Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Orion Schwalm Mar 2015
So self conscious about your every move.
Ne'er knowing
Which twitch
Might be
The last.
Orion Schwalm Feb 2015
Here we are again.
Edge of the Portal.
You told me we'd never come back to this God
                                                             ­                    Forsaken
                                                                ­            Spot.

But I always thought
"I wonder what it took"
For the people to come up with that name for the land we forsook.

Right away, I'll ask you three things.
1- What did you learn?
2- What will you do different next time?
3- Do you really think you're coming back?

Like I promised to...

A promise is a promise,
but a great love can break almost anything.

Not that the promise got broken...it just wasn't exactly accurate.
It defied expectations of sheer elation and turned a DeathSeeker into a different kind of advocate.

Praise be to glory and the light! That's what I'd tell you if I was still high. Remember? Like that time? When I'd get so stuck in rhyme? That I couldn't define what the slant of the rant signed? YOU ARE SO RIGHT!

Be animal. Be animal all you want.
I'll still animate you from beyond the haunt.
But let's be honest, if it's death you're after...
I think...I may have just met my match.

Ok, you win. Congratulations, you reached the end.
You've quenched the worst thirst that my nightmares could portend.

There is an incredible difficulty, writing in great grief.
Postmortem depression.
Pre-partum relief.
You knew that your death would cause me to split, so you held onto it for way too long. But that death, just like anything else you love so dear, you must set it free eventually.

I'm just stating facts at this point, we're too close to the brink to tip or to cry, the shattering that is happening is slowly enrapturing the entire essence of a lifetime of imbuing something like a w o r d with a purpose.
with a purpose.
with a purpose.
with a purpose.

Scary. The thought.
The thought you turned so dark.
The dark I call the dark because it's
driven into me that
I should call the deathbed
dark.
The death I learned to fear,
to hate,
             to fight,
                         to ****
                         to push my life as far as it can go against the sea.
Procreating until the entire world is covered in me,
And we're all swimming in a surging ocean of my own mortality.

You. Have. Stopped. Me.
From being that reaching fool.
The man who has a different motto for every single situation.
I can never forgive you...for instilling in me: that peace.
That crazy, crazy peace that fights for cessation of perseverance.
The light inside the lighthouse at the end of the tunnel, hanging by a rope from the sky.
You are going to be ok.

You are making it ok.

You are making death something I need not seek.

Making it something that will come to me.

When I am ready.

And when you finally get on that boat.
And you're leaving.
Take one last glance.
At the boy...
Who you have watched grow into a man.
Who has run away a thousand times.
Always promising to come back.
...but sometimes not coming back as often as he promised to do.
Who in this moment has realized:
If you leave home in order to find your home,
Do you ever really leave?

The final night.
The last dawn.
Before your elements dissolve.
Into what I've always called mine.
But truly,
I was yours,
From the moment you saw me,
and decided for yourself,
to call this...
feeling
home.

I'll always come back?
No.




I'll never leave.
Orion Schwalm Feb 2015
Dear Death,

Stop calling me.
I gave you multiple chances, and there's a time when we must realize that something is unhealthy for us, so that we can cut it out of our lives.
I am sorry.
Maybe under the right circumstances I could have loved you forever.
But those circumstances are not ours.
Rotten luck.

Have a nice lif- err, have a nice day.

Sincerely,
Your (Former) Love Interest




Sincerely...you have nothing left to say, don't say anything else don't say that there's nothing left to say even, don't even think about the creeping corners of memory storage in which there might be a few grains of substance at the bottom of a seemingly empty box. There is nothing left to say. And you know it. So don't.

Nothing never nover nether 'mother netting noting nothing.

******* lamps. Not a great hobby.


Shadow shanty.

Singing a song of the Sea.
Wringing the throngs of the clergy.
Stinging the Dongs of the ******
Clinging to poems of the clergymen.

Shadow shanty.

I tried to take a look in the direction of the sun. And what I got was a whole face full of God's good redemption. So I clambered on until I found the dirt, and I dug straight down into the earth until I hit rock. And I smashed my head on that rock until I could hear again. And I listened my way out of the hole that I dug when I decided to hold on for one more second when I didn't really feel like holding on. When I waited around to be changed instead of changing. And when I was holding on for just one more second because I felt if I didn't hold on I would just hang up. And my whole theme song is just elevator music, we're going up and up and up and the air pressure's decreasing the ringing in my ears can't wait for it to just POP and clear and let me out of here, cuz the hole that I dug was a million stories deep, and I've not even told a fraction of them yet.
Which is why I remain.

In the light, nothing can be wrong or right.
In the light, I can makeup for deafness with sight.
In the long light of the day I can withhold many words.
In the longest nights, I can free myself. Finally.

Shade Chant

It's comfortable here. Let me never leave.
It's comfortable here. Let me never leave.
It's mighty nice here. OH please, oh please.
Please never let me be free.

It's time to dig my final grave.
It's time to dig the final grave.
It's time to dig that final grave.
That final grave into the sky.

My soul I send, into the waves.
My soul I send, into the waves.
My soul I send, all into the waves.
Goodbye soul I don't need ya no more.

Shade Chant. A ***** spiritual. From the black, black heart. Of a white supremacist.




This week I will bury you.
I will never see you again.
You will never help me through.
Never push me past fear.
Never guide me to love myself again.
Never remind me of the innocence I never lost.
I will bury you this week.
And it won't be me.
I'll watch it happen from above in the trees.
As I bury my sense of self alongside.
I will bury you.
Since you dug me out of the grave.
Orion Schwalm Nov 2014
Good morning,    a stagnant air
  Warm like the blood in my brain from the night before
   Eyes crusted shut, to keep the air out
    Avoiding a lack of movement that embraces my room
     Deepening into dreamlike space
   The flicker of a cigarette glows open the shadows of hell
   Turning over and over inside me like a toddler in a
                                                                                 bathtub


    I *****. Most of it goes out my nose.

Good evening, I ------------can open my eyes now
                to block out the light.
                          The faint glow of a cigarette warms
                                 the frigid air.
        My skin stands up, reaches out to the fire
                       Clinging to the warmth of the blood
                               from my mouth.
  He is there standing over me, smoking and I
                     cannot see his face.
           He devours my genitals whole and I want to move
           He ***** out my ear bones and I want to protest.
           He strips the hair out of my skin and I want to struggle
                           I won't move. I cannot see his face.
                                                   I can still hear him coming

Good night. I open my mouth and **** in the cold warm
  air.          Drinking the moisture they left last night
                                                  into my lungs.
    It mixes with smoke as I **** in a drag.
Exhale the room into your vulnerable face.
            Your skin in the bathtub, warm and moist still.
               Your mouth and your eyes closed.
                                -----------------------------
                      never to taste me
                                never to see my shadow
                                        stagnant forever more.
                                     I *****, most of it into
A work in progress. Harsh/Close critiques very VERY welcome!
Orion Schwalm Nov 2014
Saw it happen.
Witnessed it. Did not experience.
Yet, left with a more interesting outlook.
An objectivity can rise above. Settle down. Rework, reword, reward, rewarm.
WHY DID I SEE THIS. WHY WAS I CHOSEN FOR THIS RESPONSIBILITY.
Screaming in the large end of the megaphone.
Screaming for the world to let you down.
Clutching at the door handle, hoping to emerge into a forest of rifles, a city-hive of pollen pushers, an oasis of blood.
Suddenly it makes sense...communication without contact.

Words on a page, worms on a plate.
Wards an’ a cage, words in a place.

This is our medium, through which I can love you, for better or worse, the medium that is.
The medium carries a meaning without judgement.
The judgement, if and when the word is received, is irrelevant.

The last dead deer rises, taking back his rightful place as the last living deer in a dying world.
The green world empties its poison, sheds its thorns, ***** out its parasite.

The glass is half empty.
Now its half full.

The glass is empty of meaning.
Now its full of ****.

My skin is raw and bleeding.
My love is as real as rifles.
They both hurt.
In different ways.
A response to Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson.
Orion Schwalm Oct 2014
The first time in my life, I start turning the lens back into the dreams. Point the telescope a full 180 away from the moon, so the moon can see a **** good closeup of the craters on my face.
I go to sleep
                                         asking for it.

My dearest demons, tear me apart. I am ready to die. I have done everything I could...

And here you come:
                                   traipsing down the stairway to heaven, stepping extra hard
on the creaky ones.

I think it reminds you of the way I used to whine for you.

To you. My dear. MY dear.
                                              Help me God, I whisper into your ear as you     sleep,
                                              Hoping you would wake up in my dreams and save me,
                                              How the hell could a person ever feel so ******* weak.

A bitter branch, that wanted to be a tree trunk. That tried to become enormous.
That only got cut down in the end.

That's how I feel. Not what I am.
Part of the poem, not of the slam.
Separate worlds inside one room.
Wanting to capture the flower in bloom.

Enormous tree, watered regularly by the gardening company hired by the     CEO
of the real-estate company.

The only company I really have in this lonely lake of scheduled sprinklers
are gardeners giving me much more than thanks.

They cut my branches. My unsightly twigs are mulched. I share my tears with them. They take a lunch break. We're going pretty steady.
Day in. Day out. Day in. Day out. Tick tock. Lub Lub. Goodnight. Help-
Next page