John Scalla inexorably finds himself
again
navel gazing awkwardly at chair legs
girls legs
this guy named Greg face down
passed out
in someone else’s kitchen where
multiple eyes
glimmer, glazed visibly with
half-recognition
and the amp that human ivory smile
plays on
where deaf hands moving with
blunt precision
fumbling for alarm clocks bra hooks
silent red cups
doing essential jobs that essentially involve
doing nothing
Aug 3, 2013
Aug 3, 2013 at 5:00 PM UTC
There’s this 4th grader brushing his teeth
slowly on the living room couch confused
contemplating the consequences of mom
turning on the TV to talking heads spinning
anxious talking points while shock rage revenge
unilateral retaliation is considered in executive bunkers
and everyone else watches desperate people leap out windows
through airwaves broadcasting what we couldn’t comprehend
looping those heavenly bodies those two burning buildings
still falling still burning before school starts:
“Does this mean I get to stay home?”
Jul 31, 2013
Jul 31, 2013 at 9:26 PM UTC
***** like a child
The candy-house of your mind
Sugar-coated doors
Pulling farther further away
Into endless rooms
Where the gumdrop roof leaks
And the gingerbread walls crumble
Jul 31, 2013
Jul 31, 2013 at 7:54 PM UTC
Halfway towards the midpoint
On my journey through life
I find an impasse shaped by love:
Love of words
The intimacy of bookshelves
Sitting in the back rows
Classrooms of right words wrong words
A trillion others between an answer
A lesson too subtle to learn
Jul 31, 2013
Jul 31, 2013 at 5:09 PM UTC
After a quest spent moralizing his point all the way home
After leaving lance, buckler, and steed at the door
After a few hefty flagons of old school mead
A Sir Lancelot turns to an empty bar stool
And decrees:
Whether ***** or damsel
It matters not to me.
Luckily I never have to choose.
They’re similar ***** you see.
Coins or courage to open
The velvet doors between legs.
Towers of ******
Which isn’t saying
Only ****** reside in towers
Just why the ones I free?
Oh bards sing unto me
A song fit for my misery.
For no one’s figured the secret
That it’s only the armor they need to see.
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 8:53 PM UTC
John Scalla’s multi-geared aluminum pony
saddled up in the corner of a studio apartment
quietly rusts it’s best years away
watching him take another **** rip
pass it to a friend who passes it
to another friend who passes it to
another who passes it back to him
who is now wondering if that last hit
was necessary and whether the aluminum
pony’s quiet crying in the corner
is any cause for alarm.
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 6:21 PM UTC
John Scalla remembers
plain–clothed white coiffed nuns
in sunday school classes
who were the sweetest things
you’ve ever seen with a razors edge
carried proudly from an emerald isle
John Scalla spent his sundays digging
through big soft Bibles discovering
a father who loved everyone
as equally as he was thorough
a son born to wear a crown of blood
but never lost his most sacred heart
and a universal spirit’s open-armed
quiet embrace of your trembling frame
John Scalla was born to hold a communion
with something far more complex or
precise then our poor sweaty coils
wondering how bread could be body
and blood so eagerly consumed
John Scalla stole from complex pages buried
deep beneath outdated expressions
and miscommunicated messages
a simple cypher that condenses
all the rhetoric down to it’s square root
love
John Scalla locked the cypher
in that secret spot between heart
and stomach holding it close
dreaming on distant playgrounds
where it was slowly worn away
by bullies still casting long shadows
like limestone sphinxes now noseless
John Scalla’s distant playground dreaming
of a personal relationship with God are gone
because if He was there then that makes him
a single string of an infinitely intricate
vast woven narrative where he is only aware
of adjacent pieces unable to take a firm grasp
of the situation continuing to grow
John Scalla weaves narratives through
his prayers sending them nowhere
because they wouldn’t know where to go
with so many far-off stars dead and leaving
cosmic vibrations both here and everywhere
making it hard for them to escape with
their best intentions unmolested
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 6:12 PM UTC
Hiding the starving poems of my psyche
stuffing them down fragile green necked
aluminum mouths foaming up over
jaded cries for intelligence lingering
and are loathed
personally.
Tasted fire, blue Kool-Aid, tryptamine
in my drink finding a seat while on the bumper
someone hung from a smoking cigarette
gesticulating in a foreign rhythm
lips sync
out of.
Highway headlight twinkling with
gasoline drive-shaft incandescence
going buzzed backwards sitting
on a bed of thorns; a truck
dreading the pitiful holes
of an untended freeway.
Afterwards
victories to despair
bound to tender purging
supposing red cups
will release us all to
blacked-out porcelain heavens.
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 4:13 PM UTC
Your name is my name
in that we both have one
containing letters stretched
over unrelated faces in time
until syllables are pulled from
intentions turned to antiques.
Does the reader see the labyrinth
each word holds to craft meaning
depending on what comes first
waiting for what happens next.
Searching for a pretty shape
the pattern to break a mold
set in stone before each writer
whittling away their minutes
minds blind to the situation
trying to hide its fearful symmetry;
each form crafted creates it’s own mold.
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 4:05 PM UTC
There’s this red head
sitting next to me
hiding a blue koi fish
tattooed behind her left ear.
My thoughts turn back to falling
******* dropping hanging off some
errant lotus foot bouncing those ****
Now subconsciously desperate
trying to censor what’s been encoded ******
or too much or even sexist even though
natural impulses have been programmed
to fire automatically.
Blameless and constant
silent and don’t you worry
they’ll call you.
Jul 30, 2013
Jul 30, 2013 at 3:58 PM UTC