Poetry – Page 22 – Theater of Sorrows

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Nightshade distance in the rearview
I painted the sky crimson for you
Melted the vowels until the words sound
Like warm ocean waves to dive into
We both knew this was coming
We’d stopped spirit dancing long ago to the drumming
Behind the lids of your eyes sleeps the carousel ride
With those heart shaped swans that are constantly humming…
How can I ever forget you?
All these scars on soft skin that you’ve tattooed
All these ghosts in cruel dreams that unravel the seams –
Of soft spoken gleams that I cling to
There is no sound in the drowning
Only shadows that fall down while surrounding
Come watch me bleed through these words I don’t need –
In this dim smoky room
That’s become my cocoon –
While inky breath of despair I’m expounding…
I stir the stars into shadows of vexed crows
Prophets of tumescent ruin and woe
Dahlia tear-ladened curled parchment pages
Lament of missed love I was cursed only to borrow
Your brutally beautiful haunting moon eyes
I take it all back; I want to revise
Running down my heart like red candle wax –
All of your too good to be… pretty poison butterflies…
Did you ever consider how a reprieve
Would give me a chance to steal air so that I could breathe?
Would give me time to locate a gypsy sky to hide my pain
Until I salvaged faith, hope and love that I again could weave?
And this peculiar drowning has a familiar note sounding
This novella I write of dead words that have become my surrounding
I bleed vocabulary that traces love like it was a poetic weed –
In this dim, dusty gin and cigarette smoky room
That’s become – The gins gone; Now its a whiskey cocoon –
Loves tentacle web pasted cadaver dreams in inky-rouged prose I’m expounding…
Bordeaux scented rune astral kiss
Tasted like candy-coated starlit amulet bliss
Time reveals its reasons through dream sequence seasons
If you’ll step through the mystical veil to reminisce
I can see our distance in the rearview
Finally I’m moving past you
But all these dream catchers, signs, totems and motifs
Make this fire dance an inferno in which I can’t refract or subdue

Something a bit different…

Today I offer a poem I wrote years ago. My style then was rhyme, romantic, sorrow or tragedy written with a lighter touch versus the dark atmosphere I use now. I like to think that there may be those that are eternally linked. That they know without a doubt, and take comfort in, that they will be reunited in every lifetime. Feel free to comment. I hope you enjoy.

A Thousand Years

With that first breath of you
I ignored what I knew I should do
And so I rolled with it, without mention
And then you moved real close to me
And I was blinded but could see
My soul was flying toward your attention
And such a man so beautiful
I’ve seen them come and seen them go
But this time there was something there unchanging
I reached way back inside my mind
And there you were – easy to find
It just took a little bit of rearranging
I’ve tried, to retreat from the tide
It floods me everywhere I hide
No ocean rests between us
Not one small grain of sand
A thousand years…
You’ll find me where I am…
I watch as the daylight fades
And hints of us in every shade
Become more prominent in my aloneness
Your body so warm against mine
When I saw you that last time
And found myself falling into your kiss
I stack those pieces once again
Onto ancient recollections – then pretend
That I was never meant to be more than your lover
This Universe of ours devours
Our chance at love with its powers
Refusing any answer to discover
So I try… to retreat from the tide
It floods me everywhere I hide
No ocean rests between us
Not one small grain of sand
A thousand years…
You’ll find me where I am…
This circle is our destiny
I’m true to you, you’re true to me
Whether or not we wish to continue
Throughout space and all of time
We’ve been attached by the sublime
When I’ve looked out –
You’ve looked in every window…
So I try… to retreat from the tide
It floods me everywhere I hide
No ocean rests between us
Not one small grain of sand
A thousand years…
You’ll find me where I am…

Loves Bones (Marrow)

Call me not a seeress, witch, prophet or messenger
But I know a 50 mile distance and a 75mph blur
And there’s an echo, an unforgiving solemn, empty chanting
Crows reprimanding; Shriek –
Demand a fair accounting
But there’s no answer, no simple resolution –
Only chaos drowning in sorrow, along with all of these contusions
(Yearnings depth of no significance in this monstrosity of horrors)
(No bartering or begging when the cupboards are all bare)
We swam in words during our gasoline conception
All nighters filled with language that had passion and direction
But now stillness… scavenging – picking at loves bones…
Every time you’re out of your mind, you fill my head with your despair
I have no breath that I can catch in this spiny, dead, thin air
No remedy in the webs of my mind for these double-edged cuts, seeping blue
Poetic rawness; Our jagged, gritty Valentine
There’s no truth to make this better; To wrap us back in a cocoon
To spin fire out of cinders… pinch drenched into thirst
No offerings of madness will plump a pale moon that’s just about to burst
(Phantoms behind demons, apparitions lurking in the fog behind your empty-mirror stare)
(They fill their bellies with my decaying precious faith)
No blood sacrifice
From a serrated, rusty knife
Leave my demons… ravaging – Go find your own…
No matter now
The crows are stumbling drunk and foul
Thorny beaks vandalizing the truth with reckless glee –
Stabbing, biting at my shattered eyes
Hissing hymns of death so gruesome that they’re a lovely morbidity
Wicked talons claw a map of my body; A scar for every torment
Perch upon disembodied Loves’ bony shoulders until the very last moment
(Wretchedness presses its silky, slinky heat against my emaciated soul)
(Then wipes the dirty hourglass; Ah, my beloveds true name…)
A gargoyle mass of grey and gristle sucking from my bones their marrow
While the raging clouds of crows take flight leaving behind a lone, dead sparrow
Hellhounds bray morbid lullabies… damaging – until the whole world moans …

The curtain torn so the wounds could spill; And I am at the very least
Falling away… falling, falling, falling… I fell away

Into no good feast.

In the hollow, warm and humid, lay my bones with lavender to seduce
My vile loss into sweetness among statues with unfortunate eyes
From which lily’s do protrude
Give me an unmarked grave to speak where words failed
And your whisper against the cold-stones solitude
To drown out the deeds that were merely chasms of charred nothing
So that at least in death my spirit finds a truce