Past thirty-two in two is beginning,
beginning to drag me down,
after shiftless, break less hours,
choppers land tragedy on the ground.
But I've seen
too many faces,
shared in too many fears,
heard too many stories,
wiped away too many tears.
I've tried to compress the thirty-two
and lace them with an adrenaline rush,
then roll them into a ball of forgetfulness
and paint them with an amnesic brush.
But reeling from the real forty- eight hours later,
with my respite shortened by burn's injury and time,
I return to the tall walled fortress,
where faces and fears are etched in mind.
Breezing past the stupefied wall
its chippings tells a different story;
who was the graffitist and then liberator,
perhaps rolled up into that cumulative chisel ?
All I can do
Is think of him
But he
Won't think
Of me
I'm only in the past
Where it all went too fast
You're forgetting me
I'm missing you
with all of me
And
You'll never truely see
The future has been around for hundreds of years
Shadowed in doubt and shadowed in fears
But when the upcoming becomes the past
We find the answers to what we’ve asked.
We learn our meaning and find our desires,
We mend our wounds and start new fires,
We discover friends and hear their requests,
We accept new jobs and are paid in stress.
The future, for decades has been the same
A test for humans, a waiting game.
The future becomes present, and soon - past
Always answering what we once have asked.
The only variable to change in years
Are the answers determined by our peers.
So do not fret for what is not now
The future is only what you allow.
When you seek a dark spot
when you prefer night’s shadow
when you pray no eyes can find you
see the other man.
The other man,
he walks in the fire
with an erased past,
a slipping-fast present,
and a stale-bread future!
The other man,
who knows he has to smile
on his horrendous walk
through grueling moments,
drag himself on
along the summer asphalt
and not burn out his zeal for life.
When you seek a place to hide,
seek an asylum to escape,
find out the other man
inside you.
There's a ceremony taking place
Within my sorid mind-
I scratch my nails against my face
For fear of making sound
With each step I take, my feet grow cold
As if frozen by the the night
And something more that is only told
By the ever present sky.
A bell will toll now, so they say.
I lay my ears to the floor
Yet all I hear is yesterday
Beat up against my mind.
The thudding of a distant fate
Is nothing more than the past
Too old to unlock the pearly gate
That encompasses my soul.
I heard a band come matching in
With merry dying tunes
For instead of joy that does begin
My heart did stop- and boom.
The silent street erupted around me the moment I sat down,
a thunder rumbles in the distance
but only reveals a passing truck.
The white swan drifts past
without elegance.
I watch the youths drive by on fish lane
as the silent score of stoplights
play to an impersonal audience-
tonight the pizzicato is on time.
----
The air is dense with quiet conversation
of nighthawks
and the splash of luck
on a steel tray.
Elegant servants of style remove the unwanted things.
12:30
The air has cleared,
alone again
with two fat asians.
When did boring become stylish?
GET ME OUT OF HERE!!
"It is truly a free nation that offers pancakes 24/7"
----
Normally, the solitude of wandering a sleeping city would elicit poetry.
Tonight only nothing comes out.
Not the people nor the smells or secret music. Only the flicker of a dying neon sun assuring me,
that the parking is open.
----
1:00 am.
A woman in a pink burkha enters a white car, only to be driven off into the night, followed by two taxis.
There are ancient trees twisting their tops through the modern facade. For eras, much like fashion are discarded by finicky time.
They have stood as silent sentinels for longer than I have breathed, and with any hope, they will stand as soldiers long after I come to pass. These reminders of the ravages of time.
I loved a girl who lived here once.
She lived in an apartment that overlooked the city
and had breasts like two soft moons
that tasted like honey.
1:40 am.
Other nighthawks wander as wastrels through the quiet Autumn night,
with a slow, soft gait one never see's in the rush of day.
If all evenings carried a beat, it would be thus:
a slow jazz drum.
"...psssssh-bop! pssssh-bop! pssssh-bop!...."
would sound the echo of every evening heart
throbbing slow with power.
"...psssssh-bop! pssssh-bop!..."
The car's carry white blood cells to the suburban arteries.
Taxi's are cancer.
I walk
northbound.
----
Cold beer at 2am.
Faintly lit menagerie
an open cage containing
nighthawks.
Well spoken Eastern girls
corporate white boys
two old tradesmen,
one on a smartphone with a rosary around his soft large neck.
The antique street curves away toward the river,
sloping up
then down
I follow it with my eyes.
And run them back
to the fairylights.
They hang like glowworms
or constellations.
Glowworms hang like constellations, the inside of their cave is the same fleeting feeling of being alone with the universe, it being caressed by your eyes.
For you are its lover and its mirror.
Inside the glowworm cave, I felt like the universe and everything reflected itself in miniature. That to look upon their hanging, blue stars you saw everything else.
Part 2: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/brisbane-street-sketch-2/
Part 3: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/brisbane-street-sketch-3/
Part 4: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/brisbane-street-sketch-4/
Part 5: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/brisbane-street-sketch-5/
I don't want success. I want significance. I yearn to touch everyone. Explore their deepest fears, darkest secrets, most passionate desires, and beautiful weaknesses. My heart cries to save us all. I can't live for science. For math. For facts. I live to watch you breathe while you sleep. I live to stroke your spine and reassure you that it will all be okay. I live to trace your scars with my fingertips and leave my swirling prints on your skin forever. I live to give you hope for the present and future even though the past still glimmers menacingly behind your eyes and threatens to tear you apart. You are imperfect, and to me, you couldn't be more perfect. You have a purpose. You are beautiful because you don't believe it. I want you to know I love your every flaw. I love your every failure. I will go to the end of the world to rekindle your inner fire, and that is all I need. Now I know that success will never make me whole. I only crave to kiss your wounds and make You while again. I ache for you to understand you are significant and I want to touch your life in an invaluable way that resonates in your dreams, thoughts, and hopes. I am intelligent, that will die along with my appearance and worldly accumulations. What will survive? What will distinguish me in this infinite circle of life-ominous and inescapable? I live to discover my purpose. I will fight to save you from a mortal fate six feet under, and that alone will save me. It is the greatest thing I could ever ask for.
Darkness will fall but we will not. I always thought my most destructive fault was my obsession with fixing the broken, but now I know it is my only chance to overcome the monotonous pattern of life and death.
In receipt of penance posted,
As in a love letter,
Hosted, from a flower bud,
left rolling in the mud,
Letter screams,
I love you,
From in it's purple haze,
Lifted up and dropped me,
All in one day,
You gave me your heart,
I threw it away,
As ancient trash,
I wanted romance,
You led me a dance,
Was a rash decision,
Chasing on a mission,
A fight to flight,
When passion bites,
With vampire fangs,
One who never writes,
not poems anyway,
Pen chases pen,
In pursuance scarlet,
Drowning in blood,
As vessels spill!
I cared once,
Not anymore,
You used me as your rampant whore,
Saw you during day preceding,
Realised where I stood,
At last ,
First sweet fellow,
Here I leave you firmly in my past!
By ladylivvi1
© 2013 ladylivvi1 (All rights reserved)
(in the dream it is late March)
there's a light rain in Montréal & the sky
is a gorgeous, early-morning variety of slate grey. imagine the lid
of an old metal garbage-can.
everything is dismal, perfect. and quiet; even the people leaving the bars are silent.
dismally, perfectly, silent.
ghosts of old cats—belonging maybe to ghosts of old ladies who lived, say, just off St. Lau, back
in the eighties—ramble downhill, in the direction of rue St. Catherine (Saint Cat! O patron of felinity!) ,
between the legs of those spilling out from the trendy & shitty clubs.
some of the ghosts wander out into the street, flash thru car tires that would've (& have) (at one time)
smashed them to pulpy carpet on the asphalt.
(who goes to pick them up then? when the tires have had their way with them over & over?
when they are just hair & porridge by a sewage grate?)
after a greasy smoked-meat-on-rye or a nightcap at somebody's place, just off the drag,
i'm in a sodden, but warm overcoat, hands curled in the bottoms of it's pockets; mis-shapen mass
of hair plastered to my scalp; walking en bas de la montagne just past the McGill Medical Centre.
—this late, the busses back downtown are never on time.
(driver's probably having a few smokes before he starts that long tour down. full up of drunk kids,
taking one another back to their dorms, etc.)
(and what does he have, to look forward to at shift's end?
i. a cranky wife—past her prime?
ii. a buncha dogs—yapping for attention?
iii. some fucking kid—who's disrespectful & won't shut up or turn his stupid fucking punk-rock down?
—it's enough to make me patiently wait. i'll wait forever, as long as that isn't me.)
...'spose I'LL have a cigarette too. waiting
in the bus shelter on Ave. Des Pins looking down over the
football fields of the McGill Athletics Dept.
still lit up. no sun yet but
now at 4 AM a dull inch or two of lightened grey out there on the horizon.. dawn will come,
though i'd rather not face the day. all the mornings are so hard after nights like this.
bound to be hungover &
spend the day hiccuping in bed texting some girl; maybe get up
in the late afternoon t'fix coffee, toast & eggs.
sit on the balcony,
make my little guitar sigh,
and try to feel normal until i [have to] puke.
"—and who was that girl i spoke to for so long at St. Sulpice last night? how many gin-tonics did she let me buy myself, nattering on?.. probably too drunk to even get her number."
"—maybe Sean or Dylan will know if she came thru with anyone we knew.."
the bus is finally here. twenty-and-three minutes late. the back of it probably smells of
stale smoke, dim sun, and sweaty, rain-soaked cloth, absorbed from jackets into the seats—the eau du jour.
it's always a bump 'n jerk ride down the hill; bound to,
with the other handful of dumb & silent riders, drunkenly sway,
(or is it a natural compensation of the body, to groove along with the curves and stops?)
back & forth like carcasses of half-dozen slaughtered pigs
swinging on their hooks in back of a meat wagon..
(i'll end up getting on, but only for three blocks. i'll fucking walk the rest of the way home,
after that comparison. to hell with the rain.)
SIX MINUTES LATER:
(Avenue Des Pins still—4 blocks closer to downtown)
directly in line now with McGill campus via McTavish; this way i can
cruise down thru the silence of the main drag having a couple smokes drinking beer
(copped a 40 at a Dep before i left St. Lau—frosty under my arm enshrouded by brown paper.)
& be left to my own thoughts for fifteen minutes 'til i get to Sherbrooke
—i adore that fifteen-minute stretch down thru the jumble of
student associations, clubs, faculty offices, administration buildings, resources centres & the like;
all contained in the same red bricked, white trimmed victorian monster, multiplied threescore
on either side of the lane; all built in the early nineteen-hundreds, all acquired by the university in one of several expansion initiatives in a decade i won't bother to guess at, it doesn't matter. you don't care..
midway down the hill i stop and go sit on the verandah of one of the buildings,
the graduate studies in math offices —
cccrack that forty.
sit there with the sun JUST barely splitting the seam of the horizon feelin'
like the lyrics from a Sun Kil Moon song. nothing more or less.
"off to a good start," says i.
