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The Hammer

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.

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Written by
laetitia
French
Published
Mar 3, 2013
Lines·Words
102·660
Notes

The Hammer by Geneviève Pardoe Macchiarella is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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