Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
It was the smoke days, the empty bottle days.
The days of sleep.
It was the ignorance days, the forgetting days.
The days between.

And happiness needn't be found,
misery graced the waking dreams.
And you weren't ever around,
at least that was how it seemed.
And god, sleep would be so sound,
with wide-open eyes deceived.

A change in tide
had me in binds,
when returned,
you,
from your reprieve.

And the light you shined
into my bloodshot eyes
still haunts me in my dreams.

So elusive now is sleep,
hidden between the sheets,
memory flowing in streams.
 Jul 2015 Michael Humbert
Laurent
We have all sublime love
Hidden in its intimate memory.
We all have a lost passion,
A dream which did not return,
Souvenir for a whole life.
Each of us knows it,
The fate never returns.
There is not more than infinite love,
Which will never sink into oblivion.
IF  YOU DON'T GO AFTER WHAT YOU WANT, YOU'LL NEVER HAVE IT.  IF YOU DON'T ASK, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS NO.  IF YOU DON'T STEP FORWARD, YOU'RE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE.
Decomposed and spouting methane
I lie beneath incorporeal trees.
They breathe and bask in the glory
of the thing I used to be.

I tolerate the buzzards with their
hunger for my eyes.
I tolerate the wolves with their
insufferable cries.

Yet even in death I cannot stand it.
I cannot stand your burning love.

The wax drips and
I am but a wick,
fueling your feast of heart.

The cloth rips and
I am but a mannequin,
a grotesque manifestation of your art.

Pin me up in your fields,
in your fields of acrylic and oil.
In your fields of photographs
and I'll enrich your soil.

I'll be your scarecrow,
voiding their caws.

I'll be your mule,
working myself raw.
this is **** and I ******* hate it
******* anyone who reads this
**** anyone
This collar
around my neck,
by which you drag me,
has grown ever heavier.

Yet still I choose
to wear it for you.
Today I wrote a song about your teeth.
They are crooked and imperfect.
Just like this. Our hands. And these
songbirds are all liars. We haven’t learned.
Flesh memory is overrated. Last night
I felt the linen, and it whispered to me
nothing. Not even the shape of you
reminds me of happiness. What is the use
of these metaphors if they can’t
beautify you anymore. No longer as fierce
as the inferno I allowed you to become.
Drowning in bedclothes, trying to understand how streams of consciousness
are becoming bodies of water. Today
I wrote a song about your teeth. And I
read it aloud to the voiceless, and now
they know what love tastes like.
Does hating your own art make you a better artist, or just stranger to your own hands?
Next page