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Sarah Mulqueen Jan 2017
My body is a temple, one I must uphold.
My body is a temple,
A temple with a few bricks askew?
The foundations no longer stable?
Moss and ivy growing up the sides, finding all the crevasses.

To look at, all but a natural beauty.
I'm weathered at such a ripe young age.
My body is a temple.
But this temple needs a grave.

I can't call the architect,
To tell them they ****** up.
All the sympathetic looks, or sideways glares.
No one truly understand the amount I learn,
from the way they look at me.

My body is a safety hazard.
No warning sign required.
Hips and arms clicking and cracking. Legs, back and neck no better

Ease me up gently and handle with care.
I'll bruise with the slightest pressure.
My temple may as well be completely collapsed right on top of me.

My temple has a leak causing the structure to rot.
I don't have the energy,
To fix myself again.
I don't have the energy.
I'm barely even still me.
In April last year I found out my bone cyst had returned in my right humorous. I later found out I had been misdiagnosed and actually had something called Fibrous Dysplasia (https://www.fibrousdysplasia.org/)
Which is something a lot more serious than an Anuerysmal Bone Cyst which is what I previously thought I had.

Without sounding mellow dramatic I hope I was able to portray how my body feels on a day to day basis with chronic pain.
Tommy Johnson Sep 2014
That was then, this is now
Who was where when what was how?
Hear them take their last breath as they're shot down
I scream
Floating in the gene pool, expecting the man who can walk on water to arrive
Sell outs and everyone who has had a bad week even though it's only Monday

Whippersnappers hang their heads in shame
I am one of twelve
So expendable
We live in gluttony
Lineleaders, math teachers, bottom-feeders have no idea
Watch them fall and be forced to crawl on their bellies
We laugh
Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, getting back to your roots
Progeric clock-makers, lying dead on The Yellow Brick Road
Thin-skinned Transsexuals putting bricks in their purses
We live by eight
We die from our weight
And go unbloomed
       -Tommy Johnson
Standing in a nuclear reactor somewhere in Chernobyl looking for the truth
It might be in my contaminated endoplasmic reticulum
I am a radiant
Doppler radar
Monopoly dollar

Singing in the shower, amateur hour
Projecting sour notes
Pouring out their hearts and souls, hear them
Trying

Moo-juice nectar, spilling off The Round Table
Blondes in red bracelets, Kabbalah saves them
Henry pays no tax, John Berryman's bats tell us
You are the lunatic
We are the two quarters of a half-wit
This whole thing is insane

       -Tommy Johnson
KALIGULA Aug 2019
Melancholy I was before disturbed, the rewinding of time is much unheard

Dashing away you left me cold and alone in the snow .
With no light for my roots, these branches couldn’t grow.

Melancholy I was before disturbed, the rewinding of time is much unheard.

And to say regret would be most fitting; I can’t even stand to eat for one sitting

As the hunger gnaws at my feet like hell hounds

The love I had was lost , now I’m no longer spell bound.
Robert C Ellis Jul 2022
God had to do something with their wrecks so
I rise upon my tyranasaurus backbone and, aloft,
Wonder what was returned as me.
Sediment of unused stardust choked for dysplasia greens drunk on nectar beading from inactivity or steam of the Pacific I pretend suspends above me as a child, my back to the grass
Staring down 30,000 feet to sea.
All of blood, the same salt recipe as such Ocean, harvested for the dreaming.
Mick Devine May 2018
The children say we’ve got to
That we’d be crazy not to
“We’ll treat you,” they said
“You’re a long time dead.”
Trouble is, travelling’s not so easy now
What with my legs and Malcolm’s hip dysplasia
But we’re off to Euthanasia this year!
Sibifus parable of the Light: “in a dark box was Sibufus, under a vile phoneme of resistance as the Hellenic soldiers prepared to attack and redouble the efforts of a final counterattack. Sibufus was enraptured by a maiden named Artemis in whom he took refuge, she molded with her hands the lanterns of the night with the lamps of lychnos that pierced the soul of Sibifus and her gaze when Artemis was exasperated listening to her exclaim in the thickest darkness, in a hiss in the form of words, images and strict shadows, which he romanticized in all those who wandered with Lychnos at night, concealing his offspring and finding hemispheres of day and night in a plane of darkness. Artemis not being sleepy at night, became angry with the goddess Nix, snatching a dream with mead from her and depositing him in the palace at night, but in darkness, confusing the dream with creative and fantasy death with Sibifus, of which he is locked in a box near the visions that hit Artemis's window. In the hinges that glistened when he tried to open them, shades of gloom shared in the native darkness making little chance of being close to each other, Sibifus was always condemned to a romanticism presided over by the imprisonment of his voice, but if he could whistle, Artemis enjoyed his freedom when he went out to observe him through the window of every spring. Sometimes the Thuellai would stop flowing, she being able to bring her eardrums closer to the tones, when he whistled with splendor, magnifying himself many times to reach his court, when he often told him to feel sad because the world was aging him, remaining within his whistles cast on a young night. When Artemis listened to him, believing that she felt him ..., sometimes she answered him with the sighs of an infant running through the Aristotelian teachings, of which they were always late, but with great courage from his high spirit that awaited him from his rose window, knowing very well little that awaited him, although the darkness of the night was hidden behind the messages of his phonemes and whistles, frequently in his poor heart that was encouraged in locution for something better, to see the new face and voice of Sibifus, but nowhere Capitol fire that made him understand his words crossed with uncrossed whistles. Until from the underworld the voice of Sibifus emerged making everything reality together with his real voice, whistling and singing as many times as necessary, so that his seduced could hear him and no evil would extend a lost whistle, less to a voice exonerated from crying by the darkness of the night. Something of littleness in his neuroanatomy automated him from a loving language through the streets of discernment that he learned with melodic frequency between monodies of hemispheres cut by the edge of his voice, but not from a hiss, denouncing in him capacities of cortical dysplasia that diagnosed him of maleficent gray substance of his cortex, leaving him at the mercy of an epilepsy, which always and in all the will of the ceremonial in Sibifus recurred. In dualities they bathed in the ceremonial of ablution and holy water, known as loutra, always prowling all the skies and lavender fields of Patmos, with Minoans whistling in the distance of Darkness and in a night of devotion, in a Lutrophor that from a vessel that circulated from hand to hand and that brought them water for their nuptial bath, Sibufus making a mistake, taking it through the orbit of the funerals and the regional area, instead of going for their nuptial trousseau, being imprisoned one of the other in his celibacy, which later was transferred into the Loutra with his hands, and Sibufus as well, but fertilizing himself in the sounds of a whistle beyond the light and the first layer of the earth, not being able to hear them in a low voice, or in full darkness that from afar seems to call them "

(Prócoro, takes their hands one with another and begins to return to his cell, letting the monosyllables of the night be silenced and carry him beyond the darkness, losing himself in the sounds that were moving away from him. The night is silent, but emits whistles that speak of love that nothing and no one understands, and less remotely from where the light will come)
Sibifus parable of the Light:
Autumn Feb 26
Bright grey clouds woke me and the dread for the day seeped in.
Probably better to get up but pinned down by half thoughts.

I had to wait a month for this day. The day they take chunks out of my ****** to test it for abnormalities.
Yeah, alright I wasn’t dying to get out of bed?

Life and the living did win eventually. I rolled over and after a load of laundry and some grumbling I actually did make it to service first auto.

Walking thru that door made my troubles disappear. Papers piled up. Half a sandwich. Birthday card from 2023. And one eyed Don!

He looked at me, “Subaru?” “Yeah! How are you!?” He didn’t match my morning enthusiasm. “I’m OK.” His mechanic walked in, deadpan, he said, “I’m going to get a coffee.” “Okay.”

What I would give some days to be a blue collar man.

Trying not to look at his glazed over eye, I blabbered about my brief check engine scare. How it could be the head gaskies but I want to try and go longer. Bare minimum please. But yeah it’s burning coolant. Don grumbled, “Yeah, yeah we’ll do what we do and give you a call.” Thanks!

Next stop: Nat’s. My friend going through the same cervical trauma as me offered to join me to my appointment.

We chatted. Made horrific jokes. “Yeah eventually I just came to terms with the fact that I would be that one friend with cancer.” I talked about my Thicc Thighs Save Lives vision. A bike group where the two cs in thicc stood for cervical cancer.

She helped take my mind off the speculum and the pliers and the blood and the stirrups and the silver nitrate of my future.

We discussed the unnecessary shame we felt. Vented about men and how it's some serious ******* HPV doesn't affect them but they can transmit it?

And how they can sleep with whoever they want, but it’s promiscuous when we do? And at the end of the day it’s simply bad luck. Bad luck.

I did finally make it to the room. Waiting in the chair, my eyes traced its edges and fell on the labeled drawers. Loop electrode. Colposcope. Pads. Curette. I wasn’t as scared as I expected to be.

They gave me a hot pad for my ******, opened me up, numbed the area, and at one point I saw a tiny bright red piece of my ****** in between the pliers.

That little speck of precancerous ridden flesh! Why was it kind of cute? I thought fondly of it. Off to testing you go, sweet thing. Make mama proud.

“Nothing in your ****** for 3 days!” “Okay.” Too bad I’m a drug mule. Why don't I just say the intrusive thoughts?

The nurse asked, “What are you going to do to treat yourself after this?” Well it ended up being a 16oz mocha immediately followed by a pint of beer. I mean why not blast myself with my two favorite substances back to back on an empty stomach?

Maybe the caffeine will make the dysplasia dance. Make the lesion listen. Listen when I say: LEAVE. Get out of my body.

Next stop: picking up my car. Don looked at me with the eye that worked, threw the keys at me, and demanded $750 dollars. “Still keep an eye on the coolant and oil.” “Okay.” Just one though.

5 hours in the shop made my car smell like a bowling alley. Stale marlboro coming straight through the vents. It was comforting. I thought: these are the best parts of life.

I was home for a bit and then came the wind. Sideways rain, swinging bird feeders, sirens, wind chimes, branches everywhere and then black. Power out.

I felt revitalized...energized: I breathed the chaos of the storm straight inside me. Gulping each gust in real time.

It felt right. Metaphorical. Storms happen, storms stir **** up, storms pass. Storms pass! Storms stir **** up! They just happen.

My neighbor and I leaned over our balconies and cooed about the storm. He couldn't wait to light ten thousand candles.

With only one singular candle myself, I fled back to Nat’s. We gave each other massages, laughed, and on my drive back there was a man dancing in the middle of the crosswalk.

Stop lights are out, rain still coming down, it’s pitch dark and his hands are in the air.. no care in the world just dancing. I think that man is me. He’s the inner joy I felt today and crave to always feel.
I did give a polite honk at him. A double meaning honk. Like I fully support this living going on but I do want you to continue to live. Hahahaha.
Outlanders (& lowlanders) from the European continental shelf shall expand weftwise till theirs is the girth of elephants. We shall call upon one & another to stultify mistrust & dysplasia & dyspepsia & dysentery. Our hips establish carriage—smooth glides & the wherewithal to sashay. Until Americans buckle- & batten-down, no one in Mexicali can be employed. Now's el momento when goodness, righteousness & piety count. Celebrate claustrophobic bends, needles in the pinpricks & medications of fabled remission. Choose not to spin when there's nowhere to turn. One follows another as by natural edict. The guppies that were flushed down our loos in 1974 live in our hearts within 1,000 oils of these revolving tenderloins & caudal *****. People appear @ the funeral home who have nobody dead to visit with. People vaporize in an instant when there's no need for hasty departure. Living our lives to the cruelest is of, & corresponds to, the fragile will of our prompters. I shall speed into slots with a baked face. I shall review Jim Jones' C.I.A. funding blueprints. “Fear not the reaper!” I should replace my olden connections with spiffy prayer-beads. Moving our bowels & furniture honors a keen fashion-sense.
Satsih Verma May 2020
You should not
have done this? Trespassing
the virginity of the
olive branch and the ashes.

I will borrow the
words to clean blood
in your eyes. A lovely
jasmine will sit on your lips.

The death holds its
own mercy between good
and bad. Any fondling
of moon was a bliss.

Where will dysplasia
go, after giving an unbearable
loss? You cannot roll the
carpet after the blaze.

The tangerines will give
a big surprise.

— The End —