Poetry is like a tattoo
Stamped on me from birth.
Like a mysterious voodoo,
It's my charm on this earth.

Poetry is like a tattoo
Engraved on my DNA.
Like the diamonds of Mabutu,
It shines from p.m. to the a.m.

Poetry is like a tattoo
It will never be removed.
Like my love for fufu
Not until I'm disemboweled.

Poetry is like a tattoo
Like the Nile and Egypt,
It encompasses what we do
It's life's soundtrack and script.

Poetry is like a tattoo
It can now be lasered.
But in music, like a crescendo,
It can never be chiseled.

#IvanBrooksPoetry©
31/7/2018

bizarre world
it's a bizarre world
for in thailand men go white
they have their *****' lasered
destroying the pigment
so they can look white
while in england
it goes the other way
white men go big and black
getting their tool tattooed
and made three inches longer
with a silicone implant
some want to be white
and others want to be black
as the old saying goes:
china man too small
black man too large
white man just right

My mother was a patch of smudged ink on
his arm, skin yet to close after being lasered

by the dermatologist. What were you thinking?
she had said to him before, and he answered

I love you, and as she touched herself
prodding her comical mouth with a finger

her shadows tenderly seeping into his pores
making her more vivid. Each time I’d see

my father pointing a knife at her, at her
smile wanting to tear it off. And I was his

death eater, quick to sew my mother shut
and burn her before she causes too much

damage. Then father would touch my
face as if he’s now seeing clearly through

the tears that clog his serpent eyes. How
in this chamber of secrets we dance

in a ballroom tiled with his pain. And I
was wearing ice slippers, his frozen tears

leaving a wet trail that clouds this rib vault
where our steps are quiet, where father I am

Yours,

your horcrux.

A standardized suit.
A universal fit for
all those
who do not feel the nourishment of food.

A career path
cut
through the hem of childhood
and choked by a cheap thin
patterned tie.

The mothering
of a paranoid system;
“it’s not my fault,
just jump through the hoops.

I get paid to read you this book.
Lend me half your ear
and I will half teach you:

Think.
Don’t think.”

Spot the simile.
Dot the t and circle the i.
And I.

I am all in a room painted
with flyers.

They work like road signs,
luminescent with lasered ink
and ladled with pictures
of success.

You can.
You can’t.
You shall.

They hang
like smiling convicts on the wall.
A warning shot to remember
every time you catch yourself
staring into the sky.

My insecurities come and beat my skull ,my soul,
To a meaningless pulp.
Even when I am free,
Physically there are no chains,
And I can fly
But,
Mentally I am chained,
*****
Abused
By my own insecurities.
Countless nights, tossing and turning,  I hear her/him.
I am nothing.
There is no love.
There is me, the living ****.
And I do not love thy self.
God has no place in my mind, choosing to rot in my self pity, than to believe.
Choosing to believe the negative than the positive he gives me.
My insecurities beats the **** out of my energy,
Beats the **** out of my love,
Beats the **** out of my being.
Building a wall of thorns and demons,  
There is no escape from it.
There is no savior.
There is only it and myself
Why fight a battle, that's been long lost...
It is morphed and carved into me.
A tattoo that cannot be lasered out.
It is me.

Assistance required, of a technical nature.
Urgent part need, optimal.

Insert a thought for the needy.
Satiate your own hunger, hurry!

New colors arrived after years, long wait, extra.
A trickle of lavender oil, burning towns.

The priest was not the savior, they all thought
Vow of silence briefly broken, to save another.

True sacrifice, his face is half lasered away
Insert the key. So close and far now, it goes.

Charity begins closer to home. Pilgrim, shame on you.
The light is out. Lend a candle then, a chunk of bread.

The first line came easily,
so I seized the moment,
then stumbled through a jumble,
half memories, half queries.

It had seemed beautiful
when I spoke it to the night
but now wasted, wounded,
like a lasered tattoo.

Voices, broken in the boughs
sleepwalking on nulled roads
echoing in the rain, and
the swings, empty rocking in the winds:
dry withering to budding, scenes
we never saw, until now
the everyday season;
Long since time stopped and
vanished behind the screens;
Then, can I call you, 'The Day'?
Echoes in the alleyways and
the dreary skies all the same;
But I must mark The Day: now
I chore, then endlessly refocussing
juggle as broomed go we muggles;
Know who's lasered on next?
Worry not, as big realms have
no pockets but ours;
For the ledgers must roll on;
Unmarked, we may go, like this
The Day, BUT: now work galore

In this stained room I recall,
Happiness, tears, joy, sorrow,
Celebratory cigars hazing these walls,
And the nostalgic sunshine lasered through-
Flooding impulses into my eyes that contract my irises
Focused on white orchids riddled in aphids
Due to my daydreaming carelessness,
Her leaves and my skin dry and yellow-
Flaky, like that time mother baked that perfect peach pie
And I embedded crumbs in this carpet
Fallen from my voracious gaping mouth,
Held open again when here I gained the gift of fatherhood
And taken aback when my own passed on-
In this room I recall,
These walls of jaundice, there for me,
My punching bag and sliding back support
Painted in carbon dioxide and tar.