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WJ Thompson May 2022
Rancor,
Swashbuckling with a sawtooth grin and sacrilegious shouts, selcouth with an unsound mind, the commonness of uniqueness, the commonness of opinionated onions cutting their teeth on life and crying, again, and ready to saw off the limbs of the opposition out of revenge!
Rancor, relax, you're not a Twitter matador, I wish you were because I’d love to watch the show.
We cuddle with exotic nylon fibers and squeal about our weight and status and how someone insulted us and how terrible it is to be alive while sipping on easily accessibly high fructose corn syrup! Life has never been this sweet, but I guess we’re getting sick of honey.
I complain about the complaints, I am the anti-complaining complaint club president.
I am a writer, an iPhone thumb tapper.
Hear me
These mental gymnastics will somersault and summerset you right, child,
Don’t listen to Rancor,
That man’ll grab your gaze and stir your attention into a cocktail while winking at you from behind the bar
he’ll leave your brain a little woozy from a life that used to be sweet until you left it out in the sun a few years too long,
I wonder if some of the dead watch us from the corners of our bedroom or the trees along the freeway, waiting for greatness to unfurl.
I’ll bet they do and I’ll bet you’re a glitch, I’ll bet a little piece of another galaxy hit you in the head and made your finger twitch.
How many hot car hours have been spent in a parking lot,
the skin dries, the phone dies,
the spirit once lifted towards the outlines of the mountain peak now seeks memes, transcendent in their own right.
WJ Thompson Jan 2022
The night draws near
surrounding me with the obstinate strength of obsidian arms
casting over my head a blanket of oblivion
obliterating my obligation to be anything but oblivious.
My frame oblong along this bed frame,
I oblige the night her whispering request: to rest.
So be it.
WJ Thompson Jun 2021
I want to surf the crashing waves of motion in your shoulder blades, glide along your neck until your ear’s the platform for the thoughts of sweetly singing heartstrings getting brought to harmony and pitch by the bouncing drop and lift of your laughter, so catch me with your banter, I’m a fool for you and you know it. Why hide it?
WJ Thompson Feb 2021
I am friends with the owls
and soon I will die and fade
into the midnight fog
floating among oak and redwood branches
haunting the hearts of the lonely
tugging at their heart strings
until they pour their love freely
like marriage wine.
I will haunt the hearts of the lonely
because I am one.
WJ Thompson Jan 2021
I’ll mimic Matterhorn or the worn ways we window gaze and swipe left
or turn right on the green light of another cliche
If you swear gray is all the shades you’ll
put on lamps to match the grayscale duvet
Then catch me if you cat o’ nine tails
a swallowed whale,
We swear with chapped lips a waterworn promise
Maybe the Amish had it right and we’re a little bit snobbish.
I’ll Jack O’Lantern your etch-a-sketch erotica,
Not much scarier, these days, trick or treat.
Q-tips got your tongue? I’ll Question where you Came From 4 as long i Chan.
You don’t leave the house anymore except for groceries.
Catch me if you cat o’ nine tails
a swallowed whale,
Nineveh won’t wait, it’s time to break bread with danger and death.
I feel a bit obligated to explain the general aim of this poem seeing as how most of the phrases seem nonsensical (and to be honest I didn’t ascribe meaning to them until after I had written them). This started as a flow of consciousness poem, where I was really just playing a word association game with my subconscious. I was inspired (positively) by a poet on HP who has a similar abstract flow to his poems. I wanted to write something unique, out of the ordinary, and in doing so I connected with a combative energy towards laziness and cliche. I should point out that I know cliches exist for a reason, in that they capture common thoughts, feelings, or wisdom in a succinct way, and there is a certain bravery in clearly stating your feelings for all to see. I just get a bit bored by it, it’s not intellectually stimulating. On the flip side, if you hide your feelings behind too many levels of abstraction, it’s possible that neither you nor anyone else will understand what it is you’re saying.

I also have a personal annoyance with poems which are thinly veiled erotica. It’s probably a bit petty, but I’ve seen so many ****** poems on HP. The “etch-a-sketch erotica” line was about that. My exact criticism is levied at erotica which leans towards the dark, grotesque. I have genuinely seen some clever erotica poems, but I generally avoid reading such material for religious reasons.

There’s a final annoyance, other then laziness and cliche, which is political in nature. I wonder if anyone sees it?

Lastly, I haven’t thought of a meaning for “mimic Matterhorn”. I just think it sounds cool.
WJ Thompson Jan 2021
Shhh
Don’t tell me how you feel
with crude, blunt words.
Tell me in myth.
Tell me in crashing planets,
                    swarming oceans,
                       sly words cast sideways,
                    heroes rising,
                 secret forests,
               evil lords,
           and wars.
Tell me in myth.
WJ Thompson Jan 2021
You know well the verdant bed of aster
       stretched limb along the rolling *****
       tucked between the redwood trunks
Piercing eyes peak back with bared fangs
       melting, molding into tilted neck, curious.
In your mind, anyway, but in reality,
      the fuzzy forest creatures bend their
      backs subdued.
The earth has her muzzle on, for now.
But dragons;
Dragons are real and they like to whisper
in our ears.
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