Ghost Relics**

Downtown,
where Main intersects Main
you'll see the last living tissue
of a breathing bazaar.
They weighed down her chest with bricks and girders.
It's a wonder she breathes at all.
-
Wander too far in any direction
and you're sure to see the husks
of once proud and bustling businesses.
Abandoned sanctums of mortar and majesty.
Scars of the Midwest etched as constants in our mind.
Dusty and silent since the cradle.
-
The theaters are bedeviled with dolled up haunts
who just wandered over from Greenwood to catch the matinee.
Management still leaves the lights on for kicks after hours
to throw off their sleep schedules while they wait for the feature to start.
Up all night, sleep all day; they read by neon and slumber under Sol.
Here I am, left lounging in The Devil's Chair. Crickets keep quavering.
-
Underneath the Franklin Street overpass sleeps a family bound by naught.
They watch in dawn's light as the few pedestrian that traverse Cerro Gordo
advert their eyes as some sort of silent symbol of respect for their situation.
It's as if the very stare of a privileged man could drain 'til depleted.
They never ask for anything, they just wade it out and listen to
the cars overhead, the train-clock's trumpet, and the heartbeats in between.
-
Leaks are patched, potholes filled, and yet
we're still loosing blood; becoming beguiled.
So many stray cats in the civilian savanna,
aimlessly seeking names and second chances.
"This premises is under police video surveillance" -
hanging like ornaments from streetlamp poles.
-
Guarding the gates
of a dwindling dominion,
as the armies of Union and Grand
wait in their camps
for the rust to take hold
of her iron veins.

London is an onion.
Not one of those big, brown juicy globes
you can buy in packs of three, from Tesco,
No, an earthy, shrivelled relic from an old geezer's allotment,
With trailing fronds and a few infestations.
If you were to take a bite, your eyes would smart and your body rebel with a cough, a shudder and a wheeze,
But moments later, a smile would be playing round your lips,
Such a sensory adventure, though not exactly pleasant, can still be savoured,
And you'll remember the taste forever.

Londoners are weevils, hiding in the layers.
Outer, inner, some of us worm our way between them all.
Me, I tend to head for the heart of the thing,
Soho, Southwark, the inner sanctums.
I sometimes venture nearer the surface, the outer edges,
But too close to the unknown, and unfamiliar air,
And I start to pine for the centre.
You can work between the layers,
But the many skins are tougher than you'd think,
Better to burrow down, find a place to sustain
The appetite of a hungry little grub.

Red-stained fingers match the
Taste of rust.
I wipe my mouth again.          
The fire rises in my cheekbones
And descends upon my throat;
Lower sanctums, beware—
Forehead ripple lava pits,
Eyes like San Andreas.

The only way out is through
Sky blue inundation.

I drink.

Matron jar, round
And cool to the
Touch
Dripping life
From her hands
To mine.

Embers dwindle.
One last cough to push the
Smoke from my breath—
My ribs are paper bag empty.

faked botulism
and Beulah reds
Abyssinian horses
purportedly dead

all night blindness
that 'gravel' soothes
hovering indentions
southwestern barceuse

luminaries marked
tiny infantries swell
conically formed
so steady with shell

dihedral burns
for unlucky hands
swaying cognition
oh, little demands

sanctums ******
the sputum reigns
tenderness denied
a proper grave

you were ferried
holstered soul
lift your head
and let it go

In a quasimodo feat of not only myself but my inner sanctums. I’m in a shelter. A secluded shelter far from mankind. The bells rich **** spreads across a cold Philidelphia. I hide from the tourniquets of our kingdom. Hordes of documented secrets filibustering the excutivies of a blood famished nation. Where could a turning point conspire? Not here. Not there. No where vast of what only we know. How many times have you performed German heischen styles upon what has happened? Dialect informative, all lauguages and ethinicities could tell you. Corruption. Progestational hormones of all man and woman get the gist of secrecy, but why inquire it onworth still. Atomic bombs whiping out ten times the population of our fragile pathetic planet.

An ice rendered telescope at zero gravity with the script filled micro chips of new findings amongst our universe. This was an immediate spawn of hope towards who we are. At least for the sake of another life form, they would configure an easier derogatory and denigrating outlook of a human lifestyle. Maybe they could relate, maybe they would have emmerged in trade as our ancestors of the past 1,000 years and before had. With us, it would have been magnificent for the future to come. This era though, the only significance we know collides with a destruction of a super-catastrophic function that has been reformed thus grouwan. Grouwan, the origin of grow, growing or to increase in size, building up just as the magmata composes its liquid matter within the Earth’s crust into lava. Igneous rocks now form. Reaching the Alps. Frozen, a complete opposite of what they were once spawned from.

Still intact, an ice rendered telescope photographing galaxies not seen by a naked eye. They called it, “The Orbiting Gaurdian”, while we remained demonic and caught in ignorant reality conflicts. In small groups spread across the lands, combined as one, we are still undeniably small. I built this shelter with my own two hands knowing what would come, I wanted to overcome. Philidelpia was still so cold, very odd, quite eerie for a patriot New England city. Rot, Weib, und Blau. Rodt, Hvitt, og blatt. Shiro aka to ao. From Germany, to Norway, to the super advanced technologic Japan, they all recognize red, white, and blue. Maybe we are a leading nation, but who honestly gives a ****. All nation’s combined, worlds away, a lone planet of democracy. Darkness. The abcense of light above me, directly. No two-dimensional representation of an outline of any body form. No cutout or configurational drawing with a sun glimmering backrounded setting. We are inkligs with no hint of suggestion in the sea of blackness above. If you could have gone so far back in time though, you would have found a blackned quality on the most transparent and pellucid of days.

I race through my brain waves wondering if this concealment was completely ignorant. Was it full of extreme folly? Asininity? Ineptitude? I pondered the synonyms of stupidity. I was ravished to wonder if my last thoughts would be a mind race of the lacking self-esteem I hold. Sudden deaf struck. I no longer heard shrills of humanity above. I was deprived of my sense of hearing. Intimidated to look upward, I could not manage being deprived of sight as well.

What were those dangling seconds that I could not hear?

Were they little fragments of time that I could not notice near?

They stabbed at the back of my skull to leave this sheltered hole.

I find humor in how my poetry is merely past time entries that mean nothing. They once had been published, but now at the least, they did not mean a thing. I wish them to burn long and hard, fighting. Hardback covers and dusty library shelves vanishing in this dark mess of a world.

Pain, sharp municiple pain casted into my skin. Into my lungs, my contaminated, sickened lungs that had ciggarettes by the thousands over the years. I had started as a child. A stubborn twelve year old child wanting to experience any drug my hands could get a hold of. I did too, I don’t regret it, and I dont feel remorse from my actions and those many high nights when I could not walk or stand. I felt weary, weak, helpless and finished. My eyes, my mind, my pulse, my body, my so called soul, asleep or dead?

There is breath in sweet darkness,
sanctums beyond twilight and madness
where the shining of reality escapes,
  naught discernible sensibilities
   nor reasoning of spun agenda's logic
       amidst pale incognito moonlight,
   whilst tangible perceptions wait for the
             shocking awe of a glaring dawn

Omissions we make take us somewhere
but where that could be
I've no
clue,
I lose all momentum when friends come to stay
and the talk turns to
what shall we do
tomorrow.

Like
decaying uranium we linger, the fingers of time are our fate,
the half-lives of sinners are longer and get longer the longer they play on my nerves,
inner sanctums are no more a sanctuary
the walls I concreted broke down,
the lions may roar a denial, but something's
going on in the town,
ships sailing at dawn for the Islands
on missions to take them away,
only here for a day gone in sorrow,
in tears on the quayside
I see my
tomorrow.

The future is closer this evening
the day drifts off into the past,
uncertainty is the new reason
I'm glad that's
decided, at
last when the bell starts its long climb
before it falls back down
and chimes
I climbed that tall mountain
so often
and fallen back down
many times.

They gather in their thousands
to pray to a dead forgotten God
there is no hope for them, no heaven
when they die they will just be dead

Pity the blind, if you can be bothered
no angles to make them hover
listen to them sing the lie
all will die and never fly

Sunday Sanctum Sunday Sanctums
reading the book of wind and ****
they wait for their Bible to flood
with the sacrifice of Christ's blood

By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris

Stuck in the wilderness, among the sanctums of green and indigo grandeur

Romulus and Remus are writing along their wills, shaking hands with the forest spirits as they pass by on the thorn covered roads

Crowns of silver being woven by the wrens in the willows, transmuting their echoes to blistered esteems

Among these wrecked ships, that naval graveyard whispering ink patches to sandpaper cathedrals

These things set in, among green woods with creatures looking on, as the sun sets upon the world

Labyrinths and crypts of cold stone
Ever shifting and strange
Led me to that forgotten chapel

I stepped inside its narthex
Distant and remote
A place only dreams might reach

It was always night there
In the sanctums of that place
Every trespass palpable

Yet the darkness was not consuming
It seemed stagnant and moribund
Weaving vainly around the pillars and pews

Stripped of the fear that darkness brings
It lulled about aimlessly
Trapped within those rotless walls

Waiting for the return of the light

It begins with
a melodious blur
as a taste of forgetfulness slithers
over my humble skin.

A yearning evolves slowly,
to disappear away
from this meaningless pursuit of flesh,
we are trapped by our existence
and nothing else.

I trespass within myself,
in search of a purpose,
in the hidden sanctums of my delusion,
where blues waves greet my feet,
and the sky made of ice
howls with terrible winds, at my timidity.

It never rains,
But I always forget to stride aimlessly,
these hungry eyes are served
with sumptuous visions,
and till my hands bleed
this hallucination copulates
with my reality.
I finally learn to float
within myself.

I pen all of it down,
in the night
and call them as Art
in the morning.

Deep in my subconscious live puppet masters pulling strings on my lifeline as if we are build with a data-log
Consciously inventing evil dominions and armadas of plague, death & destruction
Hellbent Devils instructed to command and destroy the HUMAN RACE...
Putrid Sanctums; Mega-diabolical Instruments of Death & Doom
Slowly feeding on the ENLIGHTENED ONES & HOLY ONES

Heavenly Armada my D0MINI0N shall overtake the EARTH by Surprise and you all will NOT SEE IT COME...I shall come like a thief in the night to steal all the STARS and ALL the Planets at ONCE... FROM THE MOUTH OF THE LORD HAS SPOKEN!!!

Be prepared Oh Little creatures my Creations for from DUST YOU WHERE CREATED AND TO DUST U SHALL RETURN...sayest, the LORD. Amen

you are lying on your back in a bed 5,487 miles away from home.
there are geckos trilling from the corridors and the trees cast shadows in the room
above the door, the air con whirs and you shift, sticky, skin sweating against starched cotton sheets
too hot, too humid, too much

everything is too much, but at least it’s too much here instead of too much back there;
you visit temples, vast and golden in their glory, and white and intricate in their purity; ocher where the sun has kissed blessings upon their pillars,
and pretend that you too are subjected to the numinous nature of sanctums and their spirits
and pray they don’t notice that the awe in their eyes isn’t reflected in yours,
hope they don’t sense that you are not here to heal, only to stretch old wounds into splitting open anew

you are ruining your life

you are ruining your life somewhere beautiful that’s been the making of so many others’ lives
but you always strived to be different, never recognising
that agony, despair, self-deprecation, self-victimisation, suffering—they’re the most common connecting factors between all humans
you are the same as the other six billion people aching and crying and spitting anger in their sorrow,
blind to the one billion who’re trying to make the world a better place so the rest of you might smile a little more often.

one of the geckos scurries across the ceiling and you flinch,
a moment of fear for the unknown before you settle once more and simply watch his little legs fidget his body to freedom through the slats of your propped open window.
inside your chest there’s a moment of heavy silence as your heart grapples for a connection between you and that little creature
both small little things striving to survive in a world too large, too bright, too crowded yet too empty
chasing freedom like a child chases a dream.

the moment passes.
your heart regains pace and your mind whirs with the lonely static of too much me time

you are ruining your life
not realising you’re weaker to suffer than you’d be if you tried to heal

I hold my standards to an apex inexplicable,

Amalgamate the serendipity bouncing up through every syllable,

Never to extinguish the conquest of a man,

through the echoes of his eyelids that put aside asylum tryna understand.

I ain't shouting to the deaf, nor breathing in the miasma,

I amass a massive mastery and disenchant disaster.

None to believe the heretics denouncing between the flames,

The accusation between falsehoods are strung beneath the names,

A rivalry hosts opinion, incongruent to the mustered memory,

I bode the omens overhead and pray these sanctums hold my enemies.

I think not of how hard I slap
how solid a fist feels.
I find contemplating pain, an eager passed time
something gutting.
Like fish hooked on skewers, vididly moving
scoping while the waters fade
breath by breath
choking

I think of crumbled letters
gracing the wooden floors
minor words wrapped in white
pages age
Like heartbreak and bourbon
potent

I think not of tomorrow,
undecided time, a ghost haunting the now
like a grudge, sewn to the flesh
groping nails cling, drawing
blood

I think of cellar doors, hinging on time
of choices that lead to dark realms
where demons whisper
of silver sanctums, wide
open

I ogle mirror glass, finding the ripples vain
I think not of who or how
I think only of a voice, strumming my death
lovingly

The bell tolls in the rain
Trecherously on that cliff face
Calling those yet remaining
To the sanctums within

None who are called
Know to what they are beckoned
But they suspect in their hearts
It is no salvation

The great wooden doors
Of that church are opened
But nothing exits
Save the screams of the lost

Burst outward
Shattered ribs
Vivid shadows
Escape at last
From the sanctums
Of a long drowned heart

Who rails against the voices
  that hide so deep

And haunt the inner sanctums
  in which we sleep

(Villanova Pennsylvania: June, 2013)

perhaps all we do

express

confess in droplets

or tsunami


and how many

to confess to

divulge the innermost

secrets from our sanctums


new decade crashes in

with your colour eruptions

what miles

seconds separate us


what to be said

said carefully

as if glass

in a child’s hands


confess our truths

at the time

await answers

like overseas mail


pen ink drunk

set for disclosure

answers to spark

for minutes for years