Cracks In Pavement

This piece has some of my best poetry in it and as well as stuff that could be improved on, but I've been countlessly combing the poem, and it's more than ready to be considered finished. Probably.

Asphalt Rollercoaster Supernova

 

Part 1 (The Same Old Road)

 

I didn’t choose this

This is who I am

Gathering myself amidst the ashes of it all

What am I?

But ashes (of what I has already been?)

I have preserved my sanity

Have I not?

(These ashes)

(These memories)

<These strings that tangle this body into something more>

(These moments ingrained on the messy fresco, the fabric, the tapestry, of my being)

(Of effigies dressed in polyester vessels of a spiked ichor’s psyche in the mind’s spiderweb)

(Are they eternal, dormant, yet unforeseeable?)

(Or have they slipped away?)

(Ground into nothing)

(Peeling into nothing)

(Colourless and grey)

(Dance partner to all my cluttered colours)

(Brilliant, dead, and beyond me)

(Celestial moon, crepuscular sun)

(Scintillating Himalayans on the skin of the fibrous night sky’s diamond eyelids)

(Shedding light like a fur coat for the shivering darkness)

(Praying in the cold pestilent perpetual fresco of a shadow)

(Within the hourglass boundaries of amorphous shape)

(Shallow colour)

(Bending greys)

(And the unending winding hands of infinitesimal serpent time)

(An effigy unraveling on the lap of gravel staccato)

(Stretched into nothing)

(Reclining inward)

(Spiralling fetal egg sun hatching into blindness in the site of an iris)

(That sees into the depths and the heights)

(Groping the width and the girth)

(And the crawl of drawling sprawls in the bulbous stamens of follicles of molecules)

(The imperceptible being)

(The imprint of the lack thereof)

(The shade and the afterglow)

(Of nothing)

 

Part 2 (Cracked Edifice, Broken Mosaic)

 

Chapels of daffodils grapple with taffeta blackened skied horizons pried from the hands of God

Serendipitous abyssal nickel conifers shapeshift liquorice through the riptide of Gaia

Of wicker lithium eclipse crystalline ricochet over the groves of kaleidoscopes unbridled spoke

Whistling in the mist of bougainvillea basilicas silhouettes dressed like frescos of crescents

Asphalt malting colosseum concrete mausoleum of onomatopoeia

Elysium plains within the veins of a conclave of volcanos

Under the greasy fleece of Sol and the castle of classical ballad of basilicas

Silk umbilical milquetoast oceans bougainvillea sinking in pink silhouettes of asphodel

Gallows of a mandala javelin of labyrinth’s cataclysms

Galleries of balaclava alleyways like hazel mazes that cradle the trail of Azazel

I see the cities crumble there under the weight and remains of their broken walls

As henbane stained-glass pastels yell carved by starlings of harlequin

From arpeggios and the shrouded cowls of taloned balconies

The swallows of swirling sterling silver amaryllis marbled jargon echo here

And the sovereignties of bottomless candelabras pollenate the unbridled horizon lilac

With death waltzing around the heir to an altar of his salted tears

To the monstrous ankh of gigantomachy

And hecatoncheires in the bronze séance of polyphonic mantras

In their hundred handed amnesty asking infinite men to dance

Faultlessly wailing to azaleas in a tornado of halos with sable barcode labels

While humming shunned from teeth and gum in bumblebee’s slumbering

The immortal sun like an orb of coral burrowing into the clouds like a ship’s prow

Somersaulting penultimate

Rummaging summits of underworlds unfolding golden in figures of rigour mortis

Succumbing to the thunderous umbrage of buried sunlight under lampposts

With mitochondrial fondling wanderlust for the rusted succubus of provocative clockwork

Brothels of the damned and the lamb of God

Comets dislodged from skulls

And collages as they mandala and domino in ominous anonymous andromedas

Like origami tsunamis of bottomless Shinigami

The living pass by like suicide

The effigies of a successful bethels wrestling vessels in their deathless testimony

How can God commit such a crime to wreak justice on order?

The chaos of our lives must be made mosaic, must be made brick and mortar

Must be made city walls that sprawl like a collage of colosseums in regal greenery

In crepuscular incandescent obsessing destinies wrestling in a rearranged picture frame

Crawling polyester vestiges zephyr

Rollicking hydraulic diabolical cauldron of follicles of cosmopolitan decomposition’s inquisition

The dead have come to warn me of the morning

Halogens in spectral incandescent crepuscular hecatomb

Blooming between the grooves of luminous construed nucleus

Ballooning Jerusalem’s of ruins of the nuisance of fruitful lucid sutras of altocumulus

Ruminating in rejuvenation’s tribulations

Picking the fruit from the stocky branches

I taste the flesh and the flesh tastes me

I endure, I struggle, I climb the bellies of the hills alone

I am the poisoned apple ripe enough to burst through my skin, all muscle, all artery and vein

Climbing combining tridents of wide islands on the earth of my shape

My heart is amorphous, it is all I am;

All stone and ice

In the asylum of the twine telephone lines of spiderweb threads of tethered Everest

Of vinyl (binary) kaleidoscopes like opals in the dew of the city’s zoo

Interwoven ambrosia like crocheted champagne everglades

Waves that cascade geographically from the graphite bright like lightning strikes on shorelines

Snaking laced in the sacred acres of aether like lackadaisical iron maidens’ cradling devas

Of alabaster tapestries masquerading as brass azaleas

Braided in every trail of a flailing whale of leftover halo’s black veil sailboat

Over molten encroaching coasts of electroconvulsive gulfs in the gurgling hernias of this land

This damaged land

This amethyst

This labyrinth

This belly of the beast

This forgotten Eden

In the lilac formaldehyde of its silence

Spiderwebs and dreads of a sunrise

Of cider dragonflies that writhe like single lines of livewire choirs in the ichor of violins twinge

And twang among dandelion kaleidoscopes and poppies with dropped necks bowed in prayer

We were bowed in prayer to the aesir

Like a virus in the ichor of psychopathological hecatoncheires

In their mob of discombobulated choreography orbiting euphoria

Parted seas of crossbreeds like phosphorus gospels to animosity’s sophomores

Students who only knew the rudimentary, the elementary, the words

To the phantasmagorical smorgasbord of metaphors I do not share

Foraging through the orchid’s orange in chlorophyll

Metamorphosis of snorkelling orchestras in forested corners in corridors of expurgatorial

Fornicating with the corroded shell of carnivals

I am the bandwagon for sheet metal and rusted nails,

And rails of Rorschach’s like pastels for the lightning maestros and rollercoaster poltergeists

Amongst the green stretch of arched backgrounds made from steel bombshells

I am the séance, and the effigy, the epileptic perplexing complexion of zephyrs that blow through  

Their iron frame trickling with sun spun with the yarn of a hundred arms

Carved out of the mountains with their fountains of clay foundations in the haze of yesterdays

On the dark side of the moon, spoon-feeding gypsies that swallowed their tongues

Mouthing the words in a hurricane

Like lost tooths of roosting soothsayers in ruthless pews, hues of lackadaisical maelstroms

Like a marble grimoire of starlight’s height

Writhing winding nylon diamonds among formaldehyde chimeras

Like briars braided together in the ironworks of silence

With heaven and Armageddon’s metallurgy

The scraps of Cleopatras ecclesiastic wrapped in the elastic daffodils of a sugar pill

Of eternity’s furnace of churning hurricanes’ furnishings

Burning the furniture of hermits whittling at the pixyish eclipse

On the lip of abyss dipping its hands into the flames

I come out of the shadow of the night and watch the stars empty of sunlight

As their castles of ecclesiastical shackled taffeta twist and turn

Their sickness sucked dry from admiring closed eyelids

Printed on the coins left on their pupils in the darkness of their journey through the underworld

Of rapture’s aftertaste, afterthought, afterworld

As they trim the linden trees beside the riverbeds of dread

On the fringe of equilibrium skimming windowless photosynthesis

In phosphorescent nectar of polyester spectral exodus

In the mechanical wingspans of damnation

There was a carousel here

Flying away from the toy cars and houses far below in fallen snow where children played

Somewhere above heaven, and hell

Creation’s initiation calling in melancholy polymerization

Comatose oceans in rows of woven chromosomes

Motionless ambrosial interloping cornucopia where once they sold cotton candy from the stands

Now; nothing, or maybe memories

Of openly warping gouges forged from the orchards of forebears’ heritage

Of barricades outside the gravestone Salem of what was left overnight in the blink of an eye

And became lifeless so suddenly

Like malevolent tempests wrenched free from the engine’s suspension of emptiness

Dilapidated by graphite’s light on the page

Of the prairies hara-kiri

Opening the cover of a book best not to be written

The book that wrote itself

Yet in blood and sweat and tearless ethereal immaterial heroes lest we call them ancestors

Earlobes of the afterglow’s bath of snow born unwhole

From below amongst the coals as they toil in turmoil and boil over from their corneas

Coming to grips with the pit in the thunder of my stomach

Falling through verse down from the summits (of alumbra)

The spires of time collide and intertwined kaleidoscopes of maestros

Of broken notes in the fingerings of scintillation and woodwind skin

Of bending limbs like outstretched tendrils of emerald empyrean speleothems

As the dead men’s crevice of maleficent Everests on their quest for hecatomb’s bloom

In the raven feather Netherlands of leathery brethren poinsettia

Of tethered engines to the pendulums of incendiary prairies

Of marmalade amorphous incorporeal phantasmagorical oracles

Of bottomless tsunami sovereignties of origami Shinigami

I am now trying to keep my head above the water of it all

So much has drowned now

Without tears; the salt of it all colouring my skin in watercolour umbrage

Monarchies of arching butterflies in the menstruating sentinels

In temples of dense heart wrenching incomprehensible emptiness

Under the heel of each wheel in my speleothem helix

Terraforming in my Victorian corneas

Born from euphoria

And the tomes of foaming chrome ambrosial pheromones

Among the mud and stones of my winter home

Imprisoned in eucalyptus and the pollen of andromeda

In the stalls of hollow follicles of molecules

In the cells of cello parhelion over the Cinderella of carnivals and the reeds of small cedar trees

Like a forest’s orchestra contorting in tomorrows’ floral Ouroboros

Crippling Icarus with splintered photosynthesis

Like a jagged crown of trees

This metal dust devil

This yell of archipelagos of rust between two bodies of water that bore its lustrous flesh

Silver, grey and then red

Fairies of alstroemerias and plumeria seraphim

Preparing their plums of umbrage

Carrion miscarriage of varicose clarinets

For barren prairies of blackberry wisteria

In the wasteland’s hands dancing cancerous banqueting anchorage in rancor of pancreas

Of handkerchief blanketed out-branching chrysanthemums

I never saw it for myself

Sanguine with amaranth prancing all answerless

In the birth of the serpentine

It was there for a century, probably

But once I was born, it was already gone

Not like a candle in the wind

But the last piece of wax floating like a moon reflecting on the waterways from above

The alabaster walls coil embroidered in meteorites

Oil paintings of sainthood embedded in shredded leaden heavens of methamphetamine

Cemeteries to memories forgotten by phosphorus blossoms of clockwork serpentine

Left between the trees’ debris of Elysium

And destitute cumulus in the mitochondrial Necronomicon

And the chronological dominance of onomatopoeia

And the opalescent messengers like uplifting shapeshifters

Ripping into the bone of topaz a gaudy collage of bulbous bulging baubles bobbing

That mandala polymerization’s constellations

Guitars like Tartarus and vases of chaos

And Himalayan ukuleles waxing and waning palpitating

Of ultimatum and the blasphemous chapels

Cast in daffodils’ classical lackadaisical maelstroms

Fabled tapestries of lapis lazuli

Battlegrounds astounding the malleable hourglass of rapture

On crashing lacquered aphrodisiac bastions

Ecclesiastical Rorschach of crevasses in the laps of Damascus

Sugarcane railroads painted in gold totem poles

And acres forsaken in the snow unfolding in the undertow of a supernova

There are no children that remember you

You were scrap metal long before they were

Rusted in the lustre of the city on the brink of your horizon

Just beyond our reach

You are grinding, failing, falling, dying, inward

Ground into dust, and dirt, and sadness, and memories too old to be remembered

Again

And again

And again

Crevasse of astronauts, the bethel echoes within the jester of an anorexic iridescent vessel

In the splendor of the malevolent eleven heavens

Schisms under the prisons of riverbeds’ red

I dream pristinely of weaving seeds in the reeds and foliage of coiling Elysium

Again

The closing of the curtain shirked from Hercules and Merkabah

The beginning of the chapter

Let God stand and wait in line for me

Let the stage of crimson (nimbostratus labyrinths) bow before me

It all amounts to nothing

Now

Death

I had forgotten you

Let them remember me,

Like I remembered them

I am nothing but a spark

In the raging bonfires of their lost hearts howling to the wind

Born in the clash

When swords meet

“Let them remember me”

“Let them remember me”

I hear them say dry like dust, and soot, and straw

And I think to myself

Maybe

Let me remember them

“Let them remember me”

“Let them remember me”

I might say to myself when I meet my end;

A rusted cathedral no one will pray for, its denizens long deserting this delicate, derelict frame

And maybe

“Let me remember them”

(In the wreckage of the rain)

(In my shattered windowpanes)

(Winding gathered by the drain)

(Wind of amethyst)

(Sky of jade)

(I own nothing)

(Know nothing)

(And nothing owns me)

(Or knows me)

(But myself)

(I bring my own salvation, the weight of it on these shoulders, heavy)

(Come, I will meet you on this familiar battlefield)

(Again, and again, and again)

(And we will learn nothing)

(And dance discombobulated, ignorant, and stupefied)

(Unable to understand the ending given to us)

(Unable to overcome the prisons of the past)

(That house the cadavers eaten by ravens of what could have been)

(Pushing onwards, going nowhere)

(Flesh, and instinct, ego, and lust, anger, and madness)

Stained by what we refuse to come to grips with

(We both died)

(A long time ago)

Silent and still as briars and dandelions kaleidoscope

<Nothing>

<Shredded through like the cornstalks and the killing scythes of nothing>

(Together)

<Or else>

<No one will remember me>

<Do you not>

(Remember <me?>)

<I do not>

<Remember me>

<At all>

 

 

Grow Past My Spindling Roots

I want to continue to be me;

To continue to grow;

Leave the nest as they say, and learn to fly

With these wings that long to grope the underbelly of clouds; between leatherbound feathers

And outgrow the stretching hectors of nectar in my golden interwoven clovers of catacombs

A stone’s throw of chromosomes rollercoasters roam

Flustering within brushstrokes of musculature

Hushed by percussion’s sustenance my husk crusted rushing lustrous wondrousness

But I stand strong and brave and vain and prideful

For all time is standing still

On the balconies with Valkyries peering through herculean Prometheus

And the delirious spiderweb of heavens in the gauze of an ensemble’s pause

In the mitochondrial mosaic, ivory staircase of glacial oasis, seagulls following polymerization

And slipknots of cloth phosphorus tangled in the bangles of mockingbird’s hurricanes

In a phantasmagorical vortex terraforming

As flowers put their petal to the metal

Wreckage etched in crepuscular necklaces of phosphorescent sepulchres

In the riches of lithium crystalline

And the sprawling mitochondrial hallways

Of the inner workings of my mind

Fallen behind

Until the mind inside outgrows the body

And I find another shell

Before jumping from the nest, the shores of this ocean, the windows of the skyscraper

The bouquet of stairways, anew

Castaway in the spinal vinyl, the materials of my mind

The record needle speleothem penning the envelope, the NetherRealm, an autopsy of sound

The roots of my sunset crest outstretching outgrowing its spotlight among highrise and skyline

Like the thumb and finger of God, (the forefront, the throat of this world, flying into the night)

Pointed up at the moon

Like a dime flicking over itself endlessly on a glass table

I am the figurehead of this fairytale

In all its aerial flip of coin; a stone’s throw across this endless coal-black sky

Leaving ripples along the back of this river

Flipping nickels serendipitous in the crippled lips of lithium tripped up by twisted Icarus

Under the splintered incubus of winter whistling through conifers blissfully

I am still crawling through the snow of an overflow’s undertow

Lit matches like brass eyelashes of taffeta wrapping me in the casket of astronauts

Hieroglyphic whispering twisted whips of nickel picking conifers glisten with the pits in men

Listen to the ripped lithium cliffs of a cryptlike eclipse

I follow them

They are the guide in the nightshade sky forever watching me

The antidote for their suffering they have become

They will be there by the river

When I swim through fire

When the oars and the boat

Can only take me so far

And I must fall too

Crawling with the rest of them

In phosphorus nocturne metropolis

In crepuscular vessels of incandescent efflorescent requiem

Crawling (underneath this beautiful carpet of martyrdom and greenery)

With the rest of them

 

Chapel Phoenix

 

Living for what once was

And dying for what could have been

Let me rip out every part you

Let me put back the pieces, sharp, and jagged, fingers of flesh

And call you a work of art

Let me make wallpapers and canvas of your skin

And paint you lively

In the brightest brushstrokes

Of the clouds adorning your head

The helix of stairs flowing with ambrosia

In a cyclone of telephone pole pheromones

The lithium conifers glisten asphyxiated

With your crystals of precipitated halos

Waltzing with your pulse

And cauldron of wallowing hallowed palpitations

Through the chanting chrysanthemums

The grey grail of your azaleas

In the melodies of cellos

In the axels of saxophones black with anathema

And the meadows of yellow ghettos

These disheveled treble clefs of provocative octaves

Blossoming the faucets of phosphorus

And the lampposts of opals

In the unbridled kaleidoscope of broken utopias

Toppling metropolis in unravelling balaclavas of satellites

Celestial Nephilim frescos echoing cardiovascular

In their parhelion skeletons

Like hectors of crepuscular wreckage

Blessed by phosphorescence in the clandestine ecstasy of indefinite effigies

Retching debris from beneath the bethels’ breeze

In the daughters of autumn lithography

Tobogganing under the sable maple trees

That bleed through the concrete canopy

With their cavernous chasm of amethyst bangles botanical in the biomechanical Albion

And the canyons elbows deep into the void of skies of endless hands with serpentine leaves

Weaving meteors through the steeples collage of onomatopoeia mandala into mausoleums

Of taffeta chapels basking in lazy Lazurus

Baptism of imprisoning linden photosynthesis

And leaning regal cathedrals

That speleothem through the rended ends of threaded heavens in remembrance

And amber hammock of clouds drawn taut

Over the encore of a sunset

Bowing with its blazer of amaranths

And dragging his coattails of railroads

Over the waning lanes of pavement pastures

Where the alabaster rafters collapsed in the scaffolding of trees

And the elasticity of the breeze

Breaking through the tomb of a new moon

Ballooning junipers in the fetal luminous cumulus

Balled up like a page of yellowed words

That will never be truly heard

Through the blond constellations’ polymerization

Through the cedared phoenix of a helix

Gnawing on the gauze of metabolical polymerization

In choreography’s armoire

Of cosmic baubles in sable maples of discombobulation

 

 

 

Descendants

The sun has left us

And I live in his shadow,

Fathered by black skies;

A descendant of a shadow

The disjointed ointment of warpaint

Flooding through the perfume of these oozing luminescent wounds

Acidic on my oil canvas face

Under a glass sky

Broken into mosaic

Of people I’ve left behind,

The dead, the living, and the nobodies,

Stitching into lithium that crowns Toronto’s god

The pieces of him falling columns of candelabra mandalas

Through a water basin of sewers draining in arcanum

Dandelion hyacinth of spiralling maniacal leviathans

You think you frighten me; with your false teeth?

The reefs of porcelain buildings like pavilions of amaryllis

The metropolis, the metallurgy of constellations

Snakes its way around my neck

Waxing and waning in my blood moon aluminum of cumulus veins

The family tree has been struck by lightning, yes

But the roots are deeper than my words

And more pen than page

 

Nectar and Soma

 

Phosphorescent exodus

The chrome trombone of combing somas in gravel’s catacomns

Nectar of sepulchres incandescent tempestuous vessels of crepuscular wreckage necklaces

Incendiary chariots like flares blitz in hallucinogenic embryos like tendrils of ventricles

Rending tenebrous ghostly oceans in the pull of lace waves and chains of pavement oasis

Like tributary marionettes canoeing through monsoons of altocumulus

With their oars of Morningstars

Gardening the cartilage

Ichor orchards of phantasmagorical metamorphosis

Like roaring floral corridors in leatherback Rorschach’s

In the endless bend of a darkened blue sky

In the canopy of mannequins with hands raised to the maelstrom of a halo’s railroad

Of the ever-blazing sun like a torched orphanage

Laughing like shrapnel capsized alive

Brighter than the wide-eyed spiralling wyvern of hive-like asylum

Flipping dimes like eyes smiling sunrising and in the skies shining over spired horizons

The moon looming ludicrous over tulips’ crisp

Over the bough of Valhallas

Over the blackening rafts of taffeta

Over the house of God built from the ground up

Into the attic of forgotten angels, no one plays with anymore

Amongst the toys of foliage embroidered coiling voids of flora viola clovers

Embedded in its the remnants with the last whimper of man

(Thrones of kryptonians and dishevelled meadows dwelling wells relics enveloping parhelions)

Into the whimsical prison of guillotine infinity

Dreaming terpsichorean like the elysian phoenixes

Of a helixes’ bridge in stillbirth ridged of this weathered and heavenless Armageddonless earth

Like menstruating azaleas and entrails’ halo

In a hurricane of champagne

Sleeping on the bathroom floor, cold, and wet, waking in the early nebula of morning

Crocheted vases empty pages bouquets of marmalade vertebrae clay

Aimlessly dilapidated and lackadaisical monasteries

Terraforming God’s contorting corridor corneas

Like monarch butterflies colliding in violet violins

Aspiring wireframes of opal kaleidoscopes of string in discombobulated choreography

Of rollicking constellations aegis to the nameless shapelessness

(The wraiths of oasis drift through their lithium chrysalis of blissful abyss licking their lips)

Of amorphous shadows in pianos of crescent crescendo

Bending their extremities in remembrance of heaven’s kiss

Withering to cinders of smithereens

Chiselled into umbilical willows by riverbed silhouettes of spectres and zephyrs’ resurrection

Combing the cyclones of pandemonium for a single angel hair

And macabre candelabras collage of mandala

Their collage, their colourless brotherhood of dead men

In crimson nimbus of splintered winter’s innards

And limbs in rivers of vermilion capillaries

Willows that billow in the wilderness abyss

With Olympian photosynthesis under the fibres of barbed wire samurais

Xylophone kaleidoscopes under the brazier of sabres

Like sable azaleas of chainmail halos

In the champagne crocheted braids of halos

That frail railroads fold into glorious aurora borealis

Through the ramshackle blackbirds of the wildflower palisades

Glazed by the flames of everglades radiant

With the talons of infallible gallows malleable

In the bowels of Valhalla’s valley works

In the murky orchards porcelain in the corpse of tuberculosis

Forked roads in the chromosomes of roaming oceans

Interloping roping in the groping of crows and maelstroms

That layer upon each grain of sand in the hands of man

Damned by their sanity in the dragging labyrinths of Christianity

“Where is your god now” they say

“Where is your god now?”

Everywhere

In omnibenevolent renaissance there is a kingdom, is there not?

In their lantern hippocampus shackled to the scabbard of lapis lazuri Jesus of Nazareth

Still growing

Chrysanthemums fanfare of amaranths

Dancing in the pits of hieroglyphics whispering

Lithium skipping through the aluminum blooming of lunar cumulus

Grooving in the afternoon June of perfumes of humulus lupulus

In the pupils of Jupiter and the ruins of juniper

That lay bare in the evenings’ air

Like barren monasteries to the stalls of Catholicism

Plumage of plumerias varicose

And prairies of caricatures that were once beautiful, seen as beautiful

Wisteria’s fairies and alstroemerias of gin and carousels

Within the blimp of incubus

Rinsed in the limbs of dwindling photosynthesis

As the shimmering tributaries of carotin marionettes

Brim(ming) under ringlets of loose skin like shingled hinges in the prisons of equilibrium

Mimicking symphonies infinitely obsidian and Stygian

With the wings of Seraphim serpentine with vines of writhing ivory

In the wreckage of dereliction’s frescoed effigies

Deafening in the etching breeze of seething elysian debris

And steam wagons of Pythagoras and draconian pandemonium

Interwoven in four-leaf clovers rollicking in the follicles of polymerization

The oscillation’s chaos of nations basin

In the rivers and lakes as the pistol ricochets with crystalline lithium

Lit liquorish Icarus sipping in the pits of chrysalis

From the lips of witnesses to the glistening ichor of eclipses that skip through the dew nude

Through the path of rapture’s pastures

Grasses of alabaster

In the evaporation’s dilapidated masterpiece

Tapestries of chapel daffodil glassware

Rorschach’s that hack at the blasphemous ecclesiastical plastered patchwork

Of Ragnarok, apocalypse, and Cocytus

Of Armageddon, and its many reverends

Fostering the brothels of phosphorus

And orphanages of porcelain

Metamorphosis of scorpions

Voiceless amorphous choirs along the blindsided unwinding geysers of hyacinth

Horizons binding rhymes of silence in hell’s parhelion

And evangelical underbelly of velvet

Swelling melodies of beaded meadows of flower petal battalions

Unravelling the splattered gathering labyrinths of ravenous catacombs for the mortal coil of war

And bipedal cathedrals of bleeding steeples

Of fiends and fields of phoenixes

Weaving their reeds of wavelength riverbank sanctuaries

In the vicarious barricades of hazel Azazel

Paled by the brazen halos out-branching cancerous sanctum

Anchored in the canvas of mosaics

Praising in Salem of braziers to mazes in the cast-out black realms of a pastel

As the cardiovascular bastion masquerade asters

In florescent phosphorescent crevices

In the never-ending depths of Everest

Like belladonna mantras in columns of revolving unfolding accordions

Whittled with chiselled calligraphy

Villages of bougainvillea under celestial crescents

In crepuscular ecstasy effigies bared by grimoires of auburn bottomless Tartarus samsara

As the kaleidoscopes run for their lives in my blindsided irises

In the conclave of waving arboretum empyrean speleothems

In the blended evanescent heavens sketched like bethels of methamphetamine

Undressing zeppelins in the blessing of unetched crests to the destinies of wreckage in pestilence

In the rending umbrella of crescendos incomprehensible

To the sensibilities of infinity incendiary chariots

That race across the lost tossing of glossy mosses of phosphorus

In nocturne’s clockwork of heroin scarecrows

Exploding supernovas in the sodium of a podium’s chromosomes

In the mortal remains of veins of hurricane titanium

Raised from the grave engrained in azaleas

In the storm orbiting my corneas of chlorophyll

Vermilion capillaries that are villas for cerulean silhouettes

As the wriggling fingers of whittling figures

Of sprigging ligaments of disfigurement

Fiddle with their amaryllis umbilical widows of willow-wisp

Gypsies as free as these reeds in the fields, reapers of city streets of sweeping tweed and graffiti

In the debris of interweaving seven seas of terpsichorean speleothems

Wedging the entrance of heaven back through the entrails of azaleas

Drifting in lithium crypts of apparitions without a sail

Capsized violins on the violet iris that spies the nihilist’s chimera

Of childlike xylophone rhinestone horizons

In the silos of osmosis and the ambrosial comatose oceans

Of dystopian Rorschach backyards

Discarded armies of Tartarus parliament in this discombobulated photography

Of choreographers merging in the blurred paintings of sainthood

And the spaceless face of a glacier of latex aether and curvaceous paper matrix

In tasteless wraiths of painted oasis

Like marmalade psalms in the palm of gondola andromedas

Carousel’s parasol enveloping archipelagos flowing terra’s sprout of buried wells

Foaming through rows of cherry hells where prairies dwell

And foxgloves rudder their cluttered way through penumbra green elysian streams of kerosine

In careless shells of parallels

Velvet jellyfish elegies in the delicacy of belladonna

Fauna and andromeda

(Blackened taffeta of the rambunctious homunculus)

(Like a swivelling porcelain orb)

(Over the phantasmagorical floral chlorophyll corridors of metamorphosis)

(Swimming over the shallow coral cowls of valleys)

(And bowels of the rippling towel of flowering balaclavas)

(In the empyrean clearing of stratospheric mountains unbound by talismans of malachite)

(Stretching into conjectures’ womb of hecatomb)

(Echoing decibels that answer each other’s lengthening anchors of granite)

(Dancing like lampshade of amaranths)

(And the welling shadows in the attic of asphodel biomechanical)

(The branches of trees that pretzel their tendrils of emerald transcendentally)

(In the amber of canopies bleeding streams of terpsichorean phoenix)

(Reeds of Elysium feeding the Eden’s of your dreamlands)

Gelatinous astronauts of graphite nights in the lightning of ecclesiastical tapestries of apathy

Cast out from the gout of an open mouth

I have no voice

The scream of time has robbed me

The ringing in my ears

Is my own blood

Pumping through the tubes, the pipes, the channels, the lines

The machine of me

Can you hear me?

Or is there no one to listen?

As I slump into the arms of wallpaper

Into the halls of skyscrapers

Into the shadow of man

Can you hear the slush and slurry of nectar and soma?

Sloshing through my veins?

Death, have you forgotten me?

I forgive you

I too, take, and do not return the riches

Of what wasn’t always mine

This poem stolen from you

Cheated you of your own words

They are mine

Until you take them back

Smiling hyacinths leviathans of Gaia’s sin from the wyvern’s fin and goliath’s kin

From the golden smoldering garden, the armada bottled up in our closed mouths

From the bottomless archeological novel of our Aristoteles parastatal rollicking

I am the spawn of your astronomical andromeda

The planets of Lazarus cavernous labyrinths from enamel prints of amethyst

Formed in the concord of vorpal aurora borealis

The chord of a thousand silent storms

Smiling hyacinths

From this garden of closed mouths

Reflected Crescent on the Flooded Street

 

Mixing the elixir of a nickel conifer

Of lithium glyphs of pixyish eclipse

As the candlewick’s asphyxiation ricochets creations’ oasis

Under reign of chaining arcanum

Verdant hurricanes blurred murmuring herculean in a serpentine earthen dream

And the waxen bastions of castaways

Frayed by daylights’ flask of the half mast ecclesiastical afterimages

Obsidian prism collisions and scissor linen lines of figurines shivering from Stygian linden trees

Incendiary chariots in the charcoal barcode of osmosis

Like an awoken locomotive with its spokes broken up into open lust

Within the ripples of affliction

Whitewater rafting alabaster crevasses masquerade Alaskan pastures of molasses asterisks

Passageways maze in many hazel grey laden with tornado cadence and hurricane salvation

Braided April of aether halo’s waves

In the after-shade of disaster’s wake

Cast in asters astral castles of wind-shaken oasis

Massive shackled laughing Rorschachs

Blackened taffeta daffodils that mineshaft the shady jaded oasis

And glades in dilapidated tapestries

On the scaffolding cracks of shacks mattress of waxen palisade

By the shuriken splintered river of scimitars

That drown in the alkaline amalgamation of nature’s cremation

Like trickling nickels of lithium

In the blink of an eye;

The dime of a hyacinth

Like turbines of rhinestone

Behind the lilac chimera of your spiralling iris

Chimney of incendiary Olympians rinsed of photosynthesis

And the infinite symphony of your wrinkled incubus

A sinkhole of think tanks chanting for amaranths

On the vantage of champions

Champagne bays of vertebrae in the braille tornadoes

And formaldehyde forest of its dancing branches

Of mockingbirds murmuring turbulently

And the crayons of eons dawning ensembles on the drawbridge of autumn’s mitochondria

Sonatas of audience and the scarecrow barrows

Of bottomless candelabra swallowing baubles like seagulls of fulcrum’s halogens

Of rollicking Molotov in the pathological tobogganing of harmonic camaraderie

In the broken opal bulb of a florescent stall

And the cornstalk’s blossoming phosphorus apocrypha

In the masses of taffeta matted fur of chandelier

Canvas blurred by amethyst

Churned in the serpentine hurricanes of barren plains

The carriage the barricade of fading mazes

In the basins of craniums’ Himalayan

Cradling radiant serrated blimps

And sun spun in the numberless penumbras’ kiss

Christening the abyss with a fistful of lithium

Bubbling with subtlety a bulbous orb of unicorns

Fornicating in polymerization the glacier of aether rapiers

Of sundial sung wildfire from the geyser of cyberspace

Graciously spaceless with the wraith of oasis

Pacing back and forth in the metamorphosis of porcelain orchards

Orbiting accordions of floral chlorophyll

Tomorrow still by the chord rung shrill

The oracles of coral spilled in blackboards of milk

Turning the page on our forgotten age;

And I’m not ready to forget even if it’s already gone, dead,

Left behind on the islands of my piety;

Wired briars in the quiet choir of my bedside bible of Nihilism

My prison of eucalyptus whispering disease to the empty pent up breeze

Are they already gone, or will I find them in the end?

In my Rorschach stained brain of crocheted oasis

In the wake of snaking napalm aether

Draping the quake of my heart

In apartments of darkened escarpments

Martyred to rust and sawdust and stardom

Barking from an army of cartilage

Wilting lilies whittling Icarus into twisted omniscience

In the chrysalis of witless ifrit

Whistling glyphs from the ripples of syphilis

And the beasts of Elysium under hypnotized cider horizon that spider

Blinded by ivory pyres shapeshifting in the vistas of the crystalline

The eyes of the horizon

In chapels wrapped in daffodils

Of kraken Lovecraftian taffeta

Like raspberries among alstroemerias

That miscarriage varicose oceans

In molten solstice

In the crescent of a cesspool

 

Smile

 

 

The barley of harlequin grows between the cranny in a terracotta sky

With cracks between their smiles, a gap in the chest, now

A rain of light and shadow

Crowns horizons over with their battlefields of grain

With blue ink drawn in between the lines of my father’s face

The paper is yellowed, bent of out shape, folded into a crane, painted in fingerprints

By the hands of the clock

Raised in hesitance to praise this hour

Their fingers like branches that reach for you

You were never hesitant

Wrinkled and rung out to dry and scry amidst the sugar-coated snow

Of blue flat light reflecting

And our SUV a boat skidding on thin ice

And the cracked lips and the smile lines

Piss me the f**k off

So I take my mind and my canvas now

And hurl it possessed

At the cars we pass

At the years that pass

At the people that pass

The lives that pass

Like a hockey puck

And I swallow this fist, this off key note, this rod of my anger

Lest it be taught to aim itself at you

And my father is still driving and now he’s talking

He says Hamilton is going to win formula 1 for the eighth time

He says that Tremblant is enveloped in snow this winter, that the ground is already a stiff board

That covid is still on the rise, and that my sister refuses vaccine callously

Without a second thought

He wants someone new to take the wheel

He says many things that do not matter to me

His mouth opens

It shuts

Like a window whispering without its shutters

And I do not care

I can barely hear the ghost in his voice caught between the teeth of his beartrap

The séance muttered humbly

Above my heartbeat slow

So, the hockey puck I swallowed is in my throat, and simultaneously skating on thin ice

And in a half-dream

I am skating over the mud with it now

And down below

Looking at the remains of slush and snow

I can’t find the rhythm

To rhyme about the stillness

And so the lack of noise that permeates my silence is deafening, so loud it consumes me

Reminds me of the bible of my lost jargon, my damaged mind

Because I’m so fucked up by you

I never really recovered from the spree of s**t that isn’t worth writing

Isn’t worth saying

So I take it out on this imaginary page

Instead of telling you

Until the wafer of white roses is full of lead and bullet points

Sharp enough the cut yourself on the paper and

I am splintered by the pencil

And dry like the inkless pen

Pretending to be a poet

Pretending to his loving son

Pretending to be better than you

Dreaming of when my sister didn’t make holes in perfectly good walls

And my mother didn’t cry lakes laid bare to rest

And bury men under a continent of lies

Dreaming of when my father’s heart first became rusted

How the percussion is so difficult to reach when it pierces and slaps endlessly at the eardrum

Like the steel factory near the water he used to work at

Before it closed and was overtaken by the Americans

When was it when the clock stopped ticking for me?

And time went on without you

Dreaming of when my trust for others was still there, where the barren juice of this land

Was alive

And in this cold drought, am I rusting too?

As we cross the bridges burned

By the forefront of the city skyline

I can think of when my father didn’t spit needles of arboretum

Into the clumsily knitting quilt of my skin

The way it tightens like millions of fibres of straw in a haystack

The way I pull myself back together

With the loose threads of my mind

The way it cannot completely cover itself from the chills

From the cold winds of whimsical winter widowed in windows on whittled whims of webs of ice

Of scratched skin scarred with memory

Going in and out of the flesh

In and out of the flesh

And now the memories are going wild in this frozen jail of my body

Inwardly incendiary

And the fishbowl is too small for them, too small

So these small fish, they suck the creativity from my veins, from the ponds of mitochondria

From the streams of consciousness that turned to glass and stone

And perhaps I am lucky

Perhaps my father is lucky too

With this winding string

 I have sewn up my mouth and my eyes to see that there are no false smiles

And I slip on this twisted tongue

Knotted by its own words

Into roots of trees

Crowned phosphorescent spectres in the sprouting balconies of welcoming alcoves of grey

Scarecrows of incandescent retching pestilence

Wielding sceptres and weapons as the mob of voices crowd the inner corridors of my mind

Representing the empty fiend that watches, through rain, and storm, and sun, and snow

The meadows of flower petal ghettos in the yellow propeller and turbines of kaleidoscopes

Hopeful

From above us where I thought there was a God

The fields are bone

The fields are bare

The fields are a feast of empty plates eaten up by its own empty

The fields are dreamland white

And I am damned by their facade of gods

Broad and beaming proudly from their ceiling

I have pissed down the storm drain of my life

Until the summer days turned dry

And slipped through kayaking catastrophe in the castaway cracks of me and my father’s smile

You don’t have to tell me he could not love me

As I could not love him

And as I sit beside him now

I know he knows this too, that this is the absolute, this one connection between us

Is rosemary, apothecary, the last flower after a fistful of knives

He’s afraid of what I haven’t become

How I am still him

How I am no better

One day, before my heart rusted too

They took me away to the hospital for madness, for a sickness in my head

They scalped my mind of every fabricated dream

And told me what to be

And so I lived there for several years, alone

Or wanting to be, without knowing it yet

And I’ve been sick in that hospital of the mind until the moment white walls burst with colour

Waiting in my cocoon

It’s been a long time now

And have been patient, and loveless, ever since

And I don’t blame him

I don’t blame, but

I never really left

I can remember all the past that pales to the present

And the present, it pales to that past

This mirror looking inward on itself

I am no butterfly, no firefly, no wind chime, dangled by the night sky of another man’s dream

And I can see that this world could not want me as anything else

That I was broken in a way where the pieces no longer fit right

No matter how many times I rearrange the jigsaw

Smiling to me now, is

Sacrilege, sacrifice, sabotaging mantras

The green and mud brown stained by the exodus of winter

Of the times we went to church

In a town that welcomed free thought and love

Mahogany tobogganing collage of mausoleums of revealing streams, cedars, in onomatopoeia

Colosseums flowing with the abyss of ambrosia

Without closure as the wavelengths dance of evangelicals were not yet gurgling turbulently

And the ecclesiastical love that I had was beautiful

And it all smiled

Before they made a monster from me

As they did

As they smiled

And said I lacked God

When I was just a boy

No hunger to destroy

My father was pious, my father was an unwritten psalm, in his open palms

He held every grain of sand on the coast of kaleidoscopes in vorpal anthropomorphic oceans

But he only believed in himself, his own truths

He never needed anyone

You’re still a photo of then, grey and faded and prideful; but

You’re more the hand that wears the puppet

The skin, the meat, the bone

Than the underneath bits

Than the father who left his son

On an island of silence surrounded by the roar of deafening rivers

A cell in this body of water stuck in the mud a long time ago

He died, right

You know you died, right?

A long time ago

I died

A long time ago

Now

When we still prayed in the handkerchief of a sanctuary

Like flowers burning in the pit of my stomach

You and I

And the butterflies I can’t hold down from there in my bowels of soil, meadow, and dead gods

That ruptured from my mouth when first I learned I could speak to God no longer

And the silence that overtook me when I learned

That you would not listen

That he would not listen

That they would not listen

That you couldn’t love me

That there was nothing there between us but the gap

Any longer

And that I had the confidence to love you no longer

The hospital was cold

Colder than you

But there is a warmth in silence

There is a crawlspace, in silence, hidden between vowels, valleys of sound

A draft in the scaffolding of alabaster’s tapestries, its masterpiece

Under the staircase of voices, and song, and crystalline noise rattling from beyond this floor

The room was comfortable, if empty, and solid; like a soundless board, sharp-angled, hard

Unbreakable

And never understanding the hatred that grew like a weed in place of those flowers,

I kept weeding; kept burying my fingers in the dirt; the hourglass of ashes

Hoping for new life, for the sinew of spindling stem to nestle between the ridges of my fingers

(I kept) Trying to plant you back into my heart

Trying to plant myself into this body, this world, this catastrophe

No longer kind, or consoling, or full of solace

I kept planting pieces of myself deep beneath this jigsaw mind

This dumping ground of the past, this landfill of plastic happiness

This garden of Eden is waiting to bury you and I, stretching out from the great beyond

Like the hands of a welcoming god

The dirt is calling my name

Waiting for the unplanned destruction of my life, to flower, to bloom, to blossom into something

Better

And the continuation of yours

My art is temporary; so it is beautiful

To sprout from you into the soft body of the earth, I have crumbled

Like ancient constellations I didn’t bother reading

Signs of life from God

You were always a fallen star

All tooth and nail

All hammer and fist

You could not love me with your empty hands

Your fingers could not touch another’s heart

And I don’t blame you

God made us solitary men

Imprisoned us with the sentence of our own words

I didn’t know how to collide, how the collision would shatter the chapel glass of my world

That it would be all so see-through

That the shards would fit between these windowpane fingers

The church has long since been abandoned

I have long since abandoned it

I no longer put my faith in a half-hearted god or a hostile world

I do not love you, yet I do

I do not die

So, I do not live

I do not seek your love anymore though

I was blinded by you, everything you were, and who you weren’t

And by the brilliance of all that I loved

It was meaningful

For you

For them

For what was

For what would be; and what should be

There was a fire in me before I became cold-hearted

Camping out from nighttime until the early morning

Under the unpolished sun

Under the scythe of a harvest moon

Now there are only embers, and chilled charcoal

I am not angry at your failure

I am not angry with mine

That hospital cured me of my madness

With medication, with suffering, with lies

You cured me of my imperfections

With much the same

The order, the structure in exchange for the clutter, the madness that they gave me

A sapling in the forest of my guts

Now I know, old forest

You burned like I did

I hack away at the family tree;

Not out of hatred

Not out of piety

I simply wish to preserve the leftover branches, the last remaining life in its roots, and leaves

As I walk over them,

Those embers,

And the crystals of thin ice that decorate this thick forest of life and death

The same way I would walk over you

Until all that’s left of you

Is me

I cannot pass the torch while my whole world burns

The torch will dampen

Under this flood of emotions I drown myself clean from, surfacing

So I remain frozen in place

A plastic memory

I wonder how it must have been for you

I suppose I remember when you were still alive

Still ticking

Before this tantrum

Before this stalemate

Until the frozen tendrils of the divine come out from the black womb of the ground

Until the world remembers itself

Or until I remember nothing

I will whisper to the heavens with their black slate licked dry of colour

And eye the page without words cleansed of all but the slightest stain of ink

Remind me of the sentences I’ve written out for us

I will eventually go back to that ward for the mentally ill

And face my reality

Hidden in the basin of my head

And I’ll wipe my tears away with that unwanted world

The portrait will be clean

The watercolour transient

You won’t have rusted off the canvas

Let this child learn to walk again

Let this man remember

For the first time since he stopped running

Let him pretend his father

Knows him

Let him pretend his father is proud

Until then, let these many hours in the dark

Grip some light within the jaws of their shadows

You do not frighten me, with your false teeth smiling

Lone wolf, I am no pup

I am no dog

Tomorrow is looming, like a skyscraper, and everything is crashing down on me

With iridescent pupils of the efflorescent Eden

Let me fit each piece interchangeably and perfectly so

In the debris and seeds of colosseums breathing onomatopoeia

In the black humour of these dirt-stained hands

In the growth of shadow until pitch night swallows all of the darkest memories

Grinding itself into harlequin barley again

Forget the hands that are stained grey with new life

As I am no better

I pass down my hatred to the next in line

I do not love myself

So they could not love me

I know nothing made from this could love me

How could they?

You and I both hate the mirror all the same

Everything we love has passed

Phosphorus pastures of elastic bastions of tapestries in the salt breeze

Patchwork taffeta of jellyfish parhelion

Terraforming accordions born from the wardens of aurora borealis shallowly

Dilapidated and lackadaisical

Electroconvulsive over the bonfires of barbed wire tie-dyed in my irises

Embedded in me

Serpentine and prancing

My spirit is here

But I find myself searching now

In an empty house

That houses my empty mind

All poppies and doppelgängers

And you

Hanging from the roof of my mouth

Your voice crawls on a collage of gaudy polymers embalmed like a swallow on my tongue

Its wings tethering the poinsettias of my Armageddon

 

Counting Down From One

 

Blasphemous taffeta

Handcrafted by alabaster massacres;

The spirit a flightless bird

Falling deep into the abyss

Inescapable

This beyond

This ending

Before the beginning of a sunrise

Of vinyl in the ivory kaleidoscopes

This cave unexplored

On the edge of a cliff of rosepetals

Settling on the dishevelled kettle renaissance

Of revelling rebellion among the burning churning churches

Ferns of sterling earthen emerging

From verdant murmuring of swelling iceberg metallurgy (of melody’s archipelago)

The skeletons of fallen sun’s parhelions

(Counting down from one)

(In the background noise)

(Black midnight’s tongue)

(Singing underwing of scintillation)

(Before the quarry of tomorrow morning)

(Infinite bethel on the midsection’s precipice)

(In phosphorescent crescents of crepuscular sepulchre incandescent in its wreckage)

(The falling star pollen’s stamen crawling in the javelin in ponds of halogen andromeda)

(In the polyphonic jaws of the map, the picture, the unlit wicker, not drawn)

(Under <Icarus> mithril skies coated in <gauze of> bronze)

(Before the coming <rummaging plumage in the sundering thundering umbrage of> dawn)

 

Continue Counting

 

Pretzeled tendrils resemble endless tempests endeavour past the clever heavens

An anthropomorphic expurgatorial toreador

Crashing through ecclesiastical taffeta chapels

Of jasper tapestries astral ashes with pastels of a glass mouth

And the blasphemous astronauts in underbelly of parhelion

Like a ball of yarn in the sky

In the tapestries of caramelized horizon

Kaleidoscope of stoked flames

Billowing vermilion clouds

Wrapping around the apple fields’ chapel

Blanketing anchorage clutters the bed of trees

Below rumpled by the spiral

Unraveling into one straight line

Written like a picture on the frame

Underneath the bunker of homunculus

Strumming the umbra of mother tongues

Spat from the mouth of God

Like a word in the endless sentence of life

In a paragraph of death or a novel of choreography

And the collage of fauna’s drawn-out reincarnation

The heartbeat continues to count

I hold my breath

The Rorschach butterfly of still-wet ink

Within the inescapable cage of my chest

Clutching my internal clock

These ruffled feathers

These outstretched hands strands painted with sacred threads

Pointing to the leather heavens

Catching myself before I slip back into the moment

And its beautiful sleep, its beautiful dream

Its roar of background noise

Its silent scream

While I write this symphony

This fresh tattoo, this fresco

Painted on the warped flesh of my scarred back

Like a memory

Or a screenplay

The scene set long ago

When the bulbous orb of sunlight

Washed me in the afterglow of a thousand combing oceans frozen

In the chromosomes of an explosion of thorned roses

Thrones for the scarecrows of Odin

His flock of Ragnarok mockingbirds in phosphorus nocturne

Burning in the serpentine corneas of purgatory’s corridors

Floral with the primordial quarry of furrowed Ouroboros

 

 

Neon

 

 

Nothing to lose

Too determined

Too forgotten

Too strong to feel, to be broken down

Too cold to be weak, beaten

Too cold to die to the fire and flames of it all

Too cold

Ground down to a single smile

Single file

The path unwinds and I

Remain unaligned

And aimless

And all my kind is left behind

By mankind

Nothing but the two wars, the two stars, the two worlds, the two holes

And like an eclipse

Two becomes one

The hole in the sky gaping now

Are you simply never empty?

Sentimentally, transcendentally, resembling, empty?

Those who are too cowardly to love do not know how to hate

They remain empty

Sentimentally (so) empty; so; empty

Are you willing to die loving what you love?

“I was”

Those young years of life you’ve left behind?

“I am”

For what you’ve left behind defines you

“And becomes you”

The dance with seconds that pass away into the crypt of dusk

“We are”

If you are not willing to die for something, are you really living?

“I’m not”

Or are you ignoring the death you have become

“I am”

What gave you life? Can you not see?

“I can”

Can you not do the honours of honouring me?

“I cannot”

Why not yourself?

“If no one else will”

Death is the finished canvas, the product life intends to paint

“You?”

Your love will never be

“Death is the finished canvas life has not yet painted”

You, your hate will never be

Death is the canvas life intends to paint

“What was will never be”

I am a broken sword with no blade to cut you with but my words

“Perhaps we are all broken swords”

Perhaps

“Warriors on the plains of our own heavens”

Nothing

Nothing at all

Where the black sea meets the dry bare parchment;

On the beach bent by tempests

Drained of the waves of our ricocheting glaciers in Rorschach shrapnel love

Falling upon and over each other violently

Like a tumbleweed of newspapers

In the incendiary wind of a lapsing capsule of landscapes

Of aether baked by the wake of oasis;

I will find you there like how you found me

Once more

Ask me who I am

Let me just be a black sea; on the endless white

“Let me write”

“If I ever lose my faith in you”

“I am nothing”

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

“The blemish embroidered into the picture frame is me”

Living in this rusted boulevard

Of your shadow

I am not ugly

Neither the lines on the featureless face of this old page

Or the ink that washes away at the dirty visage of amaryllis vines spindling whimsically

Resting in their testament, the vestibule of their testimony

Screams from the streaming ribbons of dribbling lithium christening the regal eagle of Elysium

Ribboning linen rivers of obsidian chiselling infinity’s rivets of deliverance and Icarus

And hindering the wind’s photosynthesis in the lithium abyss and the sentence for emptiness

I am the cracks in the pavement

Taking shape in the evaporated faculties of a jackal’s nature

Blooming in communication of mahogany volumes that polymerize in wireframe violins

The skin of equilibrium simulating scintillation in the pavement’s recreated elation

(Black lacquer of waxing taffeta rippling crystalline on an abandoned canvas laminated sapient)

I am the tired roots that no longer have anything to hold onto

That give nothing but empty promises

Ripped from the cradle of cornstalks, and poppies, and mothers

I am wilting on the dry river of the wind brambling handfuls of amber chrysanthemums on paper

The flowers do not remember me

The colours do not remember me

The world (turned grey)

Does not remember me

You do not remember me

Or the expressions on my blinking grey black and white neon face

Like a colourless memory on an old tv

You will not find me in these foggy clearings again

I have a shadow of my own

The length of your fingernails

The sound, the death knells of your bethel

Mantras of mourning

For the sun

In his motherless, fatherless sky

Touched by the out of touch

Torched by the black sky

Tasted by the tongues, clouds of hallowed borealis

Moulded together in the folded origami, tsunamis tethering the tender hallucinogenic brethren

Out of the afternoon rain

Cold and blazing like the sun spun by umbrage like yarn in the fibres of horizons

Chimera marionettes of dimes lariat carrion alstroemerias

My light comes from darkness

And darkness leaves me in the light

Blinded by its polar opposite, the different side of the mirror

Either with the brilliance of the bright

Of the black death of the night

I make light of the darkness

Out of the darkness alight

Hoping the darkness does not make light of me

As there cannot be shadows of what could have been

Like myself;

Without light

 

Light or Shadow in The Morning Without You

 

To guide their walk

Waltzing on asphalt salted with death

Waiting without stop

From the bottomless drop

Of a hair’s breadth

Through the pastel of a vestibule

And the blessing of a frescoed sepulchre for Nephilim

Resting in the nexus of perfection’s epitomes

Through the tethered web and heavens of a nebula

The stepping stone crescendo

And the pebbles of their wedding God

Featherless and flawed

Born from the shingled ringlet of a single piece of straw

The string that pulled itself apart

Distinct, this thing, this façade, this art

Born with every thorn of flowered song

From the times when I am gone

I hate the end

I hate our odds

I hate the sunset

The coming dawn

For they write our wrongs

They look upon

They write no psalms

They tarry not

These buried thoughts

Will carry on

The cherry popped

Trampling our fabric scattered in a labyrinth of knots

And everything our worlds had sought

As the stream of consciousness begins to clot

And every word we spoke is lost

Just a token spurred to rot

I hate the crossbreds limbs their alms, their hymns, and seraphim

I hate my end

As you begin

I wraith the bend

Of broken wings

I hate the end

Of all us things

The weightless death

Of everything

The rays that cleanse must gently singe

To smite the fire briars bring

In the wildfire this violent child swings

An unwired choir’s violin

The goliath of a silent whim

As I am winding entwined and dying for your sins

As in my dying

I might win

For within the next to dream

I will swim

Whispering

A comet’s garments garnet arms on starlit wind

Each drop of water

A cup of gin

Each lick of blood

Trickling with lithium

An iris in barbed wire spirals, wyvern, chimera, leviathan

Smiling

Colliding in the quagmire within

A tired island sired on the fringe

On the nylon fibres

The cider

Of a hyacinth

Unwinding me

This spiral’s string

This Nile’s grin

This iron thing

This heart gone dim

This uncarved shard of flint

 

 

Cracked Like You

 

 

Strangled chrysanthemums

And formaldehyde dandelions

Made timeless in the binding of its rewinding obsession

Give it to me

Give it to me

Give me back the weight of eternity;

It is my welcome burden to bear

Its pommel fits between my fingers

I want to feel its puddle

Of porcelain oceans

In the palm of my hand

Like sand flowers

Battalions hallowed in the gallows of an hourglass

Canoeing lucid cumulus

With oars of primordial caramelized rhinestones

It is here where the mountains

Show their tears in the shallow shadows

Unravelling in the malachite palace of alleyways

Growling to the moon illuminating

Calligraphy’s illustration in the lithium riptide

Of cities flaring, flickering, bickering, blinking neon and fluorescent in the pristine distance

In an all-out roar of silence

And the noise within a whimper

The static wax of apathy

Wrapping around itself and its stygian helix;

A double staircase leading into the heavens

The attics of my mind winding itself in the rapture of a jack in the box,

My springs coiling and ready to burst

Through the budding flower

With its roots

A growth within the pendulum

Of my head

Like a grand waxen candle lacquered tapestries of anviled alabaster

Drowning in the amalgamated skies

Under cypress and iris

To barbed wire horizons

Like a ribcage of glades

Where the swimming ribbons of birds serpentine

Weave like phoenix deities

Of elysian debris through the seams of bad dreams

And the splendour of memories like empty poinsettias

In the leatherback crowns

Of fallen Valkyries that lost the battle and unravelled

In this shallow gravely stretch of mitochondrial kilometres

In the graveyard of it all dead gone

And loved by no one but the sea, the sky, and the earth, one

And buried with the dirt under the bulb of a lamppost sun,

Baked and blanketed anchors of

A flower reaching through the reefs and beaches into the pockmarked sky

Planting itself in a garden of stars called twilight

I cannot allow myself to follow you

(As you sail to distant shores)

So let me give this gift;

A shard of glass in the shape of a bullet;

Amorphous inanimate and imaginary

Brittle as rivers of ice; cracked like you

My mother told me

Someday I will be a great man

Someday I will build a glass castle out of these sands

Afraid of nothing, undeterred, unbowed, untethered

And throw my stones, unbroken by this heavy gilded world

Standing there

With my eyes of jade

Climbing the horizon

Watching the tallest mountains spindle and crumble to dust

Watching the people wither and bloom

Watching the skyscrapers lean on each other’s shoulders

And I will be not shattered

Not beaten

Not broken

And I will spite death, in my spire of wildfire

And spit the pits of mens’ hearts into terracotta bowls

Like a memory

Sucked dry of fruit

In this garden of mine

Like any other crop

Without a second thought

And I will be cracked

In this heart

In this mind

In this body

In this soul

Like them

Like you

But not broken

Because

My mother told me

I must sail to distant shores

With my steady hands

And my flag of taffeta

And my heart of ice

Cracked

Like you

Mosiac

Like you

And sharper even;

Than you ever were

My mother told me

One day I will climb

Valleys mountain’s mouth and gorge

Take the railroad up north

Stand upon the Rockies

Somewhere skies are clear

Find my substitute for heaven

Stand upon the gully

Up on Gaia’s belly

Steady weight on my mineshaft back

Test my footing up on high

And climb till sunlight dies

With the moon reflected in my eyes

Climbing many death cliffs

Sharper than ice

Sharp than you

Cracked granite body

Sculpted by penultimance

Under the beaten porcelain sky

Take their mountains

As my own

Take their beauty

As my own

And fear not but a single

Of your gravelly limbs

Or of your stones

Or of the sun in morn

Or of the winter storm

And midnight’s form

Fire in my wyvern bones

My mother told me

When I am grown

I’ll be cracked like you

Too

Oh (great mountain father)

(King of the numb unsympathetic and stony-hearted boulders, uncaring, pristine)

(Cold and enduring, Everest, bright like stained glass, plastered in pastures of alabaster)

(Covered in the afterglow of golden rays of sun that plunder the grasslands of green)

(Fluttering like a hawk above the splintered nest)

(Piece of the puzzle that wears the crown of trees)

(Inhuman, unfeeling father, cold glacier, iceberg, thirsty for the heavens)

Daddy

Mommy told me

(Not)

 To be

(Cracked)

Just like you

But you were both mistaken

And now

I walk my own path through the cracked skull of the mountains

<Through the decaying oasis of fae and Himalayans on the bays of chaos, colossal botanists>

<The bulbous leaves that weave debris of the breeze weaving through the cumulus of illusions>

<In the frosty hallows of cauldrons that mandala in polymerization>

Through the ripped bones of God

Not lonesome

Like the broken cliffs

That wrestle with the turbulent tributaries of the heavens

I must go out to meet my own war, now

Among the skies

Among the vultures

Among the warlocks

And come back down upon the earth

Like a hammer

On the nails

Of my enemies

Free and unafraid

To die shattered

And to shatter

Until I die

Living with the broken pieces of my innocence (rippling)

(On) The warped spring of my mind

Building myself up

Like the house of God

Making sure to nail down

Every piece of wood

And every splinter

In my flesh

Like you father

In my soul

Like you mother

Like you

I am unwanted and alone, only able to see the desires of myself

Relying only

Upon myself

I have no need for anyone (now,) I do not seek open arms, or (the) warmth

(You wouldn’t give me)

(For in/despite my difference, in/despite my silence,) I (really) am just like like you, just like

You

 

Author's Note

Previous Edit: It's taking shape, finally. I'm starting to like this piece. I'm not sure if this is for everyone, but I would appreciate it if someone could properly criticize this poem. Give it a read if you want.

Most 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 the ( ) brackets, or ( ) and [ ], or ( ) [ ] and { }, or all these mentioned brackets including < >, or these brackets all the way up to >( )<, and finally, up to - - or -< ->. It must be in this order though if you wish to read some of the brackets. Obviously the more brackets you read, the longer my poems will be. The purpose of this is simply to allow leniency in how long or short you want the read to be. The lines in grey are particularly optional. This is not a way to ruin art in order to string in more readers, nor am I doubting a reader's capabilities to understand, or even how much they're willing to read. It is much more something where I simply do not know whether I consider these extra words be the core, and see them in a sense of not entirely understanding whether I consider them "canon", as they often change the flow of the piece, for better or worse, when or when not they are included. In a way, making it a completely different poem, as is their intention in a way, to add more, and to sculpt words differently. Think of these added brackets and words as the fat of the piece, rather than the bones.


I promise I read every single review, and I generally will reply to them. I look forward to my next review, because it helps me learn. Even if it's just one word, I promise, I will be happy to hear anything you feel needs sharing. Whenever you write on my shortcomings or breakthroughs, or the themes of my poems, or share ideas and friendly criticism, it decides my next poem to an extent. I will listen, learn and be thankful. And 99% of the time, you'll get a reply unless you're trolling me.

Reviews

[Pete]

not sure whether to run for my life or drink it all in like a desperate, thirsty man lost in the desert.

How can God commit such a crime to wreak justice on order?
The chaos of our lives must be made mosaic, must be made brick and mortar
Must be made city walls that sprawl like a collage of colosseums in regal greenery

you mention god quite a bit in this one. it's as if you write in another dimension. powerfully woven. as usual, i am spent after sampling a bit of the inner working of your mind. thanks for the exhausting trip ... :)

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you, I've been so busy with college and graduating. I also encountered a glitch on this website that made it hard to share new writing.

I'm glad you enjoyed the trip, thank you so much for reading, I take this piece very much into the realm of God and Nihilsm. It's been so long since I've even put into thought how I felt when I wrote this poem. Thanks again!

R.J

[Fabian G. Franklin]

Holy volumes of alliteration, linguistics and etymology, Batman! This left my head spinning and my mind wandering. It's likely to explode my brain at some point in the future. I've never read anything like these. They are trippy and explosive, deep and explorative. And I'm generally a bonified groupie of the unusual. I cut my literary teeth on Tom Robbins(who lives just a few miles from me), HP Lovecraft and later, Clive Barker. I thought it didn't get much wilder and weirder than that but to be quite honest, you give them all a run for their money, here. You craft these musings so effortlessly I'm stymied at how to even review these offerings. I can't honestly even say I got a firm grasp of all the visualization in the articulation. But what I could visualize was partially psychedelic horror and part imaginary fantasy...it was like Alice in Wonderland meets the alien. My bi-polar mind did grasp "each lick of blood trickling with lithium"...It reminded me most of the disjointed dreams I've had while on a course of steroids, vivid, full-color and realistic but fantastic and slightly terrifying. I' admire your ability to create such extensive and creative works of art. I must come back and read these all again. They have a pull that draws the reader in. So interesting and at times, flamboyant. What can I say but blown away. Keep up the great writing. F.

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

This is honestly one of my best works. A friend of mine told me when I wasn't happy with this as a rough draft to not be judgemental, and just to try. So I did, and it turned out to be somewhat of a masterpiece for me. Just shows that sometimes we are our worst critics. Steroids definitely leave a mark, I hope you're getting better now. My style is certainly different, kinda out there, but I know that there is true meaning in those words. So happy you found them, thank you so much!

R.J

[Fabian G. Franklin]

My pleasure. I'll be back to read more.

[Annette Pisano-Higley]

"And darkness leaves me in the light
I make light of the darkness
Hoping the darkness does not make light of me
As there cannot be shadows of what could have been
Like myself;
Without light"
Boom-Drop Mike... RJ has left the existential building. This brilliant, tortured (though hopeful?), graphic 'screaming-out' is so Dante-esque in its powerful journey. Your pictures draw the reader's soul into the steaming cauldron of despair. This is a self-portrait drawn in passionate dark and glorious light. Your lines, references, imagery, metaphor use, and every nuanced element are magnificent. Whew-what a long, strange trip it is. I hope the object of your unrequited, elusive love is ultimately kind to you my friend...
Take good care, be well and I wish you Happy, Healthy, Hopeful Holidays!

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

Thank you so much Anne, I'm always my worst critic, so hearing you say this gave me so much confidence! You have a great holiday, be well.

RJ