Sta.sh
and pretend that we still get along,
half-hearted quips and idle chats,
eyes that brush but never gaze.
While sometimes, for a brief suspense,
there was this moment when we spoke
where I looked at you and you at me
and for that moment, we were friends.
But no matter now, we're moving on,
This is about to lose its rhyme
and cover all the darker places,
And anyways, I'll soon be gone.
This one reads the gospel to me -
in the face of every question.
His book of reason, of why's,
but mostly, of why not's.
He's been writing it since he was a child,
you see, and it's a long book -
I think he'll die before he finishes,
before he runs out of excuses and explanations.
And you. I still think of you sometimes, you know?
When we're alone with thoughts of wide spaces
and copper cages of scrollwork.
But I promised that I'd save your tears.
So I do - I won't let them flow.
As long as you get out of that damn grey river
and up the stairs to the great big door.
And please smile at me like that, just once more.
I want a sippy-cup of happiness,
sprinkled with a hinted storm,
A blackened marble stallion
to rear frozen in a dead finesse.
There is something about this other one that waits,
lurking beneath the social ruse,
I've seen the Jaguar's tail
in the broken branches.
A flicker of silky plushed death
padding along softly,
glimmering beneath half-shuttered lids.
Something about him that waits.
It snowed at work today.
105 degrees and it snowed the finest white powder.
They became as fools, caught the flakes on their tongues,
flushed cheeks and white noses -
and long after the snow had fallen they collapsed
like wounded beasts as the poison took its toll.
I just watched, and pitied them.
They called it fun in their madness.
She is screaming again.
Always in the back of my mind, screaming.
But there are no words,
just garbled noises that fade in and out,
as if in a fever, where your hands seem to swell
as you shrink and shrink into the spinning bed and the walls tilt!
S C R E A M I N G A T M E !!!
just around a corner in my mind.
Never, ever, ever enough.... ...hey....
Hey.
Hey!
I'll whisper it again. "hey you..."
I wish you could hear me,
so small at your feet -
her arms wave like crazed tentacles
as her eyes bulge cartoonishly, spinning in their sockets.
What a horrid beast your rage has become in my memory cage.
Should I kill it? Would that be kind?
Sometimes, I sit in front of that torrential, murderous howling
and I think it is terrified. And hurt.
We share some tears, for this I have found we have in common,
and then my communion with the beast is over.
I leave it on with its rantings.
Why won't it just die? Poor beast.
Poor memory cage, to have to contain such a thing.
Then there was one, who must never ever be believed,
was stable chaos, my servant and ruler,
She/He/It/They was everything.
Murdered. M.u.r.d.e.r.e.d.
The morbid ball of a word lolls about my mouth and chokes.
The emotions are long gone -
burningly spent and buried in a diamond tomb.
But the one was the one, was the hope and understanding,
before I understood.
I gave up my pain, literally passed it on,
and then we hunted. And there was a cold peace.
Nothing would touch me because
he/she/it/they would kill anything on sight.
Did, actually, but no one knows about that.
Perfect lunatics, roaming and running,
and we laughed into the night
like hyenas would sing to a kill.
I was just a child when I saw how to kill
and more importantly, how to let live.
Two wolves and a sheep sat around a table
and voted on what to have for dinner.
Someone said something somewhat like that about Democracy once.
That it must be more than the above.
I think it was Reagan, but no one remembers him now.
I certainly don't, but this guy here does.
He is old and before he can say more, he has passed on.
"What did he just say?"
"I don't know. Who cares?"
Generation gap. Gap? Hah! Trench!
Trenches! That leads me to another thought!
When has art saved a life? Literally, I mean?
I know when. And I knew this artist once whose life was spared
by some charcoal and oil pastels.
But art cursed him as well,
for his life it demanded theirs,
and every brush stroke killed a man.
Or woman. Or child.
Thousands fell in seven years.
He was blessed with the brain rot much later on
and died thinking himself alone.
I share his blood.
But the filthy red pigs made him do it.
You should read the book sometime.
From pigs to swine and pearls and songs...
(And this one is still SCREAMING at me, god!
For years now! Don't you get tired, thing?!)
Things are so empty. Stardust, they say,
are you and I. But what is Stardust made of?
Entropy? But that's just an equation
so that didn't even make sense.
It just rhymed with what would have followed.
(If the dog would not lick so noisily?!
Because I just forgot! Forgot to go to sleep again as well
and I hate that.)
I heard a cicada scream in fear the other night.
Never before would I have thought to hear that tone
in an insect's voice. Yet, incredibly,
when I heard the buzzing outside,
it ripped me out of my book as would the cry of a hurt child.
The experience was stunningly impossible; I had to save it.
I couldn't even control the impulse.
I was possessed, as if someone were beating an infant on my doorstep.
An insect! I hear them every night! Why this one?!
There was something in its tone...
By the time I got outside it was dead.
The black kitten happily munched on the last wing
and I patted him on his stupid little head.
Back to War and Remembrance.
So where do we end this thing,
because by now you must be lost and spinning,
Yet my mind is still hopping, and snapping into place
these random things at such breath-taking pace.
Rhyme and structure, don't even ask.
You're welcome to try and piece it together,
but to me, the chaos is fantastically clever!
Do the rules even matter if the message is clear?
Would you ignore "FIRE!" without "Madam" or "Sir"?
But wait, I forget, this reads more like "scramble"
to anyone not privy to the rubber-ball jumble
upstairs in my attic of skeleton dancers
and bones neither speak, nor divvy out answers.
My apologies.
