I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

              If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

              If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

II

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
       This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
       This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the ****.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
       This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
     Near the ending of interminable night
     At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
     Had passed below the horizon of his homing
     While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
     Between three districts whence the smoke arose
     I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
     Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
     And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
     The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
     I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
     Both one and many; in the brown baked features
     The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
     So I assumed a double part, and cried
     And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Although we were not. I was still the same,
     Knowing myself yet being someone other—
     And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
     And so, compliant to the common wind,
     Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
     Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
     We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,
     Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
     I may not comprehend, may not remember.’
And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse
     My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
     These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
     By others, as I pray you to forgive
     Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
     For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
     And next year’s words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
     To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
     Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
     In streets I never thought I should revisit
     When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
     To purify the dialect of the tribe
     And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
     To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
     First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
     But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
     As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
     At human folly, and the laceration
     Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
     Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
     Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
     Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
     Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
     Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
     Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
     He left me, with a kind of valediction,
     And faded on the blowing of the horn.

III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

IV

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

i love you when we're alone
because you eviscerate me in front of your friends
but alone you kiss the veins in my arms
press your small hips into my hips & sigh into my neck
& blink so slowly that i can hear your eyelids whispering

you won't hold my hand in public
because you blatantly want to seem available to other men
but when it's only you & it's only me
we lie on our backs letting the summer rain collect in puddles
in our bellybuttons & you swear to god
there's only one way this can end

you say i can't meet your parents
but everything i do reminds you of your father
that tall strong man of your childhood
singing sinatra to your mother in the kitchen
just like i do when i sneak behind you &
tickle your neck with my tongue you're
giggling as i carry you like a bride
into your bedroom for naptime or playtime

you only miss me when you're by yourself
like a flower hidden in a fenced-in backyard
but you ignore my texts most days
because when your friends are around you're busy
dancing toward the sun & lying to them
about where you spent last night &
the blueberry pancakes you ate for breakfast
you don't mention the ticklish new rib spot i found
or the quiet music we make together at night
or the stars we wished on with our pinky fingers tied together

i love you most when we're sticky asleep alone
you humming in turquoise ******* snuggled into my armpit
with your warm hand melting into my chest
& me in the pinstripe boxer briefs you bought with
my arm under and reaching for your exposed breast

God bless the woman,
God bless the queen,
An Angel,
Whose immeasurable services,
Are never appreciated,
A varied flower,
Which decorates the world,
And makes life,
Worth living,
A being,
That is just another way,
Of making another being,
God bless her.


You are so many things,
In one,
As much as you are one,
In so many things,
Daughter, sister,
Mother, wife,
Comforter, consoler,
To mention,
But just a few,
And an irreplaceable extension,
And conduit,
To man,
You are some unique kind,
Of symbolic,
And unbending sanctity,
A conspicuous epitome,
Of courage,
And encouragement,
As confirmed among other items,
By the pain,
You endure in labour,
But not minding,
To go through it,
Again and again,
And again.


Man,
Can only imagine how it feels,
To carry an unknown live object,
In your body,
In the darkest,
And most precarious waters,
Of humanity,
Changing your living habits,
Owing to a vacuumed unknown,
Incognizant of what to expect,
At the end of the long,
Tiresome wheelbarrow push,
A snake or a lion,
A murderer or a saviour,
A ******* or a nun,
A president or a dissident,
A Mugabe or a Mandela,
Yes,
All these,
Came out of your generous belly,
And made you to sweat,
Scream,
Writhe and wince,
In burning,
And torturous agony.


You are peripatetic,
And ubiquitous,
A convincing symbol,
Of unfailing love,
Infact,
Love personified,
You imbue pride in us,
And our children,
And a very infectious sense,
Of longing and belonging,
Mother of man,
And woman,
Mother of the station,
Mother of the ration,
Mother of the nation.


Your heart is soft,
Like your breast,
And is fraught,
With forgiveness,
And care,
Despite that,
Some of your sisters,
And daughters,
Engage in heartless,
And heinous baby dumpings,
And others,
****** our innocent,
And defenceless unborns,
Fathers,
And mothers of tomorrow.


Like us with the sun,
You fall and rise with us,
Feeding us,
And fostering us,
When we are sick,
Having sleepless nights,
When our progeny are unwell,
While we snore,
And dream of fake riches,
A literal pregnant mine,
You really are,
Rich and abundant,
In love for us,
And a very nourishing fluid,
For our young offspring,
An offspring you strive to nurture,
Even single-handedly.


But nevertheless,
We cheat on you,
And lie to you,
With absolute uniqueness,
We abuse you,
Belittle you,
And inhumanely eviscerate you,
We make you our slaves,
And regard you,
As being beings with no rights,
Nights and tights,
Days and bays,
Yet,
No matter how much,
We subjugate you,
Or how diabolic,
We treat you,
You continue to love us,
May God bless you,
On earth and in heaven.
                                                 ________

“If I could have it my way, everyday would be women’s day” - Dr Noah Marutlulle

pieces of flotsam
soak and float on the paper,
jetsam thrown to lighten
the load,
or goad,
the alligator, away
the guttural noises, sound like harsh
commentary the closer the
gator
is allowed to get,
not wanting to look over the shoulder,
but stop in for biting remarks,
the gator's teeth are so large and famous
they have names and voices;
"punctuation or punctures, I can help"

"point of view tch, tch, tch"
                                                            ­            
"your grammar needs work"

"doubt you will finish"

"no one will read IT"

"you will never find the right word"

"is your audience a six year old"

"borrrrring"

"what a croc"

"are you enjoying what you are doing?"

"successful writers are all published"

"you call that a sentence, keep it up and it will be a death sentence "

"how many tenses can you misuse in a paragraph"

and these are the names of some of the smaller teeth,
the molars, are more than a mouthful,
have polar names, that would leave anyone cold,
                                                      even the bold,
and shall not be put in print,
they bring out the PTSD,
imprinted for eternity, by
the gator which
comes at the sounds
of splashing, flailing, and failing,
as the pounding of the heart,
the deepened breathing,
as the ink from
the pen, unfiltered,
leaves nerves and veins exposed,
while leaving to find home, a safe haven, a storybook ending,
away from the gator's keen sense of
overt criticism, intended to gut,
and eviscerate, cutting remarks,
putdowns to hold down and under,
the piece that IT is trying to tear off
while spinning or shaking the head
side to side, which is both NO!
and to bash the will, the self-esteem, into little pieces
of me...
            and my worst enemy,
                                                my internal, infernal editor,
                                                         ­                                     with the voracious appetite for self-def**eating

a tongue a knife a rhyme
a slitted try of silence mine
i could never keep it fought
rip the gut right from my life
ill scream the name until i rot
shreik a word so loud ill cry
i tried my luck but missed the cut

a trickled spiggot sputters with it
a soft spot for the eyes that fall out of my skull
flaming pupils burn the crop
the students of the fire
they stop drop and roll into the wretched thought
that comes each time they learn what has been wrought to build this pyre

to eviscerate the weakened soul
the empty rooms inside my home
voraciously in rapture
tearing sinews off my mind
splitting ears and feeding from the captured
nothing left behind my skin no map no muscles
missing compass knees buckled

******* leave me or ill pull the trigger
ill **** the lost and eat the hindered
incinerate your wicked splinters
and in this home
snap each of your twelve ******* fingers

its teeth are gentle on me in a way that only devils can
we're peckish for atrocities and it has given me a plan
a broken handed man within the corridor
his one eye wide
the other in the devils side
a matching type to mine if i still had my sight
the door is closed and i am blind but we can smell the horror more
breaking out we tore into that bodys core
but that devil, him, the house, unborn
as i woke up in a corpse
for i am dead upon the floor

Remembering time past.
Hell, searching for lost time.
Idyllic maybe
But
Flowers wilt.

The idle wailing
of Sirens and Daffodils
Allows me to forget:

Nostos holds Algos.
Scylla, Charybdis.
Is the future come yet?

Every word becomes a mistake.
All triumphs a fleeting matter
worthy of none.

Eviscerate my joy and live in its corpse.

Silver slices in the sky
Boy, I'd love a moon pie
Silver slices in the sky
Cut off my head and make it fly
Twist my bones into a braid
There's a knight who needs my aid
Twist my bones into a braid
(I hope he doesn't just want to get laid)
Carve your name into my skin
I've always wondered why my heart is so thin
Carve your name into my skin
Maybe you can make me full again
Pump my heart full of fire
I've never been dancing with my sire
Pump my heart up full of fire
Ah, this is a fate most dire
Tear my brain right out of my head
I am crazy, I should be dead
Tear my brain right out of my head
Send me to sleep in a hellfire bed.

i don’t want to hear about your former heart
don’t want to memorize the lines of the faces that betrayed you
strip down from your past
down to your brittle bones
claw your resentful hands into my bare flesh
and show me why you’ve learned to flinch at love
i don’t want to hear about your boyfriends
girlfriends
don’t wanna know where it went awry
i want to be the curse that runs you dry
sink my teeth into your apathy,
fill the empty crevices in your bed with yet another allegory
eviscerate the plot for another horrorific love story
make your memories shiver
as we fill each other - we quiver
cause i don’t want to hear about
know about -
the skin or soul before me
it’ll be irrelevant
when we make the ground split with our calls
and the earth will stand still as you exhale that godly breath
don’t wanna hear about your former heart

The possibilities are perched and overwhelming with their weight
the withered autumn branches of my street. Whining sinew of my mind
breaks off and flutters down, like leaves from life's misbegotten tree,
a petal or a timid accusation.
What now am I left holding here-- vulture feathers or sapling leaves?
That girl, with tufts here and there, dropped each quill as an embossed coin, effaced
by intrepid maids vacuuming my room of cloistered couches since
soiled by madam president during isolated summit which won't convene again, her golden
gown of rues has not a stitch of fabric for a single pocket more-- sloughing brittle currency under cushions
like Fall foliage under conscious footsteps striding in constraints of time.
She picks that soggy garment from the cleaners' with the sideways background ringing of
mistrust, apprehending
silenced, patient voices; detached from their seams with dis-acknowledgment--
the dress, comes by on the carousel and
fingers her feathers with its motion.
They're washed with him, her feathers and the dress-- shored up by late summertime’s ebbing
flood that year.
Each gust eddied unaccounted toward the beach our circumstance.
What held intact the branch of life and plucked that chord for dancing in the night?
The self-same vibration that severed from the soil his trunk, which was the ship's ballast, with the adz, my will, my want
and hopeful mooring --
cast and sunk, thus.
Sound waves clashing with our spinning crystal surface of wisping nodes
plunge now beneath themselves-- frail, flaxen and woven with water.
Held out near Tyre's port a scanty mast,
thought out for catching air; forfeited this vacuous, unstable mole', their bottle
poured on water to make earth, which swells as moistrous and abridged
as a musty vestule, corked and knotted in the wind.
Encased through sanction, hold and curiosity--
the tine rubbed and singeing, loosed you from me. Those brazen beads, sand percolating, lie with us.
We are now misrepresented; sniffling as sows after the trough who root.
The woman-leaves let will be known-- to dry up and disavow
their lecherous beauty by shriveling in the tepid sun of
late September. Does too, the feather-man eviscerate the model of time
in his way of losing each and every granule
that is the ground which swells with frozen rain 'til
Spring, then thaws and flies away. Or was it
their dainty, dizzied rose petal, suckling smog from sky since birth that has weather-worn
their gowns sheer silver, freshly hewn anew, by being ripped and pressed about
which came to stifle thoughtless dew?

I listen to the sound of my fate as it pours out of the bottle. At last the pressure can escape. Breathing a sigh of relief that would meet the clouds with gentle licks. I am seated at the edge of my own precipice and at the bottom is a river. Ready to carry me down a tumultuous pass to the sandy peroxide foamy waves that exfoliate my sins.
Scout the bottom of the ocean for my heart,
You will find it throbbing like your eardrums in the auricle of a conch shell
You will hear the sound of my voice
And feel the grit of sand as you clench down your teeth
The water dries around my knees as I float atop the surface. Exposing my holy flesh to the contenders of will power. Will power my will to engage the mighty rock. And burst and bleed and eviscerate to form, to mold, to sculpt the golden stool of my consciousness.
Feast your eyes upon my crown
Adorned with the corpses of my victory
And collateral damage
Feel its weight as heavy as mercy
The blood pours into the ink as I dig these verses from my soul. The goal, my raison d'être, ikki *** and my modus opernadi is to excuse the agenda pushing glitterti when they tell me what my life should be. I should be, cruising the milky ways and the galaxies that my being exists in. Infinite space, infinite time leaves way for infinite possibilities to truly be free. So don’t mind me.
Standing as the revolution
The testament
Revolving around your disillusion
Thicker than cement
My empire was built on dreams, schemes occupy my reality and place you next to me. And the rest of me I will give to you as I pull you inside of me. So that when my eyes close you sleep and when you are sad I weep, deep is the colour of our passion beyond indigo. More fierce than the might of Chaka and his legions and yet as quiet as snowfall and you are
Beautiful. A shock to the senses that
dissipates the fog.
This concludes
the prelude.

These thoughts grind my teeth through sleep.
These dreams make waking up a gift and a chore.
Morning injects me into reality
Like a vaccine: a deadened virus that will keep you safe.
I cannot stomach this infertility,
Not yet.

I am not what I am
The eyes of those who pretend to see:
As benevolent as a mouth full of razors.
The mouths that I always want to kiss.
The lips that I always seem to pursue.
The cuts that I always pretend to cherish.
The ancient lust shakes my blood.

And I am forced to embrace nostalgia
as She and She and He and Then penetrate my mind: a time long past.
What is memory but a slideshow of regrets?
Every word becomes a mistake.
All triumphs a fleeting matter worthy of none.
Eviscerate my joy and live in its corpse.

It is April and we are frozen:
Stuck in a world we never knew
In a love we thought we felt
A life we never lived.

Entering this house is the last twist of the knife.
You're breaking my soul upon your eyes:
No birds sing.
Life isn't very long.
Even roses wilt.
It's rude to stare.

High on sidewalks and streetlights,
The sun has set: will it rise again?
What is to become of this,
My darkness?

There is no clock tower here, and
My full moon is setting too fast.
Day will come, day will come.
Feeling too much or nothing at all.
My heart races and I've no clue why.

And I will come home, to a sepulcher
Void of all light and screeching like the Storm.
I lift the knife to my side,
I look at you, and I sigh....
These thoughts grind my teeth through sleep.

There in the trenches
I've seen headless henchmen
Bending spoons
For hapless children
Cremated too soon

Demons croon
They zip
They zag
As the lower class picks their scabs
The gift of gab
Sent towards rips from packs
The rush alone could make one gag!

Have you been there?
Would you go back?

There in the trenches
I've met widows and wives
Carousing with voyeurs
Polishing pikes
Their best years behind
Spent on pyrite-
Euphoric alibis
Which eviscerate bright eyes

Will the Church draw nigh
Or watch the stranded die?

Into the trenches
Few do proudly go
Ash pollutes the snow
Falling like pyrex smoke
You might choke
When violence hits your nose

Deathblows
Thrown by the dead broke
Cross your eyes
And clog your throat
Check your pulse
As an ambulance clears the roads

Would you leave ivory thrones
To reach a people with no hope?

There in the trenches
Christ spent His time
Teaching the poor
Healing the blind
Who are we to stand aghast?
Shrugging our shoulders
Fine wine in antique glass?

When revival comes
Will it move your feet
With Gospel passion
Down the cracking streets?

Could you spare a dime
To prepare a meal
For a drooping reed
With snakebitten heals?

There in the trenches
Good News must flow
Will you remain aloof
Or be the one to boldly go?

On wings of expelled  vapour
did they venture beyond the hangings
of gravity and they ascended to heights
that blended with thoughts of fulfilment.

Wisps were expelled till exhalation
was exhausted, and slowly what arose
descended to it eventual beginnings.
But declining was harder than was imagined.

Pain elevated as the friction of reality swept
over, and where the vapour once filled there
interior now only emptiness did eviscerate the
stable mentality and wished only to ascend again.

*"Beauty of a dream, that is a nightmare of reality,

Morning lights wake me
Evening drives take me
That girl doesn't have a soul
The mechanics of her body
Twisted & droll
But falling for her I can't help
It's a magnetic, atomic kind of bond
So long lonely
You forget what you came here for
But the clouds seem to radiate
With a dreary tune
& the brisk waves seem shaky
Pulled by a silk moon
The seasons change as we do
Warm in the soul
In love with their warmth
Falling out of love & into gloom
& back to feeling the coldest you've ever been

It's never a win win
We're entirely too selfish
But for you,
My dear
I would eviscerate worlds
Cross freezing rivers
Travel the darkest forests
Fall into the core of this planet
Or maybe it won't take that much

& you'll love me
For who I am
Not what I do

when it hit you home.

you’re eyes closed at shutter speeds,
when the heart sinks,
or sank.
and each blink individually,
starts to take a second of your life from me,
frivolously.
and your mind focuses,
but like a broken lens,
you nictate, nictate,
like you’re stuck on repeat.
and you dictate the aftermath,
like you have admitted defeat.
as cynosure slips from your fingertips.
the closure in the locus.
you spoke to me in hindsight,
and you spared me in the moment.
still glowing, albeit, caliginously.
you described the bright lights in defiance,
lying sweetly,
in a conversation, in constellations,
i’ll remember you in full bloom;
in keepsakes;
we wished to the the stars aligned,
shining flowers for you in the nights sky.
whilst you fought for your life, in kind.
high as a kite, twinkle in your eye,
as you guide your life
away.
still in spite,
of your perdition,
the latest addition of you.
when i see you in ruin.
through the body as it mortifies,
and your fortified smile,
tortured denial,
a defiant forcefield,
shatters and eviscerate,
and as you evaporate;
i see your lips crack through dryness,
my queen and highness;
i’ve not seen you laugh for a while.
and as I see time pass,
from you astute,
a calmness in your eyes grew,
and now when you belly laugh,
you gasp for air,
it’s as if,
not much is inside there.
as you stutter and stammer,
judgement impaired,
scared.
and yellow coloured,
tinged skin,
bed ridden
in affliction,
to me,
to you.
as it dawned on me
and then it dawned on you.
when it finally hit you home,
nothing left but skin and bones,
the final petal of a rose,
fell.


**I still miss you.
I miss you still.
I always have,
always will.

Sometimes words are weapons
Add an s or a certain order and
They will cut to the bone,
Eviscerate a  bowel,
Destroy a dream,
End a life,
Break a lovelorn heart

Other times sans s fronted
They caress a weary cheek,
Lift up a tired soul
And reassure a faltered
Dream that its time
Too will come to
Faultless fruition

We speak thousands of words
Every day of our lives
Without thought,
And spoken they come
With added edges and jagged spurs
Of intonation, tone,
Expression

Or with balm for healing,
Warmth for the cold
Respite for the bewildered
Mind and soul
Lifting up repairing all
And making good
On harm

But beware the poem
Most of all! for it
Is a fearsome trap
For the unready author
Who writhes upon the created flow
Struck from their own verse
Read well by another,

For poems tell our truth
Warts and all,
And like singing lay us bare
To critic judge and common herd,
Who hear, absorb
And find us whole and
Nowhere left to hide,

We are forced to face
Reaction,
Reaction to our souls and hearts
Captured upon a pen's point,
Pinned to a board or a page
And read aloud
Where all can see

And what do you hear?
What do you see?
My God you see
The real and naked,,
The one and only,
Me.....

The USA has not been attacked
Since the end of World War Two
So this Department of Defense lie
Is way too easy to see through.
We Invade foreign countries, take away
Their natural resources and then say
“In the name of peace and freedom!”
In no way does that add up to wisdom.

What it is, and we all should recognize,
Is rich politicians deluding the unwise.
In order to fool themselves and their friends
They have to make up stories and pretend.
They have to say things like defending peace
Then go blow up sections of the middle east.
We want their oil and it’s all fine in the end
After all, DC thinks ill of the color of their skin.

George Washington was a very wise man
And one of the Presidents with a decent plan
To see to it that the laws of this country
Lived up to ideas of peace and liberty.
But almost since he stepped down and retired
Somewhere, everywhere, guns are being fired
In the name of Christianity or making people free.
By killing people off? That’s total insanity.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, DC fools
Decided to make the voting public into tools
Of  fear mongering, hate and blathering,
To elevate their own public images, pandering
To the people left stupid by a lazy press
The country was a true political mess,
Because we bought the whole idea they put out
That we were surrounded by enemies without.

DC and their toadies told us about the Red Menace
To replace the Yellow Peril threatening within us
Though how colors were frightening few explained.
DC really wanted a war to fight once again.
Korea was too short and most of us didn’t care
So McCarthy in DC grunted and crapped a scare.
And once again we fell for the whole dog and pony show;
Too many talented people, to keep peace they had to go.

The disgusting story went on until the DC creeps
Came up with a new war and more peace to keep.
The went again to Asia and brought our war machine.
They had generals and soldiers march into to the serene
And peaceful jungle villages and they let the soldiers
Defoliate and eviscerate enemies they made of villagers.
That’s not to say there were no people planning attack.
Of course there were. The wanted their villages back.

So, that didn’t go well, we came back to our country
With our tails between our legs, branded with villainy
And the people back home, sick of war and not bright
Decided to be evil to the men and women that fight,
Follow the orders of those we voted them to deliver.
It made no sense then or now, and really won’t. Never.
But making sense seems to be way too far above
The voting population who say they believe in love.

These are the people that vote to put in crooks
And fools in the name of some words in some book
About a King of Peace and Love they say is their man
And when Sunday is over they immediately began
To lie and cheat on taxes and vote against the weak
The poor, the different, the liberals and the meek.
I often doubt they’re not aware of being manipulated;
After five or so decades, that excuse has become dated.

Because every excuse, since World War Two ended
Has seen us attacking the lands we once defended.
It’s almost like DC, Inc. sees enemies everywhere
And God knows we have plenty of war tools everywhere.
Our number one expense that helps no US citizen
Is for military and their stuff. Let the wars begin again.
We need oil? That guy we put in office in Iraq?
Let’s go over and bomb them to the Stone Age and back.

Well, make the excuse Iraq sent the planes to fly
Into the World Trade Center even though it’s a lie.
Then say it’s because of Weapons of Mass Destruction!
That was a lie, too. But an excellent distraction.
DC and the Vice President directly made mega bucks
And those dark people in Iraq just ran out of luck.
And a half mad stupid President, a truly evil worm,
All that handily justified his second evil term.

War went on until it got stopped by Bush’s successor.
A peaceful black senator, and a learned law professor
Finally quit listening to the commercial lobbyists
And the politicians who went on well-paid trysts
With those who bribe those with political power.,
Finally ignored, and common sense began to flower.
But racism and the ugly Old Southern nasty bigots
Got the greedy people in this country to vote for idiots.

Almost all the good work of the past dozen years
Began to get reversed, one by one, and the tears
Began to flow as human rights and our equality
Began to be thwarted by money grubbing humanity.
The unintelligent in our nation, upset to be nearly broke
Held it against the black man like a particularly ugly joke.
They just handily forgot it was the rich, the GOP
That had ruined things for us in Washington DC.

So, vote the people out that rant on the media
About fixing a nation that was not broke: America
Spend money ousting the same two hundred clowns
That made a mess of this land; took our country down.
And never forget it was they who made the messes
Don’t go out and buy more new cars and dresses
And pay no attention to the thieves behind the curtain.
If you let them run the show again things are certain
To be the way they have been for the past thirty years
Because they will never suffer in DC. Yours will be the tears.

As long as America chooses to live on the fence
Common sense will always be spelled common cents.
Because that is all you and I will ever be left.
Those of us painted as the villains on the left,
We want the words of our forefathers to be true
We are who DC and the GOP want to *****.
If we want the USA to do what our Constitution promises
We must stop listening to the greedy horse’s *****.

Swift and exact
Words so glib
Your blade runs right between my ribs.

Blooded strike
Like lightning arc
You pull the blade and stick my heart.

Agonizing
Pulverizing
You dropped me to my knees.

Eviscerate
Eradicate
Bleed me over my unheard pleas.

Waiting wastes
time on hand
You can't afford to stop or plan.

I read in my mind
Racing are my thoughts.
Am I to finally say goodbye?
For surely, it appears
I have yet again
Lost.

echoplex
once obscurantist
now scrutinised in headlines
i'm beginning to feel ok
chaser after chaser to wash down sour sentiment
eviscerate the taste
turncoat
is there an origin?
split your infinities
shed your non-essential claws
embedded deep
broken umbrellas
my eyes look different
atlas falls in amongst the spectrum
lack of character
efavirenz, whitewater in apex
prophetic undertones
cold diffusables
soda left to evaporate
poured over CMYK
through tabloid idiocy
nonsense on stilts
into wormwoods faded muse
yellow collapse
there is a feeling
living game theory
a thought of paranoia
god send the dream
anechoic
salivate the ebb
neo-conservative laden draped production
phenobarbital
can't stretch for a smile
temporal need
bizarre cognition
i feel sorry for me
suffrage, occam's swollen belly
polish fear with a sum
the way of all flesh
shadowed contents entitled: from a to b
from point to point
you want to shift the position of power
there's no one there in the morning
at the foot of the bed
or in the mirror
believe your own fabrications
dial in doubt, dial out everything
we're exactly where we want to be
moulded in consumption
ivory and elephants
the right place
stark lines
compass to televise
triangulate our complacency
shower heads dripping with aspirin
floating corpse
burning ruins, stretched moans
agony suffice, burned out
stick to the skin
all i see is rebus
face bursts with allusion
ear full of maggots
a better tomorrow is a better today
talcum meditation
underhand rhetoric
you are an idiom to fundamentalist greed
partial differential
ignorant and flabby
you can catch me headfirst over a toilet seat
working for kowloon
red ties
men of lethargy, motivated voices
islet of langerhans, shock therapy
anosmia
niche downfall
an arc structure, waste product
halftone mnemonic
lick up my words
capsule, strict reflux
wretching on disappointment
i feel faded
my skin buzzes
tonguing a molar
push it apart
flashes of light
cramps
vestige of fragility
welcoming boredom with open forceps
i don't recognise myself
sponge fed schism
sleeping pills and ***** bath water
cotton tongued peristalsis
egg shells, nodding and a pint of clotted spit
verbal copulation
sprouting flowers from my dead body
feeling like a frayed knot
desolate compendium
shooting pains in my arms
no foresight
i can't get up
i'm busy
i just won't

‘Bring me the horizon!’
she cried, eyes raging
with a terrible joy.

Bring me the light
of a thousand searing suns
and explode the bliss into my soul!

Let me writhe in the ribald heat
and simmer my flesh
in love complete
for now is all and all is now.

Fell the birds from crimson skies,
facsimile their lullabies.
bring me songs from Heaven’s stage
to shimmer in my gilded cage.

Floss my feet in clouds so sweet
as sugar spun across the sky.
free my dreams from out their seams
and fall into the blinding light.

Surge with me to silver stars;
to glinting worlds that
twist and twirl
and sparkle from afar.

And join me in Elysium;
the Eden of Nirvana
where Love strokes Beauty
and the air purrs with pleasure.

Stay with me forever
and pulse with joy unfound.
but never dip below the clouds,
for monsters wait
upon the ground.



======later======



‘It’s all a lie,’
she murmured,
guarding her cup of winter tea.
‘I’m sinking, and the mist is drinking
everything that’s good in me.’

The colours start to leak,
the world bears its teeth, as
shadows crowd round and
join their hands.

This opioid mist of requiem
hides demons loosed from out their den
I sit and slowly swirl
drowning in the silken shadows
of muttering dark worlds.

It drags me down in furtive heaves
to somewhere I don’t want to see,
but somewhere I know I believe;
with meshing, hungry razor teeth.

It’s a solitude of sorts,
pervading though it seems,
filled with plotting cohorts
laughing deep in silken streams

that leak into a Sea of Grey
housing horror on its tides,
in-bound now, with rotted sails,
cover me and let me hide

from needle-sharp torment
and callow moments put to flame.
I sit here counting down the hours
until I’m born again.

So eviscerate my fragile faith
and leave it for the saints who stay,
awakened to the mystery
of all the mouths could ever say.

The living legend is ****** into a rut of pining for his splendid playwright
She was his everything
A new breed of woman
No societal entourage could compare
No jovial jubilee could top her
Her humongous measure of perplexity
Her grace
Her charm
Her mystery

He now despises himself for this moment of nostalgic weeping
The mucus makes it hard for him to breathe with his deviated septum
He looks for something to alleviate his sniffling
And eviscerate all his emotional anguish
Nasal spray and bourbon
He can breathe but the alcohol only exacerbates the visceral issue
And dampens his already flaccid spirit  

Clouted with the disheartening reminder that it wasn't all her fault
He fumbles with the bottle while retracing the event in his mind

"It was the golden age of bronze metals"
"She was asked to do as she was told"
"A white lie"
"A foul up"
"An accusation"
"An accessory to ******"
"Madcap ad libbed alibis and recounts verbatim"
"She turned on them, they killed her"

The bourbon was gone, his nose was stuffed again
Wheezing, gagging, crying  

What's the word for when a living legend wants to die?

I deliberate
You reiterate
It completely exhilarates
Me.
You eviscerate
My heart
From my chest
Like a secret art.
Before I know it
I'm exposed
Nothing left disclosed,
Nothing left to hide
And then you
Roll away, like the tide
Leaving me ashore
With nothing more
Than an empty
Chest cavity,
An abnormality.

As I stand there
In despair
you drift away
To another land
Where another girl
Will just as easily
Give you her hand,
Without knowing
That she'll never withstand
Your ever rolling tides.
And that she'll never be able
To get rid of the pain that subsides
Once you've stripped her
Down like you did I.

I'd cry
But I don't have a heart
To even really feel this goodbye.

there's a cavern in this cadaver. noise ricochets off hollow walls,
intensifying the immense desire to initiate my demise.
my soul split after the ellipsis tricked the will out of the innocent.
i have little motivation and the voices make my head spin,
leaving me wasted and short-changed at the frontline again.
let me sink to the fourth regiment. take my bayonet-
i have no need for it now, not when my skin sings for silver
and i'm begging for the end.

we won't be saved til we're dead, but corpses never know they're saved.
i'll lay in torment in my grave long after dirt obscures my frame,
but misery to me is commonplace, like my disgrace.
"you can't go to heaven unless you get high"- well, i've tried,
but my withering physique is merely shame with a face.
i asked entrance, and the doorman could not recognize me.
he said, "this place is for souls, not for the embodiment of self-loathing."
he denied me admittance and bid me good riddance, kicked me from the clouds,
and i fell back to living hell, still hollow, without absolution or due pittance.

"what doesn't **** you makes you stronger"- what *******.
they fed those pacifier lines to me so i would stop sobbing and deal with it.
i've learned to keep my countenance blank, to stop the stares and questions.
my carcass dons a steady gaze while inside i howl, pain relentless, ageless, endless.

i'd eviscerate myself a thousand times if it would give me peace,
but i know inside that i'm too entwined with suffering for it to cease.