Shaky Spear is my name
and rhyming is my game
though I don't need to rhyme
to be sublime
I prefer the lines
that stand on their own
just words alone
in a desert of colorless bone
and dying poets

There is a gap wide enough,

Between what we feel, and what we show,

That a jungle lives between;

Neither hers nor mine, but somewhere new.

This country's a paradise, but

This country's a maze, where my sorrows

Stalk my joys through dark forests

Woven thickly through my reveries,

As hungry creatures - by my hand sent,

For the Gods of my forest

Covet no beauty but chaos.

This place has no maps,

Because this place is me;

And I am the blind cartographer

August 2019

What is it about the night time that makes us so vulnerable?
Because at 3am the world seems to stop.
I am shaded by a black veil of unconsciousness
and madness that sputters onto my pillowcase.
I feel weaker in the unknown;
It possesses a certain uncertainty that is kept
a secret between my skin
binding itself to my membrane.
I am not the queen of mystery nor the goddess of the night;
I cannot wear a cloak that will swallow me like a sewer-
that will distort me into a fragment.
I crouch in corners and lurk loosely between fiction
and reality

My brain clicks on and off
in sync with my ballpoint pen
My lungs have inflated
to twice the size of my brain
I'm finding it hard to think straight
when three of my glass ribs have
shattered into splinters
that slice their way through my heart

Startled by
the bitter stains on the white carpet
I'm sick of inhaling fumes
that don't belong in this house
that scratch at my ****** flesh like
forced zippers