Tag Archives: culture

// Liar //

1 Reply

I know you are not listening.
I know there is a voice which speaks to you
and you hold its neck beneath the
waterline;

choke the truth
that’s choking you.
You are silent, thrumming in stoic madness
to keep it hush.

It is silent
but the truth is a disease with no breath
carried along on the scarred back of eternal breeding.
It has no heart for beating

or not beating,
shadowboxing with the pulse of
a faceless time of day,
swing and a miss

and miss, miss, miss.

What you fight is what is biting
you, the Mistress and her missing fingers and
her broken window teeth.
She is there despite you

in you because of what you are
and the howl in your stomach is filling
itself as you swallow its tongue
cursed hunger without permission

filling itself with rage.

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// Chance of a Lifetime //

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There have been chance moments within all of this, moments of madness and grace,
which I fear I will surely forget. But for now I am here with you and the twilight is sliding across your face. For now your eyes holding mine and the way our fingers become whispers become the lengthening of necks become flesh over the fragile bones of dreams come back to life, for now I will feel everything. I will shatter and I will expose and I will untie all the things about myself that I have kept bound in the dark halls of my petrified being for ages. So that when this moment has gone, when it has become part of the next, and these small things become smaller and smaller still as they walk the eternal distance of time, I will have been made into everything I could have become. Because I let it all in and I let it all go and this is the magnificence, and this is the miracle of the blood of the life we are invited to know, when life is allowed to open and to close and to flow.

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// Pieces of the Whole (In Me) //

1 Reply

I am learning to look back and see that every cycle, every phase of the things I have been through, they each needed the space and time and energy they needed. That is simply the truth.

There was nothing I could have rushed through and nothing I could have prevented because I was unfolding in two ways at once: in love and in fear of love. And these two streams were crisscrossing each other all the time exactly as they were set in motion. I made choices, of course, but each was made from that intersection of love and fear of love.

I can see that now, however briefly, however fleeting that clarity may be, I can see my life, my love and fear-of-love story, as whole. As complete in the way it met and did not meet my expectations of myself.

There is a place which is a way, which is a way of thinking about these things without judgment. It’s a center, a balance, we can seek out if we can trust ourselves enough that it exists. This place within is where we cut ourselves free, let ourselves off the hook for whatever we believe the past held for us. What it gave to us and what we gave in return can be what they are.

It is really tough to dwell within that clarity and it moves ever in and out of focus.  But through some kind of madness or miracle, it can be done.

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// A While On Sadness //

6 Replies

Maybe not everyone will like it but I wanted to write a while on sadness. I needed to.

Why? Because this is something we all live with, live within. It’s all around and underneath our fingernails, our tongues. Sadness is upon our shoulders, in the hand of our minds. I want to write from it, I want to become her lips and bones and match my heartbeat to hers.

I want to listen.

The only thing more crushing than sadness is sadness which is lonely.

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// Random Acts of Blindness //

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The warm stained scent of wet city sidewalks and all the ways I struggle to say what I mean. I don’t know anymore if that is voluntary or medicinal but I’m often overwhelmed by the possibility that it might be either. Or both (I know it’s always both).

I flip through vacant magazines and pace the floors barefoot but all I can see are storm clouds closing in on me.  The second you walk out the door they move in. What happened to the way you used to make poetry out of flickering skylines? Whatever became of the sun setting behind my tender flesh and how it used to spark the bones we traded. If I had any words left I would give them all to you. I would sit underneath your shadow and pretend to be protected.

Did you ever want to run away with me? Search my eyes for the deep blue rivers of a time you had forgotten but still believe in? You come to me in dreams but so do so many others.

Heavy rain slides down the kitchen window. So many things that happen like lightening seem to last forever. I watch as raindrops make patterns of circular chaos in the cracks on the pavement and I know a journey into me is a journey straight into the center of the earth. I know I am not easy and the pressure gets inside your head. The way you look at me is your gray lungs getting weak.

You are orange slices and sticky fingers, so sweet, so goddamn inconvenient. The way you rip the names off of everything and throw my longing back at me in the words you so carelessly choose. We rehearse the end and then we welcome the mistakes in all over again, lighting cigarettes one after another in the dark for hundreds of thousands of years. Your terrible lips and your beautiful eyes, your pearl teeth in the moonlight glistening. Even through all this blindness I can still hear you smile.

I can still remember how my dimples curled themselves against your swollen need for satisfaction. I cannot find the words to tell you gently that I’m trying so hard not to be gone when I’m with you. So hard that I write about thorns tearing rose petals, that I have often secretly hated myself for being and not being with you.

When I was very small I learned that pink bleeding hearts are flowers, and once they tell you they never tell you again. You kiss the way nothing lasts forever. We make love the way civilization collapses apart without making a dent in the universe.

Do we touch or just open our mouths.  And are we talking past each other now.

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// On the Other Side of the Carnival Smoke //

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I remember you, you despite everything else which has faded from my memory. Even when my light is dark and my skin is crumbling graystone, here you are, like the most beautiful shadow falling upon the hills and caverns of my shoulders. I remember we walked, we walked all night to smell the buds of the roses climbing the trees. Observed in quiet stillness the death of a carnival, rusted in the dew of cherry cigarette glow.

Passing by the water, you take hold of my hand and I come alive with ecstatic electricity. Why would you do that (how could you not)?  We have belonged among these shared ruins for quite some time, where even the darkest secrets choke and expire.

Romance is nothing compared to war. The bridges all on fire overhead. Some will not make it to the ones waiting for them on the other side. These are the ones you must look out for, you must learn better to recognize mourning. It will be odorless, it will come to you wrapped in a plastic smile. We write love letters to the universe, we write ransom notes by connecting the stars in the northern sky and grabbing love by the cords on her wrists.

We write because no one ever told us these things would happen.

We became wings as all feathers tend to do when they gather close enough and the sunlight over the ocean kisses them with just enough promise. I offer you my tongue and you remove the metal fences from my throat. Two small animals, soft, wet, unafraid. I undress as you separate my ribs and whisper your words like small mouths into my heart, in response she beats for another century (or more) only for you.

And all the tears that pour forth from my eyes which never dare to seek the sun, they will turn this trembling earth again green. All the colours of the wind are made of pigments I had never seen. Here is the tomb of the little unknowns, here is the way they walk the nighttime ceilings. Here is the way I kneel at the foot of the bed and listen to my own blood slamming in my chest.

It sounds like the dawn may return any day now. Amen amen amen, I carve myself upon these words made flesh. I hear the faintest sounds of stirring, like maybe this time we will all rise to greet you, but I have been wrong so many, many times before. My pain bears a panic you wouldn’t believe.

And sometimes the weight of this desire tugs so deep it splits me clean in two.

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// Becoming of Age //

2 Replies

I think they are probably going to leave. It will be a thing you said as your eyes slid clear past them to the corner of the room, or it will be a thing you didn’t say when they looked to you for the answer you did not yet know how to give.

It isn’t their fault, of course, it’s just how they were built. How most of us were built. The cravings for fast, easy, beautiful things to numb the pain. The way they never turn their heads these days, you know that wasn’t how they came. I once met a man who could turn his head clear all the way around like an owl; he could do it without getting twisted up at all it was nonsense and so frightening it was inspiring.

We were born one way but now we have become the raging discomfort of what they have impaled upon us. The way you speak, the way you think, the questions you do not have the guts to ask, how much of it is your own? What would you tell them if there were only five bodies in the streets? If there were five hundred thousand men, women and children of every race, color and creed. Would that change the depth of your message or just the size of the audience?

What builds us up tears us apart.  What is walking toward us is walking toward walking away.

Here they come with their guns and their poetry. Here they come with their sunburns and cures for the common ignorance.

And here is you with your hands all on my early grave. Here is you with your tongue all down my throat. Here we stand face to face without one fucking single thing to say.

I’m not sure when I fell apart but I must have. Because everyone I meet is handing me shreds of things I do not ask for but they seem to think I need.

Every way I turn I’m kicking up pieces of whatever this is which has shattered itself to morph into me.

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