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Third Mate Third Aug 2014
this time different,
the crafting, the words knitted,
care taken, no quips or easy rhymes,
metaphors few, but the stitching is yet
rhythmic, disciplined,
beholden to its construct
~~~
yesterday,
spoke of the more and the ever less,
and the alpha seas restorative,
today,
the ****** quick and the ever still

the beating of jumpsuit orange fabric, wind-whipped,
musical homage to the terrifying
silence of a battlefield,
your utility belt,
body parts and soul silences,
a composition of what was
and what will now never be

you were there
you are there

witness-combatant,
no denying the voyeured carnage
of a human self destructing,
or being destructed in a way
**turned you on,
worse, temptingly familiar

the horror meets you, it recognizes, locates
its place within that is stored close by,
where you keep it just close enough to surface
for quick retrieval

you postulate, pose, clap hands to heads,
make groanings awful, rethinking fearful pictures

I don't believe in free will
I don't believe in free
I don't believe in will

there is good and there is no good
there is the quick and the still
the still comes fast and stays longer,
the quick lasts longer, the obvious now
always seconds of too long,
all implausibly undenied and factually reversed

I hang myself crudely,
my throat slit quick,
and the still images that follows
everlasting and unerasable,
no matter how quickly,
how often temples hard squeezed

I see the images,
the quick and the still
they won't let go of me

text me that you know,
exactly what I mean,
know what I know
night unkind Jun 2020
a truism, an overused, abused entrée to the first poem of the day,
they always are night-born, from a slow passage of dark to a light-triggering recording event, a 6 hr. poem period, gestation, incantation

and a sort of relief, temporary

many the miles voyeured, a mentaller feasting sated,
simple rhymes to covet, rephrasing the complexities of
our other lives, where our sub-selfs exclaim, out loud!
this is me unchained, this is me chained, this is...someone


besotted by the rottenness of honesty, once air-exposed,
eyes fixed, no away-turntable, all that well hidden spoilage
in dreams reverent, forsaken, my ashamed-ness, is willing
taken to the scaffold, and by daylight first, perceived, conceived


we may examine the half of me, nay, the all of me, open-face
secrets secreted in my nighttime travelogue, of crimes, revelations,
insects, drownings, strawberry moons, all the fraying edges of a
linen covering, my cadaver pouch of well used words


inscribed thus:

”human born from a sac, and to earth returned, in sackcloth

— The End —