Poetry Attempt: More Embarrassing Nightmare Nonsense

 

"Bathed in blood
Or drowning in my bed
With the fragrance from the flowers
In the gardens of the dead."
- Jhonn Balance

An Incomplete Illusion 

Ethereal helicopter blades

Whirling and slashing

Cutting through sheets of pallid skin

Stretched out across the acrylic, silver sky.

Chunks of numbered refugees splayed across 

The upturned highway

A primordial upheaval, nothing’s chained to this tortuous globe

Watch as my reopened flesh

Spirals through broken windows

Of abandoned buildings transforming,

Finding their breath, a shadow dance,

In inverted vacuums of negative light.

Among it all, I’m bound to grief 

Remembering when I used to watch the apocalypse 

Unfolding from our bedroom window

Against the engorged, ugly storm clouds

And torrents of tea and wine,

Choosing to brave it all with you,

Holding you close to our shared collapse,

A doomed caress,

Now I don’t know what’s become of you,

If you notice this severed devastation, 

Or how you now see me

Or what the point is 

Of remembering any of this at all.

It’ll always linger. 

With your face ablaze in my spiraling head,

I reenter the nocturnal zone 

Of draining light and chemical dust

Rolling hills of paperbacks on fire

Self-flagellation underneath vandalized railroad tracks

Spotlights flickering, there’s nowhere to hide

Your name ricochets off falling rockets

Caught in the burnt feathers of dying birds

The closest I’ll ever get to you 

Is a giddy explosion of illusion

Where napalm flowers bloom from concrete pores

Parades of lacerated limbs

Spin out of open graves

And survivors dance in great garments of gauze

To the rhythm of air raids and collapsing architecture 

Dominion over sleep,

I rather die in this nightmare cataclysm 

Where I can still see your twisting skull 

And hold your crumbling bones 

Than wake up to the new me 

Walking in line 

With reality limping sadly behind me.

Don’t be afraid of any of this.

I simply woke up to a new breed of deception 

The morning I became someone else,

I wish it was an abnormality, 

Your eyes grew liquidy and abysmal 

Ignoring the cyclone of mistrust 

You were about to unleash towards 

My fated destruction 

But I’m not real

I’m not there

I’m not me.

I am whatever you need me to be

In order to excuse all your actions.

Smiling from hell

Trumpets of the army of the dead

Sounding off one by one,

Rumbling dulcimer-producing demonic whimpers

Heaving walls closing in with snapped syringes 

Stand before the black sun

Slowly voiding the sickly existence we shared

A house built from hospital waste

And forces of isolated frenzies 

Even in dreams, 

Your touch is all wrong

The edge of our twisted bedframe

Becomes a vessel to knock all my teeth out,

Knead your fingernails into my putrid face

And rip out all that squirms beneath

Let’s find out who I really am 

Underneath these coiled sheets of lunacy. 

Drifting through spectral prisons,

From one life to the next,

Waking up to a new deception entangled in my arms 

In this perpetual dark age of love,

An overdose of delusion, an eternal slavery

To a futile search for connection 

Saving oneself from the bottom of a pill bottle

Hiding new cuts

Numbed and bloodied,

Trying to reach out

Nothing lasts. 

All the world’s blood rushing forth

Through the bisected highway of my veins

Dreams bobbing in the sewage

Teetering on catacombs of conspiracy 

Ready to implode and forever sink

At the next heavy footfall moving out of my life.

This is the new body I’ve slipped into

Stabbing new notches in my skin

To weave in ancient fabrics

And hissing electrical wires

Willing the night away 

Conducting a theremin soundwave, warbling and drowning

Between me and the moon

Shimmering meathooks in the shape of fading stars

Holding up the corrosion moving through my nerves

A boiling face, my breath is haunted.

Was this shape born from the fog of your past weeping?

Wandering through your tumult

A tamed and flayed scapegoat for your trauma

That’s why you hate me

Formed at the very end

In service of nothing.

Fantasy and flesh

It was nice to meet you

I’m sorry you had to get to know the new me.

A frail hangman’s knot,

Busted furniture thrown in the mire,

The new apocalypse outside the other side of the world

Is littered with falsehoods

And rat feces 

I’m leaving an open space for you 

To annihilate my atmosphere.

Nobody wears the same head they went to sleep with

Birthed out of the stifling darkness

Brought to our wobbling knees by the downpour of delusion

A puppet play in audience 

With the embarrassing dust of the universe 

No control over the parts we’ve been given

Did you miss the news? 

We’re all destined to destroy each other

And torment identities anew.

In England or New York

In the sun-depraved clouds 

Or the maggot-drenched earth,

I’m not me anymore

But of course I still love you 

In these nightmares of relived collapse 

The only you I have left,

Wake me up 

And pray I’m dead for the last time.

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