this shy white sun does not shine down on me.
the perfect curve of your cheeks
is the only thing to be bathed in a new gold.
and your face turns sideways, shining silver,
your lips curve upwards,
bruised and reddened and bitten.
cheeks of rose, cheeks of pink,
boiling blood in a heart of ceaseless wonder.
and your mouth; it break the dawn itself
with the fiery stars you spit;
we speak of fire
and the sun burns brighter in the morning.
there is no boldness to this dawn;
it has broken windless and calm,
and all the dark has run defeated to the seas;
to the seas where our fire was quenched.

i was named from out of the fires.
from out of the decaying darkness,
from out of the softly screaming redemption
i was plucked.
i will no longer weep for the love of family;
for the love of those who resent my breath,
who sigh at my pain and reject my anguish.
they shall one day fade unwanted
back into the very fires
from which they stole me.

your face is my poem.
your eyes, your cheeks,
your lips of rosy wine;
they are words of wondrous light.
i have found heaven
in the gentle curve of your chin,
and paradise in your smile.

you are my kindling, my fire,
my burning, burning muse;
your voice is the sound
that flames make at dusk
when the world outside is dark
and the embers are slowly dying.
you could burn down cities with your mouth;
together we could burn down worlds.

eating ice-cream on the promenade.
you sit off to the left,
staring sunward with an arm raised above your head.
the seagulls screech,
screech with their own beauty.
the ice creams melt,
resigned to their own wanderings,
liquid and alone.
and your lips, they split storm-clouds
with the lightnings that you speak,
and all the while the sun breaks bright;
the gold shines through the grey.
we stain our mouths blue,
triumphant in the dawn,
with the ice cream quite forgotten,
washed out by now to somewhere new.

how pained these days of sunshine songs,
how dead these hours of spring.
my tiring heart, it beats for thee,
and never for the sea.

a lonely song of april hearts,
a silent scream of earth.
these stones and rocks are bleeding fast,
these creatures never free.

sing blue and careful in those seas,
sail far, sail wide, sail free.
your heart, it beckons to my soul,
your seas, they burn for me.

that fire we started is like your mind,
and your mind is mad.
you are the fallen, the manic,
the departed sanity of a child
lost to his own dreams of death.
you are the fire starter;
star-forged, mad;
barefoot in rubble by the churning seas,
toes reddened, face reddened,
eyes reflecting depravity.

you see me atop the writing desk,
hair aglow with golden sun,
and awoken, wide with life.
nothing but the slow, silent glow;
screaming, fleeing, chaos raging.
we sit with chopin in the dewing glow of morning,
sun rising, light rising,
but the darkness staying with us,
and the darkness stays with them.

turn, look, weep;
a thousand ****** victories calmly glow,
a dozen glorious motions of grey;
the sky is grey, the dawn is grey,
our flames of the electric dawn are grey,
grey, covered with our ash of madness.

stars call loudly;
burning fire, burning rock,
no silence, no silver,
but fire, fire, fire in the dark.
look from afar at your fiction;
big dipper, little dipper,
dead in skies of ice and black,
dead in times of no-more light
by the time that silver reaches here.

you see me bathed with stars,
drinking moonlight on your window ledge,
laughing, dreaming, crying for the cosmos.
never trust me when I tell you of love,
believe the earth; take comfort in the ground.

nothing gained; a life of small and broken circles,
tiny bumps formed on my own ground,
tiny bumps of drying nectar in silver, shining dimly;
shining dimly; life is not life when life is dying silver.

bloodier than rose-tulips,
a longer red than wine on sundays,
deep,deep,deep;
fire, fire, burning souls,
heartbeats harder than death,
indentations of fingernails on wind-chilled hands,
madness, heat, moonbathed hysteria,
cooled by rain,
cooled by lighter flames,
red, crimson, rose,
blood red, love red, death red,
we are red like the fires of below.

filleted dreams, drip drip dripping into endless streams,
a falcon, a fisherman, a lonely seaboat with a blue stripe on white,
never ceasing, never dying, constant revelation, constant redemption,
dark nights, the tap tap tapping of raindrops on ceilings,
one leg cold and one leg warm, always reaching, never grasping,
a wine-drunken beam, a pill of golden light,
a breath, a whimper of sleep,
a drumming, a drumming, a drumming
of ever-closer watchmen on the rooftops of tenement houses,
weeping and watching and oh so silently
sewing closed their mouths with threads.

something in the darkness, something in the watchmen,
something in the drips of the tap and of the rain
and of the filleted dreams of endless streams,
cry technicolor, cry chromatic,
weep visions of paradise like water from Eden,
no, yes, my cautious child,
darling mother, sleeping father,
drunk drunk drunk on stolen nectar,  
rot, rot, rot into the sour deep,
buried under rubble,
smothered, squeezed, dissected,
infinite life, finite spirit,
cry, cry, cry,
cry stolen and pale into the screams of your indigo dreams.

technicolour, prismatic, spectrumic prayers;
sing holy, cry holy, sleep holy,
shout shattered and screaming and forcing souls,
cry lucifer,
cry morningstar,
cry light-bringer,
cry god-forged son,
cry fallen steel,
cry darkness and revelations and the end of all things.
scream for the lost,
scream for the lamb,
scream for the only forsaken lamb;
darling child, darling warrior, darling evil.

swim deep, cut deep,
high, fading, lost;
flying children, falling children;
do not seek it,
do not find it,
find not the beautiful pain of transience,
fall not on the amber allure of numbness,
no fruitful wines will sooth you now.
cry, scream, sing,
dance atop the tour eiffel
in this hazy noon of sea-skied dawns.

how far have you gone, o star of the morning?
shine, gleam, glow honey-dewed and golden,
drip praise from the eaves of holy vaults,
sing holy holy holy,
sing heavenly father;
redeem me, o sky-lord,
o gatekeeper of the earth,
o glorious master of the sun and seas,
weave trances of hysterical laudations,
spin ethereal galaxies from silken souls,
drink, drink, drink,
drink nectar of silver servitude,
die, fall, scream,
land gracefully into redemption,
sleep lonely, wander lonely,
lonely, lonely, lonely in the land of plenty.

we belong to the starving places, the broken places,
the screaming, shattered, hallucinated alleys
of blood and smoke and demons of shuddering righteousness.
floating lovers running high and poison-drunk
into doorways and neonic windows crying out
for absinthe and holy, holy benzedrine
in glazed teacups of library cafés.
demonic siren-songs,
shrieking car alarms in afternoon machineries,
when all the righteous are sleeping
and the chosen come out to scream
in front of shutters closed down to the ******.

vibrations from the drilling drilling drilling
into the pavements of greying rain-tears and rainbowed gasoline
spilled carelessly from engines
releasing rotten and evil from the deepness of the earth.
those righteous-shutters blow half open
in the madness of waxing moon-winds.

beautiful, beautiful darkness,
beautiful, beautiful damnation,
golden deception,
golden lucifer,
golden hell,
golden lights straying off pathways of dark-deep forests,
golden souls in eager rivers of underworlds,
golden addiction,
golden smiles of torture,
golden wheels of death and birth
and dying, dying, dying for the darkness,
dying with blood running purple
into the indigo road- drains of night,
reflecting golden constellations and golden lamp-posts
and the golden windows of empire state and the l-train.

scream, scream, scream into your indigo death.
fearful, ground-sleeping, six feet forgotten,
fires below, regret above, redemption and tears from the righteous
with their closed windows far above the bodies now.

those starving places belong to us.
the dumpster-fainted concussions,
the vomited acids of last night’s drunken affairs in amber side-streets,
the hollow-eyed babies born out of terror and war
and atomic demises of love and perforated money,
those flawlessly created youths with their drugged immortality
shining broken-skinned from out of their eyes and mouths
those nothing-brained men of poetry and heavenly visions,
those meilleurs esprits,
those wanton dreamers of scotch and rosé
and pure ethanol gulped from glassware,
burning throats and minds and talent
and running genius into drains
with the purple blood of the dying.
the starving places belong to the starving,
and the starving belong to their indigo deaths.

an evening,
a morning,
a coughing grandfather sighing
with all the weariness of a dimming afternoon.
raining,
windy,
the old flower-tree of grandmothers tap-tap-tapping
against the window.
late spring roses dropping dew and dropping petals
lodging their greenish stem-thorns in boiling bloodstreams
hooking their way into the red-thick muscles of hearts
biting paler lips and weaker tongues,
signing songs of dusk and
coughing,
coughing in the afternoon
in their shallow slumbers of  evenings.
call on me weakly,
carry me not into the evening of love,
dimming lamps and fleeting, snoring breaths
call on holy mothers with no more silence
than the tap-tap-tapping
of those flowered grandmother trees.
a morning,
an evening,
parallels of forced breaths and sighing leaf-whispers,
the childish way of half-falling off beds,
shallow, deep, ragged, grumbling inhalations
of neveragain places,
dreams of highlands and weepings of meadows
and woodsmoke in summers.
weep not for life, weep not for death,
weep not for the salty tears in your mouth
weep silent, weep quiet, weep beautiful and stoic,
weep as pretty
as those flowered window-tapping trees in wind and rain,
bite your pale rose-lips like those greenish stem-thorns.
and in the morning,
and in the evening,
sleep deep, sleep deep, sleep deep
but do not weep.

taste this blossom-sung wind
with your tongue of a thousand songs.
forget how to speak by this window,
this window of a dozen softly dreaming springs.
allow this cooling fire to refine your visions
like an icy birdsong in the machinery of noon.
breathe, sigh, shut your eyes to the light;
fear nothing of that gold-dusted dawn,
that rose-tinted glass of tomorrow’s words,
for simplicity favours them;

nothing but the hills of emerald wind,
a solemn birdsong; a tune of half-seen reflections in windows,
a distant blossom tree; its petals plucking themselves
one by one from the sundewed branches,
a rooftop reflecting light; a smokeless chimney
stretching high beyond the peak of bricks,
a sky of spring-soaked blue; scuds of white
streaking the azure vault of heaven
in little here-and-there places.

dream high into this endless sky,
dream windless and green into the eternity of earth,
dream sunny and freely; dream as freely
as those blossom petals.

reach the crescendo of this precious springtime;
let it blossom,
let it bloom,
sing forgetful into the waxing days
like a goldfinch in the waning darkness
of winter’s ice-forged grip.
summer’s god-warmed arms are almost here;
sit and dream, sit and sing,
and taste that blossom-wind
with a mouth of eternal life.

A thousand burning embers
Flit freely through my eyes.
I cannot see where their light will shine;
Where that light will shine and lead me.
Life is but a transience;
An earthbound darkness of depth
And boiling blood abundant in the folds of the hills.
In the curve of the rotten landscape
And the pain-scarred mountains,
A dozen freely falling flames
Refine the land with heat and searing memory.

Carry me not into that humming deep;
Let my sentience swim in rain and sun.
Allow me not to flee and fall;
Take me sleeping to that place of gold.
I do not weep in this time of endings;
Do not weep for earth nor life nor love,
For this closing closes soft and dark,
This closing closes death.

On a rug underneath a burning bed
I dream in colour.
How chromatic are my thoughts tonight,
How technicolour my visions.
Never halt at the obstacle of darkness;
A torch of ignited starlight is your fire-forged weapon,
A knife of filtered sun your blade.

Oh, how pale these moonlight-frosted faces,
How rich these vibrant songs of transience.
Behind these golden eyes of heaven,
A hell-sung flame of vivid madness
Dies and flickers like the orange sun
In these skies of the late prismatic dawn.

Sing me to sleep on these hollowed days,
Rest your gleaming face upon my chest,
Let your salty tears soak deep into my burning skin.

Fear nothing of this darkness,
For the light has found us.
Sing nothing of this dimming dawn,
For the moon is in us,
The moon of the night is in us,
And the sun of the golden day
Is shining silver through the forest of your beating heart.

Burn,
Burn fearless though the storms on the grey-shone seas,
Swim triumphant and splendid
Through our cities of hallowed stone,
Scream ignited odes from atop cathedral spires
In a wintery July,
With the clouds in your head
And in your mouth
And in your beating, burning heart.

Sing me to sleep.
Sing me to sleep on this dew-dampened dawn
And let your heart beat in time to mine.

Between the woods and broken wall I sit,
Atop the rainwashed stump and mossy earth.
Nothing contemplated but the sun and yellowed leaves,
Windows of existentialism floating
Through my eyes like wind.

Look to that greeny canopy;
A lonely goldfinch sings at dawn,
With all its tiny feathers ruffled by a midnight owl
Pursuing food and death and filtered moonlight.
Seven simple sparrows sit atop a gleaming birch;
None can hear their songs but I,
And nothing but the gentle babble of this tumbling brook
Can carry their tunes away.

This lonely road I walk talks of death, of half-life,
Of the softest stolen whisperings of those dawny sparrows
In the hazy heat of noon.
And then in the ochre fall of dusk,
When all but I are sleeping,
A wandering fox darts deliberately
Through the brackeny brush of night.

In the end, I think we’re all just myths;
Tales our descendants cannot fathom into truths.

This tea tastes sweet on my tongue,
And in this particular moment,
My back aches from writing in a bad position.

But my now is now my past,
And your past is someone’s future,
And I am sure that if you turned
And looked back on yourself
You would see the future me
Staring up at you.

Die quietly, darling.
Die silently and gracefully;
Die like you lived.
Those flowers they put on your grave are blue,
Those flowers are beautiful like the sea.

But then I remembered
(how could I have forgotten)
Your dislike of that same blue sea.
Perhaps the spray and the wind
And the azure waves
Dampened down your fire.
And now that fire is out and now there’s
Nothing.

Die blazing, friend.
Die blazing hot with fire and passion,
Burn through your coffin,
Burn through the hollow earth and through the ground,
Burn back to me and live quietly.
Live quietly and gracefully.
But do not die.

I hold your hand
In some ancient place,
In some ancient time
Of exaltation.
We are whole,
Together,
Together we are madness,
We are death,
We are the orange light in the flames
And the reddened heat in hell,
We are sin and corruption and intangible fire.
We stand triumphant and giddy and
With stomachs twisting with a newfound light.
We stand over everything,
Over this splendid city,
Knowing that life is transient
And eternity not forever.

We run,
Run euphoric through streets
Of stone and smoke and dying light,
Tasting the air with our sharpened tongues,
Smelling sin,
Lying dizzy on cobblestones
In the summer rain,
Stretching our hands
Into the storm-scarred skies of death
To grasp the greying clouds,
And laughing about blood
And the metallic taste in our mouths.

We are fires,
We are flames,
We are the dust after death,
We are the ash after refinement,
We consume this city,
We consume our own ignited souls,
We consume everything
In our flames of madness.

And at dusk we sit in cafes,
At dusk we sit in cafes,
Alone in the lamplight
With your face bathed in amber.
You compare me to the moon,
And I tell you I am the sun.
For nothing but the hottest, brightest death
Is worthy of our
Burning celestial momentum.

I tried in the murky twilight of Wednesday to face it.
In the inky dusk of that far-flung moor,
I tried and failed to face it.
That next dawn sang of ochre and orange dewdrops
And promises that were never kept,
And I bit my tongue and promised myself
That by the sunrisen noon
This would all be gone.

Night fell down
Over the blackened hillside,
And all was clearer.
Those stolen cigarettes
We held between our teeth
Shone new from out of our minds
As if those embers knew all of our secrets.

And on that gold-drenched dawn,
We lay dizzy on railroad tracks
Triumphant in our drunken wanderings
And exalting clean syringes up to heaven.
And in the evening of yesterday,
We burned our throats raw
With the amber mornings of today.

Wake, adolescent angels.
Your eyes are ice storms,
Your irises are tidal like the cold North Sea,
Your pupils are moonwashed and mad
Like howling western winds.

You look at your horizon,
You inhale stardust and nebulas like cigarette smoke,
Snort powdered mountain snows
Like ******* in the idle breezes of April or May.

Weep, shriek, sob yourselves hysterical
In the darkness of subways,
Beneath underpasses of ***** and spray paint
And endless neon lights.
Jump, leap, drop like stones from melancholy rooftops
Clutching burning cigarettes and *****.
Spin, dance, laugh drunkenly in stairwells,
Assault your forearms with syringes and needles and broken glass.

Cry melancholy saltwater in public toilets,
Kiss the mirrors with fight-split lips
And pick at the broken wall tiles with chipped fingernails.
Tear at the moss on empty high-rise balconies,
Stand high on the railings without hands
And contemplate life and death and redemption and eternity.

Stab, slice, tenderise your thighs with pencil sharpeners,
Fall, graze your backs ****** on concrete,
On gravel, on rough tarmac and asphalt,
Trip, split open your knees in parking lots at 2:45 in the morning
When you’re high and drunk and giddy,
And dreaming of poetry and existentialism and cities.

Sleep, juvenile metaphysicists;
Your mouths are dimming campfire flames,
Your minds are like caves of amethyst and quartz,
But time will go on,
Much as it has since the morning of everything.
Earth will spin;
Faster than your head when you’re high
And your brain is addled by infinity.
Space and time and God
Will remain eternal.
But you
(But we)
Will not.

One may wonder;
What is it like to die?
To crumble like Pompeii,
Fall like a dynasty,
Recede
Into the frost-windowed annuls of time,
Like some forgotten journal
With words written in blood
And bound with human skin.

I can feel my heart
Beating in my chest,
Beating in my breast.
Too many nights have drowned me in insomnia,
In waking dreams,
In visions of mountains
And rainswept forests,
In my memory of the curve
Of your chin
Or the subtle tint of rose in your lips.

I sleep now;
Sleep properly.
(most of the time).
When I am not plagued by my injuries
Or by the nebula,
Oh, by that nebula of stars
And words
And thoughts
That I have fallen victim to
Oh so many times.

You spilled your coffee
Down the stairwell once.
Don’t you remember?
I remember;
It seemed strangely golden,
And when the sunlight hit it
At just the right angle
It looked like molten bronze.
Molten, gleaming, and ironically beautiful.

They came to clear it away.
They cleared it away with water.
They scrubbed it clean with water,
And then with bleach
When the stain refused to leave.

In a strange, moronic kind of way,
It reminded me of you.
Not by its golden-brown gleam
In the morning March sun,
Not by its smell;
Like calm and cocoa and the inside of a café,
But because it’s still there.
It’s still there,
Go and look if you don’t believe me.
We thought that it was transient, didn't we?
Temporary.
We thought that the water and bleach
Would cleanse it and make it gone.
But it is stubborn, and fixed, and permanent.
It ruptured the pattern when it fell, and it ruptures it still.
Feet walk over it every day;
People
Pass it every day,
And they catch sight of it in the same beam of sunlight
That made it gleam and shine.

Do not get lost in this moment.
You know
(We know)
How comfortable this darkness can be.
But darling, believe me.
Nothing is better
Than leaving a mark on this world
And leaving the pattern perpetually ruptured.

Maybe we found love
Maybe we got lost
In translation
Maybe we just
Aren't the same.

Perhaps
It is our imperfections.
Perhaps
Time will halt
And seas will freeze
And the fires will cease.
And we will be perpetual.
But perhaps nothing
Is really ever created.
Perhaps you’re right.

I’m here somewhere;
Among the believers,
Between the cheats,
Within the walls,
Your favourite coffee mug,
My old raincoat,
Our patchwork blanket.

Forgetting is so
Destructive,
So damning.
But perhaps the best thing
Isn't forgetting.
Perhaps it is remembering.

I am Heavy-lidded tonight,
Heavy-lidded
and inscrutable in my childhood.

My childhood that was spent hysterical in airing cupboards,
Where I wept unashamedly to the fixed God
And the stained glass, rose-hewn Angels of churches
That reeked of oak and holy water.
Where I sat in the trees, high on life and vanila-blue ice cream
And with knees skinned by the ****** pathways of woods
Or the safe gravels of playgrounds.

Where sunbursted mangoes dripped with musky-sanded chlorine
And the sun-hot metal gates clanged shut in the holiday winds.
Where rocks were thrown by fated children
And paper-cheap candy wrappers filled up plastic trash cans.
Where strange, money-minded housewives gaggled and giggled
With their ******-white teeth
And reflected my mother' s bipolar poverty
In the lenses of their plastic sunglasses.
Where my self-hemmed summer dresses were stained
With green and brown and red finger paint
As the days outside grew warmer
And the inside self grew older,
Colder.

Where I was punished for expression of the self
And confined to the sanatorium
Or the offices of Moloch's servants
On a sun-stippled day in May
Where my scrap-bruised hands
Were bandaged by the words of the Real World
And threatenings of expulsion.
Where I hid behind felted display boards
On a landing somewhere near Neverland,
And lay and listened to the friend-fuelled ramblings of lost boys
Who sat and smoked in dormitories
And hallucinated Peter Pan.
Where I wrote self-indulgent fuckery in toilets
And drew crude artistries on mirrors with lipstick
And contemplated
Amo
Amas
Amat
As I sat and stared at my own disassociated hands.

Where paper aeroplanes flew and were thrown
By hungover kids in threadbare jumpers
With chewed cuffs and prefect badges,
Where holy Evian was poured over my head
After a long last day under a white marquee,
Where I disassembled pencil sharpeners with iron-smelling razor blades
and violated erasers at an exam hall desk in a stormy June.

Where I contemplated death;
Sang hymns in the darkness of my bedroom,
Took a blade to my flesh
Like the soulless piece of meat
That I believed myself to be.
Where I fell in love;
Hurt myself
More than anyone else ever did.
Where I read,
Where I wrote tear stained elegies
To my idols under the earth
And prayed that I
Would last
Just one more day.

Looking heavenward, I see only the earth.
The stars align and the planets turn,
But what of the holy?

Archangels sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
And the collared cherubim bleed into the rainswept gutters
Like cut dogs in cardboard boxes by the highways of New York,
Or the roadsides of back-alley Brooklyn or Paterson,
Where the demonic masses lie naked in the streets,
Their souls bared raw to heaven
And their hair as messy as sidestreet dumpsters.

The misted rain fogs on the busted double glazing,
The bare limbed trees outside fallen victim to a long winter
And a late spring.
The air that blows through the streets of these mundane cul-de-sacs
Has passed through the lungs of cancerous dodgers
In those hell-indulgent cities,
Where children find their kicks by freerunning
Across buildings of bricks made from c-grades,
Or by standing atop high-rises in the grey wind,
And biting their tongues only to feel their own consciousness
Burrowing into them
Like parasites from the condemning schoolhouses or university halls.

You’re alone when your skies turn grey,
And the rain falls with all the purposeful intent of a neon god.
You’re alone when your smashed milk bottles and broken plates
Are like music on those drug-dampened dawns,
You’re alone when your cold, ash-stippled roof gardens
Are your only way to heaven,
You’re alone when your fingers are cut on your own writing
And you are dizzy from spinning yourself sick
Alone in your splintered art lofts.

Your stars are misaligned and your planets need engine grease to turn,
And you sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
But you still look heavenward.
You see your madness in the same silver moon
That compels the tide and transfixes wolves,
You recognise yourself in newspaper clippings proclaiming ******,
You acknowledge your expression in broken syringes
And powder remnants
On the glass-topped coffee tables of water-dripping apartments,
You feel your heartbeat in the gasolined engines
Of stuttering Cadillacs
And taste your own warm lifeblood in the burgers of roadside diners.

You see cosmological galaxies bursting like Van Goghs,
Horrible, bitter-cold starstorms underneath white skies,
Raindrop-dripping garden leaves in shrubberies and verges
And earthy rockeries,
You dream of enlightened, ***-smoking boys in beat-up trailers
And the cluttered box rooms of sky-high apartments,
Of screeching atop stone-cragged mountains of green in highlands,
Of bell-rung harbours in the white seaside towns of England,
Of the salt-chapped lips of fisherwives
And the bone-skinny children of sailors,
Of visionary angels in stained glass cathedrals,
Of the cobbled thoroughfares of lamplit cafes in a Parisian purgatory.

And yet you lie naked on floors,
You lie high on floors and let visions spill from your hands
Like the whiskey you drink.
You are under us now,
Under the earth like meat sacks.
But your vision lives on
In every piece of self-indulgent fuckery written for you,
In every copy of your collected works
Or your novels.

Seek,
Live,
****,
Die.
For you are immortal, in the end.

Mad girls.
Moonlight-ripened fruit,
Fingertip-censored *****,
Fragile,
Toughened,
Violated.
Throats are burned by whisky,
Eyes blackened and tears shed.
Stars grew between your breast bones once.
Try for me now to care.

Stardust drenched in
Rain and red wine.
Poverty sitting atop rooftops in
Whitewashed cities.
Run;
Around in circles
Until you are too dizzy
To taste his breath.

It is funny;
Funny how one day you can see the universe reflected in your own eyes
And blue-rich galaxies bursting from the hidden darknesses
And the gone-places of your mind.
Your pen is as ceaseless on your paper as your feet are on your bedroom floor.

Other days are like tepid water, or half-sour milk
That is undecided on the matter of its own freshness.
Those dark, gone-places of your mind are not even dimly lit.
And yet you wish for that eye-universe,
And those blue-rich galaxies,
And for your pen to skate across the page
As if possessed by the likes of Ginsberg or Kerouac.

So you wander down to the quiet places;
To the caged city forests where the trees cohabitate with basketball hoops,
And the birds sing their squeezed-in yellow melodies.
To the crumbling, sandy banks,
Where on a good day you can find a smashed white seashell
Or a pocket watch, rusty and decayed with time
And confident in its fragility.

But all you do is stare at the sky.
No miraculous inspiration comes to you;
No stardusted metaphysics,
No juice-rich red and purple existentialism.
No darling lovers dripping with candy-yellow sweetness
As the birds sing like Blake or Wordsworth.

So You return to the loud and cluttered places;
To your places,
To your off-white apartments where the water runs cold
And the refrigerator stinks worse than hell.
To your concrete-welded rivers,
Where the only birds are grey pigeons,
And the most beautiful thing you will find
Is a ***** green bottle
Or a razor blade
With more memories than you.

And you will try tomorrow.
Maybe the ticking of your generic clock
Or the casual griminess of your old green bathtub
Will be enough.
But for now, you will sit,
And you will consider constellations
And contemplate the reason why your lover's eyes
Remind you of the Milky Way.
For now, the eye-universe is still, and the blue-rich galaxies
Are deep in sleep,
Just like you wish you were.

For this is a tepid water day, a half-sour milk day.
And that is not a bad thing, in the end.

I saw dynamic innocence violated by the cold mundane,
Thoughts and plans and dreams dampened down by normality.
They say that naivety, just like defiance,
Is a bloom which should be touched and killed
With all the haste of an eagle in the russet dawn.

I myself am pure and blissful in my confinement.
I do not know the wonders of the sinful world.
But your own bloom was erased long ago,
In a time that you cannot now recall.
Retain your wonder at all costs.
Lest you leave this world as one of their
Success stories.

This room is bright;
Magnolia and whitewash
And economy bulb-light
Illuminate paper and pens and calloused hands.
The idea that this is
Learning
Appears in my mind
With a sudden futility

I sit with my chin cradled in my palm
I do not know, I say.
I do not know what makes the world spin
Or the seasons change.
For none of it matters, in the end.
Seconds spill through the fingers of the universe's greatest thief.
He has stolen lives since the start of everything, they say.
They say that before his birth, there were no lives.
Or deaths, even.

I think of every second that I have lost
To childish existentialism;
Of the seconds lost since the start of this
Stupid
*******
Poem.
They say that I must bite my tongue and listen.
But time,
He bites it for me.

Your life is a lie.
The sweet whisperings of your mother
And the smoky crackle of the fire
Are but illusions;
Illusions of a high and ****** up child.
There is nothing but your own naked mind,
Your own dull eyes.
Nothing but your imperfect body and your raw tongue.
Do not fool yourself;
This is not a dream.

Do not get lost
In your metaphysical ramblings.
Do not allow your stars and galaxies to blind you.
Lovers fall like dynasties and last longer.
Their words and laughter and cheap smoke
Cling to the walls of forgotten tenement houses
Just as your tears and punished blood stain the pages of your notebooks.

I am a writer.
I have seen this poison drowning my mind
Since that first orange dusk.
I am lucky.
I am youthful and wide-eyed in my innocence.
But I watch my seconds bleed
Into the ***** glass beside my bed;
Seconds that lived for writing
Seconds that died for life.

I am nothing more than a young pretender.
Existentialism swims like a proud poison in my head.
In my eyes I can see nothing but juvenile metaphysics.
I tried to **** them, I really did.
But my darlings are my all, my everything, my universe.
They are my sun and my moon and my stars.
They make my emotions change like the fleeting seasons.
They make my head spin like the crooked earth.
They make my heart beat with the force of an imploding star.
These are darlings that I cannot ****.
I write poems that my idols would despise.
For this is not a New Vision that I am creating.
This is nothing at all.

Bite your tounge, kid.
Bite it hard and don't be so pathetic.
Yes, I know that you were young once.
I know your mother used to pick you up and kiss your head
And sing you to sleep.

But you're all grown up now.

You don't have the easy excuse of youth anymore.
You can no longer say it's because you're a child.
You're too old, too tired, too worn down.

Sleep is never enough.

Your tears are stupid now.
Tears won't get you anywhere in the Real World, they say.
In the Real World, your mother won't be there to hold your hand.
In the Real World, you're on your own.
But what They don't know
Is that you've been in the Real World all along.
You've known more pain than they think you have.
But obviously, none of that affects you.
Because you're only a kid, and you have it easy.

...Right?

The girl across the room is a stranger.
Her hair is familiar, her face is comfortingly reassuring,
But her eyes speak of trauma,
Of forgotten dreams and aspirations that shatter daily.
In the lines of her tired face I see a dreamer,
And in the pools of her eyes I see a perfect disaster.
Where there was once pure, undiluted hope and happiness,
there is now a dulled pretense.

She feels like a rich, red juice that has been drawn out too far
With tainted water,
Or like a piece of string, pulled taut for so long
that it cannot snap back into its original, unspoiled shape.

In her wearied sigh I hear all of her unspoken truths;
All of the things which she has never said but that need saying anyway.
The girl across the room is my friend.
Her voice is like a song I know all the words to,
Her face is as familiar to me as my own.

In the brightness of her smile I see a warrior,
And in the melody of her laughter I hear my imperfect saviour.
Where there was once desperation and despair,
There is now a golden spark of hope.
In my own tired sigh, I hear a future for the first time;
All of the dreams which I have never followed,
But that need following anyway.
The girl across the room is everything,
And I am nothing.

Breathe.

Look around you.

Take it in.

This is transient, fleeting, insignificant.

You can twist, pull, push, warp this reality as much as you want.

But you will never make any of it mean anything.

You like to lie awake at night and stare at your ceiling sometimes.

You like to pretend that you can see through the brick and slate

And paint and plaster

And all the way up to heaven, or to whatever else is up there.

But you can't.

Be wary, kid. This is not your daydream.

This is not the metaphysical realm of your juvenile imagination.

Look to the ground;

To the grass and the earth and the newly fallen leaves,

Look to the sea;

To the waves and the little fishing boats and the screech of the gulls at an orange dawn.

Look to the small things;

To the smell of clean sheets, to the feel of your lover's skin underneath your fingers,

To the sound of the rain as you drift off to sleep and dream of your juvenile metaphysics.

**** it all;

**** your dreams of stars and your visions of constellations.

**** your childish wonderment of the sky at midnight.

**** your existential ramblings and your formless morning murmurings.

**** your futile love, your darling, darling love,

Who looks like the sun and lives like a hurricane.

For this is not your daydream.


- K.L.L.N