"shapeshifted" poems
Dysfunctional behind closed doors
Shapeshifted the lovesick *****
She'll touch you timid, trembling hands
Scared that you arent coming back
Digs through drawers and under the sink
Searching for her missing link
A cigarette will do for now
At least it isn't puppy chow
Shameless in her actions past
Comfortable in coming last
Theres more than at the surface level
And everybody's personal hell
Clove hitch knot around her waist
She followed at a steady pace
Wrapped around your pinky finger
She mimicked all you seemed to give her
What her eyes can do to you
Back of my throat still tastes like glue
What a sullen memory
Of what that **** can do to me
She bites her nails and fingertips
Terrified that she might slip
A clumsy dance that she once knew
Of falling into penance due
Twirl your hair and crack a smile
This one's gonna take awhile
Different or the same old same old
They've paid for it in pounds of fools gold
Chasing after fading dreams
Tripping up on memories
Will she make it on her own
A concept simple, yet unknown
A reunion of the sweetest kind
Desperate to escape the time
Spirits burn an empty soul
But never can they make one whole
Echoing within her chest
"You have always been the best"
She sips and stares across the room
Shadowed by her phantom groom
Cut off from hearts nourishment
All on her own cursed to lament
The choices that she didn't make
And chances that she didn't take
A sigh inside an empty mind
A drop of water off the tide
She's buried next to clementines
Roots entangle, synchronize
What a pretty little mess
Of despondancy and tenderness
And she's still waiting underground
For a love once frolicked, love once found
Feb 25, 2018
Feb 25, 2018 at 7:39 PM UTC
Difficult to say it is a crisis of faith
Deadlock stubbornly cracked
Divide intensified with fact so backed
****** is truth, lost memory's wraith
"Who's to blame?" as so often "they" saith
Forget this daft idyllic hope, loyalty
To nothing has my life compared
And as most humans, no heartache spared
No limits to its reverence and constancy
As God shapeshifted, any form but royalty
Kings of Kings, my Makers, Lords on High
Omnipotent theories to query
Over verses I've traveled, all but Kashmiri
Reasonably these to view before bye-bye
Off I am to Pir Panjal, where I shall quake and die
Nov 23, 2015
Nov 23, 2015 at 2:14 PM UTC
I scoured countless streets
For an exorcist to rid me
Of your ghost.
The neon charlatans
Shapeshifted through
The spicy summer sweat
In forms of wasted witchery
And white hot shots of snake oil.
Each a silver bullet,
Swarming upon me as vultures
To peck the stains of yesteryear
That lingers like the promise
Of cool autumn air.
And now that all evenings have shrunk,
And all shameful charlatans revealed,
I find myself once again
Dancing with your ghost;
A man haunted.
Jan 28, 2013
Jan 28, 2013 at 1:14 AM UTC
Difficult to say it is a crisis of faith
Deadlock stubbornly cracked
Divide intensified with fact so backed
****** is truth, lost memory's wraith
"Who's to blame?" as so often "they" saith
Forget this daft idyllic hope, loyalty
To nothing has my life compared
And as most humans, no heartache spared
No limits to its reverence and constancy
As God shapeshifted, any form but royalty
Kings of Kings, my Makers, Lords on High
Omnipotent theories to query
Over verses I've traveled, all but Kashmiri
Reasonably these to view before bye-bye
Off I am to Pir Panjal, where I shall quake and die
Mar 9, 2016
Mar 9, 2016 at 9:06 AM UTC
At nineteen,
I told you my deepest darkest secret.
I thought I could rely on you to hold my hand through the pain.
Figured the fact we knew each other for so long meant we had a bond.
At nineteen, I told you he ***** me.
At nineteen, you shapeshifted.
You morphed into a volcano.
You became explosive with rage.
You told me it was my fault.
That I had to make it up to you.
At nineteen, I told you more truths.
At nineteen, you refused to believe
Or acknowledge, understand,
Or even think for a second that he tried to **** me.
I guess that was something only you were allowed to do.
But it’s all true.
The years I’ve spent walking through hell.
From both of you.
I know you said to never compare you to him.
But you’re much the same.
That’s why you were so afraid when in a sentence I spoke both your names.
Apr 9, 2022
Apr 9, 2022 at 12:31 AM UTC
I asked for the truth,
and you shapeshifted to sleuth,
crawling on your belly,
you simply misconstrue
an irrefutable, objective verity.
Tried and true, misunderstanding
what is out of your view.
Standing and demanding
but never understanding the variable,
to which not all lives,
will play out
the same way.
Apr 20, 2021
Apr 20, 2021 at 10:59 PM UTC
I am not scared of the dark anymore.
I no longer have the need to check every closet and corner of our home before I feel safe and certain that no one else is here.
Sometimes I even leave and don't bother to lock the door behind me.
And maybe I'm becoming careless. Or maybe my fears have simply shapeshifted into nameless beings; feelings rather than things.
I am afraid of losing you. I am no longer afraid of the dark, but now when the phone rings, before I even have time to think, I am worrying that it is the call. The call saying that something terrible has happened to you. The apologies. Strangers saying your name and me falling to my knees.
I am no longer compulsive about investigating the possibility of an intruder in our home, rather now I am compulsive about investigating all the possibilities in which you never make it back home to me. The thoughts fall through the cracks in my mind like quicksand and I am left standing with a blank look in my eyes. I am obsessive over every detail, I am consumed with every second of time we have left together, it's all I can think about.
And I no longer lock our front door. Maybe I am careless, or maybe I am leaving it open for the possibility that at any given moment, you might come walking through it, as nonchalantly as businessmen do at 5pm on a Tuesday. Regular, normal, routine.
Mar 6, 2018
Mar 6, 2018 at 10:10 PM UTC
i trace the fire escape diagram
i hear a nurse say my exam room in a voice that is a hushed yell
and then i shape shifted
i became the door
i heard the results
of the urinalysis
the medical staff murmur
the door that was not just a door because it was also the other side
it was the end of ever feeling normal
and then i shapeshifted
i became the insulin vial
into shaking milky contents before drawing up
an addiction to survival
of marks into fat instead of veins
of hoarding life in the glass walls
of my benevolent cage
and then i shapeshifted
i became the doctor
who saw a 13 year old girl shaking
withdrawal symptoms from high glucose
promising false hopes and faith healing
promising a cure soon
promising god's love
that would never arrive
and then i shapeshifted
i became the faulty pancreas
under attack from a faulty immune system
giving it my very last push of life
i really thought i was doing the right thing
i didn't know i could **** the girl
and then i shapeshifted
i became the floor cleaner
acrid and masking the smell of the previous occupant
pressing against the girls face, etching myself into her skin
becoming the fear in her trembling hand
and then i shapeshifted
i became my mother holding her daughter
slapping her cheek
rubbing glucose gel into her gums
willing her to live
and then i shapeshifted
and i became a thin, pale girl
who just wanted to leave the hospital
but after a diagnosis the hospital never leaves you
you return for every checkup or emergency or surgery
and you never know when the end will be but
you know will die in a hospital
i just wanted to be the that girl
who did not count out 13 and half grapes like all the other kids would never even think about
i just wanted to be the girl on the other side of the door
who didn't know the diagnosis
who knew the way out
tracing an escape by heart
May 18, 2020
May 18, 2020 at 11:21 AM UTC
while millions of eyes were on
the skies, I looked to the flat earth:
there, shadows shapeshifted, and
like scalloped creatures crawled
they were but ephemera, photon art,
of which my silhouette was a part: under
sacred penumbra, which augured other
light and darkness I will never see
Aug 22, 2017
Aug 22, 2017 at 5:48 PM UTC