Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
softcomponent Sep 2017
everything withers on a vine like
                                                         grapes
                                                                ­      to
                                                                ­           raisins.
Seeking the power of sublimation,
I grasp the ghost of my sadness
by the scruff of it's ghostly collar
and look it in the ghostly eyes to tell it,
as resolutely as Horatio Nelson
                                             screaming
                                                                ­  commands to his fleet to attack
Napoleon's assembled navy
at the mouth of Aboukir Bay
two centuries
and
19 years before the meanwhile write,
that I can't breathe.
I can't breathe.
I really can't breathe you
sonuvabitch.  

*but in the end, my victory is as
assured as Napoleon's eventual
defeat. I will route my demons at
their own little Waterloo...
and even if they return
from exile to rule one last time,
they will find their second attempt
much
more
fleeting.
softcomponent Aug 2017
whoever said you can't find love on Tinder
has obviously never found a needle in a haystack.

There isn't anything to blame in such a deficit,
but when you're shuffling through the wires
of
hay-grass
seeking nothing in particular
only to ***** your finger to bleed
blood
red
love,
the fact you found it in the hay
should be no reason to discard its beauty.

In an internet casino of loveless *****
and gambled encounters,
where the rest of the hay is a pale green or pale gold in color,
I would have been blind had I missed the sheen
from the tips
of your bluebird feathers
as you perched just as curiously
and just as confusedly as I did.

We wrung the slot machine's lever
one
more
time
and found one another
gazing into our eyes
like we'd known each other
for longer
than a millennium
could ever claim
to measure.
dedicated to Alanna MacDonald (happy birthday, you beautiful soul. I'm so very, very glad the lottery of internet chance gave us a chance).
softcomponent Jul 2017
as the air slithers thru my barely-opened window,
and the lisdexamphetamine begins its pulsing thru
my veins, I think of my abrogation of poetry for
manic intellectual pursuit at the highest academic
degree. The pace of an angry, deletrious, passionate
mad gift of insanity that will always leave me with
un-relieved pressure in the mind, migrated to the
solar plexus, where it builds and builds and builds
until the steam must exit lest I explode in the trapped
heat and experience a heat-death perhaps not unlike
that predicted for our universe, billions of years from now.

And I asked myself a question I recognize someone has
already asked and answered for me.

"What is a poet?"

Hello?

I asked, "What is a poet?"

Soren Kierkegaard glances up from his study in the office
I've established for him in my mind. He repeats the question
for clarification, and declares:

*“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
softcomponent Jul 2017
songbirds twitter within the acoustic enclave of my mind.

only when I've galvanized myself with the looming shadow
of nothingness,
a dark initiative,
something life-denying
and yet
spoken loudly to be spoken away
do I learn the language of redemption.

only when the darkness is embraced
can one gaze beyond its shoulder,
ready to climb the next mountain
and descend into the next valley
with no recrimination
towards the you in you
that's hurting
**you.
softcomponent Jun 2017
I sat behind the barricade between the street, the bar, and the park overlooking that glistening pause-asteric of the water... my phone was clamped closed at zero battery life so I was alone with the city and the city was alone with me. as subtly as I could, I pulled my pipe from the bottom of my over-encumbered backpack satiated with 6 books (and they tell me knowledge is power, but they'll probably just drive me insane with question after question after question because the study of the world is one in which the brain falls victim to exponential growth 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256)

MY SKULL ISN'T BIG ENOUGH

I couldn't find my grinder, so I tore the bud by hand. More than half a nug was spent, pushed solid in place like a **** mound about to reach apocalyptic ****** thanks to the soft clitoral bonfire of a red Bic lighter.

blaze, set, and fade til you rise again
little stoner boy.
softcomponent Jun 2017
pain, pain,
regardless of the pain
i will be here in the rear-view
skating past and saying
'hell-ohhell-no'
to the passerby's in Jeep's and Prius
and Camry's
and Adidas shoes
all tattered and bled along highways
and back-roads of life.

when Robin Williams died by belt self-suffocation,
i was back in the dark of a previous mind and i cried
*** i saw myself in his suicide.
i saw my darkness colored in with pitch-black pastels,
*****,
grass-stains,
and infidelity..
toffee from a homeless man
and
i hand him a cigarette.

my lungs were never my life-force - -
my lungs were never my life-force - -

all the blurry peripheral city lights
dancing in my withheld tears
as i marched from Douglas to Yates
and the old Korean karaoke bar
with the silent tv
dancing asians moving mouth-muscles for nothing
as the song sings someone else to sleep in Seoul..

the unwashed windows 3 floors up the office building are the strangest thing i noticed in this delicate flood of hopelessness, seagulls screeching from spider-men perches
on street-lamp,
power-line,
construction crane

"I want to be a man again
*I want to be a mannequin."
softcomponent Jun 2017
zero in on that second when gravity
takes a small dive into the contrast
that is nothing.
you are left comparing what your
senses still reveal to the soft blanketed
blankness of no-thing at all.

an absence only apparent because
it has been
defined.

the numbered becomes numberless
when there's nothing
to
count.
Next page