Daily Deviation and Best of Followers: Edition 7

So. I first gotta say. I woke up late today...because I was up till late playing the beta for Destiny...and then I was on dA doing some drafts for future additions of Best of Followers. I get up at around 12:15 pm, and was told by a friend that my "dA was on fire, I should put it out". I'm very confused at this point. I go to my dA and I see I have a larger number of pageviews by this time than usual, but I thought nothing of it. And THEN, I checked the massive amount of messages. I scroll down and I see congratulations to a DAILY DEVIATION I can't even believe it. I got my first DD last year, and I have received two DLD(when DLD was still a thing)...but I NEVER thought I'd ever get another DD. I am so...AAAAAAH I want to thank AlphaManifest for suggesting the piece and HugQueen for featuring it. I'm so honored that you guys find my writing worthy of being a DD. I take my writing seriously and I try to put out the best work I possibly can...I hope that I can continue to do just that. I don't even My skin disorder is flaring up making me itchy and covered in welts. But I don't care, not at all. Because this is a great day. Thank you all

For reference here is the featured piece:

SolaceShe never slept well in the dark,
not without the children of the sun and moon
to guide her weary lids home.
Guided by the aftermath, she was always two steps behind.
What did the world look like to the girl who had been through it all?
Braved the heaviest of storms,
yet skipping over cracks in the pavement.
They said her eyes were the wisps of clouds before the storm.
To him they were reflections of pages overlooked.
She said it was like she lived the life of someone she had never met.
Laid out to dry, yesterdays news.
He knew her as the girl who was built to never collapse.
He wished he was too.
He loved her more than words could say, and yet her pain was such,
that at times, he feared she wouldn’t make it.
But on nights like these, even when it threatened to consume her,
he became convinced that somehow she would.   

I love all of you. Yes, all of you

NOW, enough about me. On to Best of Followers: Edition 7!

GhostOfTheEmptyGrave

DevilDevils never cry
Enjoying their evil deeds
Vandalizing your soul
Ignoring your pleas and
Laughing at your suffering Million facesA million faces
All the same
Wandering all their lives
Without a real purpose
A million stories
All different
But all with the same ending
A fate we can't avoid
But between them all
Could there be one
That stands out?
Maybe yours?
Maybe mine?
Maybe both? The endDying
Nothing left to hope for
Vanishing
Soon to be forgotten
A fate that awaits us all Predators of the nightA gust of wind
Blowing through our hair
The dead leaves
Cracking under our feet
The night sky
A blanket over our heads
And the full moon
Blessing us with its silver light
A perfect night for us hunters
To look for our prey

LadyLaumes

Jafar x Reader - Strength in CautionHis cape swirls around him like black, squelching fire as he stops in the center of the room. The frosted oil lamps flicker for what seems like no reason at all. There is no wind to move them...or maybe I just can't feel it. With the way my head feels, I'm pretty sure I've been staring at him for like an hour already so it wouldn't be surprising if I'd lost touch with other aspects of reality. But...I mean...is it the power he exudes...? Or...?
"So you're the rat who's crawled into my palace." Rat? Really?
"Uh. Sure." His eyebrows twitch up, face tilts and he parts his plush, dark lips. Pretty sure he wasn't expecting me to just accept that sort of name calling. The flicker of a crow touches the streaming moonlight and makes me more than a little aware that the man has left the jail door open behind him.
Probably shouldn't try to escape, though. That...might just be bad news bears. All things considered.
"You do not mind," he starts toward me, careful, distrusting footsteps pervading t The OneShe wears her insanity like her favourite colour.
It looks good on her but I don't know how to let her know.
When she looks at me, I freeze and shudder
And all of the hard work of walking next to her crumbles.
But she smiles. It's a wonderful smile:
Somewhere between murderous and benevolent.
"Talk to me," she says, like we've ever spoken before.
"Tell me what you keep so close to your heart."
Chewing my lip, I reach in my pocket and pull out my phone,
Pretending that I didn't hear her.
It's no use.
Her gaze is penetrating and I'm a sucker for the meaning in her breath.
"It's you. Basically." She keeps on smiling.
"I wear the thought of you like ink in my bones."
"Oh," she remarks, "a poet."
Releasing me from her gaze she ushers me, "Go on."
But I can't find the words to continue.
And I can see that she knows of my intellectual incapacity.
"Come with me," is her way of maintaining this.
I grin like a sheep and she knows I'm hers. Six Word Story: My Consistent Wordless WhisperHow long will you hold me? IntensityI dress in broken greyscale,
In walls of smoke-charred glass:
The paper-lined abysmal veil
That glistens as you pass.
I live in boxed enigmas,
Counting star-drenched seas
Until the etched out sigma,
My breath a sour wheeze.
I am the tattered sailboat
Among your wispy words;
I dip and fly 'til I can float
Beside your past, lust-lured.
My ceiling is a blanket
You wove with mirrored stars
And set upon me, "take it",
And carved my fledgling scars.
My body is no canvas
But the artwork that you make
Within the winds around us
And the watered earth you break.

LadyLincoln

MadHat11D6

A Racial StereotypeHe is a bumbling idiot.
He never gets anything right
Even the simplest of endeavors
Becomes a full out catastrophe.
And he speaks
As if there is not a single language
In The Galaxy
He has properly learned.
They look at him,
And see a stereotype.
A poor reflection of something black.
I look at him,
And I see a seven foot tall lizard.
If I could speak plainly:
Jar Jar Binks
Is not a racial stereotype.
There is no universe
Where that makes
Any amount of sense.
And you look at me,
Expression wary,
Shoulders shrugging.
“Well,
I could see it.”
If you do not see
The irony here
Then allow me to explain you something.
If you see idiot,
Fool, inarticulate,
And think black
You
Are the racist one here.
You
Are stereotyping
And blaming someone else
For it.
Now don’t pretend
You are blind to race
Do not try to play like
The soldier in this war
Because, honey,
You don’t even know what side you’re fighting for.
A racial stereotype
Is a misleading representation
Of an ethn A History LessonThey never want to talk about the 80s.
And by ‘they’ I mean our historians and by ‘our’ I mean Americans –
And they never want to talk about the 80s.
We know 1619 as the year our people became yours –
And by yours, I mean your property.
Taken from their home, their world, shackled on your ships
In a way you would not treat animals.
And by you, I guess I mean us because
White history is black history is my history is our history
It began in 1619.
And I write these words now because of Lucy Terry in 1746
Solomon Northrup in 1853
Fredrick Douglas in 1864.
Because Zora Neale Hurtson in 1956.
Alice Walker in 1983.
Geoffry Fletcher. In 2009.
I write these words now because they tell us we live in a place
Called Post Racial America.
As if we’ve gotten past it
When they just don’t want us to talk about it
And by ‘it’
I mean our history.
1978 – Our courts uphold equal opportunity.
1992 – The first race riots in decades
And :thumb427031160:

InklingsOfOblivion

Last Night (2)Bawled promises flow
into a brooding darkness:
Shattered by the dawn at the expense ofWinter was Mark’s least favourite season. He loved the snow, when it fell and coated everything a pure, clean white, and Christmas, or the idea of it anyway. One thing overrode all of that; he hated that, even before 6pm, it would get dark and even chillier. On those nights, when it was often as cold inside the house as outside, Mark would open his window wide, wrapping himself in his grubby blankets and lean out. A game he liked to play was the one where he’d empty his little lungs into the cool air, seeing how large he could make the condensation cloud.
Perhaps his favourite past time, though, was gazing far beyond the offensively orange lights of the council estate where he lived with his Mum to the faint stars above. He liked to imagine what it would be like in space, one time nearly falling out of the open panel in the process.
Mark would always wait for his Mum to come back before he properly went to bed. Sometimes he stayed in the window pane for hours, watching for perspectivehollow muscular organ
f   i   l   l   e   d with emotion The Bay That Haunts My Nightmares.Gazing upon where the most precious
flower known to time should have been,
a thought broke his troubled heart:
“there is nothing between
us but space, and this
wibbly-wobbly,
torn timey-
wimey
stuff.”

miserabel

my pocket calculator's final taskI will measure my life
in laughter as well as tears
- honey and salt -
the wrinkles on my face
or my hands.
Paintings looked at,
shoe soles walked through;
I will count in trips and stumbles,
strangers and friends,
in afternoon naps,
midnight dances,
and tea hours.
When I count, I will skip
stomach pains and brooding hours,
only sparing a passing glance
to the number of moments
I spent aflame in anger,
or worse.
But the measurement I will
linger on, besides the number of words
written, deleted, striked out, spoken, read,
I will take my sweet time to count
the times I touched your lips
with mine. coming here is coming homeI remember coming back;
the sky was clear and I
was plastered to the airplane window
staring at mountains rising up beneath me
with a strange fascination,
as if I'd never seen them before,
as if I'd not noticed their wild beauty
while living among them,
all those years.
I remember feeling like coming home
was at the same time discovering
this very home; mountains, lakes and cities
from above, and from below
the mountains are growing even higher
the lakes are stretching wider
the cities are spreading apart, and I was
seeing it for the first time all over again,
discovering how it's so heart-achingly
beautiful, I never want to leave for good.
I remember getting swamped
with stereotypes at the airport;
someone yodeling, and cow bells
(the sound that wakes me in those
summer mornings I spend back where
I grew up) in the background,
and my family, pressing a square flag
in my hands in red and white (as if I could
have forgotten what it looks like).
Let me show you a picture book,
back from www stands for world-wide web[ connect ]
      [ trying to connect ]
    [ connected ]
                             [ internet access ]
We've long ago stopped to believe
                    that for something to be    r e a l
it has to be something you can
touch and
               see and
                            feel.
Yeah, we've gotten used
to ghost lights, phantom touches
and the general weirdness of life.
(Your face staring back at you
out of the dark screen
after two or three seasons
of whatever you [<strike wytiwyg="1"> cruelty doesn't lie in what we areBecause I was flesh you were
able to tear me apart from the inside out;
and I felt for the longest time that if I fell
I would fall apart at the seams with which
attempts have been made to hold my skins
together, to stick my ribcage to my heart.
I was flesh and so were you;
only cruelty doesn't lie in what we are
but in all that we do and you broke me
left me to bleed out in the great street
with blaring lights and my legs feeling like
something scattered by the wind.
Because I was flesh I supposed
that I was weak, but I was wrong,
and to prove this to you I will drive
the same pain I knew right into your bone
because cruelty doesn't lie in what we are
and you have taught me very well.

Nullibicity

after himclutch tight to Gandhi and Plath—
and maybe the sicker works of Poe,
his Annabel Lee—
and open cotton ears to the streetlamps
covering shadow streets, shadow people,
and tell me why we breathe.
there’s space in your sheets,
and I’m glad I didn’t crawl in and nest
like blue jays in the spring...though one
time I did fall in, and it was far from graceful—
dirt and mud on your quilt and just hand grenades
in my right breast, waiting for your fingers
to pull out all the pins. red giantI will be brave while the birds scavenge,
while the storms devastate, because no one
else will hold me together like moonlight
and apparitions in a rear-view city’s landscape.
I will be brave when I don’t fit together
in all the
right places—when making spine bridges
ceases to have meaning for any other purpose
than for granting you passage,
because my boat is only big enough
for pasts and for ghosts, and you will not stop pretending
to be nests, and lighthouses, that call me
home to port when I’ve spent too many days in the depths
in the tsunamis of myself.
I will be brave when the wave crests
and leaves me nothing more than swallowed
(footprints in forgotten sand, another particle to furnish
the world and to hold your feet, because no one else will hold me
in a way of tangibility but you, and I grow weary of being my best
in the pretenses of the sun.) another morning, another nightMaybe ingesting you
wouldn’t be so bad:
my terms, my pace..
but dear, this is a thunder-belly,
filled to brim with watered tears
and static light –
cumulonimbus ten drops away
from the greenstick fracture
that comes when you’re pushed
   in from two
different directions;
Him. His. Mine. Yours.
I’ve been invaded – degraded –
until scum were these veins
and I kept losing hands in
Innocence games.
Well I’m tired of poker
(of thieves after pearls
and of pearls begging thieves)
so please let my heart remain
undiscovered — a child’s lover—
a psychologist to the lonely faces
inside the lonely morning
coffee stains. In October.She is chameleons,
bare-tree umbrellas
somewhere beneath
Autumn’s underbelly,
beside once-remembered friends
of once-remembered pasts,
falling fragmented in kitchen sinks
and cleaning bottles,
still
breaking hearts for puzzles,
still
bandaging wounds on tables
of answers without questions;
and she is still unknown
come next October.

neurotype-on-discord

:thumb451239098: :thumb425048371: :thumb209275083: :thumb200828609:

Nichrysalis

Bitlets 102The cuts on the back of my hands
don't heal as fast as those on the front.
Movement heals wounds faster than time. Bitlets 84Tap water tapers
my rationale for
rationing rations
to the drafted dead.
What's on draft
drafts and tiptoes
into the tip-tap
of water, towed
by canal-retentive
bar floorboards.
The mortared pub
isn't abandoned,
below. Things I Would Tell HerI want to tell her the things
I'll tell her when she’s older,
but the information terrifies her.
In order of importance:
she has luna moths in her head,
monarch butterflies in her stomach,
and a feral fetus in her womb.
Her hands
are collapse-clasped and folded
in her lap;
she holds her elbows like wings
away from her ribs,
ready to flap,
to flutter,
to fly.
I want to tell her
to keep one hand in her purse
so she can always find her keys,
to keep an eye on the door
and the door always open
so she can run if she doesn't feel safe,
but her cheeks are rorschach-splotch red
and the tension in her shoulders
warns me she's not ready
to hear this.
And there is the possibility that
maybe I’m not ready to tell
this fourteen-year-old
now woman,
I’m just as devastated as her;
that she is surrounded by friends and family
who are violated by a community
where no man can say yes all men.

nightshade-keyblade

A Hero's NightmareThe souls that I could not save Seizing BeautySeize beauty with both your hands
Don't let go. Make it yours. A Thousand SummersMy weary eyes behold Mary, cradling me to sweet serenity
As I dream, Isolde's head lies on my shoulder, breath warm on my neck
And though I see her not, hear her not, I'm not afraid
Her light unfetters my courage time and again.
I err wide awake in this forlorn winter.
Despairing, I lose my footing.
The warmth of her adoring embrace is the sweetest medicine
For the fear that has frozen my soul.
Her love is an oasis at the edge of sorrow's desert
Not a mirage deceiving the stricken fool.
The world may tremble, the sky may tumble
But she will always endure.
A woman's kiss is worth a thousand summers
And a mouthful of water from the river Kawthar
I will not hesitate to collect one more scar in my heart
A risk worth taking until I find the True One. Love-struck PugilistEvery fool in the game knows the rules of the fight
Put them up, do your best or go hungry tonight.
Take some hits, throw a punch, do as best as you're able
Win this bout and go home with some food on the table.
From the day I left school to the day I drop dead
I've broken every bone just to earn my bread.
It hurts to starve but when push comes to shove
Nothing hurts worse than the hunger for love.
Every day, my heart hurts
And by night, it gets worse
I remember the day you gave me your smile
And for once, life feels right, if only for a while.
My opponent's blow puts me back in my place,
It's my own fault, dreaming of your face.
The ring has no patience for dreamers and fools,
But you'll save your skin if you play by the rules
Keep my head in the game, the fight is not done
The bell's just gone off and it's time for round one!
I lie in bed dreaming, of getting my chance
Daring to dream of the truest romance. 
My hardest fight has yet to start,
But I'll know that I've won when I'v

ONE LAST THING. I want to help out a good friend of mine, AlphaManifest by getting the word out there about some things she is doing. So please see here:

<da:thumb id="467578989"/> (I'm sorry this is late in coming dear lol I'm a hot mess).