"crawlspace" poems
I like slandering your makeshift forceps.
I hammer you down with watery *** and then spill
the remainder on the couch. Yarg! A diamond’s
worth at least a small intestine, and you
are worth whatever’s left over after night
has upended itself, poured sideways out of its
shellacked crawlspace, and turned the basement sour.
There are remnants of you in the park,
some red stain by the baseball field where,
if you’ll remember, you watched little leaguers
build teamwork, and faint splotches on tree bark
from your lactations which, if you’ll remember, happened
every morning. I whisper your godforsaken name
and am slapped in the head. The children cry
when I smile. I cry when the children smile. Good
heavens. I forbid you from not entering my corridor,
even as I set up a barricade. I like my water scalding,
my passion chilled, and I like you in easy-to-
swallow doses. I like you in my eggs.
Ditto the faucet, keyboard, the occasional lily,
but do not mess with my pearls. I mumble of apodictic
meadows while I sleep. What can I say?
I do not mumble of unclogging your bathtub,
which has a certain foul repute, and has grown
heavy and ugly with your hair, which is everywhere,
just as you are everywhere, and wherever, and so
********* hidden it’s not funny anymore, we stopped
looking some millennia ago, after scouring the drainpipes,
kicking down your doors, dissecting your mattress,
speculating about your burial site, etcetera, and even so
we have not been really looking all this time, have we,
just blaring your name through the speakers,
putting wrong numbers on our calling cards, leaving
uncooked meat out on the back porch as if you were
a raccoon, oh, or a lion, which you are not, or not
quite, though, as the books say, you have honey
in your stomach, and if you could but be
ripped open we would taste and see.
May 25, 2010
May 25, 2010 at 8:21 PM UTC
My mind could not conjure up the notion that the word, the name, meant something. A-n-n-a. I looked. I looked: she stared back the same. Unknowing, unfamiliar. I wanted to remember, I wanted to.
7 a.m, in the crawlspace underneath the house, flashlight grasped in my hand, sweat from my forehead plastering my hair against it. It smelled like dust. I inched forward on my stomach, writhing as a worm. My body seizing against dirt and webs. I yelled out her name. Just to see. Just to test if my mouth still knew how to speak.
Anna.
Anna.
There. In the corner. I flicked my light against a box with tape on the side and her name written on over it in marker. I whispered it to make sure. Anna. One more time. Anna. I sunk my face into the ground. My breath, soft from my lips but coarse in form, disrupt the filth, made me cough. I crawled over to her with ease, as if the bones in my body were pushing me, the muscles guiding me; these pulsing veins, telling me.
When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was her, smiling back at me in the form of a memory. July 1996, our wedding framed around sanded wood, with splinters etching at the sides, aching for a hold on them. And I cradled her, despite this. Despite my skin giving in.
Anna.
I almost forgot.
My head was hurting again. I blamed it on the suffocating of the casket underground enveloping me, not the staples buried into the skin of my skull, not the remembrance that underneath piles of dirt, her body was just a stack of old bones with only a stone to tag her as proof she was once living.
Anna. My Anna. I cradled the picture against my chest. I clung to her.
My light began to flicker, a spider crawled across my finger. Anna was diminishing, like a ghost, like a gentle sweep of navigating headlights turning a corner, creeping away, and suddenly gone.
Anna. A-n-n-a. I shut my eyes. I could finally remember.
Dec 31, 2018
Dec 31, 2018 at 5:04 PM UTC
The pine floorboards, cover my work.
The pine floorboards, creak at the spot I ripped them up.
I didn't want to **** her,
But she made me insane,
In a fit of rage,
I put a hatchet Right through her ******* brain.
The pine floorboards, cover my work.
The pine floorboards, stained red at the spot I took her life.
Underneath the earth,
In a dark crawlspace,
That's where you'll find my love,
Sleeping oh so peacefully,
Underneath the pine floorboards.
Aug 15, 2012
Aug 15, 2012 at 3:12 PM UTC
Tantamount to the crawlspace where your emotions
are dissembled,
is the animalistic focus in your pointed gaze,
Sketchy eyed with jerky limbed motions,
As elusive as you are always around,
Or so it would seem,
Their eyes fall upon you,
no doubt,
You are a vision,
That I do not and have never questioned,
There is a fundamental lack of
hesitancy in your days,
lately you have looked let down,
Thinking of you,
occurs outside the restraints of time,
I would like to be everything with you.
Aug 26, 2018
Aug 26, 2018 at 12:36 PM UTC
Under the spread hazel's winter
umbrella hung with pale catkins
pulling at a black bin liner rubble
spilled, a little toad tumbles free
from under in turmoil of warty limbs.
A toad in this garden where is no pond
found a moist pocket of plastic pleats
and a larder of wood lice in the rotted
pile sits on my palm calm as a buddha
thoughtless, yellow-eyed, unidentified.
Later, returning for forgotten secateurs
he drifts down in the water *** I let in
to the ground, trailing a bubble stream,
an olive green indifferent nature god.
The lordly stars sustain his crawlspace.
Jun 4, 2011
Jun 4, 2011 at 2:12 AM UTC
*So it's that time again!
Where was I?
Oh yeah, somewhere else!*
The pragmatic man is back again!
Anti-climactic game plan with slack in the chain
Snagged the habit, kicked it's *** until it's hemorrhagic
A spiky crawlspace,
Dogmatic thematics; slit your throat then cry about it
What an antic! It's kinda romantic... pack your bags and leave you nomad,
No man, would ever wanna deal with your vatic manic fits!
Every fabric of Satan's being isn't satin, it's chintz
Chances are my polysyllabic magic is tragically a product of status;
Maybe it's forced? Course it is, like a birthday party, you get gifts
I think I got this one, and now, I'm an addict
My words are indelible ink, spun in webs like the ones in your attic.
Jan 17, 2015
Jan 17, 2015 at 7:29 PM UTC
Before the universe
Exploded onto this canvas
There was a crawlspace
A cave
In a church basement
A pinprick of strange matter
Floating unfettered
In space
And after years of careful planning
Years of careful manipulation
A balloon pop
A BIG BANG
Of people places things
Life and solar systems to fill the church basement
Fill the void
God had blueprints and maps
The universe conspires
And the stars align
God mad picket fence plans
Painted this infinite canvas
Just so I could meet you
And we could become us
Jul 1, 2013
Jul 1, 2013 at 12:34 PM UTC
The sort of home you want to be in,
When all you can focus on are the buttons of his suit,
Tightly woven into the fabric, brand new
Is not the same house you were in when he was alive
Its 3 AM staring at the floor, begging for the sleep to take you,
Anywhere
Even nightmares are better than this, nothing.
The solemn stares churn my stomach,
Somersaults with acid, my body lurches
Doubling over in the pain that is grief.
When the eyes in a room all fixate on you,
It's difficult to hide in a box inside your own head,
Because they tear the walls from your fragile shelter,
And their rain is a burning flame,
You are the match that refuses to be put out,
But wants desperately to feel nothing.
The sort of home I want to be in is
Roses, the thorns cut clean from the stem,
Green tea, just the right temperature
And an old console with his favorite game loaded up
But that house is abandoned,
Left like last week's sawdust,
Swept under the rug in a pile of books,
And i am the can of kerosene in the corner of the room,
Waiting to be used in the most vile of ways.
I am an unlit candle in the midst of a hurricane,
The shadow of the night sky blotted out by the moon
I am the fading smile of remorse,
The pang of guilt,
The sorrow of loss
I am the broken inside of you,
The one that eats away at you until the shell is broken apart
And you are all that's left
In the dictionary, i look up sad and expect a picture of me,
Depressed is myself in my room, alone
Suicidal is the knife i once picked up,
Daring to question if my own beating heart was worth the blood
My House is boarded windows and jail cells,
The crawlspace of cobwebs and creaking stairs,
The leaky roof and patchy ceilings
I am all but a finished mess,
And my foundation is cracked and split.
There is always vacancy,
Because who wants to stay in a house like that?
I’d rent out the rooms, but i'm paying for their rent
if they choose to live inside these decrepit walls
I only wish someone would see the shambles
As a start, and not the leftover parts from a failure,
If these 4 walls housed opportunity,
Instead of destruction.
My house, is a home that i long since enjoyed.
Sep 26, 2017
Sep 26, 2017 at 6:40 PM UTC
So if poetry is a riddle, is love the key?
Do we subtract sadness?
Take away fear?
What about pain?
In this equation who gains?
Life's a never ending circle of questioning what comes next,
And I'm not sure
Because I've felt a feeling I can't quite keep a hold of,
And it slips from my fingers just as it slips from my mind
And in this crawlspace inside my head I've decided, that we're better off alive.
Despite the pain that grows,
The anger that flows through our veins I still believe that we are at the very least,
Human.
And that is a thing in and of itself, to be able to say that today, I am and therefor will be and therefore always will be because I believe it to be such,
And tomorrow, I think I'll love.
And maybe I'll find a reason to cry,
Or a reason to yell or a reason to scream or day dream.
And maybe, I'll write poetry,
A symphony of constructed thought like I was born into a world where nothing else matters,
And maybe you can too,
Maybe you can believe in things that break you,
Like the things that don't **** me make me strong
The things that I do wrong today I won't do wrong tomorrow,
I hope
And nobody is perfect, and nobody should try to be
But with a language as fluid, and universal as feeling?
Why restrict it to the grandest of all?
Let's get down to brass tacks,
The nitty gritty, let's find the dark spots so that the bright ones seem brighter
Let's fill the room with ***** things so that you don't worry so much about what's under your fingernails.
Let's find out how beautiful beauty can be but first, a little perspective
Let's live through these hard times so we know how much better things can get
Let's find out how many feelings you can feel in just a few short years,
Let's become the people we always dreamt of being, and true change seems to stem only from tragedy,
But let's embrace them,
Because all of these things?
Are what makes you, you.
Mar 13, 2016
Mar 13, 2016 at 12:40 PM UTC
Your mind is a heart-trembling sight,
And often as you flaunt it I know
I should never tell you it destrings me,
(Sets me wrong and then puts me in tune.)
I mustn't ever never
Say I wish to do the same to you.
(I would caress the insides of your bones,
Kiss your esophagus, clean your arteries;
I would eagerly sew myself inside you.)
I mustn't ever never
Anglerfish my way into saying
"I would be a limb on your body."
And yet "I love you" cannot possibly -
I would live in your synapses quietly
Never intruding, you wouldn't notice me,
Perhaps even forget me by and by;
But I would electric-think my way through
Your toomuchmind sofastly:
I would repair the gaps with
Scraps of myself torn off, I would
Maintain you invisibly with
My unvisible tools unsensed
And silentdense as an atom's center
Whose disvisible weight is universelifting.
I would lift worlds onto you
As though nothing ever sang sadness
And every(right)thing strongly whispering
Through your veins would know
"I want to pulse your blood and beat your heart."
So much more "love" cannot possibly
Desire, I desire (to make you) the
Overloved lover my domain over:
The king and the grass and the sky.
Apr 17, 2012
Apr 17, 2012 at 7:11 PM UTC
I toss and turn at night nervous the inferno might
swallow me whole if I leave a light burning bright
so I keep to a crawlspace that I call my room.
Home alone, roll the stone, seal me in this tomb.
The Lord will heal me soon. Has the Spirit always loomed
over me since youth? Where's the proof to back the truth?
I opened up about my life of doom-and-gloom to a sleuth
who replied with nothing from across the booth.
© Matthew Harlovic
Nov 27, 2018
Nov 27, 2018 at 8:29 PM UTC
Emblematic of the all American middle class boyhood
Cleanse these filthy blood-spattered hands
Modifying dreams into death
A clown can get away with ******
Spreading smiles on the faces of children
Bodies in the crawlspace
A letter everyday
Just to taunt you
You’ll never catch me
Apr 24, 2011
Apr 24, 2011 at 10:00 AM UTC
When I was a child, I was the riverbed's bend. The silhouette of a person from far away smoking a cigarette. I was the blushing sunset and the barred teeth of nightfall, moon's jutted chin and all.
But as I grew up, people became less tree-house, more crawlspace.
In his drunken days, my father once went out with a crowbar shouting at god for giving me clinical depression instead of a man or a hobby.
When I was a child, I would hold hands the way you hold a loaded gun. No one told me that some people are bullet teeth, trigger wounds, and pistol shot screams. That I would become one of these statistics. Those analogies. My grandfather once told me that the bravest people of all sometimes go a little mad. But you have to find the darkest recess of your mind and tell it that you know what it looks like with the lights on. I no longer need a flashlight.
When you're a child, you're the billow of a skirt. The hum of a refrigerator door in July. You could be the sun's glare or the sky's mouthpiece. But as you grow up, you start blowing out candles for other people's birthdays. You begin looking at the cracks of pavement rather than moths clinging to streetlamps. your house slumps its shoulders whenever you open the door. and why?
if none of this makes sense, regard it as a poem.
Dec 10, 2014
Dec 10, 2014 at 1:25 AM UTC
Swore I felt your flesh
Push through my dreams
Your gums soft against my tongue
Metal braces tearing through me
A phantom residue
From the crawlspace of my mind
An unconsciously yearning
For love
No longer mine
How the **** can I move on?
With the scent of your breath
Lingering in morning mist
How the **** can I move on?
With the sweat of your skin
Soaking my fingertips
This ache is unbearable
Jun 22, 2014
Jun 22, 2014 at 7:24 AM UTC
Don't you know that a clown can get away with ******
HAHAHAHA!
And don't you know that your parents don't care if you're missing
living or dead.
Don't you know that your class ring looks better on my finger?
Pull it I dare ya!
And don't you know that your god doesn't fit in my crawlspace?
Face it he's done for.
Worthless little queers and punks every single one of us.
I could show you the handcuff trick
but then i'd have to **** you kid.
Yes I could show you the old rope trick
but then you'd have to
"kiss my ***
Aug 5, 2014
Aug 5, 2014 at 2:51 PM UTC
It's not enough to merely speak w/ enthusiasm
Even most "actions" go unnoticed, unheeded
Hate to say it, a succession of blunt force
Possibly perceived as violent
Is necessary
Repeatedly
Or you could stop trying to impress on me
What you wish others would see as your
Personality
If you could do that, just that
I might try and help you.
Crawlspace of the Cranium
$2.00 / 11 poems
Copyright © 1996-Present
May 14, 2011
May 14, 2011 at 8:27 PM UTC
Every word you've
ever heard
is a lie,
***
to
find
out
Didn't you know
there is no
eye to eye?
with
you,
your
self
Some dark part of you confidently starts those fires.
Desire and I go way back, close, I've groped their inky caves.
Resist desire's lurid scope, so sure, precisely how you're made.
Some dark part of you longs to ***** to crawl your ******* veins.
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 at 2:29 AM UTC
He hides you from the world
and guides you by the hand
He speaks to you in softness
as you forget everything
outside his house near the river
We have our special crawlspace,
where the world forgets where we are
He smiles gently as you speak
without even thinking.
With your soul in the palm of his hand
he shows you to the water
the evening sun highlights your faces,
his skin glows in the light like honey
As the faded winter sun smiles upon
the young rosebuds waiting to bloom
In the springtime.
When the old man of the night
Dwindles into newborn dawn,
The conjoined soul feels a sigh
When the river must be crossed.
As he, still guiding your hand,
Navigating your soul
kisses you goodnight.
With a reluctant wave,
You watch him disappear;
Engulfed by the mists
On the other side of the river
Dec 31, 2010
Dec 31, 2010 at 1:51 PM UTC
Well I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me
I’m living in fear with a ringing in my ear
The train is on the tracks and it’s getting kind of near
I’m thinking sideways I’ll do it my way
I should care more but why start today
I don’t keep up with the same old sound
I’m busy in my head and it’s written down
I want you to see what happens to me
When I lose existence to think is to be
Under the ceiling above the floor
Between the walls and behind the door
I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me
Nov 13, 2010
Nov 13, 2010 at 4:59 AM UTC
All is love.
All is love.
All is love.
Over and over these words
slop and slosh in the
bleak that has been
too long a force.
I wait for you to get off of work.
I want to talk with you.
Meantime, I'll write conversations
that I can
hop and skip over to you.
All is love.
All is love.
All is love.
Did you know that the favoured
flavour of wandering is to settle down?
Down with you.
You.
I like writing that word.
In the crawlspace of my reaching hands
is where you live.
In the zig zag of release
is what you have
snapped your fingers to achieve.
All is love.
All is love.
All is love.
Mar 1, 2011
Mar 1, 2011 at 4:06 AM UTC
Soft curves on smooth skin showed little but a turquoise soul without sin. A sunny heart with no flaws, it was strong. The burning started soon after, a light tingle tingle, nervous laughter. Push away, close your eyelids tight, button. It will go away with the light button. So they say.
My core began to melt through my swollen fingers, down the drain. Then the scorch marks came! Craters, meters deep where it would be easy for sadness to seep and blackness to creep. I'm ******* sick of counting sheep so let me sleep let me sleep.
All that was left for the turquoise soul was crawlspace. Turquoise turns to green and quickly there is no more balance only mean. And it eats at me and I can't see so the worms and rats burrow inside and impatiently I wait for the pain to subside. Twirl my hair, feed me lies, take my hand and smother my cries.
A tear falls softly on your cheek and the guilt in my bones makes my heart weep. The fluid inside begins to boil and suddenly I'm smothered by the blood and the soil. The worms are there too, they're everywhere. I scream and beg...but worms don't care.
Chilled to the bone, I scratch and pull but then I can't move my coffin is full. Little dove, rosy cheeks, no more tears for weeks and weeks. Stop your turquoise **** it dead. Go to bed with GREEN in your head!
Sep 15, 2014
Sep 15, 2014 at 12:02 PM UTC
there in the crawlspace
they found me
drugged and *****
they pulled and tugged
spoke their plans
to help deliver sobriety
change my outlook
toward the better
I resisted
any idea seemed as hopeless
as no plan at all
that was my comfort
my morning joe
how many times
must this be said
my days can be lived
by one way only
aimed at the end
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Oct 26, 2013
Oct 26, 2013 at 10:38 AM UTC
Is there a little place,
Inside your tired mind?
A place where you can wander,
That no one else can find?
It's a little bitty crawlspace,
Where you go to hide from life,
Hidden from the outside world,
From the devil and his strife.
There's lots of stuff to do in there,
Many creatures to see,
Many demons all around,
A twisted fantasy.
Crazy wishes do abound,
In this pocket wonderland,
Horrors as well as fairy tales,
Where battles are at hand.
No matter what you need,
No matter who gives you scars,
Just hide in your little pocket world,
And count your lucky stars.
Mar 21, 2015
Mar 21, 2015 at 11:08 PM UTC