"eyeless" poems
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
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beyond the brittle towns asleep
beyond the brittle towns asleep
i look where stealing needles of foam
in the last light
thread the creeping shores
as out of dumb strong hands infinite
the ***** deep upon me
in the last light
pours its eyeless miles
the chattering sunset ludicrously
dies,i hear only tidewings
in the last light
twitching at the world
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the world sits on the wing of a dove
being swallowed whole by a fiery goddess
descended from heaven on a chariot of ivy
i am incarcerated by shaking flesh and itching cloth
the road before me is giant and knows no bounds
the graveyard is warm and wet with spirits and dew
and red clouds are born from fire in the dawn
there is an intelligent horse being ridden by a snarling insect
and this man has come to claim our souls
our sunset blood burns boils blisters until a million animals wounded
i'm still alive, transfigure me into a creator
choke up my nostrils with the scent of your ***
invade my lungs with the burn of your god
caress my toungue with the infinite promise
enter my brain from above, and regurgitate your anxiety on me
slimy worms devour a psychadelic tomato laughing
into transendency, an eyeless eel has dissappeared into a pocket
i speak from balconies, from terrible heights, from hastened windowsills
in a million desperate quarrelling cities
this is where i **** up illusion, i give up to despondency
i ring the great iron bell that resounds with corruption, with hatred, with hideous *** and admiration,
i scream and cavort on rooftops alone with a black & blue midnight
covered in electric lights and gunpowder tongues
here comes the disintegration of my mind
disgraced by the eye of the earth and spat into
a realm of salivating light
i am swimming through digested heartbreak and melancholy livers
sickened by madness and homemade bombs and ******
the rainclouds carry a truckload of babies' hearts
and it's raining eyes over the city now
the cry of the mind escapes from waving mouths in impotence
as millions of bacteria invade the brain
may these lines be answered by the bird of the sun
by the worm at my ear
by the sight of my skeleton
by the stench of ***** in the air
by the dead gong shivering through midnight
by the bleeding eye of abandoned dreams
by the prophets in proclamation
by the god of all my sorrows
Nov 30, 2011
Nov 30, 2011 at 9:55 PM UTC
The roadside weeds that clutter my hometown,
tangled skinny stems and yellow flowers.
Sing oh reverence, glory come down
to us, they sing, in daylight’s fading hours.
I cannot stomp them out, I cannot press them
in between the pages of my books.
Flower after flower, stem by stem
grow ugly. I can barely stand to look.
The preacher, he had called the place salvation
when telling us to where the high road led.
But the stars all seem to spell damnation,
and the moon, an eyeless, bloodless head.
Tonight the roadside weeds sing mercy, mercy
come for a homeward soul in need of thee.
May 29, 2012
May 29, 2012 at 1:00 PM UTC
Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
this is who I am. This is my story.
It is only coincidence that I sing it
to you,
but sing, nonetheless, I do. One morning
amidst the restlessness of my top-bunk sheets
I heard a whispering and thought it might be God it was
me. My unconsciousness begging me
for nourishment, silently loudly attacking
my awareness with questions: it asked why
I neglect it. Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
is this, too, why your body vibrates
when your thoughts are feelings? Because you too
have recognized feeling as thought? That that
faculty of wonder you hush about as if a
***** secret of forgotten childhood memory
is something that is as real as
the metaphysical pores of a skin you cannot touch,
but know is not some foreign, distant, effacing
thing, but is thick, is thick, thick as words
creaking like old wood in a library filled
with students who read so much ******** to get into
college but never venture forth for such skin
in the skin of those unconscious voices in the
shelves? Selves: we call them books but they breathe.
The ideas wriggle in your veins like
a worm. They block your blood yet move
your soul. The stillness of your speechlessness
is some movement in itself. So I suspect of you,
pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek.
So I suspect of myself.
I do not understand how else I could have been born
without eyes which we call eyes. I cannot see
why else.
I cannot.
You cannot.
There is light over there in that darkness.
A glimpse of it- a sliver of silver
has shocked you into your paleness. Into my
blackness. It is the same difference. A different
same.
Line break:
A mirror tells me things with my eyeless eyes.
My brownness ***** me into journeys with
tunnels so deep that we call them pupils.
In the distance that I gaze into I find
myself gazing into a distance I gaze into. Fathom
it. Do not. Will not will it will it will not
willed. Touching it will wilt it without touching:
this is the soul you said does not exist.
It is not there. It is.
In Indiana.
Where's that? asks my blood.
In Indiana.
Over there? my finger points out the window.
No. It is.
It is. Not.
Suddenly I smell something and it is myself.
It is not Indiana or freckles or pale-skin.
I ask you where it is.
Suddenly you smell something and it is yourself.
It is not Gaborone or curly-haired or black.
You ask me where I think it is.
What the **** do we know?
Apr 19, 2016
Apr 19, 2016 at 9:04 PM UTC
II
Blue base and pink hues, black lining, framing the face saw once in dreams, a face with a name that began with the letter M. The other painting – a hazy black, red lips, no eyes – is a man’s face. Flying across shadowed, spiralling stairs, I encountered exits blocked by chairs – all these impressionist paintings hanging along the corridor, where a painter was explaining to his students the woman he met in his dream… they all called to me as a dream factory, dream logic – where everything was bound and unburdened, and we were told to identify faces in these coffin paintings. All day we tried matching, mouth stuttering half-formed names, lost faces, amputated body parts, strangers’ fragmented memory. Then the old lady I was working with let out a wail. She bolted, I followed, and there we saw creatures known as man and woman – to the woman on the right, she greeted with the M-lettered name, and to the man on the left she pointed at the eyeless painting, said, stranger, this is you– and they wept together.
Apr 21, 2021
Apr 21, 2021 at 11:29 AM UTC
Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.
At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;
Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some
Eunuch'd, etiolated,
Fungoid sense, as a symbol of
Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor
Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-
Sloped sea waves, or admired how
Warm tints change in a lady's cheek,
None complained he had used words from an alien tongue,
None question'd. It was worse. All would agree 'Of course,'
Came their answer. "We've all felt
Just like that." They were wrong. And he
Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words --
Sold, ***** flung to the dogs -- now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily
Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among
Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,
Dear but dear as a mountain-
Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.
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The moth with newspaper wings sat under the arrow lungs of the eyeless
blood dripped falcon, more whole than the super-glued roman sculpture.
Next door a 50’s con held up church with a roulette table in the kitchen,
and boarded up the massage parlor
downstairs.
The eye of the man was a centrifuge of ducks, mallard and hen, spiraling
outward into evaporated roach-ground
asphalt.
Next door, slits in the picket fence displayed perfectly formed **** & broach,
empty shoes made of feet below, blending
fields.
The marble foundation formed from twine lollipops and fuzzy candy tabs,
ice-etched to the frequency of splintered seashell
angels.
Next door through the forest of knives a spaceship bearing gargoyles peaked
bodies through collages of faces in technicolor sepia
mitosis.
The heiress molted into tiled pieces, her own dog and sunhat caught in blizzard
cuneiform, kaliedescoping again to fractalled inchworms cemented in motion.
Jan 15, 2013
Jan 15, 2013 at 9:55 AM UTC
The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day---
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.
This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by;
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.
This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.
This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.
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Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?
Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.
In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
'Thor is angry; boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!'
But those ladies broke the panes.
When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.
Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear mother.
I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
And I faced my traveling companions.
Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born.
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep.
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The headdress danced in the sun
On the Indian's hollow
And eyeless skull.
It was framed in feathers
Brightly-colored serpents in the
Salty air flames licking at
Dancing and ***** bare feet.
Dark-skinned, tall, high cheekbones
And solemn eyes full of
Wisdom--he surveys the
Badlands, Moses's rigid face
Blank and silent in a
Heatwave desert.
Beyond the teepees and the
Black bonfire smoke and
The buffalo rhythm, the plateau has
Risen, bleached bones
Litter the plains as a constant
Reminder.
May 13, 2014
May 13, 2014 at 2:44 PM UTC
Through darkness, laced in edges of light,
And rain, falling like angels plagued by blight,
Shattering their heavenly bones and wings,
Onto the eyeless dust of their return;
Through paths stranger to the hope of spring,
Where voices of ghosts hang with cries of “Burn!”
And moss mottled trees, like macabre jesters
Dance, limbless, leaves flailing grotesquely
To the secret japes of wind-bourn nesters;
Through corpse-ridden forests of insanity,
To where the rocks dress as the three witches
And chant midst their vainglorious riches
*“All hail, Eremita, bound to the adamah altar,
All hail, Eremita, your blood soma from the mortar,
All hail, Eremita, thou shalt be dead hereafter”...*
Jun 7, 2014
Jun 7, 2014 at 12:28 AM UTC
Death patiently files his nails
And smokes a casual cigarette
Grinning and eyeless
He says so calmly
"Catch you later
Brave little dreamer"
Despite such brittle certainty
Men and women build
Despite such small mortality
Every space is filled
In the midst of death's destruction
Men and women build again
Fear, like a cringing bowel
Exudes an acrid stench
And whimpers and whines
Simpers and cries
"Don't you dare
Don't you ever dare"
Despite this clinging dread
Some will need to dare
Despite the bursting head
Dreams insist on birth
In the midst of our stupidities
Something wondrous strives
By Phil Roberts
May 10, 2017
May 10, 2017 at 12:08 PM UTC
from robin d. gill's fantastic Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!, a compilation of 1,000 Japanese Haiku on Sea Slugs
because sea slug
has no eyes, the poets
write about them
(eyeless especially seaslug's eyes haiku-in often see)
The Turtle's Translation of a Translation
A sea slug's eyes open
only in Haiku. Slugs
are blind in the water.
Mar 29, 2013
Mar 29, 2013 at 12:40 AM UTC
Milestones Toward Oblivion
by Michael R. Burch
A milestone here leans heavily
against a gaunt, golemic tree.
These words are chiseled thereupon:
"One mile and then Oblivion."
Swift larks that once swooped down to feed
on groping slugs, such insects breed
within their radiant flesh and bones ...
they did not heed the milestones.
Another marker lies ahead,
the only tombstone to the dead
whose eyeless sockets read thereon:
"Alas, behold Oblivion."
Once here the sun shone fierce and fair;
now night eternal shrouds the air
while winter, never-ending, moans
and drifts among the milestones.
This road is neither long nor wide . . .
men gleam in death on either side.
Not long ago, they pondered on
milestones toward Oblivion.
Keywords/Tags: oblivion, milestones, markers, tombstones, radiation, fallout, nukes, winter, path, destruction, Armageddon, Apocalypse, nuclear, a-bomb, atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, Manhattan Project, Trump, planet, earth, war, violence, America, environment, holocaust
Apr 8, 2020
Apr 8, 2020 at 2:40 AM UTC
My mind's a map. A mad sea-captain drew it
Under a flowing moon until he knew it;
Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,
And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.
"Here there be tygers.-" "Here we buried Jim.-"
Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim
About their buried idol, drowned so cold
He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.
A country like the dark side of the moon,
A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,
A land of hungry sorcerers.
Your mind?
--Your mind is water through an April night,
A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,
A lavender as fragrant as your words,
A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,
Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth
Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,
Flutters and beats about those lovely things.
You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,
The single voice that raises up the dead
To shake the pride of angels.
I have said.
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Don't sleep
Don't sleep
I begin to
Like you
A little bit more
I shift and sigh
Say your name
Fatigue rolls
Somewhere by
But, alert I
Imagine
So many paintings
To make for you
You mumble
Childishly
Your laughter
Is glittery
I wish
For so little
I wish too
Intensely
Dont wipe me
With a stiffened cloth
Soaked
In turpentine
And a hundred hues
Dont stir me
I might be disturbed
Out of skill
Out of thought
Onto a burlap scene
Grotesque
Picturesque
And so, so true
Don't move
Or I might too
I might too
Become a facet
Among the facets
Of your horrors
I might
Become art
Might become
Beautiful
In that strange
Black way
Of art
Dont sleep
Talk to me
Speak to me
Let us be
Normalities
Let us
Hold
Technicalities
Forget
Sentimentality
In the silly blue painting
Of an eyeless pretty
Smooth and porcelain
Perfectly closed
No night
To mourn into
Dissolve into
To stumble,
To tremble into
Don't sleep
I become too much alone
Shrivel, burnt sienna
I cannot move alone
I become the paintings
That I fear to paint
I become the sombre
Debris of your laughter
Cold, blue
Featureless
A moonlit night
Nothing but red
You don't know
That I like you
In my head
Come back
Come back
Apr 30, 2023
Apr 30, 2023 at 6:10 PM UTC
There is a place, far out there in the darkness
where shades of black are the only companions
there monsters stand bold but moments away
withered, eyeless creatures untouched by sun
never seen, though presence felt in terrors embrace
in this roiling expanse of unseen horror but thought
direction once known is lost, a meaningless farce.
Here then comes a glow, a way leading forth
bringing shape to the formless, stalking void
that fire is you, burning consuming the night
Now with smile and hope, stride into the light.
Dec 9, 2014
Dec 9, 2014 at 5:35 AM UTC
a nacreous tossing around at
the sides, a dappled silver
sunlight if looked one way, an
apocalyptic gloam if another,
exhaled from a seeming
mouth, feeding on what has
already eviscerated an unfelt
***** a predator certainly its
own prey, a heat certainly
poison-breath on a cheek
falling when a meretricious
lover spouts that spurious
hypocorism, and also just a
wavering, iridescent puddle—
cornered, soft as a liquid steel
echo of a futile struggle
rolling around, bouncing off
a wine glass, and a porcelain
table edge, while a listening
head shakes, looks down
despondently, gloom glowing
out the hair, a voice jaded
since birth saying some
thing about differences, or a
helpless slender strap of hope
hanging itself on the way two
other eyes look at it across
checkered watered wings, two
swirling god whorls, two
effulgent galaxies the color of
melting pine bole circling
around in living umber striae,
pulling its gaze, raising it, as if
they, they were blazing truth
cased behind lithophane, and it,
only an aporetic puddle now
of tepid ocher, a mild earth
stone placed in a hand, asked
what is thought of it and the
response: yes, yes of course,
before foreign distance splutters
its face, and it retreats from
its meaning imparted to every
thing (with the vulnerable
precision of a swaying finger
tip) to the baby lanugo of a
delicate floating, through
human rills, of what is horizon
docked, dead, not merely
deciduous—forever jilted with
breath bulging as when beating
a flopping eyeless fish to
half-dead, head tilted up a
throat trying to pry itself
free, trying to live by
streaming snagless, airful,
without spirant sound of going
lost straight from the hands—
then a short chop of fullness
finally expunged and sputtering
like an escaped tuft of
shackled wonder soaring up
the sky in a puff and soul ring.
Mar 27, 2012
Mar 27, 2012 at 7:43 PM UTC
Violets are blue,
Your blood is red,
The window was open,
I’m under your bed.
Jul 1, 2019
Jul 1, 2019 at 9:29 PM UTC
in the end
every warzone looks the same
eyeless broken buildings
personal possessions strewn
across rubble scattered streets
the odd house
against all odds still standing
the sudden shock of a body
the husk of a life
where is the victory
where is the glory
why do men have to break so much
just to say they won
Apr 11, 2023
Apr 11, 2023 at 5:40 PM UTC
slipping away
passages of time
slips away
down through the canyon rock
where the forever makes it yawning gait
and the weight of the fossils
forces down upon the lightless tunnels
where the urchins and sea shells
learned to sing
in their petrified state,
where the smooth stone kiss
where waters were once a rushing estate
and eyeless fish swim
not knowing the difference
of light and dark in the deep lake
echoing fathers, weeping widows
silence endangers the sanity
echoed into a beating soul
forget not the smooth takeaway winds
nor the shoreless wager of nighttime gin
a mammoth cavern performing unspoken
hollowed out by all that is forgotten
Jul 21, 2016
Jul 21, 2016 at 9:48 PM UTC
Your lips bleed
like the scarlet syrup of a
dark passion fondue;
two curly lines of red
peeking from behind
your hallowed veil,
and you,
you lay them upon
my neck,
my very body you hail
as your own.
This then, is like
a red petal falling on
alabaster
or a rose stained in blood
as I pull you closer to me
and together,
we drown in a pool of
crimson wine
you anoint
my lips with.
The taste of you
is like the tip of a sword
dipped in sparkling liquorice;
and our ******* becomes
the hypnotism
my tongue
slickly wrap around,
or perhaps,
the ****** of this
eyeless world.
We’re just like
diamonds sleeping on their
velvet cushions,
or illuminating puppets
showing the way.
Love, may you claim me,
till death do us part.
Jul 21, 2015
Jul 21, 2015 at 9:36 AM UTC
the candy cane sign
is gray with frost
its spiraled dance
stopped years before
the old man died
he, the emperor of hair,
meant to get it repaired
like all good intentions
and the clipped hair
that got swept away
day by day,
hour by hour,
minute by
m o m e n t o u s
m o n o t o n o u s
minute
the cutting,
the sweeping
punctuated by
the clang of the register
the hardy laugh at a racial joke
the passing of a borrowed smoke
and the buzzing silences
in between
when I would watch and wonder
what spell he was under
in his royal white regalia
chopping and chatting away
(at eyeless and earless heads I thought)
until I would sit in his chair
and escape the gulag of my life
with his ponderous questions
about
feather light skies
heavyweight jabbing
the “old lady gabbing”
the engine
in my “shrimp nip” car
and how very far
I would go
when I rose from his
leather and chrome throne
and once again be on my own
with hair a bit shorter
and life a bit neater
for a minuscule dot in time
I would not even remember
when I thought of his implacable place
in the cold past
Jan 21, 2013
Jan 21, 2013 at 7:50 PM UTC