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Arcassin B Oct 2014
WSQF:
Battle of the Bands

tonight we jam, it's the battle of the bands
there's smoke on the stage ....***** on the stands
smoke in the rafters, from puffin live
this crowd is ready to rock and jive

AB:

One guitar in hand,
Calling you out animantium plans,
Of having rocktastic fans,
Tattoos and silver lens,
Naked babies,
Naked babies,
Naked babies.

WSQF:

this joint is rockin'
and we be jammin'
some slam dance ritual
and hip hop breakin'
who's gonna take it?
who's gonna take it?
alright...take it to the bridge!

AB:

There is no stoppin what we doin,
Do you smell us when were cookin,
Serving you a hot plate this funkalicious music,
Some old skool flava,
Let us see if you can take it,
All you gotta bop it , move it ,break it,

WSQF:

gonna run some crazy riffs across your brain
sweet heavy metal ..drive you insane
step up the action
raise the stakes
let's see if you got what it takes

AB:

Lead guitarist,
Got a jazzy a vocal,
Bass solos and drums knockin in your ear holes,
Fresh lyrics on a platter,
Cut up nicely,
In to pieces of rock heaven,
Its time to get godly,

WSQF:

home boyz gonna kick it
take it to the next plateau
while your jammin'...face dancer
play those licks real slow
the soul of creation
right there in your hands
this pure fusion..the battle of the bands!
Me and the legend of rock
Ella Gwen May 2016
We either fall

or we fly and there's no

no plateau on which to lay

to rest our heavy heads, hurtling

between each inevitable

windburntbloodscreamingcoursing

drop

and every

goddamnbreathbaringasphyxiating

                                                                  elevation.
brandon nagley Jun 2015
Poet jalopy to ride the temptest,
Squall of shallow
Moon apprentice
Wooden's of hollow
Doctor or dentist
To Ride away mine fears!!!!

Judge or gust
Backbone of theorist
Turns pen into sandstone miracle
Dumplings are lyrical
Nursery's are terrential
As the downpoor
Is riddled by puke!!!!!!

Shutters of fine drape
Tis
The black hat,
And veiled cape
Wherein the black Cat
Finishes his plate

To the whistlemen who pouts his charisma

Plasmid instigma!!

Plateau of morinsa
Chateau of  bornisa
Plato of dorita
Dawn to thy dusk

Elephant tusk shally
Moveth on tallies
Wherein the breach is far rallied,

To the pushers of what's good to come!!
L Gardener Sep 2013
It may be it's maybe too hard to handle,
or to understand.
Truly you'll take my pain away? My worry? My doubt?
Having only other mortal souls and bodies to compare to,
the gaps are vast.
There are chasms in my truths.
Perforated facts.
Even moreso sometimes it merely seems cruel.
You've been through enough.
What good could it possibly do to have you
bear the extra burden of wretched, unrighteous us?
It should be uplifting that you be so strong for me.
It is rather, and yet sometimes I find a hint of sorrow
in my heart.
A dash of guilt in my subconscious.
You, Keenest Eye beyond any measure of the sky
hide not I from it.
Observe my wandering wonders, oh wondrous one.
Let me behold.
Beautiful, of the light and the love peace abounds.
Sorrow, never to reach such a plateau.
Not ever to be but only to know.
To feel fondness for ever.
For so deeply my heart wishes to grow
as close to you.
A soul as sweet as fruits from your own garden.
Martin Narrod Feb 2015
Part I


the plateau. the truest of them all. coast line. night spells and even controlled by the dream of meeting again. the ribbon of darker than light in your crown. No region overlooked. Third picnic table to the drive at Half Moon Bay, meet me there, decant my speech there. the table by the restroom block. While the tide is in show me your oyster garden, 3:00p.m. at half-light here in the evilest torments that have been shed.---------------door locked.  The moors. Cow herds and lymph nodes, rancorous afternoon West light and bending roads, the cliffs, a sister, the need to jump. There is nothing as serious as this. There is nothing nor no one that could ever, or would ever on this side come between. Who needs sleep or jokes or snow or rivers or bombs or to turn or be a rat or a fly or ceiling fan or a gurney or a cadaver or piece of cloth or a bed spread or a couch or a game or the flint of a lighter or the bell of a dress; the bell of your dress, yes, perhaps. Having been crushed like orange cigarette light in a pool of Spanish tongues. I feel the heave, the pull; not a yawn but a wired, thread-like twist about my core. Up around the neck it makes the first cut, through the eyes out and into the nostrils down over the left arm, on the inside of the bicep, contorting my length, feigning sleep, and then cutting over my stomach, around and around multiples of times- pulled at the hips and under the groin, across each leg and in-between each nerve, capillary, artery, hair, dot, dimple, muscle, to the toes and in-between them. Wiry dream-like and nervous nightmarish, hellacious plateaus of leapers. Penguin heads and more penguin heads. Startling torment. The evilest of the vile mind. The dance of despair: if feet contorted and bound could move. The beach off Belmont. The hills and the reasons I stared. Caveat after caveat at the heads of letters, on the heads of crowns, and the wrists, and on the palms. Being pulled and signed, and moved away so greatly and so heavily at once in a moment, that even if it were a year or a set of many months it would always be a moment too taking away to be considered an expanse, and it would be too hellacious to be presumptuous. It could only be a shadow over my right shoulder as I write the letters over and again. One after another. Internally I ask if I would even grant a convo with Keats or Yeats or Plath or Hughes? Does mine come close? Does it matter the bellies reddish and cerise giving of pain? Does it have to have many names?


"This is the only Earth," I would say with the bouquet of lilies spread out on the table. Are lilies only for funerals, I would never make or risk or wish this metaphor, even play it like the drawn out notes of a melody unwritten and un-played: my black box and latched, corner of the room saxophone. Top-floor, end of the hall two-room never-ending story, I'm the left side of the bed Chicago and I see pink walls, bathrooms, the two masonite paintings, the Chanel books, the bookshelves, the white desk, the white dresser, you on the left side of the bed in such sentimental woe, **** carpet and tilted blinds, and still the moors and the whispering in the driver's seat in afternoon pasture. Sunset, sunrise, nighttime and bike room writing in other places, apartments, rooms where I inked out fingertips, blights, and moods; nothing ever being so bleak, so eerily woe-like or stoic. Nothing has ever made me so serious.

Put it on the rib, in a t-shirt. Make it a hand and guide it up a set of two skinny legs under a short-sheeted bed in small room and literary Belmont, address included. Trash cans set out morning and night, deck-readied cigarette smoking. Sliding glass door and kitchen fright. Low-lit living room white couch, kaleidoscope, and zoetrope. Spin me right round baby right round. I am my own revenge of toxic night. Attack the skin, the soul, the eyes, the mind, and the lids. The finger lids and their tips. Rot it out. Blearing wild and deafening blow after blow: left side of the bed the both of us, whilst stirs the intrepid hate and ousts each ******* tongue I can bellow and blow.

Last resort lake note in snow bank and my river speak and forest walk. Wrapped in blocks and boxes, Christmas packaging and giant over-sized red ribbons and bows. Shall I mention the bassinet, the stroller, the yard, several rings of gold and silver, several necklaces of black and thread? I draw dagger from box, jagged ended and paper-wrapped in white and amber: lit in candle light and black room shadow-kept and sleeping partisan unforgettable forever. Do I mention Hawaii, my mother dying, invisible ligatures and the unveiling of the sweat and horror? Villainous and frightening, the breath as a bleat or heart-beat and matchstick stirring slightly every friends' woe and tantrum of their spirit.

Lobster-legged, waiting, sifting through the sea shore at the sea line, the bright tyrannosaurs in mahogany, in maple, and in twine over throw rose meadow over-looks, honey-brimming and warehouse built terrariums in the underbelly of the ravine, twist and turn: road bending, hollowing, in and out and in and out, forever, the everlasting and too fastidious driving towards; and it's but what .2 miles? I sign my name but I'll never get out. I am mocked and musing at tortoise speed. Headless while improvising. Purring at any example of continue or extremity or coolness of mind, meddling, or temptation. I rock, bellowing. Talk, sending shivers up my spine. I'm cramped, and one thousand fore-words and after words that split like a million large chunks of spit, grime, and *****; **** and more ****. I might even be standing now. I could be a candle, in England, a kingdom, in Palo Alto, a rook in St. Petersburg. Mottled by giants or sleepless nights, I could be the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, a heated marble flower or the figure dying to be carved out. I'm veering off highways, I'm belittling myself: this heathen of the unforgettable, the bog man and bow-tied vagrant of dross falsification and dross despair. I am at the sea shore, tide-righted and tongue-tide, bilingual, and multi-inhibited by sweat, spit, quaffs of sea salt, lake water, and the like. Rotten wergild ridden- stitched of a poor man's ringworm and his tattered top hat and knee-holed trousers. I'm at the sea shore, with the cucumbers dying, the rain coming in sideways, the drifts and the sandbars twisting and turning. I'm at the sea shore with the light house bruise-bending the sweet ships of victory out backwards into the backwaters of a mislead moonlight; guitars playing, beeps disappearing, pianos swept like black coffees on green walled night clubs, arenose and eroding, grainy and distraught, bleeding and well, just bleeding.






I'm at the sea shore, the coastline calling. I've got rocks in my pockets, ******* and two lines left in the letter. I’m at the sea shore, my mouth is a ghost. I've seen nothing but darkness. I'm at the seashore, second picnic table, bench facing the squat and gobble, the tin roof and riled weir near the roadside. .2 and I'm still here with my bouquet wading and waiting. I'm at the sea shore and there's nobody here. My inches are growing shorter by the second, cold, whet by the sunset, its moon men, their heavy claws and bi-laws overthrowing and throwing me out. The thorns stick. The tyrannosaurs scream. I'm at the sea shore, plateau, left bedside to write three more letters. Sign my name and there's nobody here.

I'm at the sea shore: here are my lips, my palms (both of them facing up), here are my legs (twine and all), my torso, and my head shooting sideways. I'm at the seashore and this is my grave, this is my purposeful calotype, my hide and go seek, my show and tell, my forever. .2 and forever and never ending. I was just one dream away come and keep me. I'm at the sea shore come and see me and seam me. I'm without nothing, the sky has drifted, the sea is leaving, my seat is a matchbox and I'm all wound up. The snow settling, the ice box and its glory taken for granted. I'm at the sea shore and there's nobody here. The room with its white sets of furniture, the lilies, the Chanel, the masonite paintings, the bed, your ribbon of darker on light, the throw rug **** carpet, pink walled sister's room, and the couch at the top of the stairs. I'm at the sea shore, my windows opened wide, my skin thrown with threat, rhinoceri, reddish bruises bent of cerise staled sunsets. I'm at the sea shore and there's nobody here. I'm at the plateau and there isn't a single ship. There are the rocks below and I'm counting. My caveats all implored and my goodbyes written. I'm in my bed and the sleep never set in. I'm name dropping God and there's nobody there. I'm in a chair with my hands on a keyboard, listening to Danish throb-rock, horse-riding into candle light on a wicked wedding of wild words and teary-eyed gazes and gazers. Bent by the rocking and the torment, the wild and the weird, the horror and everything horrifying. There is this shadow looking over my shoulder. I'm all alone but I feel like you're here.



Part II




I wake up in Panama. The axe there. Sleeping on the floors in the guest bedroom, the floor of the garden shed, the choir closet, the rut of dirt at the end of the flower bed; just a towel, grayish-blue, alone, lawnmower at my side, and sky blue setting all around. I was a family man. No I just taste bits of dirt watching a quiet and contrary feeling of cool limestone wrap over and about my arms and my legs. Lungs battered by snapping tongues, and ancient conversations; I think it was the Malaysian Express. Mom quieted. Sister quieted. Father wept. And is still weeping. Never have I heard such horrifying and un-kindly words.-----------------------It's going to take giant steel cavernous explorations of the nose, brain cell after brain cell quartered, giant ******* quaffs of alcohol, harboring false lanterns and even worse chemicals. Inhalations and more inhalations. I'm going to need to leap, flight, drop into bodies of waters from air planes and swallow capsules of psychotropics, sedatives beyond recalcitrance. I'm requiring shock treatments and shock values. Periodic elements and galvanized steel drums. Malevolence and more malevolence. Forest walks, and why am I still in Panama. I don't want to talk, to sleep, to dream, to play stale-mating games of chess, checkers, Monopoly, or anything Risk involving. I can't sleep, eat, treaty or retreat. I'm wickeded by temptations of grandeur and threats of anomaly, widening only in proverb and swept only by opposing endeavors. Horrified, enveloped, pictured and persuaded by the evilest of haunts, spirits, and match head weeping women. I can't even open my mouth without hearing voices anymore. The colors are beginning to be enormous and I still can't swim. I couldn't drown with my ears open if I kept my nose dry and my mouth full of a plane ticket and first class beanstalk to elysian fields. It's pervasive and I'm purveyed. It's unquantifiable. It's the epitomizing and the epitome. I have my epaulets set for turbulent battles though I still can't fend off night. Speak and I might remember. Hear and it's second rite. Sea attacks, oceans roaring, lakes swallowing me whole. Grand bodies of waters and faces and arms appendages, crowns and more crowns and more crowns and more crowns and more crowns and I'm still shaking, and I'm still just a button. And I still can't sleep. And I'm still waiting.

It is night. The moon ripening, peeling back his face. Writhing. Seamed by the beauty of the nocturne, his ways made by sun, sky, and stars. Rolled and rampant. Moved across the plateau of the air, and its even and coolly majestic wanton shades of twilight. It heads off mountains, is swept as the plains of beauty, their faces in wild and feral growths. Bent and bolded, indelible and facing off Roman Empires too gladly well in inked and whet tips of bolder hands to soothe them forth.-----------Here in their grand and grandiose furnaces of the heart, whipped tails and tall fables fettered and tarnished in gold’s and lime. Here with their mothers' doting. Here with their Jimi Hendrix and poor poetry and stand-up downtrodden wergild and retardation. I don't give a ****. I could weep for the ***** if they even had hair half as fine as my own. I am real now. Limited by nothing. Served by no worship or warship. My flotilla serves tostadas at full-price. So now we have a game going.-----------------------------------------------------------­------------------------  My cowlick is not Sinatra's and it certainly doesn't beat women. As a matter of factotum and of writ and bylaw. I'm running down words more quickly than the stanza's of Longfellow. I'm moving subtexts like Eliot. I'm rampant and gaining speed. Methamphetamine and five star meats. Alfalfa and pea tendrils. Loves and the lovers I fall over and apart on. Heroes and my fortune over told and ever telling. Moving in arc light and keeping a warm glow.

the fish line caves. the shimmy and the shake. Bluegrass music and big wafting bell tones. snakes and the river, hands on the heads, through the hair; I look straight at the Pacific. I hate plastic flowers, those inanimate stems and machine-processed flesh tones. Waltzing the state divide. I am hooked on the intrepid doom of startling ego. I let it rake into my spine. It's hooves are heavy and singe and bind like manacles all over me. My first, my last, my favorite lover. I'm stalemating in the bathtub. Harnessing Crystal Lite and making rose gardens out of CD inserts and leaf covers. I'm fascinated by magic and gods. Guns and hunters. Thieving and mold, and laundry, and stereotypes, and great stereos, and boom-boxes, and the hi-fi nightlife of Chicago, roasting on a pith and meaty flame, built like a horror story five feet tall and laced with ruggedness and small needles. My skin is a chromium orchid and the grizzly subtext of a Nick Cave tune. I've allowed myself to be over-amplified, to mistake in falsetto and vice versa. To writhe on the heavy metallic reverberations of an altercated palpitation. The heart is the lonely hunted. First the waterproof matchsticks, then the water, the bowie knife, crass grasses and hard-necked pitch-hitters and phony friends; for doing lunch in the park on a frozen pond, I play like I invented blonde and really none of my **** even smells like gold.--------------------- There are the tales of false worship. I heard a street vendor sell a story about Ovid that was worse than local politics. As far as intermittent and esoteric histories go I'm the king of the present, second stage act in the shadow of the sideshow. Tonight I'm greeting the characters with Vaseline. For their love of music and their love of philosophy. For their twilight choirs and their skinny women who wear black antler masks and PVC and polyurethane body suits standing in inner-city gardens chanting. For their chanting. The pacific. For the fish line caves. For the buzzing and the kazoos. For the alfalfa and the three fathers of blue, red, and yellow. For the state of the nation. But still mostly working for the state of equality, more than a room for one’s own.-------------------------------------------------------------­------"Rice milk for all of you." " Kensington and whittled spirits."
(Doppelganger enters stage left)MAN: Prism state, flash of the golden arc. Beastly flowers and teeming woodlands. Heir to the throes and heir to the throng.----------------------------------------------------------­--------------- The sheep meadow press in the house of affection. The terns on my hem or the hide in my beak; all across the steel girder and whipping ******* the windows facing out. The mystery gaze that seers the diplopic eye. Still its opening shunned. I put a cage over it and carry it like a child through Haight-Ashbury. At times I hint that I'm bored, but there is no letting of blood or rattle of hope. When you live with a risk you begin at times to identify with the routes. Above the regional converse, the two on two or the two on four. At times for reasons of sadness but usually its just exhaustion. At times before the come and go gets to you, but usually that is wrong and they get to you first. Lathering up in a small cerulean piece of sky at the end turnabout of a dirt road
Kimberly Clemens Jan 2014
Do you-
Do you know
How scared I am
Of gripping rope that will break
Just as I am about to reach the plateau?
Do you-
Do you hear
The distant echoes
Resonating within the hollow core of my ribs
Whispering within the empty mass of broken, gushing heart beats?
Do you-
Do you understand
That I am not sure how to act
When my vocal chords won't sing the way they should
Do you-
Do you see?
I am falling into a ditch of ashes
Of all the wishes I've long since burned
Do you-
Do you feel me
Slipping out of your hands
As I sway up to the sky aimlessly searching for stars in the daytime
Do you-
Do you know
How lost I feel when I look around
I cannot tell you how much I need to be wrapped in grounded arms.
(20 minute poetry)


Where the chamois go
out along the plateau
to where the winds blow and the Sun sets with that special lonely kind of golden glow

and silence undercuts the thermals.


It pleases the eye to wonder on high,
the eagles, another golden in the golden sky wonder why
I am here.

Away from the chaos of life in the city,
to absorb what is seen
to ponder on what will and if will
will still be.

On the spiral staircase and we turn about face
but the staircase is still there on the rise going nowhere

it's a ruse of no use to me.


The plateau is where we stow all the memories we own
the plateau is a home to me.
What a morning, a lot of things to do
Worrying about the things past due
Overlooking the wonderful blessings, like the beautiful glistening dew
I know it's been a rush, but don't forget about you.

A lot of things to do, eating more than what you can chew
I found an old shoe, wouldn't you have time to care about it too?
Wondering if it has a story too, like where you got your irritating flu.
*******, I have no clue.

Somebody sees when you're feeling blue,
Don't turn them down and give them a *******.

Slow down and chill on a plateau,
Have a coffee with me, there are a lot of things that we don't know
*Life is but a ride, sit back and enjoy the show.
I apologize for the expletives
It was the silver, heart-enveloping view
Of the mysterious sea-line far away,
Seen only on a gleaming gold-white day,
That made it dear and beautiful to you.

And Laura loved it for the little hill,
Where the quartz sparkled fire, barren and dun,
Whence in the shadow of the dying sun,
She contemplated Hallow's wooden mill.

While Danny liked the sheltering high grass,
In which he lay upon a clear dry night,
To hear and see, screened skilfully from sight,
The happy lovers of the valley pass.

But oh! I loved it for the big round moon
That swung out of the clouds and swooned aloft,
Burning with passion, gloriously soft,
Lighting the purple flowers of fragrant June.
invisible man
plods on
in his empty
world
a bleak
landscape
overcast with
oppressive
clouds full
of a watery burden
he is mesmerized
by watching
foot after invisible foot
stealing step after step
on a flat plateau
such as the earth
surrounded
by fallen
umbrellas
Daniel august May 2010
I walk in on the starting scene,
A grassy meadow, of lush green.
A beautiful woman hugging a man,
I’m guessing this is how it all began.

In his arms, she gives a kiss and a hug,
Then they both take a wonderful drug.
The screen erupts in a splash of color.
I watch as they grow shorter then taller.

Trees of every color start to grow,
On this lush green plateau.
Growing leaves they start to dance,
Putting the audience in a trance.

Drifting away, with this pair
A burst of light, a solar flare.
Floating, soaring away,
Into this magical place, this color display…
Seán Mac Falls Oct 2012
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Seán Mac Falls Jun 2014
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Seán Mac Falls Mar 2014
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Seán Mac Falls Jun 2012
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Seán Mac Falls Apr 2015
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Seán Mac Falls Nov 2014
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Vernarth says: “Nocturnal mutism, nocturnal stuttering, goes from the fragile phrasing, peripheral phrase, hovering last word, where my loudspeaker hits, dissonant Sagittarius, I must prepare my denarius, not but, beforehand, cheers of hope to Zion, who among the bush of the millionaire wind that travels from Pluto to Mercury, each day that we map ourselves, trying to be more earth than in its own flowering. Paradiso Omega, nap of the oldest dream, adobe path. My  to fly Anne genuflects her heart towards Mariah from Heaven, in the title of hundreds of throats and gargles of the pyogenic sediment rambling. Oh so long night!, so clear firmament born of the fallen ether of the great Heaven so clear and enlightening Compass 37 on the quilt of God, three by three towards one, linking above the easy pit and dreams, dying Paradiso, Agonizing Horcondising, a fragile mass disoriented, discouraged, with numeral letters and quadruple letters, stone after stone of forage falling on the cinnabar sky "

Joshua de Piedra from the high pinnacle exclaimed…: “Stone after stone in its correction is born of a new silence eternal bond. It eats it during the day, it eats at night, just like the galaxies licking the frivolous awakening from a starless night, but being the substance of stars liquefied with a whip. Pilgrimage or Path of the Cross, on the stony ground of Uncle Hugh's house, in the other similar, my Anne's house, further on in the hidden and clayey chaos, the last Indigenous in Western clothing, working and stuffing the wells with green size, distributing alms for his apprentices, I keep looking from the high hill earlier. Kaitelka the whale and a Dwarf Leviathan; steward of the unnameable, perhaps of an unknown Cyprian squirrel censoring Noah in his animals empowered to tell him about a magnificent episode.  Each species balancing its essence to make the most grandiloquent dossier in the world, to join them and value them towards the unknown peasant world. The big apple to go, with its tailcoat worms, well dressed and united by the march of the rock sentinel Evangelus. Kaitelca alpha and omega cetacean, fluffy with bast for all the most lost seas of the watery world. She so down cetacean, she throws herself into the sea in fears in this gloomy space, exhausted warehouse, lifesaver between lives of lives, like wishes without delay, to beat the divergent period, falling on the flat ceiling. Enter to sail through the mud of Iodine, of this great Parnassus of all iodine, the Messiah was squeezing his robe of love all over the upper margin of the face, Jesus light, loving great pilgrims who helped me to urbanize the skeleton of this great demolition, of a great geyser on its oceanic back, distributing gifts through the tangled brow of the Horcón and Cantillana massif.  Freshwater meringue, fluffy flowers, incense, fuchsias, and Calypso smoke migrating from house to house in Sudpichi.  Adelimpia, holding the cord of the axis of the fatigued planet, Queen Anne restored the acute respiratory meridians, which moved her heart from the sinister side encompassed, cursed globe moving to another galaxy towards its 9600 years of expansion. The stumbling of the sun's rays, crowded on the back of the Jacinta, which multiplied on her bank of meek ideas, to reside above all the assemblages of millions of benefits, since the world is an improper world. The world has no end, God is a beautiful mute world, where we make mistakes every day believing that we are ..., being less true. Rather, we are the waste of the almost noise that tried to leave us as a legacy of the first noise of creation that was felt wandering, perhaps it was its breathing, of its lipped wise crater, in the most irresistible protoforms, devoutly preparing turgid liquids for driving through every dinner, without stars tasting their multi-polygonal sandwiches. Memory is a raging waste, every time we try to get to lick his honey-like him, we run out of a famished minute of life not lived”

Says the spirit Leiak:

“Without a doubt, without drooling, without Buddha… the tendrils of the universe flamed, like rolling pickets within his hearing sea ear.  Striped with wounded marks in zigzag, by the middle row between the unarmed infidels.  Filled with the greatest amazement, massacred with laughter riddled with the non-shining meteor. From temple to temple, without Buddha close to him, he continues lost on the path of valleys among several, by the waves of chimneys like the snout of a mastiff with typhus, infected badly that detonates a thousand times, circular or macrocosmic chemistry in submissive grounds, to drink, where no one is wrong. Pendency of the lymphatic jellyfish, among the meek otolith of Kaitelka, almost deaf, of so many prayers of impious savages to hunt her ..., she continues begging for mercy as a species, she shakes and shakes as if eliminating the supposed flea jellyfish in whirlwinds of babies in her ears of children's stories. Anne came out of her basket as if she had been picked up from the Nile, but in reality, she was close to Chocalan, Popeta, or Polulo, lit up like coal from a steppe oven. I continued walking shirtless on an insomniac night, waiting in the decimals of the full moon, some indebted Solaris of the evangelist, in a space that slowly locked the crooked tongue of sleep, locked by the treacherous luck of doubt. Plague and doubt, plague and nail, which opens the vast sea, unsanitary radio, from the messianic ****** of the muses to Botticelli blaspheming. Anne, a diva of the division of past lives, does not die in misapplication against all odds like a thousand sperms of an ensign, making her stipends simple, to buy sensitive chaste little flowers in suitcases of her super-saucy folds ..., there is no probing look similar to the ocean Cousteau's journey, through which the lost retina drains, lies the selective gaze, covered by the Guardian, who looks before the denigrated sap unfolds, which wears away scarlet fever, the gaze of substance, in front of thousands of sayings, plagiarizing Tramontane rumors "

Queen Anne rolls up her sleeves, collects ashes from the ill-fated victims sifted, by the tobacco, a very good service from the fumes of venerable lost in disbelief, this painting becomes vague and with a sordid diametric image and silent cataclysm. The confine of evil godson in a duo and verse of the Universe, of the concrete displaced with pieces of the tobacco, has been spoiled. Joshua de Piedra with filings in his stomach was with hundreds of particles tickling the metaverse on the beards of extraterrestrial comets. Heaven and Hell, interrupted sleep, fatal nap, draconian wind, Ultrasensitive Glory of austere forces, as long as you are alive, you are prey to it. Ignorance continues to spend the night in the empty vapors of the valley of chaos, duels of masses of sleeping consciences underlying the erosive *****, Queen Anne, is gathered at a gallop by Joshua de Piedra, blindfolds him so that he does not numb more body incense and set on a spring flower. By the knees, they are incinerated, but sometimes they are half-burned, burning like incense with Joshua in reversible adulation, of the rawest exquisiteness of essence of escapes of blossoming in chains, with the drama of carcinoma petals in anti-carcinoma times and of eternal life external. At the Post Office, the postman envelopes the new vignettes, new gardens of relevant highlights. The friend Joshua links the trough of flames escaping from his domain, at a faster pace for other readings, varying in shreds of first-time, delineating, and walking breaths that are lost in the misty vividness.

Says Leiak: “After making a round, Adelimpia with Hugh and Bernardolipo, restart their adventure, almost at the top of the Horcondising massif, collecting riches from between stranded galleys, and vaults dragged by the cataclysm towards this consistent mountainous ..., The amounts of coins from different origins were countless, from all those wealthy who stole from all their belongings, the tainted and intrepid wisdom, getting rid of everything before confronting the thunderous flashes of the Guardian, to subtract intelligent action from the oppressive limit in maintaining the Gnostic parallel. Adelimpia saw how the thousands of nausea cleaned themselves, before liquids and gastric ills, of which they are the bad residences, deciding to die acidly or spiritually towards an alkaline light.  Karmic oppression, anhydrous bubbles, carbonating every breathing capsule of compassionate life. Every day there is more foul-smelling hunger in men of acid rust, for the good spirits of the dipsomaniac in the diet of the most lost undefeated blind, a universal record of walking impoverished at the end of his objectivity. Adelimpia…., And Carmina; maiden of the extravagant silence is linked to the ox Xenon, master of his pumpkin ox, collects bubbling fragments from their stomachs of acid and fragmented, with unfortunate applicants to obtain him, all of them exalted before his prayers, as well as that fleece that the other possessed ox; Cricket that was grazing in the radiant spaces of the grasslands, ruminating lost ties for the good of all and being able to observe in the distance going beyond all sensitive imagination, being me Leiak, the spirit of Vernarth who looks over where he does not it does, sometimes incomprehensibly because of its purging. "

Joshua de Piedra says: “Horcondising, land of Spa, of beautification to correct your beautiful osteological inhabitant, your beautiful pro-lieutenant inhabitant, I believed that wealth would flow from my hands to finance my own poverty. Horcondising, is my nurse Luz, tracing with her blood the route of the Talami reign, everything continues without direction, the lustrín lost his paste of ruby cream and powders, of the conductor who governs their destinies in my hands ..., and it is required. Horcondising, badly and fearfully I say genuflected, here are my riches, but I swear by the most sacred, that I never thought I was so poor at the same time, in the presence of the almighty. Karmic planet, you come like bread and honey from a dazzled bee, you come to fill us with light through the horns of the cat, mounted on the back of the rooster, mounted on the roan bovine. Horcondising ... What a memory! When I was running fast through good waters and Sudpichi, I saw in line some swindlers in uncertain Faith, loudly dismantling the stunning consciousness of possessing without letting those who do not have know, and what it is to lack, what is the love of the slightest doubled second, until it brings honey and milk to the mouth of the beggar and with new clothes, around the circular saffron, the light of isolation and God's judgment on Hommo Sapiens. Baba, Vrja Ananda, I know that to ascend you have to put clean, white clothes on the wind, lavender with druid purple and stuffed on the petioles that fell on the stumpy back of the little elephant. I never got tired, I always laughed and the manly wind stretched my cheeks of purple roses, to laugh at the feminine world like a new man being born from the darkness of loneliness, in a new man, with a new life, in a deranged valley of Solitude, gaseous, ulcerative and asphaltic soil, of Horcondising, in the blaze of a fierce virtuous lantern ..., lying with its lost light on the rich and poor, entangled in resin from a hopper and a villain with feet tired from walking. As immeasurable to act I continue, although there is too much, among which nothing was ever forbidden from an ominous advance. But more awaits me, whoever wants numb oppressive anti-libertarian oppression, I will continue to ruin myself after this world, in the jaws of the rogue armchair of emptiness, with strong and pious prayer, strong and pious karmic augury to ruin the ruffian, that he holds and looks at you like a kitchen log in his dispensary. Karma comes to without and are, with are without are, with dream sounds, hallucinated sounds to realize the truth of accuracy. I have no vocabulary when I am hungry or thirsty for Faith or equanimity, but rather, more than all the power of the high massif to fall on the despotic ripper and cutthroat, accursed beings of the night darkness! I decree worse evil than all the bad curses to which it provokes by a glance, and stuns you like an ant in the fragrant countryside. Karma, baba nam kevalam, anti-karmic, to anyone who doubles your life, to **** you more than three times, without falling into the arms of Forgione or a Buddhist Monk tired of getting tired, self-love and improper Karma from now on everyone and all who with their deeds and gaze invade them with disloyal flatteries and evils, the true triumph of Truth and Equality so that it is equal to all resigned, looking less like the worldly offering of goodness, but rather bad at last of counts. Francesco, are you coming right...? Here I wait for you, low-cut I will also get in line to be supplanted. My story will be vital and oppressive, full of capital, anti-charitable because I have never been able to understand it. I know that powerful affiliations will come, and I will be in your lap, and all those who process your consummation and death will fall, a bad omen of their whim like any piece. Force the spirit that outside is evil, always yours, Master...! I am going, I am going, each one who looks at me as his prey will have to govern and feed him, for better or for worse, and otherwise, I will be eternally burned along with all his progeny in the Horcondising. "


So Joshua spoke when making a wooden whistle. He cut his index finger with transparent grease, and saw a viscous bleeding liquid fall into the constant complaint, from each head of frustrated saboteurs, and mercilessly squandered by those who aim at you every day to finish you and beg your entire eternal psychic substance, without Numbers or paternal letters, Vernarth and the Hexagonal Birthright, attended with great enthusiasm this regression, knowing that he was in their nation and domains where their mythological beings accompanied them beyond all vision. They all remain normal; doing everyday things, but Vernarth's voice accompanied them from an altar in a vivid voice and with great clarity in the voice that expressed their pilgrimage.

Vernath says with an infernal tone: “The Horcondising rack runs out of people benches, to attend to their requests the sky has become convex and unattended, to walk down the fragile plateau crouching down, weightless trees rub their bruised roots on the scrubbed Living spirits over each parlor, each present master along with his present consort seemed like perfect strangers, each separated by name in their new and uncertain divided destiny. All by putting the hand where the ulcer makes intermittent unhealthy purulence, on whether we are and correspond what we are or those who manage to have in this twisted life without a surplus, and what would it be if we had surplus ...? Rows of speakers and auditors are compressed, trying to want to be understood, but the words are keys and conclaves of high architecture sifted, of the wild despair in which we are beasts escaping from an eternal safari of thunder and cannon, vaping fumaroles of ancestry and drinking Bourbon to the thunder of the steely ***** on the orphanage of looming. Here Fray Andresito unfolds his body, you know it here is…! Right here he aimed at the weakest, the strongest, perhaps being a slave. What a difficult word to define... This cell without adjoining limits, called Atman, or female soul engendering another female soul, in the arms of the sorcerer, whose packaging and the serial knot would be made by a novice, who did not know if it was tightly closed, so as not to know if it would be fine in the future and reopen it with light in Gandhi's eyes, or by a child in care appointments without his arms to approach his mother cradle, perhaps being ivy or algae that sway his breaths vain…, from the flickering of the dotted throbbing of the Sun in flight through the lost night of the altarpiece, putting silicone because it comes out of the picture. Today a being was born in the arms of the almighty, a being anointed in the placenta of golden liquid and augrum, filling everyone and everyone leaving them speechless… ”.

Its ancestry of eternal way comes from mutual funds, equivalent prices in promoting values, on falls and rises, in franc growth, and various financial statements to beat dividends. The lines of people obediently migrated to the Horcondising, they never thought that they would be a great family, all in chains of multicolored and endless shapes, all in the high mountain at more than three thousand meters, and no higher, because in this Age again life, I cannot count more than thousands, in which the hundreds stay up late every day on this streetcar called the alliance. Branches of salty puree and ammonite soups with coriander, in the transversal valleys, to the southeast, with verve envelopes and their large moral excess on their backs and their hope of leaving all their treasures on the sidelines, before entering the muddy showers. when swarming with turbulent regrets and losing all ego money, highlighting a new epidermis, with an unprotected but opulent soul. Each being devoid of the word and thought, was trans walking through the heavenly ranks, with buzzing in their hearing aids attenuated and a smelly shanghai screeching, nothing would be left to pour into the channels near the almighty, the one who picked them up from the ground satin in some small sulfur coins and bleeding hollow, nothing will charge to their accounts or in their excess pride, only white skin in dark skin, and dark turning to dawn gray dermis, for exclusiveness, only lost in the jungle of ignorance shipwrecked tundra. Grandmother Adelimpia cleaned with sweepers and pine feather dusters, wormwood trunk and molle, and with the ceiling. My Anne, swept the flat floor with her wedding dress, years ago seasoned ..., Hugh and Bernardolipo laced some wines pigeonholed in the devil's segment, so as not to lose track of the high hill, which could be seen falling on the witnesses of the fallen Calvary Before the world ends for many, but not for the Huasos. The auction continued; Anne still had an end-of-the-world fever, with so many degrees…. Don't worry Anne, a Mapu aboriginal boy; the one with the sinister ..., brings a good herb to improve you, it is said that he comes from less to more, with his face like a beautiful farm landscape, stream water that quiets fevers and ills of charm. Have faith, says the elder Sylph Angelita Huenuman, reborn to Anne…: “The bark of that oak will be demolished and crumbled to cover you from evil and worse evil charm. Tomorrow on the high snow-covered peak, sweet cakes will fall steamed with berries and flavored almonds in your Word, which always deserves to smile to the limit, you are the omega star stele that will know how to smile, you will see it just like your Joshua de Piedra; which is an eternal incense of ruse, you will be dressed as a coco channel between aromas of eternity like spring light and first communion, between your snowy new garland of sap and in which you are always like a web-footed dreamy bird, moving away from the Aculeo lagoon, away from the giant hermit emerging from a nucleus of water and its pool, sobbing on each step of lake light of ascending sketch and of a lagoon avoiding new despised damage "
Alpha Day, Alpha Night, Omega Day Omega Night
Seán Mac Falls Apr 2013
The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.
Bruce Adams Sep 2023
A text for five voices.

Note on text: For formatting reasons, this should be read on a full screen, or in landscape mode on a mobile.

i. Blank copy

I look out of the window at
the houses as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                    or glide past
                                                the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
House after house after house after house
                                                dit-dit-dit­-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the houses
                                  as they pass.
It’s 10 o’clock when I arrive at my office
and no-one is there yet
and I turn on my computer.
I sort of just
                sit there
                for quite a long time. Then
at 10.37 I print a document I’ve been working on
and I pick up my mug and I go to the kitchen where the printer is
and I put the kettle on.
I log on to the printer but instead of pressing
                                                Print
  ­                                              I press
                                                        Cop­y
                                                        instead­.
The machine whirs
The light goes
                        across
And out comes this copy this
        Copy of
                nothing.
I pick it up from the cradle.
It’s warm.
And I hold it and I look at it and I think:
                                                This is a copy
                                                                ­of nothing.
And since it is no longer an empty piece of paper but now
                                                             ­   something more
                                                            ­    something
                                                   ­                                imbued
I don’t put it back in the paper tray
and I don’t put it in the bin.
I carry it carefully with my tea back
to my office and put it
                                Carefully
                    ­                            on my desk.
I close the door.
Usually when I arrive and no-one is there I keep the door open for a bit.
It’s my way of letting people know I’m here.
It also helps me get a sense of what’s going on in the building
which students are there and what they’re doing
and once I’ve got a decent enough idea
or if there’s someone around I don’t really feel like helping
                                                         ­                           I close the door.
Today it is quiet.
It is a Friday.
                     Fridays are quiet.
It is the seventh of March.
It is 2014.
              I’m looking out of the window as I recall
              without much interest
              that yesterday was my father’s sixty-first birthday.
The buses tick past the window.
Without really thinking I
roll down the blind
                            Until the window is as blank as my copy of
                                                              ­                                           nothing.
I look at it but I
don’t
              sit
                     down
                                   yet.
My computer makes a noise and a purple box
tells me I have a meeting in thirty minutes.
                                                        ­Oh shut up I tell it
                                                        out loud.
Now I realise that I never did print my document
so I go back to the printer and the file is still there waiting for me
and I press Print All
                     and out it comes
and the piece of paper looks
Obnoxious
                     scrawled over in heavy black print
                     and ****** coloured columns
                                                                ­      and smelling
                                                        ­              Smelling of toner.
For someone who claims to be conscious of the environment I
print excessively. But only at work.
It’s the combination of it being free
                                          (or at least, no cost to me)
and that feeling you get when you
swipe
your access card to log in to the printer
and tap the screen dit-dit-dit to choose this or that.
It feels
       to me
              like being a grown-up.
It’s intoxicating.
I don’t want to go to the meeting
and I’m suddenly annoyed by this ***** piece of paper
which
       I ***** up
                     and throw in the bin.
**** it.
Not even in the recycling.
**** it.
Who cares.
              What difference could it possibly make
              whether I throw this piece of paper
                                                 which I will now have to print again
              in the black part of the bin for waste
              or the green part of the bin for recycling.
I go back to my computer and press Print but
this time
I keep clicking my mouse
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          Yeah.
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
And I go back to the printer and the name of the document comes up on the built-in screen
dozens and dozens of times
the same name of the same document
and I tap
              Print All.
And as the machine spits out clone after clone I
mutter under my breath:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
Then out loud:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
And as I throw them in the bin and go back for more I think
I’m going to buy a car. Yeah.
And I’m going to drive my car to work and
when I finish work I’m going to drive it
to a big supermarket
                            a hypermarket
                            a super hyper mega market
where I will buy and buy and buy,
and on my way home I will buy petrol to put in my car
       And I will go on holiday
       I will book all those last minute deals on the internet
       And go to Turkey or Lanzarote or Corfu for a hundred
                                                         ­      or a couple of hundred
                                                         ­      pounds, every month maybe
And I’ll fly there on a big plane.
I’ll soar over the ocean on a big plane.
And when I come back
I’ll soar over all those people outside Stansted Airport
All those
people
With banners
Moaning and complaining and protesting
Banners saying things like
                                   I don’t know
                                                 “Down with planes”
And as the flight attendant smiles goodbye I’ll think
yeah.
       Down with planes.
                                   And I’ll drive my car home and I will
                                   stop
                                   worrying
                                   about
                                   everything.
I go back to my office.
I retrieve one copy of my document from the bin and I
put it on top of my copy of nothing.
Whereas before the document offended me
                            now I have difficulty
                            telling the difference between the two.
My colleague arrives and she tells me about the motorway.
She’s always telling me about the motorway.
I think about my car I’m going to buy and I
think about being on the motorway.
I think about being on that part of the M25
where the planes are so low you duck as they thunder over you
and they come
                     in rapid succession
                                          dit dit dit
                                                        rapid­ eye movement
                                                        ­radar.
I think about being stuck in traffic there and the air
thick with exhaust fumes
mixing with the air around Heathrow
and all those tons of jet fuel from the planes zooming over
Blink and you miss them
                                   but always another follows.
I go to my meeting.
I realise that I have picked up my blank copy
along with the document I printed for the meeting.
Someone says they wish I’d printed more than one copy
as it turns out it would be useful for everyone to have one
and I laugh in their face without explaining myself.
                                                         ­             I make notes on it.
                                                             ­         My copy of nothing.
                                                        ­              Without really realising
                                                       ­               I’ve scribbled notes on it
but as I look at my spidery black biro handwriting
and think with some real despair about how I have mindlessly
destroyed
something pure
the notes
              disappear
                                int­o the paper
and it is clean again.



ii. Ringing sea

My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough.
What I’m looking at
my rational brain tells me
is a video of two people having ***.
I have seen that before.
But what I’m actually watching is a video of
my husband
                     having ***
                                          with another woman.
And my eyes don’t refresh the image fast enough
So I keep seeing his face.
The whole picture melts away and
I just see his face
                     Which belongs to me.
                                          It’s my face. I – own it.
                                                        It’s my- my- my-
                                                        And it freezes there
just his face is all I can see then the video continues for a
split second then freezes again
                                   His face
                                   His face
                                   His face       It’s him
                                                        It’s him
                                                        It’s him.
I stop the video and I put the phone down on the table
and I breathe very deeply and
every time I blink, between every saccade
there is his face
                            a face I know intimately
                                                      ­         and it’s looking away from me.
I turn on the television. It is Saturday.
He is flying back from Asia on Tuesday. I have until then to
                                                              ­        what?
The sound and light from the television
flicker over me
And I sort of just empty,
Quietly, like a balloon disappearing into the sky.
I don’t know what I’m going to do but
for now that’s
fine.
The brown armchair swallows me up
and I cry for two hours without really noticing.
The cookery programme I’m not watching finishes and I think
the news is about to come on so I turn off the TV
and I put on my shoes
and I go down the stairs and out of the house
and I get in my car.
It’s raining and I just sit there.
Without starting the engine I flick on the windscreen wipers:
                                                         ­      Dit / dit.
                                                            ­   Dit \ dit.
                                                            ­   Dit / dit.
It takes less than three seconds for them to pass
from one side of the windscreen to the other.
And I get this feeling this
unexplainable feeling
that I want to crawl inside that moment
when the wipers are moving from one side of the screen
                                                          ­                   to the other.
I flip down the sun shield and look at myself in the mirror.
There are two lipsticks in the glove compartment.
I pick the darker one
                            and apply it
                                                 carefully
                                                       ­          sensually.
I start the car.
West London ebbs away to the motorway
My car is silver and in the rain it feels invisible
I don’t know where I’m going
                                I follow words on signposts I recognise the shape of
                                without really reading them
and I keep driving
I let my eyes come away from the road and
watch the fields and trees tick past like cells of film
and I look at the cars on the other carriageway
and I notice they’re all silver like mine
                                                        (onl­y mine is invisible)
and I duck as a Boeing 777 soars over near the M4 interchange
and let myself scream soundlessly under the roar of its engines.
I wonder where it came from.
                                          I think about the people on board.
I think about their mobile phones and
all the ******* there must be on them
and I realise
how many videos there must be in the world
of people having ***.
I take the M23 past Gatwick Airport
                                          the motorway ends but I keep driving
until finally I come to the sea.
No-one is here because it’s March and it’s raining.
I have always loved the sea.
Not sailing or swimming or surfing
Just being near it, for me it’s
                                   a spiritual experience.
I’ll lie on the stones and gaze at the sky for hours
but not today.
                     There are some flowers tied to a railing
                     somebody has drowned.
Presumably they never found a body to bury.
The awfulness of that strikes me like a stone.
                                                        It­’s the not knowing.
                                                        ­The lack of 100% concrete total proof.
I take my phone out of my handbag.
                                                        ­But I know now.
The shingle crunches underneath my flat shoes.
                                                        No­w I know.
The cold burns my ears and the wind picks up as I get closer to the water
the tide slips serpentine up the stones
white-edged
                     beckoning me.
Without realising I’ve slipped
                                                 out of
                                                            my­ shoes
but the stones do not hurt my coarse feet
and the wind
                     howling now
                                          catches me behind my knees
quickening my stride.
The spit curls around my toes.
And then I catch myself wondering
                                          whether my husband will call me or
                                          text me when he lands
and I hurl
       my phone
              into the sea.
On the drive home I listen to the radio.
The news is dominated by the Crimean conflict
and the referendum that’s coming up there.
Florence Nightingale
                            is all I can think about when they talk about Crimea.
Until recently I never even knew where it was.
At school you only learn about Florence Nightingale
                                   not the geography
                                          not the conflicts
                                                 not Ukraine’s edges so charred by
                                                               invasion and,
                                                                ­             subsequently,
                                                                ­                                  explosion.
                    ­               We live in so many war zones.
and I’m wondering what else I never learned about when
the story changes and now they are talking about a plane.
A plane is missing
                                   between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing
                                          and the blood drains out of me.
It isn’t like floating away like a balloon this time
it’s like plunging off a cliff.
And at once I see
                            with brilliant, burning clarity
                                                        m­y phone, ringing, on the sea bed
The light from the screen illuminates the stormy water but
I can’t see the name:
                                   I can’t see who’s calling.
I need to know.
I need to know it’s him.
       I drive back at twice the speed limit.
In the dark the flowers look menacing and half-dead; my
shoes fall off in the same place
But the tide is in so the whole beach looks different.
I’m up to my waist but my
top half
       is as wet
              as my bottom half
                            because the rain
                                          is torrential
                                                      ­  and I can still hear the phone ringing
                                                        b­ut I can’t see the light in the sea.
and I howl
       his name
but the wind carries it away soundlessly
       and I can’t tell if I’m
              further out
              or if the tide’s further in
                            and the ringing grows louder
                            as the current takes me powerfully by the waist and
                                                             ­         the stars rush by overhead.



iii. Acid rain

Every time I blink, between every saccade I see
a brilliant but infinitesimally brief flash of colour.
       Purple
       or green
       I think.
                     One on top of the other.
It’s hard to tell for sure because they’re so brief.
It’s like when you look at a light bulb for too long
                                                            ­   or stare directly at the sun.
I see it sometimes when I’m on my bike
or on a really big rollercoaster
                                   going downhill at 100 miles an hour
                                   the wind blasting through me
                                   the screams whirling through the air.
But I’m not on a rollercoaster, I’m sat very still
it’s Monday afternoon and I’m at school.
I haven’t said a single word to a single person today.
I didn’t even answer my name in the register.
I feel a bit dizzy like
                                   everything is turning together
                                   but I’m on a different
                                                       ­                 axis?
I think the bell goes, I’m
not a hundred percent sure,
but I leave anyway and no-one stops me.
       Outside in the sunshine the flashes of colour are
       several thousand times brighter.
In the next lesson I slip in my earbuds and
it looks like the teacher is singing the words.
                                                 I put on the most obscene song I can find.
I must have it on too loud
because eventually she notices and
she forces me to give her the headphones. This is the first time
someone has spoken to me today
                                          it feels a bit surreal
                                                         ­      but the world stops spinning
                                                        ­       a bit.
After school I go into the supermarket on Wigmore Lane
the enormous white of it is tinged in green and purple
and all I want is to buy a drink
                            I have a feeling of exactly the kind of drink I want
                            but I can’t find the right one
                            even though the fridge must be longer than
                            the driveway of my house.
Racks of newspapers and magazines clamour for my attention
       the only real colour in this great white warehouse of a store
       red tops and blue spreads
       and green and purple and green and purple
              and green and purple…
They’re talking about that missing plane in the news
and they keep using the same phrase.
They’re talking about the people on board the missing plane
and they keep saying
                            Missing
                      ­      presumed dead.
Not dead dead. Presumed dead.
I start wondering what it’s like to be both dead and alive at the same time,
as if all the people on board that plane are like Schrödinger’s cat
              (cats)
and we won’t know whether they’re dead or alive until we find the plane
and pull it out of the sea
and look inside
                     so
                         until then
                     they’re both.
Out in the car park I count the planes as they descend onto
the runway less than a mile away.
       One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
       I figure about a hundred and eighty a plane maybe,
       which means fifteen hundred people just arrived in Luton.
Nobody comes to Luton for the scenery.
Soon they’ll be gone,
A town haunted by a ghost population of thousands an hour.
                                                 filtered onto the trains and buses
                                                 and out from the sprawling car parks
                                                 to the motorway, and
                                                 onto connecting flights back into Europe
              but none of them will stay in Luton
                                                           ­                  Missing
                                                         ­                    presumed dead.
As I bike through Luton I think it might not be so strange to be dead and alive at the same time.
I’ve lived here my whole life and the whole place
                                                           ­                         which is a *******
                                                 moves with the mundanity of machinery
                                                 like the big car factories by the airport
                                                 the lights on, the production lines rolling
                                                 but all a bit automatic and lifeless.
But in the airport, it’s different.
The air, with its artificial chill, hangs with a faint shimmer
and the people here move purposefully, and with charge
                                                          ­     excitedly
                                                       ­                      or dejectedly
                                                      ­         but not neutrally
heading for the gates where they are sealed two hundred a time into airtight tubes
like Schrödinger’s cat:
                            dead and alive in the air;
                            one or the other on the ground.
                                                         ­      My teachers say I have an
                                                              ­ “odd way of looking at things”.
I leave my bike outside without chaining it up and go into the terminal.
In a café in the check-in hall I find exactly the drink I want
and I pay £2.75 for it.
                            I look at the departure boards.
                            Edinburgh. Bonn. Marseilles.
                            A green light flashes next to each gate as it opens
                                                           ­                  green and purple
                                                          ­                   green and purple
                                                          ­                                 Missing
                                                         ­                                  presumed dead
The flashes of colour are growing brighter
every time I move my eyes a green and purple streak follows behind like a jet stream
but the bustle and activity of the airport is so much that I can’t keep my eyes still
       so they keep darting
                            this way and that
                                                 until my vision is painted over
                                                            ­                 green and purple.
The streaks roll over each other like clouds of acid rain.
       This is the final call for flight 370 to–
My bike is gone when I go back outside
The front of the terminal is a plateau of thousands upon thousands of cars
and it’s probably in one of them
                                          but I’ll never know which.
The car parks reach all the way back to the runway.
Green and purple acid rain from all the jet fuel mixed with the air
melts a hole in the fence and I slip through
moving purposefully
                            with charge
                                          across the green and purple grass
                                          scorched by a hundred thousand landings
                                          a hundred thousand people arriving in Luton
And there on the tarmac
                     glinting in the rain
                     surrounded by blinking amber
       there is my bike
       its black handlebars spread like the wings of a jet plane.
I duck as an Airbus screams in just a few feet over my head
the rush from the engine lifting the soles of my feet from the ground.
I pick up the bike and start pedalling
                                                 pedalling down the runway
                                                 pedalling towards the blinking amber.
It feels light, nimble, fast
the tyres take the asphalt with ease.
And the faster I go the lighter I feel
       the acid rain eats away at my clothes
       and they melt off my body and pool on the runway below,
                     Lighter
                            and lighter until…
                                                 The wheels lift away from the ground
                                                          ­     and in the air I am dead and alive
                                                 and maybe nobody will
                                                                ­                           ever
                                                            ­                               see me
                                                                ­                           again.



iv. Burning sky

The faster I go, the lighter I feel.
I’ve taken the night watch and the yacht
is cruising across the Indian Ocean
penetrating the black abyss like a white bullet
and the lights in the portholes send shimmering white bullet shapes
for miles across the endless ink.
                                                            ­                 What?
                     We’re not going very fast at all
                     But it feels like any minute
                                                 we might drop off the edge of the world.
I hope we do.
I feel light and dizzy and irrational
                                          and I feel aware of being
                                          light and dizzy and irrational
and I wonder if this is what going mad feels like.
Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
I
       feel like that a lot lately.
Marc is sleeping.
We didn’t speak much today.
I can’t really remember how long it’s been
       since we left Victoria but the fight
       we had there
                            in a bistro by the port we
       said things we
       said things that
                            we can’t take back.
The Seychelles were stifling.
The heat was stifling.
He was stifling.
And the people were stifling
                                   the people kept talking about pirates.
                                   They kept warning us about pirates.
                                   You’re sailing where
                                                        the­y say
                                   You must be careful
                                                        t­hey say
                                   It’s notorious
                                                       ­ they say
I have fantasies about being kidnapped by pirates.
Not stupid Johnny Depp pirates with *** and parrots, no
       Real pirates.
                     Nasty pirates.
                     With dark snarls and AK-47s.
When we were at sea off the Horn I’d see things on the horizon
Dots or lights I couldn’t make out
And I’d imagine the rifle against my neck
Their hot breath
Chains and ransoms.
                          I’d wonder how much we’d be worth.
                          If we’d make national news.
                          Would it be David Cameron to announce,
                                                       ­        regrettably,
                                                    ­           we don’t negotiate with pirates,
                          or would it be someone less important?
                          Maybe just the foreign secretary.
                          What is the worth of my life at the end of a steel barrel?
But it would only be a buoy, or a plane on the horizon,
and I would get into bed with Marc
       disappearing under the covers like a different kind of hostage.
I
              oh
                                   I
                                                 Sorry
I’m crying.
                     I don’t know when I started crying.
The thing is I don’t know if it’s me breaking the marriage
or the marriage breaking me.
I’m watching everything literally fall to pieces and for all I know
it’s me with the detonator.
And then
              everything
literally falls to pieces
                            My mug of coffee falls from my hand
                            shatters on the deck
                                                            ­and the sea rears up nightmarishly.
Above me
a long orange **** of flame
is burned into the sky.
                            No, really.
                            That’s not a metaphor.
                                                       ­        There is fire in the sky.
It’s about a mile up and a mile away.
Look.
       There.
              ****.
                            **** **** ****.
What is that?
                                   Marc!
I call for Marc.
                                   Marc!
       There is fire in the sky.

–              Katherine.

       Fire in the sky.
       Fire in the
       Fire in

–              Katherine.

       Fire

–              Katherine.

       What
              Marc, what?

–              Are you awake?

       I think so.

–              You were calling out again.

       Calling

–              Calling out. You were shouting.

       What
       where
       What time is it?
                                   Where

–              Dubai. We’re in Dubai. It’s 7.
                They delayed again while you were sleeping.

       Dubai?

–              Katy I really think you should see a doctor.

       Don’t call me that.

–              Pardon?

       Katy.
       Don’t call me that.
                                          Like

–          ­                                       Like what?

       Everything’s okay.



       Everything’s not okay.

–               There’s
                 doctors. You’re not well. You’ve been confused since,
                 well actually since before it even happened.

       You think I’ve been confused.

–              Not right.
                Not you.

       You’re **** right.

–              Forget it.

       Thank you.

–              Go back to sleep. ****.



–              Are you still seeing it?
                The plane? On fire.
                                   You’re dreaming about it, aren’t you?

       Yes.

–              It’s affecting you?

       I’m
              just
                     unhappy,
       Marc.

–              That’s not just it though is it?

       What’s that supposed to mean?

–              Something about seeing that
                                                           ­   plane has scared you.

       We don’t know it was the plane.
       The one that –

–                            No. But, right place, right time.
              They said

       Maybe.

–              It’s still a coincidence.
                It’s not

                                   What

–                                   A sign.
                                     From god.
                                     Or
                                          whatever.

     ­                                     Whatever you think it means.



                            Katherine.

       The thing I don’t know, Marc
       is if I’m more scared that it was the plane
       or that it wasn’t.



       Imagine.
       Vanishing.
       Into thin air.

–              I know.

                            No, you don’t.
       Disappearing
                            into thin air
       Or falling
                            out of it.

–              Falling.

       You can’t imagine that.

–              I can.



–              I can, Katy.
                I ******* can
                                          Imagine.
       ­         Falling.
                Disappearing.
             ­   Into thin air.

                *******
                            i­nvisible.

                 I am
                           right
                          ­          ******* here,
                                                        K­atherine.

       I see you.
       I see you Marc.
       But you’re not
                            solid.

       I’m not
                            solid.
                          ­                              See?

                           ­                             It passes
                                                          ­     right through.

       Now you see me.
                                   Now yo–



v. 2015

Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
The hotel room here in Singapore is almost identical
to the room I had in Mexico City.
The heat feels the same and it’s the same
nondescript decoration
which doesn’t really belong to any time or culture.
It gives me a headache. The neutrality of it.
As I check my messages I remember
                                                        ­       I’m not in Singapore.
I’m in Kuala Lumpur.
I haven’t been home for nearly three weeks now.
It’s ridiculously late
The IOC conference is at six thirty
              and I’ve been asleep all day.
                                   I get dressed and grab my camera
                                   and leave the hotel with a large, black coffee.
At the press call I see a man from Reuters I recognise.
       The coffee here is terrible.
I talk to him about his family
              his daughter is four now
              he’s shaved off his beard since I last saw him
              and he’s moving, he says,
                                                 near me apparently
                                                 to Southend.
                                                       ­               “London Southend” he jokes
                                                                ­      with a roll of his eye
                                                             ­         and inverted commas.
I say yeah that’s quite near me then move away to take a phone call.
Inside the press conference there are ten people at the table
       the women are all wearing identical powder blue suits which
       strikes me as idiosyncratically Asian for no good reason.
The men all wear simultaneous translation headphones
                                                      ­                but the women don’t.
I wonder if this is because they speak better English than the men
or if it just isn’t considered necessary to translate for them.
       They have given the Winter Olympics to Beijing.
              I wonder what is lost between the
              Mandarin spoken by the mayor of Beijing
              and the English spoken by the translator.
                                                     ­          The space between words.
                                                          ­     The space between looking left
                                                            ­                               and looking right.
It’s a nice atmosphere in the cool air-conditioned room.
I’m struck by how nice everyone is
       except for the British delegates
       including the man from Reuters who speculates
       that the voting was rigged.
A while later someone else calls it a “farce”.
              I get a photograph of the IOC President’s face
                                                            ­          as it falls
              and email it to my office from my seat.
Outside, the Petronas towers rise above the conference centre like
enormous empty silos.
This is my first time in Kuala Lumpur
                                          the last city I have to visit before I go home.
I get in a taxi and say the name of my hotel
                                          and the city flashes by.
I look out of the window at
the buildings as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                   or glide past
                                                        the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
Building after building
                            dit-dit-dit-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the buildings
                            as they pass.
The taxi stops and I pay seventeen ringgit and get out:
it has gone by the time I realise this is not my hotel.
I don’t know where I am but I was in the taxi long enough to know that I
am some distance
                            from the centre of the city.
I look up at the name of the hotel the driver has taken me to
and the English transliteration is very similar to the name of the hotel I am staying in.
       I go inside.
There’s a nightclub in the hotel
I order Glenfiddich
                            double,
                 ­           cut with water.
              not because I like it but
              because there’s something about scotch that feels
                                                           ­                         moneyed
              heavy amber liquid in heavy-bottomed glasses
              it helps me buy into this idea of the travelling businessman
              even though that’s a lie.
                                                        I’m just a man who takes pictures.
                                                       ­ And I want to go home.
I sit at the bar which is as long as my driveway.
I swirl my glass and watch the amber legs trickle down the sides.
A moving light above it hits the gloss black surface
with an open white like the early morning sun on my gravel
                                                          ­                   as I get into my car.
A girl from here, young enough to be my daughter, is talking to me.
She points out her friends and I half-wave, uneasily
and she asks what I’m drinking.
                                          A news alert on my phone says a piece of
                                          plane wreckage
                                          washed up
                                                        on Réunion
                                                        i­n the Indian Ocean,
                                   east of Madagascar and south of the Seychelles.
The girl seems nice. She says her name is Dhia
                                                            ­                 it means “glowing”.
She doesn’t seem to want anything,
certainly not ***;
her friends have disappeared so
                                          I dance with her.
As we dance I see something in her eyes that is at once
both young and
                     endlessly wise.
She has deep brown eyes exactly the colour of earth
and a small mouth which smiles brilliantly.
In the half-light they open up to me like pools
                                                 and I imagine
                                                         ­             swimming
                                           ­      in them.
Even though she’s only nineteen, twenty-one at most,
there is something about her that’s
                                          maternal
       ­                                   spiritual
                    ­                      nourishing.
She asks me what I’m doing in Kuala Lumpur and I tell her
I don’t know.
She asks me what I did today and I tell her I
                                                               ­              slept
                                                           ­           then took some photographs.
You’re a photographer, she says, and I shrug
then she leans into my ear and says
                                                        don’­t tell anyone.
What
       I say
and she says
              I’m a princess.
And I look into her eyes and she isn’t lying.
She says no-one is going to recognise her
but
       just in case
                            she isn’t supposed to be seen drinking.
Who would I tell
I say to her.
She grins and finishes her beer and it’s true
                                   no-one is looking at her
                                   but she’s the most magnetic person in the room.
In the taxi I say the name of my hotel extremely slowly
and the driver replies in perfect English
                                                         ­      yes sir, I know where you mean.
Kuala Lumpur ticks by in electric darkness.
I flick through the news as we drive
                                                 I see the photo I took this evening about
                                                 a dozen times
                                                 or more.
There is something bitter about the tone in all the British press when they talk about the Olympics
as if:
Beijing get to do it twice?
                                   What about us?
I think about a country with a quarter of the world’s population
and I think about the tiny little island I’ve come from
                                                        and I feel smaller than I’ve ever felt.
The aircraft wing that washed up in Réunion is from a Boeing 777,
they say.
The same type of aircraft as the one that went down last year.
The one they never found.
                            It was going from here to Beijing.
                            Last communication at 1.19am.
And it’s at
                     that
                     time
                     precisely
                                   my phone rings.
It’s my boss in London
she says the Chinese Olympic Committee
are scheduling press conferences.
                                                    ­    It looks like I’m going to Beijing.
Written 2016-2020.
Isabella Rizzo Mar 2015
I was just having a bad day for three years straight, but I'm better now,
I swear, I'm great.
I got the magic potion to take away the bad days,
Although it does put me in a little bit of a haze.
It takes away the dark parts in my brain,
It's a daily dosage that makes me just a little bit more sane.
I had to pay this witch fifty bucks an hour just to give mind a little power,
I  told her I wanted to blossom into a flower, but it wasn't possible because this darkness seemed to tower.
I told her that my head was fogged and I could barely see,
I'd toss and turn at night while my mind was screaming at me.
Now the screams are hushed and my thoughts are a little bit less rushed, but I still have feelings of my life being a bust.
I told her that when I consumed calories at night I had to purge them afterward to fight,
I just wanted to feel some might.
But when my teeth began to yellow that's when my feelings turned into jello,
And I couldn't put my thoughts into words because every time I tried it hurt.
So when that witch gave me that magic pill it gave me a slight thrill,
because I thought, finally, I wouldn't feel so ill.
And maybe now my life wouldn't keep spiraling downhill.
I was told that this pill was magic,
It would help me understand that my life isn't really all that tragic,
but now I just feel so plastic.
Instead of moving upward I'm on a plateau,
the days go by completely too slow.
And instead of just feeling so sad all the time, I'm feeling this numbness inside of my mind,
And I can stare at a wall for hours on end, all of my feelings just seem to blend.
Maybe I just need to make a friend?
Do you think you could whip up a potion for that?
Maybe then my feelings wouldn't be so splat, because I'd rather feel like crap than feel this emptiness inside my cap.
I know that I said I was better now,
but I'm not sure if that was a lie.
d Aug 2013
When all the joyful casualness faded away
& the awkwardness of unfamiliarity crept back in;

that’s when I knew,
we had reached an eternal plateau.

All I could pray for was that there wasn’t going to be a backslide.
Trevor Gates Jul 2013
The Obsidian Theater XV.



Welcome to my nightmare
Welcome to my show
The audience awaits your praise
And your stage light glow

My, my, it’s been too long.

[Walks across stage; light follows. Curtains pulled]

Where have all of you been?

[Audience laughter]

Oh, forgive me, that’s not the right question
To ask

Where have we been?

That’s more fitting


Where


Sipping Champagne with Bing Crosby among undead poets
With a casket made for two
“Brother can you spare a dime?”
He said,
“Lift me from this tribal paradigm.”

And

For many days I wandered the wilderness in the threads of
My carnivalesque grandfather
Ripping and tearing in the clinging trees
Hands of branches
Groping and pulling the garments off my body

In the middle of the Serbian wilderness was The Manor
Draped in dead trees and blackened ice

The valet stood at the gate in prime condition
Waiting

But for who?

“Why, you sir.” He told me, guiding me through the entrance, to the front door.

And inside were wonders to be held by the
muster of my weakened eyes

Ladybug dancers tossing their legs up to *****-tonk fanfare
Swirling magicians pulling rabbits and naked men from the shadows

Allegorical usurpers coated in a filmy residue of
Herzog dreams
And
Lynch fantasies

Perpetuated by my longing
My lost soul
My parched thirst
My growling stomach
My throbbing manhood
My forgotten affliction
And severed diction

A man slivering into the skin of a woman
A Lady donning the cowl of a man

Skins shivering with afterglow effects

And dreams woven by old witches with intestinal thread

It was eloquent darkness in the belly of the manor
Fit for a King of Devilish glamor

Brothers of Grimm
And
Sisters of Mercy

Told from the pages

From the books

Of frozen Gods
And forgotten Titans

These are the happenings of a great story
Fiction or not
You may tell it
And believe what you will

It doesn’t matter as long as it is strongly retold

From the lips of another

The wandering bard
Or
The pub crawling drunkard
To
The enamored *****
And
Bookworm report
It needs
To be shared
To others
Even impaired
To celebrate
Gasp
Giggle
Scare
Love
Soothe
Disrupt

My impeccable, capable
Hands-down sensational
Tour de force
Troupe
A la mode


Cherries on top of whipped screams and drinks
Juggling heads and animals over coals of fire
Give them a show
Give them a feat
Give them something to remember
Give them something to crawl back to
Give them a performance that will beckon the applause
For years to come
Show your audience
And readers love
And
Sorrow
The likes of which
Cannot be equaled
Or even compared to
Lesser
Congregations
Of silly-billy pud muffins
And their
Street-smart guff

Let the institution of your mind become a corporal being
Teasing and pleasing those eager and waiting eyes
Staring up at you with
Wanting
Drooling
Wanting
Begging
Wanting
Affections

Don’t you want to see a show worth seeing?

[Audience cheers; laughs and applauds]

Watch a movie worth seeing?

Read a book worth reading?

How do you come by this?

Create what you’ve always wanted to see, read, watch and say.

Those performers
Once peasants and beggars

Stood up from the grime and ridicule of the trash and rose above the
Plateau
To conquer their hearts

Look and see!

Those people balancing and singing with fluffy dogs
Magicians and warlocks summoning spirits to dance among stars
Poets on stage reading mixed words to nodding peers
Directors blocking actors on stage with unparalleled enthusiasm
All these creatures of the ubiquitous night
Gather and produce
The whim of their lives

But many of these masters
These

Unknowing

Are

The bus boys cleaning up after your meal
The mother alone at home with the kids
The unsociable man on the park bench
The frigid girl in the corner of the classroom
The nervous boy wandering the circus
The stern librarian in Brooklyn
The blogger in the studio apartment
The hard working abroad student on a farm
The homeless man cradling a dying dog
The celebrity chasing photographer
The undergraduate tutor
The ignored substitute teacher
The bullied Muslim student
The underprivileged south side coach
The Turkish cab driver


More and more

These warrior poets and victims to racial slurs
Commonwealth bigotry
Ghetto endorsements
Faulty criticisms

From hosting countries

And sheltered, over-privileged, disillusioned

Politicians

Bureaucrats

Religious figures

Dogs of War

Angels of retribution

Demons of industry

Ghosts of the hours and days past
To sympathize and cry for the world
Thrown into invisible and subtle chaos
Like an ocean littered with the blades of
Broken glass
The sludge toxic waste mixed in molten lava over craters of dead bodies
Or
The sand dust covering the thousands of bodies in the earth

So



What teams won the World Series?
Which movie star dates who?
What’s the latest trending diet?
What new pop sensation has been manufactured?
What new insult can talk show hosts say?
Is there someone new to blame for all the bad things in the world?

What are the things the media has told you?
And
The things it hasn’t?

It’s a
Bitter sweet symphony

A
Crucible for the faceless grins
Pointing fingers everywhere but themselves


Let’s leave the worries to our kids
I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
Allow me to thank my esteemed colleagues: Meryl Streep’s skeleton, Freddie Mercury’s ghost, Doc Hammer, George C. Scott, Doctor Emmett Brown, Marty McFly, Easter Eggs, internet message board administrators, Robert Redford, Aviator sunglasses, Don Cheadle, The Coen Brothers, the Dukes of Hazzard, Billy *** Thorton, Hammerfall, Saxon, Klaxons, Lou Reed, Spike Jonze, Michael Gondry, Guts, Son Goku, Tinkerball ***** force, the Die Nasties, The Iron Maidens, Judas Priestess, The Runaways
And many more I simply don’t have time to mention.

Now Get out of my theater.
The Pope and statues

Confounded old age, I keep looking on a black screen, on a plateau of nothingness
Except for the ridiculous idea, I ought to travel to Rome and see the statues
I once wrote about, and perhaps meet the Pope, and we can talk about this and that.
I must meet him now before the Vatican machinery brainwash him into a Pope
wearing glorious robes, a person of empty rituals.
If I get to meet him, he could dress up in a smart Italian suit, and we could go for
a walk and look at the statues together.
Drink beer and eat Brazilian sausages with Italian flare; tell him a secret so deep
he may think me deluded.
Dear brother Frances, your name is Erik, we are twins, shared the same womb,
but I was kidnapped by the Roma people and grew up in poverty the underdog
in our democratic world; and you are the bishop of Rome.
There will be a stunned silence, either he accepts my story and embrace me
or he calls the Swiss guards; whichever he will not forget me and the statues.
Louis Brown Nov 2010
It's up to me to build the future
With committment in my heart
Being honest with my neighbors
Is the point where I must start
A life must  always aim for truth
No hypocrisy prevail
With no blemish in my make up
If I aim for less I fail
Integrity to one another
Puts a deeper trust in place
To uphold that awesome value
Is to lift the human race
I must always stand on honor
And be forthright to the bone
Always strive to be less selfish
Where no evil turns me wrong
There will be  a better future
On that loftier plateau
God will bless me for the wisdom
If I choose that course to grow
When I truly ply those basics
There's a difference I can make
I must be a good example.....
Our third planet is at stake
Copyright Louis Brown
1

he looks into her eyes she into his stretching between is thread fragile as string of pearls if either moves too fast pulls too hard strand will snap pearls slip away who dares to charm rattlesnake take it by nape tie ends wear it as necklace love is reckless

2

first time he saw her he lost control heart spun like pinwheel  forgot what he know light burst into dungeon of dreary soul oasis in middle of desert bowl

3

he wishes there was way to get her to want him catch her heart pervade her fantasies he wonders if ever there was such power potion some ancient incantation arouse wild pangs of desire must be some secret place within her tendon to be touched causing her to tremble swoon lie down call out for him

4

i surrender i’m yours take me teach me shape me to be what you want need let me be your main squeeze most valuable player devoted confidante perfect compliment constant companion wildest fantasy life long lover volley your serve adjust to your moods make mistakes into masterpieces race you home to see who starts dinner do anything for you alone fulfill me trust believe in you we belong to each other give you confidence support inspire delight you lay great fortunes at your feet some men choose gold some men choose God i choose you may they find our bodies embraced together still warm after thousand years oh my love you are there like wild swan dragging wing across water take me as jumping fish take me as howling wolf take me as grizzly bear take me as wild stallion

5

it is hidden between them feeling around stirring nearer exploring along secret paths in early morning dew he scouts ahead skimming lightly over landscape finding area discerning scent following trail growing aroused stalking in grassy protrusion leaping across gushing stream treading in undergrowth probing spreading open folded wrap deeper into denseness she is slower drowsy yet playful coming up step by step lingering at each plateau meandering in hollow picking berries handfuls rolling them in her palms putting them in basket humming to herself she hears wolf howl she runs basket swinging jiggling berries dropping some her rhythms drifts across meadow root pulls slams him hard he prods in frenzy entwined as branches knot quiver knot forest spins around him over his head dizzy he collapses she shivers tingles whispers laid out in flowery moss resting beside tree basket spilled crushed berries all around her
Tess Elaine Sep 2012
There once was a prince,
as kind as can be.
Whenever he would write,
he’d sit beneath the large willow tree.

On one rainy day,
he walked to the willow
and rested his head
on the moss, like a pillow.

The tree kept him dry
but the breeze made him shiver.
The puddles turned to ponds
and his lip began to quiver.

The water rose as it rained
so he climbed up the tree.
Hoping the pond would dry
and he’d finally be free.

He then heard a voice
that rose from below,
A mermaid called up to him,
telling him to let go.

He still clutched the branch
but he asked of her plan.
She said that she could help him
swim to dry land.

So the prince dove into the pond,
quickly beginning to drown;
he flailed and kicked
as the mermaid swam down.

She grabbed on his arm
and pulled him up to get air.
Then she dove right back down
and swam who-knows-where.

The whole way he was gasping
and clinging to her hand.
When she finally stopped swimming
they were right next to land.

He thanked his sweet savior
asking if they’d meet again.
She looked at him sadly and said,
“I’d love to, but when?”

“My sweet little prince,”
The mermaid did say,
“if you grew a tail,
we’d be together everyday!”

“But my dear angle of the sea,”
the confused prince did reply,
“How would I do that?
I wouldn’t know how to try.”

Then the girl of the water
began to explain
a flower that bloomed
in a wide open plain.

It shines in the day
and glows in the night.
It can make men live in water,
all it takes is one bite.

And so the young prince
went on a journey to the field
where this magical flower
is said to be concealed.

After three days of travel
he is finally there.
But no flower he found
could even compare.

That night, he could not sleep,
instead he wandered the plateau.
When, at that moment,
A flower began to glow.

He pulled it from the ground,
running back to the mermaid
Another three days later,
he found her body half-decayed.

“I waited for you, my prince,”
the note by her bones read,
“I’ll wait for you here, love,
until I am dead.”

While he had traveled,
the water had dried
and under his willow,
his savior had died.
Mike Essig Apr 2015
Marching**

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.

— The End —