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435 · Sep 2019
Optimism
Briscoe Sep 2019
"Yes!" Some teardrop moon reminds me,
"Summer's always on her way."
388 · Sep 2019
Only Human
Briscoe Sep 2019
The fortune teller yelled,
She told me
"There are two breeds of oathbreakers
The liar and the failure."

It is this feeble form,
With deep roots of saphire
Juxtaposed with soft silk
Spines, undermined by magma.
The milk of these bones are
From an unhealthy donar.

Great singers sing
Through happiness and sorrow.
The writers are writing
Whether with joy or woe.
The warrior fights on
For failure or valour.
The great fear not defeat
But the fleeting self
Who flees.
"12 Before a downfall the heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor."
-Proverbs 18:12
344 · Aug 2019
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.
318 · Sep 2019
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.
314 · Aug 2019
Acne
Briscoe Aug 2019
I am disgusted by illness
Of yellow **** and festered skin.
Fierce gusts may leave me motionless
But the lotions form an ocean
To fail curing oily excess.
Thus this venom sinks into skin.
The blackheads of the king cobra
Rear up in ambushes, bushes
And murky water. Cadavas'
Rot appearing on fresh faces.
For my face, I don't care
But with women it affects how I fair.
The skin is beyond my control.
Though it's only surface deep
It pains me to my soul.
Trying to capture the feelings of the self as repulsion, not a pretty picture, but a candid one I think.
312 · Oct 2019
Strange As Fiction
Briscoe Oct 2019
To think artists live what they say
Is as foolish as child's play
Or make believe.
"Eilish and Finneas "like to completely make up things and become characters" and "have songs that are really fictional".[54] Eilish said a number of the songs also derive from her and Finneas' experiences."
-Wikipedia
291 · Sep 2019
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
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
240 · Oct 2019
Tongue Waggle
Briscoe Oct 2019
I like to keep my meaning flacid
And my sound solid,
The air must be rigid
Or else
It becomes truly meaningless.
Leave the keys hanging for access
And blessed
By a reader are the poets.
""And I forget just why I taste / Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile / I found it hard, it's hard to find / Oh well, whatever, never mind."
-Kurt Cobain
231 · Oct 2019
Ally-Way Timeout
Briscoe Oct 2019
This town has marijuana on her breath
And neon light's on the face of the deep.
Nicotine Nietsches discuss surface death,
Too tired of missing out to go to sleep.
His paranoia's poised to annoy her.
He guesses what she wants to discuss.
She refuses, confuses views and viewers
Via her hair and vain vaunts. Invictus
To explain how she hurts herself. Scandalous,
Scared, scarred, scampering. Incisions to bleed
And promises to read a meticulous
String of pages, as known as it's envied.
A pierced vein and a question. A ******
Whose esteem's sacrificed for little laughs.
Her humility and his humiliation,
His hubris, how high he gets of her calf.
Images, a thousand evidences
Of life in photoshop philosophers.
To them Nietzsche is a name
And Derrida a deconstruction
And a vague book they read long ago
But there is nothing in between
These thoughts and each memory.
"Perception can be split into two processes,[5]

(1) processing the sensory input, which transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition);
(2) processing which is connected with a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as attention) that influence perception."
-Wikipedia
217 · Sep 2019
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
213 · Sep 2019
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
192 · Sep 2019
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.
188 · Aug 2019
Pretty Smoke
Briscoe Aug 2019
I know the frost lies thin and leaves grow yellow.
I know my previous foolish things and
Better seasons past with my last actions.
I know my own disgraces, and my shallow
Pooling parts, yet let one thing be mine to know.

I would implore, but I know it's against
Your favour of flavour or simply taste.
So spare me despair with even slightest care.
Thus let your ears slowly hear, maiden fair,
Words which flicker and flutter to convey
In, out and about, through softened air.
Know if it's not too great a disturbance,
We could speak and joke with unseen smokes that dance
And laugh as we smell the blooming lilacs.
To be to the point, it's better I ask.
Will it be harsh electric candescence
That outshines dwindling starlight
Or simply your sweet semblance in the night?
176 · Sep 2019
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.
165 · Aug 2019
Air
Briscoe Aug 2019
Air
Here I will take part, for I have before
If or since my path includes to suffer me.
I, through air's hue, weave invisibly
Something I said, jagged and jaded
Spiked and broken, woven with my things
Angered and sad. Fermented by grievance, demented
Thoughts and motions meant to be said
And instead are in this,
My collection of pink demons' chants.
A fool's flaccid stabbing into darkness,
Who tickles ears and who fakes consciousness.

All this my air. Fair evenings
With my mornings of no meaning.
My indeterminate verse that does
Flourish into the key of our sea.
A pretty sentence circling around my neck
Threatens to tighten with each re-edit.
These are just words in a row.
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
144 · Aug 2019
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.
139 · Sep 2019
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
138 · Oct 2019
A Day Dream of Her
Briscoe Oct 2019
Too long I linger, since I woke from sleep.
Defading day's delay does make me say
Some sweet, soft dream I've seen in scenes of sheen
Silver. Flutters, flickers of her fiery way
With phrases, persuading to stay in sheets
Under her ghostly form. So I can say
Dreams to me in the lazy morning heat.
With inavian feathery wings, to Avalon away.
"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes
133 · Aug 2019
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,
120 · Sep 2019
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
115 · Sep 2019
Taking a Stroll
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
112 · Sep 2019
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
111 · Feb 2020
They Played A Love Song
Briscoe Feb 2020
They played a love song in the car
The wife looked to her husband
The husband glanced back, before looking out far
To the road ahead.
My friend,
A world from her husband
Probably sat thinking of that distance.
They played a love song
And I thought of no one
Because I had no one to think of
As I have for so long.
104 · Oct 2019
Text from An Old Crush
Briscoe Oct 2019
"I'm not sorry I ate your heart for my own.
I left, carelessly fed the Earth your bones.
To make friends I would cut Medusa's hair.
Speaking as Thor thundered in my chest,
His Cerberus kiss, on cheeks and lips bare,
As Zeus breathed life onto my neck with zest.
From the ribs he pulled my dust weak body.
He the better man who left me lonely.
To you I've arrived empty, to fill night.
I've brought my casual poetry to you,
I need to tire ears to make this heart light.
Heavy is he and I know you'll sit through
Me. I need a voice he's not choked to glee.
I need a line to write, before I fall asleep."
"Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.  
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,  
And they stuck me together with glue.  
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the *****.  
And I said I do, I do."
-Daddy, by Sylvia Plath
99 · Oct 2019
Direction
Briscoe Oct 2019
This locomotive motion is so slow
I can't tell if it's moving anymore.
But just sitting here crushes all the roots below
And the captain of this soul won't explore.
So impenetrable that a pyramid eclipse
Would turn this tomb to dust with nought but rays.
So quick to flee into freedom, collapse
And liberty became different ways
To say the same thing. Liminal levels
Between devils and visions of heaven
Pollute me with poignant points and stories I tell
Procrastinate about integration
Unravelling to disintegrate to late
Lights which illuminate no fate.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—"
-Robert Frost
97 · Feb 2020
El Bombero
Briscoe Feb 2020
With blood and love in his veins,
With power for the helpless and the hopeless,
The vain hero saves the same lives as the selfless.
Yet at a dinner these women
Sense something in his smell
As though he went off
On one of his adventures
Like milk left alone too long.
96 · Oct 2019
Bromance
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
94 · Oct 2019
Relationship Status
Briscoe Oct 2019
She's a golf course and a red flag marks her hole.
Our chat's meaningless to me, yet I get stressed
When her text pops up from the net. Hold ur bowl
Of blows to my ego for our banter, don't forget
To flatter this reject wen she gets sicc of me.
Still, I can't afford her, so I sold my wallet
To feed her. She'll teach me like a trainee
For a matador. But who's got my cutlass
And just between you and me, is she *****?
Just coz she's sending her signals in Norse code,
Coz I reckon miscommunication be
The cause that runes us. Set this coke to explode
With the mood and mode she's in, as I take
A taste of her minty mis-takes and heartache.
"She's playful
The boring would warn you
Be careful of her brigade
In order to tame this relentless marauder move away from the parade

She was walking on the tables in the glasshouse
Endearingly bedraggled in the wind
Subtle in her method of seduction
Twenty little tragedies begin"
-The Last Shadow Puppets
94 · Aug 2019
Midnight Ignition
Briscoe Aug 2019
My bedside table light ignites
Via letters' curvature, curls of fire
Perfectly pitch black on pages of white.
Through universal syntax words conspire
To inspire images on paper pages.
I can't recall what pages' faces look like
Only fables my bedside table says
Through the writer's words which incite.
Swept up in a tightly written overture,
Summoned through rhythm and a silent hum.
Via letters' curvature, adventure
Is promised and the writer insists you come.
Reincarnation of a writer's thoughts
In distant souls that echo as they're brought.
94 · Feb 2020
Staring at Trees
Briscoe Feb 2020
I'm always happy staring at trees.
Conversations feel violent and unimportant
When no one agrees
On pety little bits and rants.
Poems can grow dull
And music can almost hurt
After long enough.
But trees simply lull me to a pleasure
I can't replace,
To a better place
Right where I am
Beside my friends
The tree and his leaves.
92 · Aug 2019
The Autumn Tide
Briscoe Aug 2019
Autumn comes faintly,
As though it were when sleep, dreams
And first memories of waking
Blur at the beginning of the day.

Charms of Summer
Slowly undone in undulations of Winter
And brief retreats to warmer heat-waves.

Reading on the Ides of March
And the days of May
Here in Australia
April may be the cruelest month
Breeding leaves and weaves of grey cloud
And leaving steps closer to Winter's shroud.

With saps of life
And wisps of nymph whispers
Surely siphoned with scythes of time,
I fear to waste one more of my mortal days
Peering through lifeless greys.
90 · Sep 2019
Reign of the Gods
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'
90 · Sep 2019
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
90 · Aug 2019
The City Smells
Briscoe Aug 2019
On sordid airs I detect
A sizzling cigarette
That dirtily dizzies me.
The vapour shaped and misshapen
As though the pale horse of Death
Is animated again,
Forcing forth from some lung's depths.
The dizzying diseases released
Onto the city street.

Then passing a Chinese window
Cheap honeys rich in flavour
Seem woven with the air.
Wisps of some Summer, lost
Among clustered years
Covered in moss,
Dangle beneath my nose
And rising up
Almost fills what's hollowed.

But I am busy and must go
The city suffers no one for so long.
So I go on
To the city's dizzying smells,
To leave the moment's spell.

The city smells me.
The tunnels and funneling gutters
The nostrils of this grey matter
The network of working, walking
Men, women and children.
It adapts with new technologies
And the conscience of the street
As the street well knows
Controls me.
89 · Oct 2019
Father's Words
Briscoe Oct 2019
Don't dare waste your time rushing into things.
Don't dare leave venture's door without at least
A knock.
The valley of death comes inevitably,
But happiness doesn't.
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
-Popular Proverb
87 · Feb 2020
Performance
Briscoe Feb 2020
My friend says he loves performance,
But my favourite part of a dance
Is forgetting everyone else in the room.
Remembering
Just me, my mess of a body and the tune.
85 · Sep 2019
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
83 · Feb 2020
So Tired
Briscoe Feb 2020
My eyes are pressed wet against their lids
Like beans in the pantry
And like a pantry, I'm ready for sleep.
83 · Feb 2020
Breathing
Briscoe Feb 2020
Whatever it was
That my breaths came from,
You've change it.
You'll break it.
You'll make it again,
And I don't know
What's beating so fast
In my deepest parts
Since you've stolen my heart.
81 · Aug 2019
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.
80 · Sep 2019
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.
76 · Feb 2020
Why Bother?
Briscoe Feb 2020
I have nothing to lose really,
But I don't want to be
Turned away again
And it's part of my problem
With nothing to lose
I have nothing to offer.
So why bother?
74 · Sep 2019
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
74 · Sep 2019
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.
72 · Sep 2019
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
71 · Aug 2019
In My Wildest Dreams
Briscoe Aug 2019
Sleeping and leaving my memories where
Teasing taunts from last century still echo.
Leaving, cleaning, cleaving my fantasies
So I may perceive, I might even dare
Brave to believe, self deceive and thus go
Where all certainties take reality
On their way out the door. I cannot care
That I am bereaved of real rules, ergo
Pretenses may dance senselessly with glee
As my sensory system must beware
Only nightmares of no real harm. Although
These dreams are no more than false memories
Once I wake and break spells of happiness,
They do happy me, but reality
Tortures me to be sleepless.
69 · Oct 2019
G'day for Sunset Nullius
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
68 · Oct 2019
Flaneur
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.
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