"ashen" poems
Glitter and gold is the man in the chair
with rings on his fingers
and the hardened harsh stare
blinded by ugliness
wrists chained down by no use
a man with much money
he spends on abuse
the term known as trafficking
familiar I’m sure
he’s never been one for
doing what’s pure
so he lays down his money
flings out his cash
says he’ll pay the full price
for the girl with the mask
just to touch her to feel her
pet her cold body with his
run clammy hands up her scarred legs
clamp her in his ashen fist
little boys too he will willingly harm
because trafficking to him is a sport
no need for alarm
Just cows in the system
of making ends meat.
The poor solemn dancer
the poor saddened soul
the poor battered spirit
angry that they’ve been sold
with ***** feet and scabby legs
they work to feed the king
the end from him they can only beg
And freedom will never ring.
May 15, 2014
May 15, 2014 at 4:47 PM UTC
Melting, dripping with time passing,
Wick still clashing.
Ashen, waxen,
Flame un-passion.
Holding candleholder handles,
Snuffing candles,
Watch smoke-shadows
Dance to who-knows.
Out! Out! like the light that it is,
But witness yet
Grey pirouette's
Dark banishment.
Apr 8, 2015
Apr 8, 2015 at 8:15 PM UTC
When Dona died
The spring grasses yellowed,
Our cheeks ashen. Her hair became a little redder
In our minds. The boy and the man strained
Under the constraints
Of communication. What was the sign
For "everything will be alright"? "Fine,"
Yes, you should say, "Fine." That is better.
Better than just, "okay".
Mar 24, 2015
Mar 24, 2015 at 4:02 PM UTC
*
I sit alone as if I am fading
Invisible in the ashen fields.
My heart longs to be somewhere
to where I see myself
Clear as the new day
True to oneself’s beauty
Away from the toxicity of people’s opinion
Or as far away from my own shadow of doubt.
I sit alone & not running anymore.
Losing strength as the wind passes by
Losing a bit of my edge in this unreasonable persona, I face.
Yet I never give a **** as long as I kept on going
Reaching for something Unreachable,
I can only hope…
I want to feel the life of someone’s at arm’s reach
to feel that I am alive
I missed you.
*
Sep 24, 2015
Sep 24, 2015 at 7:38 AM UTC
loneliness has defined
this old soul.
Bittersweet melody
has tuned my way of
living.
I don't know how much
my heart could stand
the weight and wait
for that simple moment,
that single spark
to feel alive
and stop breathing
the ashen smog of reality.
Mar 20, 2016
Mar 20, 2016 at 10:48 AM UTC
Ashen doves float within the waves,
slinking like silent demons in the night.
They curl around my body,
jaws operating like steel machines,
gnashing at my limbs.
I begin to scream for help,
but they ****** my breath,
they drag me under their tides of black,
unleashing my unremitting fear of water predators.
their teeth, sunken into my flesh,
gnawing at my mind,
painting me my new mortality.
These are my demons,
the sharks in the bath when it comes to hygiene.
the fear of the below and the depths of human mentality,
the untraceable percentage of human worthlessness,
the detestable attraction to the demise of our minds,
I float lower into the aqua,
pressure building,
unforgiving and foreboding
I close my lids, and dream of the sand,
praying it to be underfoot when I open my eyes,
but when my lids open, the doves loom closer.
The irony of a hydrophobe,
dying at the hands of the sharks.
Oct 31, 2017
Oct 31, 2017 at 8:20 PM UTC
You're a volcano in winter
Made when the Earth splintered
Tectonic plates shifted
And you were gifted
The frigid air outside is subzero
So you become my volcanic hero
When you scorch the cold
With your warmth so bold
I await an eruption
But there's a disruption
Dormant you remain
With suspicion engrained
But entering your main vent
Was not my main intent
Yet now that I'm in your magma chamber
I can see your anger
You're made of lava and ash
So you demand drama and cash
And violently explode in a flash
You've become my Krakatoa
When I wish I didn't know ya
Because of your grand magnitude
I question my aptitude
And insecurity ensues
As confidence I lose
I realize I've gone too far
When I feel your lava discharge
That pushes me into your crater
The pain I feel couldn't be greater
When all I see is an ashen cloud
And all I hear is your lashing growl
Inside of your volcano
There is a tornado
As sure as day glow
I feel I must lay low
And dodge the debris
While playing referee
As you're dissecting me
In your burning sea
That swirls in a cyclone maelstrom
Hell is where it was mailed from
I receive it
Reprieveless
I begin to drown in fire
And wish to retire
You think you're neat
Yet despite your heat
You're a cold blooded lizard
But outside there's a blizzard
So I get used to your volcano
I can't contain my disdain though
Jan 9, 2018
Jan 9, 2018 at 6:18 AM UTC
My skin is cracked
pulling
split apart
Mucous forms, blood bubbles
fat popping
skin
melts
Hair afire!
skull snapping
arm bones
charred
Collapsed in two
scream fire
body
sinking
To Ashen State,
To Ashen State,
Immolation
To Ashen State,
To Ashen State,
A Man cannot be the Sun. *
Dec 24, 2016
Dec 24, 2016 at 7:09 PM UTC
The nakedness of winter lies heavy upon
the tolling Sunday quietude
Shed leaves perish into yesterday
and the dream of another
dawning someday wanes
The sun ― lay low
the drudging ashen skyline
Barerd emerald moss scaffolds
draw much more distantness
to the pallid shadowed horizon
The evergreens step forth,
roots grasping sacred heart,
soil and rock
In the swelling aloneness
you can feel the grain
of the heartwood
rooted in your soul
There are no hard feelings
but there's an enduring ache,
like a tree with a rotting limb
languishing within
its blackened bark sacrifice
It's not just the grinding time
that slips away begrudgingly;
more of the same takes a toll
as if another unrung belfry hour
in an empty bell tower
without a song rang out in vain,
peeling reflections
of reluctant hours c r a w l by
in the insensible apathy
A so called holiday passes ―
its footprint bears down
hard and deep
as if a paling winter rose
grieves its own passing
A dry wishbone unbroken
lay bare the poignant
truth it holds;
it takes two to make
this wish come true
.
Nov 26, 2017
Nov 26, 2017 at 12:33 PM UTC
(Interlude)
My eyes in 1910
never saw the dead being buried,
or the ashen festival of a man weeping at dawn,
or the heart that trembles cornered like a sea horse.
My eyes in 1910
saw the white wall where girls urinated,
the bull's muzzle, the poisonous mushroom,
and a meaningless moon in the corners
that lit up pieces of dry lemon under the hard black of bottles.
My eyes on the pony's neck,
in the pierced breast of a sleeping Saint Rose,
on the rooftops of love, with whipers and cool hands,
in a garden where the cats ate frogs.
Attic where old dust gathers statues and moss,
boxes keeping the silence of devoured *****
in a place where sleep stumbled onto its reality.
There my small eyes.
Don't ask me anything. I've seen that things
find their void when they search for direction.
There is a sorrow of holes in the unpeopled air
and in my eyes clothed creatures - undenuded!
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we explored one another,
similar to that of how the seven sins
would explore their vices,
corrupting their virtues.
but that's what made the garden blossom,
grow with intense passion that radiated
with a melancholy glimmer, with a dipped
and ragged vine of sweat and sheen
arousal and desire.
craving, begging, mewling, whining;
gluttony, craving for the excess
sloth, craving for moments of rest,
envy, craving for a bearing of arousal,
lust, craving for a touch, a sinful taste;
greed, craving the moans and swatches,
wrath, craving for sullen destruction,
pride, craving for the fall of a bereaved apology.
our garden;
a place of virtues, a place of our vices.
you showed me the deepest things,
darkest epithets of what was to be explored,
blossoming a crimson rose of pure desire
in the pit of my abdomen, vines of thorns
wrapped firmly around my hips
and the soft ashen flesh of my wrists
soon to be accompanied around
the thin circumference of my ankles.
the shark divots soon finding their
way around the swells of my breast,
and the tremble of my inner thighs;
body arching, lips quivering,
ecstacy of your words,
your seed planted garden that
became a part of me.
I found the cardinal sins in
the dropping countenance
of your words, of your demands, and of your wishes,
and i bathed in it,
soaked myself up in the lavender of
your scent, the scratchiness of your thorns.
our garden was the place to cast our sins,
delve into them, and it ruined me,
but oh how I solely craved it.
our encounters, our actions, our experiences
putting even the seven deadly sins to same,
forcing them to turn when catching a glimpse
of us. The swells of their cheeks blossoming
with that of a rose tinted hue.
Oct 31, 2018
Oct 31, 2018 at 1:26 AM UTC
I am your bird of prey
Caught between 2 posts
And a glistening fence.
Neck broken,
beak to the ground,
Half way trapped inside
your field of green.
I am your bird of prey,
Wings on a wire,
Still soft and light,
with feathers gleaming
where promise of flight,
newly broken, fell to earth.
'Twas passion that lured me to your
nest, where the cloud kissed Sun
with time
turned ashen my listless frame.
A testament to nature's seduction,
there was no escaping
your embrace
As the warmth
slowly left
my still
beating
heart.
May 11, 2017
May 11, 2017 at 2:46 AM UTC
I:
In which
I
amid the
whirring lights
and emerald
felt
drift
through a
raucous
flashing casino
searching
for a
table
with an open
chair
so I can
finally start
to play
the game
II:
In which all of us
are together again at last
for a family gathering—
Thanksgiving supper, perhaps—
and, as we greet each other,
I happen to glance skyward,
unthinking,
and notice that clouds
of a turbid
cumulonimbus gray
are beginning to coalesce overhead.
I look up again and notice
that they have spun
into dozens of funnel shapes,
each of them
starting to reach down for us
like the ashen fingers of Death.
We huddle down in the cellar,
praying the storm will pass.
Apr 2, 2017
Apr 2, 2017 at 7:00 AM UTC
A cloud of smoke and fog so toxic
They had to give it a name.
Out here, it coils around signs
And slinks up the height of buses:
Keen and watchful, like a python,
Squeezing the life from
My lungs. Heavy with ash
And tar from the cigarettes.
The fumes snake upwards,
Swirling in fog, smog,
Ashen clouds. There's a sight
For sore minds.
Nov 27, 2018
Nov 27, 2018 at 5:08 AM UTC
In the divet between mountains
Resides a wooden cabin – ostensibly an amalgamation of the scape
Adroitly - I - quondam female warrior flit
Down massive (ancient) hand-laid, hand-cut carved stone steps
Bounding from contingent step onto the dense pad of turned soil
Tacit compliance between gravity and soil holds footprints bound
A compressed deflating crescendo as pace ignites with bounds
Cadences of protuberant wildflowers and grasses erupt from swollen terra
A winsome chromatic menagerie, dispersed in ecstatic fistfuls
A venerably ancient ritual
My nascent clandestine vocation
Personally meted out - a beatification for my provisional sanctuary
Along glacier-fed stream
Lissome fingers shadow inert stalks –plucking dormant beginnings from their desiccated ligaments
I am austere and unadorned save for a festoon of pyrite flecks trailing my semblance
Residual gilding from my ante-meridian swim taken after requisite gathering of wild blackberries, goose berries, and rhubarb along oft-tamped path
The sun, nestling into its requisite apex endorsed my completion
I reclined into the hassock of soil, feeling the elements settle about with an embossment of my form
Imposing verdure arched subtly as compressed soil beckoned hyperbolic flux
As I lay within the basilica of opulent living columns replete with comestible bounty
Lingering dew honed inflections of sacrosanct petrichor in unison with piquant clover
Wild purple clover buds saccharinely tinted and inundated nestled nerves in mine cribriform plate
Birds pitched and galloped through the frond tips and beyond in the lapis expanse
Frequently snatching damselfly’s and assemblages of midges from their ephemeral drift
Auspicious rays transcended stippled diaphanous gravid clouds
Light inundated ether entered humbly into the cathedral oculus
Pyrite speckled terrain beneath, and my bare gilded form above
Cast a refracted aura about my sanctuary
Precipitously the elusive vaporous embankment distended further
Ashen atmospheric correspondence inaugurated liquescent sustenance to my mountain abode
And I -
Lingered beneath the descending gobbets, curls furled in a puddle
Fresh topsoil cupping my corporal topographic contours
Pressing blackberries into my mouth between smiles
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
death mourns a life
that succumbs to suicide...
classical lawless-ness?
calls the jyst...
a thieving;
a stolen death,
a suicide....
bride riddled to a bridge...
baking...
left half awake and half baked...
you count with the number of
blinding equations...
your 80+ segments?
i want nothing to be part of,
whether polymath,
bilingual, or polymath...
you resd yourself into "it"....
fuck you, and...
**** off...
in terms of .gif ***** files...
no... the part where
we don't parrot?
for no worthwhile surprise!
death is alal b & w...
memory?
all invigorating sepia...
life?
the blooming of color...
you take shrooms,
to invigorate the colors?!
oh look...
you're as loony as me...
and why would i
give a **** about your
tall-tales of subversive religiosity?!
you're right!
like you have been with me
to begin with...
there aren't any!
now?!
suffer!
you're in good hands...
turns out?!
i'm a sadist...
i somehow tested the pain on myself...
i enjoy...
the pain, of others,
having, prior, teased the pain
on, myself!
i forgot teasing the pain...
i taste it...
i welcome it...
i've become welcoming
in allowing it,
a stature abbreviating a transcendence
of victim-hood!
i need pain,
to craft an erasure of ever having
the capacity to instruct
a modus operandi for pleasure!
death contra suicide...
a fact contra a premature contest
of pleasure...
suicide is what
death calls thief...
there is no moral artifact
of a "question"...
suicide is the thief,
when death is the executioner...
what moral question is
to be entertained?
non!
i can't blame the mortality
arsonist...
less Tartarus and more Gehenna...
less S.S. and more khaki
S.A. night of the broken windows
and less...
hyper-Hindu
reincarnation,
hue hue grey...
woo woo the ashen pillage...
no... i'm not here for the
cinder and the ********
it's enough that i drink
the sort of excuse,
that sober people could hardly make
excuses about...
and that's enough...
and enough, is, where i'll stick to.
Aug 21, 2018
Aug 21, 2018 at 10:22 PM UTC
Smoke rings around the rosie,
a pocket full of posies,
ashes to ashes,
Ashley fell ashen.
© Matthew Harlovic
Nov 30, 2014
Nov 30, 2014 at 1:31 PM UTC
I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves. fly back
II
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...
III
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.
IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.
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Lift it to your lips
& let what falls adrift in the form of ash
dissolve in the wind
as dried bone thrashing,
bashing against dust & grit.
Pull; take a long hit.
Dregs to be kept until last in the bottom
of your broken lungs,
taken as deep as breaths:
to rattle against your teeth.
"O", takes the lewd shape
of your chapped mouth as you break free
from your caged-in chest,
skeletons left sat, to wallow
as ashen bones & yellow teeth.
Hold your knuckled joints
against tenderest flesh of your upper lip
& sniff, as if a try to void
all signs of violent backslides
to clandestine nicotine meetings.
Flick blanked eyes to lit but
dying embers ground between sole & soil,
& morosely swear never
another, not one more; after
this next one, this last one, never.
Jul 12, 2014
Jul 12, 2014 at 5:35 AM UTC
I envy her, the ashen girl
submerged within her flames -
with burning lobes and burning robes
but smiling all the same.
Mar 26, 2018
Mar 26, 2018 at 1:36 PM UTC
The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head
The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall.
Of mighty kings of Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away;
The world was fair in Durin's Day.
A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.
There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote,
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built,
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.
Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang
And at the gates the trumpets rang.
The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls,
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.
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