forever. party glass is a short collection of sixteen poems united by the feelings found in those moments, which seem simultaneously so brief and almost endless, but serve to remind us that we’re still here, still watching the world turn.

ebook & print editions available plus, for anyone feeling the pinch, you can get a pay-what-you-want .pdf on payhip.  

[keziacole]

INPRNT | Society6 | DeviantART | Etsy

[keziacole]

triumph dirtied and squashed, but whole triumph flaring red, frost-burned breathing heavily, they had to let their wild selves go

- blackout poem by zia cole from The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

[keziacole]

my life as struggle was fruitless I wanted to keep my hands body mind moving. I would try to endure day after day bit by bit. I would repeat like a prayer: it’s all right, the day will come when you’ll pull out of this.

- blackout poem by zia cole from Moonlight Shadow by Banana Yoshimoto (x) (x)

[skyskimming-blog]

She laughed until she could hardly breathe. Everything was the same as before.

- blackout poem by zia cole from The Constant Sinner by Mae West (x)

[skyskimming-blog]

We live in timelessness experience nothing too easy to be true; dusk falls in our room brittle bones of our bedclothes; We are still exalted, eyes closed and open, I let myself love, and she does the same.

- blackout poem by zia cole from Go Now by Richard Hell (x)

[skyskimming-blog]

it’ll be hell: neck arched                               bawling like a baby,                                                                    scared shitless this woman, her face  blinks                                like a light                                                                   blood red i can’t stop

- zia cole, blackout poem from Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

[skyskimming-blog]

don’t ever forget: we’re pretty hot; tell them they were wrong soothing those soft bodies this way: a bare body  gently contracting and expanding endlessly.

- zia cole // blackout poem from Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami (x)

[skyskimming-blog]

late in the afternoon under the almond trees bright caftans fluttering in a burst of noise and colour blocks of pink and green rich voices fading away when the dust resettled.

- zia cole // blackout poem from Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud (x)

[skyskimming-blog]

towards the cliff edge in his hands scraping the loose stones away from the ledge; i held on, kept his face buried. i gasped, my mouth open, swallowing the air into my chest.

- blackout poem by zia cole // from Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud (x)