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Briscoe Oct 2019
There the lighting lashes
And a glade in the nebulous
Reveals astral flowers.

My hugo, all my growth, how they erode
Like rocks' bones break beneath banshee whispers.
My memoir unremembered and sold
Somehow in a resumé. To my peers
I must appear and disappear. I fold
Like a lashing tongue or crashing super
Car. So I loath a lingerer listening to old
Song, too shy to fill midnight with a pur-
Pose which replaces silk silence' or cold.
Await till dawn to awake whatever
Puts me to sleep and dreams up a soul
Purpose to stay as Saturn drapes over
With a collapsing ripple of meteors
Crucified in a constellation to Thor's
Sky.

There the thunder thrashes.
Then the nebulous conceals over.
"Lately I've been seeing things
Belly button piercings
In the sky at night
When we're side by side

And I don't mean to rain on anybody's cabriolet
One of those games you're gonna lose
But you wanna play it just in case

Now it's getting dark and the sky looks sticky
More like black treacle than tar
Black treacle
Somebody told the stars you're not coming out tonight
And so they found a place to hide"
-Arctic Monkeys
Briscoe Oct 2019
Putting it in a metaphor doesn't
Make it true Confucius. Philosopher
Kings of academia collapse, sent
Away like the rest. All the inventors
Say science isn't a religion and yet
The facts don't work without faith in some test.
So we'll see it go around at sunset
No matter what beautiful book you've read.
Yet even Hume and Nietsche must accept
Beliefs must be kept. So we must interpret
Our universe with faith in our friends' witness
When they attest or confess. Disproving
One fallacy or falsehood an evening.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-Albert Einstein
Briscoe Oct 2019
Four flakes fall towards the warming Earth
While white flickers. One knows nothing at all
And falls. One knew all the world at her birth
And falls, forewarning herself of the thaw.
A leaf elevates herself with the wind;
Released from rest with upward, forward force.
The crumbling of crust from leaves and crying
Skies, mingling a monotony with the course
Of a raindrop crescendo. Oh, to know,
The beauty of books and blade cutting grass
Blades, to cleave away green and to show
An empathy for everything. Pass
Me by knowledge and yet infiltrate me
With each day forcing me into belief.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Ozymandias
Briscoe Oct 2019
Colours comes from a char, thrown by fire
The way thunder's thrown from the broken sky.
The way a sound reflects the night air's veil
The photons, pages and plastic seductively
Remind of reality. I know they'll
Seem to dream of touch, tangibility
Among magic lanterns casting onto
Smoke who chokes, evokes and cloaks what we see,
Or at least wish to. So I'll drink Earth through
Neon siphons, LEDs, LSD
And possibly a vacation back home.
Leave hourglasses. Don't ***** clarity.
Then watching the sand slide through empty bones,
Knowing all tempos take form and forsake,
The time bends my mind till it breaks
And fragments must imagine consequence,
Before lashes rip them to the present.
Is that a shiver or a thrill going down my spine?
Rush the soul to chug the universe and getting it stuck
Run out too quickly for time.
"To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,"
-T.S. Eliot
Briscoe Oct 2019
1
I don't know what this walk's for.
I'm always lost, but sometimes I find scenery
I haven't explored before.
Words aren't vague enough
So songs will do to mirror my soul's company.
Graffiti gropes, grasps, grips my eyes with a rough
Attention to detail. Never failing to see
Something imaginary, even when my eyes
Are closed as tight as the shops I pass.
I don't know what this walk's for.

2
Over a month the moon will streak across the sky
In a secluded, fading sphere. With the nights
To ******, briefly before the day.
The praying mantis of dawn
Camouflaged the dark to it's warmer tone
Moments and an hour before it strikes.
You see so many sirens if you stay up late enough.
Never prior the invention of the late nighter
Did I know constant crimes of urbanized life.
Caterpillar busses piling up horizontally like pills
In suicidal intestines.

3
I'm tired as the daddy issues of the church
Go out with the lights, but the dates too late
So Christmas crashes with babies and omnipresents
Of the night requires her and so she's too busy
To entertain that simultaneously
Occupied fixation with a fiction.
The paradoxes and boxes unravelling
To be replaced with a flirting, fleeting
Fixation with a hammer for Bob the Builder Junior.
It strange at a private school
More students arrive at 5:30 a.m. than 6:00.

4
Seated at the bus stop, waiting for anything but a bus.
Envying a long plane trip
Thinking it'll be less brainless than this,
Not caring for the destination.
Drooling at fantasised bliss,
Dreaming of inspired imagination.
Seeing a picture show.
Suspending disbelief for relief from pretending
You enjoy the anticipation for you ending.
When all your credits will roll up like a cigar
And burn away in no time at all.

5
"I wish I was cool like her.
She just doesn't give a ****."

I replied "But inside it's just boiling up
And as her dissolving sense of self crumbles
It slides between her goosebumped, quivering fingers.
Then as the voices mount in a crescendo
She can't let go through her own lips,
She hides away in her room for a month or two."

As she was standing next to us,
I then proceeded to receive a slap
I consider it a clap for my performance.

6
Listen to silence and think
What's the point of being up at one in the morning
If you're not going to be singing your heart out
Till you've got yourself a cardiovascular eviction.
Then make your decision,
To shy away or to find the way
To force a cringe from the tonedeaf night.
So what that so far the best days of your life
Were when you were a cry baby?
So what if you still are?
If you have to cry, cry out for us all to hear.

7
The Halloween theme of indifference till consequence.
I heard a scream from someone's house,
I hope they were watching a horror movie,
Because I sure as Sheol didn't stop.
Only the non-sticky outty bits of the comb
Are left standing and the spikes are stars.
Those aforementioned sirens and silence
Evoking more or less the same Viking entertainments.
Those aforementioned marvelous, gaseous, Goddesses
But dots in my sky,
Or at least they were before they were lost.

8
I saw my murderer walking straight towards me,
But luckily, he passed me by.
Believe you me, that cockroach had killer in his eyes.
An old buddy bumped into me
On a spider web and used me
As a fly swatter. He talked to me,
Fishing up a philosophy from me
I gave to him casually.
I tell him, the blackhole of a guitar releases me,
Strings strong enough to launch me from my web;
But I would only care about me,

9
All the strange two legged insects
On their way from hive to hive,
In some squabble and squawk
That should end at five
But continues long after labour's of the day.
Perhaps with the moving, cattle subway
Or a mind unmoved by the intense reality
Of what is and cannot be.
These flat ants and roaches writhing with repulsion,
Feasting on the invalid repugnance of reality tv.
Convinced these chemical trails hold some destiny.

10
Why go? Why take the slow road to know
You are all sinking in the same boat.
So why would a church bell chime
Change for better my little time.
The soul that goes without real purpose
Repulses the personal will with a rose,
Whose petals fall with each member of a community.
The trampoline of faith keeping fate
From ascending beyond its borders,
Crashing down with Satanic anchors.

11
It is good, to be not one but a fraction.
It being no matter of distraction
But of completion in another
For we are so rarely finished as the loner.
Despite a night of spite and recited criticisms
One must finish themself with an -ism
Or else be some incomplete word.
The faith and the works
The bolts, jolts and volts of lonely hours
The punishment of this selfishness of ours.
The irreversible spaisms of sanity.
“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”
-James Joyce

An experiment in the stream of consciousness.
Briscoe Oct 2019
We're not gay, but I have to something say
You fill the hole in me in a pure way.
Believe you me, when the sun goes away
Or we have our bluest skies together
With splashes of sunshine and wisps of haze
As some entree for the starlight flavour,
Even when one of us fades off the Earth
And decays like old memories, you'll say
Something stupid and I'll have to traverse
Across the universe to call you gay.
This one's just for fun, hope I don't offend anyone with the gay thing, if I do please acknowledge 'gay' as a part of heterosexual male culture that's a lot easier to rhyme with than anything else
Briscoe Oct 2019
I've heard, someone criticise her, yet
I see the green and gold in a sunset
Through a eucalyptus curtain beside
A river, rippling and glimmering, wet
Light dancing till the cusp of night swept tides.
Twin winds headed West, windless pirouettes
Of a gentle warmth, who sleeps in the air,
Curled up beside me when I feel free to care
So much less. Even when the tears cascade
And stars fade, she, like a wave to the shore
Inevitably throws me this and that way
With foam and a thousand visitors more
From places they left not so long before.
Though I know an aeroplane goes sweetly,
I have Australia and she has me,
Sure she's not perfect, but neither are we.
"Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil,
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in Nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia fair!
In joyful strains then let us sing,"
- Advance Australia Fair
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