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Or earthquake shake, or civil war;
When tidal wave wash far in from the shore,
The gravedigger's wife takes comfort on earth:
There'll be food on the table,
There'll be fire in the hearth.
Irony
 Sep 2012 Critter Khan
Day
I hop into a bed most nights,


                         most nights I take my ******* off and if I’m lucky then there’s something soft like a blanket knit by my grandmother’s hand or sometimes the boorish **** of a man, it’s all the same;

something soft to soothe my soul at night.

sometimes I paint my lips the scarlet of a harlot so that my smirk will weaken someone at the knees,
                         I only hope; and to get into my bed at night they need only say please, brush my dissipated face
with their disappointed fingers
and then whisper you could be so beautiful… and the loneliness consumes me,
then it begins to confuse me
and I could hide in here for days simply staring at a picture,
or I could drink it all away with a girl and then I’d kiss her

    but it’s all the same escape; I’m just trying to soothe my soul with something soft tonight.
 Jun 2012 Critter Khan
Helen
Down by the river
I did quiver
Did you wonder?

You caressed my breast
Over my protest
Under your conquest

Wild flowers were my bed
On several pleas I fled
Now I wonder?
Did you just want to be fed?
Every lie beat to the thunder
Released by your hunger

I traced your energy
Far north than your thought

I never denied what you wanted

Count me as a willing bride
Arrested in time
Ready for more than a moment
Every time I relive the memory
Did you ever wonder if I wondered?
a new one! surprise.... I love acrostics and I found inspiration tonight :-)
 Mar 2012 Critter Khan
Helen
a place to hide,
a palace of mistakes
all mirrors are broken,
just reflections,
fractured pieces of glass,
not bone,
lying scattered upon the breaks
of waves that lap at scattered artists
thrown, broken upon the shore,
bleached bones of arctic winters
seep coldly into open pores

Thine eyes captured all that you saw

a litany of shattered verse lines a beach
littered with bones of the walking dead
several heads,
bobbing upon the waves
weave casually at the words that are fed
to starving children that lay with their
head on laps of empty maws,
gaping,

instead....

Thine eyes captured all that you saw

all the words uttered in prose,
are fed to starving addicts that consecrate
the earth, fallen from their heavens,
wings severed from bone,
several uttered irreverence, only to be cast
in stone,
only to be remembered by
just a handful
who wished to just walk alone

but...

Thine eyes captured all that you saw

to read,
to devour,
to sup from the chalice
of Life,
to drink in the purity of another
that is casting about in the night,
trying to make a difference,
trying to make a statement
trying to ask for Forgiveness,
trying to make
it right...

Thine eyes captured all that you saw

Here,
where I am nobody
I see what you see,
I saw what you saw,
I try to say the same,
I'm muted by awe

but

*Thine eyes captured all that you saw
to my fellow poets/poetesses.... I saw what you saw, I see what you see.... where I am nobody, one day I might be...
 Jan 2012 Critter Khan
Helen
7 hours of torrential rain
driving slowly while insane
420 minutes of Country Music
which you know I hate
interspersed with idiosyncratic ads
that make a mockery of others fate
84 cigarettes flow out of the ashtray
one lit by the other as the miles
faded away. The glaring orange tip
as it burnt down to ash and died
is the only reason I lit another
thinking of you and my hope
to keep you alive
for just one more mile.
Please be ok...
Less than 1/3 of a day ago
I picked up my phone only to hear
several tears, and a small hiccup
and heard a heart trying to be brave
and I literally dropped my life
to get into my car, which is now
my home because I breathe the same breath
as the life that is now mine to save
All I said was
I'm coming, now behave
So after 7 hours of listening to
how His and/or Her heart did someone wrong
because I can't change the station
because the radio is broken and, well
I actually do like a heartbreaking song
I'm almost there but thinking of you
my heart lurched and my whole body ******
and the Cops where there, and I'm caught
I would have been there sooner but apparently
it takes longer to write a simple ticket
when they want to be long winded
about the horrors of speeding.
I want to scream at them
Look at my bleeding eyes
Have you seen my ashtray?
Can't you hear the garbage spewing
from my radio? Don't you think
all that adds up to I need to be on my way?

So after 7 hours of torrential rain
overflowing ashtrays and a $540 fine
I'm next to you, in your bed
as we lay under linen sheets and whisper
to each other, about how heartbreaking
Love can be and I'm relived to be here
even as you repeat you are fine
Sleep deprivation and a small stipend
to the Law and Order that protects us
is a small dividend to pay.
And the Country Music still ringing in my ears?
is pure torture but everything
is a small price to pay
when summoned by a friend
in need
All the horrors above
are suffered gladly
You call me, I heed
You cry, I bleed
Your champion in rusty armor?
Indeed!
an oldie :)
 Jan 2012 Critter Khan
Day
there’s evil in the way I sway my hips
                           ( like sailing ships through a hurricane hell )
where heat under eyelids
meets the cold of the outside

and storms are ****** up
from the atmosphere
and through my throat;
they claw and scratch
and make their way down
into my stomach
to sit and swell

( in a hurricane hell... )

there’s something devilish about
how all I want to do is kiss you even though
I know I’ll only **** you in the end

they tell me rainbows, they are somewhere
and sometimes I can feel them,
but you can’t see the hues through the gray and sleet
or be thankful for shoes if you haven’t got feet,
and fireworks can feign the colours so well
but nothing’s real in here
,  ( in this hurricane hell )

and if my eyes were cold
and not so ******* old maybe I could see the way you do;
a ship in a bottle.
 Dec 2011 Critter Khan
Helen
the empty street mirrors
her gaze, while many feet
pass by her in a daze
her flat stomach is just
a simple illusion as she
fools others in her delusion
she kisses the air for the rent
of the back alley she haunts
tucking her curls behind ears
that ignore the taunts
the twenty rolled nicely
for her to breathe freedom
the fifty was a bonus
for three of them
two fifty dollar notes
sit squarely in her gaze
but the gun in her hand
means an end to her days
 Dec 2011 Critter Khan
Julius
Whirls of smoke have sidled our brains
Leaving emptiness
Nights of withering inconsequence
Tinted with ghastly strokes of melancholy wit
As we grasp for more, addicted
Believers in merriment, but to no end

Fooled. The past has gone
Ah! But we are stuck, bitter nostalgics
Laughing at the times past, when we strove
Happy, for entertainment,
And stumbled'pon narcotics
I feel I have seen the failures in our ways

We've no love like we did once
But you each remain
Staunch defenders, heads spinning  
Single minded in your quest
Sober you are morose, reticent
But what merriment is brought?

Why did I take this rending smoke?
For these tired looks, into nothingness
As we recede into bubbles of self-indulgence?
We disconnect, and throw away all reciprocity
As weeds paucity causes faces to turn yonder
Or to themselves in sadness.

Is it that we are dying?
Or will be be forever stuck, in this eternal stupor?

What can stir us from these technological wonders
That light our faces in our self-absorbed, transfixed stares?
With comfort paramount, and misery found
In repressed echoings of a warmer, better place, away
From the throes of competition fought with tooth and claw
For meaningless aspects

Far from the yelps of laughter
The endless, choked machinations
The giggles and dreams of helpless schoolboys
They are only found to us when **** is plentiful
Those days have receded, like us
Away from our sight and our thoughts

We don’t embrace the life we give eachother in company
As we could, no,
Stinginess and selfishness are first
We don’t create a sound
As much as we engulf others
In our stream of subtle consciousness
Is this what you wish for?
A world of these faces staring, cold, tired
Is this what you think of?
When you dream of some stoner’s Utopia?

Or does malice engulf us too much to look upon ourselves as we do others
With phased memories that act as barriers to progression
And our life.                                                            ­                                         My friend
Your flat face may turn from this to silent, personal mutterings
Of cursed levity
As you are cursed with a ghostly heart.
You should not utter a word of revile
Or turn yourself up in sneers

Trust in what I tell, with honest roused from my soul
And do not take it in passing
Like you so turgidly and heedlessly do all things
Crying hope shattered in these passing moments
With evil beyond compare,
Incarnate in your expression,

Do not, my friend
Look upon me with the icy malice of derisiveness
Nor with the shallow, empty eyes of hedonistic senselessness
No, brother, instead realize
With momentary individualism, the gravity, at least to me
Of these words. I speak morbid
Of my, our humanity, in our restless silence
And our uttered oaths and in our artifice of the tongue
And in all things that shiver my blood to even think of

If it is so that our acquaintance is founded on a passionate whim
On a fairy’s wing, on the smothered apparition of a dream
And not grounded in earthly brotherhood,
Reposed of efforts of the mind
Then this is the end for us, brother
For I will no longer cut my heart across this herb, turncoat
As you have, in its infirmity
And cold infer’nality
 Dec 2011 Critter Khan
Day
dig
 Dec 2011 Critter Khan
Day
dig
shield yourself from winds of shattered glass
sparkling and dancing ‘cross the desert
in a twist of fate
veiled
she emerges
tall with tools in hand
strikes earth with God-like blasts
and swiftly sets the dust by her command

cracked orange and beige line horizons ahead
three-hundred sixty degrees of dry, dry land
sweat drips
from forehead
to feet beneath
but the hot ground drinks
your juice before it can be seen
like the jerky flesh of a jack-rabbit
turned from corpse to some dry, dry bones

follow along the waving, molten paths
seductive tones will take you by the hand
and lead if you beware of the mirage
ubiquitous; devious, ambiguous
so shut your eyes, open your mind
"there will be no man left behind."

in her tracks she halts, and smiles
she rests in place still as cacti
a singular explosion
starts to shatter the terrain
she dives into the chasm
and  begins to dig
and dig and dig;
she builds a home
always enclosed
to dwell, to dig
warm within
the valley of
wisdom.
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