Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
May 2019 · 276
Smoothing
William May 2019
He would act on hate
But call it kinetic indifference
Like a natural disaster
(Or a budding ideology)
Conscience behind the wave
Some kind of Freudian slave
Imploding with rage
Exploding with love
Eroding the face of God
The blind are out of luck
May 2019 · 220
Jelly-Hocked
William May 2019
A hermit crab in a soda can
Evicted from a bubble gum dungeon
Fireworks on the tongue
Licking undertow of heavy sod
Swaddled in laminate pressure
Breathing sea foam
In a featherless sinking slant
An elastic anchored pendulum
Falling zagged
A jelly-hocked comet
With coattail streamers
Fertilizing liquid nickel
May 2019 · 157
Remote
William May 2019
She stood quiet, flipping through her moods
Like depression hunting through late night cable
Dutiful bloodhound digits sniffing out relief
They fall on the carcass of something that was killed in the 90's
Puncturing the bloated cadaver a noxious fume spills out
And lulls me to sleep
Nerves untangle, the blowfish deflates
The best self-defense is reason, but it's held me at bay
It's out there somewhere
Howling at the gates
May 2019 · 160
Learning
William May 2019
Celestial cataracts, tunnel-visions of the Gods
Gossamer glory and rusted revelations
Ruins upon ruins upon ruins, on the brink of ruin
Catastrophic license, divine influence
Be merciful to the self... Above All Else

Micing conch shells and waiting for instructions
I was drowning in silence
Listening to the fog
Fuzzy-eyed and supine
Staring at the bottom of the sky
Where the shade tastes like sea breeze
And the soul flashes its sailfeathers
May 2019 · 162
Tactile Silence
William May 2019
She retreated, the slimming distance
Nibbled her silhouette
Until a crustless crumb pecked by a starling
Spun a winged pirouette
Into the sun

And I, pouting in the throb of tactile silence
May 2019 · 161
The Pugilist
William May 2019
Most people lead with the jab
But his 1-2 punch was dactylic
The majority of his poems are haymakers
Homogenous mixtures of slurred speech
That rarely connexts

His footwork is nothing special
He still finds the canvas too springy
He's distracted by blinking

Graceless graphite paws
Taking granite swings
Skipping chips of deadweight loss
Embedded in the stream of ink
Now dripping from his brow
The fighters looking up
And the ref is counting down
May 2019 · 176
Moral Gumbo
William May 2019
Out of conversation
Stirring moral gumbo
Squint red-tinted as if
Looking through a glass of chagrinadine
In a surely tempest
Grassed at impasse

Mute in the mind's eye
Sifting through hindsight
Every find was a light
That's already burnt out

And once silence is broken
And patience kneels for me to climb up
I pay tribute to the sunrise
The perpetual ripening
Among the sticky-sweet decay
May 2019 · 152
Dead Pan
William May 2019
Ire is in her pupils
Rainbow fire
Breathing in, breathing out
Inspiration expired
She is the furnace driving the choir
Her backdraft jilts the spirit higher

Excuse me...
Exposure makes the humor drier
And the bread stale
May 2019 · 197
Breadth
William May 2019
A true emissary of breadth
Shallow in trajectory
A speck became a wreck
In the backdrop of infinity

Appalled by the bearers of all

Can you cram it all in?
Foot. Crow. Words. Pride.
May 2019 · 160
A Gun
William May 2019
A chamber wreathed by powdered scarab husks
Leaden dervish whirling
Cookie cutter punches
Sideways churlish purling
A muffled roar mid-whistle
Doppled whisper curling
A puckered ejection
Twisting gristle
Saturnal tick
Gorging gorges with squeegee sips
May 2019 · 126
Venus Flytraps
William May 2019
Sometimes a heavy yawn can
Feel like digging a shallow grave
Eyelids shovel the sandman's mud
and you lie in ambush half awake
Like a venus flytrap waiting
To bless a stranger with some shelter
In the closing superdome of your affection
Gummed to death by a ******* flower
of conscience, digested in
Insensate reactivity
You absorb what you love
And repeatedly insist
That the laws of nature
In the semantosphere exist
William May 2019
My triggers are revealed
The entire plectrum spectrum
Scraped by bows
Hamartial law is meta-sin

Wild breath stabled in consonants
Like a pilgrim posing in an archway
A loaded bolt, an unquiet chamber
In naked exile---flailing at strangers

A dissolute solution? Absolutely.
But paranoia sees emergence
Into metanoia in sane convergence
Resurgence of urgency is an enemy to urchins
May 2019 · 230
Regret
William May 2019
I can't remember
But I'm thinking about memories
Too many fingerprints
Clouding up the scotch tape
On a broken lens

And what is innocence?
An instant weighed against insistence?
I hear perdition's persistent
And penitence of repentance is tinder
May 2019 · 141
Well Wishing
William May 2019
I thought that I could think myself to anything
Because the mind is for wishing, but
Wishes are besieged by wants
Taunted by the echoes of the well
Asynchronous haunts
May 2019 · 127
Deep Fried Ambergris
William May 2019
Anxiety smothers reason in the swelter of shelter
Claustrophobic familiarity threatening avalanches
Leaving Matryoshka burial mounds
Piles of broken pylons soaking in puddles of bulk
Beneath the glassy gaze of taxidermied chaos

Calcified Mounds of once-maybe treasure
Form a cavernous regret
Where mite is rite
And the moth is a man of the cloth
May 2019 · 117
Insult And Injury
William May 2019
He doublespeaks
But one voice is an octave higher

The alto is shaky
The tenor wants to be base
Waving bladed feelers

You bleeding sphinx-heart!
Fool Hunter!

We both just want to know how big this cage is

I rattle the cage and you're cagey and rattled
I won't race on your terms
I can outrun the saddled
May 2019 · 100
On The Road To Normalcy
William May 2019
A lot of missed writing opportunities
Some days I might think it
But I'd rarely ever write something like
"Diary of cryarrhea"
In some lights it's like a cute Tom Robinsonism
But from most angles it's too cheap to serve as filler
I'd like to think I can gain something by letting loose a little
But too often it feels like farting in church
May 2019 · 111
The Individual
William May 2019
Thinking about planned obsolescence in nature
Trying to find a way to justify capitalism
Where every act of immediate gratification
Is a crack of the whip
And every lash, every scar
Is accompanied by a token with a price tag
Battered batteries not fit for a landfill
Fat on flattery, pandering to wishing wells
Mad about mattering

Holding mass at a molasses menagerie
Of flypaper families with hourglass salaries
Bending to plastic
The **** from caste to caste is drastic
Might not be able to patch it
Empathetic, but that feeling clashes
With everything we're asked
And everything we're tasked with

It's for the greater good of the individual
May 2019 · 154
Intemolegacy
William May 2019
She's got fingernails like beetle shells
Lashes like arachnids
Grasshopper cloppers
And the feelers of a healer
Loud as a monarch

She's got a tick
That's gorged itself to grapehood
Her second heart exposed
Like a colostomy bag
Some kind of mystery flag
Rolled up, dipped in kerosene
And stuffed into a bottle of glowworms
May 2019 · 134
Circling Back
William May 2019
Tall tales, wagging tongues
I'm headed west for the vestiges
Unabridging the hints in yesterdays messages
Soul scavenging mannequin droll
From the costume jewelry of conversation
Deep in the hard drive of stone faced agony

I am gripped by the phantom limb of a nubbed Esau
Vexed by Elijah's wrathful honeybear
Haunted by the indignance of martyrs
Quoting crickets and sowing thickets
I can't find who brokers the barters
May 2019 · 215
Spoiled Milk
William May 2019
I can feel your pain
It sounds like ice melting in my inner ear
A whisper towing the ides of March
Like the turning of a page
A dayblink gesture
A cyclone of chaotic intention
Mechanically sorted and pressed
Gone to waste behind the spoiled milk
May 2019 · 117
Panther Piddle
William May 2019
My God this place is run by critters
Love nestles in the shade
Where all moving shadows are predatory
And a lost child dreams of wildfires
Holding the hand of an arm-sized stick
He lumbers through an unbeaten path
Vomiting greasy puddles of gasoline
Eyes shining as ferocious as panther piddle
And the bunnies scatter!
May 2019 · 138
Impostor
William May 2019
A ploy cloys coy
Boiling in your lachrymose cloister
Suspicious bubblings and clammy affection
Sentience and vengeance
Sentence and vigilance
Intense beliegerance
May 2019 · 110
Fever Pitch
William May 2019
Frozen at the cliff of reason
I want to believe
But it's a long way down
Through crag and crumble
Where footing isn't found
And gravity gets hazy
In the yawning wink of the abyss
Below an ebbing pitch
Static black
Epochal pulsing of the rhythmic rift
I bungee into the galloping buzz
Like Achilles and his swan dive dip
May 2019 · 205
I Hate The Feeling Of Wind
William May 2019
I hate the wind
The wind is like the conscience
It saltates through parallax angles
And belittles you
The tiniest draft is like
Being dragged through a burlap sack
The wind pulls my lifeline
And I spin like a pinwheel

My nakedness is the dipping point
Death sheds its modesty and
Works up the courage to slip me some GHB
I pray that I sleep through to the next life
May 2019 · 120
Temp Job
William May 2019
I worked for a year in that office
The they tore up my constitution
And replaced it with a plaque on the wall
Called me a hero and scheduled my euthanization
May 2019 · 144
Back To The Books
William May 2019
Don't threaten me with Ahab's death, that's romantic
Because purity of heart is to will one thing

Don't tempt me with Monte Cristo's fate
Or Joseph's state around year 8
I wanted love, I wanted acceptance

So pick me up Zarathustra
And drop me in the earth
Or else the sea, but first the fire
While I try to find some worth
May 2019 · 119
Lattices
William May 2019
I've been stealing from the sun
Squint-whittling spears of light
That sink into my pupils like molding pins
And come alive like tapeworms
Carving a writhing yolk
Pulsating against paper-thin opalescence
A pre-amble to the impossible puzzle
May 2019 · 131
It's All Long Distance
William May 2019
Have you ever heard
A catastrophe at the other end of a telephone?
The shriek and silence
Of unknown violence
The wail and moan of a dial tone
Phonetic kinesis corked!
Words twisted to the snap
Wrung to the crack
A digit bridge bedlam
Calcination of lispy, nasal, rasp, and husk
Bellow whispers fanning ash
A static sting and the ears go black
May 2019 · 102
Imperious Vicarious
William May 2019
Manufactured certainty
Is not make-believe
It's something much more horrifying
A universal need

A rationalized worldview depends on a bubble
Some say ignorance is worth all the trouble
Me? I'm an imperious vicarious
Phaethon without ever touching the chariot
May 2019 · 135
Saint of Folly
William May 2019
Make me saint of the excuse
I'll color in the black and white
Justify all non-systemic abuse
The oppressed aren't bad
They're just misused

I know the saint of folly
Like a brother or a mood
He's a misfired love that crash-landed
Strangled by a lesser brood
May 2019 · 115
Unwritten Letter
William May 2019
He found me with a gaping chest wound
And cauterized me with a brand
Called it collateral damage
But when it came time to deliver
The wax seal was deemed to beautiful
It was decided my contents should remain a mystery

The vowels have no breath
The consonants have no spine
The intention never was
What wasn't never does
What doesn't ever wants
A paper airplane in a fiery crash
No black box, 10 seconds to ash
I'd rather be put through a shredder
And when mania sets in - pieced together
Or at least confetti for some wedding
Or a kenneled kittens bedding
But, alas, I'll simply decompose
A muffled scream, a frantic ghost
May 2019 · 119
Scarecrow
William May 2019
I asked you how it felt to carry me
You shrugged, dropped a deadweight apology
And drifted ahead, dumb and silent
Non-responsive, the task complete
Abraham was Don Quixote the second he saw blood
You were St. Paul
May 2019 · 123
Sad Day in Tourist Town
William May 2019
Ducking the mantid mandibles of a consummate morning
I thrash in half-dream slog and squish
Amniotic chrysalis, unsplit, darkened
Adrift an ocean of bliss in a water balloon

The rain is brittle
The snow is jagged
And the sky is funneling loneliness
Down the icy porcelain chutes
To the tired murk of unholiness
Where excuses are wallpaper
And the blues are gift-wrapped

Bluebirds with batwings
Sing hymns to their hatchlings
In the din of eternal hiss
The chirp of absurdity listens
On the lip of a fleur-de-lis
May 2019 · 770
Exile
William May 2019
In the starvation of exile
Gambling on bright colors
Rapt, *****, fate-accepting hunger
Tugs vicious on the leash
Faint taste of apples
And mistletoe cramps
Among the Cypress, Cedar, Pines
That cross my path
In fog as full as clouds
Fusion of memory and idea
Crowds the milky doom
Where monarchs relax
Strawing gaseous milkweed
I sip from the sky
And await my crown

— The End —