Category: poetry

You should be running a real stage,

Oh! What a show you’d put on!

Wrapping your audiences in laughter,

You’d dazzle them with your wit,

Clever timing & pilferous bag of tricks

But instead you’re down here again

Drinking in this musicless pit,

Conducting the invisible orchestra;

Bottle in one hand, baton in the other

Casting out the symphony from your head,

Performing for an ideal audience of birds,

Rhythmic wings beating applause

Rowling in with every ring of the bell–

Like, Like, Like, Retweet & Repeat

On and on and on it goes,

Feeding ego tweet after tweet.

Inch after inch for a narcissist..

You know him better me,

“Give him one, he’ll take a mile,”

You always used to say, until

You did– Our inch was our story

Your mile is your grift, so take it;

Walk away from us and think–

Next time he comes along ask,

“Should I really drink? Should I take in

Division and vomit it without vision?

Or give frisson without derision

To everyone I see in the mirror?”

Imagine if you stop, climb out the pit,

And play truth again, a grift against grift:

Where you show him his mile,

And where he can go with it.

Used to be

I hated poetry,

Prose just spoke to the child in me,

Who always colored inside the lines;

Too afraid of what could happen outside,

With no structure, only patterns of lines

Where we put up boundaries like hung laundry,

Clipped to the line, dripping with regret;

Praying in waiting for time and sunshine

To dry up the past and erase stains

From memories in traumatized minds,

Dragged through the mud, shoved into boxes,

Left to mold and mildew on damp floors

Soaked in breath-stealing spore structures

Molded, bloody, but concealing truth

We longed to tell, but kept hidden, breathless,

Stifled in closets, where we always returned,

Borders for borders; safe, clean;

Kept inside while we waited, and grew,

Shedding clothes like we shed skins–

Outgrowing ourselves, and learning

How to conceal ourselves in color

And care more for it than ourselves,

Who we buried beneath posed prose

Hiding shallow breath in hollow structure,

Desperate to step outside & breathe.

Who’s who? We don’t know,

Fragments of disinformation

Anonymous, coercive, flow

Outbound to digital waters

Brought here from below

Where men cry, “lonliness”

And women cry to be lone

As bad mutations cross generations

While nobody puts down phones..

When forgotten gods speak–

Predictive text proclaims all:

We don’t know, we don’t know,

We don’t know,

We don’t know each other,

We don’t know ourselves,

We don’t know our failures,

We don’t know our cells,

We don’t know what we mean,

Or why we feel like we do,

We don’t choose our beliefs,

But we’ll choose yours for you

We are all Dysphoria

Trapped together alone

Forever in atonement

For what we only know

They say my body is me

Searching for a soul

Lost on the highways

Plowing through our homes

At once, we are ancients

Of tales untold before

Greatness unbecoming

For one such a bore;

With selves who’re not

And selves whoever are

Afraid to be becoming

Hopelessly bound to bars;

Imprisoned by reality

With billions of dying selves,

Locked in loops eternally,

Just bodies shedding cells

As cages of emotion

Hold on to every one

In lost minds wondering,

Who could Euphoria become?

Erase me, baby..

I need to be gone,

Define me out of here

Don’t let it take long

Say it never happened

Break me before it’s real

Shove it down my throat

You can take it from here..

Project yourself into me

Take what you know is yours

Every word that describes me

Those are words you need more;

Control is all your’s, daddy..

We all know what it’s like too

When you lose it, don’t worry,

No one will be here for you.

Why do we look to the stars,

When we could look to ourselves,

For answers unringed from our furtive bells?

Externally valid in our navigating–

Our selves stay at home, hidden awaiting,

Bodies in spaces where no one is screaming,

We cling to Orion’s belt, foiled and seething;

Desperate, we seek our forsaken divine,

Lost to the ebb and flowing of time.

Until at last we fall from this grace,

Embalmed with dirt masking a face–

Self-service eroded by forward procedure,

We’ll keep looking on, when no one is here;

Burnt away in life’s fortune and flames,

Wandering hollow with forgotten names,

We’ll look to the stars reflected in the mere,

Without ever knowing we’ve always been there.

Nothing’s harder to fix

Than broken people,

Fallen from beginnings yearning–

Never together in the first place,

But always fools will be cunning

As others are shamed for our shortcomings

And those awful, awe filled memories

Drunken in certain flaw filled teas;

But what do we do without

Maps to our properties?

When trauma roots itself in

How do we repair the lonely

One never known beyond

“Me, me, me,” in spite of you

And “You, you, you” in spite of you

We pour our hearts out in spite of you

As we project our spite of ourselves

Look up there on the silver screen

Touched with your light as it plays the scene

Of failures fixed on fermented fruits

Wrapped in lies we can’t stop growing

With every ticket sold at the booth.

Here’s another Garden

Another Well lying, unfalsifiably deep,

Overflowing.. Trickling drops roll

Down the mossy cobblestone

Absorbed whence they came,

Back, into the dark ground

Refreshing dying weeds,

Brambles, and that single

Gnarled tree, still fruitless.

What happened here?

I wonder, as the Well erupts

Some invisible force propels me

To the brink, to drink, drink, drink,

Absorbed whence I came, refreshing

Dying gods and monsters, black arms

Drawing me back into the dark.

All the answers are here, I’m certain

If only I dive deeply enough,

I might find the source, and link it

Might I bring it back to my Garden,

The one that isn’t dead, the one

That little girl frolicked freely through,

Unconcerned with evaporation,

The one never neglected, never decayed;

No overgrown invaders deeply rooted

Into impassable walls of thorns..

Choking, gasping toxic air, I find myself

In another Garden, but not the Garden;

Not the one left behind, nor sought,

Under another sky, some new place

Where the Well still lingers,

Consuming time, space, and matter

What is my purpose? It erupts again,

With it, memories of that day she climbed,

Reached for the fruit, and fell

Fingers clenched to that bell-shaped prize.

Back again, I feel the impact of the fall

But not the fruit it was worth..

Sorrow without joy; Doubt without

Certainty; A woman without fruit

In a Garden without life, drowning

Wishing for death, if only for the weeds..

I tear at them furiously, every root pulled

Leaves behind seeds for a hopeless future

Without space to grow, but I keep going

I stop looking to the Well for answers,

And work, though I know not what I do,

A Garden becomes a Wasteland,

Just dirt, the Well, the tree, and me

Where I carve these words, humbly

And offer my fruit to the tree.

Electric glow

Burning on,

It’s no longer dark

Before any dawn,

Take me out too

To these worlds beyond

Where nobody’s hollow,

Where we can all belong,

Where we’ll all follow,

Twisted and shaped:

With certainty swallowed

Through troughs of our hate.

Confirm us, absorb us

Oh Light, won’t you turn us?

Lift us out of this hell

And make us, not spurn us?

When you ring the voltaic bell–

Will it fill us with certainty?

Not doubt, not sorrow,

But safety and security?

We’ll make believe in you

If you show us a way to be

And we’ll dance together

Lost lovers in empathy

Gone, like evening suns

Sorrowful, lonesome, afraid

When these lying lights go out

And truth finds us in the shade.