Poetry – Page 16 – Theater of Sorrows

Spoiled Bones

Worms; Trails in the key of blue, gnawing the light into mulch
Where I stumbled and fell –
Cerulean skies churning and rumbling, a vertigo undertow rushing, dragging
This dissonance, malengine shadings in my bones
Indicating misplaced instruments and lost rhapsodizing
Perpendicular and horizontal planes, out of rhythm and unaligned –
Reliving the tilted dreams in your head that you can’t remember
Film on paper, of intersections with sinistral rotations –
Puncturing symmetrical contours of my living religion
This caffeinated cathedral arcs over city; Metal and rust, concrete and dust, chatter and hush…
Times dreams ride the ferris wheel; You can hear their voices expiring out in the choppy sound

So I caught the crosscurrent East of Seattle
Clinical exfoliation punching away the grey
Moldy brick road drying out in the dessert, toad lily, lilacs and sagebrush kiss my cheeks –
Dance beneath a scorching sun lathering tulle, confetti clouds
Long hair swinging round beneath fresh cactus and I hear a sound
And realize that I’m laughing…
Mint fields caressing strawberry hills bordered by dogwoods; Solstice velvet pink snow-petals twirling down
And moist, hot summer nights, windowsill by candlelight –
Words resonating through invisible portals, sliding down space and time, caressing us
Eventually calling you mine

Adobe moon-shadow dancing on fire mountain, captivating eyes
Beaded prayer sticks swaying to the winds breathy sighs
Billowing smoke fingers feather braided onyx hair
Starshine illuminates tribal totems colliding with ravens, on citrus skin
River rocks, crowstone and moonstone beckon tonight
Sage songs on the warriors path of complications and deviations
Where he lingered, stumbled and fell –
Tripping the light fantastic into absinthe and mushroom devastations
To bury his raging at every vile incision –
Her lunatic tactics and tin man narcissism

You’re running wild in my yesterday
Recollections gleaning betrayal-anger that you couldn’t put down
Pain spitting glowing crimson coals
That I walked across barefoot and naïve
Because even your ancient scars were beautiful –
Although some bridges are simply better burned
So we grabbed a can of gasoline and one last time returned…

Incisions mend yet surface scars still chant like ghosts in trees at times, dressed in blue
Dandelion ligatures creep on the ground; Fill our heads with fossilized accelerants –
But it’s summer, get the hose and spray those spoiled bones out of the driveway
Into the sand to devour what once tasted like clover but then turned sour
Our faces turned to the desert breeze, gazing over the wall into valley dunes
Your graffiti-painted eyes, all of that spider web pain breathed into helium balloons
Parched and bleached goathead soil, tumbleweed rolling down the road
Has finally become, through trial of blood, bone and bile
Home

Something a bit different IV

Dedicated to Saynotoclowns

Small Car (2002)

She mentioned he was flawed but I saw it in her eyes
That hunger which replaced her common sense at times
Didn’t matter he was wanting, so long as he was wanting her
Just call her Miss Dysfunctional and paint her past a blur
I tried a bit of reasoning –
Said remember James and Tim?
And Louie, Bill and Keith, and how each one left you grim?
She agreed, that certainly, they all had been huge disasters…
But you can’t remove your heart and fill that empty hole with plaster
I told her lessons learned would save a lot of time and grief
And she, in her witty way
Said Love is like a thief
And this boy has found his mark and wrung me out and wrung me through
And love is just too powerful, and there’s nothing I can do…
I shook my head
After all these years
I knew dread –
That I’d be mopping up her tears
This circus full of giddy fools
Their big clown-head smiles full of drool…
Oh my friend, come conquer this
Can’t you see I’d be remiss
To let you drive your tiny car from clown to clown in every bar?
Their empty eyes and cotton candy flowers
Should warn you that their love will rot your empty heart in a few hours
Those slick white gloves that hide their claws…
Which amaze you with tricks, to which you ooh and ahhh…
This ain’t no elementary school fire drill, and you, my girl, have had your fill
No more clowns in your tiny car –
Leave them lounging at the bar
Their confetti drinks and big black shoes –
Next to the beds of other fools…
She thought a bit and then she smiled
Said –
The right guys never been my style
This big tops got to have one dressing room with a star
I sighed, wondering…
How many clowns can you fit in a small car?

We Called Him Michael

We faced it in chorus, but absorbed it with eyes, pores, bones, spirits differently
9 paths of devastation, plowing a 10 year toxic wasteland, carving 13 canyons of separation
Necrotic residue from louche lawyers and corrupt bloodlines
That steel green room, with its antiseptic fringe, bland beige floors, tubes and currents, cold metal rails
And walls that screamed in silence…
A brutal, beautiful 1:45am last call
Lucid corner hawk eyes working overtime, badge 1325 stoically, tacitly silent
Sink into the wall, slide around the crime scene like a ghost, edit offenses, clock out –
Comatose manacle adding insult to injury, where are the crows with that shiny key?
Empty facts from incompetent voyeurs collecting butterfly samples; Ripping off delicate wings –
Desecrating history, writing its tragedy with an unsterilized pen spewing bacteria ink
Which could not be excised with smudging lips or two pair of zen eyes…
Those last renegade bones slicing through the thick membrane of death air –
Gestures bringing life to a conclusion; A modulation of disbelief and disappointment, rise and fall, rise and fall…
How low can you go… (How odd the thoughts you think)
The astringent, last measure of a chest expelling its final breath, like an acupunctured balloon
Do not go there, into the myth of; It will make you stronger –
Those whom suffer lifes brutal hypocrisies do not need conceited, reductive sentiments
Time has pumiced, erased, sliced, smoothed me into exactly what my choices revealed; Decided
And I am not your deterrence, so go find your own plagues, uncover your own self, dance with your own demons…
Here, in this vortex of incarceration, of acrimonious disintegration –
I will not let these acid riddled pages scar my mind, nor blunt my pen
I will not give one second of my eternal child to the vile butchers of my reflection
I will imagine, remember, put form to pieces, and keep you safe with me –
Know those eyes through every door, dream, and nightmare that I’m allowed…
Defining all space, time and matter, your presence was an orphic cathedral on top of fire mountain
Yet love… ah love –
A sophistical valentine stuffed into an elementary school, pink, haphazardly stapled construction-paper envelope –
An article of faith clutched in ecstatic hands –
Isn’t always enough…
It can’t save the light of the festering moon, nor storm the gates of fate
Can’t mutate the evil that churns behind empty eyes, nor guarantee spun sugar and unadulterated bliss
Can’t bind your fingers to mine, nor keep a grown adult from becoming a little child –
As the last measure of all you were is released, fingers slip though fingers
And spirit steps into our ambiguity, and steps into its omniscient divinity
This moment, path, this departure is its own beginning, despite being my ending
Which will then become a beginning; Tucked inside, over and over, smaller and smaller like a Russian nesting doll (Ah, those remarkable thoughts) –
To be held with acceptance and reverence, to witness and honor with love and direction, then
The violence must be tended (Come now, stop pandering to fairytales; these are visions that will be, not that may be)
With blossoming eyes, a soft heart, a childs’ spirit –
A calling to undress our fallacies, frailties, lunacies, clichés and platitudes
Our inconsistencies and absolutes! Do not let these feed you (Mirror, show me my beloved, show me my truth)
Time, fantasy, reality, love, hate; These are not our enemy –
We are
Your shadow kissed the eerie hallway, scurried down its scrapbook walls and I followed
Like I was chasing a hummingbird into a hurricane
While she stayed behind for a love letter kiss farewell
Your cooling –
Her meditative night sky, last goodbye, an insistence toward distance –
Lantern stars softly illuminating drifting snowflakes that covered the last February footsteps…
I chased your shadow until it turned into shimmery strands permeating; Seed, stone, fur, skin –
Energy assimilating
Your name rested on my lips, my snowy footprints shaky, my eyes, lips, and the smoke blue
That I exhaled in the parking lot, as I stared into my numbness
The stars spelled your notoriety and amused the moon
Wind howled like a wolf, its caramel-eyed planchettes waiting for questions –
So real that I looked for tracks across the concrete; City was your nature
The rain came pouring down, pounding like a 48 foot tall hammering man, and I knew then
That the Emerald City sky was saying goodbye
Life bites with savage abandon, chews away what once was; Turns familiarity backwards –
With a simple gesture like opening a drawer and reaching inside…
Secrets come undone
Desert sky, tequila-etched fingerprints smearing inky worm shadows on a one page manuscript…
Shadows that blur and obscure what you thought that you once were
Edits, now my duty, because you’ve always been notoriously late, including to your own funeral –
Stuck on Snoqualmie in a four hour blizzard… hey hey, my my…
Some things are to be expected, and then you find that one page manuscript
Its words wilt petals on the funeral flowers that flood this sunless house of heartache artifacts
You exhale your desolate forlornness into the dusty air of this melancholy museum
As words run backward and inside out; Lies in truth, and truth in lies… (Come hither madness, cut out my eyes!)
One page written in actuality, becoming unwritten in reality –
Pen name missing an author
No one knew he was a nom de plume until the 13th hour
A pseudonym

Including him