The Artist

Outside the sun wallows and swoons. She is like a woman in love, radiant and docile. Her golden headdress drops feathers to the ground. Feathers which the shadows with their infinite recesses fold into themselves for safe-keeping.

–

The mud cracks in a way that is vaguely sinister and fantastically human. If I look long enough I will find the face of someone ancient and famous who embodies humanity more in death than most of us do in life.

–

There is a carnival of flowers dancing around my ankles. There is heat in my body and seagulls shrieking as they swoop dangerously close to my head. I leave them all behind and go inside. Once inside I turn cold and cavernous. I am waiting for an excuse to write so I clean the drain and put on the water full blast and watch everything fall into darkness.

–

I smell of wool and dried sweat. The window is looking in on me without reservation or pretense. The sky is supple and blue. I want to climb into it and lie down as if it were a lake that I could breathe inside.

–

Today I visited the home of a painter who became a writer who dreamt of being a painter. I found her words more beautiful then her still lifes and portraits. Her paintings were mechanical. She wrote under a pseudonym but there was more of her in print.

–

I went home with a postcard of the artist herself not one she had painted but one taken of her in Paris. In the photograph she looks like she wants to crawl out of her skin, like she’s felt everything at least once and has decided that she wants to go on living only she can’t quite bring herself to live the life she really wants. She was phenomenally strong and phenomenally patient and when I look at her I see a person who is both resigned to a life of fire and anonymity, a life of compromise and incessant wanderings.

–

When I left the museum I realized that it doesn’t matter what you pursue because pursuing anything is still a voluntary act of creation. There is the sun and the moon and a sky full of ceaseless fish with scales that reflect like mirrors all the brightness and vastness which exists in each of us whatever shape our dreams assume.

–

PS I did like the painting she created of her husband, by far the most expressive

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Worth

I am still feeling under the weather so I am sharing my instagram post for the day! Hopefully I will get out a poem tomorrow! I was thinking of this while I was out for a walk today about how much time we spend trying to convince other people to love/like/accept/forgive us. Of how much effort we put into trying to impress others or sell ourselves to others and how devastated we are when they don’t recognize our value. Even when they do recognize it their praise never makes it past our inner self critic as it was intended. So much of what we are, so much of our inner beauty, and our true strengths gets covered up by the masks we wear to “seduce” others into wanting us.

Genius

I can conjure a suicide from anything

even the air can serve as a noose

if you have the time and patience

and I have both.

There is no one more capable

of my execution than I am

in that way, death is a bit like masturbation.

I know what I want and what I fear

and how to combine the two 

for the greatest effect.

 

Of all the ways there are to die

I prefer poetry, it is defiant,

it is an incubus pressed to the chest,

it is the moment

when nightmare and epiphany

collapse side by side

in an awkward but torrid embrace.

 

We always speak 

of the things we love

with such violence

because nothing ignites a heart

quite like its own destruction.

We fight the hardest

when we have the most to lose.

Genius is an open wound,

a soul gutted, deboned, and dredged

face down through the stars.

Wordle #148 and The Other Me

Your cheeks heavy with lutalica
and the acerbic sting of mediocrity
leave me feeling helpless.
I have nothing to offer
the you who wants for everything.
(God how I hate when our faces
align and eclipse.)
–
I who am, by all accounts, insectile-meander
struck by the voracity of human greed
and more so by my own capacity for indulgence.
I wallow alongside you,
sober but not altogether sane.
–
You always knew how to skin a razor
and I am only a decoy anyhow.
Deep down I think you know
that we are just fractures of the same person
and that I allow your dominance
only because it shores up the cracks in my own ego.
–
You who are unassailable and instantaneous
could survive out in the open
with or without my consent
but I will always defy you
if only to quiet my fear of nonexistence.

–

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/writing-prompt-202-its-all-in-the-title/

Wordle #282

My blood is cold and shrill
like old bath water.
It smells like the inside
of a child’s piggy bank
and I wish it were someone elses’
so that I did not have to scrub so hard.
–
I circle the square room,
exit and ingress perfectly spaced.
The days have grown queer and short
I shred them into riddles,
they are not the truth
and neither am I.
–
We are torn in places,
though I could not specify where
or at what precise moment
those tears became absences
too colossal to stitch.
–
My senses shrug,
a draw between evils.
It took me too long to peak.
What ribbon did I chase?
What substance-less virtue?
I have seen it,
the cadaverous blue
of a world gone mad
the proud, the idle, the dispossessed.
–
My smile crackles at the edges.
My singed tongue coils and retracts.
Cinders flicker in the air
like mating fireflies
whenever I chance to speak.

Wordle #92

Your tepid smile swallows

my hesitations as if a lark.

Please God not another affirmation.

Preference is the saddest

of all the seasons.

Where’s the adventure?

The punitive thrills?

Where is tomorrow in

the untraceable vortex

of your pedestrian calendar?

–

Your lips write in cursive

across the blueprints of my soul.

My heart arrhythmic, sealed

to pulchritude and the sky, the same

stinging hue of aquamarine

as the indefatigable sea.

–

I wrote this quite literally in about 3 minutes, it just popped out! Today I have another meeting with the unemployment office, I wonder if I get my training schedule?

Wordle #115

My heart is a bridge

Connecting one island to the next,

A wilderness hewn of both rock and bear.

You cannot escape me,

Retreat as often as you like

I am unstoppable,

Unstable at the best of times.

An angel fallen and passed

Round the bend

There are no lanes and no meadows

In which I might seek

Direction or solace.

I am devastating

In the fervid deforestation

Of my nomenclature.

A poem for a posy,

A poem for a mind split

Along the sieves.

I bandage my wounds in vowels,

In ink and holy water

As if I were significant.

I am only me and my words come

From the very same ruined heart,

Sometimes at great expense

But the charge is as it should be,

For I am nothing if not free.

Wordle #129

In a blink, the stars within

His hands vanish,

Swept into a lather of ink

And secrets that will not

Relinquish themselves.

–

In a basket of flesh and shrapnel

A magpie builds her nest,

Clever eyes enunciated

By the moon’s ripe entreaty.

–

His heart catches in the crunch

Of her deciduous hunger.

He sees no chance but grips

Her instinctively and with a force

Sufficient to finish them both.

*

I am back in school and while the commute is shorter (transferred schools) and the schedule more consistent it is still an adjustment. Wednesdays and Thursdays are my longest days and I have to get up very early in the mornings. I am exhausted. I am also not very adaptive so it will take me a while to get this organized.

Wordle #146 “Muses”

The others are indelicate

With simmering bucolic eyes.

That exacerbate potential.

They tiptoe along the rivers’

Slovenly edge

Missing step after step

But never the beat

Of their former synergy.

–

The others are cruel

Balancing teacups

Between thumb and forefinger.

Their open hearts unzipping

Alternate frames.

Lips greasy with adipose,

They’ve got a craving

For marrow, for senses

Gloriously deranged.

–

The others are instinct

Uncompromising poems

Thrust posthumously

Into the public’s tremulous gaze.

Scandalous, they eat endeavor

Like squares of softening chocolate.

Their rebellions, sawed in half

With the soles of discarded boots,

Stomp forward, all or nothing

Obliging no one, not even the keeper.

Punch Drunk

I have been very busy his week, writing a little here and there. I haven’t been able to complete a poem for the morning post despite my best intentions. I have several going but the constant interruptions are creating rifts/imbalances in the pieces (I keep losing the threads). I am reading a lot. I’ve found another poet I love. I am hanging out in the library and it feels fantastic. I am at that stage where I see the edge, my limitations and I want to push through but I haven’t acquired enough experience points to level up yet haha. When I am like this I write some good lines but also a lot of pretentious and incoherent gibberish. It is frustrating to say the least but the only thing to do at this stage is to keep writing and swallow my pride (the failures are necessary). I am setting off all the alarms. Too cliche! Too wordy! Too complicated! Too choppy! Too self-indulgent! I am impatient. I keep screaming at myself: simplify, remember the message, write what you know. I am punch drunk. I might have to write something decadent just to purge the system!