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Sep 2019 · 125
Dislocations
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
Briscoe Sep 2019
Fermenting nature is already tasted.
Firmaments of Hell below are taken.
Every frivolous poem,
Superfluous word and superficial verb,
Every supernatural sound is said
And all the flavours of this tongue are tasted.

That is, if you underestimate those who wield our pens now.

If Shakespeare wrote all there is to write
Then I'll rise, I'll burn new stars into the sky.
I'll compose a new constellation
Of my name,
So every generation
Will know who's to blame,
And whose dead throne to bring praise to.
"They will be met with fire, fury and power."
-Donald Trump
Sep 2019 · 60
The Greying Earth
Briscoe Sep 2019
Spontaneously another human sprouts out.
Another hair in the beard of the Earth
Who greys, wanes and weakens.
Only there because they fester too fast
To be shaved off in waves of hurricanes.
Only there to catch food with greasy hands
And a greedy grips to grasp the lands.
Lonely where they spill out.
Homely where the hills represent
An Earth they push from the planet.
"Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own ****

Come on Maggot Brain
Go on Maggot Brain"
-Funkadelic
Sep 2019 · 57
Selah
Briscoe Sep 2019
I tried to write Selah on my phone
But the machine corrected me with delay.
The word means rock, the word means stone.
It means wait and ponder,
It means ache and ruminate.
The word means dry thoughts in a dry bone.
"Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in you own hearts on your bed, and be silent. Selah"
-Psalm 4
Sep 2019 · 56
Welcome to Awake Time
Briscoe Sep 2019
Welcome to awake time.
Be disturbed by the peeping light,
Now night has shriveled and receded,
The hum of silent sleep ceases
And the thoughts no longer rhyme like
"Darkness reaches. Starless images."

Nine o' eight, you're definitely late.
It's just another note for mum's email.
Carbohydrates and fixing your tie on the way.
Punk rocks you from sleep again.
You have entered the shell with hives within.
You smell brick and baritone existence.

Classical music puts you to sleep.
"The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer"
-T.S. Eliot
Sep 2019 · 74
¿
Briscoe Sep 2019
¿
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Begin stirring machines,
Burn eyes of mine.
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
We are coughs
On the cusp of dust.
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
Awake then asleep again
Sing and dance since the songs going to just
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
ნუ იდარდებ მოკვდავს, ეს მთავრდება.
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
Nothing's delicate like a moment,
It's precious like a piano note
Precisely, perfectly preserved
But I can't keep the vital signs long.
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
ደስ ይበላችሁ ፣ አያስፈልግህም ፡፡
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
We don't deserve forever
Necesitamos más.
But we don't deserve the shards
Of broken time
In our soft eyes,
Or when it's pulverized
Like dust in our lungs.
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
แต่ออกมาเขาเป็นเพียงหนึ่งชั่วโมงของฉัน
ตอนนี้เมฆหมอกปกคลุมเข­าจากฉันแล้ว
زندہ زندہ زندہ چلا گیا۔
However,
We don't deserve forever together
And we don't deserve to never suffer,
But I'm not sure where in between
I think is just.
Like dust in our lungs,
We're dust mites, dust like
Specks of spectres.

ఫ్యూజ్ బర్న్స్
I asked an immortal
ఇసుక వస్తుంది
What he thought
ఫ్యూజ్ బర్న్స్
He taught us
"Don't worry mortal, this ends."
Pero queremos más.
"This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T.S. Eliot
Briscoe Sep 2019
Eggs?
Am I your Easter Sunday?
Your Christmas, or a second birthday?
When I say, 'No.'
Is it your fountain of youth that says so?

We have bled.
So the son is sacrificed
By knife and crucified.
So only the father and the phantom
Are left behind
Like ashes of the Sun.

Dad,
I know you sacrificed for my future
And learnt from your past
The scripture of your mind
And you fought until the last man
In your army of one.

Yet,
Do not decapitate
To put your head
On my shoulders of clay.
I will make your mistakes.
I will break your mountain stones.
I will ache the way you ached.
Then when your gone
Maybe I'll obey your bones.
But I will not suffer to surrender
To your commands.

Instead,
I will leave a mirror in my room.
So that afternoons from these days
I will be replaced
By the son you wished to see and say
"Okay."
Whisper soundlessly the phrase,
The words
You want to have heard.
"The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
    today I have begotten you.
8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
    and the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You shall break[b] them with a rod of iron
    and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”

10 Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
    be warned, O rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear,
    and rejoice with trembling.
12 Kiss the Son,
    lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
    for his wrath is quickly kindled."
Psalm 2
Sep 2019 · 74
The Devotion of a Dime
Briscoe Sep 2019
I saw a silver dime.
She reflected my face.
She echoed my voice.
She said something sensitive.
Her every word's set in steel.

Shrapnel pillow lying in the gutter,
How about Heads or tails?
I admit, I've heard tales
Proposing you're a risk.
Both in your bed to rest.
And you're the bed for rust
And dust.

Shrunken moonshine lying in the gutter,
If I plucked you up and picked you
Like a poppy from among midnight dew
Aloft flowers, reflecting your much bolder brother.

Silver fascade, if you're devotion fades
If you discard me, if you turn away
So I may only see your tail.
No, you're right, what a rude question.
If I pick you, like flesh from the skeleton
Will you remain?
"the one who wants to love you, but often
isn’t good at even that, the one who
doesn’t want to be diminished
by how much she wants to be yours."
-Ada Limón
Sep 2019 · 64
Freedom
Briscoe Sep 2019
Yes antique ones,
My future lies in the dust
Among the lazy and the dead.
Upon the ink pegasus
I careened across the sky,
Streams followed,
Old God's intervened,
With my rebellion, fed to old dogs,
Incapable of new tricks.

Grey is the ash.
Green is the blood.
Gilded is each dusk.
Grey is each speck of dust.

The sons of Ragnarok
Chase the moon, race after the sun,
The stones and rocks,
Tradition and a foreign notion,
Chase me around the fire
Chanting "Don't throw away your future."
And "It doesn't matter."
Simultaneously.

Grey is the horizon.
Growing is the shadow.
Shrinking is the sun,
Under the apathetic flow
Of raindrops evaporated
From dry eyes.
Grey is the day.
Grey is the gay flag
From grey eyes.

How easy it would be to dive deep.
How easy it would be to sleep.
How easy it would be to dive in shallow water.
Chanting "Don't throw away your future."
And "It doesn't matter."
Simultaneously.

At the source of these cancerous
Grey twirls that unfurl
There is a golden

But
I was not born for this.
I was not born to die, nor born to cry,
Although each black dot has its sentence
And each dawn it's dusk.
I was born the golden Prince
Of life, of my mistakes, of my victories.
So bring me my inheritance,
With all the weight and all the golden glories.
"Then the remains of the world will sink into the sea, and there will be nothing left but the void. Creation and all that has occurred since will be completely undone, as if it had never happened.

Some say that that is the end of the tale – and of all tales, for that matter. But others hold that a new world, green and beautiful, will arise out of the waters."
-Daniel McCoy
Sep 2019 · 68
Days & Nights
Briscoe Sep 2019
So, today wept on tomorrow's shoulder
Because yesterday couldn't stay longer.

Slowly, the Sun secreted days
That solidified into months.
Recall what the moons says,
That time takes no time off.

Despite that nothing's light like light
It still takes years to reach out eyes
From deep in depths of night
Where stars like to rest before they rise.

Although,
As stars recede, we will cease.
As all stars fade, we pass away.
So before final peace
Finds you
Find a new way
Not trodden yet.
So the future cannot forget.
"The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
   The setting sun, too indolent to hold
   A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,  
Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,"
Georgia Dusk, Jean Toomer
Sep 2019 · 93
The Show
Briscoe Sep 2019
Far in black, white blooms in an arched crystal
From the last studio light,
Now that the set has crumbled around me.
Now I know what happens
When the youngest children
Are too old for the show and shenanigans.
Santa's long gone and Satan too.
What collapsed this place.
Was it you?
Was it the wind or the waves
That come naturally like the tide,
Or my own accidental hex?
The broken ceiling's
Bones revealing light above,
And just to prove I've lost my mind,
I've begun to write outside the lines
That outline the box
And define the hoax.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones."
-End of Summer, Stanley Kunitz
Sep 2019 · 335
Why I'm not Going to Uni
Briscoe Sep 2019
I use to be smart before I was bereft.
I use to believe before I left.
I used to write good poetry.
I used to go to school and study
At five in the morning.
Reading, literacy, chemistry
For so long before the day begins
For so long after the bell rings.

I used to listen to sad songs
For so long,
Minor keys stretching over afternoons
To unlock these eyes.
For so long
That I cried alone
At least once an evening.

I failed a test today,
I didn't do my best
But I'm happier this way,
And that's success.
Not my best, but it's honest I guess.
Sep 2019 · 98
The Conviction
Briscoe Sep 2019
Bring forth the hail.
Summon the storm.
Batter my hull with the great waves
Of blood, of tears and sweat.
Break my mast and banish my men who would stand beside me.
I will not suffer surrender.
Beat my body and break my heart.
I have the conviction and I the spirit.
Alone or under the pressure of a thousand masters.
No matter the insecurity of solitude
Or the fear to disappoint.
I will fight.
Bring forth the hail.
After my older brother read this, he told me he was proud of me and it's meant a lot to me ever since.
Sep 2019 · 144
Urbia
Briscoe Sep 2019
Urbia
The city leaves little starshine.
Shampoo gurus and strands and strings
Play the song they sing.
In the place we try to replace,
Withering away, building new buildings on top.
But the crystal city seems to unravel
Like a child’s shoelace.
The streets drown the eyes,
Like the hair of a lover
Who pulls in close to the face.
Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it.

Among the dogs and dying things
There's a long droning monotonous hum.
All syllables of thought and parables of the past
Poured over with Summer Sundays
And the future grew through a crystal glass.
Yet retracted across its own bones by Wednesday
With all time on a woman's fingertips that tap at a screen.
The thoughts unsaid and yet seen
(For who dares to say)
Sizzle softer with another yesterday.
Afterall, the calendar unfolded
And the story it told said
The time will come.



So I summoned a thousand nights
And sent them yonder into yesterday.
Crusading and fading for an empty grail.
That last prize lost
Was beautiful the way fantasies tend to be.
Agile

Her face drips the drops to drench
And covers the mind
As though drawn across *******'s blinds
As the excretion of my gender bears a stench.
She leaks over my mind.
Let this image fade.
Let the ledge invite.
Let her mascara masquerade cascade in the tears on our faces.
Yet her flavour is the delicious stench
That covers my mind, filthies and fills it
With desires and a face.
Perhaps her face sullied with no sea of tears.
Perhaps the rain and lilac ridden sky
Left her not to cry, cloudless and clear.

Look back to the city, you fool.
There in those great cubicles
A thousand stand on ledges
Ready to fall.
But no one would know,
For they hide behind windows,
Working away in those offices.

Forget these harsh things, look to the world that is
Among the dogs and dying things.
There's a long droning monotonous hum
That escalates the scattered, sordid and rancid
To a pattern previously faded,
Dwindling and outshone beneath a thousand starlights
Or simply her sweet semblance in the night.
"Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium."
-Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot
Sep 2019 · 53
The Strange Way
Briscoe Sep 2019
The night drew itself across the scene
Like velvet over thin thighs and there was Ursula.
Her face drawn and painted like some artists scheme
Her round eyes the piercing blades of a peninsula.

The awkward moments couldn’t live long for some reason.
"You once told me you feared the ocean."
"That's because there's a place that steals and bends the light and offers no more, but a slithering flowing crystal. That dries and lies ‘I will quench the thirst and drench to drown away the filth’. But only chills flesh into a collection of bumps against the skeleton."
"It's strange to agree on such a particular decision."  
"And yet we agree?"
“We do.”
People can connect over things.
Sep 2019 · 209
Up Late till Early
Briscoe Sep 2019
We began as a muttering that giggled
Through restaurants and you wriggled
Into my arms when you were scared by the darkened
And I laughed that you were so easily frightened.
You told me oaths were a thing of fear
And vows were a virtue.

We drank and lapped from bottles.
We whined and divined
And found in vino veritas,
Walking the streets that sound
With a muttering command to pass.

Then as the tears rolled
She peeled me layer from layer.
She made a vow, vulnerabilities will be safe.
She told me she made incisions and bled.
I told her where my skin was thinnest.

Then for three weeks I collapsed
Into thoughts and dreams.
Into fair nightmares
That procrastinated throughout the day
With only soft mentions of her from friends
And then by night brought me away
And pulled me towards joint ends.

I waited three weeks before a word.
Then breaking I told her of my feelings,
And she told me she was taken.
So, in glades of shade,  
Where the luminous touch dares not draw near,
She decayed me from sleep then
Shattered my ribs to sharpen them.

I wish we had just hated each other. Instead
She leapt into my arms with a smile on her face
When we were together at a drinking affair,
And after a while, she slept on my shoulder.
I rested my head on her raven hair.
We and a friend left the others
Away into that house of hers.

Our friend and you
And that boy who loved you
All curled into one bed.
A branch rapt on the window pane.
Hence we left it open,
So the night could cuddle up with us.
I wish we had hated each other instead.
But I dreamed we'd be again,
If friendship was continuous.
Not that we ever were really.
I like to dream, in our defense,
We were under the influence.

Your leg lay on my covers,
Braun begged to creep over
And unbend my elbow.
You asked why men love movies of romance.
I didn't dare the disturbance,
Saying 'I don't know.'

You received a call, you left laughing.
The boy knew who you were talking to
And hearing you laugh to the man you loved
Tore his insides to shreds.
I slept at five, your friend woke me at six.
I wish we had just hated each other instead.
I caught the train to school.
I remembered,
'Most of the time I dream of the dark hue
But last night I dreamt of you.'

I spoke Spanish to flirt with a bottle of iced coffee.
I wasn’t going to waste years of my life on lessons and not be ****.
The clocked rotated to two.

I did it again,
I did it again with the same woman.
She didn’t say it this time,
But I always get the plan she could be mine.
After I knew I loved and hated her,
But knew more than that, that that
Made no difference with a woman so fair and far beyond me
I collapsed against the floor, again.
I ran out of the house,
To spare me my paralysis.
Because this time I knew what to do.
I couldn’t woo, I wouldn’t ask the impossible questions anymore
And more, I could not breathe.
The clock rotated to four.

I told a friend I was scared,
It’s not what I always try,
Or perhaps this continuous
Superfluous display, is but a lie
That has broken my mind.

I did it again,
I did it again with another woman.
She didn’t say it this time.

Friends and I met and made regrets.
Jack, James and Daniel
Hid beneath my draws for hide and seek played with parents.
The glass danced well
By the sight of light.
We went out for a night.
I sang drunken sailor.
I entered the stage,
White weft through my hair.
I sang at your window,
From the ground where I fell.
You peered past the afterglow.
Your lover cursed with 'Hell.'
Eventually I stood and left,
Once my legs relearnt their pace.

Your man made a lie.
That I returned and am of the kind
That perches upon your shadow
And not to be seen, leaves.
From you the lesson learnt was that
Love lives between the eyes hollow knowing
And the darkness it weaves.
Whilst loathing and fear flows by the ear
And festers through the whispers of rumour and word.

So she draped herself in shawls of shade
And the swirling words slither by her neck
And by the break of day
She still persisted in her own pooling conversation
That was kissed to life by the lips and tongue
That run to persuade her dress and tresses of shadow
To an overwhelming deception.

I heard her echo through a friend
With words 'pathetic' and 'vulnerable'
And beyond that
We never spoke again.
I watched you on blurring lines
Pass as a muttering
Across the street, from time to time.  
I watched you veil your face
And drape the shawl across your visage
And take the shape of splashes diving into water.
I heard it said I lost nothing but a weakness,
But I could hardly see your pixelated picture
And be painless.  

A season or two and a few novels later.
The grass wept with the midnight dew
And electric lights went through
And shimmered greyly to my eyes.
So insignificant in each individual piece
That one grey blur stretched the entire lawn.
I sat in that park and thought of a girl
The only who peeled me and pulled me.
Who taught and touched me
And felt winter upon the precipice of my eyes.
As though trenches through the Rhine
I felt the wrinkles and dementia
Rolling down my face,
And the inertia of your grace
Was too strong to hold away.
Were it said simply, if anything can be.
I missed the woman and the face of she.

The day came.
It began with messages and images
Pouring from the screen in bubbles,
Your name sprinkled their talk.
Then I saw a link,
And the light shone from my screen.

I have seen these places before.
I have seen the faces and the decor
And I have now seen the door
That women take into it.
I have one last hope,
That she has not done this with regret.
At least it pays well
And she may do it well
With her lover.

Each disappear like dates in improper filing.
Every slither. Every scrap.
Every silver lining.
I will do it again.
I will do it again with another woman
And she won’t say it this time.
I seem to have fallen for a dream
And simply keep changing her face and the voice
That breaks me.
I knew a girl and it didn't work out.
Sep 2019 · 61
Responsibility
Briscoe Sep 2019
Across black, my dogs run like stallions,
Stretching and contracting limps and tendons.
Then as I return from work, I find they brighten
Draining, darkening ends of evenings.
But the weak sinews of monkey's flesh
Compel us. To them it is the tempest
Of a thousand lifts and falls in a mess,
Indistinguishable barks in a mesh.
As we shout, dogs must think us mean creatures.
Someday, what will my wordless child observe?
"No one is born hating another... People must learn to hate" -Nelson Mandela
Sep 2019 · 314
Piercing Streetlight
Briscoe Sep 2019
The street seems calm enough to me,
With sentry lights and lunar memorials up high.
I weave with whatever air I find
My voice can shape
And my brain
Not quite empty
For I have a headache.
"Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark."
-Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot
Sep 2019 · 54
Rhyme of Repetition
Briscoe Sep 2019
With each dusk, red recedes into darkness.
Empty desires echo like antique rhymes
Of Shakespeare, speaking of love fictitious.
Like apes to grapevines, up my desire climbs,
Incoherent growls of primal intent
For fruits. Perhaps a date among the thorns.
Gold light diminishing, as the moon's moment
Looms aloft, with a pale and nervous form.
The passage of time and carnage of thoughts
Project an old, desperate fantasy
On my bedroom ceiling. My feelings caught
In my true knowing none shall come to be.
The veins of time having washed off notions
That these desires could lead to devotions.
Sep 2019 · 102
Certainty
Briscoe Sep 2019
Is it set in stone? Or does that matter?
There's what I've known, the vices and virtues,
The truths I believe and the vast scattered
Universe that hardens the path into
Certainty and leaves few beliefs behind.
For all those who seek all certainties,
Unwilling for flawed faults to fully fill,
Let limited knowledge in vacancies.
Recall that none know all and fools fully fill
The world from rim to rim. From each corner
Of the Earth they spill over vale and hill,
And giving freely to the coroner.
Accept that you may be an idiot
And always learn from every regret.
"I know only that I know nothing"
-Socrates
"Humility is the only wisdom"
-T.S. Eliot
Sep 2019 · 81
Plead for the Duende
Briscoe Sep 2019
The Duende ought to visit me tonight.
That pixie ought bring me something fresh,
Words cut from fresh wounds and bright,
Burning embers from embraces of flesh
No longer felt. I have written it before
But, I have nothing more for me to say.
I feel no real motion but the cold floor
Of a world that revolves without a sway.
I’m tired of all my words, my old theories,
Like ghosts that always haunt the same ways.
They slid through walls, lifted invisibly
And flew from lips without a fall. A phrase
Of enchantment, now looms, stiffly stirring
And reminding me of dead things.
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.'
Sep 2019 · 244
I Shall After
Briscoe Sep 2019
I shall seethe with air no more,
Nor feel the curling cuddle of cats
Nor fear those dressed in girdles and dresses,
With low hanging and ******* tresses and hair.
I shall see no more than traces of shadow and air.
"An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." - Richard Dawkins
Sep 2019 · 112
Stream
Briscoe Sep 2019
It seems in dreams
That streams intervene
In one another's course.

The scarlets of stars let
Out a louder bang,
The purple fireworks
Dripping as they hang.
"The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness (on the same cerebral highway) enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense"  - Alexander Bain
Sep 2019 · 143
It's Not Really A Poem
Briscoe Sep 2019
The Earth once met a man from Albany and asked
Have you seen the sun today?
I've been looking all morning.
The man shook his head and with a task
Died and receded.

The Sun was busy,
Playing cards with a friend from outer-space
And placing a final tarot card
Took the money from his previous bets.

The Night was tired by the time the Sun returned
Broke and exhausted,
The Night asked
Where have you been?
Just out?
The usual.
Then the night went to sleep and the dawn rose at 11pm.
"All was golden in the sky
All was golden when the day met the night" - Panic at the Disco
Briscoe Sep 2019
The great pretentious act of our poets,
Is to believe every line's scripture,
For they're painters with black and white pallets
Simply putting one word with another.
They're lyricists without melody,
But they have one refined, silver blade,
That cuts to the heart, and it's memory.
Universal tides collapsing to glades,
Which can be explored and made beautiful
Not because every stone's overturned,
Not because wisdom nor knowledge make it full,
But by the will that says "linger on these words."
To peel moss from the grave, to burn away
Ash from the corpse, and hear what they've to say.
"The maximum known depth is 10,984 metres (36,037 ft) (± 25 metres [82 ft]) at the southern end of a small slot-shaped valley in its floor known as the Challenger Deep.[2]"
-wikipedia
Sep 2019 · 103
Honey on Top
Briscoe Sep 2019
I have no fucken clue
Why I really like you.
I guess it's just the honey on top
That you're funny and hot.
Sep 2019 · 53
The Dragon
Briscoe Sep 2019
I see it's black and I see those pearl eyes
Staring through caverns of caves and darkness.
Though withered, weathered eroded bone lies
Scattered, I must disprove my cowardice.
As it growls, between its teeth I see a furnace
With golden glimmering, shimmering flames.
Ancient and old, slithering tongues whispered this
Retreat, whimper, return to safer games.
This place is made of dangerous pieces
Shattered glass, jades and jewels like jagged blades.
Blood does not prevail, passed my scaled, monstrous
Tail, and men make no echo in deep graves.
Moving my living corpse round the corner,
I ask
Would you leave ashes for your coroner?
Sep 2019 · 55
Bow
Briscoe Sep 2019
Bow
You are my bow
That with finest finesse
Fills ears with floating notes
And echoes with vibrations and vibrance.

Yet you are also your own bow
That stretches back
With the stern arrow
And sends me low
With arrow blows
As you straighten to throw
With conviction and vicious intent
And echoes with vibrations.
Sep 2019 · 178
Breakfast
Briscoe Sep 2019
I wake, I break my toast into pieces.
Timid smells of stirring streets cloud about me.
The coffee swirls and swells. Images
And hesitant senses wait in the breeze.
I wake, I break my toast into pieces.
I hate toast. I eat ghosts of bread, dead wheat.
Channels tune into place as vision meets focus.
I eat. I attempt a thought and retreat to eat.

One Monday morning
After a midnight when malaise escalates
To trauma gone in the morning.
I simmer to life with the sun low,
As though the glow
Were still preparing to leap.
I put some bacon down to sizzle
I sit happy for a second, I sleep.
The deep slumber that disappears in moments
And half an hour.
The day reanimates with burning.
The bacon now a black thing.
I see waste.
I am late.
The next morning
I wake, I break my toast into pieces.
I wake, I break my toast into pieces.
I wake, I break my toast into pieces.
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"
"At four, and five and six o'clock."
-T.S. Eliot
Sep 2019 · 218
Eight Legs
Briscoe Sep 2019
A spider hinders me
As I am
Camouflaged with cement
Caught up in cobwebs,
And wrapped in ruins
From a moss covered,
Undiscovered lost commune.

The octopus latches on.
It attaches.
Entangling tendrils and tentacles
Tickle with a greasy menacle.
The black advancing oil
Appears as though the void.
Sep 2019 · 64
Sonnet to Confess
Briscoe Sep 2019
I know lonely girl
It isn't this simple, but if you're single,
In love, tell the boy, let him stay or part.
Why not? Must you wait till your last wrinkle?
If he deserves your heart's pieces and parts
He deserves to know what you have to say.
Simply said, since his fire burns inside you,
If you don't let it out someday,
When darkness closes In, it will burn through
And you will regret the light left dwindling.
If only it were easy to confess,
Lonely girl, you could paint your thoughts and feelings
And send it to him, with the secret needed
To see inside, being his love for you.
It's never easy, but it will be true.
Briscoe Sep 2019
She came back in the afternoon.
Usually she leaves me my peace
Till after midnight. But she came too soon
And ruined dwindling light through spinning smoke from teas.

Ten songs ago, I saw her sway,
I tasted her cold shoulder and
Came back to receive her reprimand.
I never saw her voice and more
Never heard her face,
Only feeling some embrace
As we danced till twelve.

But she came back too early
I wasn't ready enough, nor strong nor steady.
She took me back to an old dance
And with bittersweet memories
Ruined my afternoon teas.
Sep 2019 · 247
Nocturne
Briscoe Sep 2019
I see crystal spires of great conspiring myriads
Collapse to spheres.
A conscience of science fiction
Aroused as one sees tin men walk on streets.
The mystics and myths are.
The instincts and maths are.
Meandering meaningless tracks are.
Then to the sound of a distant locomotive
And endless opinions and motions
And loco motives
And motivations
And locked up forts fought for in ages past
And a lost train of thought.

Cars careen in between
Houses housing those who sleep.
The river in between
The Earth and the Earth
And over the Earth.
A tar road of glass,
Eroded by no cars.
Only the path of drowning men.

Dogs bark.
Logs covered with bark
Cover the park.
The night, the vast ocean of Jupiter
Poseidon, with pearls replaced by starlight.
'Tis, isn't it?
It is.
Las vivas sin sentido
Es
Loss of vitals without sin.
"His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world." - T.S. Eliot Preludes
Sep 2019 · 69
Old Couple in the Park
Briscoe Sep 2019
Even at eighty three and eighty four,
They still hold hands, walk with conversations,
Or simply sit the way they always did before.
They're content with silence, their objections
Only that they have to go home for tea.
Walkers by, hear them bicker and banter,
Memories spilling from mouths happily.
They like the cafes and polite chatter.
But they love the park, the trees and brown bark.
But this pretense of present tense is wrong.
Even at eighty five, she still goes out.
Every day, she is glad to walk along.
Her memories are fainter now
The smell of hot coffee in the Summer
And someone's soft words to warm the Winters.
Sep 2019 · 54
Hope
Briscoe Sep 2019
There will be time to rise and raise a child.
There will be the night to rise and write
Loves and lives that were wordless in daylight.
There's a season to Spring to life and wild
Bursts will bobble from our seas who simmer.
Blooming perfumes with flowering flavours
Will sway like winds in our trees who shimmer.
The grassy Earth coloured as it covers
Hills from place to place in grassy embrace.
When your enslaved pieces, break free from hate,
The glades all softly supporting your pace
As you walk toward the canopies gate.
Though this is not today, nor tomorrow
Those fires begin low, then they grow and glow.
Briscoe Sep 2019
She was there
Beneath the
Forlorn thing
Festering
With a cold
Enchantment.

He came along the foreign path
And beneath the forest passed
The pregnable puddle of blood, flesh and bone.
He was tired by experience and exploration.
Beside the new night and beneath the looming sky
He knew
The horrendous days when women would befriend or end us.

It was irreversible once he begun.
Both were broken once he was done
And his hollow soul felt no completion.
His act leaving only a cavity.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse.
Aug 2019 · 371
Girl Who Dances Alone
Briscoe Aug 2019
Finally, after her futile trembling
Over grumbling,
She walks the waltz of wobbling candles' flame,
Or light shimmering, bending through red wine.
She's free to escape the shadows of shame
Or invisibly growing veins of time,
Flowing through every wave, pirouette
Or dying fall of muscular movements.
A romance of ghosts with widows' spirits
Finally finding one another in a moment,
After years of searching the afterlife.
The dance, the violins' conversation
Lets this story unfold through her, the wife
To melodies, to memory's ocean.
Her body finally fitting the song,
Shaped surreally and softly to her soul.
Aug 2019 · 60
Please, Understand
Briscoe Aug 2019
There is no number of wishes
That can restore these images.
I could not feel it forever.
So I sequenced references together.
But no series of breaths
Or ink curvature
Can capture the experience.
All the same,
Tonight I felt the depth of our universe.

It cannot be imagined,
It cannot be understood
How far till stars end.
Yet if it could,
To truly know the sky's ebb and flow
It would bestow madness.
All the same I perceive and believe it
On occasion.

Tonight I saw brightness across the sea
I saw it was a ship's light shining towards the shore and me.
Opening out like Heaven's door
A ghostly poltergeist.

Vastly tired, I planned to retire.
Ghastly light sinking away into night,
As I surveyed the beach and conveyed
Myself towards warmer shades of home.

Then adrift the earthling wind
And dripping from the star's tendril pulse,
Came a feeling I have not yet determined
That emptied me of impulse.

Silence, moonlight and crumbling waves
All singing our seaside harmony.
Either way, I am free to fall
As synesthesia echoes through an endless hall.

Science, starlight and lunar cast shades,
To me, a piece between abyss,
Pouring consciousness upon me.
Gazing on I could not say
If I were on the seafloor or her surface.
Although why care? For I am free to fall
Home or away,
In any direction.
Aug 2019 · 66
Moonlight on the Sea
Briscoe Aug 2019
That’s the way the light echoes
The moonlight stretching out in a lounging shawl
Like waves whose cusps fold and foam to kiss the sea,
As they roll away and the way to shore,
In the broad arms of the breeze
And their faint disturbance of surface romance.

The men at the front of the boat, cruising along.
The women singing a song that was famous long ago.
The sound of the song growing.
The sound filling with wind and interwoven ocean strings.
Telling tales which were living long ago.

One man thought.
‘Of my life tell only a few stories
Burning brightly with my virtues and vice
For lights are only passionate flurries
Those last lights before the eyes
Of he who sinks beneath the ice.
Telling tales which were living long ago.
That’s the way the light echoes.’
Aug 2019 · 101
Nights of Near Romance
Briscoe Aug 2019
I whispered it when I left this morning.
"Tonight I will ask the question."
I’ll asked her to a film, I’ll say
“This week, we could see Yesterday?”
Although nerves melt me away
As though a burning silhouette.
"I swear my voice is always stern,"
I say, "What harm's another day?"
With my voice on a squeaking fret.

The haunted concretes creak without a sound
And trains rattle to shake the way of dying candlelight.
Avoidances dance, twirling round and round.
The haunted concretes creak without a sound.
Words gust heavy and unprofound
While I must be this wavering kite.
While trains rattle to shake the way of dying candlelight,
And the haunted concretes creak without a sound.

Here where they dissect creatures that once scuttled
And pull them limb from limb,
And pour wine beside, which swirls in the glass before it's settled.
The creature's gravestone a girl with a smile grim.
A dim expression that deflates with the next plate,
As she surrenders to digging in.



Nearby seniors' droning threatens to drown
My mind with inescapable numbness.
Again, I take a glass and swallow it down
Praying on a secret unseen finesse.
I say a joke that to her seems lost
As though its ghost just went past.
I butter my tongue with liquid as though toast;
Regret all I've said and call for a glass.
I tighten my tie tight around my neck
The tangled knot neatly risen up.
Joke as though throwing cards straight from a deck.
By dessert feel numbness on my tongue’s cusp.
Dreaming she would not be one to beguile,
She and I
Evacuate the chatter with a stretched smile.

Passing lanterns looming on a night walk,
I begin to her a conversation.
Yet only dare to make the smallest talk,
Not risking she leaves an awkward situation.
I haven't the courage to encourage
What may enrage nor leap near isolation.
What would the forefathers say?
A man wouldn't wait nor hesitate.
But I stutter before I can state
Whether I'm a hasty man
With fast unlasting thrills,
Or willing to wait
And understand.

Which question is it?
But why is it this?
Perhaps it's better I ask with lips,
And without words.
So let soft suckling be heard.
But why is that?
I can't possibly, probably.
But may I know facts exact?

Then dawn rose with the sun alone and untimely.
I whispered it when I left this morning,
When I was returning home suddenly,
"Tonight I will ask the question.”

Since she waits there for me.
A young tongue is spinning and spiralling.
Lips collapse into antique whispers.

I'm certain she waits there for me.
By delirium and thoughts lost.
By flowing fountains draped with moss.
She folds fingers round the thorn.
Th'evening lingers, for golden light has lit it.
Scolding any scorn that drops to forlorn.

She has gone now.
But she'll be back soon.
Aug 2019 · 56
When Together
Briscoe Aug 2019
We were assailing city streets as was usual.
The pitter patter of passing feet all around.
A place solely described as bilingual
And beautiful, took her casual attention.
Acknowledging her distraction I asked, “There then?”
“I love the decor, all red, black and gold.”
“It is very pretty, interweaving
Fake, artificially antique and old.”
“But looks can often be deceiving.”

I looked to her, reading the sight before
Me. Her own dress like precious noire decor.
Dark tresses arranged in a precise mess.
Her faux french and her fox fur raincoat,
Clinging on with a concealing cologne,
The accent she had and the way she spoke.
She the precise princess of images
With a thousand evidences to say
That she was perfect in a way.

“Yes, I suppose they can be.”
Aug 2019 · 98
Hall of the King
Briscoe Aug 2019
As I lie in bed,
Light falls like a stranger’s memory
On the walls of palest grey,
And tonight, of love, money and dignity,  
I have nothing to say.
I have known every name and noun.
Vow and verb, vowel and word
And finally find nothing to say.
I suppose that’s what must be done,
If the floor lies in blatant disarray.
I suppose that’s what must be done.
There’s a pattern of bricks and torches
That are on a screen and are nothing more
But the firing of neurons and the burning of my eyes.
I would walk out into the night
Were it true that I could find my shoes.
For I cannot dare have bare feet bear the ground
And be mauled by such an unnatural place for them.
Laptop lit up
Like electric candlelights
With candid candescence,
Why would I dare into the fray of night,
Or daylight’s thriftless touch
Which would age and burn me
Like a vampire on a pile of wooden stakes
That kindled, burnt, dwindled and burnt out.
Ladies and Queens of the night,
Gathering in a circular court
And being veiled behind that smoke
And the strokes of grey paint
That were here before anyone.
She crescendos and sharpens into a crescent blade
That glints and glistens by sunshine in the night.
Like his scythe, which cut through the light
And drew nothing but the dew and due payments.
I wonder if he would bother come by
And thereby transport me but not my body.
For why would he come try
And change my position
When no other conviction
Has succeeded.
Without and within the voices they sing
Don't dare.
Care without the face that does.
Share without the side that shows.
Despair and depreciate without the face
Of sorrows and woes.
It's all rolling along and I’ve done nothing wrong.
Made no mistake.
Made no call to heartache.
This is all.
This is the hall of the humbled king,
Who still bears his solitude
But reduced like Vesuvius
Has no longer his magnitude,
Only that he was destroyed flameless.
Without and within the voices they sing.
For he was born and has borne
Nothing of importance since, but innocence.
It is, I suppose. It must, I suppose, be done.
It is, I suppose, of no great importance.
Aug 2019 · 106
Listen for the Moonlight
Briscoe Aug 2019
Please, if you have the time
Listen to the moon, she's really trying tonight.
She'll fatten and she'll thin.
Her voice shall strain and tighten till tight.
Please, please, listen.

She that uncracked thunderbolt,
Who never dared dash across the shadow shades
But remained to halt
Above the sea and grassy meadows and glades.
Hold the applause.

She sits up at the piano,
Hear her go.
Oh moonlight
Sing. Sing for us tonight.
Hear her before the morning glow.
Aug 2019 · 70
Hit Single
Briscoe Aug 2019
To me you are the all new pop single.
Who I find everywhere I go and
Fills my heart with starlight when we mingle.
Although whenever others did demand
To know what I felt for you, I said such
That I can't stand your perpetual presence.
But this is pretense. You do touch me much
That when you pass, secretly I sway, dance
And feel your rhythm or I hum along.
Remembering your every word and simply
Enjoying to adjoin joyously note
For note and meet our meanings' harmony.
You, simple jingle, sweet pop single, float,
Brightening my feeble mind. Years may go
With a dying fall, but I will still say so.
Aug 2019 · 65
My Guitar
Briscoe Aug 2019
Major and minor harmonies crumble
Like disintegratable solutions
That dissolve to sweetness. Amiable
Feelings of fulfilment melt ambitions
And the curves of my guitar greet slim fingers.
I don't care for my poor technique or flaws,
Knowing the simple sound simply lingers
After slim fingers have strummed and struck chords.
This wooden thing, strummed summer instrument.
The fair dust of fairies the very notes
Releasing and ceasing the incessant
Torments that are elevated to float
Harmlessly above and about my ears.
That is release, that is peace beyond years.
Aug 2019 · 171
Old Man by the Violin
Briscoe Aug 2019
By the piano and the violin
An old man sits with a grin
On his surface, a vague monologue within.

What were weeks trail into obscurity
Long after, as I forget
All the memories
That crescendo and pirouette
In the moment, then die in minutes.

I still tell people about those days,
Finally, as this age fits this nostalgia
But they were better than this malaise
Of dry haze in dusty jars.

What were waves of fluid happiness,
Foaming with fun, then threatening with collapse
Or simply a kiss,
So soon after pass
To dunes of stationary bliss;
Slowly eroding to some shapeless mass.

Again, the violin and the piano.
The hours slow and years go by
And finally what all young men know
He feels inside.
Aug 2019 · 78
Sarah
Briscoe Aug 2019
Sarah breathes with an extra word
One that isn’t said but is heard.
With a voluminous sigh
And eight seas reflecting starshine in her eye.
She wears fox fur raincoats and her french has an accent.
She has cursive articulations
And epistolic perfections,
And to you she’s been sent.
As she break lips, to release her take,
One can’t help but feel enchanted,
With that joke of hers dissolving like smoke.
In fact with every word she ever said,
One can’t help but feel enchanted.
With a quick quip, her tongue cut till men bled
As to make even the smoothest choke.
Yet, one can’t help but feel enchanted,
With that joke of hers dissolving like smoke.
If breaking free’s almost a revolution,
Crawling back to her is its completion.
Crawling even closer, ever closer,
There's a higher symphony in her hair,
Playing with strands and strings
And scents of hyacinths.
So one must care
For you've always heard,
She has an impolite abra cadabra
Yet instead the magic word
Must be Sarah.
Aug 2019 · 158
Aussie Garden
Briscoe Aug 2019
The weeds weren't feeble, clinging on to stone
And ripping up soil as they were torn out.
But now that they are gone, sit down alone,
Among soft sounds of wind, water and ground.
The leaves clash with colours and two flowers
Bravely bloom with perfumes of late winter,
Early foreshadowings of warmer hours.
The shadows of sunlight stretching further
Close your eyes, with smells of hard work and scents
Of flora. Of fauna, a single bird sings.
Australia's face still, her voice silent,
The night comes to comfort her with ceilings
Of starlight and you smile to see the glinting cross,
Instantaneously feel slowness.
“Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don’t listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that lays a real stake to the planet.”
― Monty Don,
Briscoe Aug 2019
I won't rest tonight, nor will the tempest.
Sound found far off cracking and crumbling Where skies split, like locomotives rumbling.
Unearthly bodies foreboding and foreshadowing
Something that draws near,
Like a tsunami
Careening across the atmosphere,
Polluted completely and impenetrably
By octopus ink and oil
Over vacuum and void.
Stars concealed behind congealing clouds,
With white leaping free in streaking thunderstrikes.
The shroud of night clouds
Over void and vacuum.
I hear further in the distance
Beyond my room.
I hear the thunder echo within me
Down where space is free.
Aug 2019 · 70
Somnolent Night
Briscoe Aug 2019
September is somnolent in northern Autumn.
When it’s forgotten and forgivable
To drink shadows of *** and swallow delirium.
But not forgiven nor forgettable.
When one can’t sleep for a throbbing dream and the hearts heavy drum.
For September is slumberless in northern Autumn.

Smell the collapsing splashes of our sea.
Through the night air hear the rip which whispers “Come...”
Sound out to spell a joke in memory.
To no one say, ‘I lost my way but once…”
For no one to hear but our waning moon.

Now know the lullaby of falling leaves
Slowly shows a song of things in decay.
Silently the scythe, she cleaves and bereaves.
While with things in adequate disarray
The moon forever falling towards us
Who never touches nor brushes the surface
Will drift away.

Cry for that pain.
To drink the shadows of *** and know shallow delirium.
To think that things are and can’t be undone.
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