"embalmment" poems
She was blue at the bedside ragged and warm
as sirens signaled savage red and yellow far away;
'I love you,' she whispered.
Tuesday's solemn droning sent a cool breeze over the hills,
and coughing sludge at breakfast,
and no one was home...
except for her,
with eyes like war-torn rivers flooding rooms dressed in shadows,
and her mind lit like a film rolling silent in the darkened house.
She was pale curled up in a chair
and started to doze psychosis war-torn sweet
as Death a sharpened mystique graced her thigh and cheek.
And beauty's embalmment played in her head,
and like schizophrenic spilling milk,
she woke.
The sky was beyond and untouchable,
as Tuesday's solemn droning sent cold upon the streets
and the lips of children were made chapped.
Feb 15, 2014
Feb 15, 2014 at 12:39 PM UTC
My father's obsession became increasingly apparent
with every visit I made to him.
The clocks, their hands,
their beautiful, twisted fingers
dancing to the co-ordinated sound of
ticking - he couldn't take his eyes from them.
Over the years I began to see
his irises shifting like clockwork,
miniature minute hands
beating at the doors,
ticking
ticking
ticking.
They are knitting,
knitting a fabric so tight it's a shroud,
pulling it over his head and waiting
for him to sink into the waters of embalmment.
Epitaphs, mad men entitled to nothing.
He formed the millions into gears,
expectation of a smooth, working machine
which he could grasp in his fingers
and hold up to the ***** sky,
moving, scurrying,
ticking. A better place, or so it seemed
to him, where men didn't speak in tongues
and life answered
to something beyond chance.
It was different when he first came here
but then so was he,
it was a version that made more sense.
A version where black birds with missing
feathers patrolled the skies,
where he ran his hands through his hair
to leave straggled clumps between his fingers -
balding velvet. He forgot
so much more than he had remembered,
even me. Eyes still glazed white
looking right at me, he was cold-limbed
and vacant and filled me with a filthy,
cruel hollowness that takes
and takes, relentlessly, for no gear,
or system, or rhyme, will pull
the books from the shelves. I won't find
a ransacked home with shattered furniture
and broken glass littering the floor,
only a clean, aching, vague room
that is blue and sterile and so empty
it leaves trails of goosebumps
along my arms and burns its way
into my dreams in the depths of the night.
I won't find you crying over empty photographs,
only a shell,
staring, dead, at the whitewashed walls.
Oct 24, 2017
Oct 24, 2017 at 6:38 PM UTC
I am flesh and blood,
kin to the sins you refuse
as you waste your life
allowing yourself
to be misused.
A thousand pleasures
delayed or denied
by crooks who
have lied and pried
where they have
no right to.
They spite and smite you.
As you go through
early embalmment,
because you spent
your whole life
decaying prematurely,
That’s why
when you see me
I am still smiling,
laughing, and enjoying
all those forbidden fruits
you call sin.
Aug 24, 2018
Aug 24, 2018 at 10:25 AM UTC