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Andrew Rueter Jun 2017
My sympathy depleted
My friendships deleted
I have been defeated
By truths that hit so hard
I was decleated
By intense hatred deep-seeded
My history was repeated

I guess a three-armed mutant
Has no need for a right hand man
Until his leprosy riddled hands rot off
When he needs them the most
But his ***** limbs had been pretty useless for a while
Since he had lost feeling in them
He had to do a biopsy on his life
After the inaccurate results of the smear test
He took antibiotics to rid himself of the bacteria
But that didn't heal the nerve damage
He yearned for the rhetoric to be less inflammatory
So he took steroids
Transforming the ***** into an ogre
With no semblance of humanity
...Except for the people he devours
Their patience is delicious
He eats that first
Their pity is a delicacy
A rare treat
Their disgust tastes sour
But it's a feast
His cannibalism may seem callous
But the non-mutant lepers take Thalidomide
And get pregnant
Their kids come out defected
With an intense, deep-seeded hatred for three-armed mutants
And lepers and ogres look exactly the same
To those of another species
The Darkness Jun 2012
Its about to get ugly up in here.

I'm talking
Worlds ugliest
Thalidomide baby
contest winner
Ugly.

I'm talking
Michael Jacksons
rotten *** corpse
falling apart
in the coffin
Ugly.

I'm talking
pasty ***
fat and sweaty
old white dude
in a Cambodian brothel
****** little girls
until he runs out of money
Ugly.

Its going to get ugly...

Standby.
clinton rebukes israel over east jerusalem homes obama nasa plans catastrophic say moon astronauts alaska wolves **** woman's teacher out jogging ireland frees 3 cartoonist plot suspects sarkozy and brown attack u.s. over protectionism pope benedict's former diocese rehoused abuser priest chile puts quake damage at $30bn winnie denies interview criticizing nelson mandela climate change makes birds shrink in north america dr rowan williams is honored for work on russia weymouth ridgeway skeletons scandinavian vikings live bangladesh v england michael schumacher pledges to raise game in bahrain can the u.s. vice-president broker middle east peace? sarkozy's party faces socialist drubbing remote indian state set for development new york dust victims split on 9/11 deal  german tells of childhood abuse by catholic priest a step closer to the american dream? lehman: how $50bn was buried in london ba strike union announces dates in march china's oil demand increase astonishing says iea china warns google to comply with censorship laws net clash for web police projects hsbc admits huge swiss bank data theft phil spector ****** conviction appealed sir david jason to voice cbbc animation climate change 'makes birds shrink' in north america thalidomide effect mystery solved blood pressure fluctuations warning sign for stroke winnie denies interview criticizing nelson mandela mogadishu residents told to leave somali capital same-*** couples marry in mexico city by mistake i clicked on wrong button and lost everything
When Van Gogh cut off his ear
It was for reassurance that the rest of him could disappear

That illusion of ownership that nerves create
Should have faded with each baby tooth I lost
It didn't though, contrariwise I worried I would extend
Into roads or trees and then feel the tire's friction or the elm's blight

Empathy is a ***** of its own
I pray I never wake up with a Siamese twin
I'd have to care, lest we lapse into mutual sadomasochism
That hilarious territory of bored lovers

The Thalidomide kids might get a kick
out of feeling new arms attached to other people
but that's the exception that proves the rule

After the Vietnam war, some men believed Agent Orange
Had followed them home, alive in newly discovered nerves
Now what odd god must be behind that ****!

Mengele often awoke from dreams sweating and sure
That his patients would learn a trick to generate biological anesthetics
He needed the feedback of sound to really understand the human body
“Prayer or pleading” he used to say with a wink to his bartender after work

Sometimes I worry that my nervous system
Might have a Mengelian agenda of its own

That I am woven into a potential torture chamber seems clear
but then I remember that I can always pull the tooth or cut off the ear
I walk
this Earth
like a ghost
hand in hand
with shadows
and spectres
the yellow seas
eaten by industry
are the solution
to my thirst
the apples of
Thalidomide trees
the only answer
to my hollowed
belly hunger
I dare not stray
from the
undercity
of drug
stors and
disease
It is my home, now
as much as
anywhere is
I fester like
a great root,
planted, anchored, growing
from the dirt
of misery
René Mutumé Jan 2014
(and I don’t know why we are mongrels in our heart,
but hell… Lets ask em-

Roman nose.
Broken.
pug shaped unheard of thought ******* away cos
its been awoken by high rising spirit,
but call it anything, call it the breaking of your phone
that’s replaced by another when you feel a chorus stretching
into your ***** gut when they speak, just calling…

blown away from thalidomide arms of private growths
death from long ago neither feminine nor masculine
posture of slumped morning brighter than split stare
of obliterated ***** hit gently hard and lit
my heart knows: my sheets are a poor excuse
for where the room suffers our corporeal rage
in our calming conversation

within country stare of effortless green, some:
knowingness, perceives madness from outside
its woven hands so accepted in the city as it cries,
and walks together; shed upon from all parts of its locking voice
a union within the falling parts, of islandeque love
when rising to hard abyss pardoned when nurtured,
fate, a toothless, small, finishing chew

smothered out from car fume; Buddha can’t speak anymore
birds can’t speak anymore, even the locksmiths have words
without need; i stop in a graffieted place, my veins happy
to just sense: home: proto – home, before…

with whom there is a consensus in the lewdness, rabid as 6pm
is; opened by wild cooked silk until it is made, and
ready, I’m shattered, my bloodiness has no body, none,
worth me jacking it all in, or talking, about new governments,
ours-

explosives walking through arcs of dimmed light
intoxicants highlighted in fading windows, brimming and walled open
beneath my feet, i would run, i would strip
open, the exhausted car parts
yelling, but the impermanence, of us, is the grey ebb
and flow, of engines colouring, this city, impassable
by our actions- full of Bachiacic choice, stopped at the
gate dead, when anything wants to speak inside our home,
apart from your voice, and mine

and i did not know, that cities were so moveable and
pleasurable, and that madness is always correct when animals cling
in agreement; Karma of infinite silence between them when needed-
rebearing low glance into imploding music
down past eye, oesophagus, stomach gently reseeding
hands of movement, dust spokes of haphazard drivers
like the proof in the wetness of the most lifelike dreams that
humanise the raven infancy of the winters blood

insight baked by the sun’s finally accepted sea
in clay, where we must adore what we create from our hands,
and adore the cinders of its coldness as things that can
be anything with any touch; the holograms choice in emotion
the: ‘I’:

only a background chorus
of floating crickets when we whisper, torture moons losing there grip amongst
the unsolid shapes, passing, us, as we walk through,
universal… ‘axioms’, summiting, to a peak, near the soul, when raw, but never there;
we must speak about ‘all or nothing’, in a different way, instead
as the pattern is completed by: ‘immersion’, two servants of the
womb, a judge, and a convict, and the jury broke and sprinkled
across the horizon where we walked like my grandfathers ashes

we don’t gibe, the rest, if we get there
we won’t look across the heard and pick out the
leprositic ways that are outside of our own, there is no
pride, there is no ‘knowledge’ of pride, there’s only
a proto-home, there’s unsaid gasp of what we shall eat
from the flawless flow of the weeks hard work, where we asked for no
prairie, hell, we didn’t even ask for a ticket flattened into a card
that’ll pay for it all
but hell, that’s ok

it’s a while till pay day,
but hey, i’m happier than a slave being paid in the rip-tide of several
monks and maidens authoring where i’m sold
in awesome gloom- one finds themselves a violin
even if they can’t play, even if, they have no limbs
most times, those too
go, or jitter when you don’t want them too in the middle
of the gala
i have already trusted them to you, however;
so, i’m sold, and happy.

As our grave has no flowers yet.

And we are the flowers upon that grave.

And we are the owl howling.

At that grave.

And we are the grave eaters.

And the only.

Animals.

Who can stop them.
Ken Pepiton Dec 2020
Real world, real war
in the spirit realm, breathing
leaven disemboweled,
yes yes yes
gaseous we beasties,
mobs
and congregating misinfirmed
conforming to the mould,
black and green
up up up morpheme ob
serve
some body from the edge in

piercing ever-with points of
everish means to ends,

tat-too too you, Dr. Joyce Brothers,
my boy's
real TV Glenda,
good witch of the west, who goaded us
past understanding
Thalidomide,

when we cried, for Miss Sherri's baby,
as in my future then, my daughter
Natalie, would cry, for baby
Jessica, who really did
fall into a well…

--- same size well head as we had at 120 Oak
--- I just noticed, meandering past
         wondering if I cried, when my baby sister,
             Peggy, died, in late '49? -- no, '50.
Cancer, of the sort fallout causes, we later learned.

Obtuse, to use the oft idle word
to mean to-ward or
a-gain-st
t'use the expression for compression, squeezing

water from a stone,
breaking marrow from the bone, listen
to the fire,
feel the story keep us warm,
long nights,
with only little dancing candle flames,
to emphasize the phases -- moons,
and moons, mensal mental clockish

I will if you will go go go rhythms
of the falling rain,
swishing wishes to know…

will you still love me,
tomorrow?
Free readers serve free poems and both get their just...
desserts first, deserts, then desserts again, as the mind begins to wander.
Deeded Mine Singular Default Mode To...

Communicate (temporarily,
     strictly and hypothetically)
     merely allowing me to burble
essentially rendering, limiting,
     and fixing me tubby nonverbal,

where frustration ensued -
     inducing passivity, asper myself
     shrugging shoulders in resignation
     **** sitter ring thy fate
     nsync with that of a gerbil?

Thus codifying, con
     fining, and consigning
     stricture to a sorry lot
perhaps finding me
     envying fun
     Gus of ergot,

which organism at least participates
     in a pro active life cycle,
     though one may say,
     said organism doth rot.

Now...all Joe King aside,
an attempt will be made tried
though daunted to cogitate beside
Ritch ching deep inside
     and remain on - ride
ding the straight and true
     so please dont chide
restricting me to bide

with guise of seriousness,
     when aye decide
did to complete on
     par tragedy thalidomide

wrought, yet this poem, though belied
and bedeviled pondering
     how Yukon not induce tongue re:
     totally tubularly restrained,
     sans tubby unable to talk
     plus afflicted with autism,
     hence guide
did through extreme effort

     pretending, thus
     to feign being denied
critical skill to chat
     with a snap allied
(NOT with van knit tee),
     but dead seriousness try
ying with futility hypothetically
     impossible to imagine tubby

     accursed without means to speak
     compounded by autism,
     an immeasurable frustration
     must mount inside,
viz unfortunate behavioral demeanor,
     nonetheless I cried
inside when the limp deceased body of
     six year old

     Maddox Ritch – already died,
drowned mainly supposedly,
     when dashing ahead,
     he didst play hide
with his father (Ian Ritch),

     while the special needs child
     (unknowingly) both spent
     final hours together
     bonding at Rankin
     Lake Park in Gastonia
     within North Carolina.
I would have it
More United
Than divided
If I could
Reignite a revolution
From the test of time
Withstood
In this unrest of mine
No Palestine
Awoken to
The genocide
Need still attest its
Battled tested
Children of thalidomide
To such administrative tasks,
Some feckless
Court of nation’s asks
So kindly
Deafened world
To hear
The sound of greedy leaders
Clear
Beyond the echo chamber
Breaches
How these parasitic
Leeches
Reap and keep us all
Addicted
On forever war’s
Enlisted
From one soldier ant
Who trod
In workers’ steps
As well
As God’s
My face is the front gate
of a rotting town

people sweeping
through streets
like a Plague
that kills with
disproportionates

my eyes the ticket-men
who check scraps of
yellowed paper for
numbers, ripping
of corners for their
pocket

my ears hum
with the sound of
Thalidomide bees,
collecting nectar
from dying flowers

I can smell scattered
chemicals and poverty,
children without shoes
and old ladies who
knit with rheumatic
fingers

I keep my mouth shut
to stop the spread of this
war

I let my head fall forward
sometimes, or shake

but

I will not open my lips
for anyone
Back in '71, when I was pregnant with my first child, I went for a long desperate cross-country run through Prussian territory. Waving my arms like a folle, dodging the crottes of maudits corbeaux flustered from the heaps of corpses left over by Napoleon III’s second-last stand, trying to catch the eye of the franc-tireurs, searching for Zündnadelgewehr  in the grenade pits.

In ‘46, just before bringing forth what remains of my second child, I was sitting in a prototype grey Panzer taking *** shots at a couple of charred hibakujumoku (the ******* eternal gingko) when I felt her chewing at my innards. Needlessly and in spite of my best intentions, my strict upbringing and the “Manual”, which I'd almost learnt off by heart, I leapt up off the soiled wicker seat, banged my head on the ****** periscope handle and pulled the red ripcord.

Later, I imagined her breastfeeding on what was described as “the flesh of my withered gland”; I watched her little nails squeezing the calico pythons squirming in my camouflage maternity flack jacket and recited doggerel from the Shorter OED, the classic tales of mirth and fury.

My last, Cenozoic, carried in my matrix through the Sturm und Drang of the Quaternary glaciation, cougar-pelted and covered in flint chips, something like thalidomide finished it off (according to the magnetic resonance). God, how I loved to paint the trichinosis, the rhinitis, no, the rhinocerii (we were pre-literate, after all) on the cave walls. Augustus I called it, buried with blueberries, primitive to any distinctions.

Still, the albino alligators with the orange eyes escaped from the biosphere on the Rhine, the one right beside the nuclear reactor, twenty miles from the cave entrance. They were mutant twins. Reading Herzog's plump lips, they headed straight for the heavily guarded cave door. One paleontologist and one art historian patrolled the opening in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Dressed for duty in typical ice age fashion, long caribou ponchos draped over leopard skin undergarments, they were ready for anything: filmmakers, epistemologists and brutal English; with their laptop PCs, flip phones and clipboards, they were avant-garde obscurantists. They didn't stand a chance, standing there by the door hole, waiting for their cameos.

— The End —