The mind has
its own bleak landscapes
that freeze the will,
confine the soul
to an inner space
no larger than the self.
I know such worlds
of ice - dark ones
that press against
the window and give
no light. I am familiar
with the howl
of its bitter winds
that pick at every crack
as if trying to get in.
I have felt
its icy grip tighten
almost to the point
where I could not
draw a breath.
I know too
of other places
in the mind, deeper ones
that plumb almost
to its source
and summon landscapes
of an inner calm where
there are trees,
wide undulating plains
and rivers winding
their glistening way
to the sea. Landscapes
that are drawn
from the sacred,
composed of poetry
and prayer and carry
the faint recollections
of a somewhere
not far and yet,
a lifetime away.
What do you do
when you’re riddled with riddles,
swallowed whole
right down the middle?
Music blares,
but it’s not me.
’Twas a toot or two
from a fiddle.
What do you do
when your riddles get riddled?
When you’re all alone
and you fiddle your diddle.
Nothing comes out
but a little
piddle.
Compulsively arranged
and out of control,
thought after thought
has swallowed me whole.
Riddled with feelings,
I pick at my mind,
looking for answers
that no one can find.
Can you connect the dots?
I’m trying to justify
whatever still rots.
Riddled with riddles,
discarded
like an afterthought.
Something’s not right here.
Something became
a knot.
Do poets hunt?
Trapping words in their nets
Plucking the best
Throwing the rest
With a kiss for later
Do they scour the seas?
With ravenous eyes
Only to drown in meter waves
Do they climb the highest peaks?
Race through buttercup vales
Pass a thousand souls
Who pick at their scabs?
That weep blood for rhyme
Until they are scarred
Will time test
Show favour to a vacant mind
When dry words choke
The most eager smith
Until the rain returns
And stanzas flow like rivers
The poet reborn
And everything in the world is right once more
There’s potential for anything in the hospital.
Anyone could drift into a hospital gown.
Dawning on them at dawn, then again at noon.
They have enough hospital gowns for all of us and more.
And they all have a couple holes in them.
So do our stories which combine into one giant skeleton.
Got built by us over years,
We don’t know if he’s real or fake but looks a little paler than most types of bone.
Our stories may not always align.
But we chortle and pick at our wounds in front of the tv.
Pretend to be ghosts.
Under our beds, we roll over.
My eyes.
As my mouth almost moves, which in here?
Can’t do anything- harm, good, howling.
None.
In the hospital.
Things move like a slow motion swamp.
Guilt us.
I’ve been here three days.
As we interconnect like chalk lines around a body.
The hospital.
How can you call it that?
This is a plot of land in space and no time at all.
How can you call it that?
Just how…
if it were up to me
i wouldn't be here.
i would have left
a long time ago.
but others expect things of me.
things that i have to do.
and so i do them.
and i'm not dead yet.
from the minute we are born,
we are treated like clay.
carefully handled,
molded by the hands
of each person we come
in contact with.
so i'm sorry that i can't
undo the dents and imperfections
but they aren't my fault.
blame the girls who made me feel
useless.
blame the guys who made me feel
unlovable.
blame the teachers who made me feel like a
failure.
but i'm not dead yet.
i keep pushing, persevering,
praying.
praying that someone will see the
strain in my smile.
the way my leg shakes
under the desk.
the way i pick at my fingernail beds
the way i pull out my hair
the way i hold the knife to my skin.
i pray.
and i pray.
no one ever helps.
no one ever comes.
but i'm not dead yet.
and you can thank me for that.
She placed her dreams in starshine's bright design
where she believed the galaxy would guard them
from incidents and accidents that might shard them.
She trusted stars to lifelong harmonize love's song.
Wearing confident styles, she traversed fickle miles
before finding a grand love that would surely thrive.
Now, she barely manages life or pajamas without strife.
Gone is her strong and else she wished meant to belong.
Her frantic emotions fast crashed in gray-bashed static
and just her sofa holds her in tear splotchy folds.
Wishing to be free of depressions dark torture spree,
she lives with heart bruises and painful mind debris.
Numbness blurs her pathetic in swirls of decrepit
that pick at her feel-fabric already shredded traumatic.
She cannot define when their end started its doomed sway
but recalls when he left with her 'besty' on a final, total away.
My mind racing behind a cloud of smoke. The systematic deterioration of my life's work. yet most of the time I sit smiling, open minded to the possibility's, and to the actions that require an opposite and equal reaction to the options that lay dormant . Nothing came to mind. Rather id watch my own demise then be called to make a claim on another's life. So back to my decomposition a composition I'm very familiar with. My aid might be just inadequately enough to began the healing processes of someone who needs the primordial elements from my destruction to find the reasons and meaning in their own lives. I know I'm not obligated to pick at the scabs but my empathy wont allow them to hurt alone. Those influences that persuade, to succumb to healing. To not watch the final grains of sand funnel down. To accept that by holding on there is not another turn in this mortal life of flesh and bone. Even the prettiest of flowers must deteriorate to live again, to blossom`
What can I say
I dream about dead things
Skeletons in my closet
Hanging on hangers with names of people I no longer know
They whisper remnants of the past
Of times that were filled with laughter and joy
Now they’ve become sour
Everytime they speak I push their voices out of my mind
I carry dead flowers with me
To remind me of all the love I once had
I drag a black trash bag behind me
It holds every idea that I threw away
Every idea that I deemed bad
I envy dead things
They exist without being disturbed
Like a body that’s decomposing
Lost and wanting to be found
But not all bodies are found
Sometimes I want to rot away
Lay down on the forest floor
Waiting for animals to pick at my skin
Tearing me apart one piece at a time
Waiting as the Earth reclaims her Son
I was born with a beating heart
But I was never truly alive.
I am my mother’s verbal punching bag.
When she has a bad day, I pay the price.
I can’t stop her daily verbal attack,
Because nothing I do will e’er suffice.
The things she says are unforgivable;
Her insults are like acid on my hands.
Her kind comments have always been minimal,
But what else would you expect from my mom?
I pick at my fingers to help me cope,
And oftentimes, even that makes her annoyed.
So, for the sake of my skin, I hope
She’ll be a person I can fully avoid.
Her verbal abuse is shown through my fingers,
Through the dried blood and dull pain that lingers.
The knife is against your throat and I don't think I'd regret it
Stop picking at my skin
Pull your teeth out of my neck
Leave me somewhere between life and death
Pain and emotionless
Good to know I don't have to fix this
I know respect
Your blood will stain my hands and the collar of your top
I'll pick at the little meat on your bones and keep the rocks in your pockets
My knuckles cannot be whiter, permanent stains in my vision
Your face so far away or non existent I can't remember the shape of your eyes
The auld fella’s auld fella left the tech
after Ripening for sixteen summers.
Camden-Wagon-Gravity landed a
shovel and a pick at his lonely boots.
‘DIG’. he knew that Language. and by God
did he dig. there is a dignity
in breaking your back To Stuff A Ganger’s
Pockets, And His Belly With Rich Porter.
That aching rhythm of pick and shovel
Made certain - he would never reach his height.
sure look at him now, all stooped and bended
A Tunneller’s Posture. There Is A Man!
Breaking New Ground, Smashing Sediment and
Poverty. With every drive, slam and crack
You made Certain we would never go back.
Thanks to underground suffering and penance
and pain. Schoolday’s are over.
You’ve broken the Chain.
Dentist appointments cause me to linger,
Someplace betwixt dread and the blackness,
Fright’s version of despair,
Wistful and aching with silent prayers,
Silent, silence, soundless – still,
All the reasons, the responses, the requisites,
For those hours, endless times
Spent, losing my mind,
With mouth opened to oblige
Fingers pressed against my gums,
Forcing the enemy’s needles,
Taste of lidocaine, breathing in and out,
Through expanded nostrils,
Urgent moments, flooded with apprehension,
Distracted by the metal instruments,
Dreadful apparatuses,
Some intended to scrap at my enamel,
Pick at my fangs,
Some meant to dislodge roots,
Extract a tooth, - a part of me,
A portion of my flesh, my body,
Buried deep in my gums,
Where silent forces sing of dark horrors,
Will this dentist ever finish?
It seems like I’ve been in this chair for hours,
Looking at my watch….
Can it have only been five minutes!?!
Some way from the Firth of Forth
A shoal of glittering mackerel
Swirls and sways
Swells with the sea from silver to black
Flashes white and back to silver and grey
A humpback whale
Juddering its leathery jaws together
With a throatful of panicked fish
For a moment it bobs in place
Then sinks down slowly again
To await its next prey
But some fish get away
Dash, dash, dash
Gannets with wingtips a-black
In fizzing copper-green dive bomb
Pinning their wings back
Weaving, spiral bubbles rising
They spear the blank-eyed fish
And paddle away
In the tidal pools by the beach
Where the tiny sea herds crawl
Hermit crabs pick at morsels
Washed up by the tide
Snipping with their pincers
To nibble mackerel tails
They ward off competitors with their giant claws
Crabby-crawl tiny sea herds
Squabble in the pools of the micro-sea
But steal when you can the more beautiful shell
Of a crab that is greater than thee.
Shattered shards of a broken kaleidoscope
Scattered and taped together
Different visions
Black and white
Full and empty
I’m not human
My face is twisted into a smile stretched thin
My soul unraveled and torn, clinging onto its last thread
Who am I?
Pieces of a long-forgotten psalm
Coerced together to create a distorted whisper
Clashing, scratching, something unholy
Bloody fingers pick at the scraps of my personality
Which one to choose today?
Mouth full of white lies
Can’t you hear me cry?
One day they’ll all come back to strangle me
Nowhere to hide
Eyes everywhere, staring, provoking
Pushing my limits
Slowly losing my sanity
Thrust into their box of righteous virtue
Invalidating feelings and emotions
Formed into stone
Shattered pieces of a broken kaleidoscope
Each piece a part of me
I don’t want to see
There are faces
that stare out of an inner dark
that are featureless and have
no name. They haunt memory,
some prodding a nerve
sending a regret off
in search of a home.
Others pick at a wound
not quite healed somewhere
in a hard to reach place
of a life. There are those
faces that are lost somewhere,
trapped in a moment,
unable to move on.
I never saw your face,
your brief existence covered over
by a label wearing the anonymity
of just a surname. That
was the way they did it back then,
stopper grief with denial.
Your lifetime was measured
in minutes. You would be
forty five this year.
My mind often fills
those years with dream,
wondering what we could
have done, the meaningful
and silly stuff a father usually
does with a son.
There is a place I sometimes
go to stare into the face
of an unfathomable silence.
I whisper a name
but there is no reply.
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