Forest of The UnforgottenA Poem by R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe) A mix of nostalgia and horror. Forgetfulness and memory. Love and death. Loneliness, and crowds. Hate and longing. I truly made a piece that showed all of this. What a strange pride I have for it.
O Beginning (The Shape of a Guitar)
Shrieking scratching of metal-on-metal Dusts the smudged full moon And fills the charcoal sky ballooning brooms in runes of altocumulus The shrouded cowl of balaclavas’ talons Like Valkyries in the valleys of nightshade Steady brevity Spiraling vinyl of barbed wire violins The empty field stagnantly clear and motionless, taunt, unmoving in the distance Its heart not yet still, as if held in the hands of the forest The beat never reaching the ears of corn Or the eyes of potatoes Or the crowns of the trees Hearing, watching, studying every jewel upon its head As if in disarray from the world of jade ballet The forest crawling across oceans of flesh to leave its younger brother Left to parade Its fresh spade In the grave of the shade Waiting patiently scraped with this shapeless cremation aegis A pier worn away at by still water Floating splintered Making chords that ring clear in the silence deep into midnight From rusted iron strings Chaining sentence together into noisy silence Into black and white Into nothing Churning The blistered riffing of eucalyptus eclipses in the distance Driftwood hieroglyphics shapeshifting Liquid in the mirror Laughs at him The crowd leaves him He listens to himself cry Metal screaming from every orifice The broken amp of his hippocampus A lantern panting in the rain, a lamppost Of stars like scars Falling tears from the face of midnight Scratching records like an itch He lights a cigarette He mumbles lullabies (no one can hear) God doesn’t want to hear him speak He watches the simple knot of fumes smoke its way around his fingers A motorcycle on an exhausted suburban street He strums his heartstrings like a puppet on a flatline (of telephone poles) His hands and tongue must be The shape of a guitar But the words no longer fit in their hollow syllables The body of music no longer fits its strings Much as he no longer fits At all The actors leave The curtain closes The clock stills The sun falls For the final time
I Swarming phantasmagorical stories of orgies in the chlorophyll Rattling sabbatical Vatican’s of stratosphere veneers Incoherent murals of collared andromeda fondling Comets chained in wireframe refraining from hurricanes of arcanum Renegades of hazy Milky Way grazing on maelstroms Craniums of azaleas pale in comparison To the marinaded constellations And the waterlily sigil of stygian figurine’s that imitate calligraphy on willow weave Mimicking ventriloquism in the weed and linden trees That bleed simplistic synchronicities in the intimate symphonies Like willows trilling villanelles of amaryllis guillotines In the misty eclipse of pixies rippling lithium schizophrenic hemorrhages That lisp bliss in the fist(ful) of abyssal chrysalis As its bangles exsanguinate entangled and mangled in dandelion rhinestone Fissures of rivers ribbons of linen (prism slivers of) obsidian (smithereens) Schism rhythm’s imprisoned limousine of swivelling infinities Discombobulated novelties of smattering onomatopoeia dabble in the theatre Bangled stanzas of blasphemous asterisks rasp their vast capsizing lilac horizons Transmogrifying bibles of iron scythes that vilify the skylines Dreaded malevolence of maestro deciphering provocative machinations Dreadnaught clockwork mockingbirds Hurricane through glades of stained-glass chapels Baptized by pastures of pastors postulating pastels of passionate patronizing past times Acrylic basilicas of Tartarus’ Parthenon March arching martyrs of cartilage in the dearly departed artisans of parthenogenesis Walking apothecaries of a proclamation’s apotheosis propagating Apocrypha Plateau’s of porcelain prairies portrait pixie painted pantheons of plentiful pointed pentagrams Cross-eyed priests that watch the heavens blindly and Balaclavas balloon blooming congruent luminous fumes of black and blue altocumulus Boroughs and boughs on clouds and honeyed summits of umbrage Like thunderous homunculus sundering the funneled muzzled swirl of pearl underworlds Skyline xylophones whiling in the isles of Nihilism (Arboreous tomorrows born from fornicating expurgatorius) (Exploring corneas of boreal forests void in the coiling primordial foliage) (Euphoric flora of meteors collage discombobulated with haunting mantras of fauna) Swept in the waves of yesterday’s maze II A cocktail of ukuleles like grey halos swarm morning tornados of braille Trailing narrow barrows of veiled railways below clay everglades in disarray Mitochondrial ensembles entourage ambient bottomless Bog water harbours of omniscience Confidants to the darkest unstrung harp of escarpment The fingers of trees on the hands of mountains The body of the earth sprawled out across empty cemeteries of space Sofas of clouds where angels sit cross-legged (like [half] crucifixes) As they watch the aquamarine daydreams soliloquy The wreckage of ecstasy Perplexing resurrection questioning breathlessness effigies of mute screams Streaming through the evening skyline Spiralling bibles of (riptide iris and) lilac cycle through the bike path of life Charnel guardians discombobulate Armies reincarnated patron to salvation’s hatred Chiselling billions/and whittling away at the bark of Yggdrasil Chitin ichor ripe on the vines hind legs, bulbous colonies of leaves Wringing the inner circle of this earth into acrylic Lines etched into endless rivers of twine As wood moons circle with their cork strings Like schools of fish or flocks of geese Seagulls flocking together on the pretzel pencilled tree branches Their wings brushstrokes against the blank canvas skies Painted faces below that lick the sweat from each others’ brow That spit out the word of God from the church of their mouths Each a small steeple, not as tall as the trees No light reaches the tips of their shingled roofs Blind and blasphemous astronauts lassoed like Picassos Body-painting with their scars, and their tattoos, and their smile lines A starry night of the many coloured scarves Of stars that billow in the wind like rag dolls Their blood and sweat and tears are watercolour Incoherent murals stapled into the fabric of history Watch as they bend in the wind with the (umbilical) willow trees Come see the artistry of their lives Lost to the music of time Listening to the feet that patter wandering past these shells Abandoned to the wild forest, the wilderness, the rust, and the shine Watch the slit of their crusty corrosive mouths Speak The hinges of doorways shriek Opening into nothingness I came into the nothing to watch the symphony unravelling into sheet music I went into the empty to hear exhibitions of art martyred into frames of iron cartilage The empty met me there And we shared tongues and swapped words Shedding our skins until we were just bones Left behind in the forest The soundless chorus Birdcalls of silence longing to be lonely Divorced to the word of the living The words of the animated Still, in the frame of images plastered into ideas Lost frames of mind Empty skulls And nothingness pulling The brain into complacency Imitating nature’s crematorium The cemeteries of mountains laughing together, Around the campfire of a harvest moon Drinking in the light from a star-stricken sky The way it shimmered in symmetry The way it glistened promiscuous They lined the night sky in their silver Like memories of buried gold Around the crackle of an ignorant flame The unreeling empyrean green speleothems of heaven’s remedies The remains of the reigns that spiral out of control Pulled by the unbending unbeatable soul The hideous city that hisses in the distance, as if sitting in its filth It doesn’t remember The way the wind rocks you to sleep The way the water walks with you Through dead quiet forests And carries away the newly departed It doesn’t understand The clock will keep ticking The music will keep playing The wheels will continue to turn They will forget that we love them And the love will fade Now is temporary, love is temporary, as is before now Like old pictures Hand-painted by the outstretched arm of a branch Asking the pine needles to dance with them In a hurricane of leaves Tumbling into a bed of decay Rusted into nothingness Brushstrokes bustling with substance rubbing the sand through dry fingers Tasting of earth and ferns Of grass and daisies Of sunflowers and juniper Kafkaesque crescents Junkyards of life whispering to the wind Burning brighter than the distant skyline The spines of pine trees (rioting) The conifers of blissful eclipse like ecclesiastical pixies Wrapping their silky bodies around the width of an ancient steeple Like two star-crossed lovers struck by one heartbeat Becoming one motion of the hand One blink of the eye A touch of the face Skeletons of yesterday’s men Dreamers of now Nothing but memories full of emptiness Crumbling foundations Forgotten beauty Distant memories like embers in the rain And everything that/nothing entails The river that runs its hands through the thicket Mossy yellow ghettos propellor of ramshackle houses And bushes like blouses Worn away by a discoloured world Abandoned in amaryllis metallurgy Cracked windows, glass tapestries like crocheted mosaics or Broken mazes, labyrinths, spiderwebs, of reflected sun In warped refraction, jagged eyes A wallowing collage of Autumn menageries The lackadaisical waxing and waning of regal eons Of the phases of playful daisies Halogen Molotovs Arcing carpets, harps of flowerbeds webbing Weathered wings of silver threaded river Like waves of aether, acres, anchors of a low tide Rising in the turbulent meadows (Crashing down upon purgatory of curving clergy splurging ferns birthing terpsichorean) Orbiting porcelain coral orchards that mirror the lyrics of the sun The sunflowers reaching for the moon spoon-fed Blanketing around them shrouding the forgotten in the moss and rust Growing over the flawed failures of humanity’s lost beauty Gnarled and gnawing at what once was Consuming the scraps of our lives Lost to the dirt And the shadows, the (chapel) tapestry of the trees wrapping around each other Tied into thick knotted tongues Bloating out the passage of time from heaven’s hallways As they bark at the workmen of their roots lifting boughs through ceilings Chimneys of wooden wicker (and the clutter of butterflies) Hidden from the winged beasts of the city And their jungle of iron White noise reverberating in the echoes of silence Reaching the ears of low-hanging angels A spiral stairway in the cathedrals of trees winding into sign language Leading to the remnant of heaven Reaching towards the fat apple of the sun The realms of alcoves jovial welcoming the weary travellers Clouds of deciduous riverbeds Leading freely through the pathway to Elysium Further lost in the walkways, Drawn into the drowning depths of the great, living abyss As it pulls more of the past into itself As the world forgets itself Forgotten by the many, treasured by the few The forest swallows memory whole Leaving behind the bones To decorate the decay, with the never-ending journey Of the two star-crossed lovers Life and death Memory and forgotten Was and will be Everything and nothing Gone and watching Empty and whole Nature and man They were, and we will be The driftwood, the roots, the shrubs and brush, The bushes, the sky, the rivers, the escarpment, The birdsongs, the quiet, the running water The broken stone path like a giant buddha’s rosary beads As he bows deeper than the ocean Dragging in the dirt and mud the footprints of mountains Pulling his chains entangled in the leaves and branches Like the vines on telephone lines strumming each note together with scrap metal guitars Strung together intertwined in life and death in the strings of ukulele Played by God’s fingers Screaming with the over-easy breeze As the sky weaves clouds into smokestacks crackling (like porcelain) and- -All the forest is their tears ALL THE FOREST IS THEIR TEARS III Seismic geysers, spines of horizon Of synchronizing vinyl unwinding xylophones of bone Eldritch balconies of Valkyries Pledging the edge of plebian resonance Through the pendulum engines of heavenly reverends Dank decorated depths of decadent desiccation of damp decibels Decimate desecrated deception dressing effigies in deep green reeds Rust, crack, decay, rot, deteriorating, falling inwards, torn apart One day all will fade into the nothing And they will cry for us As we did for them Until all the rivers run dry And all the skies burn black And all the cities poison the heavens And all the forests gone And all the stumps of trees remember Listening Such was our end We ceased to matter You will not have much longer to wait IV Rust, crack, decay, rot One day all will fade in the nothing Never known Chiselling billions A thousand people screaming at once One word After another And another (And another) Like dead butterflies Falling from the canopy of their open mouths This present is now And all I do is watch And listen Until the sounds and sights reach all corners of my mind Thinking outside of the (black) box, (opening it) (Checking the contents of the uncaged world) (Swiveling willows riddled with whittling soliloquy) The trees pass trapezing Elysian Like aircraft of plastered rapturous pastures Pathos manufactured by astronauts Collapsing passages of alabaster castaways Blasting away in their captivated elation In amber Nirvana labyrinths like Saturn’s rings Clad in wings lavenders in many patterned Chandeliers of strings Rhythms’ polygamy peering through acoustic lucid altocumulus Blooming through the bruised uvula of God Like andromeda concubine Unwinding in the spiralling briars synchronized spires Barbed wire admirers in diaphragmatic avalanche Of a loose cannon for a fictitious world That’s sewn from the fabric of history Weaving terpsichorean with the reapers Keepers that sow the poems of rainbow rodeos Of ambrosia of mono-chromosomes begonia woven in the soma of four-leaf clovers Roaming the oceans of ferns like the soul of a man A churning tourniquet of murmuring earth again Wrapped in the wilting flowers of Valkyries The gallows of hallowed lands chasms of clattering matadors Dangling mangled mannequins of spinning stinging anonymity The muleta cape fluttering in the wind Taunting Death and his sharp scythe of iron horns Caught in a dance waltzing with the inevitable Like a leaf in a hurricane (Carefully bred) For/Of Autumnal hymns The crashing ensemble of polyphonic rondos In the squandering caldrons fauna’s insomnia Blindingly seeing, deaf from hearing, mute from screaming ALL THE FOREST IS THEIR TEARS The memories rising from the depths of their despair From the ancient cities succumbing to rot From the common flower burned to ashes The day will come when there will be No one left to cry for And from the teeth of forest Grinding asphalt into soil Metal into rust Temple into meadow Skyscraper into rumble Man into memory And no one will hear the nothing sing Joy outstretched behind the broken back of vases of splintered bone Vivid paroxysm schism imprisoned in the moon’s prism Dropped like stained glass bombs on the horizon Thread from the leather of hollow embalming columns Clouds balled into Molotovs Free from the heavy (eternity churning) burden of our love Continuing to outgrow the warmth of our embrace Until man moulds into nature Becomes the lips of trees The pallet of ponds The torrent of leaves in an orchestra of wind bending limb into figure Form into substance, style into font A dancing skeleton without a shadow to cling to Learning to scream silence The white noise of a black void encompassing homunculus Without the ears of the material world The ticking of the clock bending second into minute To hear nothing (A sundered underworld) The voiceless singing of the insurmountable empty The gap in the stairway to heaven The hollow in the tree The nook and cranny of every crevice in our porcelain stygian pores The rhythm between each cry of a heartbeat We are the moment between what has been and what has yet to be The desolate heart thumping against the doorframe Unhinged, deranged from walking the halls of our bodies bleeding elysian Corridors born from the distorted vortex of sound Bent into a single bar with one note Come home with me back into the sun and the shadows Into the then and the now Into the dead and the living and the limbo between The tidings of a wrathful sun and a nonsensical moon drowning in tongues All-consuming all-encompassing all-compassionate Meshed into one word (Budding directly from the centre of my broken glass heart) Spit from the many mouths of the forest Once more (Will wastelands) (Once again) (Fill this hallow sky?) With the roar of nothingness V (To those who found our paradise) (Your time will come) Shaped by the hands of clocks In the dredges of the sand, In the cloth of the prairies In the barley of the forest You may build Babel Great cities that grasp continents in their overbearing arms Dominions, dominos that topple into dilapidation’s footsteps Following the unwinding path of a foreign tongue into solace Your mouths may cave-in And crawl with words picked at with teeth and tongue Memories, life and death Hulks of husks where once the busy hands of nations grappled for control Hollows where once there was but wood, and bark, and iron And yet You will be forgotten like us Too As no one (Not one) Can out live death, life Or The forest (Biomechanical gelato of galivanting pianos unravelling galvanized irises) (Lilac choirs of sign language vanquished) (Plastered wax figures lacquered with barbed wire eyelashes) (Of wrapped wyverns like formaldehyde dandelions) (Endless tempests bent of contemporaries of florescent pestilence) (In the extraterrestrial gastrointestinal carnivalesque vestiges of breathless effigies) (Sacrosanct pantheons anchored in cancerous sanctuaries) (Of mantis hippocampus and pancreas chrysanthemums) Growing, birthing, coiling voices Unmentionable entities in temporary penitentiaries Vascular patchwork pastures of elastic Verbatim of constellations Flagellated elated creation Bursting from the whispering cyst of the old wound clean Alive and flailing like worms in the decadent dirt Crawling in the wreckage, the soil, the warped saxophone of existence The parade of tornadoes cradling concrete angels in graveyards Digging through ligaments of symmetries oblivion Swimming in the stygian Wriggling wings that glimmer cinnamon obsidian among crimson Olympians Decomposing chromosomes of odorless osmosis grovelling in the soma’s skin Oceans pulling at the flesh Until the percussionist brushstrokes of thrush suffocate in clay Slush in the mush-pits of succubus and steampunk homunculus Mocking flocking docks of rocking hypocrisy Lost to nocturne’s vertebrae, crocheted Coasts molten of sclerosis and oceans of blossoming apotheosis Typhoon cruising altocumulus Statues of rapturous Cleopatras waves crashing protruding through lucid dreams Deeper than the bog waters Higher than the crumbling summits of swerving suburbia Mediterranean wailing and extraterrestrial hecatomb Blooming in the looming distance polycrystalline A beautiful rose trimmed from the heart of the flesh beats the drumskin mumbling Rooted in the soiled bodies of man Smelling of fellows in elegies the petals of pelican’s bellowing evangelical Every hanging wing of theirs a wrinkled rag thrown upon the flustered bodies That fill the garden Every birdsong a call from death Egging on the newcomers to the final supper Where the earth swallows whole Its parasitic skin to below The muscles protruding ruminations of creation Caricatures of mannequins rust in the musculature The flowers of blood bloom like ivy From the openings of pores and in the crevices of flesh We can hear ourselves speak through the muck of our insides out Reaching deep into the person hidden inside each carapace shell Pulling out our deepest secrets, unseen, untouched, unspoken to Tolling like a bell VI From our throats A newborn baby Uncaring, unknowing No purpose, no will, less than nothing Not looking for freedom or escape Nor closure or determination, weakness or power Understanding or doubt Devoid of the empty that was That used to be, and will be The sound warped into a chimney of absence A hallway of empty trailing into the distant dawn Of crawlspaces between hallowed rooms Blooming Of smoke, fire, fog, and ash Melting into the licking tongue of orange Bent and twisted, scarred foundations of order and creation fused into One We are A single piece of paper in a tornado A flower in a wildfire of lurid green (The shaping of amorphous within the shattered empty) (Rusting musculature, fairies, cemetery caricatures) (The murmuring turbines of winding high-rises skyscrapers of Gaia’s twine flatlining) A long endless winding nightmare of corridors stretched into vestige Passages of vassals like glass tapestries asteroids mortared brick by brick Licked by spores of rigour mortis (Rejecting arborescent destiny) Celestial crepuscular vessels of walking clockwork intricacies and symphonies Here, his promises mean nothing but dirt and mud for matadors Their capes flutter before the wrath of God A grand bull Who’s ivory antlers of Saturn do not mean to lie But have forsaken him Much like the forest has forsaken us As we have the forest Cursed to pray for the predatory weak Shackled by reality’s chains VII End The scarves of endless silken silicon Spiderwebs that thread the needle through A woven hurricane’s black eye peering through the muddy horizon Gazing upon itself in horror Seeing the mirror image of beauty fused into the nuance A noose of spruces The dancing lances of branches embracing newcomers as we pour into the empty lot Of a discarded backyard swept clean of memories Only the feast Only the green Only the forest As we rumble like the stomachs of clouds that rain saliva in staccato’s vibrato Ready to indulge in our personal tastes Biting into the graphite lazulite of black and white Our bodies blooming into endless flowers in the garden of Eden Lining the stomach like ulcers of altars We were mistaken The metamorphosis of God Is not the butterfly of men We do not belong here Lost in the jumbled jungle gym of our graves There is no beauty without sacrifice There is no love without death If you were born to love or be loved Then you will wilt too And become the trees In the shadow of the forest Looming over the lost Burying the very idea of a funeral The grievers of past celebrations age and distance themselves from memory Never facing the reality of their decay Intoxicated by the inevitable Pushing onwards into conclaves of bodies being broken down into spare parts Made to garden the Beast’s wild mane To trim the phantasmagorical scrapyard of jagged bottles And white satellites of poltergeist blight Combing its teeth, its branches Irradiated and smiling upon the red sun’s distant glow (Bathed in blood, moulded by body, one and legion) [A great hand that strangled the throat of worlds long ago] [In all but a bristled whisper whipped by thistle] [The forest will tell you what it told me] All the mourners Are the trees ALL
THE FOREST
© 2021 R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)Author's Note
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4 Reviews  Last Updated on October 20, 2021 Tags: forest, of, the, unforgotten Author
R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)Burlington, Halton, CanadaAboutMost of my poems can be differing lengths depending on the time you want to spend reading them. You can avoid reading anything brackets, or read it all. If you want an in-between, you can read only th.. more..WritingRelated WritingPeople who liked this story also liked..
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