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A jinxed wedding ring
‘A Jinxed wedding ring’
A gold wedding ring with diamonds two
A hundred years ago was bought new
He went down a mine, a hole to blow
Something went wrong, what? We’ll never know
She kept the ring on her wedding finger
Cos for his return, she did linger
She died all alone in a paupers bed
Wear this on your wedding day to the nurse she said
The nurse wore it with pride
Seeing the old lady by her side
Next day her husband went off to war
Never to be seen any more
She waited for him and happy news
A life of solitude was what she choose
Constantly waiting forever forlorn
Her wedding ring forever worn
The nurse gave it to her daughter
Whose husband also went of to the slaughter
She wondered what It was all for
Another widow, another product of war
The ring was passed down to her son
Who gave it to his chosen one
But, shortly after the lovers pact
They were both victims of a terrorist act
Once something new the ring of gold
Was handed down as the something old
There’s no use for you to get worried
The jinxed ring is now buried
Never to produce another loner
Interred with it’s last owner
Another gold ring with diamonds two
My dear! ! ! Will be bought just for you
Michael Micmac Mccrory
poem by Michael Micmac Mccrory
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Bush - 'am I jinxed
planes crashed down
strongest towers pilloried
new orleans submerged
iraq emptying coffers and hearts
hurricanes, typhoons
mr bush in a whirlpool - 'am i jinxed'
poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Her Looks
Jinxed out
was the sex panel
on the honour’s integrity.
Deep water a fish
was found dead.
The destination
of your rival was
feminism. I was talking
of the moon
without gender.
Your fingers were probing
the dancing words,
in this strange event.
Darkness was falling
on my lips in morning.
poem by Satish Verma
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Chaste Tree
A poem writes my name.
I am trembling
on paper like salt.
Flowing like moon
on the black wound.
The lamb and the skull.
I know the saint
invented by masses.
You need a fresh awakening.
A vastness from nothing to nothing.
Later the pebbles will dance
on the bay of death.
Sometimes the scales were jinxed,
sometimes the weight was light.
I was sitting under a chaste tree.
poem by Satish Verma
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The House of Relationships
Oft the house of relationships is
Built on the land of selfishness,
It bricks are shrewdness
Plastered with cement of treacheries
Painted with color of pretensions,
The ceiling is foxy hypocrisy
And floor the opaque opportunism.
When the earthquake of
Difficulties strike that jinxed house,
The bricks of relationship falls apart
And all flee, not unlike the rats
that desert the sinking ship.
Then sisters sue sisters
And Kens attack Abels
Perhaps they are sworn
Enemies of past lives,
Who are born as
husbands, brothers and wives.
Was it in vain
cried the Christ bold
Man’s worst enemies would
Be in his own household.
Dr Hitesh C Sheth
05/08/2009
poem by Hitesh Sheth
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7 Years
Its been seven years down the road
I got no more tears in me left to flow
When I did my baby wrong
She left me lonely for so long
Now Im out here all alone
Lord, wont you please bring my baby home
Chorus (x2)
Lord, wont you please...bring my baby home
Lord wont you please bring my baby home
It go one for the treble
Two for the bass
Used to mess with this girl
Way back in the day
She was from the pjs
And she went both ways
Yeah, the girl was a freak
I used to call her monique
And before I even speak
About knockin the boots
I say her name been changed to avoid lawsuits
So now we gettin down to the nitty of the gritty
She brought her friend around
And damn she was pretty
Betty was twisted
She said her number was listed
They grabbed my love two fisted
Hugged it and kissed it
They say one in the hand
Is worth two in the bush
But when shove came to push
Yo, I had my own theories
World series of love
Its two on one
Till I got caught with the smokin gun
His wife came home
And she bursted in
Now Im lookin for my heart
Like Im made from tin
The road that I travel
Aint got yellow bricks
My old woman jinxed
That all men are pricks
And she flipped the script
Shes puttin lip to lip
And every time I think about it I just lose my grip
cause Ive been up
And Ive been down
And Ive been fast
And Ive been slow
And Ive been square
And Ive been round
And Ive been high
And Ive been low
And Ive been cool
And Ive been calm
And Ive been kind
And Ive been crass
I held the whole world right in my palm
I tried to spread it around
But it sure went fast
Chorus
Seven years sure have flown by
I got no more tears and they are left to cry
When I did my sugar bad
I lost the best thing I ever had
And now Im out here on my own
Lord, wont you please bring my baby home
Chorus (x2)
Bring my baby home...
song performed by by Everlast
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Embrace unconquerable life
Suicide; is a ghastily lingering spirit between
resplendently sparkling heaven and diabolically
ghastly hell,
Suicide; is the most desperately hedonistic crime
committed against every conceivable fraternity of all
mankind,
Suicide; is the most truculently unforgivable outburst
of any organism; murderously imperiling the crux of
symbiotically mesmerizing existence,
Suicide; is a ghoulishly amorphous abode; without the
most infinitesimal trace of doors; windows and
robustly functioning entities,
Suicide; is an indescribably treacherous venom; which
brutally asphyxiates the impoverished ghost; even
after the wholesome end of priceless life,
Suicide; is the most preposterously scurrilous corpse
that incarcerated you from all sides; morbidly
dampening every quintessential iota of your blood,
Suicide; is the most luridly mortifying death that an
entity could ever undergo; ensuring that he
indefatigably suffocated in diminutive lidfulls of
water while the other world danced; everytime it was
born,
Suicide; is the most ultimate curse of the devil upon
every civilization; religion and tribe; afflicting the
fabric of society like an uncontrollably lambasting
tumor; which simply had no end,
Suicide; is perniciously sinister balderdash; the most
incongruously distorted and heartlessly inclement
fantasy; that the stinking pigs could ever construe,
Suicide; is a coffin of disparagingly bludgeoning
solitude; a measly quavering insect being blown away
into the aisles of nothingness; at even the most
mercurial draught of infidel wind,
Suicide; is a salaciously jinxed witch casting her
spell of unsurpassable doom; even upon the most
blissfully gratifying of destinies,
Suicide; is a vindictively hollow and lecherously
gawky edifice; baselessly wavering towards the gallows
of emptiness; without the most infinitesimal of
foundations,
Suicide; is an inexplicably cancerous sorrow that
gruesomely crucifies your soul; disdainfully maiming
you on every step; for infinite more births of yours
yet to unveil,
Suicide; is a flagrantly whipping extinction that had
not the tiniest chance to ebulliently revive;
stagnating in the prisons of torturously bleeding
hell,
Suicide; is a flaccidly corpulent mosquito
parasitically sucking blood every single day of its
life; heartily preferring to sleep on a lavatory of
derogatory shit; abrogating the most majestic of
silken delights,
Suicide; is a chain of fanatically unpardonable
misery; which perilously dries up every trace of
mellifluously golden voice,
Suicide; is the most prurient caricature of vibrantly
ecstatic life; slithering like an obnoxiously infected
worm; in the junkyards of dissolutely demonic
dilapidation,
Suicide; is dreadfully sinful abnegating of breath
without the Lord’s consent; a misdeed which even his
Omnisciently magnanimous grace; could never ever
condone,
Suicide is a tunnel of blindness without any end;
Suicide is the most punitive betrayal of truth;
desire; dream and immortal love; Suicide is an
unrelentingly bloodstained night which inconsolably
cries,
Therefore massacre the very thought before it
transcends you to commit forlorn suicide O! Man; and
instead embrace timeless sensuality; instead embrace
enchanting beauty; instead embrace unconquerable
life….
©®copyright-2004, by nikhil parekh. All rights reserved.
poem by Nikhil Parekh
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Brighter The Light, The Deeper The Shadow
for Rebekah Garland
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.
Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.
You don't need to know where you're going
to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you're on.
Shine. You're the blue orchid in the Pleiades.
You're the firefly in the skull that kicked in
like a bioluminescent emergency light
when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.
You're the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon's heart.
You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.
Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.
Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed
that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish
whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole
like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity
of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal
shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.
You can do cartwheels across the sky
as if your legs and arms were spokes.
You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence
until your ears turn into radio telescopes
turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel
looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life
like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders
on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.
Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry
from a long return journey of the smokey dove
that wasn't sacrificed, but volunteered
to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first
to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak
as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,
we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon
wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors
of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts
we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers
like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,
a slaver's neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.
Shine. I know there's a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp
and you don't need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,
though I expect you'd meet up later at a seance,
like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.
But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace
as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.
Shine. This is your hour. When it's darkest and it matters the most.
Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.
Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire
once every seven thousand years, and when the wind
doesn't feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,
I know you've got the ferocious courage
not to blow it out just because you can. Shine
like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon
like a garden it intends to plant in its wake
that will keep on expanding like the growing edge
of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood
of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit
even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest
under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.
Don't hide in the weeds and the shadows
of the star you were meant to be at this zenith
of your ascendency whether you're peaking or at nadir.
Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone
what constellation you're shapeshifting into
like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own
through the eye of the hurricane
in the crowns of the black walnut trees
where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn's coming on
for you to show them how to make their own way home.
Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.
Just as the moon that's apprenticed like a sorceress
to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Mistaken
1.
Clenched in Snowball Earth's ice viced grip,
survivors hid, shunning sterile shores
and as eternal winter melted, drip by drip,
a forest stitched the silty oceans' floors.
Crinkled spindles and leafy globes open,
man-high, thumbnail thin, sentinel fronds.
Multicellular life, freshly woven,
modules linked and branched with fractal bonds.
Too dark, too deep, to be photosynthetic,
nutrients were gleaned through membranes fluted.
Strewn in an unseen ghostly aesthetic,
not plants but animals, static, rooted.
In places, Earth's belches and coughed ash
sank, killed, coated and cast still life tableaux.
Sediments weighted and imbued the cache,
layer on layer of time-locked plateaus.
Hundreds of millions of years rearranged Earth's wrinkles,
dipped or exposed, buckled crusty scabs.
Pink and white volcanic ash sprinkles
fleck glacier scrubbed pitched grey slabs.
Erosion exposes a false beginning,
fossils of creatures which nature scrapped.
Immobility jinxed their innings,
condemned as unable to adapt.
Minimal repetitive genetic commands,
holdfasts marked by circle and groove,
hint at no scope to meet the demands
of competitors, newly evolved to move.
Failed experiment thwarted by simplicity,
a ‘survival of the fittest' flashpoint.
Outcasts' remains with unknown affinity
on the sculpted rocks of Mistaken Point.
2.
Perched above the Atlantic, fog-wrapped,
fractured cliffs concede a slant ledge outpost.
Raked by winter's storm waves, white-capped,
mariners thread rocks on a shipwreck coast.
'Seabirds on the port bow' the seaman bawled,
a sign of land near, though in truth his ears,
could hardly pick their shrieks from the howling squall.
The mate held their course, discounting his fears.
For hadn't they already rounded the Cape,
heading north for wide ocean, abrim with cod.
Guiding stars blinked through the fog's cold drape.
Watch over, the seaman slept slickered and shod.
But rocks slice schooners as schooners slice waves.
Before the unforgiving night finished,
the elements sent several poor men to sea graves
and swept two to a land ledge, diminished.
The mate and the seaman lay prone and spent,
shaken, grieving for those thought forsaken.
The wind dropped low to a moan, in lament,
the mate whispered 'seems I was mistaken'.
Their hands traced rock indents as some strange braille
and dawn's first horizontal rays,
struck reliefs which told a fossilized tale
of a wrong way course from Pre-Cambrian days.
By mid-morning, the mate and the seaman were found.
By noon, they'd been saved from their plight.
Hauled by hemp rope to the cliff top's safe ground
on a day when a rare sun shone bright.
While waiting for rescue, they'd lain on a page,
a fragment of Life's chronicles disjoint,
a glimpse of a flourishing singular stage,
on the sculpted rocks of Mistaken Point.
poem by Diane Hine
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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She Really, Truly and Immortally Loved you
When you possessed the most wealth in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because of the lure of forever and ever and ever; leading a majestically luxurious and opulent life,
When you possessed the most impregnably conspicuous muscles in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they knew that there was none other than you; who could protect them from even the most diabolical of catastrophe,
When you possessed the most inimitably gifted sense of humor in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they perennially wanted to be unabashedly tickled in their funny bone; even when uncontrollable mayhem reigned supreme upon the planet divine,
When you possessed most rare gift of magical clairvoyance in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they thought they’d lead a sparkling life forever; wholesomely averting every ghastly disaster that came their way; pre-warned by your miraculous aura,
When you possessed the most hypnotically mellifluous voice in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they thought that they’d eternally float in the aisles of paradise; as you sang the most sensuously romantic of songs,
When you possessed the biggest birthmark in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they felt that timelessly being with you; would also ensure that their otherwise jinxed and jilted destinies; would suddenly metamorphose into the most burgeoning flower of good luck,
When you possessed the most pricelessly embellished poems in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because of wanting their beauty to be transcended to the ultimate epitomes of superiority; as you indefatigably immortalized them in your verse,
When you possessed the most number of Nobel prizes for peace in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they thought that they’d never get a man more tranquil and tame than you; to infallibly exist for a countless more lifetimes,
When you possessed the most slavish nature in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they could make you lick the grime from their boots all day and night; victoriously keep the chains of every aspect of your life in their tiny fist,
When you possessed the most unassailably scented body in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they could forever drift away from the ghoulish stink of sanctimonious worldliness; compassionately mollify their nostrils till their very last breath,
When you possessed the most insuperably masculine form in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely because they could then give vent to the most uninhibitedly uncurbed of their desires; ravenously cuddling up the electrified hair on your brilliantly sculpted chest,
When you possessed the most terrorist organizations in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely to trade their tantalizingly seductive flesh; for every moment of their vividly undefeated life,
When you possessed the most number of Kingdoms in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely to unconquerably control the lives of boundless countrymen; as the invincibly unbridled queen of all times,
When you possessed the most intriguingly innovative brain in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely to be discovered of a limitless intricate emotions of theirs; which were otherwise deplorably spat upon by the sleazily commercial planet,
When you possessed the most poignantly sensuous lips in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely to be endlessly kissed and thereby culminate into a untamed fireball of unfettered passion; for as long as this earth exists,
When you possessed the most artistically blessed fingers in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely so that even the most infinitesimal part of their body could be admired and sketched; at the tiniest of their commands; and in every conceivable shade of light,
When you possessed the most unshakable fame in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely so that even the most untrimmed cranny of their bohemian fingernails; became the perpetually 24 X 7 X 365 talk of every single organisms mouth; on this unceasing globe,
When you possessed the most sharp vision in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely so that that they could put their foot into every possible profitable venture existing; and then exit whenever the odds were astutely foreseen by you,
When you possessed the most loudly throbbing heart in the world; perhaps an infinite women came to you; solely assuming that here was where they could get the ultimate fructification and friendship of their otherwise; wantonly infidel lives,
But when you didn’t possess any of the above; and if yet there was just a single woman who came to you on the trajectory of this fathomlessly bewitching Universe; then it was solely and solely because she really; truly and immortally loved you; for what you were in your most natural form; just as the Almighty Lord had bountifully sent you….
poem by Nikhil Parekh
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are
I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Going Through A Dark Time
Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant,
the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not
blame it on the stars? How could they deny it?
Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.
I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found
languishing under the neighbour's stairs, its
deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels
that hadn't turned for years, want to paint it
with model airplane enamels again and run
a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender
gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun.
How many worlds away I am from that pure moment.
Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons
that have finally become like the moon
that's never known rain, a frozen watershed
in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well.
I'm striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell
and I'm turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall.
Why not? I've got no use for their eyes anymore.
I've drained the lies out of the samples of their deaths.
I've chewed the flavour out of what it was they had to teach.
I've trashed my best features in dangerous neighbourhoods.
I've broken my own brain like bread with them,
offered them my blood like a rose with teeth
and watched them evaporate like stars in the sun
as if they never really knew they had my devotion.
What I made of them to set my own potential an example.
Something unattainable to aspire to
so I would be sure to lose as they did
preferring a brilliant failure to a mediocre triumph.
I think the quality of a human is a direct function
of the depth of their suffering. And I loved the ones
who cried out so beautifully in their agony
the night birds didn't dare lift their tiny voices
up again for fear of being put to shame
for the pettiness of their desire. Or the wolves
ever howl at the moon again without being aware
of the absurdity of their longing for an old stone.
I have danced barefoot on the splinters
of the winter chandeliers that brought the trees down
like a palace of tears in a brutal ice storm.
I've heard the Pleiades crash like silverware
all over the ground of a botched burglary
and seen the junkies run like collapsed veins
to pick the spoons up like fences and crows.
Going through a dark time. The shamans
are dying in the treetops from the shock
of what they had to see and live to be
if they wanted to die thoroughly back into life again,
apprenticed to their own foreseeable pain like savage healers.
Winged serpents angered by the humiliation of the flesh
like a rose too beautiful not to be abused
by those who desecrate life out of their own self-hatred
that they are possessed by what they despise the most
and beauty will have nothing to do with their power
that isn't forced, or broken, or garbaged.
The mirrors of the spirit freak and flake away
from the ideals of their silver lining in horror.
Funny how you can come to look upon
even the most passionate of loveletters
with the eyes of a three hundred million year old reptile
as if life could not be borne any other way than as a thorn
through the heart of a voodoo doll
that cursed the good in life for the passing of it.
What have I not buried in this desert of stars
as if one night I would be able to come back to it
and ask it what it dreamed of in my absence?
To see if the afterlife of a mirage tasted
like water, blood, or wine, or more real than death,
the tears of someone who had aged into understanding
when the windows that looked out on life
like a valence of silicon dioxide slow down
like glaciers of glass, and the mirrors speed up
as if they were running out of time for reflection.
Ask a man what he misses the most and listen to the echo
of how long it takes to reach his ears and if
there's an ocean in his eyes he drowns in
and I'll reintroduce you to someone you already know
talking to themselves in the dark to keep from going mad.
Who toys with the smiles of their approaching assassins
like the slash of a snake's mouth breaking into blossom?
Life is the puncture wound of the staple
that was meant to mend it like a bridge
that sat cross-legged on a lotus in meditation.
And it's easy enough to look at the fireflies after a storm
and the stars so out of touch with the world as it is
you long for the innocence of the childhood distances
you traversed every night you crawled out of your sleep
to approach the mystery of your own solitude
like an estranged familiar calling you to come alone
to the furthest extremes of the night and beyond.
Going through a dark time. Too many gates.
Too many doors. Too many worn thresholds
Too many threadbare carpets under the one-sided window.
Too many dead birds killed by a lack of transparency.
And still, I refuse the blindfold when I'm standing
in front of a firing squad of stars
armed with the latest telescopes.
I've always been one of those who prided myself
upon my strength to see it coming from afar off
and stare at my own death in the third eye of it.
And what monument could you possibly raise
befitting someone who made exile and rebellion
the two monolithic cornerstones of their life
if not a rogue planet beyond the reach of gravity
looking for a star they could thrive in the light of
without the slightest shadow of ulterior spontaneity?
Going through a dark time. I will not put my eyes out
by turning up the light on what befalls me,
as if there were something I could save myself from.
I will eat every detail of the pain and not waste
one unmarrowed bone of it. I will consume it whole
like a prophet in the belly of the whale, make the message
flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and then
I'll spit it out like a bullet I pulled out of my heart
with my teeth, my soul, the elegance of my desolation.
I'll make key chains for the blind out of spite
and striate the rocks of this cold prison with the runes
of the horned ones who linger here with me.
I'll be a mile-high corrective lens of ice
and putting one hand over my third eye
I'll read the writing on the wall from memory
and renounce every sacred syllable of it like heretic
that thrives on fire, that scatters his ashes in triumph
and feathers the wind like a gnostic phoenix
with gospels of my own where there's not one imperative.
Pain demands my obedience, threatens to break me.
I smash myself on the rocks like an empty wine goblet
and say, you can break what remains. You can grind
me down to dust, if you like, you can step over me
like Spinoza lying down in the threshold of the synagogue
to atone for what he opened the world's eyes up to,
but my vision of life, though a squall of stars, remains my own
and the seeing isn't in my eyes, and the one who suffers
isn't in chains, nor the door locked on my heart
for fear of the night, for fear of turning to stone
when I look the snake pit in the eye with a microscope,
and observe the minutiae of the heart's addictive attention to detail.
Though every word be a thorn through my tongue,
Yet will I sing of the agony of lemons and roses
bleeding on the razorwire in No Man's Land for mercy,
and those compelled by the whips of circumstance
to dance themselves to death because it amuses the cripples,
and the little, amoebic man who never amounted to anything
and his wife who has aged like salt in a conquered city
still thinking she's a garden ornament, I will sing
in the name of what even the worst must endure,
just to set this methane moon afire in the darkness
like a furnace in an abandoned school of unregenerate clowns.
Going through a dark time. A rite of ordeals,
the brutal pit of the mystery you can break your teeth on
like a koan or an iron-nickel tektite in Antarctica
to get at the life inside your own panspermic mind.
I should happily break my flesh like bread upon the waters
for the fish and the birds, and save the life
of an unworthy man from drowning
like bad meat in a well, or lose
my own precarious foothold on the precipice of an abyss
that humbles me to the point of no return. I should do this
for the thought-trains of the birds that shall come after me
high and late at night through the bars of my longing,
yearning to return to my ancestral homelessness
like a wandering planet that doesn't give off any light of its own
but shines with life, despite the odds, shines
tenaciously with life through all these transformations
I take on like a river in its own running,
pouring myself out of one life wholly into another
like an igneous fireclock on the nightshift
that keeps adding more carbon to my steel.
Going through a dark time, I will not suffer
this passage passively like smoke, I will not plead
to abstract my senses from reality to deaden the pain
or thin my blood with holy water from a dirty fountain.
This dark child of my life shall not be an orphan.
I will not disown the pain, I will not drive
myself out into the wilderness like a scapegoat
to wash the soot off the temple I cry in
though they were my doves that were stained
in their own blood in the name of a useless sacrifice
to a unity that includes as much of separation
as of love that welds a stronger bond
that doesn't scar the spirit, or dull the eyes,
or deaden the tongue to the taste of the stars
on the lips of the people who pass through our lives
like thresholds on their way to somewhere else
than this palatial homelessness we dwell in alone
throwing boundary stones like asteroids through the mirrors
just to keep things abundantly clear and open between us.
Going through a dark time. Swimming through a tar pit.
Another doorway without an exit or an entrance.
Another keel-hauling on the hull of the moon
trying to maintain discipline aboard a shipwreck.
And the unbearable sadness that crushes your heart
like a pop can in the depths of an unrevealing ocean.
Your face is a skin graft on a burn victim.
People reach out for you, but only with their hands
when there's nothing at all, nothing at all to grasp
of what has already come and gone for good or bad,
who can tell? I'm centered like rain in my falling.
And there's something vaguely radioactive about the way
I glow in the dark, though there are dozens of dead fireflies
on my windowsill that dropped like exhausted stars.
I move into the available dimension of a future
that hasn't won my confidence, and the past
is the burnt foundation of a crack house in the zodiac
cooking rocks like a meteor shower with its radiant
in the eyes of everyone I meet who's trying to shoot the stars out.
Going through a dark time. A bardo state. Nirvanic doubt.
The new moon no brighter than the last eclipse.
I hear the disembodied thunder of my amplified heart
making its way toward me like an enlightened storm front.
I've always chosen the hardest teachers to ignore
and where the road divides, I've gone both ways at once
just to give my earthbound guides a chance of a wishbone
to find their way back on their own by following
the choices they made to get here like an avalanche.
I'm as effortless about my despair as I am about bliss.
I treat them both as if they were none of my business.
The birds and apples come to this rootless tree
of their own accord and the tree does not protest
the unleaving of an earthly excellence
that blossomed awhile in the human heart and was gone.
A windfall of loss. The dead flower frosted with winter stars
in a dream where the waterclocks are frozen in time
and this is perfect and that is perfect and if you take
perfect from perfect, it's still as perfect as it was then
and as it is now and shall be tomorrow.
I watch the moonrise without breathless aspirations.
I observe the sunset without lingering disappointments.
What I have received in joy, I will not deceive in sorrow.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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