there is a darkness
that the silver song
of soft illusion lights
in symbolic equivalents
of images real
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
the breakage
at the jagged edges of the world
and lays hostage to impersonation
that resembles fragments
of smashed oval shaped mirrors
reflecting pieces of broken
brown terracotta soldiers
and causes the eyes to hurt
with a watched inner holocaust
of disturbing coloured detonations,
implosively autonomous
given to a deceived departure
a departure from reality
given by the advocacy
of ideological rationalism  
that sees three kings
with blood on their crowns
in amplified convulsions
call mustre for
disturbance, disorder, destruction
and death
as blood stains the Balkan streets
and all emotional impulse
is volatilized
and a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy
stalks the land
where sustaining minds
are subject to a brutal insensitivity
that dazzles on the edge of a spiral vertigo
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
a vocabulary of incoherence
like the rancid stains of *****
that inhabit the jagged edges of the world

She might laugh if she read this
at the flat little version of her
that lives in my mind.
She may laugh
at my comparison of her
to a hideous sea spider
but hear me out
it could be touching.

David Foster Wallace wrote:
“Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience
we do not have direct access
to anyone or anything’s pain but our own;
and even just the principles
by which we can infer that others experience pain
and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain
involve hard-core philosophy—
metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.”

"[Lobsters] do have an exquisite tactile sense,
one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs
that protrude through their carapace.
Although encased
in what seems a solid, impenetrable armour,
the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without
as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.”

and so

“We lift lobsters out of the bag
or whatever retail container they came home in
…whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen.
However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance,
it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water."

As much as I cannot comprehend the pain
of the exquisitely tactile lobster
in a *** of boiling water,
I wonder if I could
walk a mile in a lobster’s 8 minuscule shoes
and I wonder
what it might mean or not mean to her
with her armoured yet acute exoskeleton
to be back at home with her father.

They might try to butter you up
or snap elastic bands
around your oversized claws
and use a wooden spoon
to try and nudge your thrashing, clinging arms
back into the ***,
but remember:
lobsters can live to be over 100 years old
and grow to over 20 pounds in size
which is very large for an aquatic insect
and remember that they are marine crustaceans of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws.

And DFW famously said,

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

and he's not a lobster either

the dead re-materialise by the side of the roadside
they are visible as though seen through a spotlight
it is a brutally interrogative light
that magnifies these corpses
makes them resemble the fragments
of suicidal terracotta pots
it magnifies them as symbolic equivalents
of their real image
its beam dazzles broken glass on the pavement
the breakage an impersonation of their cataclysm
causing the edges of seeing to hurt
and hearing to submerge itself
in a turquoise blue aquarium in fear
as speech sounds a primitive retreat
in its atavistic echoes of inveterate distraction
there is a disorder of blood stains on the road
where all emotional impulse is volatilised
causing a wild distillation of programmed anxiety
which in a different vocabulary becomes
a figment of somebody else's imagination
causing a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy of sound
in palpitations, dropped heartbeats, nausea, headaches
and a foul change in bowel function

Yes, she stole my thoughts*

devoured, digested and made her own
in the shortest possible time one could imagine,
made her imprint to make it a through job.
all between a stuporous sleep of my unmaking
after that frenzied mating instigated by
her  cheating instinct at its acme.

she did it quietly in the dim light
of the zero watt bulb,
after we slept together
for the first time;
it was eerie
my romanticized thoughts
were the first to
get drawn out,
a tree full of wild red blossoms,
the name of which slipped
from memory to oblivion,
migratory birds of different feathers
sitting on that tree chirping in love's sweet passion.

i woke up
when the thoughts circling
like blood in my veins were touched,
she was there prowling
with the look of a witch,
a happy one at that
how victorious she looked!
my angst has no place in her scheme of things
after that, she coughed and spat
and pretended ,IPR never was violated
When you get bitten by the
serpent called  lust,
and two ***** conjoin,
thoughts go down and hide,
one become unreasonable
and glide through moonlit sky,
stars wink, thoughts wink back,
and the stupor takes over.

yes, she stole my thoughts
how could one complain?
You need to be one or the other at a time.

Sometimes I awaken from my dreams
from that soft mindless drifting that is sleep
and I get snagged
on the subtle undercurrent of worry
a swirling feeling of fragility
the antonym of youth
when I was the captain of my soul
steering with assurance
buoyed by faith in my muscle and wit.

In the slowing pace of my days
I get snagged on remembering:
the steady increase of forgetting
the ache in my knees upon standing
the declining elasticity
of my skin and my will.
All of these hiccups  
twist me toward the scratchy edge
the bleak and chancy fog
of anxiety.

This thick arrhythmia
in the music of my day
can tempt me to get stuck
in the stupid stuporous thread of
thinking: the rest of this bad day
is a foregone conclusion
instead of this confident conviction:
It's up to me
to discover the next thing
I can create,
to open the blinds
and the windows
to ***** or stick or trick
my mind,
to wake up
and imagine
or remember how it felt:
to hold an infant
to hit a solid fly ball
to see fireworks light up the dark
to win a big jackpot
to make the perfect shot
to kiss her luscious lips
to see my first eclipse.

One other trick I can do
when I trip and fall into counting my losses
or lamenting my crosses -
is to make a gratitude list.
It always works to lift the fog
and step out of my slog
to rhyme me out of the sadness bog.

I hope I'll remember these solutions
to fear's dark and dangerous pollution
and when I think I'm too **** old
to try a thing or two
I will think of the days of being bold
and live and love me
into the new.

“MindTricking,” Copyright © 2017 by Glenn Currier
Written 5-6-17

I’ve lost count of the weeks.
Grief has made its own calendar.
The pandemic stopped what ambition started
I surrender.

4th March 2020:

My mother has died
I can't close my eyes tonight
not because I am afraid of falling asleep
but of waking up in a tomorrow
where she does not exist.
Behold, the audacity!
I never accepted night,
and still, the sun creeps up
across the jagged Tokyo skyline
ascending the tower ladder,
bouncing off windows,
pushing apart curtains
pouring in from all crevices
as the city flips up
person by person,
onto its stuporous hustle,
as if nothing happened.
-----------------------------------------

Amazing Grace:

A million poems came to hold up my heart
as it fell apart
in my mother's death
I had prepared for this moment,
but what preparations suffice,
when air is wrenched away from breath?
I could write the saddest lines,
sadder than Neruda's
but the tales of her glory
have a more engaging story
to tell.
What would she have said
when she saw herself tagged
in her obituary?
she always counted the likes
and read the comments I receive,
rejoicing momentarily,
in what, she claimed, was borrowed fame.
And now I grieve.
My frantic efforts to capture screenshots
whenever we face-timed,
so I could hoard
her presence.
Oh, bless her essence!
even though her skin-clad bones
had lost the cushion of flesh,
even though the bruit
of the fistula in her left arm terrified me
like a constant 'low-battery' signal,
when she managed to hug me, breathlessly,
that last time,
it was an exchange
of the most amazing grace:
her pain wrapped in patience,
mine in gratitude.
-----------------------------------------

Retrospecti­ve Realizations:

And suddenly,
I remember all the condolence messages I have ever written
and retrospectively fill them
with feel, only now revealed to me.
My best compassion and empathy paled in comparison
to this reality.
Death is inevitable; mortality, inescapable.
but life,
with its enticing persistence to carry on,
is cruel.
-----------------------------------------

The poem ends but the pain doesn't:

The real mourning starts
when the visitors leave
and the phone calls end
and the messages stop pouring in,
when you have to resume living
but the dead can't un-die.

Arshia.
22.4.2020

#onewritingaweek
#weekunknown

i love the music
      of rain.
  it is like you
  are nearing and
  i, behind walled silence,
  waiting
  for the sound to
  billow immenser
  until my worrisome
  body bursts
  with a certain gush
  of anticipation,
  and it is you
  in all that is the world

and when i peer through
  the window, the earth
  is soaked with grace
  as the trees are stuporous
  in their roots,
  as the flowers bow
  in acquiescence
  and the peripatetic air
  foams an amorphous figure,
  your silhouette naked in
  immersed wonder and when
  i close my eyes, only exists
  your touch and i am one
  with the world dripping in
     wanting, trilling and naked.

I am rattling, as is my proclivity

muscles tense and then collapse
limb by limb, releasing a skeletal clatter

would i hover if the gravity, of dizzying,
that makes my head swim, lightly,
floating in the ocean of stuporous emotion
thunderstruck connectivity, latched onto me
crown o’ my skull, pull my spirit from its vessel

would eye
blink shut
a rut in the road
a node
bowing, wherethrough flowing in the breeze; it bends - again - against the everything so rushing
by and i
consider it a blessing to believe in nothing
knowing only what approaches me
and seeing things so clearly
how spirit lives in me

have you ever felt the chills?
ASMR, perhaps, electric, rising
running fingertips over goosebumps

have you felt the way Earth communicates with plants?
can you bleed into the natural expanse?
you’ve been dead before, do you remember?

Summerset
By fall beget
Where'n winter comes
With much regret

Scintillating spring
What wonders you may bring
And round we turn
Cyclical burn
Upon my frail skin

In January we begin
Life anew with hopes to win
In February, thoughts of love
Carried by wings
Of harken dove

In March, we march
For luck, we do embark
Upon the journey
To April's storms
May's flourish

June brings tunes
Familial revery
Many grooms
And brides, aplenty


In July
We ask not why
For celebration
Lights the sky

August turns
An auburn red
Reminding us
Of winter's dread

September,
Such a hopeful thing
Academic inklings
And much respect for those
Now long dead

October tells
Of Christmas bells
Of gluttony
And feast wrought
Stuporous spells

November sings
Gratuitous
Chiming
Christmas bells ring

December dies
Until what lies
Beyond us, again
Rebirth implied

mania's omphalos--drags around its
umbilical cord, like a gas pump.
while belting out the first emanation.
a circle's radius clamps shut, as a
wilderness picks at its navel.
black iron gates come down on clouds,
a blizzard accumulates a spiritual reality
far more physical.
even if you're barred entrance, there's no
such thing as waiting.
just a stuporous death by holiday--like
standing across a room expanding with
space.
to a foggy window wiped clear, revealing
past lives vivid as the partitioned
properties of neighbors.
a minotaur hopping fences--suddenly
pressed against the window.
as if covered by distance, not covering it.
straight from a snowy frieze, its circuits
of agon.

I woke up from comatose
For taking a strong dose
Of some freak herbal tea

My hands were feeling cold
They looked wrinkled and old
From sleeping by the sea

Then I was told
By a lady wearing gold
That I needed new clothes
For I was shattering my teeth

She said I could get some gloves
At a warehouse down the road
And shoes for my feet

So, I drove my shopping cart
Down the Street of the Destitute
There to the old mart
To get me some mittens and boots

On the end of the road, I saw
A decrepit brick wall
Where the old market stood

It was forsaken place
Long left in disgrace
With windows of rotten wood

I walked through the parking ground
Until by the gates I found
An ancient pig as guard

I knew I was out of luck
When my vehicle got stuck
And I couldn’t run a yard

As the crinkled hog struck
I quickly tried to duck
Behind the shopping cart

The beast jumped like a goat
And it almost got my throat
But I escaped by a hair

I promptly offered him some wine
Because I knew that a swine
Would drink without a care

My gift worked out fine
The mean creature got benign
My neck it would spare

The guard got drunk as a skunk
And I quickly dived in the junk
As a stuporous pig laid on the ground

In a pile of scraps, I sunk
And amidst the waste I found
A pair of gloves for cold weather
And boots of shiny leather