Dusk's fire vanishes into me these days,
a simmering that chills the soul,
an eternal gravity of parted ways -
yesterday, a lifetime ago.
Those resigned retreats I have beaten, it seems,
have all folded upon themselves
in this samsara of half-abandoned dreams
with their twisted trajectories.
Words stoppering my throat return to the pen;
they come out all messy and wrong
in discordant collisions time and again,
denatured by decrepitude.
The alternating current leaping through weeks -
snippets of a life without me -
rampages, heedless to memories it wreaks,
feeding the voltage in my brain.
I have confined you to a prime number beyond my own imagination
to turn my blade on a yet time-frozen heart;
but all I find carved upon the blocks I chop it into are your initials,
indivisible cube roots of memory.
Oct 11, 2020
Oct 11, 2020 at 1:14 PM UTC
this week is melting into the last again,
an unspooling reel of denatured days whelmed in a geodic cavity of suspense.
entombed air turns stale quickly, curable by neither smoke nor innumerable crystalline mirrors refracting the lightning blinking in my window.
occupation's familiar musk hangs heavy,
pierced only occasionally by storm sounds.
the flightless beast of languor growls an uneasy thunder
rolling adrift in a hollow sky, phantom wingbeats striking my temples
as I recoil at the realisation that my tormentor is my pulse.
lucent orbs of twilight gemmed in a shapeshifting head
stare at any number of absent realisations guilty talons rake deep into the void,
yet even this suicidal contemplation snares in ephemerality.
we barely remember to maroon the latest self-undoing consecration.
May 27, 2020
May 27, 2020 at 1:30 PM UTC
A compass in my thumbs deposits me variously reincarnated on the doorstep of our conversation,
yet each time an infant wrapped in a different blanket.
Long have I pored over the spectrum of untrammelled human emotion,
spanning cover to cover in this self-forbidden grimoire prefaced with bearer risk warnings.
Now my tongue plays host to an intermittent rebellion of intangibles,
each laconic usurper alacritously poised to halt a never-ending coronation.
Hope-marbled milky shadows beckon softly with a sleepy seduction,
searing the remaining threads of her stitched through my fibres: a cyborg-like tingling.
I wonder if we have all along been welding another contradiction onto our feet,
birthing the latest excuse for returning to our destiny under the yoke of newly-minted gods.
Mar 15, 2020
Mar 15, 2020 at 1:20 PM UTC
I am the hedged question put to a bland catalogue. Perhaps there is no right to expect anything more than diluted answers.
The rose buds are falling off, a bell tolling in silence, an uneasy clock slowly sweeping fairy dust with its bare hands.
Soon the paint will dry, congealing thick and fast on the brush tip it has never left. It is pungent as a rotting flower.
Watered-down doubt flowers, its roots grazing my conviction. I fear the simple answer will undo my seasoned justification.
There is little good in ex post defibrillations. Ambulances are not made for chasing after Frankenstein fairytales in various reincarnations.
Feb 22, 2020
Feb 22, 2020 at 12:07 PM UTC
Sometimes I am the whip-flailing horseman charging into tomorrow
On the fevered hooves of the present while
Safe under my cloak against sunset-red clouds of kicked-up dust.
Sometimes I am the frantically zigzagging prey half-blind with fear
Cursing the double-dealing wind that lashes against my hide
And feeds my scent to the ravenous hounds of the past.
Perhaps I am both hunter and quarry in a simultaneous paradox
Which explodes from the shattered fiction of single-mindedness
Into fresh awareness brilliant and dark and incomprehensibly vast.
For all I know I could even be a sprite tossed haphazardly in a Bermuda Triangle
Above fault lines where yesterday's memories collide into the future
To birth strange whirlpools of thought stirred by phantom hands
Waiting for me to join them below among hulking carcasses of rust.
Dec 31, 2019
Dec 31, 2019 at 12:16 PM UTC
Orange earplugs, pill-shaped, one pair:
for use when pretending the neighbours' furniture-dragging is comforting invariably fails.
White humidifier, cylindrical, spewing vapour:
twenty minutes per cycle. Each manual reset is a life lost and there is no Player Two.
Day curtains, thick and heavy, one set:
to evade the pincer of lunar Cyclops' glare and unblinking orange streetlights.
E5:E2: the projection clock spits on the wall, fresh red and upside down:
it's almost midnight. I shall feign death until the whirring in my head dies.
Nov 17, 2019
Nov 17, 2019 at 11:13 AM UTC
The jogger stops a while to catch his breath,
a sweaty grimace painted on his face.
Perhaps in half-light it appears a grin
to others - actually he feels like death.
With averageness as his only sin,
he thinks, how apt to go in such a place.
Her memory is blank beyond this place.
She draws a rasping, thin and ragged breath,
inhaling scents of forced carnal sin.
The caked make-up is falling off her face
but all her thoughts these nights have been of death;
a cigarette will reapply her grin.
The old man looks around and gives a grin
at all his children gathered in his place.
For months he has been waiting for his death,
his lungs to finally run out of breath.
The ghost of life still lingers on his face,
a long, benign existence free of sin.
Bejewelled silky hands still slick with sin
support, neck-like, a head which wears a grin
that looks like it's been stolen off the face
of mannequins and plastered into place.
Her role in hastening his final breath
still haunts her. So it shall unto her death.
This industry is headed towards death.
They think intelligence is just a sin
and try to cut him off at every breath.
He finally allows himself a grin.
With this he'll put them in their proper place
and wipe that smug expression from their face.
The kiss of malnutrition on her face,
a souvenir from those merengues with death,
lies testament to horrors in this place.
Though poverty may be a fatal sin,
she bears the burden with a toothless grin
and croons her lullaby under her breath.
Behold my face! They all know I am Death.
But truth is, there is sin in any place;
I'll grin the same before I stop your breath.
Jul 27, 2019
Jul 27, 2019 at 11:57 AM UTC
I return once more,
to where the rivulets run dry,
the horizon flattens into nothingness
and the ravens cry.
I tread back across
to where the waters once ran deep,
and watch my feet sink while I hear my
winged companions weep.
Scrabbling in the dirt,
I become painfully aware
of every inch of my exposed skin under
the naked sky's stare.
There is nothing here,
nothing but the wind's icy bite
gnawing at my cheeks with the frozen breath of
overflowing spite.
Then, the distant growl
of thunder from just beyond sight;
it knells for all these dust-swept dunes I've built yet
whispers of delight.
I may have returned
to this dead oasis again,
but now after all this time I'm finally
waiting for the rain.
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 at 11:28 PM UTC
sonatas soulful, soothing, softly somnolent:
i kneel in surrender to their swells —
slipping under the spray, slow submerge of sound
soaking my eardrums
sealing sight
the sea’s silence deceives, concealing
songs so solemn, solace’s sorcery suddenly suspends:
sorrowful solipsism sublimates —
i seek stupors soporific as soliloquys
Jul 3, 2018
Jul 3, 2018 at 11:25 AM UTC