"mausoleum" poems
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
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Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I
Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it
Thinking 'Sweetness, sweetness.'
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?
If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush ----
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious ******
To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,
The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her ----
The mausoleum, the wax house.
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Before you criticize me too soon, I think you should spare some seconds and answer a simple question to yourself...
If Shahjahan loved Mumtaz Mahal so much, why he had a harem of wives to use at his own pleasure?
While I agree that the Taj Mahal is arguably the most extraordinarily beautiful monument in the world, I don't agree upon the fact that it was built as a tomb of love. It is just a symbol of madness if you asked me. An emperor's insecure feeling to get his name registered in the history books. While it may be one of the most beautiful architectural monument, it was built by over 20,000 architects, craftsmen, masons and engineers who took over 16 years to build the magnificent building.
He got this apparently high & prestigious monument of love built but everything that the Emperor did was not pleasant at all.
° The lavishly living Mughal Emperor spent all his - his subjects' money into building this monument of love instead of keeping his subjects well-fed.
° Mumtaz Mahal might have been the luckiest woman to have died and got such a marvelous building built as her mausoleum but she died giving birth to her & Shahjahan's 17th offspring and then Shahjahan who had uncountable other wives was inspired by her demise apparently to undertake what is termed as the biggest project in history build the costliest monument proclaiming his rule.
° The arrogant - falsely proud lover - Mughal emperor didn't know that what he thought to be looked at as the greatest symbol of love will be criticized by some poet in his own land nearly 375 years later. The insane Mughal Emperor got all the builders of the Taj Mahal's fingers cut-off of so that there could be no other Taj Mahal.
But Aurangzeb, his & Mumtaz Mahal's son overthrew his power when Shahjahan got older and locked him up in a jail at the other end of Yamuna river where the emperor then died a sad old lovelorn bedlamite person in prison. Aurangzeb was the exact opposite of his dad, he showed religious intolerance and his habits drove the empire towards its doom after his death.
But let me think this way; when I look at any picture of the Taj Mahal, what I get the first thing in mind is this: Such a CRAZY emperor who got such a beautiful monument of Egotism built!
May 7, 2013
May 7, 2013 at 11:23 AM UTC
Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?
It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The **** of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!
Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off
In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.
So the swarm ***** and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.
It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.
The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!
Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.
The bees argue, in their black ball,
A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,
Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom! Pom! They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!
The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.
How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.
The man with gray hands smiles --
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom! Pom! 'They would have killed me.'
Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor,
A black intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe! O ton of honey!
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Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; with none of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a bright morning.
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they danced in a dream
of bending shadows
face down
begging ***
all hungry back door paradise
ankles strapped on a foot worn floor
paint faced in whorey nights
with pin needle eyes
beded
blood crimson neon's
cut curtains
like kissing claws
so their bodies wouldn't forget
dark pleasures lightening
and biting tantra tantrums
they swallowed mad ***** blossoms of hell candy
breathing the others inhalations
foot sniffing ballet arch
in fastened Japanese melting red slippers
gazing upwards rectums prayer
solar eyed insurrection
finger by finger
clutching wrists like the grave
for bloods salty cove
an injured landscape
a dire pink desert
like bogs hold bones
a rave for a slave
covered in yellow ocher rubber sheets
soft on the feet
x rated amputee costume
made of blood and spit
look mommy no arms
a bellied tattoo
of hennaed homunculi
burning Candomblé Jejé, skull
black eyed beauty hissing
while accordion throated
rip tie tighten
another notch please
a dizzy *******
down silver fluted gullet
in a steamed up bath house
party of blotted sockets
*** kitten
kissed dead girls thighs
tremulous and stretched
a shimmering serum
like wide tubular channels
as pontoon edges slit
through midnight howls for velvet skinned girl
who thrills
her head a veiled Jehovah
saliva wagging tongue ****
a stuttering ****** dance
a hula hot momma in rubble
slapping hot lipped kisses
over starved darkness
along telegraphs avenue
melting eyes like butter
a globed pudding spill
******* drool drops of gold
and black river gladiators
slaughter lies
with every long stroke
between cascading squeals
paraphilias mausoleum
like tumbling eels
a scapegoat pulp fiction
chiseled in cement
******* rips
drip drip drip
babbling **** bubbles
**** spasms ooze like a hot glue gun
fire spats soil cherry clover
Jan 12, 2019
Jan 12, 2019 at 3:39 PM UTC
Museums as art
Art as museums
Sail the trail to my mausoleum
Psychopaths and physicists
Psychiatrists and philosophers
Philanthropists and pilots and painters
Declare now, that these are our days –
Our hours, and our days
These are our city, our hours
Our time, our days.
This is our world –
At 14:92 I landed here and claimed it
And searched it and found it wanting
Of civilization that I could so easily supply
By means of wounds and iron
And brawn and truth
(and just a tiny touch of influenza darling)
By means of our Lord,
Who grants us all that we desire
If only we **** enough of those he did not choose.
This is our world –
And we shall make it what we will
Make it in our own image
Teach it that innocence is not knowing the difference between right and wrong
Raise it to hate no one
But to love itself so deeply
That all other love seems hateful in comparison.
This is our child, love
Yours and mine.
Here the first shall be last
And the last shall be first
But once the first are last they shall be
Last
Last
Last
And once the last are first
They shall make it so they can never be last again
This is our primitive accumulation
Of necessary materialism
Let’s cultivate matter
To make objects that we can place on shelves
And in cases –
These are our cases
And we love them as we love ourselves
Museums as mass graves
Mass graves as museums
Kiss me in my mausoleum
Priests and prisoners
Prostitutes and prophets
Pioneers and pilgrims and pagans
This is our time –
And we are dispensing it in spendthrift increments
Buying threadbare bandages for our cavernous canyons
Buying ample earplugs
To seal in the silence
So we can somewhat say
“look there is peace –
Look we have done it
In our time it is accomplished” –
This is our peace –
And we know it by the signs
The lions and lambs lay quietly together
In our brass-barred zoos
For as long as shelves and cases
Are intact and the first are first
And the last are last
And the civilized are organized and holy
There is peace –
Oh, look
We made peace!
And as for Solomon and Socrates –
We take their words to weave through our new wisdom
And when we re-chart the constellations
We shall give them each a star
And salute them once a year
When they come around the universe
Oh, look
How wise we are!
Mass graves as art
Art as mass graves
There have been no better days
There has been no greater time
Politicians and pornographers
Professors and pirates
Psychologists and pastors and pianists
This is our time –
And we are doing with it the very best we know how
The last are toiling and trying
And the first are trying to think to try –
But there is a shortness in our hours
And a violence in our peace
There is inherent foolishness in our wisdom
And disease in our cities
And there is death upon our shelves and in our cases.
This is our world –
We crafted it and declared our truth to be true
We sculpted this, our colosseum
Please inscribe my mausoleum
With “we know not what we do”
May 31, 2015
May 31, 2015 at 5:43 PM UTC
*"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."*
Shall I compare thee...
...to the Iguazú Falls River, where legend serves that a serpent; Boi, demanded a sacrifice each year of a young female, and the day two lovers; Tarobá and his beautiful maid Naipí, took to escape, and in revenge of such an act, Boi exuded such anger that he parted the river, thus forming the Iguazú Falls, splitting the river and condemning to two lovers to the falls.
or
...to Cristo Redentor; Christ the Redeemer, the Art Deco statue, protecting and looking over the city of Rio de Janeiro, to whom in all its glory cannot escape the force of nature, struck by lightning, causing damage irreplaceable.
or
…to The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, hundreds of metres into the sky, a place that to this day is unknown, myth being that King Nebuchadnezzar recreated the homeland of his precious wife Amyitis, who was deeply depressed and homesick, allowing her to find comfort and happiness.
or
…the Taj Mahal, of Pradesh, constructed using marble by the emperor Shah Jahan, in loving memory of his third wife; Mumtaz Mahal, the jewel of Muslim art, a calligraphy written Great Gate reading; "O Soul, thou art at rest. Return to the Lord at peace with Him, and He at peace with you.
or
…the Temple of Artemis; Istambul, on sacred land in honour of the Greek goddess Artemis, the most apotheosized of Greek deities, the supposed daughter of Zeus and Leto, the temple also known as Diana, one of the goddesses who vouched never to marry; alongside Minerva and Vesta.
or
… the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, of the Persian Empire, whereby Mausolus ornamented four sculptures created in relief for his wife (and also his sister); Artemisia II of Caria, generating an above ground tomb that would become to be listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
But of all,
I compare thee to the Goddess of Love, Beauty and Sexuality; Aphrodite
arising from the sea, floating ashore on a shell;
Venus rising from the sea,
a lover of many,
later depicted as a painting of the Birth of Venus,
by the sufferer of unrequited love; Botticelli,
using his muse Simonetta Vespucci as a model.
© Sia Jane
Jan 19, 2014
Jan 19, 2014 at 2:42 PM UTC
Her press on nails graced her sunken in cheek
Tracing the bone that seemed to cut like glass
Remembering days of endless driving
Her high heels out the window
The sun whispered sweet nothings
But no one knew how personal those were
And here she is
At the vanity of a ****** motel
Dusting powder across lesions that spattered her skin
****** patches on her skin
Just like holes in her skin
She cries
Removing the brown wig that she tossed for years
Brushing it in her hands
The tears held on as if they didn’t want to let go
Standing
She slips off her briefs
Gazing into the mirror
Horrified at the person staring back at her
Invisible bones now visible
Crevices and cavities too deep
Webs of veins that were colored too brightly
Wearing the anatomy of a man that was no longer there
A body not worth surgery
Wiping sweat off her forehead
Smearing her drawn on eyebrows
All she can hear is
“Your mother and I gave birth to a son named Raymond.
What happened?”
That name echoed in her head
Drawing pleads from her ears
She collapsed
Her thighs bruised from one too many needle-pricks
Tracing each hole with her finger
As if to draw out an answer
She
A forgotten woman
Who only tried to cope
Her t-shirts were too big
“Raymond, Your T-Cell count is too low”
A forgotten woman
Who only tried to cope
“Is this ‘cause you’re a ****** Raymond?”
A forgotten woman
Who only tried to cope
“Raymond, there is no cure for AIDS”
She wept
Mascara staining her pale face
Press on nails clutching her arms
Hugging herself
Because no one else was would
Rayon died alone
She was no longer forced to love from an infected vessel
To hurt from a torn home
To pray on laced knees
This hotel room became a mausoleum
Smelling of death and perfume
Rayon was a forgotten woman
Who only needed to cope
But exiled by a community of people
For loving too much
Apr 9, 2014
Apr 9, 2014 at 11:46 PM UTC
I am not your enemy.
I want to give you a colossal domain.
I want to bottle up the seas for you.
I want to paint you a picture with the sun's rays.
I want to pull down the moon with a chain & tie it to your pretty waist.
I am not your enemy.
I would give you a palace if I could,
or a distant farmland if your tender soul required.
I would found for you a university,
so that the world's young lovers could learn your
proper caresses.
I am not your enemy.
I would catch for you, if I could,
the world's brightest birds, the world's fairest fishes.
I would build you a zoo, then, with an aquarium,
so that you could watch at your leisure
the creatures of your creation.
I am not your enemy.
I will build you a mausoleum, so that I can entomb
you somewhere where only I can visit you,
with flowers in my hand,
and a pretty pearl necklace,
and tears hanging from my
rounded chin.
Aug 12, 2014
Aug 12, 2014 at 10:21 PM UTC
Mary, plain name. Mary, mother of God
Mary, Queen of the Strip Mall
Mary, daughter of a King and a *****
Divinity in her blood, conqueror of lands,
Monarch of her body, kingdom of junkies.
Nails inlaid with pearls, mink lashes and onyx eyes
Indigo polyester wraps her 36, 30, 41,
saltwater taffy legs, **** and ***
Mary wasn’t a tall boy, Mary is a funnel cloud queen
Obsidian brazilian in velcro, soda can curls.
Mary has no titles, Mary is a ******* Mary is an exile.
Queen of cream stucco and neon and parking lots.
Mary has disciples, all named Judas.
She has Roy Cohn, the judge’s son, and Louis XIV on their knees in prayer.
She has **** Cheney, Little Richard, and Freud their knees in the bathroom behind the Tesco.
Mary doesn’t confess, doesn’t beg, doesn’t buy.
Mary the conqueror, Alexander reincarnate, she survives.
Body bathed in ultraviolet, cocoa butter, vaseline, and newport menthols.
Mary talks to God in the mirrors at the salvation army.
Mary is scared of dying, she knows she is no ones martyr.
Mary never kneels, left the Bible in the motel nightstand.
A graceful end, a unceremonious departure.
Trade rose petals for needles and styrofoam slurpee cups.
Mary’s mistresses, lovers, and wives, gave her a few lead rounds,
Left her in the strip mall mausoleum.
Mary, queen of the carnal, saint of suburban perversions.
Mary never asked God for forgiveness or a fix.
Jan 28, 2019
Jan 28, 2019 at 3:47 PM UTC
In the graveyard chapel
With the candle wicks nearly extinguished
Was a black dog who guards the grave of his master
Who's bond to this world is relinquished
Old bones sit in the mausoleum near by
Do the dead ever come back to the land of the living?
Sometimes the dog barks at seemingly nothing
But on Samhain when the divide between the dead and living is so thin
The ghosts of the deceased inhabit their homes again
The faint murmurs of voices heard a long time ago
The dog barks and the ghost light glows
People never seem to believe
Deceived by their own scientific nature
But if you stare into the mirror at Samhain
You can see the image of those who have passed
Maybe heaven or hell is not enough for these spirits to fit in?
Long forgotten souls their grave stones unwritten by time
Eroded away like the decaying of time
Youths flower fades into dust...
Jul 16, 2016
Jul 16, 2016 at 8:30 AM UTC
wrapped in the tatters of my body
in this measureless place
I search for release
among the disconsolate boles
thin as hope
hard and dark
wearing pallid shrouds
of frozen lace
proudly displayed
in their alfresco mausoleum
an inexhaustible study
in the extremes
of leaden purity
their moribund limbs
and ice sheathed fingers
reach into me
pulling me on
tears of other lives
in frosted glory
cold upon my wintered face
always renewed
and living on
in fractal eternity
Dec 18, 2022
Dec 18, 2022 at 2:35 AM UTC
*When you read them you said words were dead
Only mausoleums could be created of them
You spoke the same tongue " words"
And yes you were right ! your words
entombed my living heart but in your love
But these same words archived hope
Only the true seeker could find
What if they created mausoleums ?
I marbled them
with the turquoise white of my tears
Intricately chiseled with love's essence
Only sunlight could ride with the breeze
Into its minarets laid around you , my life confined
As now you slumber in the deep of afterlife
Under the canopy of the crescent moon
Yes I created a mausoleum
A mausoleum of undying love
A mausoleum that crowns you
A mausoleum I called "Taj"*
31/7/2014
Jul 31, 2014
Jul 31, 2014 at 10:23 AM UTC
You broke bread and cracked voices.
Accompanied choruses of songs
you never bothered to learn.
Played God with radio dials and
sought salvation in airwaves,
leaving translation to the speakerbox.
Like a proper disciple-turned-prophet,
the static air took artistic liberties
and ****** up the message.
In all honesty, you wanted
so badly
to believe that this time, together,
you could out-live the reckoning.
That this time you were
something divine.
But tonight you're too sober to speak
and too tired to try.
Once again, you apologize.
She'll cradle your cheeks just so,
with such delicate touch
you're almost convinced it's done lovingly.
(You've been trained to speak
between such parentheses.)
You always tell her exactly what she wants to hear
but never what she needs to know.
You both leapt from this bed, aiming for Space,
Hoping for something biblical,
but found, once again, that the sky
is nothing more than a mausoleum of stars.
And what
goes
up
Must
come
down.
From that funeral view
the truth collided into you
quicker than the avenue below.
Now you know what the moon must have felt
when the rockets came promising that
after this, things will never be the same,
then left just as quickly
with their pockets full of rocks.
You know what it's like when they steal part of you
just to put it on display.
It takes this distance
238,900 miles,
from here to the moon,
to leave your Me at ground level
and plummet into the
second person singular.
From depth like this
it's almost as if,
it never really happened to you at all.
Apr 4, 2013
Apr 4, 2013 at 7:16 PM UTC
Napoleon shifted,
Restless in the old sarcophagus
And murmured to a watchguard:
"Who goes there?"
"Twenty-one million men,
Soldiers, armies, guns,
Twenty-one million
Afoot, horseback,
In the air,
Under the sea."
And Napoleon turned to his sleep:
"It is not my world answering;
It is some dreamer who knows not
The world I marched in
From Calais to Moscow."
And he slept on
In the old sarcophagus
While the aeroplanes
Droned their motors
Between Napoleon's mausoleum
And the cool night stars.
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I’m choking on a fistfull of bones. There’s a skull
hidden deep in the back of my closet,
maybe in the abyss beneath my mattress,
maybe lodged somewhere behind my bookshelf,
that reads aloud all my past regrets
like bedtime stories.
I found the dried up teeth of my grandmother
on my vanity and used them like dice.
There’s a rib from my great aunt that I use
as a clothes hanger dangling on a hook in my bathroom.
When I was little the playset in my backyard
looked like tomorrow,
but weathered down and rusted, it looks
like a mausoleum.
There is a lock of hair on my bedside table that
is not mine, but hers, and I can’t help but
wonder if she wants it back. Does she want it back?
There’s nine-year-old smoke in my lungs and
five-year-old iron around my heart.
There’s a wishbone branded to my liver
to signify the what if? and a
skull branded onto my chest to
signify the what is.
I learned not to trust so fully the first time I
nearly drown and how to be independent the
first time I learned to swim.
I used to want to be a “daddy’s girl” until I
realized what that meant. The roses he gave me
for graduation went headfirst into the trash.
I have many things left unsaid.
Jul 21, 2014
Jul 21, 2014 at 1:20 AM UTC
It is within this rock I sit
Encased in regret, solidified guilt mortality
Hurt friend’s tear drops etch’d
Dead for all sense and purpose
Shifting on ancient sand’s sorrow
Blistered by dire gale forces breathing
Stoic between cracks in the lies
Weathering at rapid paces of mistaken footsteps
A mausoleum of loneliness
Branded with hot iron’d deceptions
Deafened of heartbreak earthquake tremors
Hammer and chiseled contaminates
Crushed bits of worthless rubble
Scattered in anguish’d apologies
****** by stupidity…
...dust on the wind
Feb 19, 2014
Feb 19, 2014 at 9:53 AM UTC
I see the trees trying to grow large enough to leave this place.
They were:
Hand-Holding-Plants
makinglovetopeace
We are:
as if statues building one another
large enough
to destroy themselves
We are the wicked,
making love
to our sickness.
and when wicked
is the eye of the beholder
we build a great and terrible machine around us which we call Us.
It is the shaking scared skeleton of a forest rotting away from a place which beauty built in it's sleep.
the motion picture of the horror sequence of our mind.
The world bleeds out the fire of man
Born inside a seraphim skin
we abuse and build death
around our bodies
in connected piles on the ground.
waiting calmly.
coming in for the ****
an anthill
vacated and caved in
until everything is finally
quiet and still.
you can not grow skin
on a mausoleum
and wait for it to breathe.
while you sit
and you wait
your own skin
will leave.
when nothing is left to die,
in that time;
no one is left to grieve.
May 6, 2017
May 6, 2017 at 9:32 PM UTC
Mounted in Ulster Mausoleum
you greet me with your rotted smile,
with oaken bones splinted into pose
with cloven feet riveted to the floor.
To the side your cratered eyes
that tunnel down to your cage
that watches of how we feed,
that recognises skin, fur and hair.
that will keep to see,
waves crash on mountain peaks
and we, holding hands in barren fields
and no one finding fossils in the mud.
Jun 19, 2013
Jun 19, 2013 at 11:53 AM UTC
I heard the flutter of a thousand feathers above me,
black birds convened at tomorrow’s end
I saw a ****** of crows encircling the sky
rushing downward into a vortex
Clattering straight for my skull
aiming for divvy morsels that fell off my body.
There’s not much left of me,
their blunt bills perforated most of my skin
Unveiling the skeleton inside this closet,
Unraveling the secrets this mouth can’t
In hoping to shut my heavy eyes to rest
and dig me a bed six feet under
so I can tumble to eternal slumber.
The tears running down my eyes diluted
the colors of my blood stained hands
as I wipe them away
Raindrops, tears, and blood
doesn’t differ much from each other
For they’re all just liquid substances that symbolizes pain.
I sight these black birds
sitting by the branches of a dead oak tree,
their claws clenched against the aged wood
Bathing in the ashes that fell like snow.
But I’m just lying perfectly still,
my back flat on solid ground
Facing the bleak sun
remaining numb and frozen
This is how I picture death
like sketching a mausoleum.
Oct 1, 2013
Oct 1, 2013 at 9:39 AM UTC
He shakes his bones around
And wears them overhead like flags
By night he stalks through shipping yards,
Amusement parks by day,
In time with all the parts he's stolen,
He will build a mausoleum
Seal himself inside just to
Emerge when moonlight fades from view
And night is darker than blindness
He stumbles in an out
His brains are full of fire
He tastes the morning sun
And falls aghast with pleasure.
He stands and brushes off
The filth and turbulence.
He barks into a mask
His sweat sustains him
He presses pennies through
Your skin and seals them
Inside their package there
Where you can feel them
He laughs indifferently
He cries with pleasure
Ignites the tablecloth
And folds it twice
He slips ideas into
The money boxes
He hears the rain upstairs:
What? What's that? That's a fat cat! That's a fine hat hat hat hat hat...
He calls his mystery
Out through the sunlight
The birds don't ask him why,
But spread the message
He stings on either side
Whoever watches
He wets his hands and sets his watch
He waits with pleasure
He gathers firewood
In stacks that tower
And when they tumble down
He loses power
The skies break down their door,
Ask him to wonder
Does he belong up there?
He knows the answer.
The skies defend themselves
They rain and thunder
They pelt him down with flames
And tear asunder
A hundred artifacts
Beneath his bootsteps
He grasps at them in fear
And dives on after
Into the tunnel here
Where others like him stay
Paved into the ceiling
He hears the clattering
On down the way
He chases after echoes
Trips over shadows
He loses himself
He loses himself with pleasure
He comments on himself
So no one else can
He's overweight and he
Could use a sun tan
He waits for you to leave
Before he'll follow
He feels inside his skull
And thinks it's hollow
He hears his name and he
Takes flight at noon so he
Can make it back again
Before the moon
He single-handedly
Gives up our secrets
To any spy who'll pay
A healthy ransom
He's spoken innocence and
He's spoken nonsense
He comes to me each night
Proposing new games
I've never played before
And always feared
He cannot calmly state but scream
His shopping list
He tries to change his name
He's on top of his life
Cos he's the only one
The only one who lives it
Nobody will do it for him
Nobody will do it for him
Jan 22, 2011
Jan 22, 2011 at 8:19 PM UTC
trade insanity to the tailor for top hat coat and cane
to wear to the mausoleum ball, daylights bane
where Lilith masquerades as innocent love
and black bat wings spring forth from every dove
skeletons twist about the living wearing skulls as masks
the grave keeper rejoices in his gruesome tasks
Nov 30, 2011
Nov 30, 2011 at 8:06 PM UTC
Walking up the stairs, it was quiet
Feeling that old **** carpet, like pillows beneath my toes
The house smelled the same, of dust and wood, sometimes
a hint of clean laundry and vanilla candles
Approaching the room - hit like a stroke - or a baseball
to the left eye in 1998
A museum of furniture, clothing, trophies, memories-
Notes whose meanings no longer could be immediately recalled,
And some we wouldn't want to remember
A slip of paper, under my mattress, it read "Please
just let me say I'm sorry one more time, I can't lose you"
Signed, The First Girl I Thought I Loved
She now has three children and goes on vacations to Lake Tahoe
To see the sunset, to breathe again and again
I searched everywhere for the box, the one where we
keep sentimental **** because it feels wrong to throw it away
Then I remembered the day she threw it in the street, saying
"You think they care about you? You think any of these people know what you really are? Nobody will ever love you like your mother loves you"
The screen door cracked that day and my memories
Oh, they flew away like paper airplanes, flying so high
I sighed to release myself, to be free of it
Grabbed the bright red canister and began
Drowning the time capsule, the mausoleum, familiarity dissipating
I lit the match, paused for a brief moment of silence
Then watched as it was devoured, chemically altered
You both preserved this room, just the way it was
Locked me in that room, throwing away the key
Safeguarding these memories, only the ones easier to swallow
Maybe if it never changed, then I would not have
Maybe if it all stayed in place, it would be ready for my return
Let this serve as a reminder
That room killed me, and now it dies with you.
Jul 10, 2019
Jul 10, 2019 at 2:24 PM UTC
somewhere there's a graveyard
with unmarked tombstones
and a distinct absence of bones
and the space under each headstone
is filled with all of the words that were never said
all of the tongues that were bitten and held
and all of the mouths that stayed shut
all of the thoughts that danced around the periphery of consciousness like shadows flickering in the firelight
a mausoleum of missed trains and missed chances
an ardent arrangement of alternate realities
a collection of the opportunities and objects that slipped through the cracks.
an obituary of What Could Have Been.
May 19, 2013
May 19, 2013 at 9:50 PM UTC