Consider using the enumitem
package to perform your list management. Here's an example of what you might be after:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}% http://ctan.org/pkg/enumitem
\usepackage{showframe}% http://ctan.org/pkg/showframe
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
[align=left,style=nextline,leftmargin=*,labelsep=\parindent,font=\normalfont]
\item[FIRST ITEM] Note that my list definition is not indented
\item[SECOND ITEM] This one is also not indented and the description
is long enough to span two lines.
\end{description}
\end{document}
The optional argument to description
performs:
align=left
: Ensures a left-aligned item label;
leftmargin=*
: Left margin of description
is flush with left margin of text block;
style=nextline
: Automates the process of using \hfill \\
;
labelsep=\parindent
: The gap between the label and the start of the item is \labelsep
, which is set to be the same as the regular paragraph indent.
font=\normalfont
: This modifies the default bold font of the description
item to \normalfont
.
If need be, you can also create a new list environment to perform these "optional settings" automatically. For this, see \newlist
and \setlist
in the enumitem
documentation (section 7 Cloning the basic lists, p 10).
showframe
was only used to emphasize the text block boundaries within the example.