A Reading from the Book of Puppets

Her
Ventriloquist venom is never ending
engineering every word I should say

Pity me as her words drip down from my mouth
Look to me... my paralyzing awkwardness admonishes all attempts at paucity  

the ***** of vernacular continues
Manifest as a million babble born words
look at her and you’ll know why
Would you sell your soul
if you spoke staccato and she smiled sadistic?

And when she’s not there
I lay prostrate on the railroad tracks
of her impending presence
restrained
and retrained in the tailisman rope of your arrival
Look there now, a Tongue tied in knots, a mind firing (shots)
I am reduced
she is labyrinthine, in both style, and substance,
a sapiosexual maze, a soothing syrup mixed with
biter bile


why then does
nothing feel better than to see her smile
Why validate her pleasure
with my defeats?
Stuck and ****** into a singular melodious smile, the tune of which I can’t help but dance to

Why? Because at the end of the day

your eyes jut out
candelabras in defiance the night
notifying the world
of all you want but have yet to receive
a shallow existence .... a marked man... a million morbid motifs
made of mucus and stuttered star beams

You are that rare being, a glimpse at myself both wretched and alluring
A soul already tainted::: still I seek to embrue, the boredom
I am voiceless
in this decaffinated life

a tendril of hair
a woman domestic
a shadowland chaser
a light that’s poetic
The addictive tape worm of my soul

cdh

knew a girl named Faith
who had none at all
husky breath, taut body
aligning laughter with anyone in sight
sotto voce-
fading into the carriage of the night
rolling within the mazes she chooses

she's a tall tower squishing my chest
tabi heels from margiela
give her all my love but it's never enough
takes it all and serves it to everyone
else
crosses for earrings
knew a girl named Faith
and i love her

baby I got hours of green
to edit, mondays goes dumb hard
like kicking kittens like footballs

leg day to finish myself off
to seal my confidence into the night
i hate days like these, rocky roads

and nowhere to hide from the sun
and the ugly, being assimilated into
the lifeless machine in a lifestyle-less queue

I walk into the mirror box again and it’s as if my life
really is just an extension of my own metaphors.
I’m caught in the mirror maze, searching for something
in the mirrors at angles, but all I can see is myself,
my sad, stupid self, stretching on and on forever
with the same boring face, the same boring feelings,
again and again until I stop being able to make out the details.
Am I looking back at myself or am I looking forwards to the future?
Will it always be the same or has it merely been
the same since forever? I stare into the mirror tunnel
at all these selves repeating themselves,
forcing the years, the weeks, the days into the same strict patterns,
merely following the self that came before them, merely mirroring
the feelings, only doing it worse and worse with each new rendition.
It’s just me, I think, in the mirror box, caught up in myself
because I am selfish and horrible. I’m selfish and horrible
and I want to turn my back on myself but
how can I possibly do that in the mirror box?
I meet myself over and over, and it’s just me,
in all this vast, repetitive vagueness, just me in
this long stretch of lonely unsettledness that surely doesn’t end.
I want to smash my own face in, so I close my eyes
and try to think, maybe, maybe, maybe, because I don’t
want to be this grey-cloud self forever. I can’t be, and so maybe,
just maybe, somewhere beyond all these selves
there’ll be a day when I’m down on the shore
and the sea will be calm and the sky will be
faded purple. Love will not sink down into nothingness
because in the cool evening air,  my heart will be full
instead of gaping and my mind will be at ease
instead dwelling on it’s own boringness
or entangling itself in own self-created sadness.
And maybe, I’ll have abandoned my book
and its pages will be dry because I won’t have been crying into it.
They’ll be no mirrors, just the ocean,
glinting like an amethyst cluster in the half light
and I’ll rest my head on the shoulder of the girlfriend
I'll meet someday and I’ll smile in this beautiful liminal moment
and nothing will be tainted by the dread of returning home.
We’ll kiss – on the shore – and rewrite it forever and
maybe the stars will fall out of the sky when I shake it and
all my trains will run on time and all the wounds
in the world will heal simultaneously.
It’s a moment surely stolen from someone else’s poetry,
but I’ve got to cling to something to avoid becoming
lost entirely in all this dark, intangible vagueness.
There’s got to be at least one imaginary moment
that isn’t just me, reflected over and over.
There’s got to be one moment that doesn’t stare
back at me from inside the mirror box.