Dest

I’ve seen their kind before, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve seen your kind before. It seems like that’s my career now, seeing. Seeing when sight is a privilege, eyes when I wished them away. I saw the tense ones, the calm ones. Stoic men and hearts staid by meditation. I watched them pass by and return, the crack-heads and pill-poppers, base-heads and shoplifters. The ones with faces that shrieked their misfortune, sins etched permanently into grooves of waxy skin. Through pupils pale green, bitter cold like an arctic slap, nerves severed two inches too early. The heroes, the destitute. All different, yet all seen, all same.

Bible dust

In grooved halls and chambers gleaming

We presided over the dust of times

Individual slices, a zephyr of energy, split by nose

Bushy beard and cob-webbed hair, yet kingly, royal crown of light

Bent down to feel the weight of children

The burden of knowing nothing is impossible

Our lord took his first line, stood in line, snapped

Clapped Lucifer, brothers as always, brothers of the chain

My man, exclamation, my man my nose-hairs

My burning, singed, mounds of dried

Petrified wood, mind, a steel-trap

Don’t mind the lord he’ll go around our ignorance

They say if Jesus came back today he’d throw up

If the lord returned, a change of robes would be in due

Collect-calls to organizations, let’s get some agendas straight

Nostrils caked with the juice of lovers, the juice of speed

21st century ambrosia, the finest of the fine

Ground between the breasts of thirty-three Colombian virgins

And poured directly into the nose of the lord himself

Angel’s dust

Membranes pulsate, undulate, languid lemurs leaping

Profess the lord profess

Oh lord, the king of foreign cabins, good-will servant

The bread of all the Earth weighs not the poundage of your speech

All the words, the possibility

Aeons of memory and infinite knowledge, the labor and reward

Served only to a God

Capable of saying anything

And he asked for seconds

Even the lord can appreciate cocaine

Dreaming

Whether we weather the storm

Or conform to the norm

It’s uniform

The decisions and provisions

They feed the hunger strikes

And visions of the weaker men

Die in the cradle, choked and when

A spirit falls, wings break too

Tied to down to earth by problem glue

Icarus, he knew it too

When dreams fly too high they crash and burn

But without dreams how can we learn?

To imagine is to love in thinking

That life is not just endless sinking

Hope transcends the prison walls

Mistakes made early, choices, falls

Dreams outweigh deepest sin

Portray the grace that lies within

The souls of men, weak and weary

Without dreams are rendered bleary

Life and death, two terms, too vague

In lying helpless can’t relate

The struggle of wings to escape time

In spacial terms, of rap and rhyme

The words provide the means to see

In dreaming we are truly free

the well

I see it now in their dead eyes. In the prying of cold, hard fingers. Disillusionment sits on the throne and we bow down weekly. I knew a musician who tried to escape it. Science, reason, and progress he trumpeted every evening over cigars and glass upon glass of fetid wine. Yes, his notes would travel and move our souls, but it was the movement of a corpse in a river. We were impassive. Our greater senses lifted high into the sky but we were oblivious to the pleasure. Damn the fools that kept their spirits. Damn the well.

Monster

I tensed. Frantic men looked around at other frantic men and we all exhaled a collective breath of relief. It was over, but only later did I realize I left something behind in the war. It was over, but so was I. It was the first few shots that changed most of us. You could see it in our eyes as we struck down men. Wide eyes, dumbstruck faces. We had the expressions of torn souls, ripped between the love of our country and the hate of our leaders. I wished so many times I had ran away with Stagnowski. The field marshal brought back his body days later, bitten by wolves and bloated rats, but at least he died a human. We will die as monsters.

Masks

I thought I saw the sun today

But it couldn’t have been, the sun went away

The light died as the body-bags filled

God ran away as the blood of youth spilled

Eager to pull the trigger, they didn’t figure

That with each cut to the skin of a child

Humanity’s armor was chinked

Severely, it appears that wearily

We divine the process but it’s too heavy

To understand, liters of blood stain the white sand

Figurative streets without mark or name

Bono tries to save but it’s all in vain

Open the window to the sight of children slain

I just hope they wake up where the souls have no stains

Criminal acts, disease marks the murder

Crimes so harsh they don’t have a word for

What was done, ribs showing, innocence dead and gone

It’s bitter, brutal, grim how we see the world

But what’s worse is society deserves its reputation

Fit for degradation, it suits the situation

Allegations of stimulation, fallacies of truth, it’s makeshift

Left with a stub of humiliation, indignation at your cosmic placement

It’s over, the leaves have fallen, songs are written

Go back home, but your old life isn’t fittin’

Butter on too much bread, hope it doesn’t last

Can’t go through life wearing a gilded mask

Soul

Why is the voice of the youth dead

Broken, once jovial

It lingers on blasphemy

A shadow draped on magnificence

Translucent, redolent of death

Her wailing echoes and I feel the madness

It edges forth, it writhes in front of me

A burlesque of lunacy

Why do the chords of madness quake

The trembling unceasing

Tones, hollow, her soul shudders

I can hear her dying

Fluttering towards the cliff of insanity

In the white-washed rooms of early graves

Of infants felled by mental rot

Hers is the lost generation

And just as the arms and legs of countrymen

Amputated to feed a machination of war

Her heart is detached, no feeling, numb to the finer things

Hers are the blunt nuances, the faint turn of phrase

That makes one wonder, is our purpose to toil

I cleaved and cleaved into her

A breathless sigh of sinew

And I found no soul

No word or clue

LCD

Light beams of horror reign supreme

They deign it deemed, it means to scheme

And we believe it so, without divine knowledge

Yet we claim we know, brows furrowed

To the chained ego, profess a hypnotic

Solution to disillusion, column of profusion

World of confusion, ball of translucence

Corruption meant to hide but it’s revealed to amuse him

Paper and pen in hand to uncover the truth

Vistas of lies, bile rots the fresh tooth

Immediately, media free, Collegiate search

Of what went wrong, three hours into the program

Two shots in the dark, expectations damned

A dosage of prozac to stimulate your mind

A hit of mary-jane to help you unwind

Addiction to the drugs that twist and bind

Is really dependance on the system that finds

Weakness in the hearts of men, choke-hold

On your family and friends, insurance for the worst

When we lost all hope and expectations are terse

Realistic, the voodoo of LCD, plugged in

Blind to reality, You don’t need your family

You just need the latest DVD, but see

That isn’t me, I can’t hold up to that standard

It only takes one, a chink in the armor

One murmur, one last word

Archaic

I’m muddled. The final bastion is broken. Even then it’s not poetic. No soliloquy to lay me down. No maiden to brush my hair and apply scents. I’m alone with the candles. Ashen wicks on pale towers of phosphorescence. I am the tower, the last barrier. The divots and rivulets reflect madness. Brewed by primitive cravings, the lunacy lingered and clutched tight, a desperate beast of knowledge. Hollow thoughts in a bruised mind. For weeks the only sound is the scratching and skittering of rats. This, and the shrieks. But they are my own screams, not of terror but of lack of company. A scream is a rock thrown to test company. A bellow proves just how alone one truly is. Who am I fucking kidding, though? This act, this charade of sophistication. Vigils held at moonlight only serve to show my arrogance. Fuck parchment.

Separate

Decapitation was the beginning, and boy was it wonderful. We all stood around her waiting in anticipation, like dogs nipping expectantly at the heels of their master. A whimper here, a whimper there, nothing a good piece of scotch couldn’t handle and we were off. Off as in to say we were really on, but headless to say we enjoyed ourselves. Rather five-star I’d put it. She lolled around for a while, wag-wag and what not and we all had it rather joyous watching her head tumble around here and there. Eventually one of us has the nerve to jingle around with it and what it started to bite at him, later we figured it was the reflexes in her snapped neurons but it seemed ectoplasmic at the time. Really just splendid in that hovel. Of course her burnt body stumbled around for a little searching for itself in the few last moment of movements and that had us going off again. Laughing like a bunch of African hyenas staring at a vulture with a snapped neck except noffin’ was attached to this here one. Wonderful night, that was.

It was prim and proper, to be perfectly clear. See we wasn’t in the business of making a slop, and the lady, taking a few hours to really start a smell, well we got her out of there to find a suitable burial or burning. Pots, tin to be certain, and bags of linen right, we snatched them up and began the slicing. It was a regular butcher-fest with the daggers and shivs going in un-natural unison. A hive-mind of flesh, really wonderful. Well, sooner or later we took what we could from the larder, had the woman in carry-able bits and was out of the place, after requisatory cleaning and detoxifying of the scents. Couldn’t go out of our way to leave a redolent home in the middle of a settlement, even through the girders and rust, people had a way of smelling decomposition, must have tied back to our old instincts for eating what we could find on the plains, really just dreadful how it was.

Few snaps of the bone was all it took, really. Carried over the shoulder, stained bags and what, pals and I whistling a tune underneath the mask of din in the city. Through alleyways and dung-strewn mess we had to jaunt, but proud we was, eh. Whack of the canes and snap-of-doodles we did a number or two on the way to our own shack. Pile it up, I would say to them, and yes they would, we’d all jumble together all group-like and pose for the sky. Yes a pill of clanging, a mind-rumbling. It was cracks and bells for us fellows.