DEAR PENPAL PEOPLE, best alone again:>

their tongues spoke in languages of dim black
not for the people, not for the universe, just for the humane lack
their mercuries slipped into a coma of grace
is it too much of an ask to grant a questioning face?
their secrets molded, intertwined, & folded
for the eyes to formulate the truth from the lie sorted
their breathes sent  beat to their hearts to syncopate that keeper
then feels out of their laces or not just them alone in the Ether
their dreams although vanished weren't a matter of none
for the hurt to be a double impressionist's helixed one
their souls craved for a carve of that humble form
so do they submit to rain & dance under the thundering storm?
cliché or not
somethings are left unsaid without a period dot
blunt or rude
better feel shame from faults than when ****
what does it mean, to be delicate's recipient ?
to be an exception to the head of a never lenient?
what does these ancient walls say?
if the colors of the face couldn't cover up before that end day?
a crime to deny them sensations
to get to know someone in six conversations

                                                                                    -------ravenfeels

In misplaced demographics, an underlying figure
Gets lost in the middle of double-helixed bound’ry lines
Dissolving past parameters, confounding to the mind,
A deadlocked debate decides if pain or love is bigger
It’s like the world’s hardest riddle, answers buried deftly
That no savant or prodigy is able to surmise
And the truth does differ from what words can now describe.

I’ve learned that one can tread life’s forest with a steady course
And with the best of intentions and stark, concerted path
Turn winding bends ambiguous: mistake a birch for ash
So to end the tiring journey in tangent to its source
The nature of the Earth is neither white nor black
It’s more like the palate used when blue becomes grayish sky
But, then again, it’s not this easy to describe

Inside my head there lies a circuit, closed unto itself
So, through this loop I’ve learned to see the difference between
Progress and regression, what has been and has never been,
Is like finding from a deck why each hand differs that is dealt
But the answer matters not, for the circle spins again
It’s kind of like the ocean where the calm and break collides
But, then again, it’s not this easy to describe.

I’ve watched a daunting fog descend upon my clouded eyes
It curbs the hue of ev’rything to darker spectrum shades
So this shroud submerges light until definition fades,
Frustrates the sense of passion; luster steadily subsides
When the mind’s only window is comprised of rippled glass,
It’s like a drunkard’s double vision having not imbibed
But, then again, it’s not this easy to describe.

Each step I take grows even more uncertain than the last
If I could convey to you the shape of this confusion
If I could draw a diagram or picture of delusion
Then you and I might, together, construct and raise a mast
So with to steer life’s wayward ship back toward a purpose
At times, I’m unsure if living’s just learning to survive
So, in this pall, I reach you now, and in you I confide.

of blissbrick meanderings
smacks straight into
purpose, full

don't number
nameless incubating
prior to hatch

unimaginable unknowns
may yet manifest

one potential alteration:
me, singer in this
ambiguously yay rap duo

Vernacular Spectacular
Spitshit Linguistic
or maybe Prolix Helixed

first album:
Straight Outta Whoville

you may know
but you never
quite know

the One is THE
ultimate storyspinner
weaving all our tiny threads
into tapestry bigger
than grey matter
can muster

let it
let go

in that little honey hued moment
after helixed bodies
came and went,

where the arc of something sets down
over us
from over there,

with its glow suggesting things
of clenched whitened-knuckle awe,
hugging worried spaces,

i face
myself as
not just watcher -
not just wanderer -
but rushing water wide,
being conveyed

somewhere

into the big run of the space over there
where the strange firebreather awaits
as conjured conjurer
with nestled talking wings that cue us forward,

as we
gyrate
around
in circles; swirling
objects along
the side

for now.

I

I recall in tranquillity

Fever-dive hours.

Once I saw a sailboat listing

Upon a great-waved sea

The sea was I and so was the boat

I could not see any stars

For the blasts of ocean-spray



In what quiet cove can I go hiding from a storm

Blasting up the cartoid artery and flooding through

The cognitive estuaries, over-spilling memory’s tributaries?

Tell me where I might make my stand against my wrath?

Might a clever present play the future off against the past?

Am I to live only in the lacunae between foretelling & recollection

In the times between guilt and dread when, exhausted of mental flight,

Whether backwards or forwards, the mind drifts in easy content?



We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



II

Behold, a shattered glass bowl that held doubts

They multiply in shattering

As each beam of light

Crosses every glass splinter

It breeds a new splinter

And a new lance of light

Fecund heresiarch



Absolute clarity lies within

That lit glass rubble but the trouble

Is that so does everything else

As in Borges’ library up in that tower



III

Do you know where your right hand is? Walking through a shop and not knowing whether you’ve assaulted someone heedlessly. Analysing each moment of your past like a sicko prosecutor. The fears iterate by sinister Darwinism, seeking cognitive blind-spots. Did I mutter threats of violence to that child? Did I insult that shop attendant? Mixed memory and aversion form a rancid bin-juice born decaying.



IV

I came to the stairs

There was a wobble in her voice

By each step her voice rose higher

So I rise to her and she calls with greater urgency

And I rise to her with greater urgency

She and I can only meet after escalation shatters

Past the horizon of panic and further-

Past the sea rock of worn defeat

She and I must be one.

I sprint.



V

Imagine that someone came to you in the middle of the night, stepped into your mouth and began to grow through your capillaries. They were not content merely with habitation, their constant insistence was that you must keep grafting dead organs and limbs onto yourself. You become a born-again Frankenstein (don’t be a pedant) with all the zeal of a convert to an undead lifestyle. The new limbs are heavy, and stink, and burn up your flesh with septisemic fire and ****-flood, but the man who stepped inside your mouth begs you stitch on more.



VI

The inside of a head becomes lonely as it becomes crowded

The only things that elbowed through those crowds

Were other hauntings

Brief dune-sedge love in salted ground

Warring wrath against money made world

Twin engines of raging-love and loving-rage

Racing for diversion and the exaltation of rebellious motion

Circulation round the track kept my blood in motion

Rammed down winds to bellow my lungs



Political contention, war, courtship, frenetic study

Vain dreams of greatness, discontent

Which gave me a little contentedness

To declare permanent war or endless love

And so to terminate surrender in unutterable resolution

“Optimism of the will!”- clenched hands, though they wobble

In the obsidian lands where resistance gave no comfort

Resistance still gave sustenance

Just as all the previous Sugatas



VII

Life is so long. Are you so innocent? You are tired. You dream of a gentle place. You saw it as anyone might imagine it- holy light on wild-flowers, easy with its comforts, free with its joys. To be such a place it had to be distant from this world and sealed against you.



VIII

Maybe I just wasn’t ******* often enough?

Victorian life is better novelised than lived

Hysterical, neurotic, guilty, phantasmal

Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough?

A friend called me the Ayatollah

In respect of my beard and sobriety



Hume and the Buddhist sages pronounced that persons are aggregates without greater unity. I find myself a bundle but there is no liberation here. The parts rub against each other like cans in a grocery bag bruise fruit. Or perhaps I am the curate’s egg.



IX

Give me a seabird’s wings

On the cliffs, about forty meters over the crab pools

I dream of ascending with the gulls, but higher

Diving and again rising in alliance with wind

What waves perturb the gull are brief

And if it is to end by hawk, that too is brief

Yet I would rise higher still, till I sat on a perch

Overlooking time and the jolting succession of moments

Above the waves of kings, ministers, exchequers

Yet if I am not to reach that exalted perch

I will be low enough to observe the bright net

Of refracted sun that plays upon the hills of water

Give me a seabird’s wings



X

Easier perhaps to talk of the accoutrements of terror and the reflections it invoked. Easier to do that then to photograph medusa. Yet I do remember being confused as to whether I was more guilty or more afraid. It seemed important that I be more guilty than be afraid, but it is hard to feel guilt while facing knives. Consequently, I felt supplementary guilt at my thin guilt.



We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



XI

The future is boundless, not only ahead but sideways

The patterns of your inferences only ever ape

The subtle causal chains which bind the forward momentum

Of the world whose surface you cling to

The mind is stretched between times and possibilities,

Beyond any accommodation by mental sinew and bone

The heart successively roars and fizzles



XII

I came to the living room

And it was filled with ash

Though I never smoked

Or sat by fire

I made an ink of that ash

And began to write these verses

upon my arm



XIII

He is there, and I smile into his oblivion

He never loved you, so ideas of romance

Had the character of Banach-Tarski’s sphere

He is gone now, other suburbs, other worlds

I do not miss him, except on special occasions

My affections were never lost, except perhaps at the first moment

Dead on arrival

Yet still worthwhile



It is right to rebel against most things

But not you, oh sweet tyrant

It’s good odds you kept me breathing



IXV

We do not sit upon heaven’s throne

Nor are we the rebel, cast down like a slash of lightning

We are the flesh that raised our gaze

Half wondering, half begging

The dance is ending, where is the bridgegroom?



XV

How rash are those who clamour for justice?

(I have been among them)

Life is wide, deep and changing. We are excesses

Of identity, act, motivation.

Of miscalibrated judgement and selfish grasping.



Do you think you would be clean under heaven’s eye?

Were there a book that contained each numbered thought and small deed

Of yours wouldn’t you shred it, burn it and eat the ashes?

I wouldn’t. I would give you that book. Press you to read it.

I do not think you would like me, but my terror is to be misunderstood

I fear that you will think I am a different kind of monster than that I am.

So I give you my promise, that should an angel scribe that book

I’ll give you a copy.



And I promise that if you ever give me a copy of your celestial biography

I’ll try to shut the my eye of judgement and open that of mercy

It’s simple self interest. Chesed pro chesed.



XVI

Can we remember pain? In our mind’s eye we might

See rose fluids or, under that, a startling glimpse of pearly white

Laid open by a scalpel. We shudder back. We peer forward.

But who has the pen by which to bind agony?

“Sharp”, “dull”, “throbbing”, “irritating”, “intense”

Wholly feeble, as if a snake tried to wander with its vestigial leg bones

But that is where we find ourselves- thirsty for conveyance in a desert of names

We can only hope to articulate pain through our inarticulateness

Just as, by chance, static on a television set captures a snowstorm



I remember wandering the streets, sobbing and calling for divine fire to **** me and all the other wicked. As I wept I listened to pop on half smashed headphones. What would it take to make you march through city streets weeping and calling the fires of an unknown God?



XVII

I ascended to the attic

To store, retrieve, invent

A mnemonic parade

Without volition my hands

Raise the dust in small incantations

How does one dislodge a fake memory?

Or terminate the routine of shuddering



I see

He and she are here, interlocked eye-beams

I am not in either eye

In this attic I lay in the pattern of my veins

I am sinews. Whether these gobbets

Be thought or flesh I am in neitherway free

I am chained by my own substance

Above me powers contend in the air.



XVIII

Think now

Life has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering trepidations,

Guides us by vanities.


After such knowledge what forgiveness?

Forgiveness after such knowledge what?

What forgiveness after such knowledge?

Knowledge what forgiveness after such?

Such knowledge what forgiveness after?



IXX

In metamorphosis the tissue is not merely subtracted from and added to inside the pupae, rather the whole flesh devours itself, save for microscopic clusters (imaginal bodies), becoming a soup of cells. What unites both life-stages is scarcely more than a double-helixed teleos. Yet memory persists.

We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



**

If I could but seize the wax of Icarus

The tailor of Ulm’s fabrics

Etana or Bladud’s crown of feathers

If I could but fly, I could seize the sun’s silver

Forge a mirror by which to demonstrate

The storm that rends the head

Of some shivering soul you know

Forgive a thief that stole for you and

Shelter all, for you cannot see their weather



XXI

To find a point of collapse at which

loss and victory die.

And that sea is now

A vast lake that

Night or day

Forms a perfect twin

To the sky

Over the stones of the tower

Drift currents and sweet, lazy fish

The waves will dance again

But I might hope to dance

With them

If only I could be Light,
but I am dense,
weighted by the matter
of the fact--
reality is duality,
all happening simultaneously,
never,
and strung out into infinite emergence.

If only I could be Light,
but I’m a heavy chord,
wound round and round
so tightly...
Brutal, brutal reality--
Yin-yanging eternally.

And here I am--
Light,
Specter of the Holograph,

Double Helixed,
Doubled-Bound,

If only I could Matter
while being Light.