Sadness clung to you like a staticky old dryer sheet

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors --
Stage curtains, a widow's frizz.
And I, love, am a pathological liar,
And my child -- look at her, face down on the floor,
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear --
Why she is schizophrenic,
Her face is red and white, a panic,
You have stuck her kittens outside your window
In a sort of cement well
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can't hear.
You say you can't stand her,
The *******'s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He's a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
His Jew-Mama guards his sweet *** like a pearl.
You have one baby, I have two.
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.

Meanwhile there's a stink of fat and baby crap.
I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
Floats our heads, two venemous opposites,
Our bones, our hair.
I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.
In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: 'Through?
Gee baby, you are rare.'
You acted, acted for the thrill.
The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
I try to keep him in,
An old pole for the lightning,
The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
The blue sparks spill,
Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!
That night the moon
Dragged its blood bag, sick
Animal
Up over the harbor lights.
And then grew normal,
Hard and apart and white.
The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
The silk grits.
A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
That opens to the sea
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back.
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted.
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and *******, blood-loving bat.
That is that. That is that.
You peer from the door,
Sad hag. 'Every woman's a *****.
I can't communicate.'

I see your cute décor
Close on you like the fist of a baby
Or an anemone, that sea
Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

We, the invisible reasons for your problems, blind ourselves to the
dismal inevitability that we will
suffocate because you refuse to stop
the pillaging of the future for the sake of your own ******* lineage being able to further itself and potentially give you a chance to again close your mind and scream as loud as you can when confronted with your own toxicity

We, the ones who humbly take the bludgeoning from your self-proclaimed pious hand, know these chains are only on your bleeding wrists and ankles.

We, the silent and the broken, know Santa Muerta by the nicknames she had in college and all accompanying wildness she brought in her wake.
We still will stroke your hair while you
throw your tantrums and wail about what is and isn't fair on your deathbeds.

We will burn the mattress and all while cheering you on on your flight into the night sky you ignored for a lifetime.

We, the servants of streaming digits and stewards of bottled stardust, will create stories about how it wasn't your fault and how you shouldn't be hated for bringing the world crashing into the excrement of wasted potential so our children know there was a choice to be made.

We, the overly polite pariahs pry laughs and love and lust and learning from looming catastrophe like Burroughs writing Naked Lunch with a glassy eyed stare that burned holes in the veil hiding the tide of partially coagulated blood and ******* that YOUR world preached as milk and honey.

We, the proof in the moldy pudding still finding time to rot, will burn tobacco fields in your honor just to dance while getting drunk on the breaths you'll never waste.

We, the lovers of questions and haters of creeds, let tears stream in the hope that they are not considered part of our body's 75 percent while fantasizing about your ghosts seeing them and the dehydration they may be in spite of and quiet your tired old yelling and shaking of fists at the clouds when overcome by the slight sadness that whispers "its too late" lovingly into your ear.

We, the lovers, the thieves, the reviled, the *******, the witches, the junkies, the ******, the reptiles and worms under the rocks society deems unusable and misshapen, will be the ones lifting the crowns off your corpses and throwing them high as graduates do when full of a hope only ever dashed by themselves.

We, the drooling monsters you vehemently deny anything besides the cramped closets or the space between bed and floor in childhood bedrooms, will be the Valkyries to descend onto the blood-choked battlefield you set aside for your souls to suffer on and offer you respite in the form of soggy bread and wildflower honey while  ravens and jackdaws bicker over the eyes and fingers of those that once showed us how to ride a bike or drunkenly beat us beneath our favorite trees or touched us in dark rooms in ways that would chase Love away from the shadow of our hearts until we finally climbed high enough to see it all as someone screaming of war and bravery while running from the sound of steel biting steal because their protectors talked so highly of honor and duty that it seemed as if it were God and Adam touching fingertips on the arched ceilings of youth. that, then was painted on the crumbling walls of abandoned houses they would secretly indulge on the forbidden fruit soaking pages of a faded **** magazines or up skirts of blushing  girls who put on their mother's prudishness until fingers pushed past
cotton and virtue alike to the warm center they both melted in.

We, the unsung and numb, walk in spirals while the complexity you rebuked as devil-born becomes the sigils of yet-to-be kingdoms bringing about golden age after golden age in the distant mists rolling over hills and valleys of memories of moments yet to coalesce into rigid experience.

We, the eyes weeping blood atop crumbling pyramids, have seen the walls you want to build in futures dissolved in the winds blowing dust over the dream-roads we skip down and how it resembles the one you built to keep your heart from breaking from the pressing mass of what you can't file away as noise or heresy or communist propaganda;
We drew throbbing ***** and dripping ***** on all the blueprints we came across and tucked them back into the secret compartments of wardrobes and roll-tops passed down through generations.

We, the keepers of the singing stones you traded for cheap concrete, will embrace the tiny souls you neglected out of ignorance to the existential snake oil pitch you broke every tooth biting down on all because the salesman reminded you of your drunk father or mother imposing their wills like you make shadow puppets dance on peeling wallpaper in the silence that ensued after they had passed out on creaky couches reeking of Lucky Strikes and spilled ***** while the shine of the staticky T.V. set covered them like the blanket no one ever put over their slumbering forms because of those infinite lists of excuses used to skirt the skirmishes of showing any kind compassion even if they alone were sole witness to it.

We, the pieces of self the deathbed "you" sent hurtling backwards through time to shine lights on the siege seething at the gates of what you stand for, are only holding those lanterns to show you that fleeing is futile and your death is just a hallway with a door that leads to the knowledge that life is not a cell to watch time morph into tally lines scratched into cold stone as if they were epitaphs for the seconds bet and lost at the roulette table crafted from any slave ship the ocean never swallowed.

We, the flames mimicking those dancing girls you longed to have squeal under the idea of your thrusting masculinity amidst the graffiti on the bathroom stalls in seedy dive-bars or the paupers playing prince you follow giggling with hope in hand like a bouquet of baby's breath and daisies for that one day they would stop and turn and smile so handsomely that your knees would shatter against one another and wedding chapels would bend down to tie tin cans to bumpers of beat up Buicks and Oldsmobiles your fathers give dowry and the crowd could watch "just married" poorly written in shaving cream on the back window grow small until it disappeared over the horizon.

We, the dreamers, are tired of sleeping and are in need of a old tree to swing from, to bury our dreams like beloved pets under, and watch as it lets its leaves fall to the hungry earth that is more patient then anyone closed eyed and humming ancient syllables beneath crooked branches could ever be.

All the trees you climbed and kicked and fell in love under have died from too many hearts around intials being carved into them or were used to make fascist pamphlets you yourself passed out at churchs mistaking the mask with bone structure or the river for the people it swept to sea.

We are laughing;
like a loving mother at her clumsiness on display in her cackling child and not like the crowds gazing at the sideshow stage as the curtains pull back and stage lights illuminating John Merrick's flesh and the intricate dissonance it lent to minds.
Minds that afforded only sips of bliss as monotonous stints on factory floors but were preached about like they were some heaven-sent golden cobblestones laid lovingly all the way
to the beach where Heimdall will one day sound his horn, one foot feeling the grit of the edge of the world and the other washed clean for the grave we will all step in.

So, all these words, all these images, all of it is intended to be a moon so all the stagnate tide pools that have forgotten their origin and the freedom they used to give form to lesser forms they forage forgetfulness from.

We, the ones beneath you on the climb to the summit of our collective potential, beg you to think of something beside yourself when taking a ****.

It is not just ******* in the wind if there isnt wind and we are right below you and dying of thirst.

It is not an inalienable right if someone else is deprived of the same.

It is not Heaven's gate if the brilliant gild has a melting point or if it remains latched to any soul's approach.

It is not "liberal *******" or a myth if whole flocks of birds fall from the sky or schools of fish wash up on beaches while people snap photographs for their feed.

It is not "god" if love dispels it like smoke hanging in the kitchens your great grandmother sat in and told you about a witch shapeshifting into dogs without heads to scare drunks stumbling home because she was a ******* racist.

It is not just food if someone's organs fail from starvation that even the worms and flies are free from.

You wave your banners and let your war-horns echo and you wear your ignorance as armor.

We, the eaters of life and death, will chisel a name into stone and pick your bones clean if you think we should march to the sounds of drums and trumpets just because you were stupid enough to think it was anything other than your masters convincing you to whip yourselves ****** because "at least God hath been kind enough to give you a purpose" or "he works in mysterious ways".

**** that.

Look at what it has brought out of the swirling sea of " all that could be" while you write the same song about how shiny and numerous the scales of the prize are.

We are not responsible for pillaging God's bounty.

We are the bounty and our emptiness and lack of foresight are in jeweled bowls at your feet, but in your hubris you believe it to be the slaves that come to wash the dirt from between your toes.

We are Death and She is the wet-nurse that will give us intimacy to fertilize our hearts by refusing us her breast but turning our heads to your silhouettes shambling off the edge of existence far off in the distance only a decade or less could be confused for.

[AS ONE VOICE WE SING/SANG/HOWL:
Lux amor potentia restituant propositum dei in terris.]

As if it were as easy as holding the hand of a dying tyrant afraid they cannot the luminous terminus while wearing your father's face as a mask to trick radiant angels or the contortions of gods reeking of struck matches by those trembling and their swirling black hearts closed to the breeze carrying leaves celebrating their liberation and caressing a cheek they were too ashamed to kiss when opportunity was their ally.

We shouldn't hate these piles of skulls all parroting the same axioms to those who only show up to add another or leave an empty bottle turned into a candle holder, wax dripped down the neck and froze before any trace of tallow could finally unite with the dirt it longs to become one with;
icicles hanging from the eaves of abandoned asylums.

This place was supposed to be alot of things but that is what lead THEM to drown in the sound of buzzing bees, birdsong, and abundance in all directions.

I suggest we stop trying to squeeze it into a shoebox we scribbled Promised Land on and just let it be the open armed paradise it inherently is.
Let it be the heart and home as well as the hostile territory because it is only ever that and what we wont find in any Oracle's Prophecy.

I'll end my rambling with a question and it's answer.

How do you turn a police station into a hospital and a schoolhouse?

Burn it to the ******* ground.

it's so strange how fear strikes
gently at first, like morphine
it dribbles through you, you bottom out.

and then when you are dry and cracked
it soaks into you like gasoline to driftwood
the sound of the birds become dull
and then you panic about your panic
because the birds see everything and you need them
when the wild beasts come
need them to listen, so you can sit still and hum--mmmmmm
dear forest, can you block the taste out of my mouth
block the sound of talk radio voices whirring through the channels
pineal staticky as a black hole, so you say
vacuum packed emotions cemented in nothing
compressed trash dumped into the same landfill
and suddenly your cup runeth over with the poisoned caviar
and you ignored that ******* caveat when you were young
the bed you make you lay in it, you dug your grave and then fought them
all the way in, i guess that deserves another personality pathology

words and pictures and angels that george carlin doesn't believe in
but i don't mind i still mostly agree with him
except quietly poking that thought to the back of my mind
to recirculate and well i don't want to forget it in too much time
but angels, there are some things you can't describe to people
that eventually make sense, and some that make you stop
before you start because, you have to see quezacoatl to believe it
and i understood after all those nights of john darnielle
soft voice meant to carry, snakes, destruction, and ripe plums

there are some little devils and some little angels
they don't need a medium, just an invitation
a little thought, blind intention, unconscious manifestation
and only then can they live
hocus pocus **** whatever,
illuminati is distraction,
these aren't legends they are presently presence
essence and breathlessness and aristocrat embezzlement
i'm not worried about the devil
i'm worried about the people who crouch to his level
leveraging him on their shoulders
parasitic loaner, bankers thirsty to sell us
everyone's just looking at miley cyrus
welcome to america, this is a ******* mess
i might overnight some toy blocks by UPS to congress
if they learn to count 1 2 3 but in millions
perhaps it'll dawn on them how much ******* debt we're in

so some nights i let the crackle overwhelm
and sink into the consciousness
and let the shadows prowl around
because pajama sam keeps demanding
not to be afraid of the dark now, for my art, for my heart
there's a world in there and sometimes you have to fall
to know what's life when you come up for air and see
this show is so debonair i can barely bare to read the latest
it's all so plasmatic, phlegm and smoke and paper
burning cities, smoke and mirrors, moving more paper
the only way to act outside the script is to stop acting
and it's the roughest road to choose
but it'll be worth it when you can actually rest in peace without dues
reality isn't real is it, blue collar is another word for slave isn't it
9 - 5 is another expression for consume, a check goes in a box
but we assume it's fair work for pay
we are each a stock, worth about as much as a tea bag
to a party of executives in hot water

and the man outside keeps screaming
something evil is hidden in the depths of the news page
slipping through slack fingered open mouthed people
somehow we're still clueless in the information age
we see it, we read it, we feel it, helpless
we sit in our desk chairs and wonder what next
and the devil sits in our ears whispering don't worry
i know what you're expecting of me
i'm coming, if that is what you all collectively believe

i turn to quezacoatl and all he will murmur
is
what are you going to do about it
the collective has power
waiting for a fateful hour like
a wave puffing up it's chest
oppressed does not mean suppressed
and politics are liar language
money is bluffing to keep us thinking we're nothing
once you've seen what hides in the dark
the light glows brighter in comparison
keeps you safe in the early hours of morning
when you listen

we are the change
we are absolutely everything

Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

The Doctor named Seuss was such a great man.
He wrote words so deftly like few others can.
In fact, to this day we honor his rhyme,
Or, I do, at least, to waste all my time.

It's odd how with frequence I get up the urge
To write tiny ditties: a poetry surge.
I'm volted to pen any number of things,
Shocking, to me, like a staticky sting.

Whenever I am s'posed to be working,
I notice that my duties I'm shirking.
Perhaps without pressure my mind is more fun,
But by the same token, I get nothing done.

Maybe I study so well that it spills
Onto my other thinking-type skills.
My mind works so hard that it often requires
More wood to fuel my thinking cap's fires.

Anyways, I'm probably ******* for my test.
I wish I could say that I studied my best,
But honesty stabs me for truth til I'm ******:
The truth is that I fail when I "study."

lately i've been having these good days
i don't have sad wet cigarette saxophone nights anymore
i watched the sun wake up six times last week
i found a blue bucket of tulips &
gave them to a bald-headed krishna girl when
she sang to me on the sidewalk

i hired a boy to hide in the foyer
& peel a fiddle if i rouse from sleep during the night
or whistle through a harmonica
if i'm wet-eyed during breakfast
i finally got rid of all the pictures you stuck
to your side of the dusty bathroom mirror
except the blissed-out polaroid of us
perched on an old oak tree limb
like a couple of soft doves versus the turreted sunset

i deleted your number because you don't call me back anyway
i stopped mailing letters to your father's house
i haven't listened to the Plantasia record
you bought me since you left
i never feel the gray heat from your
staticky hand warming my shoulder
i forgave you for the blood in my kidneys
& old smog in my mildewed vinyl lungs

i sleep under the running green vapor light
of the moon & stars instead of the frothiest pillows
rippling on an ocean of sheets & project quilts
i finally scoured the lipstick stain from my collarbone
after what seemed like two years
i forgot how your armpits smelled
i sewed all your sundresses into a shower curtain
& i never see your delicate ribcage
peaking through the streams of hot water



i hardly ever notice the noose
you left hanging in our apartment

I don’t feel very good
She says and she looks at me with those big doleful eyes and
I say
Oh yeah? What are your symptoms?
And she says I feel far away from you even when you’re next to me
And I say me too
And I’m listening to the staticky scratch of the needle at the end of the record thinking about how far from me I’ve been
And how could I have possibly been close to her when I was so distant
From the present tense
I’m tense in the present tense
And I’m sleepy because in the conditional tense I can do what I want
I want to sleep
And dream about anywhere but the present tense and my single bed with its yellow-tan sheets
And that record’s still skipping and has yet to be flipped and I’m
flipping
but externally I’m ice water
crackling on my wobbly coffee table singing me to sleep so I can dream about something else again
something like meaningless ***
because meaningless *** feels good
in the present tense
and I’m present tense
I’m present tense and future tense and conditionally tense and
I just can’t bring myself to flip that record
Because I lost the tracklist
And I don’t know the lyrics
And what if it’s worse than the first side
So maybe I’ll just listen to it skip
Until the skipping

Puts me



To sleep





Again

This new man has staticky ambitions;
Believes the future needs something to do
And talks to me in straight lines

The ****-flavored pears
Now littering my yard
Are only the beginning

For the sake of misdirection,
I suggest we **** Keyser Soze
But he's stuck on his previous observation

'I said, 'gravity's gone bad for you, girl;
Everything 'round you's up in the air.'

'Yeah', I tell him,
*'I heard you twice the first time'

we run like radios, communicating on channels of frequencies
but I’m running on a different frequency and I’m alone in the sea of static
it’s so hard to find anyone’s signal just reach out and call SOS
there’s an in-between channel that isn’t always so hard to reach-
it’s filled with jokes and happiness and we all laugh
with the same vibration
but there are days I search for the channel and the laughter just sounds like static
it’s like something’s wrong with my antenna

but we’re not radios, we’re people and we hear the beats of drums.
I hear a different beat than the rest of you
but not a special one just a mix of many songs
clumsy and too loud and full of contradictions
I twist and run and trip and fall trying to follow the beat
but it’s hard because there’s not one beat there’s thousands
and I listen to a different one every minute
they tell us find your one beat one thing to carry you through life
but I choose a new one to try and save me every week.

we’re people, flesh and blood not stone, but we all try to be marble.
we sand ourselves down into perfect statues carve off all the parts we hate
but when you carve off everything that makes you unique you start to look just like everyone else.
so keep those things. try to accept the pieces you don’t like about yourself
find a beat each day that makes you happy no matter what anyone else thinks
and don’t worry. your radio antenna isn’t broken
someday you’ll find a channel whose signal works more often than not
and on the stormy staticky days when it doesn’t
there’ll be someone to hold you so close you don’t need a signal to reach them.

She often seems confused, and pauses midway
through a task, unsure which way to go,
and drops her task to move on to another.
With hurting feet and tunnel vision, hearing
muffled, voices staticky and loud,
confusion is a sea she cannot swim.
She is an hourglass, her memory,
slow falling through the hole, and all her days
are passing through a chasm out of reach.
The old one slowly turning back to child,
needs mothering from children till she's born.

(C)2014, Christos Rigakos

A list of kisses:
We sat on the edge of the water tower and you couldn't stop staring at the ground. You asked in a small voice if I ever thought about what it would be like to jump. You only looked up when I told you I did all the time. You pressed me back onto wet concrete and we didn't say anything else for the rest of the night except for "I'm sorry"
I followed you up creaky stairs to the attic of that stupid abandoned house and we shivered until you huddled close and you made me forget about the god dammed cold with your sinner's lips.
We kissed only through staticky telephone lines.
You pulled over on a back road and we got out of the car. Your jacket was spread on the wet gravel and we watched the stars until we couldn't wait any longer. Then we kissed and I watched you instead; your eyes were closed. We stumbled to the passenger side door and squeezed together onto that tiny seat until your neck was bruised all over.
We were by the lockers on the last day of school. You missed the first time, I missed the second, but it's true when they say the third time's the charm. We didn't speak all summer.
I try not to remember your name or your face, but I remember your searing hands on my back.
We left your friends on the dock and walked along the water front, you were carrying my shoes for me and you dropped them just so you could hold my face and you stared for a long time before you kissed me like I was fragile.

Winter means cold
It means staticky hair and red noses
But it also means you and me by the fire.

I sit
in a puddle
of my own tears.

so staticky
in complete
emptiness

he reminds you of the last time you were in florida, sunscreen-white skin, hiding the damage underneath. skin like the ivory you saw on the elephant on the safari, making you think, ****, they are going to **** you for that. making you understand why.

your sleepy hands dove into his sleepy hair in that sleepy hotel plenty of other people have ****** in, loved each other in. not like this. never, anything, like this. because it wasn’t *******, not like in the movies, not like your friends talk about while you’re looking at your hands under the table, trying not to cry. you are trying to tell them how he is different, how he can carve your heart right of your chest, how you’d hand him the knife.

you try to convey the type of special he is, the kind that lives in the staticky silence after you tell your estranged father over the phone that you still love him. your knowledge of your father consists of 10 numbers you couldn’t care less about.

you dug out the box in your closet, kept for times like this, and stowed away the pieces you have left of the boy, pieces you got away with. broken rays of sunlight you captured in your bag the moment after he first kissed you, the sun breaking through his curtain because it just needed a ******* glimpse of his jawline, the slopes of his back, roadmaps you wanted to explore with him, confetti that used to be pictures of him, of his hands, thuds and melodies you made on the unfamiliar bedspread, ones that crawled into your ears when he played you his music. you couldn’t help but think of his hands, long palm-tree fingers plucking something out on the piano like he knew just how to break you. you wish he could introduce you like that to his friends, all of his friends. this is chloe. i wrote her two weeks ago. i’ve erased some parts, edited them, changed them. added in better ones.

you keep having this dream, where he is in an unfamiliar body of water in front of your florida condo. washing your sunset painting off of his back, pinks and purples and reds, too many reds, saltwater curling his hair. he’s surrounded by swimming babies, babies that don’t look a thing like you. the ocean could sweep him away, if you let it. if he lets it.

he tells you you are beautiful, tries to make sure you know that hurting still hurts when you do it yourself. you want to tell him that he is beautiful, too, but that would be too easy. he wants to tell you to take him to the most wonderful place you know of, but you don’t know where he was born. countries away, and everything else. you want to tell him to take you to the top of the tallest mountain on earth and not show you the way home. you want to say, okay, you have been inside me, now it’s my turn. crawl into his ribcage, sit on his hipbones, and make a home there.

when it’s ending, you remember the hole you dug in the beach, too close to the waves. you are used to living in the negative space. just because the tide filled it in, doesn’t mean there was never a hole there, never something missing.

when you say you love him, not like that, it’s too late. when he says he is leaving, he’s already packed. when he says goodbye, he is already so far away.

open a book and the words shoot
off the page, each letter a photon bouncing
off an orchestrated universe, illuminating
a world that wasn’t there
seconds before.  
i am in a chair,
and then –
riding a tram through 1930s Berlin,
black-and-white photos turned into
black-and-white words turned into
black-and-white as ends to a color spectrum
filling in sights and sounds and scents.
and then –
sitting at a dinner table in 1890s Ireland,
witnessing an alcohol-infused christmas
dinner go up in flames,
petty remarks and self-righteous politics
the tinder and faces like embers,
pulsing with heat,
breath stoking the fire
and then –
soaring in a flying car, london
below, the thames a
serpentine ‘s’ winding through the city, bridges
segmenting it into a divided
snake that calls on ben franklin; buildings
sprawling every which way,
swarming with lives.
and then –
i am in a chair.
the clock’s hands are
on its hips at four and seven,
scolding me. my legs are
staticky and unresponsive, on
strike at having circulation severed.
the book is shut but
the words live within me.

a picture is worth a thousand words, but
a reader lives a thousand lives.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                   Ice Storm: Darwin Needs to Re-Think His Errors

The electrics flicker off then on, all night long
Which wakes me, and my wake then wakes the dogs
Who protest and blanket-burrow even deeper
While angry sleet rattles the window panes

When the weather is foul and the power fails
We are left with a flashlight and a book
Staticky noises from the radio
A bottle of cold coffee, and our thoughts

When the night is cold and the wind is strong
One comes to understand that Darwin was wrong

KISSING THE DOT

Our new black & white
more full of snow than pictures

holding the rabbit's ears just so
(“No...no...no...YES! ! ! ! ! ! !”)

holding it aloft like 9 year old Statue of Liberty
watching with fascination as I DREAM OF JEANIE

emerges
to our chorused 'ooooOOOOO! '

Even turning it off was a thrill
the little white dot dwindling to an infinity

the electric static tingling our lips
as we kissed it goodbye

. . .a pleasurable pain.

Now, after the bus crash
lost in staticky snow

I turn the set
on off onoff

watch the little white dot
die again and again

place my lips
against the fading screen

the electric kiss
of death.

The fireflies appear in my sleep.
In black and white with a kaleidoscope scheme.
The staticky canvas such a sight to see.
With lights and forms of a parasitic scene.
I suppose it was all a dream?
I suppose when I close my eyes, I look for hope, a night that please.

My protean soul transmogrified
on the altar of your heart;
what am I now?

I've watched homes construct
themselves from our past incarnations
and burn to ash in the same rainy afternoon.

You are forever unchanging.
You are change, forever.

They are the same;
the maelstrom I would smile and sing "Come Fly With Me"
to as it ripped the nuclei of my atoms from the electron clouds that obscure them.

I am static on the television that almost sounds like Sinatra;
a murmuration of starlings unaware
of the beauty in their intricacy.

Our gestation was cut short;
the television caught fire
and the starlings lay broken on an elementary school playground.

You, to me, are the silence that
replaced the staticky Sinatra or the wailing
children that find the murmuring ceased for good
by the monkey bars and plastic slides.

You are the reason for my loss of faith
in the words gorgeous, stubborn, and coincidence.

I am contented for the moment by just knowing I breathe the same air as
the flesh straining to contain you.

When its loud, it becomes silent
When theres light, it becomes dark
When its easy, it becomes hard
When its full, it becomes empty
When theres fun, the fun ends
When theres happiness, it turns into anger
When theres joy, it turns into depression
When theres dreams, they turn into nightmares
When theres confidence, fear takes over
When theres talking, silence is overwhelming
When theres appearance, it becomes ignored
When the eyes see, it becomes blurry
When the ears listen, it becomes staticky
When breathing, it becomes breathless
When the mind is in peace, it becomes dangerous
When the heart speaks, it becomes broken
As i shut myself in and lock the door
I stay to bleed all over the floor
It was silent
It was quiet
I wanted everyone out
It hurts now
Its painful
I never accepted help
It was dangerous
It was serious
I couldnt be controlled
It was stupid
It was unexplainable
I wanted to go

Half-written poems made up her life. Fragments of concessions to feelings. All of them, deconstructions of moments that when combined, create a facet of clarity.

“I woke up in a bittersweet desperation/falling into the sun/that staticky feeling/hum of faint memories/I dreamt of you last night and it felt like torture/everyone’s reality is based on their own circumstances/With me, it will never be easy/I have a worn-down longing for a love that never was/breathe deeply for four seconds/I hope we find our way/We can’t be afraid of losing each other/something inside me felt indifferent/On the verge of collapse/I bury my feelings for you, only to dig them up later/I fall deeper and deeper/You are cruel/a million crushing breaths/We only wanted desire and knew nothing of devotion/the inability to control drives you/7 am alarm goes off wildly/buckling under pressure/My habit of looking back/always devastating/Just a reckless moment, filling me to the brim/So lovely, so tenuous/Yes, I’m a *******/how soul-shaking it would be”

Somehow, the incomplete feels more whole.

Some days silence is utterly stunning
The aspect of talking without a tongue
No mistakes made to send people running
No pointless chatter chaotically sung
And some days I wish the world would just hush
Finally, people can listen for once
Maybe we slow down, forgetting the rush
Pause the media and behold a bunce
Or maybe our world is now too far gone
Silence affixed to the staticky past
No longer do we hear the birds at dawn
But then again nobody ever asked
Whatever happened to the quietness?
It’s muffled by our own self-righteousness

I felt like i was squeezed;
Like my body was ******* itself into my bones
I felt like i was choking
Like my vocal cords had been snapped from the impact within my soul
I felt like i was weak;
Like my legs just collapsed over my feet
I felt like i was numb;
Like my skin went into a deep sleep
I felt like i couldnt move;
Like my bones turned brittle from the weakness from the cold
I felt like i was dizzy;
Like my head was spinning me around into circles
I felt like i couldnt focus;
Like my eyes kept going blurry
I felt like i couldnt hear;
Like my ears took everything in as being staticky
I felt like i couldnt breathe;
Like my lungs had been broken and my heart stopped suddenly
I felt like i could speak;
That my air had pronounced as being anxiety

It scares me sometimes
How much I love you,
That I can't get you out of my head--
But I don't want to be
Clingy, like a staticky garment that
Won't stop sticking to you...

Let me rest from you,
Let me breathe--
Not because I've stopped loving you,
But I just don't want you to leave.

Go back to your life,
Return to your loves--
I won't chase after you,
I just might give you up.

It's not that I'm leaving you,
Unless that's your wish,
I've begun to realize
It's your life that you miss.

(c) 2018 Indigo Kenna