Tom McCone

Tom McCone Feb 2013

birds sing to birds,
and the insects hum along,
through the small holes in
dry dirt or rifts, in the tree
limbs.

I am awake, in repose;
sense scent of my skin losing water,
I am alive, in this indolent glade.
I am wearing cut grass on my back.
I am made of distraction,
but trying to lose it.

I am still, like the winter;
but as many miles across as
the forest can bear my weight
of bark and root, stone and
hoof, I am the environment my
senses tie together.

I am the life and decay,
pulling each other, like taught strings;
having no need for meaning,
I've become devoid of reason.

I am,
that is all I need.

I am.

Tom McCone Feb 2013

4:32 a.m.

-I stand in a corridor and scream-

there is no echo, I am not screaming,
the scream is a landmine,
taped to every last pore of my flesh.
I make clawmarks, pulling skin off.

but the pores go on forever,
but my fears keep flowing,

like the white breaking porcelain
on the shoreline I drown in,

-I am alone-
and,

and the clock's killing me,
in slow moves, toothache,
and the rising tide of that sea.

-I am a field-

littered with bodies, just like mine:
I've discarded each of them,
when I don't want to be me.

but I want to be me.

I just don't feel this way, with any consistency.
so,

I just need some small anything,
need your love more than everything,
but who am I kidding;
you'll never love me.

-I am left to my misery-

Tom McCone Feb 2013

sleep in shallow

pelagic hearts sink fast,
intercostal routines never cycle to dead standstill:

we've drowned, at last!

taking vicious inbetween gulps of night air, stealing unsatisfactions,
meagre half-lung fills.
tread the water,
watch it grow
from clean nothing
to the murk of azure, affections and
crowding of teeth on that
vast sandy below,
miles down in the darkness,
husks of hope,
filter-fed,
through experiential banks and
cut down to bled chum.

and me,
here;

I wonder why,
you're so sad,
with the world in your palm.

Tom McCone Feb 2013

ἀπορɛία

Humanity, the island
I swum round, circles made eventual stone,
'til I'd learnt that I'd learnt nothing,
-know nothing-;
for all the purported wisdom,
accumulated with such great care,
I was none wiser than
the first breath I had taken,
adorned with the sterility of hospital pine- or lemon-scented antiseptic.

I know the world, now,
I know the hair on disappearing creature's skin,
I know the strands of broken bamboo,
I know the endless breaking, upon the shorelines,
I know the words of lovers,
dead and alive,
the words of enemies,
and of those impassive.

I've known the grand vastness of the empty above,
the crawling complexity of the unceasing below,
the burnt haze of day,
the dead silences of night,
the spaces between lips,
the lonesome tied in white sheets,
the rending denial of mind,
the sardonic acceptance of heart,
the weight of life,
the light of whatever comes after.

Yet, still,
I know nothing.

Tom McCone Feb 2013

mock seed

call up in spring, maybe maybe maybe
                                          maybe,
I've caught mine in the stream:

                 hollow things.

hollow, hollow, seeing and free
directions, contortions
cool down, riverbeds of
flowers that sun made
in dark spot phase turning to
alive alive alive alive alive
breathing cold warm cold, nothing

  any
                                            more

ripples like the stilts feet fell through to
carve square pegs in the holes in my
skin and feign ignorance to let up
sunspot light fading writhing
keeping me alive alive
alive alive alive
all through
this gold
cursed
night

Tom McCone Feb 2013

never, never, never

We met in an airport opening of mouths
with broken teeth and shackled intentions
on the edge of the lights of a dead man's
legacy. The lights burned out, as, in
the back of a taxi cab northbound, we made
our hands into birds and let them fly out
into that devouring city where we'd last
slept and searched 53rd st. for a sign.
There was never one.

She spoke in rain and said she'd never see
me again after that night of close vulnerabilities
and rust trails. I said she was ******
wrong. She was right. I said I'd never stop
loving her, but I already had, for when you
know what's right "I'll miss you" and lips to a
forehead is the only goodbye you have in your
inventory.

Turning to wave, you were already a ghost, bled
into a crowd of ghosts, and I was gone.

Tom McCone Feb 2013

in stormlit nights

get out
of my dreams, you
burning violent soul, your
teeth like knives and knives and knives and
you’re
tearing me

a
-*******
-part

so,
get off my back, those teeth
sinking in and
bleeding me, all the way
out to the hills and streams where
smoke, billowing from
your porcelain screaming organs,
making my skin grate along yours in
the dense black
fog of that shimmering
night under the pines
and

I’m not
*******
sorry
any more.