Tag Archives: poem

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I only study history out of fear, not out of any particular desire. Most times I would much rather pretend it wasnt there, or convince myself that it doesnt mean anything anymore. The same way the young woman softly pushes at the scar on the right side of her chest in a dirty bathroom mirror; studying it like an dusty old map found in a dead relatives attic.

    Its funny how we obsess over the terrible incidents of our lives while memories of happiness and elation so quickly fade. She is trying to keep quiet so she doesnt wake me, but when the dim light from the lamp in my my room catches the tears slowly dripping from her cheek in the mirror, the light creates endless glints and I feel like I’m looking up at the night sky – with an infinite number of planets and stars that are both equally terrifying and negligible to me.

  We push things much farther through agitation than through any type of knowledge or endearment of the subject. I know far more about my enemies than I do of any friend or lover. I can describe in detail every single scar on her body, but I couldn’t tell you the color of her eyes because I only look in her eyes when she weeps.

   I pretend I was asleep when she crawls back into bed.
Ive read all the history books and scripture. They say she was created from Adams rib long ago, but I am so reckless and I break bones. And even though they typically heal stronger after small fractures, I’m still hopelessly drawn to the damage…..the history….the fear that these afflictions carry.

      She lays in the bed next to me and stares at the filthy, cracked ceiling the same way she looks at her reflection.  I let my fingers push at the scar on the right side of her chest, even though I know it still aches her. I want her like a cat wants a tiny insect on the other side of a window pane. Some sort of maddening necessity. Something far deeper than the skin. There is something underneath these flaws and deformities that I crave. Something I need to study.
and fear.
and fuck.
and destroy.
Not because I’m malicious or spiteful, but in the same way we refuse to be alone in a creeky, old house at night, yet we love nothing more than telling ghost stories. In the same way that the cat kills an insect and then get annoyed when it stops fluttering it’s wings.

I don’t know why, but she’s never more sexy than when she is crying.

I study history out of fear, and her skin is decorated with so much of it. I cant seem to help myself. I press gently at the raised tissue and softly drag the back side of my nails across the scar on the right side of her chest. Not because I’m not afraid anymore,  but because she tells me she hates it, and that is irresistible.

… like a tiny insect just outside the window pane.

History and the present are like scorn lovers that still keep a close eye on each other but will never comply to each others needs.

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Maybe the chemicals needed for these types of things no longer flow accurately… My mind makes a mockery of all natural and fairly simple things. Things that should ideally coexist beautifully – like love and lust.

Yet, these two have become entirely different to me now. They are two ends of the same snake eating its own tail. They will lead back into each other continually but only come together in some sort of violence. They refuse to operate along the same guidelines.

My lust causes romance to become obtrusive and deserving of ridicule. Nothing beautiful belongs in these moments. 
Only hues of black and blue and green underneath.
I do not make love, I make you do everything else. I make you suffer. You burst into flames, then I throw your ashes out over the ocean. 
And my palms pressed into your neck make you feel like you’re drowning.

Then we wake up in a hotel overlooking the east coast. Like we got lucky and somehow drifted back to shore. Your limbs are twisted into mine, and my arms and torso are wrapped delicately in your black hair – like seaweed decorates a shipwreck.
You listen to my heart push blood around inside my body. Back and forth. Waxing and waning like the tide. But now the current is so very low – so very far away from you – because I’m back in love and you are safe. Away from filth and depravity of moments ago. Like it was all swept away in the undertow.  Though, we both know that tonight, my heart will push the tide back in, and soon it will engulf you entirely, and you will once again begin to drown. Gasping for air. Clawing at my chest. Your empty vessel will again be lost in the fury of my seas. My waves crashing relentlessly against you. Doomed to break apart and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

…..then we wake up again, strewn about like broken planks torn from haunted shipwrecks. Waterlogged. Safely washed ashore together.

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She wears makeup like an old house wears bars and wooden boards covering its windows. And similarly,  these smashed-berry and ash colored adornments are applied by external means, because her hands no longer work in tandem with her mind. Her body no longer matches her internal intentions,  and even when she bleeds -and she does quite often – the crimson slips off and splashes away like water on oil and only serves to make all the messes that follow her like hungry dogs even more desirous. Thier mouths foam and thier teeth grit.

Houses dont close their own doors or stain red thier own carpets. These happenings are caused only by the most unfortunate inhabitants….

The car was silent and pitch black most of the ride home until a small flame suddenly splashed atop of her lighter just infront of a crooked cigarette. The amber glow lit up her face just enough to see that her eyeliner was running and smeared as if to show that just like a weathered old home, the boards covering those windows that alluded to her soul has been tampered with. As if someone had broken in and trespassed beyond her locks and rusty fences and warning signs and smashed her insides like disgraced fine china and smashed holes through all the walls, so that everything spilled out into everything else creating an indistinguishable mess. Now which body part shows tenderness? Could it be lips or fists? And what, now, is love without a pit of guilt in her stomach? And faith…is it the kind she prays with or the kind the world preys upon? And a voice inside her tells her that this whole place should be burnt to the ground.

…In the distance you could hear bad lucks stomach growl and it’s mouth water.

She left for good the other day, but I saw her last night by the tree out back. Only it wasn’t her. Perhaps the frayed fabric between dreams and waking life had snapped and let one bleed into the other disgracefully. She was moving as if tangled in some sort of wind, but the air was absent of all currents and there was not a breath within miles. Not even mine. I walked over in silence to show her I hadnt moved a muscle since she left, that my heart had been collecting dust along side the broken furniture and useless, faded old books on the floor of the old house behind those eyes – Behind her eyelashes that resembled iron bars. But the second my fingers seemingly touched her face, I became unbearably confused and withdrew out of fear that I could be lost in that delirium forever, and she dismantled and reappeared elsewhere across the yard. 

I guess every ghost story begins with something lost. In fact, a very basic definition of a ghost could be the return of something that was supposed to be gone forever. So thats where ill re-start this story:

A body. Not the traditional cadaver, this one still had quite a number of breaths still in it. (Though I was trying my hardest to take those away) A body with its warm back pressed against the contrasting, cold dirt in this very yard. Under a different light, maybe our bodies resembled some type of resurrection ceremony,  only time and a little more illumination would prove something much more debauched.  The placement of our hands were contained solely to the vital organs and all my main arteries were, just below the skin, dressed up with her pretty little hands grasping and clawing at each of them. Warm violet blood made its anticipated escape from my chest and spilled back into the dust where we came from, If you believe those types of things.

Just as vandals on the streets not far from here mark buildings as thier own with aerosol cans only to be washed away by mid-day,  so have I tried desperately to claim the charming woodwork of her body as my own. To bend the bars covering her incredible eyes and build my miserable estate back there. To sweep the floors of years of forgotten, broken things and to stumble incidently upon my heart covered in dust and soot and place it next to hers, in the attic where I could finally put a bright candle and chase away the pitch black of an entire life. 

This is not a ghost story in sense of rattling chains or floating tea-pots. But, rather, a haunting of every conceivable sense. An immense teething sensation – a displeasure from deep in my gut that keeps me up at night, knowing that her endearing old house is now miles from my own and perhaps still in immediate danger of arson.  She was not the true ghost in this encounter, even as haunted as her old home had become over the years. She was the very impetus that brought forth the return of something inside me that had been laying seemingly dead and decayed for a lifetime. She was the poltergeist that startled me by rattling my heart and then dispersing into thin air leaving me terrified and alone….

and if only this haunting would never cease….

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Picking up lunch today for work, I watched a fish push hopelessly up against a tiny glass tank inside a fancy restaurant.  I guess as humans, we have a tragic knack for keeping other creatures contained and the sight of this caused a worm of regret to start tunneling away through my abdomain. I grew sick. I guess that I may have associated it too much to my current situation; Feeling like nothing more than just a charming decoration for something or someone that merely just appreciates your sacrifice.

If I was a mink or a fox, I would have been skinned and drapped over a prestigious shoulder blade at some upscale event and if I was a koi fish, I would currently be floating hungrily inside of a small, cloudy pond outside of some suburban home. Begging for mercy. But because of whatever chemicals,  math, physics or deities designated me to this specific body and mind, I live here and I am me and this whole thing confounds me and twists my insides into cats cradles.
Of course I shouldnt be here in this restaurant feeling mirrored with a helpless fish. I should be somewhere lost in a blue ocean floating oblivious. But certain fates tower over me and rip me limb from limb.
I am perpetually flustered by the gritted teeth of a limitless sky.

I continually wake up to a tightness in my head,  and in my lower abdomen and groin as if my organs are cowering into one another for safety and withdrawing further and further from the outside world. My head is weighted and foggy as if pieces of my dreams had stowed away from wherever I went to have them, and hidden somewhere on my clothing, they followed me back into my daily life.

I felt an insufferable desire to peel back 3 layers of earth to lay them gently back over my body and close my eyes and finnaly feel rested.

The familiarity of every day life, once delicious on my tongue as an ignorant child, is now sour, repugnant and unending. 

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Its sunday, just like any other day, and a million storms whirl through my head. I am disinterested in the becomings of today and I show no mercy for the ambitions within them. I feel low and unbearably drowsy as if all my dillemas now swing from my eyelids. I can feel, as if in the very air around me, that life itself is insulted and disillusioned from my insurmountable boredom and lethargy.  I convince myself that its mere coincidence that recent days have been so especially gloomy. As if the sun has been appeasing its appetite with strong helpings of clouds. Such gluttony is not constricted to only man, you know. The rivers consume more than their share of hopeless bodies dragged slowly downwards. And the mountains, with their militant lonliness, set out to toss all trespassers from thier atop thier peaks as if to fill its summit relentlessly with the same lack-of-everything that I am composed of today.

The street is entirely black save for dim lampshades from windows with backdrops of glowing TV’s. The lights bow and turn low at my arrival and I walk past a million blank stares from the windows of the houses.  I have yet to feel true solitude and they have long since heard a knock on thier door that came without ill intentions. And yet it is me who feels intruded upon and not the figures staring from behind the open curtains. It is me, alone outside, who feels betrayed and trespassed. Me – without a true home yet infinite places I’ve laid my drowsy head to sleep. I have dreams of tossing every blank gaze, stupid smirk and entitled, rotten carcass off the cliffs. And I stand as a mountain with the same blank, apathetic eyes as they fall away. I dream that I am the great waters pulling down the prestigious, glorious bodies. Filling their lungs and pushing all of me down into thier full,  spoiled bellies. In dreams I am the insatiable gluttony of all nature.

In the mind of a young boy, the future is negligible and life draws out so far into the distance that it hurts your eyes. You watch things die but can place no empathy for to be a child is to be part of the dark clouds above on gloomy afternoons filled with moisture – Filled with such possibility. And to grow is to fall violently to the earth into pools of filth and rusted pipes. Dirty rooftops and sickening alley ways. And it is just as much a game of chance, for some of us land in great pastures to flourish with all the necessities of life and others fall to the sewage and rot of the earth.  Some land on great cathedrals and others drop into the bleakness of the oceans as one impossibly small molecule that barely (yet certainly) adds to a enormous amount of nothingness. Terribly aware that if it had never been, there would be a million other “could-have-been-something-else’s” in its place to participate in the inevitable tedium. The intolerable “scheme-of-things.”

  

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