"shingles" poems
Shriveled & shrunken.
Intoxicated & drunken.
Hung over & agitated.
Mild to moderate brain activity.
Common sense & basic reason lacks mental ability.
Bad with money & squanders financial stability.
Passing a psychological mental health evaluation not quite.
Kept in a straight jacket & sedated in isolation they do spit & bite.
They go through everyone's trash day & night.
They panhandle at the street lights.
They have tempers & pick fights.
Nothing they do is legal or right.
Slobs with no jobs.
They lack work ethics.
The sight & stench of them is sick.
They're sad story is lies & tricks.
Not a truth that sticks.
They cuss & their pocked face oozes ****
Their frontal lobe is filled with dust.
About telling your teacher the truth they get homicidal & make a fuss.
They drive a piece of **** car consisting of smog & rust.
Getting arrested for 365 × 3 + 2 counts of child **** is never a bust.
Keep your children away from drunks.
Some drunks get violent, beat you & lock you on a trunk.
Most pedofiles & rapists are drinkers.
Not religious or moral thinkers.
With shingles, hpv virus, ****** & boyles.
Zero morals as hideous as an ugly *** gargoyle.
Enjoy arguing, screams & shouts.
Daily drunk driving & behind the wheel blackouts.
Feb 8, 2015
Feb 8, 2015 at 10:51 PM UTC
Her face is wrapped in snakes
Her skin shingles of mud
and when the rooster crows
she comes to save her blood.
The loss of childlike purity
it was never hers to lose.
Chained to the bed
wishing to be dead
but the man must always choose.
Apr 23, 2014
Apr 23, 2014 at 4:43 PM UTC
Brothers on the beach,
Seaside in reach,
The two amigos,
Blood brother bros,
Fraternals and kin,
Pals and companions,
Sidekicks and playmates,
Coastline siblings,
Buddies in the shingles,
A forever brother band,
Golden memories of the strand.
Nov 5, 2015
Nov 5, 2015 at 12:46 PM UTC
To have them shipped across the sea,
sitting like ornamental drops
tinsel strung around your eyes
pocketed the tree
walking down sunset avenue
reeking of bamboo stalks and water chestnuts
looking for a place to submerge your treasure
with a rattling breath do you deflate
And the Oak trunk that grows unimpeded
hanging her branches
caressing the Spaniard shingles
the clay missionary tabs
touching the stucco with a golden blade
of sunlight
cutting a thousand little strips
to hang about the face
moving a thousand miles a second
stopped in place with the quiet repose
of a yoga state
humming and shimmering
yet let me be sweet oak tree.
And I wander through the canyon boulevard
between the rocky cliffs and the endless riff
of surf-rock echoed off skate parks
and riding the PC
highway hair bedraggled and snaked into next week
lingering bonfire on the cotton shirt
plant for plant
*** for tat
seed to breed
Now dance, you and me.
Insinuation
drooling salivary tongue full
bacon
pigging out on burgers
getting red-eyes from vegans
smoking plants
murderers
We squirt,
relish on the act of dying
all things dying
choking life second by second
dying to live.
Staring at neon fins lining the gravel lot
Koi flickering beneath the celestial night
Suspended pondwater
pondering
In surfce tension
the deep mysteries of life
Tracing the snake through the winding streams
we watch atop the rooftop
Gaia
Taking in the burgeoning
Ocean of incandescent tangerine
and Peyote-light
Cacti hidden somewhere between
the quiet slumber of mindless streets
aligned by formless hands
Drinking the mescaline
air
Twisting the nightly moments
as locks of hair
I curled them, slipping, within my fingertips
tracing the long winding road of Tao
along her shoulders
Enraptured by her sensual bliss
When I finally drifted along the clouded memories
of divine rumbling eyes
she disappeared into the sky
blinking along the Jet turbines
Never meant to be mine
for more than a night
Aug 7, 2018
Aug 7, 2018 at 12:25 AM UTC
Dear Talia,
I don't want to be a tortured artist.
I don't want to be depressed and I don't want to be anxious.
Competitive sadness and disorders treated like accessories disgust me.
The world glamorizes mental illness, and I don't understand why. There is nothing romantic about being mentally ill just like how there's nothing glamorous about a broken wrist or a torn medial collateral ligament. There's nothing romantic about constantly being afraid that the world will fold in itself and **** you with it. There's nothing romantic about feeling like you could break down and cry at any moment.
This is the first piece I've written while being medicated.
I want it to be Christmas already.
The world dreams itself a halo, but can only attain horns. The halo is an illusion and the horns are an idea.
I'm due to take another Lorazepam. Would I look cool to the kids who idolize dysfunction and misinterpret pain as style, if I were to take one of these, with water and a distant glance, in front of them? Geez, to have their approval would to have everything and nothing at all.
I'm not sure why I've written as much about this as I have.
You.
It is 2:48 am and all I can think about, in this moment, is you.
I can't wait to spend Christmas with you. I can't wait to wear bad Christmas sweaters, and be the couple everyone hates, as we sing Christmas carols and spread holiday cheer.
I wrote this poem a few minutes ago. Sometime around 2:30 am. I'm not sure. I'm exhausted:
I sat on the edge of my bed, and on the edge of my life,
medicated to the point of pointlessness. Soft.
It was the nineteenth, not the twentieth,
and I wished I saw the fireworks with her fifteen days earlier.
My gasps tore the shingles off of the house.
And they hung suspended above the hole in the roof.
And God stared down into my room, as the shingles swirled skyward.
"I see you," I said, "but I don't believe in you."
I left home and ran until I was a dream that had passed itself.
I hope that was okay.
I love you.
Yours,
Joshua Haines
Jul 20, 2014
Jul 20, 2014 at 2:56 AM UTC
they disappear,
tip-toeing past bedtime,
out into the cozy darkness
protected by the full moon shadows,
and fading high school hoodies.
both carrying a blanket,
a pillow, and a future
they climb,
step-by-step,
towards their favorite hole to the sky,
next to the old brick chimney,
weathered black shingles,
and forgotten leaves from
past seasons.
they lay,
hand-in-hand,
whispering valuable nonsense
and counting the asterisks,
until they slowly fall asleep
only minutes before the sun
begins to rise in the east.
Jan 4, 2010
Jan 4, 2010 at 7:36 PM UTC
Listerine fountains are falling,
breaking through the roof,
shingles like helicopter blades,
scratching up my face.
Your mouth is making violent motions
and I can see mirages between your teeth.
It took me a long time to master,
but I can't here the news on repeat;
I don't want to anymore.
I don't know what you thought
mismatched socks would accomplish,
but those mixed with an heated face
sorta make my scull feel like
marzipan.
5, 4, 3, frozen in the moment,
right before a scream.
2, my iPod crumbles in hand,
just like the game I always lose.
1...one, one, one...
I blocked that out too.
Jan 29, 2015
Jan 29, 2015 at 9:32 PM UTC
Sitting in this dusty old attic
listening to the shingles flapping in the wind
I flip through a dog-eared book from my childhood.
As I skip through the pages,
I look up and notice the fine inlaid
carpentry work of an old chest.
Going over, leaving prints on the dusty floor,
I lift the lid. With reptilian slowness
a lazy fat spider edges away.
Inside this trove of ancient treasure,
magnificent finds of days gone by.
Mementos of a honeymoon, a parachute jump.
Gramma's best biscuit recipe. A photo of
Sam the hound with spittle running down his jowls.
A picture of a babe at his mother's ******
A permutation of these tucked away articles
give meaning to a life well and truly lived.
Closing the pages of these treasures I
wander away to watch my grandchildren
make memories of their own.
Sep 20, 2011
Sep 20, 2011 at 8:49 PM UTC
Boy left me feeling raw and pink, like the baby born a comma in the taxi
17 years ago. Boy left me feeling like Aunt, who didn’t know any better,
but still knew it all, and now she looks like a graveyard. When I was 14, I went
to her funeral, sat Shiva with her (my?) family, didn’t allow myself to cry, but I did.
Opened Photo Booth app. on my MacBook when I got home, because I didn’t know
what my tears looked like – I just wanted to see myself cry. I love crying,
and I love when other people cry. I think that I don’t like crying alone, but I do;
I keep people on speed dial, so that they can hear me cry. Boy used
to be on my speed dial. He and Aunt were the only ones who could
unravel my guts, but then Boy raveled them back up again. He gave me up
for the Girl with Brown Hair living in the next town over. She lives in a house
that quakes, and tilts. They say houses are like dogs. That people buy houses
that look like themselves. My house has a rich, bleeding door, and shingles
that try to bring me back to nature. I am the exception, although I do try
to bring myself back to nature. There is a forest in the back of my house –
it is brown, and deep, and swallows the monsters stuck in the squiggles
of my eyes. Last year, I went to the forest at night, and slept there. My mother
didn’t know. My father didn’t know. They’ll never know. My father
would have been okay with it, if I had asked. My father called himself
a pushover when writing his brain’s biography, and I murmured in agreement
when I read it. Or thought I read it, but I don’t know how to read properly yet.
I can’t keep characters in my head. I eat characters
for breakfast, along with Nutella. I’m 5’5”, and weigh 130 lbs., and buckle over
when I walk, because my crying weighs 50 lbs., so I push the Nutella
out of my stomach. The Nutella is in Boy’s stomach. Probably in
Girl with Brown Hair’s stomach now, too. I miss Aunt. I wish
she could eat Nutella with me. Next week, I’ll bring a jar of it to her grave,
and a camera. Cry and have a photo shoot, maybe, because I don’t know any better.
Sep 22, 2012
Sep 22, 2012 at 10:30 AM UTC
LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles
over our house and whistling a wolf song under the
eaves.
I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl
the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came.
And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was
beautiful to her and she could not understand.
A man is crossing. a big prairie, says the poem, and
nothing happens--and he goes on and on--and it's
all lonesome and empty and nobody home.
And he goes on and on--and nothing happens--and he
comes on a horse's skull, dry bones of a dead horse--
and you know more than ever it's all lonesome and
empty and nobody home.
And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows--he
fixes a proud neck and forehead toward the empty
sky and the empty land--and blows one last wonder-
cry.
And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks
off its results willy-nilly and inevitable as the snick
of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimetre
projectile,
I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts
of Manitoba and Minnesota--in the sled derby run
from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.
He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg--
the lead dog is eaten by four team mates--and the
man goes on and on--running while the other racers
ride, running while the other racers sleep--
Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle
of travel hour after hour--fighting the dogs who
dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep--
pushing on--running and walking five hundred
miles to the end of the race--almost a winner--one
toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten.
And I know why a thousand young men of the North-
west meet him in the finishing miles and yell cheers
--I know why judges of the race call him a winner
and give him a special prize even though he is a
loser.
I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding
heart amid the blizzards of five hundred miles that
one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland--and I told
the six year old girl about it.
And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles
and whistling a wolf song under the eaves, her eyes
had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful
to her and she could not understand.
2.3k
We are faults; we are despairing flaws that blemish the surface of our revolving sphere with the intent of making reparations.
We collapse entire cores of foundations and tear down freshly plastered walls with family portraits and decorative ceramic angels hanging from stainless steel nails.
We destroy entire civilizations, coating citizens in molten lava from a volcano that never overlooked them in the first place, leaving future lovers stepping over their remains unknowingly and blissfully clueless.
We are natural disasters; we tear through corn fields, bring down windmills, and rip shingles off of roofs while toddlers sleep soundly under quilted blankets.
But moonlight shoots through your veins and sun burns from the crevice of your chest and I can't help but cup it in my hands and put it in my coat pocket for safe keeping
Aug 7, 2014
Aug 7, 2014 at 8:38 PM UTC
The orange fire of morning sky
blazes through birthing branches
green with sprigs of spring.
Wrens announce their intentions
to live this day as a breeze from the west
kicks buds of oak-leaf hydrangeas toward the sky.
A grey bank of clouds fights to claim territory.
Soft pit pats, pit pat across patios, sidewalks and roof-top shingles
forewarn the burst arriving against the earth.
Rain, beloved by some
disfavored by others,
becomes relentless.
Bolts, sharp and direct,
provoke clouds to participate
in the deluge.
Rain, beloved by some
disfavored by others,
shifts gears to softness.
Rain, beloved by some
disfavored by others,
owns the day.
Apr 4, 2014
Apr 4, 2014 at 10:38 AM UTC
I only smoke
when you're around
or when I'm around you,
I don't know which is which
just that a consumption is going on
within me.
You reach down into your pocket book
and pull out a few killing sticks
hopefully,
I'll die of consumption.
That little creature
inside me,
the pink satyr,
jumps
in between my ribs,
whenever you go rummaging
in that golden shimmer of stripper's purse,
and **** out the Marlboros
with a wet-lipped,
wide-arcing
smile.
The creature,
the real me,
plays with his
satyr ****
all day
and bites his nails
and soft cuticles
until the blood runs
and pools in
little
red
pearls.
I am love-starved,
and the satyr is afraid
when he jumps
because that means you're around.
When I'm around you,
or you're around me
something smells,
possibly the iron
of the ******
left-over finger flakes.
The satyr picks up
the soggy,
spit out nails
and shingles
my heart with them.
The satyr shingles my heart
with the fear that you will leave
and that I will have no one
to consume
or be consumed by.
You are my ******
nails and cuticles.
What a ******* emo
you
make me.
I am uncomfortable,
even,
with the notion
that you have an effect
on me.
That's why I dismiss it,
with that whole
"What a ******* emo" title.
And that whole
"What a ******* emo."
last line.
Nov 22, 2011
Nov 22, 2011 at 12:15 AM UTC
You leave the apostrophes to someone else, I can't even make it in to 'im', instead I'm writing papers about the Oneida and Jonestown murders.
The television is on, the air purifier
is dying. I can hear the ***** fan belt of my laptop on the fritz or the fizzy bubbles of
The Cranberry Redbull that I'm trying.
I could be a great sport. Ya know, anything you want.
Jump to.
Make the Miso soup, clear off the kitchen table, buy brand new markers with no recent pictures drawn into their nibs.
Throw in comfy pants. I don't know what else I have to offer, a clean bath? Some books? A magazine?
The weather is exciting, we could call get Pneumonia or at least share a drink and catch Hep-C,
Put our children together to catch the gift of Shingles. A motorcycle toy for my Uritis it is better. The roses from the sweater paired with leather, leggings, and a kick *** song. Inside we can talk about his hair cut and going to California. I'm intimidated by you moreover when you tell me you can eat airplanes with only your bare hands. And even if I'm a bore, I still have Streptococcus. So seal and deliver. My cerulean goddess, with the best, thank thank you for the nightmare fever you stole from the words I wrote. And at the end of your book you don't have to cop out and fall along a crippled sky. With crippled words, verbs, and losers. Score cards of different colors. Tunics proud as the walk to the river we voted from Baptism to demon-voter. Stand and deliver, flora and fauna that threatens to eat our home.
Nov 18, 2013
Nov 18, 2013 at 3:11 AM UTC
poetry, only poetry is immune to the whole
mozart gig,
it's immune to the wizard kids,
only poetry is immune to the age old ageism
of being given a status genius so early
on in life - i mean - what sort
of feelings could little mozart have
other than demonic mischief so early on in life?
where was the emotional catastrophe?
given a. he was a son of a musical composer,
an b. he probably had a tiger mommy too
- monkeys also learn to climb trees with
as much prodigious ambition as an elder
flute player giving instructions to his son* -
less idealistic poets bite the shingles...
if poetic genius is anything like that of musical
genealogies...
it's idealistic... but after keats, shelley or hart crane...
it's still the same old cold grit regime of realism.
*you have to attack the big boys...
it's synonymous with attacking snobbery
and the historical claustrophobia
of: only a few ******* were apparent, the rest
of us were statistics.
Nov 18, 2015
Nov 18, 2015 at 1:18 PM UTC
Love Sonnet
This afternoon at the local grocer I had bought a bottle of beer
and a tin of tuna fish and I meet the daughter of the woman
I had been in love with, I had never seen her before and said
halloo like she knew me and she was as lovely as her mother
was. Her mother came and I said something flattering, they both
smiled knowingly, you can't fool a woman about love. I'm sure
her mother had told her daughter of my trips to the post office
where she worked t the time. And they have been laughing, not of
derision, but by my inability to express my love openly.
I'm telling this because when I came from hospital in December
after collapsing and had been given a pacemaker and the onset of
the shingles I was in despair both physically and mentally and
I said if I had died I would have no knowledge about this tristesse
My wife cried and I promised not to speak thus again and I would
not met the daughter of the woman I loved
Jul 25, 2015
Jul 25, 2015 at 2:54 AM UTC
The night before I killed myself I tried to sleep but couldn't. The mantle clock sounded second ticks long-handed. Loud, long ticks.
I climbed up on the roof. Sat on shingles layered in leaves I'd promised but never got around to blowing off. The neighbor's cat stared at me across the way. A look as empty and weightless as I felt. She meowed one plangent note before she left me there.
Dark mistletoe hung unused from lintels long ago. You and I we stood there not sure of what to do.
The night before I killed myself I built a fire. Fed it the notes you wrote.
Declerations of love turned to ash without protest. Your pleas were next, their ashes floating up in black and white.
Columns of supplication falling cold and grey.
You never want to see me again; I saved that one for last, just as you did.
The night before I killed myself I searched my contacts. Only a few remained and still it felt crowded, filled with intimate strangers who'd stopped calling long ago. I tried to count the people who might care, but I came up empty handed.
The night before I killed myself the moonlight spilled on lawns manicured through quiet dedication only suburbs can posess. I enjoyed it once. Now the silent solitude I sought ran screaming, chased by racing thoughts and guilt I could no longer place.
That night I tried to tell myself to live, while the last lights flickered in my eyes. Ash is what's left when the fire dies.
Sep 23, 2015
Sep 23, 2015 at 9:27 PM UTC
Crashing whitecaps peaking
A sound tsunami
Shingles glistening
Groynes mossy
Seaweed pungent in the salt filled air
The rhythms old as time
Remind us of our insignificant mortality
A marine metronome soundtracking our existence
Apr 18, 2014
Apr 18, 2014 at 11:13 AM UTC
The fisherman tells the sea
that he promises to weather its storms.
The sea tells the fisherman
that she promises to carry him
to adventurous lands
upon her leeward waves.
As for me,
I promise we will be okay
as the winds blow the shingles
off our tiny, little house.
I promise we will be okay
as we follow the maps
and navigate the roads
while the radio sings static,
our hands clasped together
at your knee.
I promise that the rain
will radiate diamonds,
that reflect the gleam of your eyes,
onto the shores,
into the sea,
onto me,
and especially onto you.
We will find hope inside the clouds.
Apr 7, 2014
Apr 7, 2014 at 1:38 AM UTC
Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes.
Homes for sandpipers-the script of their feet is on the sea shingles-they write in the morning, it is gone at noon-they write at noon, it is gone at night.
Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpiper's wire legs and feet.
1.5k
Falling asleep with a mind
full of caffeine
and fever dreams,
the wanderlust saddens you
as the hallway light slowly flickers
into tangible nonexistence.
Spirits assault your shell
of vice and cold monologue
as you dream, tapping into your
infantile fears of smoke and mirrors
and waking up with
one lifetime too many
hanging over your head.
Rain stings against shingles
sending your thoughts
hydroplaning into silence.
Thunder flashes against
the background of sirens
and missed phone calls.
The weather forecast looks grim:
Slightly cloudy, with a
one hundred percent chance
of remembering who you've been.
Anticipation...
Death's mask is a mirror,
he is us
we watch ourselves slumber
waiting for each breath.
You listen closer,
trying to find a song
within the static,
human fragility
at its finest.
Petrichor presses against
your window pane, threatening
to intrude on your atmosphere
of Viceroy smoke and mildew.
The clock ticks closer to midnight
and your vision smears like
a watercolor painting under a faucet,
slowly sliding into blankness.
Oct 5, 2012
Oct 5, 2012 at 10:45 PM UTC
Up I go tarred tower chamber, and molten bed
Scaling igneous shingles, hard lava my flight impossible
Crawling lofty ambitions in metallic heat resistant robe, slippers
Texting my last, "I love you"'s before kissing Pele's mouth
She is kindness and showers me in ashen snow
Welcomes with sulfured gas and acid rain intoxicants
Heady now, provocative bubbles glow, spit, reaching her tempting ****
Eyes pop, burst, char, sizzle, every nerve ending cauterized
Magnanimous one takes me, I evaporate in Aiiaka-noho-lani
Given to the Great Cloud Holder to be carried off
See my dreams fulfilled in droplets shimmering on rainbows
Touching down on sprouting new ground
Dec 21, 2015
Dec 21, 2015 at 10:34 AM UTC
As I laid on the roof with my back against the shingles and the guitar over my chest, I could glance out toward the right and see dashes of heat lightening rapidly setting the sky aglow for a few short moments, while I watched the last remnant of color diminish from the cloud above me.
I wondered what the cloud was seeing, it still had the warmth of the sun that i could no longer gaze upon. I watched as it slowly faded into the blackness I was in. It seemed instantaneously after the cloud disappeared into the blackness a star was there to take it's place. I began to notice the crevices in the oak tree above me, as the twilight made out it's shapes.
The only light the earth was yielding were the few stars above me that weren't blocked by clouds I could no longer see. I looked across the street and saw a dimly lit lamp post, that looked like it could have been from a mythical time, it was surrounded by branches that it's light could just reach to outlines of their vegetation.
As I breathed in, I set my head on the roof I knew to be grey but now was black, and found my gaze anchored on one small star out by itself, absent from any other form of constellation. It flickered, as if it was an aged lantern, far way in the distance, who's light was ailing to die out.
While I watched the lantern I unconsciously observed the lamp in our neighbor's house across the street present itself, once it did a man placed himself in a chair to read, while I was watching him I began to ponder about the activity in all of the other dark houses around me, all of us in boxes that we spend most of our time in. But then I was drawn back to my little isolated star, watching the ever so minuscule light glimmer, in the sea of black.
And as I watched, that weak star I had thoughts, I had thoughts of you, mainly of you. Somewhere, on this planet you were present. It's Friday, so are you out with friends, prehaps being a quarter back for a football team I don't know the name of, or on a date with a girl who's trying to make a good impression.
Then I pondered a thought, what if you were seeing something similar to what I had my eyes set upon. If you could be lying down, and looking up at sky, soaking in the atmosphere, and if you could be looking at the same solitude star I was peering into.
And then I just laid there, and could not look away, not for a moment, I was enjoying the knowledge of knowing we are both under the same sky, and you could be viewing the same star I was, and I imagined looking at you, and watching you study my favorite lonely star. And when I did, I didn't feel the night air on my legs, the marks in my hands from the guitar strings, the still damp bathing suit on my body, or the sandpaper like shingles that were beneath me. At that moment, I felt you, looking back. And that was enough.
Mar 11, 2012
Mar 11, 2012 at 9:55 PM UTC