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Briscoe Oct 2019
Incredulous city's lights, and loud sounds
Crescendo and billow to blow my mind
As though those Marco Valdo's mushroom clouds
Pouring, bursting from vehicles' behinds.
Blue light on the chapel's crown,
Do these images cross Christ
As dances on disintegrated bones?
Fool, ask the blue light, "What's right?"
Neon siphon's psyche, soul or sorrow,
What is left like a Hiroshima shadow
On the ***** white wrapping of his corpse?
My views a metaphor's meteor shower,
A star high rubix cube kept from collapse
In a glass skyscraper, flowers
Like perfume in vials labelled colon
Or a thousand shattered, scattered shards
From photos of photon lanterns with golden thrones.
I must embrace shimmering facades,
As if more glimmering mirages
Would water this soul with images.
John 8:12
When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."
Briscoe Sep 2019
Someday, as the night arrives
Glows grow from Afremovs on leaves and blades,
Then they turn to nocturnes after the afternoon.
Birds chirup, chirp and serenade.
A whistle. A wrinkle. A tune.
He prepares strings to sway, persuading air
Knowing, it's his final chance to tame time.
Shadows move through grassy hills' hair.
Finely, he siphons wine and life through lines
Of nylon. His fingers are old, they're cold, yet it seems
Linger long enough for a song, some songs maybe.
His melody akin to dreams.
Maybe a single sound's plenty for eternity?
Eyelids embrace, but black covers not the soul.
His last song, soon lost forever long.
"Into the wild abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross."
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Briscoe Sep 2019
I am terrorised for I am my flaws
And I fear I'll never be more.
My mirror melts like words of Eleanor.
My ears bleed, leak by metaphors,
Like an overused *****,
To hear such decor
Of air carved and reformed.
I have, without remorse
Been to words as criminals of war
To the Jews and the poor.
I am mortified that I fear not failure, nor
To be impossibly less nor to be never more.
At least, they can't drain the life from a corpse.
"Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart. "
-Sonnet 62, Shakespeare
Briscoe Sep 2019
She had an Asian face
And I'll remember her that way.

There's the rumble,
As train track lights
Penetrated black night,
By a gutter a flutter of outdoor wind
I saw her walking alone,
Clinging to her bones.
At first, I thought she some vampire.
Then I saw holy water drip from her eyes.
An apparition, shaped like a man
Walked out, under a leafy shroud.
"Come inside?" Sounded out the shout.
"Hurry up!."

There was a short pause,
Between seconds and eternity.
He was already in the crooked house
On a crooked street,
Her silhouette so hesitant.
Then she began her retreat
To that crooked place
I know not within.
To that crooked cave
Or that crooked grave,
I let her pass without a phrase.
There's the rumble
Of another train.
"Do your duty, and leave the rest to the gods"
-Pierre Corneille
Briscoe Sep 2019
My brother and I
Sit in our uniforms.
A cloud sniffs whiffs of the house,
Shifts and moves on.
My bare feet fricatives
Sound as though a warm afternoon.
"The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone."
-Carl Sandburg
Briscoe Sep 2019
I haven’t lost them,
I just don’t want to play
With them anymore.
I know it’s sad to surrender.
The dinners they bought me.
The debts I’ll never repay.
But I don’t want to play
With them anymore.
It’s hard to make believe,
When the toys have beliefs of their own.
So I guess I’ll leave.

God damns the fertile,
The futile rituals to grow a child.
"Daddy, I have had to **** you.  
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,  
Ghastly statue with one gray toe  
Big as a Frisco seal"
-Sylvia Plath
Briscoe Sep 2019
A bird released
Three ethereal notes.
Perhaps it's the briefness
That lets them float.
"Then he sent out a dove from him, to see if the water was abated from the face of the land;"
-Genesis 8:8
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