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It seemed the space between us became torn and
Profoundly distanced....................

Jamming bony knuckles and spread eagled fingers,
Lying their mapped out journey.....direction on point patrol....
Adorned by silver decoration, delighting in their skinned habitat
Shafted, deceit punching the recipient of the poison digits
Prodding and pushing their intent....dare you contradict
The intended carved out dose of punishment, Risk and
Safety......not yours and never would be; stooped
Down under the assailing bony palmed attachements
That delivered penetrating power, cupped around
Your arm til it became discoloured, pressure points
Backed you into a corner, up against the grain of the
Brick wall, cold and damp, the odour reaching
And scolding your nostrils with its stale internal vows
Refuse, stretching and protruding its foul remnents
An earlier life, when you were not under threat fades
Your very existance in jeopardy, your eyes pleaded for
Normality, willing someone to hear your silence, grip you
Tightly, not with malice, but with bravery and valour
Right now you need that shining knight, that white
Horse galloping down the blind alleyway, yet you
Know that won't happen for you're already sinking
To the floor, the blow comes sharp and stings, warmth
Exudes and trickles a path downwards, leaving your
Body, finding the cold concrete beneath you, travelling
Outwards................
Poetic T Nov 2014
Red balloons* litter the floor,
Out numbering the pure ones before,
What once was *white
now
Discoloured
Violated
Shrouded
Float from view
Each a moment of life
As the balloons once white
Now no more,
For all is stained red
Crimson,
Droplets,
Dried
Upon white like a tear,
It slides down marking
Before greeting the floor,
Expelled air, ruptured by the
Violence,
Anger,
Death
Still lingers, an after image
Of the life that was here before,
Red balloons float leaving their imprint
Splatter effect upon floor & wall
Cold eyes stare seeing both
White
&
Red
Balloons
Clinging around this fallen life,
Where white once was now all
That floats is the stench of death
Red balloons huddle around,
Each carrying a moment with them
When life became death &
White was scarred by crimson,
Life is static, still, for death  now floats above the floor
Akemi Jan 2019
The Ache is leaving. Three years languished by dead end jobs, drugs and friends. Last week above a bagel store, the sun morphs mute amidst travelling clouds, indifferent fluctuations of light on an otherwise featureless day.

You arrive a tight knot of anxieties over a moment in time that could only have arrived after its departure. The Ache welcomes you into their sparse interior. You trace last month’s 21st across the black mould complex; navigate piles of stacked boxes, unsure if anything is inside of them.

“I always make the best friends in departure,” the Ache says, flipping a plushy up and down by the waist.

“Maybe you can only love that which is already lost,” you reply, with an insight a friend will give you a week later.

The acid tastes bitter under your tongue. Small marks your body bursting, a glowing radiance of interconnections you’d always had but only now begun to feel. The Ache follows suit and you sit on the couch together to watch .hack//Legend of the Twilight. The come up entangles you in the spectacle; the screaming boy protagonist, the chipped tooth gag, the moe sister in need of saving from the liminal space of dead code. You take part in it; you revel in it. Bodies morph on the surface of the screen in hyperflat obscenity, their parts interchangeable to the affect of the drama. Faces invert, break and disfigure, before reformation into the self-same identity form.

A month earlier, you’d hosted a house show at your flat. Too anxious to perform you’d dropped a tab as you’ve done now. An overbearing sensation of too-much-ness — of sickening reality — washed through the nexus of your being. You writhed on the ground screaming into a microphone as a cacophony of sounds roiled through you. Everyone cheered.

The floor rose later that night. A damp, disgusting intensity that triggered contractions in your throat and chest. Pulled to the ground, you fought off your bandmate’s advances, too shocked to express your revulsion and horror, to react accordingly, to reconstitute a border of consensual sociality. You broke free and slurred “I’m no one’s! I’m no one’s!” before running out of the room. Hours later, you tried to comfort them. Weeks later, you realised how ******* ******* that had been. Months later, you learnt their friend had committed suicide days before the show.

Back in the lounge, a prince rides onto the screen on a pig. You turn to the Ache and say “This is ******* awful.”

The Ache responds “I know right?”

Outside the world burns blue with lustre. The Ache trails you and falls onto their stomach. “Oh my god,” the Ache blurts, “this is why I love acid. Everything just feels right.” They gaze wistfully at the grasses and flowers before them; catch a whiff of asphalt and nectar, intermingled. “Like, gender isn’t even a thing, you know? Just properties condensed into a legible sign to be disciplined by heteronormative governmentality.”

“Properties! Properties!” You chant, stomping around the Ache with your arms stretched out. You wave them in the air like windmills. You bare your teeth. “Properties! Properties!”

“You know what I mean, right?” The Ache asks, pointedly. “You know what I mean?”

You continue chanting “Properties!” for another minute or two, before spotting a slug on a blade of grass beneath your feet. You fall to your knees and gasp “It’s a slug!”

You and the Ache stare at the tiny referent for an indefinite period of time, absorbed in its glistening moistures. Eventually, the Ache says “I think it’s actually a snail.”

You used to read postmodern novels on acid. You loved their exploration of hyperreality; their dissection of culture as a system of meaning that arises out of our collective, desperate attempts to overcome the indifference of facticity. Read symptomatically, culture does not reveal unseen depths in the world, but rather, constitutes shallow networks of sprawling complexity — truth effects — illusions of mastery over an, otherwise, undifferentiated and senseless becoming.

Then one day, the world overwhelmed you. Down the hall, your flatmates sounded an eternal return. As they spoke in joyous abandon you traced the lines from their mouths — found their origin in idiot artefacts of Hollywood Babylon. The joy of abstraction you once relished in your books took on an all too direct horror. You recoiled. You bound your lips in hysteria, for fear of becoming another repeating machine of an all too present culture industry. Better dumb than banal — better to say nothing at all, than everything that already was and would ever be. You cried and cried until everyone left — until you were alone with your silence and your tears and your nonexistent originality.

Dusk falls in violet streaks. You reach your room on the second floor of the building, open the bedside window and stick your legs out into a cool breeze. The Ache joins you. Danny Burton, the local MP, arrives in his van, his smiling bald face plastered on its side like an uncanny double enclosing its original.

“Hey look, it’s Danny Burton, the local MP.” Danny Burton turns his head. He glares at your dangling feet for a few seconds before entering his house. “You know, this is the first time in three years he’s looked at me and it’s at the peak of my degeneracy.” You turn to the Ache. “One of my favourite past times is watching him wander around the house at night, ******* and unsure of himself. He always goes to check on his BBQ.” You bounce on the bed in mania.

“See this is what people do, right?” the Ache says, mirroring your excitement. “Like, look at that lady walking her dog.” The Ache motions, with a cruel glint in their eyes, to the passerby on the fast dimming street. “What do you think she gets out of that? Doing that every night?” Without waiting for you to respond, the Ache answers, in a low, sarcastic tone “I guess she gets enjoyment. Doing her thing. Like everyone else.” The lady and the dog disappear beyond the curve of the road. Another pair soon arrives, taking the same path as the one before.

A few months back, you’d met an old friend at an exhibition on intersectional feminism. After the perfunctory art, wine and grapes, she drove you home, back to your run down flat in an otherwise bourgeois neighbourhood. She sat silent as the sun set before the dashboard, then asked how anyone could live like this; how anyone could stand driving out of their perfect suburban home, at the same time every morning, to work the same shift every day, for the rest of their stupid life. The dull ache of routine; the slow, boring death. You said nothing. You said nothing because you agreed with her.

“Life began as self-replicating information molecules,” you reply, obliquely. “Catalysis on superheated clay pockets. Repetition out of an attempt to bind the excess of radiant light.”

It is dark now; a formless hollow, pitted with harsh yellow lamps of varying, distant sizes. The Ache flips onto their stomach and scoffs “What’s that? We’re all in this pointless repetition together?”

You respond, cautiously “I just don’t think that being smart is any better than being stupid; that our disavowed repetitions are any worthier than anyone else’s.”

The Ache returns your gaze with an intensity you’ve never seen before. “Did I say being smart was any better? Did I say that? Being smart is part of the issue. There is no trajectory that doesn’t become a habitual refrain. When you can do anything, everything becomes rote, effortless and pointless.

“But don’t act as if there’s no difference between us and these ******* idiots,” the Ache spits, motioning into the blackness beyond your frame. “I knew this one guy, this complete and utter ****. We went to a café, and he wouldn’t stop talking about the waitress, about how hot she was, how he wanted to **** her, while she was in earshot, because, I don’t know, he thought that would get him laid.

“Then we went for a drive and he failed a ******* u-turn. He just drove back and forth, over and again. A dead, automatic weight. A car came from the other lane, towards us, and waited for him to finish, but he stopped in the middle of the street and started yelling, saying **** like, ‘what does this ******* want?’ He got out of his car, out of his idiot u-turn, and tried to start a fight with the other driver — you know, the one who’d waited silently for him to finish.”

You don’t attempt a rebuttal; you don’t want to negate the Ache’s experience. Instead, you ask “Why were you hanging out with this guy in the first place?”

The Ache responds “Because I was alone, and I was lonely, and I had no one else.”

It is 2AM. Moths dance chaotic across the invisible precipice of your bedside window, between the inner and outer spaces of linguistic designation. There is a layering of history here — of affects and functions that have blurred beyond recognition — discoloured, muted, absented.

In the hollow of your bed, the Ache laughs. You don’t dare close the distance. Sometimes you find the edges of their impact and trace your own death. All your worries manifest without content. All form and waver and empty expanse where you drink deeply without a head. Because you have lost so much time already. And nothing keeps.

Months later, after the Ache has left, you will go to the beach. You will see the roiling waves beneath crash into the rocky shore of the esplanade, a violence that merges formlessly into a still, motionless horizon, for they are two and the same. You will be unable to put into words how it feels to know that such a line of calm exists out of the pull and push of endless change, that it has existed long before your birth and will exist long after your death.

The last lingering traces of acid flee your skin. Doused in tomorrow’s stupor, you close your eyes. You catch no sleep.
“Self-destruction is simply a more honest form of living. To know the totality of your artifice and frailty in the face of suffering. And then to have it broken.”
douglas chesa Feb 2012
I have been drinking wine
To douse the burning tip of my mind
Worries chewing at my nerves
Like the filter end of a rich Havana cigar
Woes of this world turn my whiskers
Into drab willows of misery
My nights into endless nightmares
And my thoughts rattling and jarring
Like the business end of a mechanical hammer.

Dreams clad in limp loincloth
Revisit me from the dark
Urns of history
The salad days of our beings
And their neauseating euphoria
When in drunken trance we siezed
Conscience by her arms
And threw her on her back
Splayed her legs
And smacked our lips
As blood spurt out...
I wipe my mind with the back of my hand
Trying
To brush away the dregs of the sordid rituals
We once enshrined.

A plump shiny green bottle
Buzzes around my mind irritating
Reminding me of Death
Hanging mockingly
Like a pendulum over my mind seducing
''O Sweet Carrion
You are food for the elders!''
And my sins in their hordes shimmer
A deathly pale round the nooze
Suspended from blushing heaven's bottom
My mind's eyes shed crystal tears
Giving away bucketfuls of Chiyadzwa diamonds to regain
Long gone and lost innocence.

I shared a bottle of wine
With my new-found friend, Today
Clinking glasses and minds
Then a greenbottle in full flight
Was caught between the grinding bellies
Of our glasses and minds
Bloodied fleshrot bespattered our intelligence
And our minds rushed to the wash basins retching
A brush with the fetid breath of the past
Left the gums of my mind barren and obscene
And together with newfound friend, Today
We covered our private parts with our hands
Ashamed
At the ****** of our thoughts.

She knocked at the door of my mind
Eyes shadowed in wet grey paint
Lips smudged in scarlet smiled at me
A Good Morning
My palm hiding the discoloured teeth
Of my inner-self
I muffled a Good Mourning to her, but
I felt a warmth spreading
At the base of my belly
Her milky-white mouthful was inviting
A milkyway blaze trailing into deep future
''I will flirt with her'' my mind whispered
But then the rasping sandpaper touch of her lips
Bruised and bloodied my thoughts
And I saw red at the future.

I must have swooned
From the First Lady's fistkisses of philanthropy
Doling out sweet nothings and promises
At a ceremony sheathed in royal pomp and dignity
Where the guests dressed like Harlequins
Mesmerised us with the crablike dance
And flummoxed O poor we
With democratic mumbo-jumbo and lingo
And the Povo touched with feeling
Donated oceanfuls of diamond tears
And their sincere prayers a mutter flutter
Into the heavens for beloved leaders.

I broke Biltong , my past, into the ***
To give life to ailing friend, Today
With my fingernail I peeled off
The tomatoe's tough ruddy jacket
To make sauce
And I heard a rumble of objection
From the August House
And the Mujibhas and Chimbwidos' angry yawn
Gave a chilli spice to the dish
And the food touching Today 's lips
He sneezed and broke wind
Startling ghosts of old nostalgic memories
That had took seats at the kitchen table
To wing away to the scrapyard
Their home beyond the rusting horizon.

Perched on the anthill of anticipation
I roll my thoughts
Into a big joint of mbanje
I **** and grey fading puffs
Of wishes spiral into the bored sky
Each a crippled dream
That was bulldozed at Churu Farm
An ambitious dream that was displaced
By the Operation Murambatsvina
A dream that lost an eye and limb in the food riots
A dream that lost its ***** at university
A dream that fell from the 11th floor at the Towers
Into the Taxman's hat
A dream that drowned in the opaque beer tank
At the Uhuru celebrations
A dream that lost its breath
On top of another man's wife in Mbare
A dream dumped and disowned
Only to find home at the bottom of the Blair toilet...
To find home in the sympathetic clicks
Of poets who have lost their voices.

The stub is burning my fingers
Minds run out of fuel and fire
The angry verbal lash
Of the emotionally wounded
Is a stub licking back at the wielder
To be snuffed out and discarded
On the ash tray of hopelessness
The grave yard that houses all
Once active minds.

-dougwa-
D.H. Lawrence  Nov 2010
Drunk
Too far away, oh love, I know,  
To save me from this haunted road,  
Whose lofty roses break and blow  
On a night-sky bent with a load  
  
Of lights: each solitary rose,          
Each arc-lamp golden does expose  
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows  
Night blenched with a thousand snows.  
  
Of hawthorn and of lilac trees,  
White lilac; shows discoloured night        
Dripping with all the golden lees  
Laburnum gives back to light.  
  
And shows the red of hawthorn set  
On high to the purple heaven of night,  
Like flags in blenched blood newly wet,        
Blood shed in the noiseless fight.  
  
Of life for love and love for life,  
Of hunger for a little food,  
Of kissing, lost for want of a wife  
Long ago, long ago wooed.
   .   .   .   .   .   .        
Too far away you are, my love,  
To steady my brain in this phantom show  
That passes the nightly road above  
And returns again below.  
  
The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees        
  Has poised on each of its ledges  
An ***** small girl looking down at me;  
White-night-gowned little chits I see,  
  And they peep at me over the edges  
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should I call        
  Them down to my arms;  
"But, child, you're too small for me, too small  
  Your little charms."  
  
White little sheaves of night-gowned maids,  
  Some other will thresh you out!          
And I see leaning from the shades  
A lilac like a lady there, who braids  
  Her white mantilla about  
Her face, and forward leans to catch the sight  
    Of a man's face,          
Gracefully sighing through the white  
    Flowery mantilla of lace.  
  
And another lilac in purple veiled  
  Discreetly, all recklessly calls  
In a low, shocking perfume, to know who has hailed  
Her forth from the night: my strength has failed  
  In her voice, my weak heart falls:  
Oh, and see the laburnum shimmering  
    Her draperies down,  
As if she would slip the gold, and glimmering        
    White, stand naked of gown.
   .   .   .   .   .   .  
The pageant of flowery trees above  
  The street pale-passionate goes,  
And back again down the pavement, Love  
  In a lesser pageant flows.          
  
Two and two are the folk that walk,  
  They pass in a half embrace  
Of linked bodies, and they talk  
  With dark face leaning to face.  
  
Come then, my love, come as you will          
  Along this haunted road,  
Be whom you will, my darling, I shall  
  Keep with you the troth I trowed.
LN  Jul 2014
A Poem About Trying
LN Jul 2014
Like a greedy vulture, I pecked at my skin
What is there to accept?
Is it the discoloured patches where plump red blush had settled before?
Rosy and full of life, I will mourn for my past self.
Is it the falling strings of hair giving up on embracing my tired neck?
A backbone that has defied its own purpose.

In a world of exchange and sharing
Nature has found a place in me
My soul reconciles with the desire to bloom
But my body is dwelling in its ashy winter days

Between the night and day
Find me halfway deciding where to go,
It will either be aspiring to be the sun
or waiting for the end to die with the moon.
I have finally written something after weeks of mental exhaustion
Leah Perry May 2016
I look down at my feet,
toes adorned with chipped nail varnish,
a pitiful plaster clinging to the sole,
and I grimace at the
purple marks, reddening blisters,
cicatrices of stories long forgotten.
The ***** of my feet are thin and worn,
my heels rubbed raw from
shoes I have loved and shoes I have detested,
faded scars from childhood accidents.
I have aged hating my feet,
the discoloured skin, dotted with odious callouses,
my throbbing, wrinkled soles.

They have grown with me,
from tiny clumps unrecognisable as a foetus,
to wide, long size 7s.
My toes are misshapen, twisting this way and that,
freckled with sun kisses from foreign countries.
They’ve been battered and bruised
repeatedly,
victims of my hurtling abuse and mortal neglect.
I have punished them
with verruca socks and freezing ointments,
pin ******, small shoes, razor blades, nail clippers and
not once
have I nurtured them, soaked them with praise.

These feet have walked me up mountains,
aided me in athletic championships,
withstood six inch heels on weekends,
ran me through marathons,
enduring my never-ending physical torment and though
they may buckle,
with weeping blisters and aching pains,
dry skin, broken bones and sprained ankles,
they will recover,
rebuilding the scabrous skin.
Regardless of how unstable my life may become in later years,
whether I am stranded on a deserted island,
or walking the ***** streets of the city, no room to call my own,
my feet will always,
undoubtedly, lead me to safety.
And when I am old
and withered, an exhausted heap of human life,
with my last dying breath,
I will thank my durable, reliable feet.
Laura Reinbach Jun 2012
Crouching in the rotted dust,
Covers covet the light;
Dull, discoloured dust jackets
And wrinkled leather hides
Of the books that moulder and muse,
Ruminate and render themselves
To dust, as everything must,
Upon long-forgotten shelves.
Becomes the perfect breeding ground
For shadows, for sickness, for sin;
The ladies are seen to turn away
With tarnished faces and tattered gowns,
While the hero remains anonymous,
A nobody about the town.
A plot studded with lacunas
And paralysed on page one,
Words grown together in intimate embraces
Never to be undone.
Thin volumes of poetry
Shiver with the poison of years,
As passions freeze and snow falls in May –
The daffodils die a beautiful death,
The clouds are mottled and grey.
A teardrop hits the page.
I wrote this about 6 months ago and kind of forgot it - much like the books I'm describing actually.
Ayad Gharbawi Feb 2010
HANDWRITTEN WORDS OF A MISGUIDED WOMAN

Ayad Gharbawi

February 1, 1989 – Cambridge, Mass., Boston, USA.





A silence dictates
Its hopes essential
That thirst in their intertwined
Hatreds for the
Struggle to breathe
The crowds staggered in their plodding
The howls turned nowhere
Even though they themselves
Really felt that their words
Had so many depths
But at least some flocks did hear these sounds
There was some heat generated
I say I heard roses
Crying gases inert
Their real feelings were soon discoloured
Did you ever understand
The ways and means
Of people?

I heard of clowns dying by suffocating themselves
Quietly
Didn’t they at least
Entertain themselves?
I saw humbled and determined gatherings
Of angry frustrated citizens
But they soon were to hear
The words
Of misunderstood monks
Who finally produced a smile
But their words
Did ramble on and endlessly on
And the winds of their spirits
Were far too directionless
To be of any meaning

Then I saw Hurt
I saw engines crying
They spoke meaningless melodies to me
And I did try to guess
But I screamed
“You engines!” I screamed
“You can never sing, you maniacs!”
My brain
I felt was losing
Its functions
I wasn’t too sure of what functions they were supposed
To do actually
Did you know what those functions
Were supposed to do?
I was not walking straight
And I knew it

Tell me of your cooking
I’ve been hungry for too long
You see
Or, you may see
It’s been too long
And your language destroyed me here
My appetite was killed as well

And your subtle hatreds
Yes, I remembered them all
And I will repay you real for real
What you gave me
I shall give back to you

While a hopeful clown
He
And she
Entertained and spoke in dialects misunderstood
I swear
I even saw smoke
Emanating from your breaths
That gunned me down
Down to my protecting ribs
I never have ever
Seen hatred like this
I confess to you
The units of my poetry have gone mad
And my sense of geometry
Have turned ridiculous
No, I agree
I never hated as much as you did
But I am catching up fast with you all
Jesus
I never guessed
What predicaments Man can debase himself into
And then again
I never realized
What a lowly depth, I too could be forced into
I was stunned
I cried
My name is ‘Ayad’
I thought that was enough
To convince criminals of my innocence

I was not misunderstood
That was incorrect
I was actually understood, quite well
Truth was
Nobody wanted to feel my truth
The speed of life
And human interactions and conversations
Easily bewildered me
And misguided me
I was tempted by the flowers of literature
I was tempted
When I saw independent women
Laughing joyously
I believed
There can exist a time
When loving can exist
In its sheltered solitude
Wherein there exist no indignities
Imagine
That your father
Is never berated
Imagine your mother
Is never to be shouted at

But then
The skies did change their colours
And meanings changed
And with the change of meanings
Intentions did change
Unto whom did the skies turn to?
And where did all the meanings of
Of every philosophy become?
Unto whom did they turn to?
RH 78  May 2015
Dirty Money
RH 78 May 2015
The glint of a gold coin discarded and under a hedge.
The unmistakeable ***** and ****** of the shrapnel congregating at the bottom of my pocket.
I can find any combination of currency in a lovely jingle jangle of metallic discs.
The cashier slips me a note and some change on top which spills onto the counter.
A 10 pence piece tries an audacious spinning escape morphing into a ball.
The change rattles again as it all settles at the bottom of my pocket after dropping in the new recruits.
I slide the discoloured crinkled creased five pound note into my leather wallet nicely nestling next to a ten pound note.
I love the  smell of ***** money!

— The End —