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Janek Kentigern Oct 2016
Sadness
it's strong stuff...
I've had so much I can't walk
without falling
I can't talk
without stalling
And slurring
Can't think
without blurring the lines
between problems
and mere actualities.
Lacking the faculties
to sort factual reality
from the masochistic fantasies
that lurk at the back of me;
Passively, I watch them attacking me
ransacking stacks of ****
that once brought me happiness
laughing mirthlessly, cursing the birth of me,
tormenting, caressing,
augmenting the worst of me,
Cementing self pity, bitterly nursing the urge
to revel in misery. Rolling in muck
and mire of recent history,
desiring nothing.
In anger I pander to these base demands,
Mistaking mere sickness
For something more grand
Avowing the charge of my own propaganda,
Allowing this world that I loved
to be slandered
Cowed
My friends are pulled down to an
unflattering angle. From here they appear
(no matter how dear)
to be traitors and thieves,
with knives up their sleeves.
I'll believe every lie my sick mind can conceive.

Don't give me the keys
'cos I'll drive off a cliff
Don't give me a pen
Cos I'll only write this
There's nothing unique in the words that I speak,
and this piece is nothing but
cliches,
mixed metaphors you've met before
similes sing of sick malaise.
Tongue out of cheek,
Dazed.
I'm released from policing
my verse,
Sad soul knows no quality Control,
As the heart beats crazily, I proofread lazily
sentimentally, hazily.
Without a **** to give
I chuck away the voice that says
“Don't write if it ain't great.”.

Days achieving nothing
but self inflicted *******
Gouging self-inflicted chasms
between loved ones and I,
apoplectic rage in spasms,
fits of fleeting normality
Bridge defeat, despair and insanity.
Weaponised hatred for all of humanity.
A small inconvenience
becomes a calamity.
Then revert to intertia perverted by vanity.

Next, corner a companion and
complain away the pain and drain your glass again and again without restraint

Explain the ways that your to blame, oh the shame the shame,
Dissect regrets, reflect until you've bored yourself to death,
(let alone the poor sod who kindly nods and slyly checks their watch, before they stammer out excuses,
Hints which I'm too hammered and useless to hear,
Too wrecked to check myself. They've done their duty as a mate, but remember,
steer clear of the fate,
Of getting ****** down into the vortex, of depression and regrets.
We've all got our problems. He's out of cigarettes.)
Whilst here I  reading aloud
still sore texts, to detect traces of affection.

Sad ****, sad drunk, alone again,
Get my coat, forget my phone. The inconvenience provides some light relief,
From the background grief.
Now tomorrow's replete with distraction s and tasks to complete.
The horizons' brightened with the prospect of splashing some some cash, and so much to choose!
Afternoons busy spent perusing reviews,
Megapixels, memory, which brand do I trust?
But I know I'm just
buying time,
Before the consumption high subsides
and I'm back with this background mosquito pitch whine saying "maybe I'm better off dead".
Bite you lip, hold on, its temporary. and whilst it feels scary, remember
Your not sick, you're not dying, your just heartbroken,
trying to move on, and maybe occasionally crying.
And that's healthy.
The weeping ain't that bad,
It's the cold light of day. It's the misguided logic. That's says "you had the best time of your life, now you've lost it,
All that was worth having,
Is behind you, and may I remind you,
You ain't getting younger, it's starting to show,
And times flowing towards the end, the time you spent on earth was wasted, getting wasted, not facing life head on and you'll never change. It's not strange that she's found someone better"
etc etc

You've been here before and each time it gets better. If you could write a letter to your younger self you could share a wealth of knowledge about Dealing with horrors from within.
Emotions invade us, but we can repel them. But you have to embrace them before you expel them.
So whilst it's not fine yet
And whilst I still pine, yeah, I'm resigned for the time being,
seeing the bigger picture.
And we're designed to recover then remove the stitches. No plans go without hitches. At last, whilst they might not go as fast as we like,
In the night take respite cos
Like the drunken high, and this ******* Hangover
This too shall pass
And one day you'll wake up sober.
1542

Come show thy Durham Breast
To her who loves thee best,
Delicious Robin—
And if it be not me
At least within my Tree
Do the avowing—
Thy Nuptial so minute
Perhaps is more astute
Than vaster suing—
For so to soar away
Is our propensity
The Day ensuing—
Valsa George Jun 2016
Here lies my dog, motionless in his kennel
unable to wag his tail as he always did.
Yesterday when I saw him, curling helpless on his mat
he still wagged his tail and from him arose
a faint tremolo of love
punctuated by gutturals of pain.
At some bleak hour of the night,
the last ember of life died down
and his supple body turned stiff and stark.

Now he lies straight and majestic in death
leaving a track record  of love
far difficult to break,
- a love no vessel can hold
or equated with what we humans feel.

Speechless as I stand, memories churn within.
He came to us - too young to be weaned,
a glossy black puppy with tawny gleaming eyes.
His short, sturdy limbs, large drooping ears,
slender waist and elongated frame
well proclaimed his pedigree aloud
So full of mischief, he capered and hopped,
like a new born calf, always up on his heels.
Sniffing with moist nose, he dug and dug
as if unearthing a treasure trove
buried deep beneath the soil.
With alert vigil, he guarded our home,
barking at strangers and driving rodents away
He expected nothing in turn but love.
His loyalty as we deem was never servile.
Never was he on chains to be hauled like cattle.
He enjoyed sauntering through the courtyard
giving company as we took our evening rounds.
He gloated rubbing his body over our knee
and sat content as our stroking fingers ran all around
Licking our feet and arms,
what he conveyed in inarticulate words
could be deciphered thus -
‘I love you, love you true’  

Like the bouncing ball, he often played with
our hearts made to bounce up in love
and our hands fold in benison
for a comrade who departs,
valiant in life and loyal to the core
hoping to meet him anon
on the far green meadows of bliss,
still wagging his tail, avowing a bond
too strong to be snapped or splintered.
Jo Nov 2012
These cold months leave me haggard
Breathless, as I struggle to regain my grip
Slipping through plains of uncertainty
Seeking that evasive simplicity

Scoffing at past words of comfort
That so gallantly wrapped the falsehood
Of time and its fabled curative powers
How I have been eagerly deceived

Jaded breath travels forward
Seeking concord in old and battered retentions
To only be limited by brooding reality
Where lays my pool of forgetting?

Utterances wisp past insistently
Avowing it to be just beyond
While others toy and slowly slither
Hissing of its non-existence

By miscalculating step I fumble
Mind drained of all, but shelled rummage
As it seeps into my frame
Ever hunting that eradicating amnesia
BR Jun 2018
My mind is an open palm, raised to the trees
avowing and disavowing the love of sunlight,
and translating fractured thoughts caught on the breeze like cottonwood seeds,
snatched by a hand in the air;
like the way we used to catch mosquitoes, and ended up with one one another's mingled blood crushed into the lines on our palms
and to be honest,
I didn't mind it so much.

I guess I wanted to reclaim something
I guess I wanted to take back a little of the life that was siphoned from us

I am sick of lifeblood being stolen and replaced with poison, and the anticoagulant that keeps it flowing long enough that we never know we've been bitten until it's gone, and carried away in someone's belly, where it melts into so many others inside their stomachs

It's so easy to let your heart get to racing, long enough that you don't know what's being taken from you. Like the first time I let a man take off my shirt in the back of his car; he used his hands  to show me where I could stand to be improved; carving another woman into the air,
and she would live there like a ghost for so many years.

Sometimes I still see her.

Sometimes I am afraid that I'll never know what it's like to feel safe in the eyes of a man.

But I always feel like that now; peeled clean, exposed, disrobed to the heels in front of everyone. And there are so many hands, creating ghosts for me to fear. I am afraid of being afraid to let anyone near me, especially since I welcome it so easily.

God help me.
God help us.

There is comfort in being crushed to one another;
our essences coalescing in our minds and open hands crashing together to catch the cottonwood memories, stinging before we know what’***** us.
There is comfort in being bled together, our grief being wed together, and being folded into one another in the bellies of sleepless nights.

God help us
There is nothing I can do except feel numb next to you.
God help us,
There is nothing I can do except feel alive in pain next to you.

My mind is an open palm, raised in a question,
Translating fractured thoughts,
Caught between us.
Travis Green Aug 2021
Sometimes, I wish I could be
His dreamy winged muse
Bringing unalloyed brightness
And clarity to his life

Sometimes, I wish he could
See me smoked out
Avowing my affection to him
Waiting for him to show me a sign
That would rhyme with my poetic mind

— The End —