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Briscoe Sep 2019
Spring arrives, tipsy with delight.
Fairies aloft a flower bud lift off.
They tickle nostrils, they sing 'Sweet fragrance…"
With such soft whispers. A soprano cough
During a shuffling swing and low tempo dance,
Escapes lips, foreshadowing wet winter.
They float fairly, as all the flowers fall.
Tremors of terror interrupt chatter
Among them. Above, trees, no matter how tall
Shake as though poppies under thunderstorms.
Then it is calm again. Without winds' arms
Jostling and jarring their world. Cold now warm.
Souls simply resolved. Harm is now disarmed.
The fragrance, so sweet and so fleeting.
So impossibly soft. Some real feeling.

Then a soprano cough.
"Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves that I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms
Of course I do
But I get along without you very well"
-Jane Brown Thompson
Briscoe Sep 2019
The thunder thrower falls into silence,
A whiff of purple wind, the sky's fragrance.
See Zeus droops into droplets and drenches,
Soft layers of water reflecting blue,
As our universe sees through eyes, images
Of itself eternally boiling through.
See our scientists seek the commandments
Of our new God. No longer reading scripture
To see the future, woven through moments,
For all millions of millennia.
All the Old God's grow cold in hollow graves.
Now I see her. Darkness, careless chaos.
She's the shadow of Sheol. All petals' shapes
And decay. Endlessly devouring creatress.
Yonder Yahweh melts as rain which drenches.
All falling down, as heaven collapses.
"2 All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. 3 This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead."
-Ecclesiastes 9:2-3

This poem was heavily influenced by a talk by Alan Watts called 'Nature of God'
Briscoe Sep 2019
My skull is empty on set.
A studio light casts shadows
In through windows.
Burning an iris as I pirouoette.

Do I want to play this game?

My thoughts have descended
I dread to confess,
Down to drown my heart
To dwindle stars before they start.

Do I want to play this game?

Blame circumstance.
Dance! Dance! In circles dance.
Cram yourself against every puzzle piece
You like to look at.
Crash with foreign bodies
Then regret, you reckless idiot.
Briscoe Sep 2019
After antique whispers and thoughts, we are
Children of the Silver Millennium.
Slithers of light reflect on peaks out far,
From waves of a rising tide or Autumn.
The alchemy of notions, the cold ocean
Encircling, on our electric windows.
All our memories born in some fiction,
Projected out from within screens. But those
Glinting pearls of the ocean out beyond,
Shall defy gravity, yet we won’t dare
Go there, where we would be beyond our bond
To this mortal coil and this planet fair.
Lest this planet won’t always sustain us
We must cease to release black winds thunderous.
"Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century, it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both."
Briscoe Sep 2019
Each man I meet,
Each time eyes teach
The colours of characters
Only to have them fade away,
Dissolve, depart and disintegrate,
Just another face on the street.

Soft licks of love
On lips of mine
Which whisper of
Devotion of body and mind,
Remind me of solemn goodbyes.
Just another sweet sight on the street.

Each venture I venture,
Each pain that came,
Each pleasure I endure,
Each rain sustained,
Just another street
Wearing a away where I wear my feet.
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
-Ezra Pound
Briscoe Sep 2019
I wander this valley verging on black
And exhausted, I lap the ***** lack.
The question whether I'd be fast or slow.

Often my flesh begs and beckons for flesh,
The same way entrails desire to digest.
Furthermore, even and ever more so
The eye sees a feminine collage and wishes
To take and forget a thousand faces.

But flesh makes no remarks that it wants a heart.
For I do not need love, nor regret, nor
Shattered shards that implore to call for more.
Although sometimes I aspire the pride of two parts,
Since the single must play and pay alone,
A debt of dates not buried like bones.
For I often feel I must play the scriptless part.
So sometimes I wish to play the jester,
And for a soft face to grow lighter.

Yet…
Why reenact what was?
Why phlebotomize my pen?
The call has been made and rejected
With the mentors and the Goddess I have met.
Afterall, the sky was already blue before she left
And now shades have only darkened.
For women excite and ignite the cauldron,
Only to boil the broth, summoning smoke
And conjuring cuneiform from words I thought I knew.
Within darkness previously mentioned
Leviathans slither by lips which whisper.

To fall and collapse
For jokes at her feet.
My pen pressed.
Unable to clear the hourglass sand that dirties
The wind sweeps across the beach.
My pen pressured to leak.

No one told that man, how hard it would be
To let unfurling sapphires become passion. Yet
Everyone knew which way he ought to be in action.
They bought your innards with dinner, they took
The muscles by which morsel and mouthfuls travel
And took your mouth in debt that lasts till death.
While the rain fell like ink on the heartbroken stage,
As my pen wept upon the page.

I know lessons ought to be known with each mistake
But with this heartache, which mistake do I begin with.
Still my pen weeps upon the page.
He cries to speak,
Of a girl who spoke of vulnerability
And thought of Othello till the leaves yellowed
And funnily enough, pierced me.
A story she’d never write for me, for why would she bother?

I now care only for the alarm
And howling, hollering sirens
Of diversions and perversions
And I’m scared only by the harm
That wouldn’t bleed but would imply
My lacerated pen leaks upon the page.  

As a thousand poets pens have bled.
For heroes have fled into stories of old
And all stories told from youth
Say let lingering souls lay low.
Don't dare resurrect this meek creature.
Hasn't he suffered enough?
Don't dare twist via alveolar to say "Hello."
Don't you dare continue this.
For why would we let tongues lick our innards and hollow us.

Yet…
Sometimes on tired nights as I stare above,
Lapping the lonely lack. The void stares back,
As we lock eyes and despise one another.
I wish I could turn my face and see her
Who at least to me, is a precious beauty,
For only a moment sometimes.
I could close my eyes and hold on tightly,
As she folds within these thin arms of mine,
From somnolent nights, till the end of time.
"I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love"
-George Harrison
Briscoe Sep 2019
I look to the stars above who tremble,
Like ashes scattered over nocturne oceans,
The gaseous masses, afire and immeasurable,
And beneath the vast weight of oblivion
My mind all but crumbles.

Shining through the city's broken crystals
Beneath rusting lights,
There is one dwindling carnival
That delivers prizes to lucky fools.
That presents us images of bait and night.
That offers the floss we entangled with our teeth and pulls.
I'll bring to all men's attention
That when the dances and performances pass
After the tar dancers have paraded through,
After they have cascaded over and faded away,
There will be a final puff.
Yet once as I slept and could not close my eyes
I dreamt of a movie
Where our hero passed the shadows of doubt
And out of the woods would join with joy to a ruckus circus
Of bright unfolding colour, glamour and levitating decor,
And dreamt when I was so tired
That I thought it could be true.
But I know in the day, the carnival will convey itself away,
Leaving only land for toil and broken soils.



I see a man, his hair a circling smoke
That reflects light in a twisted silver lining,
And with September I almost awoke.

I will hear the charming tolls of a celesta
Muffled through a cellar door,
Taste tar like cigarettes regretted on deathbeds
Know the colour of noire decor,
That comes after the final door.

Afterall, we are a gilded horizon,
No more than the dawn of all our days,
And dusk of all the shadows sent away,
Those seldom remembered then forever forgotten.
A lily lurches across the sky towards us.
The void’s pulse continuous
Tick tock… tick tock…
              
Turn the hour glass and walk towards the shade.
Shuffling off with the feet of the reaper.
As though children who slide beneath black waves
Sift sand and shift, sink ever deeper.

They all fall to the bottom of the glass.
The sunken sun sets, soon she shall pass.
The gold must go, and all colour with it.
              Tick tock… tick tock…
"And in short, I was afraid."
-T.S. Eliot
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