We can all dig it.

The blush drips and dries
On a face so shocked, bitter and yet sweet
He sits in the puddle of her arm, thoughtless, cries
In face of his defeat

What feature has she that marks
The perfect form, the elegance
It assaults the senses, shakes the core
Yet in the same instant, it’s the most sweet fruit

The most prominent feature of Siren senseless
Is the way she promenades, restless
She knows the turmoil she causes, and in the face
She offers man the only embrace

He knows not, but now who does
What he wants, the illusion of tinder and bile
In a sleight of hand, she gives and retrieves
Simultaneously breaking and mending

Her voice is a call through the smoke
Piercing the fog, the grating and acrimonious fear
I hear her calling in my dreams
That sound, elegant in shape, my dear

Damn

What says the rock to a broken tree. It says nothing. For rocks don’t talk. They would sit in silence, but neither sit. They tip their hats in formality, but quickly remember they don’t carry hats. In fact, they remember they can’t carry anything. They can’t even carry conversations. The two inanimate objects who may have the most interesting viewpoints, ideologies, and one-liners are forced into silence by their own inability. Just as I am strangled into solitude by my own ineptitude. I am in a shroud of formality and indignant underhanded phrases. Damn it all.

Vulture

The vulture cries as the animals die. This vulture, you ruffian. Circle, circle. Never has an annular object been so deadly, your ring. Vulture squawk. He laughs. The scraggly-capped mad laughing bird, ingesting the dead. I’m haunted by vultures. Every turn, every avenue. Gulfs of the infinite, a million places, but the vulture stalks me. It makes one question mortality. Does the followed lion act more recklessly?
“No! I am a brave lion, a noble lion!” He roars with a shield of matted hair. But the lion is always reckless, so this doesn’t change. What changes is the expectation. Being followed by a cackling, rabble-rousing, ring-making vulture makes you wonder. When is my time? When will the vulture claim his prize, those terrifying beady eyes stark and lively, boisterous fire. The vulture plays not the sitar, but vulture sits as vulture does. Huddling in the mist, beak trembling with the drizzle drops diving. I am the vulture’s spread. The olive in the sandwich. Hooded jacket, trench-coat vulture, he finds me. Knows me. Reads me. Come, vulture. I know already what it is to die. You’ve taken those who meant the most, I thought of them as brothers. Without these brothers what am I, the brother-less, no other. Come, vulture. Pick at the flesh of a broken man. This is my last satisfaction, that I have tainted the taste. No soul so acrimonious as I could ever be nibbled with a twinkle in the eye. Die, vulture. Poison skin, the sinew torn, but I have won.

Frolic

Frolicking is a deceptively hard sport. With its guile, it’ll attempt to entice, silent and free-spirited. It is a deer-specter, haunting you with blue ethereal matter, a fright even more fearful because of its awful beckoning. Its injured wailing. The blue deer whimpers into a harshly biting breeze. I have the urge to rhyme here, but the matter is too grave. The blue deer shakes his head, for wont of a more appropriate action, all the more artifice. The little liar. A frolicking deer, the worst type of deer. Stop staring at me deer. I can tell you are saturating me with hatred. You wish me to frolic with you. To jump and dance together, to let go of all our material bonds and simply let the wind take us. But, what of us when the frolic is done? No man frolics for eternity. The blue deer may bicker, the blue deer may tug, but I can’t, we can’t. The spirit doe knows the consequence. Without the coarse curb to file it’s teeth, the demons flit out. Flit, flit. Dropping on the ground, plop, plop. Propagating primordial bile and hellish steam, they unravel wings that flutter with vibrations not of this dimension. Grimy claws clatter on the terse terrain, smacking and clutching in vain efforts to sprint and frolic themselves. But the deer demon can’t frolic, it’s too late for the deer demon. It can only destroy. It would destroy that which it loves, but it loves nothing in our realm. The blue deer was a guise, horrible and mystifying. A gateway to an unimaginable hell, barely diverting the sound of Satan impaling babes and shrieking mothers. But as they stumble and jitter, the deer demon dancers don’t emit a shriek or howl. The quiet and taciturn evil is the most base form of putrid death. It is the black pit. It is the cosmic rift engulfing whole galaxies without a sound. Death’s hand shuts eyes with a graceful sachet, the blood ballerina.

Feel

I
I feel like
I can’t feel
I feel like
I feel not
I thought I felt
But feeling fell
To foes
Does bleeding count?
The bleeding persists
I see the blood
But feel the blood?
I don’t
I feel the fear
Fear is the feeling
Of this I’m sure
Tremulous nights
Numb to all
But my heart
Numb to the world
But for my incipient antipathy
Cruel
Cruel world

Nascent

It’s the constant nagging, writhing under my skin. I can feel it pulsating, negative charges shooting through diseased nodes. Bulbous veins tremble as if to burst with the juice of a millennia’s afterbirth. The placenta of the gods squirms through me, tentacles gripping and hooks incising lines of infinite knowledge onto the inner wall of my skull. My pupils dissolve and dance in a hickory induced madness, and the walls angle backwards, providing me with a trampoline. We hop together, the crone and I, the hag uttering sibilances into the oddly human ears of her ferret-esque familiar. “Back! Hold the line!” I shriek, cliches frothing, threatening my tender dermis. What blush I divine, I hold to my chest, but alas I feel my sternum crack. An Irish woman heaves in the mountains, a nest of foliage engorging her leggings. A tin-whistle spits fumes of musical horror, beasts wake from eternal slumber, popping infantile heads out of nascent bush-babies.

Angel

A careless angel climbed into my dream
The halo grimy, the cherub struggling madly
Of what then, did the angel want?
I couldn’t tell, but angel came
Soaring, gliding, tenaciously
The angel sprinkled colors unseen
Cherub wings carried me far
A beneficial hawk in an insidious land
His sweet lips crooned into my bitter ears
Quelling the contumacious urges
I wouldn’t fight back now
No struggle against my savior
Who held me aloft
The burnt forests and fields
He carried my over the famished land
The kingdom asunder
Here now I must let you go
The angel whispered with words of honey
I couldn’t bare to be alone
But the cherub’s hands relaxed
And falling to the burned earth
I woke up in a sweat
Blanket choking a madman
The angel back to heaven
I never saw the cherub again
Never in the air by such a pinion
But in bitter death, I held some glee
To see the fairest angel of my dreams

Comrade

Oh, comrade, the work is near complete
The beading sweat on brows, terse fire
Oh comrade, I know your eyes are sore
But observe the dogs of war, released
Blue eyed comrade, it matters not
Our hands, these fingers, of what are they?
But when these limbs strike together
Oh, the force
The collective fire
A thousand torches to a fallow heart
The boon, it spreads
Comrade, the horse it plows
The beast it snarls, the tiger prowls
But to what end, do creatures toil
We seize the day
Storm the soil
Ah, comrade, knowing full you died
With hopes and dreams, yet future bleak
Your body lies in the acrimonious frost
Heart as lifeless as the Russian cold
Siberia, it claimed us all
But, comrade, the fruit is worth bearing
Comrade, you left soon before I
Yet the baton, it passed
Together we fight

Marilyn Weaver

A hastily scrawled name. Marilyn Weaver. She etched her name in ink on the front page and forgot about it. The unloved book. Its pages slowly turned yellow. Its words, unread. The teal outer shell is almost grotesque with age and spots of unknown origins. I hold the textual island of misfits in my hands. There is no wisdom here. No forgotten manual on how to achieve happiness. This book is unloved, and its contents un-spilled. The crop of new minds, un-sown. Never before or ever more will an eager, nubile scholar hold this text in his hand and ponder its meaning. It has no meaning. It is raw, putrid, chittering bile. It is the combined effort of every sickness and anathema known to man. Marilyn Weaver banished it from her mind, as did every other unfortunate soul who picked it up. Its filth and its stench are memories long wished forgotten. This book is unloved. It is my book.

Well, shoot

It’s almost funny. The last thing that’s kissed me in a month is the rain. Steel girders and lonely sidewalks. I shift the grime from foot to foot. Ashes to ashes. Bacteria squiggles in the dirt and grainy picturesque fluidity at each step. In rivulets, it jumps from angle to angle. Recompense? Please. A man sits at the corner with a board and a bag of broken dreams. I know change won’t help him. At least not the kind that gets stamped out from machines. But then again, is there another type of change? I don’t know anymore. I never did, in fact. I sit down by the man. He doesn’t even offer a second glance. What are societal quirks to a man who has constant thoughts of eating his own shit every time his stomach growls? He even scoots over. The only thing this man has left is space and he gives it to me. It doesn’t affect me. I’ve been offered plenty by strangers, but I still say thanks. Well, here we are stranger. Unknown friend. We sit together in an ancient ritual of sympathy. We break the bread of silence. No words are shared, doubtless no thoughts are common. No special bond. I get up in half an hour, having felt nothing. The only constant is the rain and the dirt. And my eyes. They remain stern.

Father

Oh father
You took it away
Took it away from me, without a thought
My father, alabaster saint
I wake up every night
I look for you
You aren’t there
I wipe my eyes, pierce the mirage
I still hear your echoes in the halls
But the man is dead
I still expect to feel your hand
Clean away the tears from my face
You, heavenly father
You, with the foundation of tempered steel
The rock
You were brushed away with the stroke of tragedy
The tremor of disease
My father was taken
I lie in the cusp of anonymity
For without my father
There is no me