Short Rictus Poems

cheerless, wretched life
                      failure cycling
                   gaping rictus of
                 disheartened gloom
               preying on
             my soul’s regret
           faith chagrined
         headlong plummet
      into darkness’
    gaping maw
  I depart
oblivion...

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ACCEPTANCE

Thinking that I’m happy today
Well now, isn’t that just great
It makes a change, you think
Faking it right up to the brink
What you probably anticipate
When hearing a donkey bray

My smile, almost a rictus grin
Almost as cold as shiny shoes
Joy is an old grainy TV show
It’s canned laughter you know
I guess it’s time for the blues
They’ve arrived, show them in
...

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The Scuba Diver 

we look down
signal frantically
‘come up’,
though it is already 
too late

he dances wide eyed
with ecstasy
as the nitrogen 
tickles his cells

anemones
cling to the steep
rock walls
fish feed and dawdle
incuriously

we peer through
our tiny windows
into the ink black sea

as he goes 
free wheeling 
down, 
down,
a rictus of laughter 
on his face...

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The ragged precipice surmounted,
he stands, leaning forward, looking down
into nature's yawning rictus—
pondering flight without wings.

Restlessness in being,
he’s come unhinged in time
whose moments intertwine,
leaving him indifferent to his age.

Neither older than yesterday
nor younger than tomorrow,
life's review passes. Reaching out his arms,
he jumps...and simply floats away....

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A PART OF HISTORY

Our failures in cities burn-forget-

Our failures haunt us-biting heels

We choked rictus stun their neon

We are awaiting instructions-but-

His masked beings see us but do not touch us

They can not protect us day by day our failures
Frenzied adjusting the struggles to not overdoing

I see no valid interlocutors in our failures
unsustainable and necrotic inside
dolls and stumps but only weak

Crawling and scratching kevlar window separating us from living...

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