A sea of gasoline's,
Grace of novelties,
Cars and halogen,
Social disease,
Manufactured dreams,
Scream on screens,
They glean from all living things,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
Such a contumacious existence,
Results in an animistic decline,
All things that once made us strong,
Oblivion has made a meal of them,
I walk around this town,
I see the colors,
I watch the scenes,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
I live in a world without a heart,
But machines keep it breathing,
And it has many sons,
Crowned with clockworks maturation,
Am I the last one beating?
I don't tick,
Not like them,
I just watch men bite one another necks from the steps of the front door,
They call me the queen of the creaking floorboards,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
I have matchstick eyes,
I twist fires with my fingertips,
All of these people made of wood,
They are like smoke to me,
I breathe slices into them with teeth that have no number,
I am December,
I fight,
Take,
Hide

I am ready to fall apart
and with a shaking heart I whisper:
"it's okay"
I know the taste of a blade
and the color of the sky as it bends and then breaks in that way
I am ready.
I hold my head steady and I step
forward, bringing no baggage with me to shlep
"I am ready!" I scream
the lights on a silver screen illuminating
my internal clockworks ruminating
this soul is weak and older than time but I am prepared
I can step into this light with all my anxieties bared
the scars are fresh
on this flesh, prison for the wispy not-quites
the things inside that make me me that give my eyes light
I am ready to fall apart and with a shaking heart
I whisper, "it's okay"
another time, another day,
I can look back because today
the pages of time flipped and turned
and everything synced into rhythm and rhyme
and falling apart seems scary until you do
it makes you wary, you don't want to
but you fall apart, all to pieces
only to catch yourself, not so much glass as puzzle pieces
put it all together and restart.
I am ready, and with a shaking heart, I whisper:
"it's okay"

i woke in an asylum ward.

the skies were replaced by tainted walls
and the sun, by a menace clock
the second hand clicked its tongue
60 fifes and the minute hand waves
every hour, a blade-like hand
drags my knees across the polished floor
and i wonder why they bothered
paving the ground for me
when my skin only tore like glass
flesh exposed and the doctors do not see

my fingers hurt from the hands i hold
but i can't let go.
what if i run out of time?

the smell of chemicals overpowers
the scent of flowers
the epitome of time was the wilting
as i am dragged out of sight

they say time will tell
but all i hear is the hollow echoes
of sharpened clockworks
i fear a wrong move will throw the sparks
into the gas tank that we drink from

my name is not on this bracelet
the doctors draped across my wrist
and if i don't tear these walls apart,
these hands might drag me into a morgue.

Tick-Tock,
Left, Right,
my head spins, like a caraselle that has just had it's rigs oiled.

One breath,
Two breath,
deep breaths, remember?
I'm struggling to keep up with the times of,
having to decide everything on a three second basis.

Three breath,
four breath,
focus now, this is a hard one,
I feel like my view of a casual day is slightly slanted, just like my over crammed clothes rack, crooked.

Tick-tock,
the clock ticks, hmm funny, I don't own a clock,
Tick-tock, five breath,
tick-tock, six breath,
I am taking too much air in, yes I know how ridiculous that sounds.

One has heard that after the fourth breath you should be fine,
nothing has changed, I'm just the idiot in the mass of people who frantically breathes deeply, fussing over a two-piece decision.

Seven breath,
eight breath,
now this is getting stupid,
why jump to conclusions when your ending could be your beginning?

Tick-tock,
left, right,
my head stops spinning,
is this the right choice?

Some days start with a blah
the eyes won't stay open
yet still I must continue on
find my way through this world

I wish I could find the switch
the one to reset to bliss
put me back to a calm place
away from confusion's din

I'm not speaking of medication
self-applied to numb the mind
bringing harm where good is sought
separation were it should not be

I suspect I want much more
with two paths I could walk
one is the steady none shall see
the other wrecks a world's purity

as dramatic as the latter is
thought to be swift when done well
what if it fails by God's grace
with lessons beyond experience?

and then there is the consequence
the clockworks turned against their will
too early in the brisk transit
from here to there, without God's bless

there is a time that all must end
it's in the hands of Almighty grasp
the cord is cut by the wheel
until that time my days will unwind.

© 2017. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved. 20170513.

“Our characteristics smear through us,
Like colours in a stick of rock.”
He says to the audience of ties and blazers.
“If I cut you open, what shades
Would I find in your cross-sections?”
“If you cut me open,
There’d be a fair amount of red,
I should think.”
I say behind my sharpened teeth.
“And my parents wouldn’t be very pleased.”
Oh how witty I am
With my quick fire of sarcasm,
And petulant spasms of acrimony.
Eight miles away,
Our house is full of September;
Raincoats and Crane flies,
And I water my Guinea Pig’s tumour
With tears I owe elsewhere.
A teacher at my school
Committed suicide, people say,
While we skipped waves
And created poetry from the leaf-light.
They can’t tell us the details,
Of course not – sensitivity is key –
But that tells us all we thirst for.
School clockworks forwards
With a hole in the Geography office
And I forget about remembrance.
He drove a BMW and laughed
Small laughs that coughed with nervousness.
I sit in History, pen-chewing,
Thinking of all these more important deaths.
The school bells don’t hold silences
The year sevens don’t stand
Or bow their heads in room 180
We try making futures for ourselves
And apply ourselves to those things
That still have chances tied to them
Like clover leaves and birthday candles.
We turn on lights in the evenings
And I wake myself from darkness to darkness.
My life consists of the cooling,
Cotton-throated early mornings
And the bike that my brother bought new
Six years ago.
And the drag of my newspaper bag
That claws backwards from my peddling.
The world is blue and grey with rime,
I rip my fingers on letterboxes.
My shoes fall apart from the heels
My ballet shoes fall apart from the toes
My life enjoys unravelling itself
From wherever I’ve chosen to stitch it
And I fray and crimp at the corners.
I prefer to go barefoot
Across the rinsed, diluted garden
That smells of rotting apples.
Ballet tights rolled up my legs
So that my bruised toes get kissed
With grass slobber and the faded zeal of autumn.
Slugs crisscross pavements like surgical tape
Then get stuck and frazzled there
While the sun toasts them.
“Maybe I’d find hopes, dreams,” he says.
“Maybe you’d find organs.”
You’d find me weeping over pirouettes
And geometric lines and extensions.
You’d find a twice-broken arm
And an array of internal fractures.
There’d be shards lodged between each rib.
My parachute lungs, pumping filth,
Would continue to tear and furl
Until they wouldn’t resemble
The things we scalped in biology.
I re-write lists of ‘Things To Do’
In the hope that they’ll seem shorter
But I add all my flaws to them
For amendments and for procrastination.
For some reason people still expect things
From this emptying girl
Who actually thinks
That the one who cut into her
Would be in danger of finding
Nothing but a brittled, bitter hollow.
I highlight my essays
And highlight the cracks
I’m carving in my personality.
I paste impressions of myself
All over my exterior shell
Alongside character traits.
Who knows what lies beneath
The papier-mâché of well-played parts?
My fingers play music on the computer keyboard
More than they practice the piano.
But the songs they make are far from sweet
And rarely beautiful.
My parents think I’m working
On Hume, Bentham and Kant
But really, I write jaded poetry
Which forms its own philosophies.
“Your experiences would be evident,
Spread through your character.”
My brother ate away at his life
Until he starved.
They set him down in a mental unit
For the ‘Screwy’, ‘Freakish’ and ‘Insane.’
So I buried my childhood
In the side ward mazes
Of hand sanitizer and tubes and tombs.
“I’d find what makes you unique –
Your religion, perhaps.”
I laugh away the suggestion
That is actually the truth of how
My Sunday mornings fall under ‘Church’
And the afternoons are ‘Top Forty’ –
I don’t even like chart music.
How can I be ashamed of the faith
I try fervently not to doubt?
The sun drips from the evening sky
Like a squeezed lemon
And Monday cycles round again
I live in a little world of spirals;
Eternally coming back to the same place
Just worn a little further down.
I waste my life on the vanity
Of mirrors and self-deprecation.
Sometimes I think I must be arrogant
To make the pretty little assumption
That I don’t have to wear make-up.
It’s funny that I lay my skin bare –
Always –
But can’t manage to strip myself down
To the crudest, rawest truth.
I can only write for people I don’t know;
I let my parents believe blindly
That I’m a creative prodigy
Instead of human
By refusing them the blessing
Of honest words from ink and paper.
But the truth is;
I am not the faded mystery
That I pose as in my writing,
I’m just someone who sits in school assembly
And tries to make self-portraits from words,
And tries to forge intelligence,
And tries to never grow old,
And tries to be something,
And tries nothing,
And tries –
“But what I’d really want to see
Is compassion,” He says.
I turn my face down to my knee bones
And permit myself to agree.
Compassion, I tell myself
And, just for a minute,
I feel a little less
Superficial.

We are born into an invisible grid, each and every one of us Intersubjective, but never intertwined.
What does it feel like to be a woman?
What does it feel like to be a man?
What does it feel like to be?
What does it feel like to be in another grid?
Deathly silence, a metaphysical barrier.
You may stare into foreign eyes and drive the probe of your celestial self into the deepest flora of "the other."
You may explore the ground beneath "the other's" feet
Until eternal oblivion sweeps you away.
But you will be none the wiser
You and I will never comprehend the inner clockworks, the intellectual mechanisms, the factory of the mind.
Even if the black ribbons of smoke from cement chimneys continue to rise,
Even if the mechanism continues to churn,
Even if the clockwork continues to tick,
Until the suspension of time,
You will be alone with yourself
And I will
–In all the glory of human futility–
Keep on searching.

The beginning:
He needlessly noticed my hidden words.

...He noticed.

Nothing... Wonderfully.
Still alive, deprived of senses,
Fallen in stares... I felt so.

A smile, reversed clock, Number 43, black jumper, her fingers...
Short bordeaux nails, nasty mouse face, enormous glasses, a smile.

Was I feeling through what?
What was I feeling?

High five.
Disappear and appear again, up behind me and at my left...

Our stares, weird clockworks;
I knew there was happening something senseless.

...Behind again. But that's the last time,
that's seventeen-nine. I read it.

I couldn't think I'm thinking about pain,
Although something leaded me astray.
Blinding darkness... Weak, far light...
Far smile.

So I couldn't think consciously
about everything died before its wrong birth.

Moments of pure madness. Insane; escape;
no way.

The last time repeated again, for the last time.

An inexistent history.
Pleasant history pleasantly little.
Nevermore.
Again,
and again nevermore.
Forever.
Disappear.

I know I've been here in this afternoon
4: 10 P.M.
Like lubricated clockworks in a perpetual machine
My life returns to this brown earth blue sky
Pressed in between the distance
And the silence and the cries of crows
Who gather, circle, and grow louder
In the rising dusk.
This is how it has been, is, will always be.

This red clay bank where the road was carved
Has risen here forever.
That old capped well has always dripped and echoed
In the plunging darkness
And the far-off crack that is cicadas breaking from their skins,
These things have always been in motion.

That path that disappears just there between the trees
Leads now, as ever, to a grand but faded house
Drowsing in the humming shade,
Where my father's fathers lived and died,
Lay open eyed and wide awake
Through first bird sounds and whipporwhills
As grey ascended into daylight once again
And just as always far too soon.

A place where lost boys raged
And beat their hands against closed doors,

Is this my road, these shaded woods,
This certain path the only map that I can read?

Sometimes in the small hours even now
I think I hear the pounding of my father's desperate hands
On doors locked, bolted, and immune,
The ringing of his secret wars
Down darkened, pine floored corridors
Where secrets are piled thick upon each other.

The only sound I hear now on this narrow road
Is wind that hisses in the branches
In sharp swift gusts from long ago

Standing now beneath those branches,
Owning no locked door to pound upon,
I wonder why my clenched and aching hands
Are bleeding.

Thunder rolls and rumbles,
Distant in the fading afternoon

Two photographs merged into one vague composition -
A world of wordlessness;
A two-dimensional space made of faded lights and shadows.
As my pulse dances into the rhythm of clockworks,
With eyes wide open, I continue to fall stead fast on solid grounds.
I fear that time will mercilessly refuse to stop when it should.

He cut trees down in his mind
Working when he wasn't working
Dovetail chisels careening down
Highways of cherry and side streets of birch
I could see sawhorses in his eyes rocking madly like
Crazed wooden clockworks,
Wood Chips flying everywhere,
Collecting in small mountains in his peripherals.

I hated it.
The way the each lobe of his brain
Was now a delicately carved
And well-oiled work of wood.
In bed each night I tensed
As he tossed and turned,
Finally getting up to sand off the corner of a desk
Or hack off our daughter’s arm
And sand it away to a soft lump,
Leaving the severed appendage
On the shelf like a trophy

I married an artist, but then he was a painter
And I loved how he smelt of acrylic
And how his brushes moved endlessly
Despite the piles of works no one wanted to buy.

Now I was living in the mad palace of an architect
And a sculptor, his works growing in size
Consuming his live,
And mine,
Which I never signed up for.
Canvasses were one thing but
Enormous trunks of hundred-year-old maples
Were another contract entirely,
Marriage vows I didn't agree to
Registrations left unsigned.

And now I too toss in the night, making my decision
Hesitating like he must have with his axe raised
Above the arm of the sculpture of our daughter
But he followed through which I admired
So though still I loved him in a way still I rose in the night and drove
Hundreds of miles, the highway dark and gleaming
Like the stretches of mahogany inside of him I knew were endless.
In the morning I called him but he didn't pick up
Must’ve been working
As always carving,
Carving.

I shall gaze into your mind,
to see the clockworks' machinations.
I shall reach into your core,
to tear the soul asunder.

Through your death,
I am complete.
Through your life,
I stay my hand.

I am the Darkness.
I am your Fear.
I am your Madness.
I am his Servant.

He is the Light.
He is your Grace.
He is your Charity.
He is my Master.

When you look up from your grave,
to see the face of God.
May he free you from your mortal bonds,
and give way to eternity.

Through your death,
you join with Him.
Through your life,
you promise Him.

I carry a casual carapace,
A character trapped in ambience.
Amble the alleyways and ascertain an avid state in acid rain,  
The product a revision of charisma corrected conditions,
How I've come to envision a victim or a villain.
Attach the cataracts to collapse to a tone of grey,
We're all the same under the sages, same as saints.
Geared to the gutters, I greet in mustered mutters,
I mumble through humble structures,
The tongue erupting ruptures.
                
I'm sure they see me as a background actor,
In the shadows of a flagship,
The character on mute behind a selective scene of laughter.
Is this disembodiment, or an echo of the cage?
The skin, bones and flesh under the semblance of a face.
Amazed by the growth of atrophy,
A passenger passing passively,
Impactfully passing passages,
Just practicing for a classic scene.
Fit in, camouflage, play ******* chameleon,
The inner truth a Gilles suit, where this mere meat is measured in a meager mediums.

I'm certainly a circus of surplus circuitry,
I could be less of a mesh of flesh,  with a sense of urgency.
Here a golem strung by the clockworks of a blueprint,
Chiseled in with details and a little bit of hubris.
Pistons Positioned to pivot, pin, - all inclusive,
Grinding on the causeways of abusive truths in future,
Joints cracking, hinges at their thresholds,
Attention to the details, a trend to tend to tenfold.

There’s no way that my being is defined by clockworks, sure we see time fly by and things come and go
But my being isn’t defined by that amount I know, I refuse to let my time be dictated by the endless tick-tocks
I can decide when to face anything and everything when I want to, and that is not destiny casting a choice at me
Credit is given where credit is due, I have more things I need to do, and so little...
Time? No, I have so much time and so little freedom to get it done, I would love to sit and play, and laugh the day away
Although there is a balance that creates an income, of questions and I don’t have answers until I am presented
self-control: guilt, ignorance: awareness, doubt: confidence,

[I am going to make a lot of changes, sorry if you get left behind in the storm. The ocean is a provider, and I realized I haven’t been left out to drown...but to learn to swim on my own. I forgive everyone who has recently done things to me and made me feel a certain way. I forgive you but won’t forget.]

I am here on this earth, created by God.
I am here to live a life that isn’t just guided by Jesus, but to enjoy the gift given to all
I am here to make mistakes, sometimes I’ll fall,
I am a man and will provide and stand up, and be tall,
I am fighting so much because what I want isn’t mine,
I am going to get it soon, I image it daily
I am visualizing the day you might find me
Nowhere close to the past behind me
I am a being with so much potential
And will always be riding the flow of the ocean as far as she’ll take me.

tick,
tock,
the drippling droplets,
escape like clockworks,

to fly,
and fall upon my mind

on the balcony
of our flat,
i light a cigarette
as the buildings
flickers its lights
harmoniously
like a morse code
in the night.

i look frequently
at the back of the sliding
door to see if they're
back already.

i hope they won't be
until i am asleep.
i am one with myself
tonight or any other
night.
an overdose of loneliness
in a place full of business
and contracts and the years
to come.
it will change me, i fear.

the books i have with me
are all i have,
words from dead writers
whom secret
readers such as i
embrace like a last
source of warmth in a
cave i find myself in,
shivering from a winter
state outside.

so many ideas for a novel
and yet none could be
done, helplessly i cling
to the idea of
these dead writers
as if i converse with them
through the weight
of the book i choose
to read
every night.

if i throw these words
out to another human
being, it'll only pass
through like a ghost
and will mean
nothing as it took
me on a distant
phase once
when i was
wounded by love,
stress and disappointments.

i am a beacon in the dark,
consumed by the dark,
a black lonesome
creature as dark
as coal
and as brittle
as coal.

as dry as the wind of
this country i'm in,
as lifeless as the lives
i have come to notice,
as lives become no
different than clockworks,
worn out tires and
beat up soles.

nothing could be done,
this is how things are,
the lives are
narrowed down
into an organism
filled with nothing
but the same things
over and over. . .

i return to the proper
reality,
the cigarette between
my fingers on my right hand
is grayed out.

below are the neighbors
hanging around,
wearing their jilbabs
probably talking
about something
i couldn't understand.

Machinations of dreamlands
Clockworks turning into ideas
Inside a dystopia of emotions
Perfectly tuned to each possibility
Until each sequence is in sync
And all residents devoid of variables

-K

A man sitting at
The edge
Of the ending world
Singing, wailing with his
Raspy, low voice
Whiskey & smoke voice
He swallows dimmed stars
In his mind.
Drink another one


Living through infinite worlds
Infinitely,
Through the clockworks
and mechanisms
of the machine
******* each world dry
off its juices

I was a king, a sickman
A star-eyed bizzare one
This girl, and every girl,
In fact.
This africano suited in leathers,
And a sound vibration in some canals
Only to wither away, again
Like a dying plant
And to repeat,
Infinitely.

Sing on, at the edge
Of the ending universe
Swallowing
Dimmed stars
Throwing these words to waste,
To jaws of changing rails, or
to turn to gold
Or night-bone
-the string broke--
And... Oh

Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch
Bang in the first measure
Came the congenital seizure
Skewing the first invention from scratch.
The campfire skied its sparks
Into the ghost-ridden void,
The skittish tchotchkes
Of paradox and entropy
Quirks and tics as dumb as bricks
Until a headstrong mongoloid
Started groping for rhythm
In the quavering spasms.

Oh, but it was a jawdropper
A bang-up tour-de-force
A horrorshow time-warper
Of Luke and Kirk and spice,
The good apple ran the table
Till the old goat hacked the matrix
And the young hawks did their mind-tricks
Of a tessellated cat’s cradle...
And paparazzi made the odyssey
From planets Claire to Z
To dish how cosmic *******
Trysted protomolecule
As the major ghosted ground control...
In all, a very large array
Of bingeworthy groundhog days.
Lukewarm confabulation
Of the smoking embers
From the essential tremor
Ceaseless oscillation
Between good cop and bad copper.

And the girl scouts chorus
With cheeks full of S’mores
“For all of your fables
Of hobbits and hubbles
And sabering at windmills
You will never untie the volition
Riddled into the convulsion,
Nor how the campfire kindles
Nor be one of us.
You will always ***** the pooch
Halfway to the paw-paw patch.”

Nurse Dipso-Etheromaniac
And Dr. Thorazine-Brainiac
Shoved their two-part invention
Cold turkey into the clockworks,
Cleft lip
Fetal eyes
Flipper-fingered
Riddled with the shakes
Cold-shouldered him to another dimension
Where muggles punk ETs,
And their whiskey wizards
Serve up mock elixirs
Not some hair of the dog to undistemper
The secondhand DTs,
His doggo superpower.

Bill Grogan’s goat
(Bam bam bam bam!)
Was feeling frisky
(Bam bam bam BAM!)
Chased three red skirts
Across the galaxy...
“I knew you were one of the ***** boys
But why do your hands shake like that?
They flipper and gibbet all over the keys”
The sour-smelling teacher spat.

And the mean girls echoed
With tongues of acid
“See how they lurch and squirm!
You will never get to the paw-paw patch
You will never find dear little Susie
She will never teach you to hulu
And you will never two-step
With dear old Johnny
With fists of wiggle worms.”

He touched off the fireworks
Torching all your pomp and cirque
In some skullduggery
Of **** and villainy.
I, Dropout
Outcast
Clonetrooper
Mutineer
Hitched a ride north of the watchtower
Where imperial walkers with hooves of ice
Stomped the land flat, and late-blooming
Summer never shakes the phantom menace
Of the winter that is always coming.

Somewhere in the interstellar distances
Of Kantian prairie perturbed by auroras
Like those night-blooming skyflowers
I glimmered back into existence.
I drank with wildings dropped with the dead
And vaped the contrails of the mad rocketeers
(Kid Rambo, Def Louie, Jedi Freddy and Manny
Steampunk Sal and Wig Out Johnny)
But never found sweeter ******
Than the next bridge to burn.
I, callow flamethrower
Of Shiva, the destroyer.

Marshall Gunpowder Jehoshaphat Miller
The bad apple of the force
Hatchet-faced and porkpied
Dead by ****** suicide
Born again old-schooler,
Packing halitosis
From ossified canon
Skywalked me down.
Gospeled me like Luke
And knee-capped me with a curse
Shame; the oldest mind-trick in the book.
I served out my prodigality
In Ludovico therapy
Which for a half-life, somewhat took.

Headlong into retrograde
I crashed the zero-sum arcade
Fed a quarter into the supercollider
And with some crazy tic of the wrist
Spooked the ball’s trajectory
So it champagne supernovaed
And spat out the shabby ghost
Of a birthright lottery.
Thirteen golden statues.
But as the digits flipped
And the mission crept
As it does to one and all
Faster than a cannonball
I flashed back to renegade.

And the made girls chorused,
With cheeks full of Botox,
From their partial-view suites
And partner-track perks
Of bottomless cups
Of shut the **** up,
“You nearly made the grade, you!
But then you had to mouth off job-hop Hulk
Out, which finally betrayed you.
Now Security Guard Miller
Will escort you off the premises
For a reckoning with your nemesis
Regret, the silent killer.”

True, for a season I was a bluepilled moon
Marooned with space junk
And cypherpunk
Doomscrollers
Of deadend might-have beens,
Like the lunar sonata’s
Primal whisper of futility,
Until it tripolars
Into ultraviolent agitato
And hits escape velocity

Now loosed from orbit of the Goldilocks planet
I tumble through space in dumbstruck rapture
Of hurricaned stars and thundercloud nebula
I tremble in the thousand-parsec stare
Of the headless horde of dark riders
That stampede the stony hobbits,
Through the looking-glass of lightyears past
I see monstrous galaxies in ungainly copulation
Blushing Hiroshimas of atrocious release
And multi-sunned planets where misbegotten
Beings shudder into self-consciousness,

While I drift toward the event horizon
To be gobbled into the enigma
With a little gasp of gamma
Hammerstricken wires frisson.
Where the eleventh measure of the first invention
Counterclockwise corkscrews
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,
After a very long array of groundhog days
My skeleton crew bunch into alignment
Like that hunch of spooky entanglement
Or just possibly like that eternal dissonance
Quelled by a quanta of true arrogance,

In a clockwork grotto
Grows a chrysalis F-sharp
Where fingers at last Goldilock
Into queasy equilibrium,
To my dumb surprise
The dark sac butterflies
And there is Susie
A little tipsy
On hard compatibilism,
With hips of pulsars
And hands of auroras
She hulus like the time warp
Not spasm without rhythm
But otherworldly vibrato.