On Clouds and Black Diamonds

To the bold that failed and hover on the night:

There are souls in the clouds
and they scream by blocking the stars.

The scream is not a loud scream:
It is a rodent caught in a trap that has collapsed its lungs
and gasps
tiny little gasps
as he fades(as you too shall fade),
abandoned by the void,
only to fall back into the clouds
and murmur soft and moist
his acid rain,
to an indifferent world of steel.

Never reaching, no change, no escape.
Ah, but never to grasp and slip
is bitterness to life and all its broken dreams.

The sky was black and crystalline that night,
but the edges such blunt, brilliant monsters
that they eat greater men than I.

So then, you sickly sliding apparitions,
be bitter, and sing your water song
and hide from me the
shadow diamonds
that I might not dare to stare,
and love,
and fail,
as you have failed.

Simplicity

Scribbled memories meet irises on the window and there in the twilight is a painting of a blue box.

Have but all insights died? Do these words reflect the dull me that feels no pain at all? Art without pain is as useless as art in a five star hotel. I am become my plastic image of security and it frightens me. On the trail home last week I tumbled down a rocky, muddy hill and cut my hands; brown and red from the fall, pants tattered. In the stream a reflection I could not immediately recognize. Oh pleasure, oh sick, twisted face, that you can be a filfthy piece of bleeding flesh in the mud and be all the more happy. I think now as I bent over to clean those hands, I may never wash myself of the concrete that has taken a hold of me.

"Out! Out damned spot!" And I am just the painting in the five star hotel(abstract, oh yes) that pretends to be more than a colour splattered mess. How can I write?

Blurry Night

To awake
"Surreal" she said and
a nebula is vibrating in her hair.
Red. Green. Amber, somewhere,
her shoes are leather cracking the gray milky way
while all eyes stare down at her.
Flotsam and drift-shine

on the dingy drenched asphalt.
She is cosmic
Waste.
And her craven eyes mere marbles
of ice
in a furnace of sky.

And I saw a rose die

The top trees of the far mountain were as shadows;
olive statues over looking the
deep green slope stood out as sentinels
or the sages of old, staring us down,
ants on asphalt,
with bitter indifference.

This is the path I take.

When I stare at the velvet tapestry of the night sky,
woven together as roses in a garden of thorns,
I cannot help but think these petals have compassion.
No, they cannot be as indifferent as the desolate forested island from which I claw.
Somewhere,
somehow,
caring for the dystrophy and soft crumble of the universe's puzzle
as it falls apart,
never,
ever,
to be reunited...

is a beautiful petal... Still disinfected, scratching across the widening void of space
to save us from the fall,
to save us from ourselves.

Destination

(It takes an hour of musing on writing sitting on a rock in the wilderness before you discover, with your cindering heart that you have nothing new to say.
Well.... Let's fail anyways.)

Green-scape shivers
feeling something like wind
or nothing (swaying, swaying for nothing),
like the seething sun spinning me around and around
in its rage against uncertainty.

Don't move little particles, we can't stand not knowing where you'll go.

Spin the merry-go-round, faster, slower,
pain and pleasure all we know,
children laugh, blurry,
not knowing how to cry anymore:
Whether God is dead or he's in a shot of heroin.

I carry black feathers in smooth palms
that ant hills have forgotten with their materialism.
money mystery
career destiny

All of it, useless as this dangling junk pile of branches(which leaf,
my God,
which leaf to aim for!).

We are no more than
slingshot rock.
No less, than a billion pendulums.

We turn and swing(the merry-go-round spins)
and I fall to sleep sick to my stomach(we're not supposed to feel it)
and we can't see the sun,
and we can't see the pull,
and a canopy of stars covers the depths of the green junk pile
with a dirty distant light;

And I dream I'm in an amber nebula,
lungs full of a cool undetermined gas,
And I dream green leaves
of zenith,
of meaning.

On Power Lines

And he folded his knees and sat
under the long metal poles of power lines,
his sinister black trench coat soaked by the rain,
his dark black thoughts drowned
like his running mascara
by a talentless rumble.
Where is the lightning?
How can we write without the lightning?

So he takes his razor blade and cuts his pale flesh
like so many before him,
scratches pain and depression into words on tapered paper
with an axe and a crane with a wrecking ball

...and laughs his trendy little laugh,
and thinks of how no one ever wrote poetry under power lines
in the raging rain.

Well no one ever writes poetry on power lines either,
so consider this a tribute
to everything we've forgotten.

Keep feeling, keep learning

If the journey had ever been easy
Prometheus would hold back his fire,
and there'd be no Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe.

She walked crippled with weight on her back,
and in her pale brown eyes
burnt a fire singed with philosophy and pain.

Every morning, stepping into the furnace outside,
with each dry expansion of her lungs
came the weight of her musings
sending little chills against her arching back
which, having receded the billionth time,
made her wonder on feeling nothing for just a little while.

"Oh sweet, slithering sun, inspire me;
make me a phoenix and build my nest!
Let me rest in my ashes,
bear my burning wings,
and born me a new back to carry the load,
and maybe some new shoes."

Then the furnace flickered
and that was all she said.

Art

Everything beautiful dies. Everything pure is corrupted by entropy or wisdom. Poison, it seems is the conscience that screams at the blazing edges of photons in the sky, that knows beauty and suffers for it endlessly.

Trajectory

We are all just little ashes from the embers of a fire,
heaving our lungs to the milky stars,
always on the verge of luminous and darkness,
as we ride back into that cold blue flame...

My God, My Heart!

Midway into the core,
we see the broken wings of God
spilling in large red goblets into the stars that,
for no reason,
burn as gelid glaciers into the pulsing mystery of space!

My blood raves,
my heart ignites.

I will not chop off my ear,
but empyrean has shattered,
submerged me into a calloused dream of arctic light;
an aphotic stare of an ocean reflected with
silent shards of

murmuring milk and
malachite mist!

The murmur, like a cannonade of meteor bursts
across the eastern sky, reverberates
through my veins.

The mist, crepuscular and dense with the thoughts
of a billion tiny and ethereal lights, jingles
on down plasmatic lanes.

Rationalize

In the dark the floor boards rattle
and the wind creaks through the rotting wood.

You live,
you die,
and in between
the fury is the stream the animals drink from
as decay sets in
with the dirt and fog and poison,
the bitter worms,
the swamp swarming inch by inch
from experience
up the clearing
where the structure stood.

It rocked and bent to the bog
saluting it's fierceness and greatness
knowing it was more than it could stand.
Like an old moral,
or an old truth,
sacrificed and let loose
for some great cause,
or some great lie.

Origin

And she drowns

The interconnected wave of nothingness
washes over her lips
in smothering strides
fatigued
from shouting words of poetry at the
dying stars
exploding ever so quickly
too quickly
too slowly
outwards:

And she said nothing.
Perhaps there was nothing to be said
on strings,
on life,
on stars,
on big bangs

or sea breeze,
oak trees,
spring leaves,
or salmon tracing their paths back up the stream
from whence they came.

The Curtain, the Play, and the Opiate

If God be for us, who can be against us?
- Romans 8:31

The voice was thundering against crumbling bricks in the deepest dunes of the desert, fat and slurred like pigs, were tipping a crystal glass to the sound of filthy grinding insects spitting out a thick, black passion for power from the Earth's entrails.

It speaks! does it think as well, of the crypt or the raven
or the decay she stares in the face from day to day!?
Economy!? What now?
The voice of Queen Necropolis!
Let flow your bitter loathing upon the walls of this latest Iron Curtain of ignorance!
How close will she come to destroying it all!?
To launching off her missiles of self deceit and grinding her teeth as she chops off her own hair!?
By the gods how it falls to the floor!
Terribly lost like autumn's terra-cotta leaves swirling in the sunset of what is to come!
RELEASE!

RELEASE your hand from that damned trigger!
We're all hovering on emptiness,
repetition, rhetoric,
and running on nothing but perpetual shadow!
How many times can we play the same play without the epiphany?
This is no time to play Russian roulette with our lives!
It's no spectator sport. Stop damn ye!
Stop cutting off those strands of hope and honour,
and take the bitter bullets from your mouth,
and gently from those hardened eyes.

For as long as I've known you and your sweet lies of
between the trenches,
hidden and puffing with flaming disease
and sickening poison gas carving out the flesh of the lungs,
over a loudspeaker,
in the hearts of the ant piling in infinite rows upon silver rubble
against the heat of the sun,
laser guided meteors,
even between the old gallows!...
And even now, in the desert, bubbling up from the Earth the black cancer of our reminder:

The shadow of politics is still hot and seething from your lips.

Transient

Death in Beauty
Beauty in Death
they dance together in the tapered rose garden,
eyes shifting between syllables of their twilight song
merging for the chaos of a dying sun
and its crimson light.

"If only I could die," says Beauty,
her smooth arms around his shoulders,
quivering,
like her pain streaked eyes lost in the raging whirlwhind.

"Oh darling," says Death,
switching his clumsy feet with the dusty times,
"you'll be there soon."

And no one could explain if there was any purpose
in dancing,
if there was any purpose in moving at all.

Of Life And Death

The vibrations are screaming between the margins of the paper as he writes like a desperate madman; possessed by the margins of life and death. And Mozart is crying at the notes in his head. He must get up and pester the drab of the tide. He must sink and swallow whole the flame of living, though it smells of life where there is truly death, the ashes burning his eyes all the while. Against his brow there is contempt for the aristocratic fool! Who shall know of music if no one knows of that candle against the mahogony desk in its meager flame? It could be killed at any moment! Its life is a testament to will! It must get everything done, must burn out everything it knows!

And Mozart is crying at the notes in his head, and moving his brow to descend with the tide in his heart and the ashes in his soul.

Breathe.

Never, ever let the flame in you subside. Never, ever forget the fuel that drives it, or the wind that contorts its shape like the winding of a cliched road, or the keys of a piano, between the margins of Mozart's own immortality.

Rapture

I passed by the sunset with its sclarlet silhouette
wasting the day's last light on the barren earth before me,
springing alive against the winter's sinking snow
it caught my eye in a sparkling reflection.

On the horizon was the cold pale moon
and I had forgotten the salty warmth of the equinox's air.
There it glared!
Solitude, indirect, a soothing yellow light,
a full circle of memory for the silent starry night.
Did you rock the Earth to sleep a billion years or more,
and surge the silver ripples to a lonesome sandy shore?
Did your rays cut through the twilight atmosphere,
and stand an eternity of the sun's savage sear?

Oh, it doesn't matter how many times the seasons change,
I'll stand in rapture at the moon.

Storms

(hope you don't mind my posting this, Lex) ;)
"And so the storm does brew, out of sight and out of fathoming. Does that make it less the danger? Does that stop the worst from coming? Ponder, oh sweetly brooding philosopher, why the sky grows dark. And ask thyself, with rain downpouring, how this came to pass. Wonder so, to proceed in life, why you are struck by lightning arms. And wonder so, sweet dying soul... What brought about the first dark storm..."

And if the sky grows dark, as it has so many times before, will it be the end of us? Will we drown in nothingness and sink below the tide? never rise, never rise, but she can't help but look upward and study the patterns in the stars. how they form shapes, and we give them names, and how lightning never changes how they constantly arrange? think nothing of it, but that all storms do end, and we could live a thousand years without ever seeing them move. Orion can be your saviour, even if he's already dead.

"Ah, but what is a savior when they cannot help? When you are caught in the eye of a storm, that you may have created. Who can be saved from what is inevitable? It dies yes! But in time, so do we! And would not that be truly tragic, to die in the storm you were saved in."

What is there under the moon that cannot be torn? Rise, I say. Rise above it or plunder through it. what is there that cannot be worn from effort? Be vigilant I say, and smile when you reach the eye with another silver lining, for but half you've done, and yet another half to live another day!

Circuit

And she sways to the beat, the one she knew had again assumed control, like mangrove trees in the heat, like Toth laughing at cancer, like thunder clapping its noisy paws at the moon, like rain drops against the window, slowly, slowly but to dissipate, like a purple mark on a fragile arm, like a bitter word flying through the mouth of a careless man.

Spiritual Armageddon

Hark, now, the beast is marching on to Israel
and there's a star in the east burning my eyes,
wormwood falling, falling for this rotten mercy
like a downward spiral playing a mourning orchestra for something without ears.
And Jesus Christ is on his knees
and the beast laughs because no one believes in anything anymore but their own apathy.

I drank to escape it's morbid disarray,
to find the best tasting wine,
but half of it was too diluted, losing its reassuring answer,
and the other half would make me so drunk on answers I'd be lost in ignorant bliss.

But I don't want it... No... I just want to listen to my phantom orchestra.

Ether Lost

Air pierces fire pierces my will to escape your holding cell of sagging dirt; I'll consume you, I'll crack the plates and open hell on earth, will bathe in poetry, and scrape the ocean with the sky and merge the stars with no alibi but loneliness piercing all the while my winding path, elements will leave no trace but one, will turn her face, because I have no nature left to give.