Sunday, October 16, 2011

October Phoems in re: Girls, Anxiety, Autumn.

This fragile little leaf,
eyes like sad almonds,
she floats in flowers
and breathes gentle secrets
that ring of the tragedy of truth.

She scarcely looks further than the ground,
but when she dances and sings forgetting pain
she is often the only thing to punctuate my day
with a semblance of a smile,
with furrows finally carved north
with the volatility of joy.

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Here we go falling
insane little autumn rodents
muscles bulging and hungry teeth
restless hands and frightened eyes
jumping from limb to limb hand to mouth.

Winter will be long long
longer than we can stand
so here we go now while we
can still remember our names.

Just don't worry
when I build a nest of your hair
and seal myself in with lead
until the lashes of Easter
massage my eyes
and stir my spine.

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Relapse (with Ian)

What a day!
like a little skipping stone
we end it sidewalking
and talking from our assholes
in bright clouds of the wine
and love deep in our guts.
I am going to bed hungry
and yet am already bursting
with the thought of tomorrow morning
being spooned like butter
and golden cigarette butts
upon two no more well-deserving goats.
Sleep long, sleep well,
tomorrow we take Hell.

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The day unraveled in its nervous string,
webs of blonde anxiety spun through trees
and exploring my throat,
the last bittersweet guesses of my questions
whispering wind to your sails.

Sitting immobile my heart threatens to explode
like a blossom of sawblades to sever these shining ropes,
we will crash to earth like birds forgetting to fly
and meet eye to eye with broken ribs
and the wheezing justice of my anxious love.

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Nothing's good enough for you,
nothing is real enough,
is honest in its permanence,
least of not I.
But I Am and can do no else,
and I am Real and can be no else,
and have Faith enough for nations
in my honest contempt for the ephemeral.
I am good enough for I,
that I am good enough for me.

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Desert nights I'm glued to the surface of the lonely fucking moon. Knowing you and I are sleeping alone, no matter who breathes by our side, stealing air from our parted lips. It seems too easy, we two wrapped in pages and doom, and some nights, these lonely fucking nights I'm terrified at how little sense it all makes, at the injustice carving chasms through the mettle of a heart. I've surrendered to my eyes a sadness that will shape me beyond the veil of death, and until then I will walk breathe sleep with a patient vengeance.

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Staring at Kandinsky (Morphine)

Staring at Kandinsky,
wondering where the water goes,
wearing a disguise of my own skin.

Last night shudders rubber through my veins
like a thousand needles of sex,
thirty hours of dreaming
I'm made of air and laughter.

Morning all great erections aimed at no one,
day all eyelids and drag,
afternoon all coffee and stuttering,
night all pain wrapped in moth wings.

The walk home is as all walks home,
indifferent to the sky's indifference,
praying for exciting stab wounds
and an end to your boring bullshit.

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I am reminded of you in moonlight and pyrite,
worthless shines but honest stone.
My saviors will always lose.
My saints have always eaten the dragon.
Better to keep you with rubber bands
and photographs of burns.
I remember your skeleton hands
hiking across pillows and meat
to steal the crown from my temple,
not a second thought to the smile you've glazed
across my hopeful sleeping face.

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Autumn is bleeding,
listen to dripping colors
and the sound of smokey wind
wrap itself around melancholic afternoons,
this bittersweet purgatory
an excuse to bind ourselves
in veined leaves
and assume a nature
not dissimilar
to the ground
we tread.

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Count your blessings in the wound
hidden behind your snake mirror
that we judge you only for who you could be with us
and not for what you actually are without.
Lord give me strength to find no schism between your two
and finally be rid of this gross malfeasance.

The Letter Opener

Somewhere in Iowa, I drank a lot of cough syrup and wrote this.

He stands unsteady, his eyes in his hands
the letter-opener still protruding
from his massacred left socket
"I'll cut my fingers off next" he mutters
"and then go to work on my tongue with gardening shears
and on my ears with chopsticks to the hilt."
I don't reason with him,
I've been too far gone myself
and I know that reason is dead
in the swollen, bleeding heart.

His screams are unnerving
as any who choose to scream alone
behind closed doors
and I can hear him even with the
key in the ignition, even idling in the street.

There was no telling him
no matter what he chopped off
what he butchered from his body
or scraped with scouring pads and lye,
her letters will glow neon in his universal night
her skin will wrap him haunting still
and O God how she will roll yet on his tongue
and sing poison bells through his skull.

The trenches of memory are dug deep
and filled with bodies.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

September

A True Story

A melancholy Sunday, and yet you glow with the same lightning of years past and their verdant desperate grinding of soft kisses, nothing more, and how the tenderest ornament was placed atop the highest broken limb.

I dreamt of you, what with brown eyes searing a late summer's night of longing leaving, and awakening I found my bedclothes twisted into a limp shape of your fragile body clutched in my arms and us quivering in every night being the last night the last kiss the last knowing glance tracing your tattoos with my fingertips. Those summer nights I would have died. I may die yet.

You taught me love beyond reason and I've drug that cross ever since. I will wait on your doorstep trodden and I will sob this rock to mud, and I will never surrender your luster in my memory to these cold demons of rationale. Wait for me at the doorway to oblivion. You'll recognize my scars and I won't forget your little yellow dress.

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I have no room in my heart save for the desperate,
as the idiots go caterwauling safely to darkness
I am left alone in purity's embrace

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Boys Strumming War

I will not die for some stamped cause
let their children's boots tremble
not me, not mine
I can scarcely win this war of living

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Is it wrong to be so jealous of the ground you walk upon,
of the moon that watches you sleep?
I'll spend my days staring at setting suns,
waiting for the cloak of blindness
to make a religion of memory
and a faith of forgotten faces

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Another Drink

It occurs I don't need another drink,
I don't need to walk on unsure knees
or fall asleep already sleeping,
to pour another glass of rum
in a houseful of friends already retired,
not one more ring of dizziness
to cloud my vision of night and cat,
and I will go to bed as unfamiliar as I am
and rest bashful sober and quiet.
A poet's work is never done,
which is why I'm a line cook instead.

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I spent today a grinning skull,
lost in the awful wonder of the world
losing all sight of the gunpowder lessons
hammered through my heart,
losing all sight of who I had Been, who I need to Be,
just sick with amusement at broken bones,
a shrinking banner of pride
limply waving in air never so chilly and heavy
with the smell of bedrooms and hair.

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I've found this beast bloating beyond my comprehension,
rearing up like jagged mountains that eat sky and drink daylight,
crawling on its belly through my gut,
pulling at my hair until my eyes roll back into my head
and I stare into nothing, nothing at all,
just the jaws of the End and the ripple of my sinking heart.
We are willingly drowning in a lake of roses.

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I'm creepy, man
diving into navels
finding none so deep as my own,
dancing dead little circles around lovers,
snorting state lines for kicks
and heartbeats pushing sweaters above waistlines,
just creepy and asleep
cross-legged
mouth sagging
bile
fade to wide-eyed concession
that this night was not mine to win.