I live in the basement, never venturing
upon those stairs, I hear her voice...
"Come up and see me its been to long,
Holding my ears singing my favourite song
repetitively until she is drowned out of
my thoughts. rocks tied to her voice as it
sinks out of view.

I use the stairs that open to the outside,
Lingering looking at this place I called home.
Venturing in the old ford, she lets me drive
it when food is but breadcrumbs and eggs
old enough to birth the dead fetes of a partly
grown bird. I look out though a ***** window
screen, this trip takes two hours each way.

I always wonder if my bald tyres are ever
noticed, but I'm not hindered by the thoughts
of this. So much to see when driving in solitude.
I stop at the side of the road picking cherries,
I slump them in the boot. I may eat upon this
morsel or just hang them outside watching
them swaying in the gentle breeze.

My father just looks out the window.
Doesn't talk much these days his eyes are sunken
like the titanic splintered between two pools.
I move his chair and his arm falls at his side.
collecting it, I put him palms resting on a blanket
He's so gaunt now, he was a strong man now but a shadow.

I look at those cherries lingering above the ground,
shaded from just picked to becoming spoilt, but i
just leave them swaying the aroma fills lungs with
life's eroding perfume, I breath it deeply within.
This is my home, "she never calls me for dinner anymore,
I just make my own, the washing up is festering in
my ignorance, like a garden of petrification flowering.

Saying bye to my dad, I get in the old ford.
Its time to pick some fresh cherries, the tree
is looking unkempt. Its blossom is in honour
of a mother, I hang them all there. My
Mother hung there for a long time ,but she's
long gone. So I bring other cherries to the tree
to show that she'll never be forgotten....

Please forgive my hesitation
at instigation of flirtation.
Did I ensure my elimination?
My romantic assassination?
I'll gladly partake in any placation,
for any chance of indoctrination
to the centralization of your concentration.
An operation of admiration.
A correlation of inflammation.
Your gravitation brings animation,
exclamation and elongation.
My specialization is duration.
Not to hint at a connotation,
but I feel a certain *******
by an obligation to a certain destination
where your presentation gives me restoration.
Petrification?
Total mind evacuation?
Would clarification bring fascination?
Stimulation!
Salivation!
Gratification!
Insinuation of fornication?
A simple salutation to syncopation.
Would a single bright carnation
be enough of a motivation,
for a two way relocation?
Would poetic recitation
be sufficient lubrication
for collaboration?
A consolidation?
Or an exacerbation of isolation?
Please hold no reservation,
I've only got one aspiration.
To achieve a higher elevation;
by means of inhalation,
or a certain recreation
involving a bit of perspiration
along with physical communication.
Does this seem such a bad situation?
Or are you ready for pure elation?

My feet almost quiver as they hit the pavement,

Terrified to take another step.

Petrified to move forward.

For it forces my mind to realize what comes next,

What is in front of me,

What came before that step.

Can’t I just stand still?

Make time stop,

Tangle myself in a freeze frame,

And wait for you to arrive to resume?

At this hour the walls are black,
They breathe with apparitions as
The sky splits open,
     I am alone as the sun dial walks
Across the stone bodies,
    Where there were once streets and homes
Now lay in waste filled with your
Silhouette of silver memory,
Vast as my Earth at the crossroads
Of eight directions I walk through
a gallery of echoes and the infamy
Of the present,
And the verbiage of the moment carries
       Your luminous spectre,
A master of reflections,
     The dialogue of a lonely poet....

I am but a poem haunted by your ghost,
petrified by the frame of your spectral silhouette.

Whether storms are all numbered, counted, and expelled from heaven's manufacture as sensational, furious strands of wind and rain, who can say? As they arrive, however, it is nonetheless clear that they arrive as effects to sets of circumstances.

I sat up straight as an arrow, freshly awakened from a stirring dream of madness as the latest one arrived, watching the black clouds like mighty arms, struggling and arguing against the trees outside my bedroom window. I had been torn by an invisible hand clutching me by the throat, snatching me from the murk of an ephemeral bedroom.

Engulfed in unsatiated fear, powerless to convulse even the tiniest flesh patch or creak a bone, my body was wrapped in only a gray silken **** cloth. As I lay awake, speechless, thunderbolts cracked.

As I was rendered helpless to petrification, I was surrounded by strike after strike, a confounding series of white bolts striking seven times in each place, following a path of concentric circles around my small bed.

I struggled to move, feeling a moving static across my body like jellyfish stings from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, as I felt the cold chill from each bolt setting my face into a freezing strangulation.

I was pulled away. I faded away from the smoking holes surrounding the bed, the sub-zero chill outside and the torturous heat of fear and arrhythmia pumping spews and spurts through my arteries inside, and I was left to wander in my own fantasia as I stared up to the ceiling above me in my real bed, daydreaming of its meaning in epistomological fashion.

Cold and unforgiving, no longer caring,
no longer happy, but also not grieving
My body just sits here, numb, motionless,
for what feels like a thousand years
Forgetting what it means to remember,
like using logic to sort through the feelings
Like a statue made up of *****,
like a machine choking on its own tears
Like trying to escape from a room with no door
Surrounded by people, and still so alone
Each day comes darker than the one before
Heart turned cold, then turned to stone
Petrification of compassion and empathy
Metastasis of pathological apathy
Irony and cynicism replace joy and hope
Divinity and love exchanged for empty *** and dope
Unrelenting curses and half Muffled screams
Mask the sudden death of unrealized dreams
Such is the nature of love which has been lost
Before it ever even had a chance to live.
Such is the nature of mercy and grace
Before it ever even learned to forgive.

'something didn't come that should have'
                               you never looked more like a little kid
                               and you wouldn't hug me.
visibly, apathy became your decision
thinly smeared charcoal to conceal
petrification.
who were you trying to
fool?
'abortions aren't a big deal'
                                i never looked more like my mother
                                and you wouldn't touch me.
in the backseat of that jeep
you gave me some quarters
and told me not to tell.
'i gotta go to class'
                                i smelled ****** on you
                                and knew i would smell it later.
                                ****** is what got us here.
i hid my face in my sweater.
my *** said no baby
i said congratulations on not being a father
you said cool and i'll talk you later.
                               i wish it was
                               that easy.

Trial i: Crimson


By: The Mad Poetess


Purpose:

I shall birth
a new colour.

Sprung from the womb
of passion & rage--

cacophonous.

The name of the labour:
The Crimsoning

after the spawn:

Crimson.

Hypothesis:

from the quill
baptized in crimson ink

to the torn parchment

poetry shall hail down

like a meteor shower.

Materials:

- Sewing needle
- Blood
- Berries harvested from the Belladonna plant (devil's cherry)
- Teardrops
- Artist's palette
- Inkwell
- Bunsen burner
- Quill pen
- Parchment


Procedure:

1. With the needle, ***** finger; remove needle at the first dewdrop of blood
2.  Crush and mix devil's cherries with teardrops upon artist's palette
3. Add dewdrop and rest of concoction on to palette and mix using whatever is convenient (fingers, paint brush, hair, etc)
4. Transfer Crimson to inkwell
5. Place in well above bunsen burner
6. Burn for 40 days and 40 nights until Crimson is matured
7. Dip quill into ink
5. Press quill to parchment
6. Write poetry


Observations:

The parchment kindles
beneath the ink

pages curl up
at the corners
like Medusa’s hissing serpents

every gawking
letter
a petrification of
what could have been

every lowercase t
crucified

every serif
a burning branch.

Is this the context
of a self-fulfilling prophecy?

To write poems about forest fires
and then

burn?

~

My poems and I:

on the cusp of extinction.

I throw my head back
at a ghastly angle

like the ancient
Ornithomimus.

There is something awry

I can feel it
as I step into
the thick and tense
stifling and sinister,
suffocating ether.

I have a peripheral sense
of an occluded slumber,
a disturbance.
Begotten by me?
I can only hope not.

Haunted by something unknown,
unseen but not unheard.
A sound, a whisper, a chill
Ghastly squall
The rush suspends my breath,
captivates my thoughts,
hurries my pulse;
throbbing and pounding,
in my dizzy and cluttered head.

The door has closed.

Impulse and instinct
drive my body
but it is dark,
         never-ending,
    surrounding
Me.

Perturbation reaches up
And grips my very being;
strangling my conscious,
operational will.
Numbing all perception short of
foreboding and dread.

My entranced, mortal corpse
stumbling over my own hastened direction
that it already knows.
Scrutinizing and bellowing
an audible, unmistakable
laugh
which freezes me again
with crippling petrification.

There is no escape.

Now face to face
as I turn to confront it,
stare to glare.
Menacing and perilous
it consumes me.
      Devours me.
Immortally imprisoned by
              It.

I'm not sure whether it’s the swarm of parasitic tasks we busy ourselves with
that wedge between the two of us,
as if work supersedes love.
Or is it the stress that is curling its fingers around our throats,
digging its nails into the flesh and thickening the air
until we choke on tension.
Tension that could be replaced by passion
but instead takes the form of a dying flame that desperately cries to be tendered to.
Perhaps it is the distance that is more than just geographical, but the gap that truly lies between our close chambers of slumber so that every night gets colder, lonelier.
What I do know is the fear that resides in my heart, the panic that becomes depression that whittles me down to a measly core,
one that cannot so much as hold itself up against the wind, and before it can recognise it,
blows away like a tumble-**** in my barren mind.
Barren, empty, soulless,
but I, I have my soul.
Yet with each passing day, half of it dwindles -
the half that is you -
for I have sacrificed that half for one who I was sure would have my heart forever,
but in both petrification and melancholy,
feeling definite in it is not surely so.

Man, whatever bleakness has named
You, I have never seen your face.

I imagine you rugged and more....
More than I had been for her.

I imagine she sees strength in you like
A stone on a mountaintop: loftily perched.

And your hands that have stolen my embraces,
I imagine them smoother than my calloused
Fingers,

My jealousies grow as you see in this poem,
It kills me, every verse that I imagine you....

Are you like this?
Is this the unimaginable lust she has for you,

Are your ears ringing now,
Do you even acknowledge me as her man?

Tell me, tell me if you held her through death,
Did she cry herself to sleep in your arms?

When you see your destiny,
Is she among the constellations you foretell?

I am sure you are quite the lover,
You who now kiss the woman I had before,

You who hold her in adoration,
Perhaps you know why I wanted to live,

Because you have stolen all good from me,
All the hope I had from this verse,

In petrification of my soul
I confess to you I am a broken man.

What divine intervention will seek you out?
Will karma let you be as happy as I was?

In a myriad of solemn thoughts,
I am at a loss for the wrath I hope vengeance has for you.

But treat her well,
Kiss her methodically and with purpose,

And maybe she will show her angelic eyes
Which promise forever, quietly whispering:

I will be here with you always,
So that when the promise has penetrated you,

The divinity you feel at the comfort of her
Lifetime of promised cherishing,

Maybe she will find something else
In another promise of another soul,

Only this thought eases the heavy bitterness
Left in my procession of days.

For now move forward,
Because I am paralysed,

And to the other man,
The burden of me writing this poem.