To whom do I owe this ecstasy,
this birth of ten thousand stars?
I delve into your intricacies
without pretense or delicacy.
Tell me your secrets,
the horrors that persist on awakening.
–
In your effigy I have planted
the face of another and in mine
a mask of gelatin and barbed wire.
We lie in the name of intimacy, we lie
to preserve our most brutal illusions.
–
I measure each bounce,
the inflection of each smile
knowing that every nuance
is a joke of sorts.
–
I have not found a way
to subjugate temptation.
We break and calcify,
we thrive and plummet
myriad nodes of necessity.
Wordle #127 “October 31st, 2016”
Eschatological or esoteric?
Silence straddles my inflammations.
Words without insight
are undeserving of breath.
–
I ripen in adversity,
an uncertain fruit
bursting at the seams.
What once was beauty
is now only decadence.
–
I wrap myself in deceit,
in the debris of man-made ignorance.
Until it comes out on film
I do not want to see it.
–
I am more apostate than sentry.
Bedraggled and self-righteous
I do not even warrant a glance.
Drouked in my own misgivings
I wait fervently for my collapse.
Purgatory
Ours is bridge of insatiable frost.
In crossing I am made horizontal,
humbled by your transparent tenacity.
I do not want to speak
of feelings or doings anymore.
–
I have no recommendations to give
if you favor me then you might as well feast.
I am only bones anyway
but I’ve plenty of marrow.
–
Your gravity pinches off my margins,
drawing out each breath,
a passive scream, two lungs
tenderized by terror.
–
My calendar is full of your musings,
of your footprints deep as fossils.
I would follow you to my own demise,
but purgatory does not allow
the visitor much of a view
and in truth I have no where to go.
(I am a bit stuck today and I know why.)
Skinny
I coat my dermis with wax,
subsisting on air
and the occasional drop of tepid water.
Once vivid, I slip between the rungs
of her skeletal frame.
My ever-present, ever-dying companion.
–
You dip in and out of my margins,
tearing at my inedibles.
Whatever human implies
I want no part of it.
My thoughts are too weedy
and nefarious for broadcast,
still you plunge, eyes open,
into the reaches of
my inconsequential detritus.
–
All answers are theoretical;
proven, debated, disapproved.
The only truth one can rely on
is that chaos undresses without
ever revealing its intentions.
–
My freckles wilt like logs
In a steady, recumbent fire.
There’s no mystery, no riddle,
only a mawkish face oozing
with contradictions and contagions;
too oblong to be glamorous.
–
Time has a taste for puzzles.
Each day he tears off a little piece
of what might have been,
and fills in the gap with an X or a O.
As if to say it’s all a game, isn’t it?
–
Another submission piece, I was away all day (Midsommer) and didn’t get a chance to write anything new.
Wordle #260
I sweep your boiling shadows
into my fury, into shrunken parks
with swarms of confectionery crows
and chain-link fences far as the eye can see.
–
I watch you shimmering,
ripping me open like a wound.
My blood rises to meet
your kiss, black with exertion
and the deceptions
I have been made to swallow.
–
I have such terrible dreams,
such terrible inclinations.
I turn and turn,
but for every passage
there is another wall
twice as thick.
–
Your eyes search me as a storm
stripping me of everything
save my crucifixions.
–
I watch you rippling
your careless eruptions
castrating my silence.
–
What is this illness
that shores me up
and plucks the sutures
from my seams?
Is this love?
–
Who is this woman-
her features pleated as a lampshade-
peering past every reflection?
Is she the avatar
of a querulous soul?
Is she me sick with excuses?
Needle’s Eye
When did I become me?
Was I born obsolete?
To what end do I furnish these rooms
they are only closets
keyholes by which my bones are passed.
–
I have such an impossible heart
it goes up like a balloon and at the very apex
crashes with the weight of mountains.
She is discord, she is fruitless
a mother wounding babies
and such a mother is not fit.
–
If only I were outlandish,
substance-less, ornamentation
then it would not hurt so much.
Each breath, an onslaught,
a firing squad, a punishment.
I was not made to last.
–
I hold out until morning
chugging the aurora,
the stars so contentious
in departure
my soul a scintilla,
a needle’s eye view
of memories unbending.
–
I am sick possibly delirious that has nothing to do with the subject of the poem I am just making conversation. I had work today too and a fever the whole time but I am afraid to miss any days in my trial period (my own craziness). Tomorrow or actually today because this will come to you on the 22nd is my 16th anniversary!
Wordle #241
The ground gives way to stars,
to a hearth of fallow contingencies.
The spark has gone from my eyes,
the amethyst from underneath
my ancient tongue.
Defiance serves only to instill decay.
–
My beneficent corpse cradles oblivion
descent is not possible, I am alone.
Who would hear me fall?
My story starts with intoxication
and ends with games of chance.
Mine is a spirit that illumines in darkness.
–
lots of anxiety could barely get this out
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/
Exorcism
I curtail the prodigal blue of your souring gaze,
a moment unto itself, a collision of scars and artifacts.
I can’t consolidate my past with your relentless nostalgia.
The stars do not cross, they drip
their nomadic splinters into my callused dreams.
Spinning circles, collecting flowers, writing
and everything we are is an exorcism
doomed to fail but perpetually administered.
Mag 305
The ocean winks at me as I bathe
in convulsions of turquoise, fully-dressed.
Between the stones and her indigenous tidings
there is no room for my boundaries.
–
Her arms topple and twine,
an embrace desperate for meaning.
–
She is a contradiction in which
epiphanies are rendered malleable,
a requiem unfathomable
but for the bluster of illusions.
–
I never loved her but her paradigm
still comes to me in moments of distress.
I could have been poor and happy
but I chose the accolades of predation.
–
I prefer nonsense to conjecture.
I prefer nonsense to the company of masquerades.
I prefer nonsense to the trial and bother
of my own antipodean sentiments.
–
I dream without sleep’s indulgence
pouring my blood into the open grin of a carafe.
I am never discreet, not even in whisper.
Mine is a continent of infinite discord.
–
I possess and ingest myself
yet the question of my species remains.
What am I? A coffin? A whimsy?
A sheaf of undated manuscripts?
–
Inside where the bones lie
my sutures amend themselves in satin
and the hope, however, grim that my scars
will not overwhelm me.