That time at the lake,
As the mist looked on expectedly,
When I cried sad crystals,
And they flew skyward,
Joining hands with constellations,
It was then that I knew,
As my eyes still spilled celestial ink,
That the night sky was built on hurt lovers,
Cosmic beauty derived from pain,
The night was an anthology of romantic tragedies,
A sky of stories,
A landscape painting of bloodily cut diamonds,
Bled on to the firmament by the brush of our tears.
Stashed in this dark cubicle,
Like a vintage speaker inoperable,
I languish in pained silence,
No more does poetry and music escape these lips,
No longer do I monologue,
I am alone,
No incoming voices,
No mechanics come to fix me,
Just perpetual let down after sore event,
Spurring me to depressive inaction,
With each crank of the dial,
I am less myself,
Turned down in volume,
A muted soul,
No longer to produce a syllable nor tune,
The loneliest sound is a single teardrop.
As they say,
The face is a masquerade mask,
And the eyes are windows to the soul,
But windows can be boarded up and blockaded,
And a masks purpose is to deceive,
You never know the intentions within,
The bad aura that permeates its design,
The gentlest smile can hold the most umbrage,
A held stare can be pure amorous obfuscation,
Cordial words can hide poison within,
The back of your skull often suspects something,
A defence mechanism for your peace of mind,
That sixth sense hints at hidden danger,
You’ll wish you had heeded the warnings,
That imperceptible lightning of negativity in the air,
The bad vibes,
Rancor hovering about an angel.
We’ve been savagely chased from yesteryear,
Demons of loss and pain at our backs,
Like Jack Russell’s nipping at our heels,
Chunks of us left in the last year,
Physically and emotionally,
Not all survived the rout,
Yet we must look forward,
It’s a mad new world,
Time waits for no man,
The days ahead are in flux,
Waiting to be crystallized by new experience,
New faces and affairs to be held in glass,
But take note,
It is yet unclear if this new year will also maim,
That same glass may be jagged,
But our assault must be sustained,
For time will not tarry,
So we ought face the year like a hopeful sunrise.
Throughout this thousand year war,
Numberless threads have been severed,
Both political and carotid,
Every fall gives rise to a cult,
A coven of worms,
A morbid congregation drawn together,
Each elongated creature both priest and disciple,
Each slain prince or pauper,
Becomes a temple of writhing masses,
Another prone parish of rot,
Erected on putrescent pillars,
Ribcages holding up their necrotic chapels,
Flesh is chewed away in ritual feasts,
Marrow supped like wine from bone,
These cultists are no fiends though,
It’s simply the way of the world,
Entropy and taxes being the only certainties,
Even the most triumphant and grand of us,
Shall be naught but a temple for the worms,
Little more than grisly alms,
Meat for the cult.
Her words were as an errant furnace,
Viciously melting me down,
Magma in her breath,
A suns core of spite and rage,
Each word burns hotter than the last,
Broiling blow after blow,
Tangent after criticism,
Tangerine flowers and brass fall from me,
Depositing hearts and memories in scoria on the floor,
I am now only a pile of ash,
Bestrewn across this wasteland of a life,
Tired and stale,
But this won’t be the end,
Not this time,
That same fire that destroyed me shall remake me,
I’ll be a phoenix this time,
Erupting like a volcano to new heights,
And I’ll lay waste to your animus this time.
It was unclear what invoked this detonation,
The world has many stray matches,
A look,
A word,
A revelation,
But erupt it did nonetheless,
All I can glimpse is burning confetti,
Metal shards of a man,
Sharp as a tongue of a soul in pain,
The heat feels like tar on the skin,
As if I can touch the heartache in its mucus,
Munitions from a heart and mind imploded,
But observe,
Those piles of singed petals and broken glass,
That is what it looks like,
When a life becomes shrapnel,
Reduced to a sorry wreckage,
No phoenix here.
I pulled that cellophane over my head,
Covering my mouth and ears promised clarity,
A carrier bag emergency exit,
A suicidal aegis,
To drown out the voices,
Those noises of normal society,
To nullify their edges,
Their droll criticisms,
And as each breath was stolen in plastic,
As the clear veil grew foggy,
It was as if a great weight had dissipated,
Like oxygen leaving blue lips,
Normality could scold me no longer.
This nursery is held often out of sight,
Behind church walls and ragged hedge lines,
Out of mind,
At least that’s the hope,
This garden of corpses,
Decorated by obelisks and headstones,
It’s home to crops like you and I,
Planted here by fate and chance,
The rows are a series of stories carved into granite,
This old soil holds more than morbid botany,
There are memories planted here,
From babes cooing to final embraces,
Joy and rancor and fear preserved,
Every romance and broken heart under the sun,
All eventually find themselves interred here,
Along with worms and flies,
Awaiting a harvest that will never come.
One day I grimaced at my hands,
And I saw that they were not truly mine,
Bound to schemes not my own,
Tied to some parliamentary puppeteer,
Oligarchs bluffing authority,
So I took a rotary saw to them,
With each rotating bite,
Every vein separated,
Muscle torn from radius,
Each bone bloodily gnawed through,
I felt no fire from the excision,
I felt relief,
Self-mutilation rapture,
The roar of petrol chokes any vice,
No longer can these hands commit the evils of others,
I’m no longer a tool,
If I cannot touch,
I cannot harm.
WorldofHarley 