It’s like I’m carrying everyone’s mail.
Even the junk mail.
And also a lung for transplant.
Which failed.
When you’re depressed?
You get sliced and spliced.
Like a dead body for transplant.
Almost like apples for apple pie.
Which was botched with too much cinnamon and goo.
Can’t uncook it.
That’s the issue with depression.
You can send a lung to someone and it’s ruined somehow.
Or send the most annoying junk mail ever and it makes it every time.
They blame me either way.
transparency is mirrored
you may stare
right through
my chest
only catching
your reflection
in the subterfuge
of rest
the self it splits & triplicates
stays bound by feet alone
an ecstasy of horrors
spliced & given space to roam
I'm undone yet placed on parchment
to bleed & bloom
in equal quarts
a reaching hand
that never grasps
with light & dark
ascending thoughts
all I need is printed
in signs & patterns
I can't read
as I float through all eternity
half-aware of warnings
I didn't fully heed
there is nothing to absorb
when taken outside of scale
on the inside
feeling a vacuum of temporality
forgetting, the salve
fast-track in slow-mo
undulation of gossamer breathing
stroking the skin
inhabiting bone
I feel you - feeling
fractals flip on their sharp edges
carving particles
form is spliced
remains are in rapturous form
a mass exhale
pulls out my lungs
whilst you bathe
exposure
separates the silt
succumbed to sedation -
lilting sound becomes tonal, flat
choices tilt
.choke on thought.
sighs cannot wash away
I could flail - let me flail -
yet my core is made of lead
this world is in quicksand
a held centre
a spiral
scratch the walls
beneath the flow
scratch the walls
cling to
time... . .
Inspired by 'universe of water particles' by Teamlab
Battle axe (For the 2nd Half) ... "At last!"
Way too fast past the rescue rascal hassling haphazardly mastered dastardly bastards' fractions of captioning cast iron spiraling wired wax on wax off golf cart Bart Simpson minced garlic cubes boob tube huge goober schooner dooms Days Taser taker wafer run stun gun NOT funny honey bun for one shunned lonesome wholesome quotient potion grunt of a stunt punt the ball into mid autumn leaves fall raking reiki draped date maker place mat patty whack hacky sack crap slapped happy tap dance romance slanted jambalaya riot spliced mice diet quiet cheese, please teases on both knees bereavement easing Fort Leavenworth girth that brings birth to twerk twerps slurred slurping squirts of hurting beef Jerky lurching around the church yard disbarred and charred crash cars 100 yards too far to see scars Mars rover Range Rover Red rover come over 4 leaf clover lawn mower seed Sower leaf blower as NOT just another voter devotional spokesperson swerving tertiary but too scary hairy fairy blue berry merry go round sage turns the page safe and sound clown town brown bag the sandwich fad dude and all of that...
Lots of people speak in slang
It's just a normal thing
No rules of grammar apply
Just let your words fly
Words are sliced and diced
Many times, syllables are spliced
There's 'bestie' and 'baddie.'
Then there's 'daddy'.
Sometimes things are 'dope'
Some may say others are 'woke'
If you are said to be swole
You're just a muscular bloke
Hopes died knotted when dreams betrayed
and my spirit lay prone in my marrow.
My heart watched love fray until failed.
No muscle of emotional strength left
was even tentatively dream linked.
Now, jailed in my mind-built fortress
are desires deceptively pieced parts
that once tingled my anticipation.
Morning to night, heartbreak guards my
fort’s locked cells where starvation
gives no salvation to dark false posing.
For years, I fell atop love bruising gravel
yet I stayed glitter and tackle saddled
seeking soulmate love on the horizons.
All love I thought breathed genuine
was paradise deception had spliced.
For true love, I would have lived in a cabin,
dressed daily in inexpensive flannel
and felt no jealousy for those living
adorned in silk and loving in a castle.
*
/ \
/ \
sliced
and whole
a cleaved life
in flux cast dice
state of non being
potential in between
eternity's randomness
flip a coin up into the air
unpredictability flies there
alternate reality hints upon
•>•
parallel universes going on
realistically just one path
life’s inevitable no math
untangled observation
spit out my creation
god particle sown
new baby grown
chop the cord
use sword
spliced
\ /
\ /
*
Nothing complex about His love,
A relationship with Father above,
To seek Him is to love Christ,
Father, Son, Holy Spirit a trinity spliced.
A hero turns conspiratorially,
staring into my future.
What he said into the camera then,
is meaningless now,
but I see his lips move,
as if he were predicting this moment.
A heroine hikes her skirt over her thighs,
blood fills the flesh of memory.
I remember I love her, but it is too late,
she is dead, and she did not die young.
Often, I wonder,
about the never was and the could be.
Has this been a badly spliced life?
One day we may all get to watch
our full movie.
Build a padded wall around the entire earth.
We've become one giant insane asylum.
For which there's no cure.
While you're at it.
Hang a neon vacant eyes sign.
For everything has turned the deepest shade of blind.
Right has turned into wrong/wrong spliced into right.
We've become the galactic idiot-a universal blight.
That's what happens when you replace growth.
With a quick-fix prick, Charmers and anorexic influencers.
When mountains of youth are glazed with victimhood.
Unearned accolades -no accountability balm.
There's no longer social sedimentation.
Between the saint and psychopath.
God is flipping us the dirty bird.
While searching for his misplaced wrath.
God Around the Corner
By Mark D. Stucky
My cat’s favorite spot to sleep and surveil the house
was at the top of the hallway-to-basement stairs.
I would sometimes stealthily lie down on the floor
just around the hallway corner from her and wait.
No matter how quiet I tried to be,
she soon peeked around the corner,
her curious face mere inches from mine,
delighted at her discovery.
We had also been inches apart just moments before
but blocked by an optical barrier of spliced sheetrock.
Although she couldn’t see me,
she could sense my nearness.
Her cat’s curiosity caused her
to investigate my presence.
If we are quiet and still enough,
can we feel God’s unseen nearness
just around the mystical corner
of everyday earthly existence?
If we follow spiritual senses,
can we come “face to face” with the divine?
(First published in Agape Review, 11 June 2023. See also my poems “Consider the (Dreaming) Birds” and “Jurassic Prayer.”)
(Image by Sebastian Molina fotografía on Unsplash.com.)
Still clear and sunlit
are the tanned, weathered faces
of the fisherman,
their bloodshot eyes,
beanies and checkered shirts,
how they
stood hip deep
in their boats
looking up at a gathered crowd,
the fish arrayed in neat rows
with glistening scales,
caressed, turned
and splashed with seawater
by reverent hands,
translucent mops
of squid and trays
of crabs whose tormented
writhings rippled beneath
blankets of wet
hessian bags.
I can hear accented
voices yelling out prices
and frenzied seagulls overhead,
a haze of smells
and noise jostling
in a silvered morning,
when all was spliced
and wound into a bright
necklace of wire
from which a dozen
or more fish hung
to carry home,
a ring of “tommy ruffs”
fit for the pan or to smoke
in an old tea chest
until they became
a sweaty glaze
of amber flesh,
a filet of sunlight
and good to eat.
She waited on the ground
For the first stone to be thrown
Guilty as charged
Coming through brambles, her seed had grown
In silence he lingers
Secrets choking the soul to shame
All the regrets of wanting money
Ran him to the board, a pawn in their game
Plots and schemes
Drive him to the next big thing
Determining every move
Luxuries untold
Everything can be sold
To a heart that can NOT lose
Bound to fear
Every thought, dark and drear
No escape for hope
Stained skin
Rolling in the pen
Groping for the elusive rope
Court is in session
TRUTH stands in WORD
On the scale is the soul
Whole or spliced through the SWORD
Written by Trudy Schrader on 04-17-2022
broken
ends of a love
being spliced together.
couple on the outs hit the pause...
button.
Date written: 12/31/2021
An actor returns to his Beverly Hills mansion –
blows his brains out with a 38 special.
I must have dozed off,
cops at my door,
a line of chain-smoking flashbulbs
in baggy turn-ups.
I watch myself being taken away in a body bag.
The movie is badly spliced.
Black Packard’s keep morphing into flying saucers.
We are all wearing hats,
even the writers in the backroom
are wearing wide-brimmed hats.
The women are wearing hats.
They wear pencil thin skirts,
and talk out of the side of their mouths.
A screen flickers;
a skinny man behind an obscuring microphone
apologizes for the delay.
Meanwhile, space aliens have landed in Brooklyn,
and are exterminating people in hats.
It’s a radio show hoax,
but I don’t know that –
until I wake-up
into a world filled with terror and chaos,
there are no aliens and few brimmed hats.
I can’t sleep.
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