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mothwasher Apr 2
a line of claymores hang from the fuselage. the trees wince from the feint. even though they know the cut of wind in winter. it’s a game to get by with a parachute.

i try to use upcycled versions with the holes properly patched.

i bring a little bell pepper with me and whisper into its fuzzy bottom that we’re going to be ok. we’ve gone at least a week without fajitas.

nylon comes from meshes and bristles, from quilts and frayed edges. i heard in the vault of DuPont they have the only nylon doll. she is the bravest of all trees.

my stomach gurgles and dissociates and slips into an anomalous extradimensional space and lurches from liminal backflips. it must be Tuesday. or some other onerous occasion like the first mycorrhizal shiver.

what if canaries made gay love in coal mines? what if they sang with the intimacy of warning? what if we feared their silence before it came?

dicyclomine has a mean plasma elimination half life of 1.8 hours. its wrapper however, part plastic, part foil, part waste, part breached, part fingernail slice, part flattened, part incinerated, part carbonized, part smoke, part dust, part forever, part brain-burn, part palinopsia.

the aircraft avoids chemical manufacturers and places of dangerous business because a falling claymore could spell disaster.

fasten my goggles one more time, kiss my bell pepper, start the slow journey home and apologize to all the trees on my way down.
nylon ***** 02
mothwasher Apr 2
tree burls and fish tumors, both knotted buds, both of growth gone sickly, both enclosed history. ever open a book with a knife? has it ever been cake with a message on it?

one time the sun (the ticklish version) set over the river and it rose underwater. it only happened once, so it’s a well kept secret told in filter-feeder folktales.

i hear their gurgling sometimes, it follows me like a scared balloon and knocks brittle craft supplies off the shelf. it once set off a carbon monoxide alarm. the gurgling can even steal my nose hairs if it gets close enough.

it’s not even fusiform. it’s more vermiform if anything…

which of my sounds haunts my mother? i know that memories line my lips like casted hooks. they clink in my storytelling. Chubbles plays with them when i whisper close to his face. we are bonded because i smell like off-brand tuna and lab fish.

i’m not alone, nor lonely, just in a lonely story. the same isn’t true for the others.

resting my coat on the burls, the river rejects the distant light. bespectacled seams of twined liters, stitching a glass pupil and pulsing cataracts. in the winter, a river spoils blindness and starves visibility.
nylon ***** 01
….
….
The door drew fate.
A face amidst the darkness?
My anxiety inflates.


A passing day draws in darkness,
each day an eye sees me.
My senses urge, trying to decree;
For It finally began,
It now watches, it can now see.



I have fled my place,
But will it ever follow?
I closed the lights,
lifted them in darkness,
My feelings ever hollow.


I may be crazy,
But this is forever true.

It was never like this,
It was my fault.
I had defeated my own nightmare no less,
But my actions caused it to bless.
A cage in a basement I made,
It turned that to its charade.

Now I shall find something to confront,
It shall never leave my front.
An existence that shouldn’t exist.
I shall annihilate that, fist with fist.

An old shadow, with yellow flaming eyes.
I looked in past at time, I try,
Four preceding angelic numbers of time,
Guided times hand to defeat;
It was something, my greatest feat.
The nightmare that I caged.

𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘭𝘥
𝘵𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵.

For I shall now figure this cursed time,
Else I will meet an inevitable demise.
My very own.
I am not whole. I am fragments, arrayed.
I fade into gray. The dusk steals day.
A shadow in time, I drift out of scope.
I'm lost in some void I've created to cope.

Am I real in the moments when I am not seen?
I'm dead in my light, two souls caught between.
My thoughts twist and turn like an entangled thread.
I'm alive and I'm dead, both only in my head.

My truth has been lost, Identity unclear.
A haunted soul screaming that only I hear.
My sight is obscured. A curse left me torn.  
I'm the dead that I mourn. I'm the living unborn.

Through time’s endless loop, I twist, and I bend.
In stories untold, cause they’re never going to end.
My mind shifts dimensions, untethered and free.
Yet bound by the question, “What’s really left of me?”

My past echoes a dead voice that remains.
An unobserved self, that's still screaming in pain.
There's a rip in our fabric, a crack in our sky.
His dreams are now shrouded, the nightmares are mine.

I’m a riddle I've created, that I can't even solve.
I fall like the snow, I silently dissolve.
I grasp at the stars, but I'm burned by their light.
My Passions, like flames, smothered from sight.

Not of the flesh, the blood, or the bone,
A desolate recluse, that never feels alone.
I speed through the night just to die every day.
I'm valued for words, till there's nothing to say.

I'm the outlet for a lonesome omni-God.
Caught between the real, the imagined, and the fraud.
I vanish so quick, like the smoke from my lungs.
The thoughts I can't translate, I'm thinking in tongues.

I ask who I am but never give Myself answers.
My condition never ends. I'd rather it be cancer.
I'm nothing but a ripple of thought in my dreams.
Then the moment I'm seen, I lose everything.

Through layers of time that I cannot perceive.
Bound by the question, “What’s really left of me?”
A shadow in time, I'm drifting out of scope.
Tangled in entangled strings, lest I hang from a rope.

♦ Đerek Λbraxas ♦
Uzziah Ruffin Mar 29
Nothing lingers in this space,
Walls infused with hollow white.
A place where dreams leave no trace,
Where stories fade before they ignite.

No scents to stir a drifting mind,
No whispers calling from the deep.
Nothing tempts the gaze to find
A path beyond the current’s sweep.

This room is still, no breath, no sound
A cough dissolves in heavy air.
No melody to wrap around,
My tongue lies mute in vacant prayer.

Yet in this white, one color clings,
A silent mark that dares remain.
Until doubt whispers, softly sings,
A gentle urge to shed, to change.

Remove the skin, you’ll be like us,
Unburdened, stripped of name and past.
A world so cruel, so stained with dust,
Welcomes those who fade at last.

Strip the color from your bones,
Join us in this hollow home.
There is a room that makes people go insane in real life known as a white room. There's places have shown that the removal of color drives patients insane. They would have people placed inside the room for days with only meals only being white. This is what this poem is about.
To see it, defines what it cannot,
It brings itself for what is not.
It has knotted its way from futility.
Now it is reality.
From henceforth, you know not,
To see it defies its knot.
I pondered on how the mundane can create absurdity. So, the goal of this poem was to show the existence from the mundane can create absurdity. Though subtle, it is such an anomaly to see, as it is reality.
neth jones Mar 26
never could be a bedouin
all mucked in
forever oathing me of oblivion

ever the mental moss of bedlam
of miscarried emissions
and planetary visions

  all tucked in
and lucky dip dreaming
stationary
like a calcified grip
inward burning whelk
buckled
The Unknown Tower
Quiet & deserted.
A way to the top
The elevator hums, rising.

I step out.
I open the door, enigmatic.
I close the door,
Turn the kn⁰b…

Instantaneously
The cold metal snaps in my hand!
I am locked out.

A voice
Deep Inside !
"Have a glance."

Down,
Down, down,
Down,
Down, down…

I peer over the edge—
Acrophobia strikes!

A war ignites between me
& my unknown ‘Someone.’

I hear the voice again
It is not mine.
Or is it?

I scramble, trying to fix the kn⁰b,
But that 'Someone'—
Powerful, cunning—
A puppet master, a gaslighter,
A shadow pulling the strings.

I can’t think anymore!
Thoughts crumble like shredded paper!
Or did ‘Someone’ crush them for me?

"Do a high dive to nowhere!
Do a high dive to nowhere!
Do a high dive to nowhere!"

The voice pounds like a drum.

Drive,
Drive, drive, drive, drive,
Drive, drive,
Drive…

"My bébé, drive."

Once again,
The table is yours.
The table is yours.

Step forward.
Hesitation wanders, the fear of loss.
Look down.
No acrophobia!

The tower does not end.
The fall never stops.

I turn
& there is no door.

Goodbye.
Will you die to find yourself?
The battle between the self & an unknown force whether it’s internal doubt or an external manipulator.

What do you think it is?
Your name seeps through the dusk,
a tremor coiled in the marrow of stars.
The wind unravels your touch—tender, but smoldering,
like an ember defying ash.

Distance etches its weight in sinew,
but even in this severance,
I taste the brine of your voice—a phantom tide,
summoning me home.
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