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The Exulansis Machine of Deep Sleep

“Breathe it in

The stardust air

The lung-clamping smoke

And vile pious inflammation.”

Listening to sounds of irritation:

Humming of the fluorescent bulbs;

Shoes sticking to linoleum tiles;

Flies buzzing behind my ears,

Leaving me to count the years

And spaces between spaces

Fill the lonely night

until

 

All is silent now.

 

Then,

Tooth and nail and eye crust

Fading away to off-beat lunacy.

Her spine slithers sinisterly as she performs

With Vaseline greased hair that stands like horns

People stalking like beasts with mental disorders

Hobbling penguins and droll-ass walrus punks.

Cold liquor manipulating my contemplation

And I have moments of primal desperation

A monster suckling another monster

Bodies tangled like olive tree roots

Delicious and dreadful

Fraught and shameful

 

It’s the way of all flesh.

 

 

Among

Modern Soothsayers

and plenty of culinary racists,

Spraying ***** onto parchment pages

With forked tongues dancing on ***** stages

Coffee for blood and computer screens for eyes

With cool cats strutting to unknown leeching voices

Bottle-slung pistol whip hooligans with eyes of yellow stains

From chronic ink-sprayers of riots in narrow sectioned lanes

Snapping fingers to juke box ghosts and royal jazz sires.

Fourteen gypsy demons wanting to pull me apart

Showcasing trinkets and rubies she adorned

All while she smiles and performs

And the weight of the world

falls between my fingers,

 

Like cascading sand.

 

As I write,

The rhythm is changing

Like seasons in secluded eternity:

Orchestrations of sexplosions overtake the carnal scene

With hair pulling and gnawing teeth on the table in front of me

Those Bohemian idolaters basking in acid kiddy pools

Using tired variations of apologies in eastside sin city

Arousing the vortex of virtuous degradation

In a hole of sunken matchstick validation.

Eyes of judges like the public census

And taboo connotations

Rule this attrition.

Rusting

Leaking stalls

Blue-plate special

Of sprayed blood on walls

The essence of color and voice

The culmination of illusory choice

Dances of erasers and procreators

Fever dreams of police shooting children

Like movie monsters and misunderstood heroes

Specters and Banshee sympathizers

Marching to ******** synthesizers

Burning ***** blue postmen

With afropunk priests

Of astonishing feats

To whom

May

Be

 

Concerned.

 

This deep sleep exists

To mediate the social cysts

The reprimand the blundering kids in the mists

From dreaming of their world without the risks

Of falling into fields of blackened earth

Where it all burns like a first world birth

And greater souls speak of my worth.

So I cannot wake up

 

The deep sleep

Is there for that.

Request permission to use this poem
Written by
trevor-gates
26 / M / American
Published
Oct 6, 2014
Lines·Words
83·420
Notes

It's been a while since I submitted some poetry.  This is like a combination of a rant, meets free-verse and urban spoken word.  It's just what's been on my mind lately.  I'd love to hear what you think it all means, or at least know your interpretation.

~

Exulansis: n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

Food for thought.

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