Beyond the cabin walls
a shimmering molt of starlight
brushes brilliance
over my black drenched car.
Snowflakes fall
disappear
then appear to float up
on weightless whisps
breathed out
from inky cisterns.
A chill window reflects,
it takes my picture
through a fisheye lens.
Behind me,
a log fire cracks and chirps.
The room chirrs warmly
like a fiddle in a ghost camp.
I turn to look at where I live
see only yesterday still unpacking.
Something in the timbers
creaks through listening ears,
a softy shuffling rumor
trails hollowly
like whispers in an empty clock,
but its just the wood
speaking its mind.
I think about future nights
here in the arboreal twilight
locked in by the weather
with only the tepid churn
of daydreams
providing narrowing paths
for my soul-searching.
Tomorrow I will wake up and work out just a half hour,
And yet I find myself weak.
Today I will limit myself on the sweets I devour,
And yet I find myself weak.
Now I will get up and actually do something and clean,
Yet I find myself weak.
I will read today! Instead of stare at a screen,
Yet, I am lazy and weak.
I will hold my tongue, be less mean and obscene,
And yet my soft lips turn to a sharp beak.
I sail on, a captain ignoring a leak,
Not taking steps to fix the wheel that squeaks.
I promise myself hollowly to improve week after week,
As I sit at the bottom just wishing for the peak.
I can do it, I can make steps, have it be more than what I speak,
If only if only…I weren’t so pathetically weak.
Her Side
By Sy Roth
Are they going to die like that?
Expire
Retire
As a broken, opalic string of DNA
Ribonucleic disaster
Worm-eaten womb
Ascerbic molecules.
Who enabled this procreatic mission?
They rimed it with a urine trail
Left --Her side
Discordant disdain
Heeding her rantings.
Across the hall a pink room
Only denoting her sex
Imponderable expressions of emotions
Laid bare among a string of rejections.
It echoes hollowly in the recesses.
She laid WMD traps,
Exploding in sickly apprehensions
A vale of tears.
The sisters fought the battle of Cain and Abel
Smashing their bloodless heads.
The progenitors walked between them
Without trepidation
To the other side
To vanish in a haze of decaying synapses
Leaving behind only questions
Left silent in the detritus of their disdain.
Earthy barmy leafs scurry
Pulling rapidly in peak flurry
Lamenting blind as mists worry
Crude cool calm earth attacks slowly
Silly calm breeze shoo wholly
Sharp plume vanishes hollowly
Descending riveted cloud gleam
Sputtering upon scratching stream
Hurries vacantly in sprinkling steam
Lying oaks bewail 'n bemoan
Unobtrusively giggling delicately unknown
On clear red foundlings windblown
Deciduous elm trees fluster
As slow clouds be one of cluster
Above and slowly disappears in a duster
Suavity forlorn pebbles grieve
Amongst sluggish ol' buttermilk sky heave
As stars twinkling thru' pea soup vapor retrieve
FALL UNTO
A smile in a mirror
Cracked!
Swallowed in shadow.
Haunted by violent secrets and fears
Fact forms from our fictions
Hollowly grow gray
Heal broken back
Silent grievance unsoothed tears
A turmoil fault – a symptom in form of an addiction
Temptation fought day after day
Turning from red to pink, orange to yellow
Blue to green And violet to purple
Like a sunrise
An exercise of an entire spectrum
Barely seen
It took nearly ten years
This poem now complete.
It denies defeat, and claims no victim.
Ending a promising career.
The Darkness at Noon
Taps - echo hollowly
over the grey stones,
acrid odor of gunpowder
stings all memory,
flag, creased, folded,
presented.
A last salute.
A darkness at noon.
John G. Lawless
4/22/2014
Trails of laughter amid tears
Tales of the ancients rake pensive queers
History is but present hollowly thought
Experienced oceans of belittled naught
Swelling chest and above the eyes
That constantly gaze on high
We hear the change of the believed
Rainwater drips into the pangs of eve
Enamored upon the brink of a wind’s tide
A tapestry of the softest gold beside
It is the tip of the highest sorrow
That brings a happy tear to the morrow
Look back, but upon the wind you stay
Treasure ashes remain acceptance, gray
Leaves curling dutifully brown
As the knowing tiger lilies frown
Prison guard of the future
With a hardened face revealing today
Be present at best in an experienced face
Into the eyes that trace true pain
8/17/12
There is nothing to these phrases
But somehow they reach the reader
They touch . . . me
Am I the only one caged in this prison?
Do you ever wish life had a better meaning?
Do you ever wish you can touch his or her heart?
The absence of meaningless words flow
Into my dried up, sorrowful mind
And through it all, these words are written
I can’t seem to express myself in any other way
I wish sometimes . . . I truly wish
That I was not me . . .
What if all of these verses were erased from time?
Where then would my words go?
Where would you be?
Nothing means everything
I think I would scream
Deep inside a part of me would die
There is nothing hidden in this verse
They are merely words,
Hollowly displayed for the visage of mankind
Keane blasting in the background,
Tears falling down by their words
My mind is locked in a trance
As my hand moves across the line
Seething silently for meaning
Maybe the sun is done shining for me
Maybe nobody cares for me,
For these arbitrary words . . .
I think I will stop today
To be reassured
SANDS OF TIME
My child the struggler-
Half-buried, sand-holer
From fractious family.
Each christmas hollowly
Joyless in the cold
Tracks in the snow,
A pointless journey
A useless straggler
My boy filled the void,
Though almost destroyed.
Controlling with care
And knowing when and where
Trying to survive
In that world half-alive
My man's half-drowned
In the sand pit around.
My wife seeks my pain
As each running grain
Pours back, fills the hole.
She rescues my soul.
far beneath the steeples of cobble stoned london,
he moves without the parting of a shadows grace.
from morning to morning he carries no longing.
under the heavy hymns of the luthern organs
he breaths amongst centuries of dead and
thoughtful saints
he can see thier forms in the darkened hour,
their drawn out robes crested and wrinkled.
the emblems of holy words dust covered and faded.
now once again he must part the letters
in tombs of mortered regret.
resurrection of the coffin figure to wander and speak
to whom he may, walking through herb gardens,
carried by tombstone... gravestone october winds.
which blow hollowly causing his morbid child to flee
all those memories of her.
now he must refrain from the glow of the brass
lanterns and pale jugulars his clavicle redemption.
as through the arterial streets of london the
bloodless form of his opaque continence
mourns and is drained of all mineral colums.
Friend caution in recklessness cast
at mercy of four elemental winds;
marooned to rest abandoned in
eerie thrall of empty deserts.
Tanned into wisps of burning paper,
dust-blown ghosts dissolving,
coughing up a storm.
In truth I shot the albatross,
hangs now her windchime bones
about my craning neck;
brittle, white-bleached they click
and whisper, canned laughter hollowly fades
into musical discord.
No blueprint, chart or compass
to autopilot navigation of
love's most ragged peninsula;
naturally I ran aground,
dry-docked, adrift and treading dirt,
classic lifeline weaving deft
'neath Damocles hanging sword.
All my demons are high precision engines
geared with rapier cruelty;
and all the while
throughout tears and smile,
drive me softly
screaming
down
the
years...
The whale song resounds in each shedding tear,
The surface lies stoic and hushed,
Each aqualung fathom compressed every year
Blue velvet and casually crushed.
The parting of souls torn a sorrowful drag
Of fragments of driftwood and sand,
And every cat tied in every black bag,
Drowns out of sight of land.
When sapphire ashes sweep far out of sight
Like memories failing to hold,
The bells make for chiming the onset of night,
Hollowly ringing and cold.
The trembling fingers painstakingly laced
Trickled tears that run through their thread,
We cry the blue ocean, alone and displaced
When all that remains is unsaid.
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