The infertile sky
carries on for miles and miles
black as a fiend’s tongue.
All that I have left
is the outline of your boot
pressed against my chest.
For now I will not
wash it off, for it must serve
in place of my heart.
Wordle #42
Your erection haunts me
Stalks the avenues of my brain
Entirely out of context.
A bar of soap rides my flesh,
A jackal wept of too much blood.
I swirl hostage on the tiles
The arch of my foot
A mussel’s geying smirk.
I will never be a mariposa,
A unison of dubious flair
For I am alone
A pseudo mollusk
A cable that writhes
Of Zeus’s featureless touch.
The gravel in my hand
Is what remains of your teeth
Of you sickly sweet smile.
Never again a paperweight
Never again the proxy.
That I should not be loved
Never escapes recommendation.
*
Unrelated to the poem
I received my class schedule it is extremely irregular, each day is different and I am not sure how to plan my days. I am entirely overwhelmed there is so much down time on the bus/waiting for the bus and I am not sure how to use it in a really efficient way. I can’t use it for my blog because I have no idea how to use my cellphone yet (I can’t even write a text, it is a rocket ship compared to the previous). I am thinking of studying but I am not sure if I can do written work. The teacher is obnoxious and it is a much larger class then expected. I am stressed!
For
https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/wordle-42-january-5-2014/
Circus
OrmHuz@Deviant Art
The pauses in our conversations,
Unraveled, could circumnavigate
The globe again and again
As if a needle in a groove
So oft revisited that it stutters.
We’ve grown apart
But the stitches do not give
A hem of scars like a constellation
Of indistinct faces.
The silence is extravagant
Like the howl of a coyote
A stigmata wrapped in eyelashes
A dusty jewel, cold as a corpse’s tears
The betrayal of your footsteps
As you pass from my boundaries
And cross illicitly into hers.
Your fingers reflect
Against my flesh
Like blades of lightening
There is no reverence
In their application.
My womb is full of splinters
Of your wooden sperm
Delivered at intervals
And from a distance
Not reflected
By our mixed filaments.
I trace your smiling mouth
And wonder if the picture
Was taken upside down
By mistake
Because I don’t remember
Your lips ever reaching
That altitude.
Our misery has a longevity
Worthy of distinction
So long has she prowled
Flanked by our bones
And incessant for want
Of tenderness
We no longer exist
Without her
We are the exception
Not she,
She is the tigress, the star
Of this unmanned circus
*
I have been doing a lot rewrites lately and that is largely because I am hard at work on my second book “The Necessity of Flowers”. Like my first book I am aiming for 100 poems. Right now I have 81 poems (there are more than enough poems on my blog of course but there is so much on my blog that it takes a while to sort). Melanie is away (for happy reasons) so I am not sure if I will have to find another editor.
Wordle #2 Darker
Tomoki Hayasaka
There is only this moment
Headlights and horns blaring
Moonskin eyes sere and cavernous
Knuckles tense and gutless
Like the womb of a prepared fish
*
The scarf around my neck
Sticks in the axle of your left wheel
That queer oscillating grimace
Vital to the propulsion
Of your defecting asylum
*
We gather feathers and rifts
Powered Juniper wishes
Which disintegrate between
Our intimating and indulgent lips
*
Why must we speak of misery
As if a sacred elixir brewed
By our ancestors and given in infancy?
As if it were the primary ingredient
Of our cellular composition
Like hemoglobin only darker
Abject
1
There exists
No greater fear
Then vacancy
What if
My ineptitude
Stemmed not
From inexperience
But from a lack
Of content?
*
You told me once
That my vocabulary
Was too big
To justify
That all love
Was a form of
Self-indulgence
*
Architecture
Without
A resident heart
Affectation
Without
Affection
What right
Did I have
To speak
Of happiness
When I knew
So little of her
What right
Did I have
To speak
Of moments
Not yet defiled
By a captious brain
When they stood
So few and far
Between
*
That was the day
I put aside my pen
The day
That I decided
Unequivocally
That I was nothing
I lacked
The confidence
To redeem myself
So I hid
2
I drank of hemlock
And in agony
My soul from eyes
Withdrew
Hence forth
I reside internal
Hence forth
A Judas
To my muse
*
I was inspired to write this after speaking to Bianca. Many many years ago before I had a blog when my poems were selectively and seldomly shared I received a critique that would stop me from writing for years. I had a friend I shared my poetry with regularly and for many years he was a great supporter of my work. Then one day I decided to write something quite different from my usual fare. I was quite excited about it because I felt that the only way for me to grow was to push myself out of my comfort zone and take on new challenges. He HATED the poem. His criticism went from the poem, to my worth as a human being. For several hours he questioned the very foundation of my beliefs, he said I was a phony. He did not like that I used vocabulary he was not familiar with and he felt that the poem was cliched and lacked emotional depth which led him to the conclusion that if I wrote it I was equally superficial. He’d read countless poems of mine before and had never criticized them for being superficial so I am not sure what led him to believe that in one day I had transformed into another person but that is precisely what he did believe. He truly believed I was a traitor. A person of depth was never happy and never could be happy that was the burden of genius madness and misery. I had fallen. The critique really hurt me because not only did our friendship take a blow from which it never recovered (he does not read any of my poems now and rarely talks to me) but it hit on my biggest fear, the fear that I had no emotional depth. All through my childhood I had been accused of being insensitive, cold, and emotionless. What if everything I wrote was cliché? Vacuous? What if I had no substance? No soul? Without substance I had no worth. I stopped writing for years. I tried but my confidence was destroyed I did not want to write pretty poems, I wanted to write meaningful poems. Everything I wrote seemed so empty. It was a very long time before I took the criticism and used it to strengthen my resolve as a writer. I hardly remember the years I didn’t write I became very withdrawn. I offer my poems to a much larger audience now as part of a resolve to be fearless at least where writing is concerned.
Painted Dragon
She could’ve been beautiful
But the makeup on her face
Amplified every imperfection
Made her seem unreal
Like a slipshod animation
*
We talked for hours
About philosophies
Too convoluted to consume
About ambitions
And the despair
That shapes realities
She would have sacrificed
Everything for the stage,
Instead, on her knees
Choking down creation
*
I find myself standing
On the same corner
Night after night
Surrendering
To the instincts
Of inhuman men
Selling pieces of my soul
For the abstractions
Of a primed syringe
*
We bought
An apartment together
On the lower end
No furniture or food
Only conversation,
The sustenance of fools
I remember
The hours piled upon hours
Of words so casually strewn
I remember
The weight of her shrinking skin
Defenseless beneath
The weight
Of our transient bones
I remember
Watching her fall
Shapelessly
Into addiction
My spirit too weak
To stall the descent
*
I opened the door
To find her on the toilet
In my sagging robe
Hair unwashed
Body slouching lifeless
Against a tiled wall
And neither my hands
Nor my breath
Could draw her back
From the widowing shawl
Of a commiserating death
*
I couldn’t stop screaming
I love you
Until my voice was gone
And I had to mouth
The words instead
I wish I’d told her
When I had the chance
When she was crying
For hours on end
When she was screaming
I’m better off dead
When she hated me
For getting in the way
And herself more
For what she’d become
Those words never
Hurt so much
As when unsaid
I wished I’d screamed them at her
Over and over again
Until she went deaf
So no other words could ever enter
And cause her pain again
*
Now I am standing
In her place
On a modest stage
A modest crowd genuflecting
As I start to play
And whisper the lyrics she left me
I imagine her in my place
Squeezing the microphone
Lips as round and full
As an orgasm
*
Here I stand claiming
What time could not
From my heart cleanse
In her place
Picking up the dreams
That she left
*
This together with Paper Heart is the remnants of a novel abandoned and lost long ago. Paper Heart was written from the female’s perspective and Painted Dragon from the male’s perspective. I’ve done extensive editing of this poem over the years but I’ve never been satisfied by my efforts.
mindlovemisery 