#exile
My swaddling cloth was my haven.
I was under the protection of the black angel.
I did not need sleep then,
for I rested in an endless sleep already.
I bore no weight then,
for I belonged to a time beyond history.
My fall into life is catastrophe;
its consequences, a nightmare.
Every breath I take is resistance;
every breath I release, a struggle.
Even while the heavens rest, sleep never enters my eyes.
Even while civilization runs without rest, my foot sleeps.
I think of it—my motherland.
I remember my homeland.
I mourn for Neverland.
A dim ache gathers in my heart;
I long for the abyssal arms.
From the exile, I write elegies.
The destinies there are uncertain.
I arrange praises for nothingness,
and they vanish inside its emptiness.
Perhaps this is precisely what it means to exist:
to be absorbed by the void, the ultimate home.
Life is not life.
Death is not death.
Life is death,
and death is life.
It is my struggle to exist,
in memory of annihilation,
that leaves my eyes fixed upon the horizon
for the sake of my lost civilization.
That empire has no name;
it rules beyond even namelessness.
That empire has no location;
it reigns beyond even placelessness.
I do not know where I exactly came from
or where I am going, forever heading.
But I see with absolute clarity
where I have never arrived, and never will.
This place does not pull me toward itself,
but through my whole being
I feel the ache
of somewhere that does.
Take my soul and bring me back to yourself.
I am freezing here, and I long for your cold fire.
**** me, annihilate me.
Liberate me, set me free.
Let me dissolve in the darkness of the cosmos within your yoke.
Change my cage, sweet swaddle.
― Atrona Grizel
6d ago
May 28, 2026 at 3:58 PM UTC
All or nothing
Is all some of us see
A guaranteed loss
Void of reality
All or nothing
A foolish play
If you can't have it all
You throw it away
When I was much younger
I had a big dream
To perform for the masses
Rock star supreme
While that dream was lofty
A small population fulfilled
Had I just quit music
My passion would had been killed
All or nothing
Some require
If I can't have it all
I'll set in on fire
All or nothing
It's not a surprise
Nothing's for certain
It takes compromise
Wants fall on a spectrum
From weak to strong
We can't always get
Everything for which we long
In every situation
You'll find good and bad
We're not always happy
We're not always sad
All or nothing
There should be take and give
Walking away if it's not perfect
Is no way to live
May 8
May 8, 2026 at 11:44 AM UTC
The flowers have withered
The leaves are burnt
The lovers are heartbroken
And the fiancés have gone into exile.
Why so much drama for one day
So much vanities for a single evening?
The cards are scorned and discarded
And hearts feel desolate.
The perfumes have evaporated
In the smoke of the soirée
Where was love in this melée?
I abhor negativity
The vicar has ruined everything
In the frenzy of kisses.
P.S. Translation of “Après La Nuit De La Saint-Valentin »
By Hébert Logerie
Copyright © February 2026 Hébert Logerie, All rights reserved.
Hébert Logerie is the author of several poetry collections.
Feb 16
Feb 16, 2026 at 12:12 AM UTC
Whenever she loses a child
to the arcades of sickness,
to the basements of dungeons,
recruited for the mills of war,
or to the wilderness of exile,
she picks up the prayer beads of her chronic diseases
adds merely another bead
an olive pit.
silently,
in the quiet of Afrin
she cries for them, another winter.
Dec 8, 2025
Dec 8, 2025 at 4:08 PM UTC
Bleach hangs in the air like frost.
Trailers crouch low as coyotes.
Grandfathers fold into their lawn chairs,
skin gone parchment,
methamphetamine ghosts flickering by the pumps,
waiting for angels to drift off i-10.
I never chased winter south,
but once I saw a girl who had.
Her people hauled down from cold country,
living in an aluminum box
strung with sagging Christmas bulbs.
She stood at the window,
eyes sweeping the dust
for anything with breath.
Hunger knows its own.
She pressed her cheek to the glass,
breath frosting the pane,
wanting the world to open wider
than the room her family pulled here.
Her little brother slept
on a pallet of moving blankets,
mouth ringed with the crust of last night’s beans.
I thought of the night we moved again
and I slept in the backseat,
shoes still on, afraid to ask where we’d landed.
In another life
I could have been her
a child pulled too far from home,
face to the window,
learning the hard truth
the desert keeps to itself.
Watching the girl watching the horizon
two exiles measuring distance,
waiting for whatever dies last in the desert
to say it straight
we’re not getting out clean.
Dec 4, 2025
Dec 4, 2025 at 8:20 PM UTC
I.
in a desired love that resembled alienation—
no vows whispered beneath your blue suit,
your tie a bloodless knot,
our hands beneath the table, untouched.
you stared, then diagnosed,
oh, that american love,
after i said love should be a refuge
for our worst truths.
you called it messy. unnecessary.
i called it the only ethic
i could stomach.
II.
and there—
in that disagreement—
the first partition appeared:
two languages refusing translation.
you stirred your cup
as if rehearsing silence,
steam ghosting the face
you keep in public.
i watched restraint glow faintly,
a small theology of distance
you believed to be grace.
III.
my eight-year-old asteroid map,
forty-seven lonely craters,
numbered and named—
i catalogued every time
i felt alone that year.
you smiled, said kids are strange,
stirred your americano,
never tracing the distance
between yourself
and everyone you’ve ever known—
like a raj-era officer
counting ledger lines.
“first lust for rocks,” you said,
missed the orbits of my solitude.
now my adult eyes follow the same lines—
you see a child’s drawing of desire,
not the blueprint of exile.
IV.
when you ask about my morality,
i say it began in quiet discretion.
you sigh—again—
a man who has never been a territory to be lost.
i do not sigh.
i press my thumb
into the fresh bruise of your absence—
a test. to feel something
other than this knowing.
and still—
here we are:
your hands hover over empty pages.
the map folds itself shut,
its craters darkening to script.
i trace the borders once more,
not to claim—
only to remember where the distance began.
Oct 11, 2025
Oct 11, 2025 at 11:16 AM UTC
I have always been the in-between.
Too restless to live in the neat lines of ordinary life,
too structured to dissolve into chaos.
I was the girl who stitched her own clothes,
who wore rebellion like a second skin,
who refused to buy what the world told me to wear.
I moved with the dreamers,
the late-night guitar players,
the ones who screamed their truth into microphones,
and yet -- I also carried myself through offices,
boardrooms, and deadlines,
trying to slip into a language that was never mine.
Neither world held me.
I belonged to both, and yet to neither.
A ghost wandering through borrowed spaces,
a misfit wrapped in leather and lace,
and in pressed shirts and quiet shoes,
too disciplined to be truly reckless,
always too much, and yet never enough.
Call me the contradiction call me the outcast,
but I know what I am.
I am the seam between fire and forst,
the echo in the empty hall,
the haunting proof that not all spirits
fit inside the rooms they enter.
I was meant to create the space in-between --
to live as proof that categories fail us,
that a person can hold rebellion in one hand
and refinement in the other,
and still be whole.
Call me the misfit, the outsider,
the odd one out, but I know better.
I am the bridge.
I am the seam that two worlds try to tear apart.
I am everything that doesn't belong --
and in that truth,
I finally do.
Oct 9, 2025
Oct 9, 2025 at 2:38 PM UTC
Between the lychgate and narthex lay
a limbo approaching communion,
where one can linger at the border, sitting in the margin
with enough of a toe hold on tentative worship,
while insulated from the assembled fervour.
And Arthur prayed alone:
conversant with his God,
but wary of the draw of the warmth within
and the risks associated with human contact.
Aug 17, 2025
Aug 17, 2025 at 12:44 PM UTC
the peasant girl
who once brought water
from the well
in cracked hands
has returned.
she didn’t mean to
leave her home behind —
it was just to escape
the silence between
what she needed
and would be never given.
she left with nothing
but a hunger for life,
so she started living,
and never apologised.
Jul 12, 2025
Jul 12, 2025 at 9:31 AM UTC
Made a bruised heart wait out in the cold
Had it sag down
On your streets where there were no justice
Only merciless dogs trembling in their skin
For so violent an unbelonging
Such a vain act of expelling
Came from your seat, your house
Cold hearth
The ones you bore waiting waif
Out on your streets, in concrete embellish
the ones you could not take home
Orphaned and fooled
Ding ding ding
Hearing of the death bell ring
And honor dies bleeding
But not a love lost
Oct 11, 2024
Oct 11, 2024 at 4:41 AM UTC
There are parts of me I've hidden
from long, long ago —
There are parts I have treasured
and let the world know.
There are parts I have shunned
what I didn't want to show,
And there are parts I've enlarged,
magnified in my dreams - my ego!
Some have danced on the pages of journals,
some I have lived out, so —
Those that don't serve, I've exiled
to antipathy's limbo.
Intellect will soldier on in the face
that only trauma knows —
But somehow, the playful one
charms and warms me aglow.
Remember, I urge,
there's more in me than I know!
Don't be frightened.
Jan 20, 2024
Jan 20, 2024 at 11:16 PM UTC
Into this world we all come
Great Kings and Queens
Every last one
But pretty soon this world
It has reduced us to mere... scared beggars
Thieves, outlaws...robbers.
Jan 27, 2024
Jan 27, 2024 at 4:25 PM UTC
There's a secret only one angel knew.
It goes like this:
There is a place that once grew.
A garden made for two.
A tree.
A treason.
Mankind evicted from Eden,
... for an obscure reason.
Curious,
An angel flew down
-biting into the apple-
Adam and Eve had eaten.
Because the Lord's plan must be broken?
The Angel pressed their luck...
But ...why plant a tree,simply,to test their trust?
Now in a rush to reveal what was learned
-before they could soar past those
pearly gates-
Lurid illumination eviscerates their pristine wings.
The Lord sees All:
and He is Irate.
They create a crater as they collide with our world;
exiled forever from the Lord's estate.
They awake as a woman for their costly mistake.
Her place amongst the holy host is gone.
Cursed with forbidden knowledge.
Awareness of right and wrong.
Exchanging a halo for free-will:
Heaven is no longer a place she belongs.
The Angel outcast.
Cast out from her home.
Forced to roam this world all alone.
She sought out the Truth;
Then her faith became clouded.
There is few who listen to what she says now:
yet still she shouts it.
She tells me-the former angel yells,
"Devour fruit from the Tree of Knowledge
...if you dare.
but beware!!
God did not plant that tree...
It was already there."
-
May 22, 2023
May 22, 2023 at 7:05 AM UTC
Living in exile:
hoping or not to return --
covered with honour.
Nov 19, 2022
Nov 19, 2022 at 4:20 AM UTC
Where is that hand,
That motherly embrace,
Which comforts in its ****** -
That motherly hand I can trust?
Where is that hand,
That warming caress,
Which eases the nerves -
That cocoon of soft curves?
There is no rest anymore
In thoughts of exile and escape;
My being is shaken to the core,
My soul bent under the stress.
Where is that hand,
That soothing absence,
Which cradles you gently -
That silence of calm and mercy?
Where is the hand,
That promise of better days,
Which relieves innocently -
That convincing “don’t worry”?
There is no rest anymore
In thoughts of exile and escape;
My being is shaken to the core,
My soul bent under the stress.
Apr 5, 2022
Apr 5, 2022 at 2:25 PM UTC
I seen this ****** photograph once, taken in lovely black and white
A beautiful figure framed by shadows,
A beautiful young dark-haired girl naked
kneeling on a stairway
With one hand draped across her *******
As if protecting herself from something, maybe even shielding her heart
Her face, it is turned away to one side
And buried in her other hand
As if she's suffering some great distress or sorrow,
Far from arousing in me ****** feelings, this photograph
It spoke to me of something else
Something quite different and much more significant
More than mere words could possibly say
It spoke to me...it spoke to me of my whole life.
Her body there, so youthful, beautiful without a blemish
Her lovely contours and curves smooth like the sand dunes of a desert
Her beautiful face made sad
Her petite delicate little shoulders and arms
Her wonderful ******* her lovely tummy/belly, the roundness of her hips
The bones of her knees jutting out from where she was kneeling
Her thighs and calves resting upon one another
Her ankles and little feet tucked in behind
Here was Youth in all its glorious splendor... and innocence
With all its wonderful promise,
Strangely, it reminded me of my own Youth and my own body once
Before age and the World had done their damage
This wonderful garment thrown over our eyes and our bones
And I remembered myself as a little child, running across the beach... across the strand
And I was talking to my legs, saying, "Come on legs! Faster! Faster!"
And I was hitting my hip with my hand as if it were a whip
And as if my legs were those of a horse galloping
Just like in the old Westerns we used watch (on TV)
Yes! There was a time once when I used to talk to my body, a private little world I had,
It was my closest, my most intimate friend
You'd do it when you were alone like it was the most natural thing in the world,
You needed a friend to talk to about this strange world you were in,
And then I remembered the little girl next door
They used put us together playing, us children, us being around the same age
She was such a sweet little thing, the way she used to laugh and smile all the time
Like the cutest little kitten
The joy in her eyes and that smile of hers
Where was it coming from... somewhere inside, somewhere within
And then I remembered, I too had it once, that same joy, that same smile
It had lived in me too once... that bliss.
2
That photograph, it struck me as being something almost holy
It reminded me straightaway, it reminded me of the Garden of Eden story
The beautiful body had been the Garden you see
And in the Garden there was no fear and no danger
Like a little kitten lolling about, rolling on its belly and stretching itself out
Without a worry or a care
Without a cloud on its horizon
A beautiful magical kingdom before the Mind ever existed.
But now looking again at the photograph and at her face made sad buried there in her hand
Now the photograph was telling me
Suddenly, all at once, there came a day and a shadow
Something from outside, it had entered her mind, some ugliness from the world
It had disturbed her for the first time
And this was a new sensation to her
And it had frightened her
"How could such a dark ugly thing exist", she was wondering,
'And how can I live now with this in my world,
Now that I've seen it, it will always be there",
And then another memory came back to me, That of myself as a little child lying in bed
Shaking my head from side to side, even bumping my head against the wall
There was something there in my head I didn't like, something I didn't want to hear or see, something disturbing
I didn't want it there, I wanted it to go away
I wanted it to stop,
But it wouldn't stop and it wouldn't go away
And you realised it'd always be there like some shadow hovering in the background.
3
Now dark clouds were beginning to gather over the Garden and the beautiful Body
Now the World was coming and the Tyranny, the Tyranny of the Mind was beginning
The Gates of the Garden, they were slowly starting to close
Yea, the fields of Arcadia were fading, the exotic fruits and feelings there were being taken away
Its lovely sweet river of ambrosia would now soon cease to flow.
Like the Snow Queen and her Icy Blizzard, like a cruel invading army
The Mind had awoken now like a sleeping dragon and the World, it was coming, coming now to feed
Starting to pour in like through a breached dam
The World with all its books and its lessons, its rules and examinations
The mental world forcefully asserting itself
With its bullying cajoling teachers and its many humiliations,
The Mind weighing down hard now upon the Body, leaning on it, squeezing it and straining it
Pulling it this way and that, hither and thither
All out of shape, all over the place
Rivers of outside influences flowing in now
You were like a tiny boat tossed upon stupendous waves
Always at the mercy of other people's words
Blown all over the place
Sometimes, sometimes I just couldn't stomach it, I couldn't digest it
Sometimes I could only just throw it all up.
4
The Beautiful Body... Garden no longer, now just some hollow empty shell
The Mind alone was all that mattered now
All consuming and all devouring
The Body starting to buckle and to crumble
Underneath all that weight, the stress and the strain
Not knowing how to deal with it....lost and bewildered
Among the new feelings of emptiness and of pain
Overeating and undereating, unable to eat at all
Growing fat thinking that that could protect you from all the new fears in your brain.
5
The Body that beautiful Garden with its golden days
Were now long gone and forgotten
Thorns and briars had grown up in their stead
Just like some long lost fairytale Sleeping Beauty.
Made poor now and impoverished
I remembered... I had been a King once long ago back in my old Garden.
(The faint joys of the Mind y'know they were nothing in comparison
To what I'd known in that sweet Garden of old, that sweet Garden of mine).
Now when I look in the mirror I can hardly see myself anymore
But when I look at this photograph
I can see myself there.
Apr 20, 2021
Apr 20, 2021 at 1:07 PM UTC
Looking down from over their bodies - I count them.
My split mind at once rejoices in and recoils from that counting.
Peering back over my shoulder I make
dark associations.
It’s as if I was afraid of becoming lost
the way the bodies made a trail like bread crumbs,
leading back from the places I had been.
I walk with the Holy Light.
I walk with my dark companion.
I walk between the spines of the body shrikes.
They harvest all my crumbs and remind me I am lost.
They hook the bodies high from spikes
so I look up to make the body count.
I can see the Holy Script
but I can’t seem to find the way.
Red and gold beacons in the dream,
flickering off and on like syncopated declarations
as if saying:
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am.
All elbows and knees I slip between the webs of the
orb weavers and the cactus spines of the butcher birds
while they count the bodies for me:
Here they are
Here they are
Here they are.
Hang-dog and hard of breathing I have my medicine.
I’m hanging from the sleeping cliffs over
hell’s half acre and the high deserts.
I remember my brother flying me to California on a great olive branch.
He fed me sushi and smiled while he watched by brain heal.
But I was coming for the bodies.
My count was smaller then, but it was high enough for him
and his hands were the keepers of the flame.
The fire there was exiled and quietly he laid it by.
My brother spread out over the carpet of time like
the faithful departed with the weavers and the shrikes and
mounted bodies in the sky.
A child appears before me on the walk - eyes like a baby deer.
His mother is two blocks behind, so he asks three questions while he waits:
Why are you smoking?
Where are your hands?
Is it getting dark soon?
He leaves me to wonder where my hands are and where the dark is,
the Holy Sage smoking at my side.
Like some dark sabbath.
Like some reading of the will.
Like some dark and holy delta sleep in a crib of red clay.
I have a feeling I have been gone a very long time and I
want to be home now,
but there is buzzing and chirping and a red light and
Saul of Tarsus holds a great tome before me and with my hands
I hide my eyes.
I am the dreaming of the world of dreams.
Therein the Holy Light rages like the flare of 1000 suns
while my eyes are shuttered tight
like old memories all gone beyond the sorrow.
The old oath keepers are all plates and screws.
The golden woven orbs and cactus spines are all empty on
the altar like a decommissioned slaughterhouse.
So I go and make a body count.
Jul 31, 2020
Jul 31, 2020 at 8:00 PM UTC
A mutated earthling—
From an elitist experiment—
Burst with thorns and limbs,— yet too little to be seen,— That struck mines— Into landslides.
Through and through,— to species and things
A coast to coast hunter— that becomes a Gremlin ********** and thrilled by a prophet, foretold—
"A ditty hatband to put in flute,— is a note of sphere bullets."
For the meantime, hear the Chieftain's announcement:
"The folly is the naked; as the prudent is the masked—
No one should be phlegmatic in this game,—
For all of you should be sensitive— Unless, if you want to be an elsewhere's feast
Do not act— like a pearl with a great price!"
Soldiers cluttered in passageways,— For Pirates are Ubiquitous thieves
An assemble of frontiers hosed and geared— of wrought bodies— with uncertain prone.
In this war, together—
Barricades of water and bricks— Our chances to be unleashed,— From a long concealment,— To be sooner conquerors of intruders' exile.
May 17, 2020
May 17, 2020 at 12:28 AM UTC
Look at me like an animal,
with-drawled and wing over young;
my peers.
Separate them from us, perceived as vile.
You fabricate a false stigma,
a shrouding ghost stench we excrete.
You’ve kept me from connection,
congealed by your false projection!
Falling farther from coitus, laughter, and joyous.
Torch of aspiration, doused in fabrication.
Curious, like a bee,
buzzing around but can’t see.
Craving sent bitter,
they hate all but those sitter.
Elect thyself primus.
Hate me like a sinner.
Blasphemy to love brother or sister.
You can’t mask your vileness.
You’ve kept me from connection,
congealed by your false projection!
Falling farther from coitus, laughter, and joyous.
Torch of aspiration, doused in fabrication.
Apr 28, 2020
Apr 28, 2020 at 3:20 PM UTC
A Note From Exile
I cannot go home.
Rather I cannot go where my family lives - that place ceased to be home some time ago.
I was a soldier during the Cold War and my neighbors there have become more like East German loyalists than American citizens.
They surrender their rights without question
They are eager to call out community members on social media for ‘social distancing violations’.
They use shame and ridicule to control others
They applaud the police for keeping children from playing in gigantic public parks
They trust politicians who ignore public defecation and drug use to look out for ’the public good'
They allow themselves to be labeled ‘essential’ and ’non-essential’
They carry ’traveling papers’ in the event that they are stopped by the police
They propagate the most inflammatory statistics without ever validating their veracity.
Because…
They heard it on CNN.
So I will remain 1098 miles away
Zooming
Skyping
Facetiming
Until the contagion subsides
And then I’ll return
To a completely different world.
Apr 14, 2020
Apr 14, 2020 at 12:21 AM UTC