No Use

Is desire such an empty thing?

Each time a star falls

it is greeted with a wish

and there is no end to the greed.

–

I am a window without resolution,

a door impeded and without passage,

a slide that spirals down into infinity.

If I were nothing would you love me?

–

When I am called to action

I find myself a mitten instead of a boot.

Were I to crawl I might find my dignity,

the shards of an ego gone circumspect.

–

Why do you look at me that way?

I am not a plaything, a secret

willed into existence

by a disreputable muse.

You cannot strip me of my roots.

–

My curves have worn me down.

I am sparse, thin in inflation.

There is no use hiding my face

behind yours anymore,

no use at all.

–

Together our skeletons make a nest

but it is without warmth

that we lie frozen back to back

facing our respective walls.

–

I keep catching shrapnel.

The wars we carry inside of us

are so easily misplaced

and I am tired of being a mark.

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Need to Need

We want most what we already have,

it’s the addiction within the addiction,

the enigma draped in ostrich feathers.

Denial through rigorous premeditation,

if I subtract my faults, I in turn am less.

–

From one grave to the next,

we shamble hungry and inchoate.

It’s Sisyphus all over again,

the need for redundancies,

the need to need.

All the better to hypnotize you with my friend.

A litany of deceptions, an erosion of hearts

harder and more brittle than the bones that contain them.

–

Want more, feel less.

Need more, think less.

Your success is a testament to my failure.

Perhaps we should do away with the game altogether

or we could both participate bereft of desire.

The lack of competition has made winning

more important than ever

only now the lessons are lost.

–

Take away everything but my failures

lest I become more incompetent than I already am.

We don’t want fair, we want the balance in our favor,

to be the exception in exceptional.

Take my life at your own risk,

become me, endure with me

the long, effervescent winter.

Music Prompt #31: “I Can’t Escape Myself” by The Sound

My lips cradle your forgotten reliquaries.
I am dissatisfied with my meager existence,
with the unquenchable depths that are my fears.
So senseless, these stories with their grievous outcomes.
My senses are addictions, they shovel in horror after horror,
at least my brain is given to such ornery interpretations.
I hate my brain, how weak and sickly a thing, a brain.
I am polluted, sacred still, but markedly polluted
and I think that I should suffocate
if not for the occasional bout of laughter.
–
What reason have I to laugh
what reason could I possibly need?
I don’t like people in a collective sense.
We are an insatiable wake, always seeking
a definition that excuses our personal excesses
and prohibits the prosperity of others.
We envy everything, even the deficits,
even the illnesses of others because those scars
could be used to claim some benefit
for which we are not eligible given our fortune.
–
We are cruel to one another because in others
we assign our motives and in others we see
that which we find lacking in ourselves.
Beneath our frightful costumes
there is a child hurting,
an innocence indelible
and if we could only forgive
we’d see that we too are substantial.
–
https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/music-prompt-31-i-cant-escape-myself-by-the-sound/

Gypsum

The heart is not a shiv

Which can be thrust upon

In times of unease,

Loneliness is the defining feature

Of all hierarchies.

So long as there is a steeple

There is a ruin of trust beneath

And a foundation of gore

Whose precise transmission

Can not be wholly sanctified.

We idle expensively

Gypsum dreams crumbling

In the courier’s purse.

Wordle #49 – Cabbages

Ever since the cabbages died

Her smile is a partition.

Beside it I rest a Paper Tiger

An altruist tearing

His pockets in shame

But no man has the right

To claim a woman’s pain.

 

She called them cabbages

But they were always children

Our sons and daughters.

Anabiosis cannot be

Breathed through war,

Whether meteor or bomb

Heat curdles just the same.

 

Ever since the cabbages died

I sit on the porch in silence

Draught after draught

A beggar’s bowl

Between my knees

I asked God first

But some prayers

Only the Devil will seize.

No woman has the right

To censure a man’s retreat.

 

A visage twinged

Sings the saddest songs

But who will listen?

The days are sparse

The days are wearisome.

Default or defunct

Each man crawls along

A broken heart cutting

The palms and knees

Of whoever greets him.

 

She called them cabbages

But they were always children

Our sons and daughters

Taken by the Country

To fight in wars that the rich

Should have sufficient fodder

To seed their seedy schemes.

*

I took one look at this Wordle and knew immediately that it was going to be a challenge. I mean really what was I thinking?! Thanks to Jen for introducing me to Tim Buckley because it gave me inspiration for this piece.

This entry is for

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/wordle-49-february-23-2014/

Wordle #41 “Conceit”

They gaze upon

His conceit

His mischief

The strangle hold

Of his ridicule

On their bridled necks.

He erects blinds

That his neighbors

Might not find

Fodder for scandal

But whether gelatin

Or steel the scars

Within his heart still set.

 

The rise and fall

Of his draftsack

Does not belie

The poverty within.

An illeist grumble

Erupts at the intersection

The Apocalypse dawns

Brick by brick

The ghetto unveils

Its atrocities

The fizzle of hunger

Of the underfed

And eager intellect

Education is necessary

But who will guarantee

The right?

 

His face the color

Of zinc, crude and hypoxic

Whirs like an android.

A sour kiss seals

The lungs once

The quintessential element

Has been extracted.

All it takes is a coin

To reverse a man’s fate

A slip and the grave

Will well up around him

Like a vulture’s vociferous flight.

*

My cold has been followed by fevers and headaches, why the fevers are coming after the other symptoms are passing I have no idea.

 

For

MLMM

Signed “To the Devil with Love”

Pawel Kuczynski

They line up single file, pockets stitched, pupils blown.

 

The particulars are a sphinx without resolution.

An X mutes alternative, dims hearts when leeched.

 

They slit their throats on dollar bills,

On dreams not worth their weight in confidence

Becoming less with every meaningless acquisition.

*

I generally like to try a new form twice. This form is fun, no rhyme or meter!

Written for

http://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/bjs-shadorma-and-beyond-november-22-2014/

S Slashed

Richard Keeling

We of the swollen carapace

Shall know pain mightily

Shall learn when to hold

And when to surrender

But until then we carve

Our ruts especially deep.

 

The world is a petri dish

And my expectations

Are irrelevant to the duration

Of my species as a whole

I speak for no man who does not

Possess a heart and tongue

Equally capable of noise

Sometimes there is even

Music between us

A kind of invertebrate symphony

Our flesh more easily stitched

Than bone or is it?

 

No amount of persuasion

Could draw this veil aside

For there is always another

Willing to negate the privilege.

We are alive but only just

Who among us can face

The collective consciousness?

We’ve created a society

That is contradictory

To life and our sorrows

However, scarce their content

Cannot find amelioration

In any known conquest

 

We contend that as children

We lived but every whisper

Contains its dose of poison

To be is to be had, to become

For the sake of an approximation

That in conflict does not stand

 

There are no eyes only

Pits of contagion

No smiles only frowns

Of inebriation worn askance

No hands without blood

For mercy does not fill

Leather as hate does

The seismic universal

Of self-worth is S slashed

 

We never look into the fires

That we have lit unless

We’ve found in some

Fool a culprit or alibi

There is no accounting

For denial, we survive only

In this moment

No matter how precariously

The future rests

*

I got too excited about the prompt Jen suggested so I went ahead and wrote something. I might have to move that challenge up in my schedule lol This is just where my mind took me on reading it.

Rogue

Photo by: Oloriel

My heart is a spider’s purse

She overstates reality

For the sake of luxury

She hungers even in content

Each eye a satellite

Milking flowered tendrils

Their potency

I want to live wild

In the recesses

Of your wooly head

Like a rogue shoe

I want to pass brazenly

Pirouetting from star to star

Transparent even in sin

Brittle

Artwork By: schattenkrahe

As a child there must have been a time

When beauty was more state of being

Than degree of starvation

A time when imagination outweighed

Monetary extraction as it ought to do

In any society that professes itself civilized

*

As a teenager

Graphite hearts ran deeper

Than their messy counterparts

And immortality could only

Be extinguished by fire

Which meant, that in order to die,

One had to live impractically first

Mine was a language capable

Of rescinding and reshaping existence

I was a genius because I suffered

The reverse didn’t necessarily apply

*

As an adult I find my resignation

Tempered only by discontent

There is red and yellow tape

Beneath which no treasure lies hidden

All my mirrors appear carnival themed

I don’t like the way aging assumes flesh

I am brittle and inflexible

Like an unsuccessful resolution

*

I wrote this in the bath which is where I find myself whenever I am unable to produce anything suitable on dry land. I have had vertigo for the last 37 hours so if anyone has suggestions I would be grateful.