Category Archives: Dark Poetry

Melancholia 1

Arching Arms Aching

Frigid bitter morning
Will these hostile days never take their vile taunts and retreat?
Raging torment biting my tender mind, gnashing, crushing every hopeful thought
And I, I sit in this decrepit corner, listless
Useless wit, senses devoid of articulate ingenuity
I am withering, wearing my cloak of funeral shadows
Ink-stained fingers screaming in protest, curling like the Eastern witches pointy shoes beneath that razing house…
This bloated desk smirking, crumpled pages, half fed, demand my crucifying
The empty, dusty air drifts into seedy corners that screech my fears without mercy, each time I shift in my chair –
Sinking further into this drafty void, this hollow, lonely nowhere… alone…
Between the light I falter
Webbed, shadow tentacles scratch fissures in this crisp air, and the borderland exhales its oblations –
Provocative demon sliding through the cracks –
Lips wet against my lobe, it hisses in my ear; You hide behind the curtain
I succumb to the rotting in my head, and wander in a wasteland of disease
My mind riddled with tunnels from this spectre, this vinegar worm, chewing ravenously
I am a timepiece leaking minutes, while recorded minutes fade
Disappearing… making a ghost of myself…
There is no voice as warm and sweet, yet cold as mine, licking at my wounds with its acid saliva
Like a bitter herb mulled into tea of which I drink
Each sip a betrayal of myself
I take hatchet to my fingers, for what use are they if I have no words to write?
Even when I’ve written them; They are monstrosities, bulbous caricatures lacking and absurd
I pierce my own armor
Whiskey sours swilled to notes of blue melancholia dappling my mind
No better angels to compel in me a faith when lifes unkind
I take cigarette to gasoline and tend to stagnant poetry
Burning hot, like a dried out scarecrow among parched stalks
Piles piled high, like intestines climbing to the sky…
Dour eyes, ankle deep in this wintry mix of jewel-encrusted snow –
Peering through the frosty glass with baited breath, they caw, these nosy crows
Fingernails tapping on the rim of this nearly empty glass
Liquid fire burns like hell in summer
But its good for aches, and shakes, and worthless dreams
Clink, clink, clink, then take a drink –
Clink, clink, clink, like a church bell promising saving grace
Or, at the very least, a respite from the mundane in this madness
I lean into the keys, so sweetly sensuous beneath these liquored, impaired fingertips
Where are the seething, growling, gutting words? Why do I betray, devour myself?
The ruthlessness of my own thoughts sucks me down bone by bone
These empty months have untangled me, as in the mirror I seek my soul, but find
A reflection halved in two; the human, and the Grendel –
Bleeding isolation, howling desolation
I can no longer speak
Oh… these pages crisp and winter white, yet bare
My voice fades in the air of yesterday
I howl into this nothingness
I howl into this emptiness
I howl

We are born, innocence shining briefly, like a shooting star
My oh my
How the world spins such wickedness into gold
Crushing spirit into lies
Cutting out ecstatic eyes
And then one morning you believe what you’ve been told

My Mourning Gown

Snowy Steeple

My mourning gown
My stinging undoing
A wreck, ruined and breathless
As my lungs insist –

This firesong was ours without a doubt
Hearty passion, intuition, entered at our own volition
Look through my seasons
Look through my eyes
Onto the parts of me that no one else should ever see
Onto the pieces that should be left to obscurity
Douse the melting flame
With breath and touch and gasoline –
With lips and mouth and quarantine –
Where starched sheets tangle, like our legs
As kiss becomes one spark to flame
Within thin walls pressed ears could obtain
Soft moans, in peaks of cherished pain
Reckless marks on tender skin
Taste so sweet they should be sin
And mortal, crimson petals bleed
Passion purring rhapsodic need
Velvet smooth against the rough
To singe so sweet never enough

And in my mind I live to dream
Of angel wings we laid upon, as over skin our fingers crept til dawn –
Fingers drenched in the sweet obscene
That, after pulse and breath did still
Did hold filter-tipped to our delighted lips
Bleached, thin strips, of menthol flavored nicotine

Into your eyes I remember; I fell unbound
Silent, sweet, searing sound
To fade, to die as mortals do
These lips immortalize what was true

My mourning gown
My stinging undoing
A wreck, ruined and breathless
For what no longer does exist

Witch

Tempestuous Testament

Anathema; Reviled and shunned, by my own hand, having written my own, detested story
Pages turned where the voice that speaks, my own, creaks with cursed harbingers –
That I am damned, and detested, within my own cruel, disordered mind
These sharp and rusty fragments do not dissipate in this ill begotten wind
That blows through the hollows beneath my cheeks, through stiff joints and swollen knuckles
Brushes the low curve of my spine producing tremors that embalm me like a thousand feral gnats
Lapping at my meringue flesh, pricking it with their tiny stiletto teeth, as if I am a succulent –
My plump flesh ripe and sweet
However, their hordes are merely demons smelling my earthy scent, a dead giveaway of my wretchedness
I am witch
I seek no harm to others, only to myself, and on my behalf must admit that I am full of wrath
I call the clouds, the wind, to roil
To chastise myself for my grievous errors, upside down and sideways, singular and plural –
Threefold when webs cling to corners, and ruse slithers up the walls, my minds eye blinded –
Unfolding a collateral morn…
Debris crunches beneath these funeral boots, antiquities phantoms smeared upon their withered soles
Briar and bruise, cut and burn mars skin with a map resembling a tortured playground –
Like the one long ago where my 5 year old self first met its shadow…
A circular teeter totter from which I fell and broke my arm in two places; A greenstick fracture
There was no teetering… nor tottering… no movement… only sitting
Barely the space of a few feet between ground, and girl
The beginning of wreaking mayhem on myself for my helplessness to exterminate abominations
How else could this occur?
Perhaps I bore marshmallow bones?
Or were they volcanic; Full of holes and feather light?
Some believe that there are accidents, but the rest of us know there aren’t
From the time that I could tie my shoelaces
My mind at war with itself
My heavy eyes observed the intricacies of the universe –
The pecking order of oblivious mannequins
There are few saviors, and none blessed me with their good deeds during those 2am night terrors
As, swept up in soft arms, we would creep into the brittle, cold night air…
When he, fulcrum to her lever
Ran amuck through the wormwood fields, leafy oils seeping through his skin, staining it green
Until his mind was gone and his demons breathed, inhaled her forlorn miseries –
Throwing them back at her in a cyclone of blood
Brutal, metal zig-zag teeth leaving bite marks on her tender faith
Droplets of bitter crimson climbing up the hem of her precious wedding gown
The only bit of good in the bad; She would not collapse, would not pass onto her offspring the feeling of forfeiture
But even with her clever, feline, agile tenaciousness
Her medicinal, crafty armamentarium of spotless, contemplative infinities, intuitive planes, and transcendental artistry
She could not separate the heart from the hurt, the child from the tarnish, the soul from the shame
I am a product of primitive gardens; Seeds that bloom threads of dark divination –
Harms that need not be human faults, though they be!
I screech and scream in red splattered so brutally across creamy walls that it settles; Into silence –
I am a ghost in Time magazine photographs
Bleeding and bled yet revived and fueled by fury; A porcelain pinata exploding with a parched bloodlust
Come Fall I feel its nearing –
That inky wash staining my skin and eyes
Its dark, dreary appendages, spider-leg fingers reaching for my spirit, clawing at my dreams
A childs memory mottled with guilt
Its skulking shadows magnified on the wall in the candles flame
I am a chromatic aberration, circles of confusion along the path of chronic calculations –
Energy exhausted, to determine sacred ground, where my eyes need not plead for, nor fear… love
Mugwort tea to bless my dreams, yet knowing that I can’t undo those parts of me that now travel through each lifetime
I can’t spell an answer when the question is irrelevant –
Whatever determines what remains, so shall it be
And I can scream red, can cut off these scars, dig deep and long, break these wicked bones rip my hair, my lashes
I can rage that I will not become the results of blights, and plagues, and ravages –

Of brutal things wrapped in pretty bows (vile atrocities should be thrown to hell, but even hell doesn’t want them)

I can fight the good fight, but as the long, grey shadows of fall slink over my face with their cold, wet tongues
I am all I am, and although I loathe certain things that have brought me here
I loathe the abandonment of myself even more

I could not save her from his thieving arms
I was a child with an angelic spirit whose wings were torn, ripped from their tender seams
Left on the floor in a crumpled heap, in their shattered bedroom –
Holes and glass, metal and wood, paper and pierced photographs; What vile dream is this?
My child is a monster
I invoke the clouds, the wind to roil at her strength
While my wicked eyes send heartbroken tears down my lonely, empty face

I am witch
I seek no harm to others, only to myself, and on my behalf must admit that I am full of wrath