I'm going to take KittenX's advice and follow the lead of Redyelruc and Skyfire and start adding onto a single thread. Please feel free to criticize, lobotomize or super-size anything you find here. I hope you enjoy my stuff. And if I can impose, please try reading them out loud. Poems are meant to be spoken. They work better that way. Cheers. The rules of the game On slow Saturdays we sip the morning with cigarettes low light lighter flicks yellow dawn orange roll joints and sausages for breakfast return to bed naked and lose the taste for poetry for daylight sometimes arguing through mid-morning orgasms, negotiating the terms of this little truth we fuck about this little love we share building a village of promises in the living room refusing the clock's helping hands or the slow Saturday sundial curling like a lip over the hours and we refuse clothing to grunt and scratch at the carpet going tribal for the afternoon opening each other with zippers cauterizing kisses, stroking sutures into 3 o'clock crying victory over dinner no sweets for this sweetness cast from wriggling fingertips dribbling, sprinkling concessions into the sauce on slow Saturdays we play enemies to keep ourselves interested play assassins in the bed, the shower fucking for love of war fucking for all the hate in love and playing allies afterwards moving slow spent slow as Saturday's infatuation with slower Sundays a meager few frames a second when we play penitent lovers cooing in the treetops and feeding each other funny olives. ____________________ Heavenly bodies We grabbed the day with our nails, sank them into that bright face and demanded treasures, secret fields of light and long grass flooded blue and rippling in the stone of a warm wind We burned our hands on the sun and drove the clouds before us soothed our blistered palms slapping their white backs herding them into some gone place away from here We showered together in rain we danced ourselves naked in the backyard and lit our calendars from endless cigarettes burned in effigy scattered the ashes We held our own and grabbed a few more before we faded like the light of that day, held the world at arm's length for a time and We scorned the device of sleep until sleep could be resisted no longer and when We slept We slept as heavenly bodies without ever dreaming of waking. ___________________________ Emphysema on my mind With lungs that open like black butterfly wings, a wheeze and a cough, the glint of flint on a coffee table threatening & lungs that open like tar for mammoths, an artificial preservative speeding the death throes disguised as sleep in lipstick & army grease paint for romance not in the mood spitting blood but breathing fire from lungs hungry for a whore's breakfast, coffee & cigarettes, & the air in the city is so clear the sun casts standing lighters as timepieces better than Swiss and perpetual motion reminders of white addictions and personalized carcinomas warnings on labels like death and birth defects are placebos psycho-semantics that go rarely noticed by the dragons over their ashtrays, treasures of previous moments passing forgotten save for the odour, aromatherapy for shallow breathers, for lungs that crackle like paper, that are iron and hold flame god bless the loss of morning virginity god bless the lungs that open like black butterfly wings god bless the yellow fingers that grab death by the short hairs not to force an early retirement but to demand the nature of that departure, birth is a command, death is a whisper, a slight inhalation, french and slow, and the soul escapes in blue crepe. smoking is a theft from the killer called life. ________________ Heaven has soft walls Let it be known that today i am king Let it be known the **** lied when it said there was light beyond the tunnel Let it be known the tape has ended and we're fresh out of loadstone Please do not speak to Mr. Scratch, just help him get over to the card table Let it be known the man is quite mad, drinks tea with lemon Let it also be known that St. Christopher has lost his compass, please notify the proper authorities, Let it be known the commercial never ends Would someone please check the restroom, Mr. Nazarene has been drinking his urine samples again Let it be known that it is 2:20 a.m. and i am king of this room Let it also be known the world stops at the window and we have thick blinds Let it be known this is the end of visiting hours, please put out your cigarettes and move out calmly, in single file Would someone please wake Mr. Yahweh, he's drooling and it is time for his medication. ____________________________________ The children are cannibals And the children are cannibals eating time, smearing seconds across pug-nosed faces, big moist eyes tearing up, straining to moisten lips stretched taught around the minutes that drag in the wake of passing adults, vestigial and unused, gnawing on our fallen appendix, our ungraceful tailbone Cast off hours that crumble when cradled palm up and the children Are cannibals gnashing at our heels, demanding all the secrets of Achilles, holding Helen by her perfect smooth neck arching swan-like the curve of a clockface sundial approximation of time itself, and Einstein generally stands by while the little ones pull theories from his mane and pop them between delicate fingertips, catch them on hungry tongues And the children are cannibals who’ll swallow us whole and raw and aching to move faster in coffee shop lines, webpage load times, microwave meals, but demanding that time itself forget us, forsake our sallow skins and graying hair crackling like newsprint histories of tales best left forgotten, and the children are cannibals with mouths wide as space itself, not bound by popular physics or quantum mechanics always charge too much, can’t trust them And we once were cannibals too, but the gut can only stretch so far and there’s always more time than teeth, more seconds than saliva, But they’re there in the waiting dark filing their nails and smiling sweetly, unmindful of the tiny footsteps scraping along the sand behind them. _________________________ Mad science of a brain in rebellion Staring at the blinking cry of the cursor, the demand to excise the syllables that crowd into a mad nutmeg brain, that crowd and shove and push for escape, for birth is not some easy excuse to cry out loud about the wages of sin or the left foot or the world's ways of beating down, hammering, crushing with a kind of love that ends in broken bones. Are there tears for this kind of happiness? The black kind of weakness felt in the wee smalls when there's nothing between you and the world at large but the thin glass of skin that peels off in shattering splinters of eyelash wishes. Did you see it vivisected on the kitchen table? Did you hear it creak into stirrups on the sofa examined for the gynecological syllogisms of late afternoon arguments? There is no dinner time anymore, just meal time seconds between commercials and social networking websites where we're all so much more interesting than in the really real. And where is this going, and where has it been and will it take us along for the ride, the dark ride, the dark ride, the dark ride into Thomas' long gentle night that wraps us like a womb, longing to be suffocated by love, murdered by it, left bloody and broken on the page, but sated and satisfied and spent like paycheques always too small anyway. The cursor makes demands for perpetual motion, get it all down and out fast like Beverly Hills. It wants to know that there is no fertile ending or fragile crescent or Assyrian love parade vanished into the sands of a dying hard drive. This is the archeology of a brain in rebellion. This is a pyramid, the room a South American jungle, the town a Persian desert. There is no poetry here. Only dry tears on a Saturday morning. _____________________________ A strange ritual And we tear away from the pull of the walls and the streets and the windows to a place where there are none, no limits to tie us down hold us back, just Bone and the Trail and the Falling Leaves drifting whispers about London and Thoreau and the desperation we wear like stains in our regular hours, ours is a quiet kind of madness that rages at the streetlights But now we’re into the wild like Supertramp forsaking lovely Lilith and her demons and her giants and her beer fridge and TV for the rough embrace of the dirt track, doing the hard-scrabble shuffle along in a dance to the tune of autumn leaves pin-dropping a tattoo on the forest floor It’s a strange ritual we keep to shout a grand FUCK YOU to the world and the million generations dedicated to chasing down comfort, herding her to the cliff of constancy and finally bringing her down — we demand an end to that kind of seduction, a brief respite from the voracious demands, the convenient bonds of expiration dates It’s a strange ritual to reconnect with the animal that clings to our guts, that clings to the amygdala for dear life casting jealous glances at the cancer of the cortex, that self-righteous bastard with his consciousness and weakness and complaints about the cold and the sweat and the burn of muscles that force the Machine to curl into desk chairs like hairy fetuses fit only for qwerty and the flatscreen And we demand that strange ritual, need the trail to find our way back to the beginning, the world beyond the streetlights, and there’s a destination but its somewhere on the other end of the compass is the medium, the message is to unplug and breathe again, one foot in front of the other, each one forward is one farther back to that lost beginning. And the air smells familiar here, some unconscious collective of genetic memory that knows when it has found home. And home is where we wander until we are spit out of the bush womb wet and born again. ______________________ Chi commando qui It was a day like any other day she said, forgetting the gone peach tree and all those days of high ripe summer, in August when the peaches hang heavy and low on the branch a million falling uneaten left to burst in the grass beneath heels feed swarms of greenflies the bleeding juice of summer itself, there was one last fall and then it fell too, and the house grew sadder and we all felt that there was something stirring in the shadows of the evening kept at bay by Mary and strings of beads and printed promises, and then the house too had one last glorious fruitless summer, and then it was never there and people parked on it It was a day like any other day, she said when it was the final season last episode dramatic conclusion to the series no more loose ends, nothing to wrap up the down staircase into eternity and oblivion and it was a day like any other but she screamed and her husband screamed, but She with her beads, She stayed quiet chi commando qui She used to say, goddess of Elsemere garlic-scented five-foot madonna, who's in charge here who's running this show and then it was time to go and when She went She was gone slowly, casually but She lingers on in taste-bud daydreams of vanished summers It was a day like any other day, she said and then fire fell from the sky and Rome burned and the Babylonians were at the walls and the sky lit up all at once, like death was something unexpected like it drove a car through the wall and crushed the Woman in her bed, no, it came soft as the feather-tipped vows of young lovers whispering close enough to savour the taste of the other's breath, it came gentle and sweet and slow, but it came as no surprise for it was not a day like any other day it was the day She had waited for plotted and planned and willed into being and She went sleeping, on Her back, propped up on some pillows delicate soft onion skin lost its olive, madonna of the peach, gone Eve, it was Her day, maybe their day. She chose Her death like She would choose a lover chi commando qui?
This is fucking fantastic! Absolutely fucking fantastic! I am standing in the middle of my room. It's about 1 hour to sunset and the light is perfect, and I cannot stop reading this. I must have gone through it 20 times. I love the way you use the s's to control the pace, to slow the reader down after they have built a head of steam. I really love the way this feels. The part where it comes to 'slow spent slow Saturdays with slower Sundays' really sets up well for a perfect final image. Thank you for posting this.:cheers2: The imagery is great.
Jesus, I've still got 'the rules of the game' bumping around in my head. I can't get over the ingenuity of 'slow spent slow'. I'd love to hear you reading this one Scratch. Inerested? Could you record yourself maybe and post a link or something? It would be interesting, for me at least, to compare with how I read it. If I can borrow a mic, I might just record my efforts too.
Thanks Red...that really means a lot. On the recording front, I didn't realize I could post sound clips. How would I go about doing that?
Well, I know one of the regulars over in Random Thoughts records clips and uploads them to another site. www.putfile.com and then just posts the link. You should do it. It would be great fun.
Hey folks: I've added four new ones after a summer spent relatively computer-free. Please give me some feedback. Question, concerns, social notes always welcome. Hope you like 'em.
