"metastasis" poems
Cold and unforgiving, no longer caring,
no longer happy, but also not grieving
My body just sits here, numb, motionless,
for what feels like a thousand years
Forgetting what it means to remember,
like using logic to sort through the feelings
Like a statue made up of *****
like a machine choking on its own tears
Like trying to escape from a room with no door
Surrounded by people, and still so alone
Each day comes darker than the one before
Heart turned cold, then turned to stone
Petrification of compassion and empathy
Metastasis of pathological apathy
Irony and cynicism replace joy and hope
Divinity and love exchanged for empty *** and dope
Unrelenting curses and half Muffled screams
Mask the sudden death of unrealized dreams
Such is the nature of love which has been lost
Before it ever even had a chance to live.
Such is the nature of mercy and grace
Before it ever even learned to forgive.
Sep 18, 2013
Sep 18, 2013 at 2:55 AM UTC
the worst thing is the realization
you have nothing to say.
the worst thing is
a collision of words spinning
deaf into a vortex of irrelevance.
you finally understand.
you are like the rest of them.
you have nothing to contribute.
silence is cancer
deaf and dumb metastasis.
it happens to giants and dwarfs
locksmiths and astrophysicists
mathematicians and short order cooks.
it happens to saints and serial murderers.
silence so deafening
it barters with suicide.
maybe that’s
why they invented
television.
Feb 15, 2015
Feb 15, 2015 at 11:58 AM UTC
There is common ground between the seasons and I
Stages of everything going conclusively awry
Undergoing this divine metastasis
I view it as lacking the act of being courageous
And being even farther of described as spontaneous
But I never berated a late afternoon in September
Especially the absurd image of even knowing it was a possibility
I hope in a decade or so I will remember
Every one of these disjointed thoughts
As rapid as hummingbird wings I'll soon miss December
Jul 8, 2010
Jul 8, 2010 at 9:55 AM UTC
We equate Success with the positive
when in reality
Success can also be a negative,
like Cancer.
In this instance,
you are Yearning for its failure
Praying for its failure
Desperate for its failure!
For if that pesky little cell decides
to invade
and begin the
Dance of Death called
Metastasis,
Success is in its favor.
May 26, 2014
May 26, 2014 at 4:37 AM UTC
creeping madness slicks black and manic
spider high up on the wall
eyeballing me nervously, "who are you?
why are you stalling? whats come crawling back?
you know how this ends don't you?"
swift answers and an amniotic happiness installation.
speaking of stone, wired the lilies grow and the intrepid sank there was quite a stillness in the air.
sunken sand around my feet water cold and green.
out to meet the entity
her languorous form so ravenously tempting
so utterly repulsive and unspeakable.
looking for lights offshore
heretics of the unimaginable disciples of the moon
chemical ooze gels burns in the stomach
lit on up and walked out over the water.
after his peak, went heat seeking to the east and he ceased his babble easily, stuffing his mouth with pennies and bits of charcoal. we called him land-lubber and left him for said.
there is no part to this.
there is no heart in this.
blistering and out of control the fever spins.
wandering tills the level.
filtering cold and pushes me out into the yarns.
Feb 17, 2020
Feb 17, 2020 at 2:17 PM UTC
Weakness haven't any pride in itself,
neither it is shame.
It is a disease.
if you didn't eliminate it in it's first stage,
it will be ends up with metastasis.
Nov 30, 2018
Nov 30, 2018 at 10:58 AM UTC
night falls. space slackens.
falling into common placeness, the realness
of quotidian moon.
.
a love for the metastasis of minutiae.
a hand on the cold **** pale like the dead.
the tombs of fingernails. creases for
delineations of Earth. clenched, evening.
unloosened, bare as morning.
hand in hand, twilight.
.
outside the house, a figure.
things stir in the persistence of silence.
the flagrant irony of hearing cacophonies.
a part of the world that becomes a kin.
say, without light and the dimensions of
things, no shadows display in grayscale.
listening to the cancer of the avenue:
the continuing tachycardia in the edge
of things. things that pulse or flatten.
the mind, in your passing. the heart in your passing. respect this chronology.
likened to the metaphor of beginning
an immediate and forever turning of the body when trouble meant togetherness,
and consolation, simply remembering.
.
there is a deconstruction in sleep.
the alterable garment of dream. or a flower
revealing its inflorescence.
the blackred hemograph of petals, the accuracy of thorns, the tabulated geography
of its stillness - something it that does not completely practice. the constancy of the wind breaks its mimesis.
.
outside your house again. the undesirable quake in the monotony of your dog, Oliver, chained to the stilt of the house that does
move anymore.
the absolute quiet of the street foreshadows the variegated Dieffenbachia.
the color of my palm, starting to green.
i could be anything within your presence
as the moon intensifies the plunge.
Feb 27, 2016
Feb 27, 2016 at 3:48 AM UTC
could you fathom the
cavernous entangled
facets of all that has
passed my scope
those whom
are seemingly debilitated
would inquire
those that hold an
intrinsic capacity
to metastasis the
venom of the
human condition
would not
May 25, 2015
May 25, 2015 at 1:55 AM UTC
I knew it without knowing; I cannot tell you why.
I sensed that this would be the day that we would say goodbye.
The doctor in in lab coat had played this scene before.
He used the term “metastasis “as he told me the score.
I asked if I could be with you as you faced the end
He said “of course, it’s better if the pet is with their friend.
He promised me there’d be no pain; just a pinch and then
My Labrador would drift to sleep and to his final end.
I kept a brave face for Boots sake; He shouldn’t see me cry.
The hardest part of having a pet is the day we say goodbye.
Dec 10, 2018
Dec 10, 2018 at 8:26 PM UTC
Darkness hits I go through my metastasis,
My metamorphosis complete
Transcending Dante's circles
Into this limbo of a night
I'm alight.
May 1, 2017
May 1, 2017 at 8:17 PM UTC
this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to
vertigo.
in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,
are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.
Jan 26, 2016
Jan 26, 2016 at 7:54 AM UTC
next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
her body not even the slightest resistance.
after bathing when feet barely dried
leaves pools, like an admission of something.
i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
by the neighboor as you confessed one
April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
now aged, wind reentering a distance
like i imagine your hand in my denim.
spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.
carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
wasting its voice to no audience,
when we crawled from one room to another
leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
across a tablature is music of creaking wood
and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
on the bedpost softly sings
a punishment: now an urge to go back
yet not knowing which door to enter,
every surrounding object as witness,
memorized a minute's completion,
refusing to map out which way to go.
May 13, 2016
May 13, 2016 at 3:41 AM UTC
Yet your soul withers and is dying
Mayhaps you were mistaken in your choice
Regretting the decisions
The words were spoken in anger by a cruel voice
The smug triumphant demeanor
In shame long forsaken and lost
The desolate chill in early winter of the senses
Now comes the metastasis of feared black frost
You have in your hand all you desired
Yet silent in torment, your spirit weeps
Rest comes without in the guise of exhaustion
A weary conscience infected sleep
I say again
You have in your hand all you desired
Pray tell what madness in your mind have you sired
Though with company
Still alone in a cold empty room
‘With a slowly dwindling fire
But at least you have in your hand all you desired
Aug 29, 2017
Aug 29, 2017 at 10:39 AM UTC
The darkened room
Sterile and clean,
She stood with the Doctor and stared at the screen,
An ugly black spot,
“What is this?”
The Dr. said….”metastasis”,
He offered her chemo,
“It could give you a year…6 months without it…“I am so sorry dear.”
For ten years,
She did what they said,
Now everything’s changed
The tumor spread,
No surgery,
Because of the size,
They said live with it
And she tried……
She learned to live with it,
She did,
Why?
How is she going to learn to die?
©B L Costello 2019
Jul 26, 2019
Jul 26, 2019 at 1:05 PM UTC