Everlasting vicious circle Breaks
Up again,
Only to slip into the dark.
I wait for hands to pick me up,
White-knuckled and holding on,
Until I finally fall in
The circle never breaks.
Steady for a second,
Then the floor gives way.
Gripping tight until my palms ache,
Up again.
Off balance, but not alone.
Someone pulls me from the shadows
and plants my feet on solid ground.
I hold on, eyes toward the light,
breaking the circle to become my hope
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First, the shovel bites dirt~
a clean incision where grass
pretended the world
was always this green.
Dad’s hands, knuckled
like roots, twist the spade deeper.
He doesn’t speak, but I know
this is the language of a man
who trusts the ground.
We kneel, pressing seeds
into dark, damp pockets~
each one a buried secret
waiting to unravel.
His fingers, thick as carrots,
brush mine by accident.
The sun stretches our shadows
long across the turned soil,
two bent figures stitching
the earth back together,
one row at a time.
By dusk, we are dirty
in ways that won’t wash off.
The garden doesn’t thank us yet,
but the love and gratitude
between Dad and me
is soft and growing.
Fallen leaves knuckled
below eddies float again
along the slick street.
Rain withers with gray
asphalt rising. Curbs cement
leggy puddle spills.
Sunlit raindrops stop
hissing at guttural moans
tickling us for laughs.
Raw,
a nubby grey knuckle-boned day,
when the wind blows through my skin
pulling at the cord
which holds my insides in,
oh infernal internal wall
keeping without without
and within within,
off key Wednesday
crashing chords that I have swallowed
not a passing thought for the blue tunes of tomorrow,
or the music I have made thus far in life
and the ones that I have begged or borrowed
as always I’ll wait for it to pass
fill the gallow glass
to fetch me a drink while I think
but no-one is near
my fault, not because I fear them
I hear them in the hall
scratching
but I don’t let them in
it would give them a chance to win
I need them on my page
to take away the blank
fill it with ink
because being empty stinks
I don’t want the void
empty yarn from a ragged yawning hole
so I’ll sleep,
hope to feel when I wake
no idea how much more time it is going to take
will it break me or make me
perhaps I will try the fake me
the one with the smile
the one I revile
but there it is
sat on my face
smug and satisfied,
all while I’m melting away
a Dali soft watch
on this raw knuckled day
(center)Visions grow
out of our imaginations like vines.
We want to excavate a bare-knuckled past
with the jaw bones of concussed elks.
A cold moonlight carves them still.
They are the blunt teeth of a low wailing sky,
the works of a hand-crushed faith
far beyond the ken,
of we curious and depthless delvers.
We who stand now non-plussed,
our minds turned around
these mute megaliths
as if we were stone thoughts
upon a grinding lathe
searching
for any distant sense
of - why
while myopically questioning
the source of our
softly rooted selves.(center)
Streetlight dander. Jawbone asphalt.
Blink razors carve her iris script.
Rib stars ovulate in feral grates,
mechanical tongue juts a bloodline breath.
Keystroke ruin writes in collapse,
a waveform lodged in sternum glass.
Lipsticked rodeo—a gash in faded denim
Banana-knuckled hands torch filterless ghosts.
Tree-call through copper root systems.
Wire-pluck storm,
vapor chews the stock market
Cancer caught in molar hush,
brined in citrine static.
She opens her throat like a coin purse.
Spine bows in semaphore.
We dismount the edge—
An incisor cusp,
the confession still blistering
beneath the flesh of no language.
Her skin, a velvet sin, a scripture I recite with the tip of my tongue,
melts like dark chocolate, bitter and sweet on my hungry lips,
pouring confessions in breathless whispers, a dance of endless desire.
I pull her closer, white-knuckled on silk sheets,
intoxicated by the ecstasy between her thighs, a paradise lost and found,
a pleasure so intense it hurts, an echo of unshared desires.
Let me worship, adore this altar of the senses,
let me destroy and be destroyed, lose myself in your depths,
for in this ruin I find rebirth, in this chaos, the sought-after peace.
She longs to do well she wants to do what's right
To rock all those that hurt in her insignificant lap
Holding to Hope in white knuckled fists so tight
Yet learning to bend with the wind and not snap
Maybe all she needs is for someone anyone to clap
Midwinter - means
transparent ice walls
pressed against shrinking skin.
Dead-eyed horses are revived
only by the steam of their nostrils.
No one predicts a beginning or an end,
'mid' is a frozen idea
in an ice-locked fountain pen,
it will not write even in warm hands.
Killer clowns' shelter behind
their fixed, blood flaked grimaces,
the whites of their eyes
reflect pinpoints
of a dawning apprehension.
Roads decelerate,
creaking through knuckled hands.
Chilled mounds toboggan off rooftops,
dump malformed snowmen
through unmeasured backyard graves.
At the hazy horizon of each grinding day.
midwinter blurs perspective.
This is the middling 'Mid'
a middle where the mind stops flowing
up or down.
Fingertips etched and wrapped,
white knuckled, yet steadfast -
the journey never finished because
...there is no destination
except the next brick or perhaps
EGO?
What then, when there are no more
"electives"?
"Alexander wept, because there were
no more worlds to conquer".
So thus, the tendrils, naked and burdened,
circle back,
their vines and blossoms celebrated,
while the sacrificed - those who cling and die
go unnoticed...
Freedom isn’t a delicate flower;
It’s the fist that goes through the ground,
the teeth that grind at the chains,
the howl of a wind
that won’t ask for permission.
I refuse to bow to the crumbs of tomorrow,
I won’t let my bones sink into decay,
a shell waiting to grow scraps.
I’ll carve out freedom
from this stubborn rock—
bloody-knuckled and relentless.
Do not tell me that patience is a virtue.
Patience is the poison they peddle
to keep you under control.
Freedom roars. Freedom bares its teeth.
Silence will never hold my name.
He went on an ayahuasca retreat searching for that magical seed.
To lead him up the stalk to his soul's treasury.
This white-collar fellow with money to burn, sitting before an old shaman.
Who'd so much to teach and he with so much to learn-
They quietly sipped the potion; the trip soon arrived.
On a psychedelic current, virgin constellation branding the eye.
After his ayahuasca odyssey, he told of wonderful things he'd seen.
Secret places he'd breached...
The mind expanding to the fringes of time.
Where he'd kissed a gilded silhouette of Jesus Christ.
He asked if I'd like to board the next mind expansion ride.
I politely declined.
Being concerned about ingesting a bad batch.
Perhaps clashing with a brass-knuckled devil.
The mind eroding into a total mental contraction.
I'm content strolling through this realm. clear minded
With its bits of heaven and hell.
I'll reach the next realm when the flesh is perfectly ripened.
It's not quite that time yet.
slowly,
her knuckled cracked eons
into buckets
of whitewashed lies
and her sigh elongated
into dainty icicles
that hung around
her neck
like a noose
which slowly sliced open
Pandora's box
of poetry and she, cried,
sonnets in the winter
.
i'll punch you with uh phuk'n
boom
to your jaw
BAAHM
to your lungz
punch punch
uh phuk'n
bare knuckled
(((PUNCH)))
not like sum
MMA thugz
nope
like 'my thud'
MAN
all up in your
now
Mangled
'Month'
The destiny of my parents
was to be ignored by a vaguely dismantled child.
The youth grew, his mind so dispersed,
that he hardly saw them anymore.
How can you tell,
when your filial emotions
are all stuck in a knuckled first?
Years passed, parents passed,
time passed and the child,
became an old man.
Only then did he see again,
a mother doing her best,
a father doing what he could,
and a child that never cared,
until now.
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