"gutting" poems
Faking Bad
In anticipation of my
Evaluation to be declared
Non Compos Mentos
I slept under a bridge
For three days
"Getting into character,"
But on the morning of
My intake interview
My hair fell perfectly,
I mean I looked like
A ******* rock star.
College girls on the bus
Were giving me their
Numbers and my skin,
Which I'd purposely sunburnt
And caked in the finest filth,
Glowed like an Australian
Chippendale dancer named Weegie
And even the female Assisstant D.A.
Who had busted me for vagrancy
Waved her ******* from
The third story building
Of the Courthouse.
No matter how much I
Tried to speak gibberish
Poetry and philosophical
Tracts spewed from my mouth.
Shuffling past the park
I beat eight
Grand Masters
At chess on move 1
Inadvertently I solved
The Phi Epsilom Theorem
By kicking stones
Into an algorythym.
When I arrived they didn't
Make me wait at all.
My caseworker giggled like
A schoolgirl while I told her
Each day was like an endless shift
In a Chinese fish- gutting
Sweatshop and every one of my fellow
Employees was motivationalist
Richard Simmons.
She ungirdled her enormous
**** and as they spilled
Like fishguts onto the desk
She began to howl
**** me, **** me, oh ****
Me right here in
Front of the open window
On State Street as everyone
Watches me ******* the strongest,
Healthiest, smartest, most popular,
Well-adjusted man in the world.
The rest of the examination was
Also a success.
But as I left the Mental HealthCenter
feeling marvelous
I accidentally bumped
An old woman with the door:
"Watch out you manic-depressive
Schizoid with Socially Avoidant
Features klutz."
-Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 5:05 PM UTC
The comely *****
a comely ***** o' twenty three, from yonder village banburee,
alight her sight on poor auld me, a poorly man wi' one bad knee,
she buxom be enough fer three, her legs be thick as big oak tree,
but contrary to crippled me, she sprightly be wi' two good knee.
as I took flight on that fateful night from rutting comely *****
I felt a pain, a twist, a strain, and a gutting Rumley Wrench!
yon knee was spent, wi’ geat lament, she's upon me in a jiffy
she made it clear, she said, “m’dear I want yer little ******
now twenty three ‘tis not in years, but sire, tis stones in weight,
and 'er on me wi one good knee, be too dire to contemplate,
but to my surprise, she got a rise outa my little wrinkled pecker,
wi’ her big thighs and **** the size o’ a bleedin double decker!!
May 8, 2010
May 8, 2010 at 8:13 AM UTC
This terribleness. The blur of traffic lights and puddles paints Los Angeles on my face at night. It's so hard to know who will doze in my blind spots. Sunflower seeds and ******* lining the carpet. I sat on the front porch for five hours gutting the wolves from my appendices. Usually the headaches go away with the squashing of the lights. Fluorescents are the worst, halogens second, and 60-watt 120-volt light bulb the bane of my existence. I look at my phone but I cannot summon a quirky 120 character quip. I need excedrin but all I have to grape flavored children's aspirin. I should have asked for the water. How many unfinished glasses of water have I left around this world?
Maybe Bruce and I will squash after work. I can hear his weekly catalog of two night stands with those married transient women who drive from Santa B. I hate golf, I could have made carried a career in this resentment. Maybe rolling down the window will alleviate some of this pressure. Maybe it's barometric pressure, The Baby is here in time to drag the houses out to sea. It feels like Michelangelo is carving The David in my head and it's the chiseling I've never wanted. It's Tuesday and the drugs were horrible. They killed five of them today. We wrapped their heads in blankets from the Thrifty, and had to have the interns find clothes that would fit for the Christian caskets. Two days until Giving Thanks Day.
I am wrapped in copper and stuck in amber. I am acquitted by nonsense and stipulation, sick with nausea and pushing my forehead into the steering wheel. This is all terrible. The lying I've never told myself. The people that don't even know it's lying. Her and I always seem to escape with our happiness and pleasure in tow. The odds are slim, but our clothes have never fit too tightly.
Nov 25, 2014
Nov 25, 2014 at 2:54 AM UTC
He is known as The Leader of Men.
His combat skills and his undisputed valor are unparalleled.
The cryptic tattoos of his body are the gospel of neighboring regions.
The utter of his name sends shockwaves of fear and trepidation across the land.
Biding idle time by sharpening his spears, swords, daggers.
Gutting, severing, and beheading those opposing his path and will.
The elders say he is the son of Achilles.
Yet at the twilight of every night of battle,
He lies at his bedside.
Alone.
He never talks, he never sleeps.
Just gazes upon the blood spilled upon his hands.
He weeps.
Jul 31, 2011
Jul 31, 2011 at 6:56 PM UTC
My name is stolen like a Spaniard
Inquisition,
My heritage barely a patch of fog,
What is the truth of myself unwritten?
" Your name is....You shall be called"
My father once said,
But I sign this name at the end of no poem,
Are you sure this is my name?
Have you navigated the flows
Of lava in my bloodstreams,
My geographical mind that beckons
A deep bitter valley,
Dark beautiful mountains that have
Reclaimed by nature what my people
Claimed her?
Can you see my subterranean pyramids,
My great moist jungles,
Gutting out advanced mathematical models,
Bleeding precise positions of stars,
I can cry the Winter Solstice,
Oh my proud heart pounds
Through my chest with dreams of then,
When the Coyote was sacred and the
Nature of all things was balanced
Even in the darkest days.
Am I Gonzales from the old Spaniard name?
Does my brown skin and hairless
Arms not cry for the Aztec of my ancient
Fathers?
The root of my root,
The flesh of my flesh,
The veiny branches of a family tree
Where wild flowers grow in
The words of the Aztec bark,
Bleeding its sap through me,
Is this Spaniard to you?
(I know the difference)
Let me ask my blood:
Do you not see the fire in my eyes?
Don't you see the fire raining tears
Of embers onto paper,
Every word a burnt offering?
Maybe one does not know of my
Great grandfather in the valley
Of Mixcoatl, there he lived as the last
Nocturne, his great scar along his back,
The last of a warrior
Where he died among the stars of his fathers,
The scar from a knife, a knife that
Stole his true name!
Has Olin and Ehecatl taken it
With a breath of wind?
I will take the Sun Stone with you Octavio!
Take me home.....
And I can see it!
The noble people forgotten
As time forgets all,
My voice of the Warrior grateful
And speaking like a shiny tip of
Spear piercing the night wolf!
I am no longer a riddle in the water,
But a pure flow of immenseness,
A profound respected beast,
I feel the purity of ancient things,
I dissolve into memory's ink,
My combatant blood boils,
The land flames of my fire,
The people of the Sun!
My ancestral blood with calloused feet,
My ancient jungles,
Tamers of beasts,
Oh the Aztec Dream,
Yes, I am what my blood says I am,
What's in a name?
The identity misidentified.
Feb 23, 2016
Feb 23, 2016 at 11:22 AM UTC
I can’t write with all this rage
The knife I thought I put away
That slicing dicing silver blade
Always thrusting inwards
Always gutting my innards
Betrayal and deceit turn upon
The victim become his own a-bomb
Wasted red-eyed monster
And those who committed the crime
Walk away scott free without paying
Leaving me to do my own time
A prisoner of my own angry mind
Nov 26, 2014
Nov 26, 2014 at 9:53 AM UTC
when he was 84, he rarely recalled
the Great War, though he left a finger somewhere
in French soil, and on deep sleep nights,
few and far between, it would call him
a spectral image of gas dead faces
drifting through like sallow clouds
in the charcoal sky
his nephew was the only one left
to fish these green waters, to court the steady
trout that he too saw in his dreams--all the others,
even his own sons, marching in the concrete squares
of the cities, visiting now and then like peddlers
hawking wares he could not understand...
soccer games and mutual funds
gourmet feasts at eateries
with cryptic names
the lake was still the same
the loons chatting, the waves lapping
but without his Helen, the fish he caught
were usually granted reprieve, saved from
his sharp gutting blade, her sizzling skillet,
and without her beside him under her ancient quilts,
the nights were not longer, for grief, he knew,
did not stretch time, but only
made its circle smaller
was a sun sated Saturday
when the nephew had honey do's as good excuses
and the old man was left alone, sitting by a black rotary phone,
waiting for one of his old nine digits to dial the new nine and two ones,
it is what they all would have expected, a cry for help, a long mute ambulance ride, them seeing him helpless with hoses and wires, delaying the funeral pyres, as was the custom in this post teen century
instead, though he felt the anvil on his chest,
and sweat drenched his JC Penney work shirt,
he moved not his feeble fingers to the phone, but his fated feet
to the lake, once only a long a hop from the porch, now a mammoth journey, ten, twelve Sisyphus steps downhill--when he reached the waters edge, the fowl called him casually, their slow song on the currents,
and he sat in the fresh grass, watching the painted blue sky
he saw the fins of those he had set free, hoping
that would count for something
when he curled in fetal repose,
and closed his eyes
by this lonely lake
Mar 5, 2015
Mar 5, 2015 at 10:31 PM UTC
And then it got worse
no pens would work
I couldn't escape into verse
nothing rhymed without reason
I drank and became hopeful
but there were goofballs in the soup
and my hope began to droop
A hissing hissed
and I felt I couldn't die
not ever or forever
that hell emerged slowly
gutting my army of pawns
Strangers were disappointed in me
I paid the homeless for company
and tried desperately to warm my hands
over a garbage can of dying rage
Aug 10, 2012
Aug 10, 2012 at 3:36 AM UTC
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
We see the youngens, they little bait,
but once we hooked them,they'll be
piranha's in our tank, stripping the
dignity from out of your
voice in 20 seconds flat.
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
We strung up your boys, gasping for air.
But once we got our hooks on you
were gutting you easy.
But not before we get what we need from
your pleads.
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
Look little fish you in a tank of sharks,
we grin our grills gravestones of what you
see last before your dispatched.
But don't you worry there are plenty to keep
you company down there, you ain't the first
and you ain't going to be the last.
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
We got nicknamed the fisherman, we sail into
your town catching what ever we want.
We don't scrap the sea floor hoping
for a catch. We fish for the real deal.
Disillusioned of the fish bowl they swimming in.
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
Making it even easier to catch, to turn them from
neighbourhood trash to one of our sharks.
showing other that once we got you hooked,
the only way you leaving is dead floating at the
bottom of the tank.
We coming to your postcode.
We got your crew like you were an
easy catch, cos once we got our
hooks in your postcode we ain't
letting go, fact.
Feb 25, 2020
Feb 25, 2020 at 6:23 PM UTC
Departures and Arrivals.
The dust hasn't yet settled on the torn up trail behind me.
Particles still linger in my hair, my teeth and in the air
around me like they own me.
I wonder, even though it seems like I've dearly departed, if it
will ever settle and I don't necessarily expect it to because
maybe it has to sock it to me
so no sweet amnesia can shew away the memories of what it was
that got me here to this place of growing respect for all the
potholes and all the unpaved roads.
Driving in the dark tree monsters slide bye one after the other,
their silent dialogue giving me the shivers like so many other
things in the world do,
cold sweat running down my face as the car rattles and the
music stops and there's only the sound of dripping rain. Tears,
like rain aren't separate from sweat.
They're constanly recycling and bleeding into one another like
night bleeds into day. I get that and I even love that because where
does hardship go if not to tears?
Stuffing grief into the cracks of the bodymind is a recipe for sick. I get
that too. People may tell ya to take a pill, have a swig, do anything to
bully your discomfort away but you sense
and you know that you sense and only you can sense what it is you
have to do. So you keep on going because what has drinking the
sweet numbing Koolaide ever done for ya anyway?
And it's a relief to come out of the comatose to watch the rose-gold
sunrise coming up over your landscape as your gears shift on the
broken hill of this awakening;
laser sharp beams of light gutting the nonsense out of ya, your feet
touching down onto solid ground and you feeling shaky but all
aglow in your skin
and this departure is telling every cell in your body that you have arrived.
There will be other departures and other arrivals, other days and other
nights but for now,
in this moment you have arrived and you don't give a **** about and
you're almost grateful for the dust and the particles and the freaky
and the the not so freaky fallout hovering over ya like a halo
1/2020
Aug 25, 2022
Aug 25, 2022 at 10:00 AM UTC
fingers seeking
release
gutting desperately
only finding
emptiness
the ghost of someone elses hands
the memory of love
pain swells forward
turned off
Jan 11, 2018
Jan 11, 2018 at 1:38 AM UTC
I am soft-hearted,
And Sapphic.
But she is not a human girl
Anymore.
Every time I lay her to rest,
She rises
Like a phoenix.
Or a zombie.
She is soft-bodied.
Empty-headed.
Empty-hearted.
She is rotten to me.
All memory of her,
Warm woman,
Is gone now.
Her body is a dead thing.
A shell, only good for gutting.
My heart is spilling.
My insides are gooey.
They slip between other girl's hands-
Repulsive.
Hazardous.
A lost cause.
My heart is a terminal case.
Until it's replaced,
I am all robot.
Hard-bodied.
Hard-headed.
Empty-hearted.
Every girl
Who gives me the kiss-of-life
Is cursed.
I search for a shell
To put my dead into.
But she is in cahoots
With the rotted.
All I want
Is a soft-hearted girl
To lay with.
To lay me down
To rest.
To love to death.
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 at 1:58 PM UTC
♦ Become a friend
♦ Learn her secrets
♦ Swallow her demons by choice
♦ Tell her she is wanted always in all ways
♦ Choose time shared over all else
♦ Pick weakness out of need
♦ Push hard while showing kindness
♦ Sincerity and pain
♦ Wanting all, yet giving nothing
♦ Prove dependability
♦ Turn fear into reality
♦ Use her heart against her, gutting her invisible
And with the final lie that defines a gender
"I want you to always be here"
Turns into a silent, wordless exit
Mar 11, 2014
Mar 11, 2014 at 4:27 PM UTC
In midday I watched the children play
on the west side of town
outside my classroom window.
I thought how bright the paper is inside
with blues and limes and how proud
the colors stand within the skin to be
a pioneer for the small and tender.
With the last of the spiders wiped
with pencil textiles I could hear
these tiny howls, a gathering of five boys
throwing around a football remaining invisible
behind thumb greased glass.
Surely children’s beady-eyes bright in hopes
for resulted gutting knees and grass filled mouths
is a life lesson of it’s own.
But, outside is a war and I am watching
against a patchy globe rondure the blur
of a boy beaten down around the ball;
the white lace shinning off
a sunlit fire pit of loss.
It was like watching nerves of growth
as an oceans current; the ripples
carrying them along onto an islands sand.
The red shirted boy holding onto himself,
clenching for breathe while the others like flies
when surrounding the pig; hovering over meat
raw and stiff.
Nov 30, 2012
Nov 30, 2012 at 1:36 AM UTC
from the bank
I see the ghost of a pier
old posts standing solitaire
a ramp rotted, long gone
moored to one stubborn beam,
a bass boat, tethered to time, rocking
with the whims of the waters
fickle, but steady
storms upriver may hasten
the current, bloat the stream
though the flow never ends,
lapping against the hull
hiding inside are more ghosts:
phantom footfalls of fishermen,
odors as old as Eden, sounds
which once made songs
by those who cranked the motor,
manned the rudder and cast the lines
into the depths, seeking a tug--a pull
that meant dinner, a small success
a simple surrender of one species
to another, from beneath the surface
into the sun, a sublime suffocation,
then stillness before the gutting
many a day ended this way
the boat buoyed again to the dock
bellies then filled from the sacrifice,
the waters licking long the wood
Mar 28, 2017
Mar 28, 2017 at 9:14 PM UTC
The crippled bull has yet to live Another Day
It proudly ambles on Year to Year
Its discordant song
Triumphant
Is an iron sword that clefts, rips apart The Age
Four hundred and thirty-two thousand
Times over and over
Gutting the
Detested coward and honored brave alike
‘Tis the stench of war and of hot oil
Quickly seeping o’er the
Horizon
With the armies aflame and howling for battle
Crimson red bloodlust and scarlet wrath
‘Tis the jewels that adorn
The tyrant’s
Crown, gleaming and fiery with authority
‘Tis the wedding bed of the wretch’d *****
Defil’d, soil’d, forsook
No man can
Deny the captivating, luxurious tune
O mighty bull, your song may last from
age to age, and you may
Hobble on
your single leg
Bellowing
and roaring victory
and dominion o’er the nations
But even you must fall down, bow, and come to rest
At
the feet of
A humble
Lamb.
Feb 17, 2015
Feb 17, 2015 at 4:22 PM UTC
Who do you think you are,
stealing my heart like that,
wringing it dry,
bleeding all my veins,
gutting me like you did!?
You feel so proud,
so smug,
like you’re the greatest.
Me too, believing in karma!
It may not be instant,
but sooner or later,
it’s going to get you.
So enjoy the basking,
you still have time,
before it gets dark.
Jan 10, 2014
Jan 10, 2014 at 2:32 PM UTC
You are such a nothing
a blank canvas
an etching
i squeezed onto my fantasy shelves
gutting the plans
to posses your Rorschach
ethereal squalor of meaning
and threw the world's paint
on top of you
absent,
transparent draw cloth
translucent and opaque at once
femme fatale, bejeweled betokened
breath
and plaything
i want to whack
a mole
Self-righteous being
Feb 10, 2012
Feb 10, 2012 at 3:19 PM UTC
We wrote our names on the beach in animal bones
as a vivisection, on our love.
there, she’s whispering into shells
into their Fibonaccian, trumpeted, dresses
and full-cheeked into a razor clam flute.
I, too, gave my blood to grease our domestica
and hung names on stars over the nighttime sea
always accompanied as I were
with the shark-eye, death, of her looks.
We dressed up the walls of home in black and pinstripe,
filled the place up with lit and lightless places,
Shadowboxed, shadowfucked, and silently argued.
Spent hours inside, laying floorboards
and then laying on them
to stare at the sodium lights
and discuss the inkblots on our eyes.
We vivisected our lives,
and splashed it on the walls
and carved it into the carpets.
We set alight to christmas trees
when the kids were sleeping upstairs.
We dressed in each-other’s reddening horror
and answered the door.
Valentines day was full of bone bouquets,
the gripper rods grew through the carpet
so on them we danced.
I prayed for the first time in the first year
and every one hit me subesquently
like I was its anvil.
I should have gone to war.
Because it makes forever shorter
things can only happen right now.
I watched everything in our domestica,
like when the static moved off the television
and played on the window
gutting me of my escape.
The smiles hung on our faces like lupus,
We had people round,
we cooked and coughed and choked
And their faces peeked round from the doorframe
and laughed.
The domestica lives
only to be a bit of fun,
but in the very same span of time
that decided to **** the birds on my windowsill
and my children’s love for me
and my dexterity.
We’ve happened to the whole world too
I promise you, my love,
my little hospice fire,
my flat tire at night at nowhere,
the lie you recognise means it’s over,
A field of a thousand three-leaved clovers,
the brightest night when you’re hiding,
your heart attack on holiday,
your bloodstained bed sheet
And sleep, whilst outside
the sleet and snow makes every emergency
harder to get to, and still the morning
much more beautiful.
I, you, we happened.
Jan 2, 2016
Jan 2, 2016 at 12:02 PM UTC
i'm 7 1/2 inches old. 8 by you.left. a film on me
like melatonin.leaking outside of it.vocaloid choaking. kawaii grunge in the
waterlogged
meniscus.my genocide- your ears.ihate the way it ran
down the wall then. better.if i crouch inside your cradleface18+ years
ago. like an inflammation. you qualify for
recursion_
like the newer- more appealing nightterrors.we escape certain
allegories. by gutting them. filigree-
whipped outside.to punish the exhibitionist inside: your lanky breathing.i am tired of borrowing your guilt i must be good.you
think.i break my wrist.
we.
anyways,.
Feb 17, 2016
Feb 17, 2016 at 2:12 AM UTC
Universal unction
A beatific box
Friction in the function
A tutorial. A talk.
We winnowing the worship
We wiser for to seek
Here harrowing through
Hardship
We winkle out the "weak".
How holy is the hilltop
Which cannot help at all
How horrible the House of Pride
Which cannot help but FALL.
Please pray for persecution
Let them not stay their hand
GOD BLESS the repercussions!
The ground on which to stand.
I beg that I won't barter
Without nor yet within
I pray that I won't falter
I'll stand against the sin.
For the Church as it emerges
From underneath the waves
Surfeit in the surges
Gamboling in her grave
Wreaks havoc on true holiness
Divides doctrine "uncouth"
Gutting out the Bible
Laying waste the TRUTH!
The "Universal Union"
"All for one, and one for all"
"All roads lead to Rome"
How the mighty fall!
There are, in truth, just 2 roads
At the tolling of the bell.
The narrow to eternal life...
... *and the broad road straight to
HELL.*
SøułSurvivør
(C) 10/31/2017
Oct 31, 2017
Oct 31, 2017 at 5:16 AM UTC
To the average working stiff
the mouth feel of Saturday
always popped and fizzed
a day to get on with the business
of being
without being defined by your business
(shout out to all in retail and shift work
your heartache is saved for other verse)
This Saturday has come
with revised terms and conditions
that seem to have rather stunted
the former purpose
like a PC revision
gutting all the cheeky dirt
for contemporary sensibilities
Fine, but understand
that from behind closed doors
a million folk are figuring
how to **** about in a myriad
of new ways
Ye can take our pubs,
but ye cannae take
our shenanigans!
Mar 28, 2020
Mar 28, 2020 at 8:55 AM UTC
I imagine a hook
entering my
side
an eye
senses warring
blood and
muscle
nerve endings
frayed
it was a simple
touch,
the hand of a
man
broad and
bearded
rough skinned,
you could imagine
his fingerprints
worn down by
years of
scrubbing
bricks,
building houses
for children to
grow up in
raging walls
instead of
wars,
each goodnight
kiss fiercer
than the
last
the side of
my face
fitting perfectly
into his
thigh
I imagine a hook
gutting me
like a fish
bones pulled
mercilessly apart
spat out of
mouths
stuck
in people's
throats
I imagine a hook
piercing me
blood leaking
out of
a pinprick
ears, eyes
and nose
quietly, very
quietly
it puddles at
my feet
before I pass
out
I imagine a hook
holding me
by the neck
an example,
a terrible
warning
drained and
empty
I imagine a hook
imagining me
May 5, 2014
May 5, 2014 at 10:22 AM UTC
Like Hercules
we were set tests
of character
building fires
that could warm
ice bitten fingers
that had plunged
through layers of
flesh, gutting out
a heart
hunting wild animals
with nothing but
hope and hunger
&
walking into the
ocean, taking on
one wave at a
time, one breath
of salty air at
a time
knowing the if we
fail, we will be
outcasts
of love
Apr 7, 2016
Apr 7, 2016 at 2:37 PM UTC