"lidless" poems
Oh, will you ever return to me,
My wild first force, will you return
When the old madness comes to
Blacken in me and to burn
Slow in my brain like a slow fire
In a blackened brazier - dull
like a smear of blood,
Humid and hot evil, slow-sweltering
up in a flood!
Oh, will you not come back, my fierce song?
Jubilant and exultant, triumphing over
the huge wrong
of that slow fire of madness that feeds
on me - the slow mad blood
thick with its hate and evil, sweltering
up in its flood!
Oh! will you not purge it from me -
my wild lost flame?
Come and restore me, save me from the
intolerable shame
Of that huge eye that eats into my
Naked body constantly
And has no name,
Gazing upon me from the immense and
Cruel bareness of the sky
That leaves no mercy of concealment
That gives no promise of revealment
And that drives us on forever with its
lidless eye
Across a huge and houseless level of
a planetary vacancy
Oh, wild song and fury, fire and flame,
Lost magic of my youth return, defend
me from this shame!
And Oh! You golden vengeance of bright
song
Not cure but answer to earth's wrong
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The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.
Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.
He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.
His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.
Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.
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The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.
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This poem is dedicated to the fallen of the First World War, and also, to all those we have lost in the years since.
- Somme Harvest -
In the early morning
Dawn of the fiery horizon,
The sea of green caresses the land
And gave it gentle kisses
Of tender sadness.
On this day many an unlived life would find
Life in Death, but first must come Death in Life,
Indeed, a bouquet of barbs grace the
Dark, dank, *****
Halls of Morningstar,
Servants go to and fro preparing the sordid feast
Of unsung heroes.
Babes in arms are they, who shall
Ever sleep till the break of the final day.
Fields of Flanders infertile,
But for the harvest to ripen
The fertilizer of life is
Scattered, battered, tattered,
Sown,
Human manure, nutrient of vitality,
It seeps into earthly soil.
In the year of our Lord,
One thousand, nine hundred and sixteen
Did the farmers collect their greatest bounty,
Not all farmers reaped massive yields,
Farmers Kultur, Sickle and Hammer
Fed their maniacal hunger with rotting corpses,
While famers Lion, Bulldog and Bald Eagle
Wept their hunger with mechanical eyes,
Farmer Scythe, steward of Morningstar,
Laughed dry, dead tears of hungry joy
And sang the golden harvest song
As his blade swam through the harvest thirstily,
For indeed, the harvest was an endless
Smoky sea of blood green
And thousands were sailing.
Twilight gleaming through the sky,
The raging war god vomit’s dry thunderous wrath
And wreaks barbaric, savage, ferocious, ****** carnage below,
As sleeping
Babes in arms fly through the red twilight.
Vultures dressed in human feathers
Gather and crowd around their congealing cold feast,
With hatred sewn on their
Lifeless, lidless
Blind eyes,
They shriek their throaty, ******
Thankless prayers to idle gods.
A multitude of thousands upon thousands
Of souls sour to the heights of Mount Olympus,
Unshed tears,
My child, I saw you in that dusky evening half-light,
Flying, soaring and rising higher with your
Brothers-in-arms.
As I looked up at the darkening sky
My heart wept warm tears of ebbing love,
While my eyes forever dimmed the light,
And my baby,
My body became the Earth,
The phoenix has nested.
Nov 11, 2011
Nov 11, 2011 at 6:04 AM UTC
See the Rabbi. See him tormented by choice. See his people. See them wracked by hate. See the others. See their anger radiate outward in glowing spokes, exploding firebrand in a tinder city.
On a night like any other, the moon at sixth house, fulcrum of pinwheel zodiac, the Rabbi, awash in lidless starlight, rises somber and makes his choice. And when the sun is furthermost, he and three of his others gather at the murmuring riverbank where the brown clay is most pliable and begin to dig, sifting rock and root from trundled earth. Hours spent exhuming the clay, molding it, kneading its muscles, tracing its veins, baking its skin in the starlight. More hours spent in whispering prayer, the words bent and somersaulting over themselves like tumbling books.
See Truth drawn on its forehead, life etched from clay and word. As the sun rises, so it does, wavering at first, but steadier, lapping at the river, and their faces move slowly across the water. See the Rabbi speak to it, his words winding its mechanism. See it stride past the ghetto, wade through the market, and into the borough, siege unto its own.
See the others scream for mercy from the kiln of its stare, from their flaming tenements, their crumpling rooftops.
See it wade back through the market, past the ghetto, back to the riverbank to kneel in the underbrush. See it tilt its head to the lilt of a stranded daisy caught in a vagrant gust. See it caught, too, and see it see. It sees the colors of Eden in the ferns. It hears the river churning sediment, fossils, gravel, whirling over driftwood. It touches moss on a rock; gently rotates its hand to let a grub complete an oblivious circumference. See it sit in silence.
See the Rabbi meet with the others, then his others. And on a day like any other, when the sun is at its apogee, they slip down the riverbank where it still sits, still. It ignores their autonomous logic, their homunculus rationale. They are perversions of variety cloaked in righteous intention. So it remains.
See the Rabbi and his others gather at the murmuring riverbank, shadow conclave in shifting sunlight, then rise somber and decided. They pin it to the earth as the Rabbi chants, invoking the void in which forbidden knowledge spirals. It squirms under the power of the Word, mind-forged manacle as incantation. See the Rabbi draw to a close. His hand is arbiter, swooping down to smudge Truth from its forehead. What is left but Death.
See its hand crumble in its passage as it reaches for the stranded daisy. See the colors of Eden darken in its eyes, its own body the dust that denies it light. See it collapse into itself, the clay that was once animate spilling onto the riverbank. See the Rabbi and his others shimmer then fade into city grey.
The daisy stands still.
Dec 15, 2011
Dec 15, 2011 at 4:22 PM UTC
High on the O2:
Red Rossopomodoro, Wagamama,
and on the bus shelter, Marc Jacobs,
and again higher,
Habitat,
then Metroline moves past.
It's the 113
to Oxford Circus,
and the 13 to Victoria:
Thrilla Lives On,
shouts the slogan,
while National Express has
All Set For Take-Off.
They're gone...
It calms
empties,
nothing much
just the red lidless eyes
of cars
two, three, four dozen pairs
hover
over the asphalt road.
Where...
where am I?
Ahhh, yeah,
in the Oriental Star,
the road seen from a table and stool,
waiting
for food.
Where have I hailed from?
My lover's womb.
No, no
NOT THAT!
The North Star, yes:
A pub on the Finchley Road,
Where Tottenham beat Liverpool 4-1
A pyrrhic victory!
Over a couple of beers.
Warm years, and tears.
A sense of place,
a home, a nest,
Receding in the traffic
Of a busy road,
Waiting on noodles.
Nov 10, 2017
Nov 10, 2017 at 6:15 PM UTC
I
How should I seek to make a song for thee
When all my music is to moan thy name?
That long sad monotone - the same - the same -
Matching the mute insatiable sea
That throbs with life's bewitching agony,
Too long to measure and too fierce to tame!
An hurtful joy, a fascinating shame
Is this great ache that grips the heart of me.
Even as a cancer, so this passion gnaws
Away my soul, and will not ease its jaws
Till I am dead. Then let me die! Who knows
But that this corpse committed to the earth
May be the occasion of some happier birth?
Spring's earliest snowdrop? Summer's latest rose?
II
Thou knowest what asp hath fixed its lethal tooth
In the white breast that trembled like a flower
At thy name whispered. thou hast marked how hour
By hour its poison hath dissolved my youth,
Half skilled to agonise, half skilled to soothe
This passion ineluctable, this power
Slave to its single end, to storm the tower
That holdeth thee, who art Authentic Truth.
O golden hawk! O lidless eye! Behold
How the grey creeps upon the shuddering gold!
Still I will strive! That thou mayst sweep
Swift on the dead from thine all-seeing steep -
And the unutterable word by spoken.
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HOW should the world be luckier if this house,
Where passion and precision have been one
Time out of mind, became too ruinous
To breed the lidleSs eye that loves the sun?
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow
Where wings have memory of wings, and all
That comes of the best knit to the best? Although
Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall.
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these
To gradual Time's last gift, a written speech
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?
2.5k
For the first time ever; I truly do not care
if you, him, or her wished me a happy birthday;
But, I wouldn’t mind if you did. Though it is fair;
I am one of the lesser friends; I am a boring play;
A play so fake; I am of made up characters,
Sometimes I am the flattering villain in smiles,
And at times I am a copy of the Westerners,
At others, I am gullible, yet I never am;
I pretend to be; but I am miles away,
For interesting I am not; so funny at least be,
Says my brain; for maybe they will remember,
That my birthday was today; It is an endless plea:
I always remember and prepare pages of wishes,
For almost everyone, but all I get is 4 days late
One liners sent out of guilt; to stop the guilty itches,
Not out of care, love, or from genuine friendly state;
I deserve it; for again; I am merely a boring play;
A paradoxical headache of weird introverts,
And annoying extroverts; I barely even weigh,
To a normal person; I am made of endless alerts;
Alerted, focused, attentive; all on your acceptance;
I am what I feel you want me to be; a nice man,
A racist gangster, a diplomatic figure; I am resemblance,
I resemble everything I see in you and scan;
I am stardust that was never meant to shine,
I am a thread; intertwined as I feel pleases,
I am a road with temporary signs; I am grapes;
For you I squeeze myself into juice; or ferment
Into wine; I am a fake play where you write scripts,
I submit, because all I cared about is receiving,
A birthday wish. On that one day in the entire year;
I do not want even want gifts; because when you don't,
I feel like I am ceasing to exist; slowly deceasing
from everything that we were: teenagers ambitious,
WhatsApp stickers collectors, School runaways,
Kids deceiving; it feels like I am dead; for the dead
Do not receive birthday wishes; I feel peerless;
A white beans *** lidless, a body complete limbless,
A walking sickness, a moving flesh in stillness,
unpardoned by my faux and obvious silliness.
I do not care about not getting birthday wishes;
But I cannot not overthink what it means.
Nov 22, 2023
Nov 22, 2023 at 4:25 PM UTC
Time stopped. I had no bearing as to who, where, or what I was. All that was in my presence was the high, rolling desert painted orange with that odd sand-mud that he called “Geonosian rock;” his ebbing backpack being pulled from his shoulder, just like the ocean tide; his canteen bottle, lidless, slipping out of the rear pocket and whetting the sand with the boy’s quickly diminishing water supply; and the boy, Davy, being torn helplessly from safety by the cool, malevolent hands of gravity, and into the crevasse.
Reaching out desperately for the boy’s damp, warm hands, I grab a hold just in time—to consciousness, as he plummets and I stare wondrously; dumbfounded by my own ineptness in rational thinking. the boy is gone. Davy, my own stepson, my ******* child whom I would do anything for to prove my worth to his mother, Mary, who was the token to happiness with a new family, was ripped from my grasp, and eaten by the New Mexican terrain. So I delved after him.
Mar 24, 2014
Mar 24, 2014 at 12:30 AM UTC
lidless eyes
and the thought that
I'll never get better
is comforting in its
own particularly dreadful way
waves of solitude
self imposed and ever increasing
can't won't fit in afraid to fit out
misunderstood and still in search of self
identity folks is more important than anything
it just ***** when your self
is... not much at all
just a phase
i hope
Feb 11, 2015
Feb 11, 2015 at 8:00 AM UTC
days like these
i feel comatose.
a sleeping beauty
in a coffin.
a death of eternity
..not new
or waking,
a floating enigma
defying logistics
a tiny winter scene
trapped inside a snowglobe
never changing
cold and wet
yes wet like her lips
as she strikes a damp match
didn't you know, it won't catch
warmth is gone from this place
the dark dragging days
snatching
the light
from lidless eyes.
Oct 10, 2013
Oct 10, 2013 at 5:31 PM UTC
Twin snakes berthed on the wrists
One born of innocence, one born of sin
One lies asleep, the other awake
With a lidless stare and a restless ache
Tongue twists between forever and for naught
The heart yearns to reach the momentous, often cited fraud
‘Impossibility,’ the serpent screams
‘The unproven disease’
Slithers on the spot
In perpetuity
With a ceaseless speech
I follow completely
In my wake
Is dust and death
The once conscious snake
Has become rotting flesh
Upon my right
The other stirs
Fat and swollen, it smiles
Calling itself sin
Jul 18, 2013
Jul 18, 2013 at 7:15 PM UTC
I see demons hiding.
I wink at their shadows.
******* themselves, halfway to the curb.
My censor is muted.
My eyes now so lidless.
My voice, oh so set to disturb.
You ring out your outrage-
Crowned Queen of the Vapid.
I mirror the things that you chose.
The Soma, the money,
You burned through such tinder.
I break sidewalk with spoon for your dose.
Aug 29, 2010
Aug 29, 2010 at 7:31 PM UTC
emaciated faces placed hastily in waste filled space
graceless shapes, mass of flesh
lidless eyes scanning endlessly
searching for rest
impoverished waifs piled
on the mentally ill homeless
skin pressed together
inappropriately –
lost child wildly blinded, bound
gagged on diesel rags used to clean tools
torture implements rented on ebay
scented candles transmogrify blank surroundings
and color splashed lashes shine red in the afternoon
glistening –
fake baking ******* easily ballooned
ozone less atmosphere cooks plastic skin
releasing Botox and wheat germ
creating orange clouds engulfing tanning booths
light skinned pretenders swish across foray’s
looking both fabulous and abhorrent
frolicking –
camera angled babies
in thick foundation hide tears
so as to not disappoint
or fail in the eyes of the media sharks
fear and gun-rights send them into a frenzy
seeking to raise and destroy
everyone –
political ridicule in a public tribunal
grandfathered unborn wait to rule
wombs of power hold genes of control
eggs designed to tax
meeting ***** engineered to manipulate
deform –
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 12:59 PM UTC
I Michelangelo, was fair game amongst human animalia...
until I latched upon the vault of Heaven.
In light of total Absorption...I betook to throngs of glory--
I became a lidless eye, trillion-handed.
All I beheld for four years unblinkingly, was undrunk paint
from plaster drip off a human form, stretching and stretching
to macrocosmic proportion.
It's as if I were painting through a black hole, poised upon
the whitest of emergence.
As it were, upon that ceiling prior to brushstroke there's only
the black of unrealized vision...ravenous blackbirds at their
feeder--then suddenly, the palms of angels cup them...that
they may eat out of them.
I could hear my name glide through: past/present/future...
for I peopled a Heaven, a Hell's dynamic tension--it was
given that I take it upon myself.
That eyes shall look above and know man is more than man,
woman is more than woman...it was given that I situate Us.
Feature the unending moment of creation as chaos harmonizes
upon this ceiling.
Color is so strange...it's immediately superior to my most
creative application--I become the color I apply, as the outlines
of the forms they take become beautiful illusions.
Naturally I worship the outlines of these forms, but neighboring
forms bleed-in so quickly I experience an ecstatic union...countless
times a day the paintbrush falls from my hand.
To that which I've supposed likeness...likeness I paint--I give you
suspended animation, the non local no time of NOW!
Rome was built in a day--I shrunk it down to an Adam...then split
him!!!
Dec 30, 2013
Dec 30, 2013 at 12:01 PM UTC
Honeycombs of light
****** themselves into being
in metro fields.
Children cross the lush
to skip stones at the dead fence
as night assembles itself
into spaces and stars.
Day falls away like a skin,
beneath conquering belts of milk
that separate from a lidless emptiness.
Silver subway trains gleam
in their charcoal tunnels.
Apart from all of it
is a chalk morsel moon.
Sometimes you are
the thrown stone
sinking down to post
& sometimes you are
the star wheeling off tether.
Jan 12, 2021
Jan 12, 2021 at 5:42 PM UTC
Conifer-covered hillside
in the hinterlands
of this sleepy town
on a warm day
in this mid-June
The unspoilt soil
neither grieves
nor revels
and there's no revelation in that-
just what you see.
It's just what you see.
The quivering quakeys
can't hack it even when they cackle-
an attempt to unravel the shackles of
their incomplete alchemy-
cause it's never enough
one laugh is never enough.
The high's always flanked
by a sunrise so rank
as to wrinkle the brows
of the loudest and proudest-
the laughers and criers, or livers and die-rs
Just give me the bliss of the birds
and a big lidless urn to retire my fire
when the work week expires
when I finally can see even truth holds some lies
and when the sun sets too low to appraise the horizon,
I'll fly.
I'll just fly.
Jun 22, 2016
Jun 22, 2016 at 10:42 PM UTC
Stole some fixed verse, from a nicked purse
Drown me in turpentine
Told to react first, and act terse
Barren with no arginine
…
Diluted grape juice poured like nectar
Drips faithfully down to a rat in its cell
Forged delusions, lidless projector
Purgatory bound through this, a stint in hell
Outward embodiment shown as a spectre
Wilted flowering of a southern belle
Bedpost batters, it earns too deep a notch
Piggies arrive too late, they smell of scotch.
Feb 17, 2015
Feb 17, 2015 at 5:33 PM UTC
Lonesome tree,
Left to stand in a field of green.
You are as free as free can be, at least as much as a tree can be.
You’re the sole survivor of a proud oak line,
And the tallest timber I’ve ever seen in this area of the countryside.
Only you have lived long enough to see the red sunrise.
The lidless moon and the eye of the storm sent by the sea.
It baffles me, that you a tree, would watch over a farmer and his family.
Your rightful and natural enemy, who pushes the plow beneath your feet.
Surrounded by a society which cuts down all of your company,
Just to build and sow with lesser seeds.
And yet you, the mightiest of trees, refuse to pack up root and leave?
Refuse to let yourself be twisted by the progress of humanity.
Why are you doing this?
I guess no greater love exists,
Than to share your shade with your enemies.
Thank you for this, oh lonesome tree,
You are a symbol of life to me.
Jun 14, 2016
Jun 14, 2016 at 11:31 PM UTC
All along the midnight prairie,
Across the twilight plains and rarely,
In those oft forgotten and half imaginary,
Waking dreams of bygone maps,
Lies that kid you used to be a lack,
Lidless moon and starlit flack,
Illuminate loves long lost track,
Wherein , perhaps, dear child, dear friend,
You'll find a way to here again,
But in this world oh so blue,
Where twilight never gleams nor shines on through,
Where going back is no mend,
And dying forward is one's bend,
Verily little boy listening clearly,
My wisdom sense I pass on dearly,
You'll get nowhere on this life I fear,
Without losing your innocence,
In a midnight prairie
Sep 23, 2015
Sep 23, 2015 at 1:58 AM UTC
Lidless wreath
Blind me with your teeth
Bone white, chalk lines; bitter retreat
I’ll sing through the embers
Of our charred reverie
A brick & mortar apartment
Holding three dead children
We flee.
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 18, 2014 at 11:46 AM UTC
the door to the basement is locked, but you don't remember where the key is. you know it's somewhere hidden, under the floorboards, under the mattress, over the door frame. it's somewhere. as the burning of your heart ignites your desire to go into the basement, you hear a creak coming from the stair. you don't want to feel it there, but you do. you spin and find that you're bleeding. the scars on your hand tell you you've been through this before.
suddenly, you're in the basement. the key is in your stomach and your heart still burns with passion. inside, your nightmares are all sat in concentric circles round and round the devil himself as he dances for you. you wonder about bible quotes and floods and how they got down here, but then they all stare at you with lidless eyes.
you blink first.
when you wake up, you're in bed and you're warm but the key is lodged in your throat and you're watching your parents make love, and you reach out to touch them.
they are no longer making love; they are consuming each other. their mouths close over each other's flesh and lovingly rip. the rips leave holes in skin that fill with blood and the smell is sweet-rotten, but soon they are nothing but lust and love and bones. even the bones have handprints.
so then you're upstairs again and you can't remember the basement but all you know is that the key's gotta be around here somewhere and you must have been crying because what is that lump in your throat?
Feb 14, 2013
Feb 14, 2013 at 2:38 PM UTC
Across the way seems taught,
It stretches the wits
Lifeless forms, unyielding but fraught
Flowing from the depths
Neophyte the new thought take
mirrored opacity
Dumb mouths, cease to communicate
All out in the middle ground
Lidless pupils temperature moves
derived discourse
Winners only fail to lose
Eventual slouch is universal
Ones and Twos, entrenched in hate
forgotten loss
Trembling nails, cease to quake
Swiftly sweeping like hair in wind.
Nov 21, 2013
Nov 21, 2013 at 9:37 PM UTC
i do not need to pry open this
lidless box to see what
thrives in its wet spaces
i do not need to sculpt the words that
sink into the dark waters for them
to find their home
nestled in the plans of the plotter
i only have to place the whimsical laughter on the plate of silver
and let the lesser natures take course or the darkness of empty room take its toll
this lidless box with its dire face
painted to be more friendly
but with bright colours gone dull with the passing years
carried through wicked winter storm
and through gentle spring rain
through all the toils of his life
what can it contain she often wondered
so she dare not
but knew she might mourn her sorrowful choice
could she spin up a misers coin from such a lidless box
and spend it on lush accommodation
with the finest wine
and the hostess with the forever smile
but the pavement under her feet
still feels cold to her soul
so she fears to take such a path
secure in such troubled thoughts
i know the lidless box will be safe
to the end of days
because no-one dare think beyond the consequence
its wet spaces and its dire faces
to the misers coin contained within
Dec 18, 2013
Dec 18, 2013 at 7:54 PM UTC