Vengeful Spirit

I could be a chrysanthemum

in the hands of a child

or a bronze bell

sitting stupefied in the shrine

of any number of saints.

But I am more like an unshakeable ferocity

that forms itself again and again

in the jutting of hips

and the gnashing of teeth.

–

My emotions are vengeful spirits,

torches burning blue

in the fanatical condolence

that is sleep.

A heart which is part stomach,

a pelvis gutted like a Jack-O-Lantern,

a fan of hands which sweep away

the remains of a day

that ended on a sour note.

–

Happiness is rage.

Sorrow is a kind of seething hatred.

Intimacy can only be found in softness.

To overcome me

is to breach the invertebrate shell.

It is the palest of deaths.

–

I have given birth to infinities

and to a thousand screeching indignities.

The waves are restless about me.

I travel beneath them

like a hunter whose only weapons

are that which can reasonably fit inside the body.

Blood, bones, and organs.

–

Vulnerability cannot be extinguished.

It is the best and worst of what a man can be

and the sharpest of blades.

I have tasted and tortured.

I have walked up the wall

and back down again

without a sense

of where I am going.

–

-Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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Desire and desire alone exists.

Birth and death are simultaneous.

I have seen the spiral,

the ineffable,

the innumerable, existential sins

which empty false hearts

of their reserves.

–

We are womb-bound,

vestigial little strokes of nothing

imbued with genius.

All genius is, in fact, savage

in that it consumes

without remediation.

–

I have touched the inside out

brought forth the clay man

and wept for hours without reason.

–

In the dark our screams

are another’s crescendo.

Some people have a taste for fear.

I myself prefer the scent of butterflies

and the brittle light of a pencil

that catches unremorsefully

on my innermost something.

–

I could tell you that today

I was supremely ordinary

and that, in and of itself,

is an achievement.

I could tell you how

I lie awake at night

silently praying for an emergency

to justify my vigilance

but what I most want to say

is that I know someone

very much like myself.

–

She occupies the same

imperious suit of flesh.

She worries

that her desperate,

middle of the night tirades

have been witnessed

and that her body

is slowly but surely succumbing

to the ravages of her mind.

–

Dying isn’t such a big deal.

It is perfectly natural

and as subject to change

as any other state of being.

No one really knows

what goes on in the minds

of children and Gods.

–

Sea grass and fireflies

what more can one soul contain?

The primordial “oh”

that tears the seams of one man

and empties him into another.

I may be obsessed with love

but there are worse idols.

–

Photo Credit:

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

Volatile Constructs

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

I turn indignantly towards

a tremulous room

and one by one

the ants resume

their impervious,

earth-bound march.

–

I am a solitary migration,

a winter broken in two

by the horizon.

Pauses yield to silence

and silences to rooms

thick as oil.

It is within these

volatile constructs

that my heart pretends

to sleep.

–

I miss you,

the dull, windowless ache,

the effervescence,

the sudden creak of a smile

falling into place.

I tug at your coat

as you walk away

but it is as all things

only air.

–

Somewhere a door closes

and the sudden shock

is as obvious as gun fire.

I have to let you leave sometimes

but it hurts enough to kill.

–

There are days when you love me

and days when you don’t.

I am never sure which day it is

but I am sure of the uncertainty

that moors my breath

and of a love that is

its own special kind of loneliness.

Black Hole

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

I am one of those witches,

full of resentments,

that mumble darkly

in the cradle of night

Love me, love me, love me!

–

Desperate women are dangerous

they carry hell within them.

They are, themselves, a kind of hell.

Wild as fire and rolled at the edges

they move as cold breath,

warm, white, and weightless

into the wounded arms of fate.

–

None despair so much in love

as those who desire it.

The oceans of loss

I alone have wept

could drown the stars.

–

I subject myself to death daily,

to the tortures of the unkempt mind.

I have terrible thoughts, thoughts

which gain weight and density through repetition,

thoughts which suck the marrow out of everything.

This is how a man becomes a black hole.

WIP

Photo by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash

She sits pale and sinister in our windows.

There is no escaping her, her hideous smile,

her gnashing bones, her nothingness.

On those rare nights when she is invisible

her phantom still rejoices in your great, hanging shadow.

She is your moon, the impenetrable heartbreak

which holds us hostage in a nightmare of togetherness.

Now

Palms pressed

to the moon-soaked pavement

I pray for the momentary

captivity of a witness

whose soul stretches out

like a field

from one horizon to another

without ever collapsing.

–

Breath tethers me

to gravity’s dubious game

but in the interim,

whereupon dreams exist,

I float above the wreckage

and find that my soul

is too vast

for a single body.

How did I ever fit

within this self-conscious pincushion

that is the human experiment?

–

The stars churn overhead,

their unresolved laughter

jettisoned by leagues and leagues

of untenable blackness.

Your words make it

impossible for my heart

to stay in one place.

I want to live for as long as possible

even if my life is nothing more

than a series of abused commas.

–

Only my eyes dare to bridge

the chasms that exists between us.

Scars hold the silence together.

Some day when I have become an abyss

I will drag you into me

and kiss you until our senses

fuse together.

–

I stand naked

under a sheet of ignorance.

You don’t know it yet

but your love for me

is unfinished.

I will carry with me

the sunset and leave you

with the sunrise

with hardly any space between them

you won’t even know

the difference.

–

I promise you

that for every prayer

I will find a heart of greater measure

to test it against

and for every strand of hair

we will find a woman

breaking herself open

in recognition of freedom.

Heaven isn’t a place

it’s the space

we make for love.

–

You are the deepest

of all shadows,

an army of wildflowers

and every afters

dropped one by one

into a manic sea.

I watch you

pulling fish from the water

with your bare hands

and I am reminded

that every thing you touch

is broken by the primitive application of time.

–

I am alive. I moved back to Sweden. I am trying to find a job. I have to go to the doctor again tomorrow to see if I can figure out these health issues. It is not even just the relentless heartburn or the stomach pain or the weight-loss I have also lost a lot of strength, particularly in my upper body. I recently started studying to become a yoga teacher and beginning exercises, exercises I have practiced for nearly 20 years are really pushing my physical limits. I just don’t have any strength in my upper body. Pumping myself full of B vitamins has helped my energy levels and focus somewhat but not my strength. I know my poem is disjointed but I like it and I think there is something in there that wants to be expressed.

Invisible Girl

Photo by Serhat Beyazkaya on Unsplash

There is a moon

in my heart

that rises up

in the darkness.

Silver and chaste

it trembles

like an enigma.

–

I can feel it swelling

in my throat

like a great, triumphant OM

and I want the world

to stop for a moment

and listen to my voice

not because my voice

is the most remarkable

but because there is

a message inside of me

that is more precious

than life itself.

–

My life is just one

eclipse after another.

I know where the pockets are.

I know how to walk

from one end of the hall to another

and align my feet precisely

with every shadow and prominence.

I know every secret,

trick, diversion, feint

and all I can say

is that I want to be seen.

–

I might run

from one end of the street

to the other with a wave

and a smile so light

that it catches in the breeze

when what I want is to sing

and dance and tell stories

about beautiful, uninhabitable places

like those inside of my own mind.

I want to be heard.

I want to be known.

I want to stay wild

even as I flit between

the domestic and the mundane.

Wordle #285

Photo by Christopher Parker on Unsplash

All the flowers in the garden have been plucked and repurposed into halos, vase-fillers, and oracles. None of which have served me particularly well. My life is mostly decoration and sleight of hand. People enter. Bridges burn. Hearts puncture (my heart has more holes in it than a colander).

I still view everything through the speculum that is trauma. I am vulnerable. I am exposed. I am open from the inside and stretched to my limits.

I am an ordinary person living violently at the bottom of a well. I have no outstanding features, unless by outstanding you mean distinctive. I am a pile of bones woven together with flesh and red string. I would rather be a kite than a thimble-full of brackish water. I would rather be a catalyst than a consequence of reason but you can’t have everything and that’s why I settle sometimes. If I could have everything then I would have a cabin in the woods, an attentive lover, a Pagan wedding, the soul of a poet, and the heart of a dog.

The sky is gray and gluttonous I pour my sorrows into the rain and the mud that wallows underneath my chilled feet. I have no stories, only rancor and a vague but unshakable sense of hopelessness. The only service I am capable of offering is lip service and like anyone else I search for meaning wherever I can find it. Mostly my life feels like a series of roundabouts and one-way streets. I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast. I dance when I hear music. I think in words. I feel in words. Sometimes my soul comes loose and I drop to my knees and wait for the moon to strike me dead.

Just gibberish rambling. I have been writing intensively for several days and now I need to recharge myself.

Rainbow Adjacent

Photo by Rhett Wesley on Unsplash

Never surrender to pretense

when there’s a door

or a window or the faintest flicker

of the vacuity and vastness

that is conscious awareness.

–

Let your laughter dissolve

the clouds that overshadow

the fiery indolence of youth

and lie down with me

on a sun-saturated patch of dirt

underneath a tree

who speaks to God

about the seductive wisdom

of certain fruits and reptiles.

–

We can get married

and arrange things together

in organized piles

and pretend that wishes

are our best kept secrets.

For example I promise

not to test the water

before drowning

in any adjacent rainbows.

The only halo

I want wrapped around me

is your smile.

I don’t have wings

but my hands

hardly ever touch the ground.

–

There are so many ways

to strangle the life

out of a relationship

I never thought

that my love for you

would become a weapon

until I realized

that its content

was mostly rocks

and that what I took

for sophistication and spontaneity

was just a sly way

of crossing the street

without being recognized.

–

Magic like everything else

turns out to be real

right up to the point

that it enters into the eye

and in that still, viscous pool

everything takes on

an air of artificiality.

Deep down I think we know

that nothing is real or realized

outside of ourselves

which is why

you are an angel

and I wear a grin that looks

more like a bread knife

than a waning crescent.

–

This is the third poem of the day. The others I am planning to submit. I hope this one came out okay!

I am that wilderness

Photo by Michael Olsen on Unsplash

I have too many emotions.

They stick in my teeth,

in my twisted viscera,

in my glowing red heart

in my stiff grey lungs.

They are my hands and my feet

and all the spaces in between.

–

Feelings can’t be ascribed

to any one organ

they rise up between

the solid bits.

They are a void.

They are eternal

right up until the moment

of exchange.

–

I am inconsolable

whatever my orientation.

Viscous and viral

there is a wilderness

so wild and so vast

that no map could ever

hope to translate it.

I am that wilderness.

–

I never have

the same emotion twice.

Each emotion is its own construct.

The only thing which is certain

in me is uncertainty

but that does not

bring me comfort.

–

I sleep hundreds of hours a day.

I am the dream, not the dreamer.

I do not wake but every now and then

life comes pouring in like salt water

and takes me to another place

and in that foreign place

I take on the arduous task

of drowning.