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98 · Aug 2019
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.
97 · Oct 2019
Arcane Serenity
Briscoe Oct 2019
Winter's waste was harsh as she commenced us
Withering, shivering shells of carcass
Made materials. But mayn't silence us.
Blue and purple the phrase meticulous.
So the golden queens of Iceland
Shall dissolve from flakes in brief sunlight's touch.
Gleaming streams of silver sewn on beach sands
By some moonlight, stretching over white dusts,
Grey silks, laid on sea's soft sapphire, flamed spots,
Placing those hands where the nebulous black
Goes not, save in glimmering rain drops.
Knowing nought but how chills race on my back,
I can now allow this sight to calm me,
As is done by no works or memory.
"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings."
-The Lake Isle of Innisfree
97 · 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.
96 · Feb 2020
Supermarket Sonnet
Briscoe Feb 2020
I liked her. I guess. beep there's two problems.
First, beep speaks little English. beep would like
To think I beep quite big English. ehem
"Would you like two for one?" "No thanks. One's fine."
I mean we've spoken beep Spanish at least.
I beep that I speak un poquito beep Español.
The beep I seek's unknown to beep.
"Thank you! Have a nice day." Maybe I'm cold,
Desperate for a body to warm me.
There is a stiff breeze in this dark carpark.
Secondly, she's religious. I believe
She'll wait for marriage. So a dates the start
Of some far greater commitment. I mean
My Spanish is Okay, but not ready for eternity.
"We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable --
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
93 · 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
90 · Feb 2020
A Girl
Briscoe Feb 2020
I don't think of her like a desire.
I think of her as an option.
Thinking time and time again
I guess...
"And know me, no you don't even know me
You're so sweet to try, oh my, you caught my eye
A girl like you is just irresistible"
- The Fratellis
90 · 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.
89 · Oct 2019
Puff
Briscoe Oct 2019
Leopard, lion, lepper, lime, linger on.
Sounds. Silence. Seduction. ***. Super serum.
Dilly dally, dissolve dandelion.
Boil, bobble, brim, burst, babble on hobo, ***.
Sonidos sin dirección.
A purple puff pronounced 'poem.'
"William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, his 52nd birthday. In truth, the exact date of Shakespeare’s death is not known, but assumed"
-No Sweat Shakespeare
89 · Feb 2020
Teenage Mind
Briscoe Feb 2020
Stop thinking I only think
About *** and how to be ****,
I don't like the accuracy.
Stop thinking I only think
About *** and how to be ****,
Sometimes I actually attempt to be.
Briscoe Sep 2019
I see wet mirrors on the floor
As though skies pooled into puddles.
The reflection shimmers some more
As though sights shown, shone and wobbled.
Water covered tar's ignited
By streetlights' illumination.
Flickers of fire, flame and brightened
Colours of electrocution
Serenely, surreally, softly  
At peace.
Please, look up Leonard Afremov. It was a shame to hear about his death when I woke up this morning. He was an amazing artist and his paintings are all worth a look.
Briscoe Sep 2019
She had an Asian face
And I'll remember her that way.

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

There was a short pause,
Between seconds and eternity.
He was already in the crooked house
On a crooked street,
Her silhouette so hesitant.
Then she began her retreat
To that crooked place
I know not within.
To that crooked cave
Or that crooked grave,
I let her pass without a phrase.
There's the rumble
Of another train.
"Do your duty, and leave the rest to the gods"
-Pierre Corneille
86 · Dec 2019
A Christmas Sound
Briscoe Dec 2019
As planet Earth slid into December
It must have collided with a thick net
Of Christmas lights, I really remember,
Along with a dense cloud of snow and wet
Sugars that titilate with briefest taste
And precipitate on the planet's face.
The night's gloom glowing with rainbows to waste.
Green and red greeting with a warm embrace.
Brothers and mothers and friends I can't count.
Stories of Jesus and things I enjoy.
Laughter, flattery, songs and Christmas sounds.
Tears of joy, from girls or maybe a boy.
The filling of stomachs, feelings of home,
And firm hugs from mum, so no one's alone.
It's pretty bad, but I hope someone enjoys this.
84 · Feb 2020
Sex Death
Briscoe Feb 2020
I am at such a point of unemployed and undesired,
That I am turned on at the same time as a lightsaber
And I care more for a Skywalker
Than for ***, money or any other transfer
Between one body and another.
In fact,
The only bodies I plan to explore
Are planets far beyond my ragged claws.
"Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,"
-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
82 · Feb 2020
Grey Religion
Briscoe Feb 2020
I have my acne medication
With chocolate milk
For balance like Budhism.
I have a niche,
I go to an Adventist church to practise my Spanish.
But I'm not Christian.
I'm interest in Arabic and Turkish
So I might become a temporary Muslim.
Unfortunately however,
All these religions have the same ending
With me dead and anywhere but Heaven.
81 · Jan 2020
Goodbye
Briscoe Jan 2020
Goodbye, old friend.
I'll remember you,
And if the years allow you to,
Come back and spend
An hour with me, just one or two.
"Clinging to not getting sentimental
Said she wasn't going but she went still"
-Alex Turner
81 · Sep 2019
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.'
80 · Aug 2019
The Cows
Briscoe Aug 2019
They began on soft hills, hairy with grass.
Their hooved soles greeted by soils, brown and green
That were interwoven in the world past,
Before man, with his hideous machines.
But now they tread between the decayed trunks
Of skyscrapers that scatter their own dust
Over waves of tumid wind. Air whimpers
On its way through the streets of rust.
The voice of ghosts echoes into whispers.
The city is gone. The older, colder days
Before man, stir up slowly from rubble.
The wolves beginning to creep through the grey,
Silhouettes projected through smoke, crumble.
Man is now replaced and where he once stood
Wolves now watch on from, the city like woods.
80 · Feb 2020
Hairy Ladies
Briscoe Feb 2020
Don't take this the wrong way
But since I have nothing else to say,
It doesn't do any harm
But you see a girl who hasn't shaved her arm
And you just think "that's hair,
That shouldn't be there."
It's not a problem,
This isn't an accusation
Or a criticism
Or a part of any -ism,
Just a part of my experience
Of women with hairy limbs.
79 · Sep 2019
Growing Up
Briscoe Sep 2019
I haven’t lost them,
I just don’t want to play
With them anymore.
I know it’s sad to surrender.
The dinners they bought me.
The debts I’ll never repay.
But I don’t want to play
With them anymore.
It’s hard to make believe,
When the toys have beliefs of their own.
So I guess I’ll leave.

God damns the fertile,
The futile rituals to grow a child.
"Daddy, I have had to **** you.  
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,  
Ghastly statue with one gray toe  
Big as a Frisco seal"
-Sylvia Plath
Briscoe Jan 2020
In one of those nights where your eyes are useless
But to feel wetness, pooling, cooling your skin,
There's a song of images that won't progress.
There are thoughts paper thin and all is dim,
Yourself included.

There's a cool beach.  
There's someone to share the deep.
There's a tender reach.
There's the ocean
Pooling, cooling your skin.

Pulling back the curtains
Stops the performance,
And all is dark,
As though cold tar.
"You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands."
-T.S. Eliot
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.
78 · Aug 2019
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.
Briscoe Sep 2019
My brother and I
Sit in our uniforms.
A cloud sniffs whiffs of the house,
Shifts and moves on.
My bare feet fricatives
Sound as though a warm afternoon.
"The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone."
-Carl Sandburg
Briscoe Oct 2019
I saw your lost chocolate fattener,
I remember him like a suspect on the wall.
Ears ate words from mouths from one another.
He had your hat on his head where he wore
Your halo last week. You two upside down
On each other's head, under each other's
Heels. While before, during and after's drowned
In this blur of… He had a jacket. Verbs
Begin to be proverbs prompting old thoughts
From the better time only two weeks ago,
Or so he tells me. He said, "Cobwebs caught
Something, still sticky but just drying slow."
I said "You know she said she regrets thee."
He said, "Better that than she forgets me."
"When you think of a chocolate, the word yummy comes into your mind. Almost all the people in this world love chocolates. When someone offers a piece of chocolate to you, there's absolutely no way you can resist taking and eating it.
Chocolate depicts different things. sinful temptations, sweetness, greediness, time for celebration, special occasions, love and romance, lust and also desires.
Meaning of a chocolate dream depends upon the kind of dream you see. were you happy when you consumed the chocolate? Did it taste good?"
-WeKnowYourDreams.com
Briscoe Feb 2020
Opinions splatter across my mind
Like graffiti on a sign
That gets harder and harder to conceive
But all the more interesting to see.
77 · Feb 2020
New Family
Briscoe Feb 2020
"Shut up!" I cried, as we children raced up
And down the hallway. He never gave up.
He never let me win. It wasn't fair.
Broken, indoor winds streaming through our hair.
We raced and raced and raced. Trails in the floor
Leveled by our vehement feet. Those closed doors
Where our mother's colleagues blocked out the noise,
Shutting out relentless cries from a boy
That would in distant days grow to be me.
I have an image of the place I see
As I close my eyes. A faded, dimmed reprise.
These old memories remind me of now
As now reminded of them
As yesteryears remind me of yesterday
And things I chose to say.
I recently called someone my family
And now I wonder if I have made the word cheap.
I don't have these memories
Not with my new company.
Briscoe Aug 2019
Gasoline wraps itself around the flesh
And a rainbow flash ignites and incites
Chants from demons, simmering licks and a mesh
Of flames fuming dance and phosphorous lights.
An ancient skeleton, given green life
By rain, now flickers, flares red and yellow
And disintegrates to ash. Caring wife,
Who holds the river on his path below
Off seaward where oars find direction,
Is as shapeless as his watery substance.
While we share in hollow conversation
Death burns with vibrations and vibrance.
But I sit a world away, awaiting
The toxic touch that this death will bring.
thanks to Moments Before for inspiring the central theme of this poem
Briscoe Oct 2019
Dilly dally, dilly dally, the dandelion desintegrations.
These country town thoughts appear just as though
A dolly pulled back and shrunk creation
Till dust dots in morning light. The shadow
Of infinity sharing silence done
Within my mind. String theory confirmed hereby
An avian feathery cosmos made
In colours, shapes and shades, flowing to fly
Gilded and gliding. Powers to persuade
Not existent in words or praise. A phrase
Unable to capture what eyes cascade
Upon me. Despite this, a make believe face
Consumes my will and not for memory
I would recreate, nor an open path,
But simply a fantasy I can see
With glee through my mind. A fancy, wet scarf
I drape on me at dawn and under black.
So do I dream of dreams or girls I lack?
So would valkyries convey me to Avalon?
So would avian visions
Fly me off and away.
"Arabella's got some interstellar gator skin boots
And a Helter Skelter 'round her little finger and I ride it endlessly
She's got a Barbarella silver swimsuit
And when she needs to shelter from reality
She takes a dip in my daydreams"
-Arctic Monkeys
76 · Sep 2019
The Peruvian New Year
Briscoe Sep 2019
The hour hand swings around to twelve,
Like an executioner's axe
Or perhaps a guillotine
Towards the head of the snake
That feeds upon itself.
The Earth's orbit, allegedly complete.

Flickers of images, she dances
Round and round the embers.

Since this morn, a monarchy fell. To say
"All the king's horses and all the king's men
Toppling wood carvings, piled up like greyed hay."
All the landscapes and shapes of paint, blackened
By an incredulous shadow. "Lights out!"
Cried the wicker man, as the blaze burnt down
The last efforts and thoughts effigies
Can muster. His energies
Exhausted and run out,
Like children's feet over the ashes,
Like the last scampering echoes he heard.

"Burn the embassy.
Shower the embers
Over the Sea.
Recall the sounds of November.
Save for them, no mercy."

Oh! But isn't it a delight,
All flamenco shaped flames
Lifting throughout the night?
All the jokes, japes and games.
Flickers of images, she dances
Round and round the embers.
The Peruvians are bustling,
Stirring up some smoke.
The populous is burning
Tires to make them choke.

Since this morn, a monarchy fell.
Thorns in his hair, ablaze with red,
Burns In the air, unresurrected,
Fumes, firm pillared, piled firmaments
Not faintly reminiscent of Hell.
"my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one."
-Cesar Vallejo
76 · Jan 2020
Aaaghh
Briscoe Jan 2020
The train hit me
With the ocean's blues.
Blows from sad songs, deep
As an ocean tune
Pouring through shells.
Deep as empty wells.

The key was patience
But now it's courage
I left on the bench
In the last carriage.
"Stop this train" -John Mayer
75 · Feb 2020
From Ages Past
Briscoe Feb 2020
I saw three black towers' silhouettes
Against a white light
Deep into the night.
We knew these were the bones of brick giants
From ages passed.
Before the steel spiders killed them all.
Before the steal spiders dragged their hulking bodies
To flattened the roads
And weft shattered glass, silver webs
Over and in every hole of flesh
In the old brick giants' remnants.
I lay a paw down and listened for a whistle
And knowing it wasn't to come, listened
To hear a stray cat's story teller tell the end.
Yet, great sprays of illumination
Splashed up on our secret meeting
And scattered us to the night.
Briscoe Oct 2019
There the lighting lashes
And a glade in the nebulous
Reveals astral flowers.

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

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

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

Now it's getting dark and the sky looks sticky
More like black treacle than tar
Black treacle
Somebody told the stars you're not coming out tonight
And so they found a place to hide"
-Arctic Monkeys
74 · Sep 2019
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
74 · Sep 2019
¿
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
74 · Oct 2019
At the Library Again
Briscoe Oct 2019
I sit in the heart of some mason's guitar
As defined by echoes as by design.
Books and scampering eyes are scanned like stars
From telescope glasses in silent time.
I see crystal girls sit across from me
With their obsidian hair, silver oars
Of light sinking like oblivion keys
Through tremulous tartarus. Strands force
My eyes like gravity, yet can't compel
Me enough to pull questions from these lips.
Do eyelids talk, to tell more than words tell?
I feel them, as the moon feels tides and rips.
But I do as usual…

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

Then a soprano cough.
"Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves that I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms
Of course I do
But I get along without you very well"
-Jane Brown Thompson
74 · Oct 2019
SONETIKA
Briscoe Oct 2019
Lad with a mouth, loud lauts gotta shout,
But there's nought profound to be found
In the sound spilling out.

A flicker and a flutter of his platter;
A splitter, a splatter,
Spraying splashing spit dispenser.
Twister, tengo, tempo, soft tongue dancer
Doing the worm to wiggle words into form.
Peter changes with an interpreter
After a translators had their way,
If they so choose.
Define a sign to find value
Not in it's use or what it can do.
So build a statue of Zeus
And put a deus into it like glue.
He misses her kisses, finds lips to replace her
Calls them a name they say on an early date.
They say so much.
Read between the lines to find white
And nothing but.
Inspired by a video I saw relating Jean Baudrillard to American ******.

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
-Shakespeare

"I thought I saw you in The Battleship but it was only a look alike
She was nothing but a vision trick under the warning light
She was close, close enough to be your ghost
But my chances turned to toast when I asked her if I could call her your name."
-Arctic Monkeys
74 · Feb 2020
The Dragon
Briscoe Feb 2020
There was a light in the clouds.
We all felt it as it came
And forgot it as its sound
Faded, along with the rain.
The smoke cleared its throat and then
Dragon fire precisely struck
All the world at once.
Briscoe Feb 2020
I cried during the movie Step Brothers,
And I must warn for spoilers.
Basically, a girl I like called me a loser.
I wasn't a hard worker, not anymore.
I was without an employer.
I didn't focus on academia.
I didn't focus on anything more
Than being a writer.
I knew I was probably gonna die poor.
Then I watched Step Brothers
And here were these losers
And I just watched and as I did, all i could remember
Was "You're a loser."
Then I sank further and further
Into self pity. Flattened and weaker.
Then Will Ferrel sang 'Por Tí Volaré'
And I felt a tear…
And another
And another
And all together,
In this fall of water
And for some reason,
One moment of pure beauty
That wasn't ashamed to be comedy,
Like that part of Shrek 2 with 'I Need A Hero.'
It magically, shamelessly,
Lifted a shadow
From me.
It's strange to me how many movies and Tv shows originally intended for children have such a resonance with adults as well and a lot people blame nostalgia, but I always wonder if it's because these movies and shows allow themselves to not be taken too seriously without sacrificing any of the passion behind it. They don't conform or try to be Shakespeare, they're just artists doing their best in a simple story.
73 · Oct 2019
Scepticism
Briscoe Oct 2019
Putting it in a metaphor doesn't
Make it true Confucius. Philosopher
Kings of academia collapse, sent
Away like the rest. All the inventors
Say science isn't a religion and yet
The facts don't work without faith in some test.
So we'll see it go around at sunset
No matter what beautiful book you've read.
Yet even Hume and Nietsche must accept
Beliefs must be kept. So we must interpret
Our universe with faith in our friends' witness
When they attest or confess. Disproving
One fallacy or falsehood an evening.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-Albert Einstein
71 · Sep 2019
Self-Consciousness
Briscoe Sep 2019
I am terrorised for I am my flaws
And I fear I'll never be more.
My mirror melts like words of Eleanor.
My ears bleed, leak by metaphors,
Like an overused *****,
To hear such decor
Of air carved and reformed.
I have, without remorse
Been to words as criminals of war
To the Jews and the poor.
I am mortified that I fear not failure, nor
To be impossibly less nor to be never more.
At least, they can't drain the life from a corpse.
"Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart. "
-Sonnet 62, Shakespeare
71 · Aug 2019
Exam Room
Briscoe Aug 2019
Volts of boredom course through me.
Jolts of energy strike like flies
So I click, click, click my pen quickly,
Then meet with eyes which despise my sight.
What compels them to work?
Scattered, shattered tatters faint
Seeing innards inwards were
Grey and drenched in drying paint.
What force keeps them to this course?
Holding my pen and pain of knowing
The examiners offer no remorse
With that cow's eyes narrowing.
I should rise and rally some revolution
But I won't, I'll just click, click, click my pen.
71 · Oct 2019
We Are But Breath of Fire
Briscoe Oct 2019
The blank black of vacuity stretches East
With white streaks, with flaming meteor showers
To combine the sublime with a burning wreath.
This unbreakable spine, this cosmic flower
With physics' patterns in her form, shade and shape,
The thorns upon the multidimensional strings
Of this vast vessel who observe her own way.
The mass mediocrity of creation thinks
Herself so specifically defined by arbitrations
It can't know how well it knows or if it knows
At all. Construction. Destruction and function
Drawn with chalk on a blackboard, stars on shadows,
Those wisps of moonlight in silver song's pieces.
I only know the lonely God, when I know
This universe's fundamental forces.
'All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, But He does according to His will in the host of heaven And among the inhabitants of earth; And no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, 'What have You done?''
-Daniel 4:35
70 · Jan 2020
Once & Forever
Briscoe Jan 2020
I watched the soldier, fallen
Aloft the absorbent green.
When will I be forgotten?
I once said of memories
They are dead things hung on walls
Drawn from imagination.
How will time, after I fall
Withdraw my memorium.

I once thought the past was dead,
Stiff, motionless in the grave.
I now see the past lives yet,
Onward, unchanging to wave
No flags of dull surrender
Whether or not we remember.
It is not that the song is sung of us
But that we have sung
And we let others sing
While we each have a time
To draw ourselves into eternity.
"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn."
-Laurence Binyon
70 · Oct 2019
Love & Lust Lost
Briscoe Oct 2019
Knowing only our words and dancing lips,
But not her thoughts, I pierced black with blunders.
Arrogant to assume our bright abyss
Between was traversed. As vein bells thundered.
Vaunting my vice and confidence as those
Weft waves vaunt of their temporality.
Great velocity bringing long shadows,
Charges, a Rhamesses' dream of history
Set surely towards shores of broken sand.
From an alien surface I see rings,
Like a silver tiara in her strands,
Divide black of night. My mind in foreign
Lands, where lust is lost among moondust streets,
Where I waltz alone. Memory's a wreath.
Sheets of Saturn, of silk upon the heat,
She was a white clothe upon our own teeth.
Flames of her furnace, her firmament crown
Hearth of my heart, I have forever found
To be somewhere between eternity and me.
"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
-Percy Bysshe Shelly
70 · Feb 2020
Something Romantic
Briscoe Feb 2020
We snuck up like clouds,
Away from the music
And the constructions site sounds
That rumbled up the hill.
We used our jackets on the wet dew
To keep us warm, to make our soft picnic
And then with just me, the moon and you,
Stole a brief kiss.
70 · Oct 2019
Spanish Girl
Briscoe Oct 2019
This joker fell through vats of chemical
Desperation, severely misplaced desire
And maybe a drop of a drink. Too cool
Not to be too rapidly set on fire
When I set my eyes on a mujeres.
I hit on a girl at my Spanish class
But we weren't speaking the same languages.
Worst of all I took it way to fast for us.
My corona, my cheap beer is her crown.
My idioms and her idioma
And the spiciest sauce I can take down
Es simplemente su salsa normal,
Although, she doesn't like her meat so white,
I don't really mind not being her type
Because you can't cry over that each time.
"cuando el cierzo no parece
perdonar.
sirena, vuelve al mar,
varada por la realidad.
sufrir alucinaciones
cuando el cielo no parece
escuchar."
-Heroes Del Silencio
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.
70 · Feb 2020
To Write
Briscoe Feb 2020
My boldpoint booms like bazooka
In a silent movie.
My books takes off like a booking
For a spacecraft imaginary
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