Tag Archives: poetry

. Wolves

My past is a wolf tied to an old oak out back. Emaciated and starving.

And it knows shes here….

It’s senses are now just as sharp and desperate as its fangs and I can hear it howling from the garden. It knows when she shivers in the middle of the night, and the hunger digs through its body relentlessly.
Occasionally,  I sneak out and feed its hollowed body – just enough to keep it alive. But my hands have become raw, bloody and chewed. So I try my best to hide them under her body at night, but the flickering lights from the storm outside expose the blackened blood as evidence of all the things she does not deserve. All the things about me that would slowly disgrace her from the inside out.
At times, for our own wellbeing, I starve the wolf for weeks at a time, but its wimpers cut deep under my skin and it wakes me from a dead sleep. I watch the worn mutt suffer outside my window. Harrowed and weakening; I feel the same way.
I crawl back to my bed and I feel her quiver when my lips brush just below her ear, and I tell her that everything will be fine…
And I smile, because it feels good knowing that I can still cut it free from its ropes if I ever stop giving a fuck.

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. Negative Space

Take particular notice to the silence and stillness of others. It is these non-actions that expose the true colors of anothers soul.  Not the things that they tell you, but the things they cant seem to. Not what they do, but things that have never been considered. It is the negative spaces of a person that paint the greatest picture. The silence, unintentionally placed, exposes a divergence. It proves true capabilities or complete lack thereof.
Once you present these lack of details to the canvas of another’s life, an entirely different picture emerges. The blank spaces where hands never reached out, or the identical silences before “I’m sorry” and “I love you” as if equally embarassed or ashamed of both. When applied to the canvas, these blank areas create something a bit more sinister. Like the whites of a wolf’s eyes right before striking, just moments before all the blood.

Take great heed in the lack of motion and language in others; Words that never reach the tongue cannot be tainted by sophisms or lies and what lacks movement naturally can not elude.

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. Poltergeist

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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.The Protégé

I do not wish to undermine the gifts of the worlds most operatic songstresses, but at the moment I find even the most beckoning siren a bit lackluster. Since, in history, there was hardly ever a chord struck more pleasantly to me than these – which are delivered with unfathomable elligance from from her – whos head now lays softly on my chest. And from her lips flow wonderful, dancing syllables that float out like great flocks of doves. I close my eyes and watch them all, in my mind, manipulate the atmosphere above our heads. Each letter of her alphabet flaps its white wings and mocks gravity. Twisting and diving and then floating back towards the moonlight.

Maybe its due to her current proximity to such a vital and nonsensical organ as my heart that makes me mutter these things. Or perhaps due to her voice – which always covers me in such a strange nostalgia. Her voice being the most endearing accelerant to the inferno that is my imagination. If she could only see all the lives I’ve lead in my mind through her words. All the foreign lands I’ve conquered. All the kings I’ve slain….

I lay back and focus on her fingers which tap my ribs to an off-beat. Vibrating my veins like a string instrument. My very being now a grand piano at the fingers of the most astonishing protégé.

What a magnificent symphony has she made of me! I doubt cherubs could pluck away at their harps with such grace! Ha! She has made them all a fool! And look how Ive become the most blubbering concerto!

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. Lavender

I could sit and watch the lavender drip from the sky and watch roses cripple and sleep under endless layers beneath me. I could sow the bottom half of me into the soil and rust quietly.  I could count patterns of dying mammals and describe the hollowing of all sequoia and birch. My bones would slowly begin to splinter over millenia of dying land as I watch cities all fissure and fall back into heaven and the insects crawling about my limbs would evolve and then I would smash them all one by one.  My roots would turn and twist overcome this entire fucking world forever.

No god could shake me.
No history could fathom me.
And no earth could ever undo me.

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.X

I took myself out to lunch today before work as I usually do, and as I walked into the restaurant, I overheard a group of people snickering about “crazy, smelly old bum” who was sitting at one of the corner tables outside talking to himself. I placed my order with a young girl at the register who clearly wanted him kicked off the premises.

Maybe through a mixture of boredom and curiosity,  I chose my seat 2 tables down from the old tramp and I discovered that he wasn’t mumbling to himself at all. Rather, he was reading from a book that was slightly hidden in his filthy old backpack on the table in front of him. He was reading very well and in a strangely pleasant voice about an old man suffering alone on the bank of the Mississippi River – reminiscent of Siddhartha laying next to the river before Govinda stumbles upon him.

It was all actually quite warming and equally melancholy. I sat and ate quietly and tried to ignore the fact that hidden in the chapters he softly spoke was likely a very personalized cry for help. And even now I felt as if every laugh and joke and dirty look issued from the front of the restaurant was like another surge of water causing this old bums own river to overflow. Even I, being too late for work for any kind of discourse, paid for my meal and walked away in silence. But looking back over my shoulder, I could picture the river overwhelm him and drag his body away.

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.Manowar

“I miss you, too”

Only those words hardly reached me. They fell from her mouth and smashed on the ground like dinner plates from unsteady shelves and, similarly, all I felt was the residual regret of knowing that I now had quite a mess to clean up because she misunderstood me.

The words were, “I misused you”
And what’s worse is that I intend on doing it again.

But this is where things begin to blur a little bit because her leg was wrapped around my waist like soft, porcelain hook I couldn’t seem to escape and I found that very disorientating. My left palm was on the small of her back pushing her into my abdomen and the other hand was hiding in the coils of her dark hair. Her hair was so impossibly long. I imagined her floating lifeless on top of the ocean with that hair dangling miles beneath her, beneath the waves and swaying so slowly in the water like poison ribbons from a man-o-war. And I was swimming straight towards it.

I had a fistful of these dark, poison ribbons now in my right hand and I used it to direct her head inches from my face. I looked into her light blue eyes and all I could think is that they are not deep enough to drown in. Hardly enough to even splash around in temporarily- like a child. I craved the murky bottomless dark of brown eyes. Thats what I needed, a quiet place to drown. I brushed my thumb against her soft bottom lip like a fish hook and I turned and let her teeth sink into the back of my neck creating a vast wound. The type of wound that is not so easily compressed and soon, great rivers of dark red fluid began to fill up the entire club and all I could distinguish was arms, so many arms moving in so many directions. Frantically snatching drinks from the bar and dragging them back to thier mouths like chameleon tongues. Arms flailing about and tangled with other arms. Wrapped around bottles, wrapped around bodies, wrapped around purses, pushed against bathroom stalls and shoved down throats. All I could see was hundreds of arms splashing around above the blood red tide issuing from me and great, bloody waves crashing over their heads, submerging them entirely and the coils of her poisonous hair covering the place, tangling and collecting bodies. Every-bodies body, but not mine. I could swim right through unharmed. And I remember that feeling brought me so much dread, as all I wanted was to die silently in those ribbons but for some forsaken reason I was unaffected and I used it all to my advantage like a clownfish living momentarily in anemone.

I used every piece of her body. Every strand of her hair and every drop of her blood and I swam away and left her floating lifeless on top of the ocean.

Collecting bodies.

Every-bodies body but mine.

I need to find a quiet place to drown.

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.Fishtank

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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.The Bird

Is longing only achievable with knowledge of a target for it? I wonder if a small bird kept in a childs room instinctively dreams of open skys even through its ignorance of them?
Yes. There must be something burried in the soul of all creatures which makes them feel unbearably culpable of thier disguarded fate, even when unaware of it. The same instinct that causes me to be crushed by the weight of places I’ll never go. The longing that makes my heart ache for passion and love, which I certainly know nothing of. Perhaps I’ve kept myself intentionally bereft all this for so many years that my daydreams have become deep-rooted and habitual. I wonder if maybe it is not a matter of instinct, but of compulsions born from continuously running from everything I secretly desire. Perhaps it is all my doing. Suppression is, after all, the main culprit behind all compulsions. So here is what’s left; Twenty-nine years without fascinating journeys abroad or whirling, singular love stories. Twenty-nine years of self-inflicted disillusionment.

Outside my window, I can hear the rhythmic juxtaposition between the scraping sound of the wind against the top of the lake out back and the grinding of cars on the highway pavement about a half-mile down the road. Car alarms and birds chirp flirtingly back and forth to one another and burrow themselves into my subconscious – to be used in dreams at a later time. My desires and fears tangle into one another like the most insufferable fabric that separates life, awaiting just past my windowsill, and my all my years of abandoning it to pursue an existence compiled of nothing more than vivid daydreams with images taken from books I’ve read and pictures I’ve seen. Yes, even my fantasies are stolen.

I thought about writing her today, but my body would certainly cripple and my fingers would snap in all cardinal directions. This is one of the many inconveniences Ive collected through life. How could I write her as such a tangled, broken mess? And what, anyway, would I ask of her? ‘I cant have you back, but please dont go away’? The foolishness bubbles up beneath my skin and I may as well just smash my face endlessly against the blank page in front of me and have whoever finds me – snapped and splattered – mail it to her, still dripping dark red with my insecurities.

The inconveniences I’ve collected through life drape fittingly about my limbs.
I wear a hideous fabric that only she would adore.

I rummaged through my head for memories to live in.
It was 5am the other night that I found her standing at my door. Im still not entirely sure how she got here. A strong current must have ripped her from her life and the undertow must have dragged her towards me, down to the bottom of the world where I make my home.
I watched as she took a drag of her cigarette. The dull light from its end revealed her eyeliner, diluted and pooling grey beneath her eyes. I wished she wouldnt cry but it makes my heart ache for her. The only thing more lovely than her misery was her happiness and I felt greedy for wanting it all. It was her curse that she would have such a wonderful glow, even under duress. The whole ‘rest-of-the-world’ surrounding her was pitch black and meaningless to me. I’m amazed that shes here. Im amazed at her tangled, wet blonde hair and I’m amazed at the new cuts on her hands. We sat on the dock over the lake and talked about the futility of modern romance, the deaths of our fathers and the dismantling of whats left of our sanity.

These are the memories that allow me to live here alone. Twenty-nine years of nothing else suits me just fine. These daydreams – and my garment of inconveniences draped over me to keep me warm.

She spoke about a crooked, old, wooden house in the dark that visits her at night. A reacurring dream she had or, perhaps its a coping mechanism that allows her to participate in this world, but as she rests her head at night, she wakes up frantic in that terrible place.
The house represents a rusty safety-deposit box in the back of her mind and its inhabitants were thousands of traumas and tragities she suffered through life pieced together to compose scowling, putrid creatures that live in the attic and, at night, slither thier raw bodies down the steps to tangle themselves in her blonde hair.

I feel as if that is where I first met her, in the den of that creeking, old house.
That den was the eye of a great storm that streched the expanse of her entire life. We lived there – so temporarily – among the dusty books on the shelves, and we traded them as if what we couldn’t express through tongues or our bodies pressed against one another could be effectively spoken through those pieces of literature. But I knew I had to leave soon. I did not belong in her dreams no more than she belonged in the home I’ve made for myself at the bottom of the world.

That is the curse of a disobedient mind like mine. The drive that constantly lures me to her – To a life I know nothing of and a love that finds me unsuitable. Is the same drive that pulls me away, trembling and guilt-ridden. What was I doing in that old house? How did I find the key? What brought me to that den burried deep in her mind? Did I come there to dangle the illusion of safety in front of her?

I am irrefutably driven by the bleakness of this life and cannot help but to call out to her, endlessly, from below. From the bottom of the world where I made my home. I sing to her like a caged bird in a small childs room and what could I bother to expect? Of course I could not expect her to stand outside of this terrible cage of mine and be content. And what would happen if she awakes in that forsaken old house at night? My arms would fall short desperately reaching out to her through my rusted bars.
They would cripple and my fingers would snap trying to hold her and keep her safe.

Twenty-nine years of disguarded fates and barren fields. Twenty-nine years of waiting in that den holding an old skeleton key and calling out to something I instinctively know awaits, yet am still unable to bare. Something that I somehow know of, but still couldn’t possibly fathom.

I threw the blank paper away and went back to the windowsill.

I still sing to her from my cage. Even through my ignorance.

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.Fog

Monday.
The clouds have apparently grown suspicious of our actions down below and sunk down into my city. They peer into our empty streets and into our bodies, in our mouths and lungs, and spread themselves through town as if an obscene, thin cotton. This sky-sludge has no business down here. In fact, I doubt it could even bare life below and the curse of discovering its own mortality. No, it should stay put with the idiocy and ignorance above, far from this city and the terrible lights illuminating the far worse.

It makes me think of the fear. Not to say that the fog instills fear in me, but that I suddenly fail to see a difference between what haunts me and the dark sky thats been dragged down here to surround me. They both start as a light, inevitable nusense but gradually tend to seep into every corner of the world, including those hardly yet discovered, and can grow so black and omnipresent that the world as you may have known it (even just a day ago) is hardly recognizable and scarcely perceivable.

Ah, so thats it. This thick paste of the atmosphere has come to mirror the pitch black of that which is happening inside of me. It’s come to crush me. Stepping out in this dark city tonight feels as if the God’s are shoveling the entire sky down the back of my throat. It’s the same feeling I had in my dream, watching K fall off the balcony, and hearing my dads voice outside my bedroom door saying “I’m sorry”. Its like the fog is not enough and I’m suffocating on the entire universe and all I can hear is a muffled voice from outside,
“Christian, I’m sorry. Alright?
…..Can you hear me?”

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