I’m taking too long in here.
This cart I am trying to steer.
Is squealing around corners constantly.
There’s nothing except throwing groceries in endlessly.
The wet floor sign is laughing too hard.
I still need to buy a thank you card.
But words don’t exist in the confines of the store.
Just lines and scribbles galore!
Ribbons streaming from nowhere.
Like sadness from a tearful pear.
I could leave this store at any time.
But not without an angry lime.
Not without doing something odd.
Like catching bags of chips with a fishing rod.
Eating a pastry from a display.
Jumping around to avoid the fray.
I’m taking too long in this place.
Where I can feel the freezer section’s embrace.
The cold is not the only thing in me.
I wish everything was free.
Free like a smiling flower in the floral department.
Which is beautiful despite dismemberment.
I wish I was free too…
In this store with too many tears undue.
It’s all right if I fall apart
Vases are meant to be broken
My glue fails in togetherness
See ancient plain of jars stalwart
Old, weathered, and unwoken
It’s all right if I break into pieces
The day comes with its crazy glue
Beckoning me to keep it together
So what if others look mint
I practice wholeness bruised
I’m letting go of perfecting
Even fine porcelain has its cracks
Brokenness has its rewards
Scattered see how the pieces fit
When the day comes hammering
The whole is afraid of falling
Down below nowhere to go
Perfect in imperfection is a relief
Pieces of me drop away again
My heart lurching finds a home
If only my pieces have a voice
Speak my broken objections
Help me to remember shattering
Natural as peaceful dissection
Poking anthropology for clues
Without dismemberment true
How can I know the whole?
It’s all right if there is no glue
Don’t put me together falsely
Finding perfection in pieces
Vases are fine either way
It's summer, and sunlight's syrup pours sweet into afternoon.
We've come to the bungalow's cemetery
to pick over bones of bygone days;
touch time's tender skin, lay flowers on childhood's grave.
The lodge is razed to the ground. We raise
our eyes to sky and take each big breath of blue.
Sharp lemon-light cuts through
the detritus of our days; the oaks once cloaked in dark.
The knotweed nooses and dreamlike domes of fly agaric
have all been cleared; the forest sentinels' leafless limbs
discarded - an abattoir of strangeness, sawdust-strewn.
But all dismemberment is a clearing of sorts.
The echoes of emptiness eavesdrop
on each reminiscence, as we forage for a few last remnants:
blue paisley swirls of 70s tiles,
red bricks from an 80s fireplace.
A yearning rises suddenly, slick sick-sour in my throat...
and yet, it feels cathartic, this purging of the past;
this merging of our then and now,
this blending of bitter and sweet.
23 February 2023
The tiny old school, which was my first guide,
has become a museum of a distant age.
The playground--swings, bars, and slide,
still stand in mute dismemberment stage.
A fence around, a ticket to buy,
purchasing memories packed away.
Days so distant, unseen if you try;
Sharpened pencil scent, recalled today.
Inside, Grade One, up the stairs, Grade Two.
How can it now all appear so small?
So proud to pass to second-grade view
learning how to write, we felt so tall!
The tables are there: six of us at each,
and now I don't remember one name.
They gave our class the best to teach:
so tiny, like one of us, we felt the same.
Some memories better left behind,
with sadness they bring of years long past;
and daydreams we always hoped to find
around the corner where dreams can last.
September 13, 2022
for Back to School contest
by Francine Roberts
Honorable Mention
to love and be loved,
two sides upon the same coin,
to have a dalliance with life.
mother grows roses with thorns that pierce,
father controls the darkness of day,
a duo in which to divulge my thoughts.
I am a merry man with unshown madness,
a soft spoken psychotic sweetheart,
to be and also to see from the world around my body.
a great room, men are monotonous,
a drop in a glass shatters silence,
there is never an easy way out of normality.
I crave dismemberment from the hand almighty,
to decease and also desire contentment,
a dance with death, a waltz with wonder.
he plucks me from a field of forget-me-nots,
to see me from afar is a blessing in disguise,
I'll burn your eyes, blind you from the murder of the world.
an ending in embers, a phoenix risen from ash,
afresh departure, train station to hereafter.
goodbye and goodnight.
Nightmare revealed insidious corrosion
It had confused the subconscious element
Signature manoeuvre to sensor fusion
Align and contort the soul’s dismemberment
Surprise and attach signalling erosion
Oblivious to seal cracking detachment
Glory-Mae cuddled in her blanket awoke
Discarded ouiji board did hell’s fire invoke
I was:
murdered
in the
bargain basement
of a
relationship.
chopped into
pieces of
discontented
dismemberment.
I am:
bleeding out
from a
deceitful
arrogance.
pooled in
muddled
puddles
of
forgiveness.
Scattered pictures lay crumbled in the fire,
smashed mirrors with reflections,
blinded by the darkness.
I needed you like air.
I longed for you like water.
I ached for you like food.
Deep in the dismemberment of
our trickled reality
I found a hole I needed to fill.
A hole.
A deep endless hole.
Needing to be filled.
Torrential winds exasperated
the flames of sour regret.
Pages burnt up into ashes
causing an existence of
depression and mania.
I bled for you like a razor.
I lived for you like life.
I held love for you like crazy.
Introspect and intellect must have
been confused with my happiness.
My sanity does remember
your broken heart.
My insanity forgot my broken soul.
Bring me back from the depth
I have fallen into....
Will continue to fall into...
if I stay...
Written By: Laura Loo
Date Written: March 27, 2016
Soldiers in uniforms
Crucifying their brothers
In order to establish
Justice for their colors
Why on earth is this
Even accepted
To kill and proclaim
Death by dismemberment
Killing all people
Our friends and relatives
Who's really our enemy
When your killing your family
To live by a cause
Diseased by corruption
No matter what faction
Your reason is false and disrupted
Nothing can be justified
If your killing your brothers
Killing is killing
Whether its me
Or your mother
No law to decide
What is right
Or who dies
Just body's that lie
Facedown by a guy
Whos spilling
All the blood
Of the victims
As god is the witness
No one is innocent.
And the killers
Keeps on killing.
The encumbrance of
life
Copious and
never-ending
A leaching
gangrenous wound
In need of
dismemberment
From his torpid soul
The medicinal
elixirs have raped
the mind
And replaced it with
a dense syrup
That makes
cognition, onerous
He cares for nothing
Feels nothing—is
nothing
A means to an end
Has him captivated
Fixated on the task
Relief is at hand
But he lacks the
strength and courage
You scrape a living in a harsh barren land,
never ceasing the hope,
that rain will finally come.
Covered with spines, you brace, and wait out every storm,
yet bearing fruit, just those few days of the year.
You bring color to the desert, ever reaching to the heavens.
Brushing off dismemberment,
a new shoot where a severed limb once sprouted.
Seemingly the giant of the wasteland,
but often, merely a small potted plant.
Knowing full well that the next day may very well be your last.
The scorch of the noonday sun blazes down,
drying, burning, razing to the ground,
what has clung desperately to life.
But still, the Cacti, endure...
The point was, he had swallowed
the pawn.
The world rips apart
and ultimate wintering
sets in.
Shy of one truth,
the hour of reckoning demands
the blood facts.
You could have destroyed
me if I were to sing.
There were no crisis. Dismemberment
went on to squeeze honey
from the hapless victims chanting
Hail Mary.
I sizzled in vain.
Choking on your trumped up
victory, you will break in the house
to find the silver god stolen from
a golden mantel.
You climb on a tall tree and
then disappear in clear blue.
Satish Verma
Poets Escape
by Odin Roark
How willing
This heart and mind
Absorbing pain's daily prose
Global flagellation becoming
Best sellers
Top Box-office
Google's lifeblood
Whether Syria's dismemberment
Washington's absurdity
Or Hollywood's Grand Guignol Follies
Exhausted passions and intelligence
Clutter synaptic duty
Excused as collateral damage
Everyday wars of fear
Slowly accelerate
This self-destructive countdown
Repeating Time's insidious cycle
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
While few escape
Some find refuge
In the manifestos of metaphor
Using echoes of cranial madness
Illusion's manic voice
Mumbling through the night
Arranging similes
This is like that
That is this
Until...
Dream's phosphoreal mirage
Becomes imagination's reality
Layered tapestry hanging firm
Mind's needlework in progress
Becoming woven experience
To shroud forever
Weakness's acquiescence
For what?
For whom?
Poets know not
They just are
On this day pestilence had hands and fingers,
dripping with maroon redemption, soaked in alternate intention,
on this day even the desert felt despair,
felt the footprints of a poisonous discourse.
The Nile with a disrupted course,
soaked with a disposed corpse,
a pest by the name of Seth scarcely shook,
dismemberment with a calm dispose,
a surgeon he worked to implore,
the remains of Osiris,
a drunkard for death,
for blood a whore.