The leeching color from my eyes
My parched mouth puckered
My joints are stiff, stubborn and brittle
Creaking like exhausted floorboards
Wringing my fists, white ands shriveled
Twisting my hands, skinned and raw
I'm ill with desperate thriving
Too weak to carry on, don't have the choice
Veins laden with liqueur, thinning hopes and regret
Pulsing pulsing pulsing
Bones fluttering with birds of bad omen
Scalp rid of hair to make place for the thorny crown of vanquishment
Blood diluted with bitter disappointment,
Sloshing, smearing through my mucked-up system
Aching from the deadly drone of existence
From small victories, large defeats
I'm the mortar, they're the pestle
Clobbering into my hollowed life.

The hammer of that thing
Routine so dull and tedious
Pounding and pounding and pounding
When you can't even scream or weep
Thud thud thud
My temples scream with dank submission
My brain is reeling, hurling from the vertigo of it all.

Morning, noon & night
The dead avenues, the empty buzzing
Beats hammers in my brain
Throb throb throb
I'm quivering with numbness.

I'm mature now, I'm ripe
So ripened and rotten
Adult things, adult preoccupations pulsing around me
It seems like person really only has two choices
Get in on the aimless hustle or be forsaken
I've taken it all up
Rent, coffee, wine, cigarettes and newspaper
Forgotten pills
Unpaid bills
Thump thump thump
Anguish, pain, woe and misery
Turbulence and stress, the banging hammer.

I'm a drunkard, a wanderer
With a beaten, battered suitcase
Days like these, weeks like these, when all the weapons are pointed at me
I'm a ***, an outcast
A pigeon in the pummeling rain
Dribble dribble splash
The ache is a relentless thing.

My job, my rent, my house
My walls limp with memories stuck with rotting glue
Wallpaper torn, curling at the edges
The cold hard floor radiates and screams
The couch, cold & hollow
Incrusted with bits of filthy grime
The dead radiator hisses like an angry snake
The shades down, no sunlight
No life seeping through the venetian blinds
And my clothing sits in the chairs
Like the dead emptied out
The blankets are thin, frayed and tattered
As hope is
The moths, on the other hand, are alive and well
They weave webs of moribund rot
Interlacing me into their strands of decay.

Surrounded by the coldhearted, they snarl
And their laughs abash, dishearten the pure
Bruising me relentlessly
They are so tired, mutilated
either by love or no love
All their bleak and sunken eyes
All their weak and drunken souls
All their meek and shrunken hearts
Vultures with neckties
Weasels in frocks
Collared beasts, that's all they are.

The mournful poet with the shrapnel wound
Was so wrong
I guess he wanted to be lyrical, but his words led astray
Time is not water
It does not flow easy, smooth and transparent
It drags you into dark alleys and batters the hell out of you
Punches you in the ribs, rips your skin,
Jerks you by your hair, stabs you, disfigures you
Leaves you crippled and broken, gasping for air.

Sweating in a rocker
Lanky skeleton hands clasped, praying- for what?
I'm not living, or dying
I'm simply crawling backward
Or no, I'm not crawling, I'm being dragged,
Through nights of lonely perfidy, breathing the beaten dusty air
The dark wind wailing, ebbing through the frail curtains
Laying in bed, too wretched to move
When memories, of heaven and hell,
Droop like broken shades
Across the window of my mind
And ****, I can feel my soul slowly dropping down through the mattress
My stomach is heaving, my teeth clenched and gritted
But not with fear, no, it's too late for dread
And it *****, because we realize we were all so caught up in a life in which we can find no meaning...we end up wrong and graceless and sick
We're born shriveled and alone, we die shriveled and alone
No matter what.

Only several days before we met, I had killed myself several times
Each one for a sin on my soul, repentant death of the ego
And the trees on my grave were hung in joyous apathy
You were neither man nor woman, yet a person all the same
and your hair was smiling

The objective Slavic King was foreboding but intrigued
and you pained to be affectionate
I feigned the aptitude to appease the master
While you danced around the wizard in robes
but the children had no faces

The spectrum gave way to the memories of childhood despair
The dying chair and the wooden man that beat against dun windows
Mossy branches were groping hands that felt the insecurities
and I lay bare in mourning winter air

Still those whistles sing for fallen queens that litter stray beds
The misguided steed in the blacksmith's den, asking for another fix
and the inanimate table that miraculously walked away
They were all there in my vivid nightmare
But you were safe in the rubber box built by nimble giants
and your mother cried alkaline tears

It was cursed pain that you felt
But the horses of your marriage fled for the fields
and you were left there in Novosibirsk
With a silver coin pressed to your chest
And I, lay lonesome in Saratov
'neath the blackening skies
On a wall in Kryty Square

Always, and after things have passed
do I think of you, and see where I went wrong.
then the revelvaltions come so fast
of what I should have done all along.
But somehow in the middle of it all
I forget to call on you
and ask that you'll not let me fall
and that you'll see me through.
Instead I let myself go on and break
the promises I made,
From my uselesness I cannot wake,
all reason seems to fade.
Then always, and after things have passed
do I turn and think of you
and know that you'll forgive me to the last.
How I wish to be worthy of you!

Everything that used to be
Is now all that has been abandoned
Hollow-shelled and left for vultures
Not even bugs dare to touch the dust ridden and forgotten

A marvelous twisted combination of steel
In all its glory laid to rest
Paint chipped in all the wrong places
Blanketed in dust it rides no more

The blanket rises above all
Everything chipped broken and worn to slithers
All around flecks of red or yellow peak out
But what is all around you is a cold insensitive grey

You feel the unloved and unwanted mask to your skin
You hear the children crying, laughing and shouting
You taste the grey clogging you airways with the reminiscent of cotton candy
You see the pain that the beautiful beast has gone through

Fresh salted water now stains in areas where the dust is
Clumping it together like a pitiful pile of unwanted mud
You now see and realize.
You are The Circus

Falling, crisp air folds,
Sculpted by the angels,
This moment, our time.

Eyes awake, I embrace you.
Crystal smile back.

We dance through ephemeral bliss,
Sharing passing solace.
In so rare a moment, I ask,
“Please Last”
As I indulge in your smell.

Hot breath on neck…
Melting. Always melting.
You’re so soft.

Tighter and tighter I squeeze
Thaw becomes inevitable.
The fantasy is fleeting,
Desperation outcries pleading – “Stay”

“Your sparkle delights me”
And still you vanish.

“When will I see you again” I mused,
Water running from finger tips.

“In reverie”

We were interstellar travellers,
children so interested in creating
our infinite microcosmic civilizations,
that we missed it. I saw it,
briefly, once, at night.

We jumped from rock to rock
in the grand pond of the
universe, swam between asteroid reefs
and through the turbulent vents
that were black holes. We
lived everywhere, nowhere,
all at once and for an eternity
at the fringes of galaxies,
and their centres (having burrowed
through the thick skins of dying suns).
We built, advanced, explored,
warred, and coexisted. We knew
everything. We thought.
We knew everything, we thought.

It began as a small blip,
an electromagnetic pulse at the
beginning of time which meta-
imposed itself into the rest of time:
a god, or something of
the sort, it grew and
shrank, and grew and
shrank; a heartbeat--
life. Death.
It ended as a small blip,
an electromagnetic pulse at the
end of time which meta-
imposed itself into the rest of time:
a god, or something of
the sort, it grew and
shrank, and grew and
shrank; a heartbeat--
life. Death.

From the former to the latter,
it sparked creation
and destruction
and advancement
and setback
and belief
and theory
and one
and none.

I saw it,
briefly, once, at night.

by Ashley Capps

Ophelia, when she died,
lay in the water like the river’s bride, all pale
and stark and beautiful against the somber rocks,
her hair an endless golden ceremony.
She made the water sing for her; it flowed
over her folded arms.

Not so my father’s sister Karen,
swollen in a day-old tub of water
when they found her,
needle tucked into the fold of her arm,
her last thing: a wing.

So everything went as nameless as the men
who lifted her naked from the tub,
or those who rolled her
into the mouth of the furnace,
which is what you get
when you don’t get a service,
when your mother’s years of grief turn
last to rage: I won’t pay for it.
Leave me out of it.

And even though they finally said
it wasn’t suicide; a mistake—
no one knew what to do
with all of that anger,
or in the end how not to blame her.

Even now, in her unmarked container.

*


People once believed a deeper reason, some dark secret
motivation to the way the lemmings threw themselves
en masse into the sea. Were they weary
of their lives; could they, too, despair?
Or like those second-vessel swine
when Jesus exorcised two babbling men of their demons,
driving the demons through a pack of bewildered hogs—
the way they plunged?

The truth we know now: they leave when food is scarce,
when they’ve grown too many;
believe the roads they follow
lead to new meadows, a place to start over.

I think of Karen, feeding
and feeding her veins, how it is possible
she saw us all suddenly there—miraculous
and festive on some bright and other shore,
like the life she had been swimming toward
all along, trying to get right.
Like those sailors long ago,
that tropical disease, calenture—
when, far from everything they knew,
men grew sometimes delirious
and mistook the waving sea for green fields.
Rejoicing, they leapt overboard,
and so were lost forever,
even though they thought it was real, though
they thought they were going home.

—by Ashley Capps

Passing by what's worth it, it all makes a bitter sense.
Sticky little liars, sticky little souls,
with a thirst for attention and a long mane of hair.
**** of, marrow and slurp the bone,
no no no no.

The pique of my attention,
is aroused, there's something beneath my bed,
it's gripping the sheets and ripping the threads,
extracting the blood from fingers,
it's making me sweat.
**** you demon I'm not ready for this yet!

Missteps are for the hungry,
mistakes for the reachers,
and I wouldn't **** up if I didn't try.
Liars you keep me in a rut,
sticky little liars.
Confuse me and I'll give up,
not anymore.

Stumble no more,
drifter, I saw you eat the words in your room.
Write on the wall, **** out the nonsense,
let the real stand raw.

And stopping, wont hurt me.
And stopping won't **** me.
And stopping will save me.
And stopping will help,
now, don't let me survive on my own,
help me surprise myself from time to time.

Don't be scared of what makes your heart loud,
don't be scared just be proud,
you can stand on broken feet now.
Picture me, one more time,
on a wire, one more time, make me stronger.
I've got my feet all scarred and here I stand
on the ground soaked with my blood,
now I wait.

As my breath kills this flame
that stands near my mother's ever smiling image
the soft scent of warm candle wax
sweeps through my room.

The smell of comfort left
by the single flame I lit
to tell her so much.

To say thank you
for those fifteen years she held me,
above hunger and the winter's chill.

To show appreciation for each drop
of blood, or of tear
she shed to nurture life in her child.