Ground smolders and smokes

Luminescent men, humps at the front

**** and poke

The air acrid, the smell of burning stone

On a wall three boys

Gaze, eyes wide, mouths

Marleyesque, dropping

Bewitched as the florescent men

Smooth and calm the steaming earth

Spraying water from a can

To quench its thirst

The seething, black

And exhausted ground

Murmurs in sick response

To its own fragmented curse

A yellow dragon near by

Belches black blood

Oozing from its innards

Through Gothic gargoyle mouth

The lime coloured men shovel

This toxic *****, smear it

Across the gasping earth

That lies, ripped like a jagged

Wound on a dying man

The lime colored men

Mount the yellow dragon

Speed off, leaving

The scorched ground

Burning and hissing,

With sulphurous smoke

A million sizzling angry snakes

The three boys run away in freight

Dropping playthings as they fumble

And tumble in their horrified flight

The black earth cries, bubbles

And consumes their toys

Passes sentence

Makes them L'Enfant Commune

The lost boys

Then there is a quiver

A tedious tremble, a treble;

That played like stretched

Elastic flicked with

Forefinger and thumb

Making the heart numb

Extracting false confessions

A stench of putrid untruth

*** charades of delicate

Ravaged faced youth

A drole de ménage

Slave to the hunger

Of the unknown demand

The French grooming

Of horses, that may charm

The curious but leaves curiosity

Still smouldering in the

Hidden depths of the

Universal mind

Sanumbolists in the

Fullness of a dream of

Ineffable torture consume need

The boys cry out, for the

Earth has stolen a liars tongue

Branded them abominable

With decaying enormities

Detestable, enamelled eyes

Lurk and peer from

Behind gauzed curtains

A corpse of understanding

That inspects the invisible

Images of imbeciles

Parchments dripping in powdered

Crystalline drops smear the pavements

The boys wave their arms

But no-one sees them

There is the rise and fall of cryptic waves

That ebb and flow scorching

A shore of silent sorrows

Lapping feverously at the

Arc of a whirlpool

Whose decreasing concentric

Circles **** the boys down

Into an eternity of hot tears

Leaves them without parents

Gives their brothers and sisters

Into a slavery of barbarous belief

A ferocious language

Banning the boys from all beaches

Provides tyrannical pilgrimages

To black robbed priests

Possessors' of serpents' hearts

The yellow dragon returns

Lemon coloured men spill

From its foaming mouth

The boys hide behind

Dead rose bushes

Ah, but their tenebrous

Trembles creak in the

Blotched and bloodied

Butchers sawdust

A fabulous elegance cradles them

Making the smoking dragon angry

It spews molten bile taken

From the bloated stomachs

Of white beasts

The luminosity of the

Lemon coloured men

Increases to blindness

They wave tattered antediluvian

Bark and scream from

Their dark, deceitful, anchored armchairs

From railed and spiked alters

Spitting bitterest gall

The lemon coloured men

Butcher the fabulous elegance

Leaving the boys naked

Prey to the perfections of

Puerile generosities

That vows to extinguish

Their human desire

Vacant eyes with

Nauseating sight strut

A cruel distortion

Terrifying voices offer

Demonic destruction

The boys weep, but

no-one hears them

A violent paradise

Of popular poses tries,

But fails to caress them

The dragon burns the boys

But no-one smells them

Their terror turns to molten flesh

The lemon coloured men

Spread it over the earth

The beast' heart beats

Joyfully in its bulbous belly

Sacred men smile while

Pitiless priests provide

A comedy

The boys become a hallow

Antique night their left

Legs held up for all

To see

Delirium devours the minds

Of a subjugated people

The deadly hissing of the earth

Like a silken spectre rises

Making scintillating shudders

Through the spiked splinters

Of time

Intelligence is reduced

To the rubble of religious

Intolerance

Lime, yellow, lemon drips

Heated plastic from false eyes

There are cries, sights and sounds

But no-one hears, sees or speaks

No real people are left

Similar boys watch from a wall

Huddle together and weep

I was 10
when I first started to
pray for the cabinet to swallow me whole.
To splinch my human body into something a deity won't pass up unworthy
to enter a magical realm where
I can meet a godly lion and a warmer sun.
I was 10
and, even then,
I wanted to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

I was 12
when I first started
looking out the window,
waiting for a temperate owl on a tropical sky. I twirled the wood chips I tore off my mother's dresser
with the pink lipstick stains, and thought to myself,
my god, my god, what a life I am destined to live.
I was 12,
and even then,
I wanted to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

I was 16
when I first started
distancing myself from the wardrobe,
from the wooden dresser,
from the creaks of the floorboard,
from innocence.

I flicked the ash off my 20th cigarette to the tear-soaked dishcloth I gauzed on my wrist to keep me from tracing the intersecting lines my father etched on the living room floor after a night of bowling and tears and tears and sadness.

I thought to myself, my god,
my god, my god,
what life am I destined to leave?

I am 20.  
I want to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

i always knew i would never be
"girlfriend material"

maybe the gods forgot to cut me carefully from the same cloth they doted out to everybody else

a thicker and more claustrophobic material

one that overheats and suffocates you

my mouth is a forest fire that ignites at the first sight of thunder ahead

other people use their words to heal and comfort their significant other while i'd always had a natural disposition of wielding my tongue as a freshly sharpened knife

i wanted to learn

i wanted to teach myself that in order to be in a relationship you have to treat the hardships like delicately gauzed wounds

changing them out every few hours and applying ointments to soothe and mend the broken flesh

but i don't know if it's because of my mother
who was never very nurturing
taking emotional withdrawals from me throughout my entire childhood

teaching me to cultivate my isolation and find comfort in my loneliness

i'd see the signs of her packing up her bags and departing from a mile away and the only survival method i knew was to let her go before she let me go, again
and again
and again
and again

i tried to mend myself for you
to be less broken down for you

i promised myself i'd be healthier and fight my depression like a true viking at battle

i knew i was never girlfriend material

i don't have the patience or understanding to learn how to nurture wounds

my natural instinct has always been to throw salt in them

to slit my throat and slit my throat and slit my throat until i bled out all of you entirely

it's not that i never knew how to love
but that i never knew how to love properly

caring too much and showing too little
displaying my fear of losing you with an anger that destroys everything in my path

instead of affection and vulnerability

my lovers never know if i love them
i display my feelings  in watered down sentiments that take shape in the way i allow my body to mold into theirs under bedsheets


the love i carry though, suffocates me
it drowns my internal organs
and floods the entirety of my body
leaving me speechless and incapable of articulating how i feel or why i feel the way that i do

in turn i appear cold to the touch
and that is how i knew i was never girlfriend material

i want to lay down on train tracks and sacrifice my body
again
and
again
until i get it right
but i fear it only leaves me in poorer condition than the last

i'm sorry i don't know how to love you properly
i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry

you see, i'm just not "girlfriend material"

there is a straightjacket noose man
                   gauzed inside my chest.
breathing with inside fever and moving
around the edges with a mumble and
a shuffle he crowds the walls
                      with blue light.

the tapes fuzz and hiss when
his hands raise up to the glass
           the security operator is crying
            into his wrinkled shirt collar
and the wind whips itself
to a frenzy, the tapes fuzz and hiss
when his mouth opens up and
crawls a gasp straight to
the shout the shout rises like
sharp pockets of steam

            and the director is shaking so hard
            the pens on his desk chorus like
a thin drum choir, the desk is too hot
to touch, the noose man slips
      to strands then to particle
           then to simple sugars and
                                    energy like light
right through the floor and the ceiling
                                     and we are live
so live.

the glass once slow flowing moves faster
and sand is everywhere and
his eyes snap and chip into the
locks and the tape.
           he rages in the deep the
           lightbulb left, in the dark desert,
                                            the red dust.

he lights like sparks and rises again
       until my every muscle trembles
and the mothers chatter and my
teeth chatter and the director shakes
and the neurons shake and operate
                                  like telegraphs.

(outside, I am a clenched fist.
a tired pillow,
the shadow under an open hand
and a closed eye.)

inside there is a crack and a moment
of confusion so brief as the smoke
clears and the neck has broken
on the noose man,
cut open by the speed of
       his own sharp snaps.

all my past
      imposes on my breath today

i enter a grand mosaic public building
        and on goes my medical face mask
i join the back of the queue with my documents in one hand
            and my numbered butcher ticket
                          in the other
i admire the mosaics
               a jarring tide of art against the bureaucratic purpose
                     of these rooms
gauzed in with own product exhaust
       all my past  is attending    
exhumed
  patted  into my breath
    baiting remembrance with unsubtle notes
for example :
   integrated spittings of 'drum' tobacco (i quit a decade ago)
horning catches of cologne every boy used as a teen
seasonal scents  unweaned from deep in my system
(some reigned in from the different countries
                                                    i lived in or visited)
then i am frisked back to infancy   with breast milk and rusks
it's all there    a basking flippancy
all there in musk about my face
  one fragrance after another

it's an honest relief
     to host an alternative to my 'old man' breath
           but odd and concerning
something of the brain ?

theres dark spaces between my bones
that she has not crept on and
there are soft spots i have not spoken of
kept wrapped and gauzed
and waited when she would
hold the kiss she knew where to plant
there are places that are lonely
inside my head that she
cannot fill, for a heart like
mine could hide away
the loveliest lover and the
faintest lies.
theres no heart beat
loudest enough in this dark forest
for a lover to hear the sound”
— there’s no heart beat loud enough

he just knew
when he saw her with her
porcelain skin
he bet her heart
would crack
because it too
was made of porcelain

he touched her hands
they were ice cold
he had gauzed them with the
thickest cotton he could find

he promised her that
he would never let her go
even though she cried
"let me go"

he  accidently fiddled
and little by little
he had let her go

he did this
not because of lack of love
because he had been a man of love
not a man of words

his actions told more.

he had been born of
with weak fingers
but yet had a strong heart
and couldn't let her go

so then when he saw the
girl with the pretty porcelain skin
he promised to never let go

(b.d.s.)

Our scars show the wars
Past tears & growth
Birth, trauma the healing over
The telltale signs
of living for better or worse
Reminders of pain, loss
Gain
What has been here &
now gone
Choices we made
Toxic spills
cleaning up
The calcification stone rub of our sentence & prison years
, Falling down
Falling up
the ****** **** gauzed over
Second skins

Words harming me and mine

bleeding on the inside

cuts tear scars sear
the burning of rhyme
chaos in mind
Faded welts from forgotten paths
but not forgotten for etched in flesh
Rivlets bumps holes
puckered scars
aberrations in our universe
The pink red welts
The wriggle worms

mind slashes time
our years our fears

Our scars & battles
Survive these days
our ways
past memories
ripping apart the darkness
Letting in the light
Green glow of heart
Glow of hope
The truest carefree smile
Full breath of life
No holding back relax

Our scars only signs
Our miracles of flesh and light
Revenants left behind
Momentos
Memories
Souveniers from the roads we traveled

I wish to store my scars Away in jars
I don’t mind the reminders

but please no remembering today.

twined,
grey & silver sing along
the edges of consciousness,
bolstering themselves
in the still

life of subtle breathing, the ear,
caught by midnight’s velvet

blue, drinking muted honey
dark’s elixir, a blanketed embrace

technicolor mind dance, coupled
with the gauzed feet of presence

these are Nox’s symphony of arms
wrapping awareness inside her
primordial soup

Twin eyes to those hours we were apart,
double standards of monetary values; the
monitoring funds to buy out your heart, in
preparation for the view of love to come

It fills my feet with a blesséd relief; walks
of faith with tears for the damp streets—
a tongue in dormancy, doesn’t have much
good for itself to say; desperately fighting
back the great sickness of life— having to
be so patient with this world

Hanging on the ledge, eyes gauzed with silver
mist, to try and seek out a golden approval of
those gone too soon to the brilliant sky, where
the air floats above a turquoise-like dome
In a time that is of mirrored jade; of those
waiting to be heard, and those who dreamt of
a better life far ahead