Failed Poetry Attempt Exploring Beauty and My Idol Dissolving in My Dream

 This is a sort of unintentional follow-up to a poem I wrote quite a long time ago now. Nearly two years ago. A strange, miserable little poem that I handed to Nick Cave when I was lucky enough to meet him at a book signing. It was hand-written so he probably couldn't even read the damn thing. And it was filled with dire descriptions of atrocities and feelings of intensifying loneliness - if only I could have seen what was to come in the next few months. 

But it is not only that, it is also an attempt to write something towards those that are lucky, or delusional, enough to see the beauty in all things. All I can say is; I tried. 

Is There Anything Left?

Expired night seeps through my window

A porous blackened sludge

Spilling, flickering, spouting

Out from smashed specimen jars

Scattered across my crudely harvested body

Memories of the worms calling you 

With a synthesized wheeze,

I see you falling upwards, forever upwards

Reaching out, I’m caressed with violent spasms 

And insect mutations 

Squashed and twitching

On the opium “lawns of dawn”. 

Crystalized forces of dead dreams,

Behold the amber cracking 

Children siphoned and discarded

Floating listless, bloodless, alone

Through weightless prayers 

And mirrored tar-black stars. 

Something smashes my legs, 

Breaks open my face,

Acidic singing scraps of torn flesh

Flitting away in the suffocating wind,

I’ve been primed all my life

To give in to the malignant rain,

The sweeping torrent ushering my rapid decay. 

I still wasn’t prepared 

To go on my own. 

-

Nothing holds me here, 

Routine failures to prevent the fall,

I remember the two of us in the ancient library 

Feeble little shadows of words

Squirming down my wrists

And onto the song I idiotically handed to my hero,

He emerged first through your eyes 

My body still crucified within you,

I wanted to walk as one, 

Before me, he was the Nephilim,

My poem shrank to nothing in his storied palm,

But you stood there smiling  

His arms wrapped around my shivering

I’ll never know if you noticed 

The crushing intensity of beauty 

I felt at that moment calling out to me

We shuddered out, a shared blissful shock, 

With you being all that existed 

I failed to notice the library behind us

Jitter, glow and burst into blackened silent flames

Splintering out into skeletal trees 

Of encroaching destructive nothingness.

Surviving beauty inside called back out to me

All but a hollow echo. 

-

Carried by lonely floods

Of amputated time

Wailing under crayon-colored gore 

Surging from kitchen knife stigmatas,

Begging for another harmonious hemorrhaging,

A kiss of puncture wounds

Self-harm revelations told in dreams to come,

Ravaged books pile before me

Empty and threatening,

The library shatters its flaming amber 

Melts into charnel ash

Still spiraling into the soaring crippled children’s 

Eviscerated guts.

On this reckless night 

Of memory’s itching, irritating embrace

I’ll force every broken bone 

And ill-sutured gash 

To plod away 

At taking my life. 

That’s when I saw HIM. 

Immaculately clad in black

Golden twine stitching his waxen exoskeleton up,

Beautifully born from baleful shadows

As he bisected the freezing heaven

That I was flaying myself under.

He watched the caravan of devouring rodents 

And tiny, muscle-colored birds 

Cojoin me to collapsing nature

He twisted his hand into the surfacing sounds,

Observing my carcass losing 

All of its dead light. 

But it wouldn’t end so easily,

I heard one bird softly herald

As it severed my ear;

“There’s beauty in everything,

There will still be beauty here

Long after you’re useless

And dead.” 

With opened arms sluicing off the bones, 

This shattering crypt of a man

Took me into my perpetual unrest,

His words dangling from his lips

Like bits of undulating meat,

I’ve seen this face before -

Lost myself in the eternal pantheon of his songs,

Now in this maelstrom of my last moments 

Pinned to the earth like bitter, primordial dirt,

I don’t want to believe 

That this is him. 

Reality-shattering angels resurrected,

The only hope lies with the leaping, mocking

Gleaming visions

Of my hero’s inevitable rot. 

What is this reality?

Where his once void-hued hair

That ran from his unwavering slumped brow 

Down leading to his emaciated tailoring,

Is now before me mostly gone 

Left in chaotic clumps,

His scalp like a jungle 

After an assault of flesh-colored napalm. 

Carrying me upwards 

With each word he spoke taking away 

More and more of his jaw. 

His charity towards me 

Was a self-inflicted cancer,

Emaciated, reeking of abandoned machinery 

And exhumed flesh cloaked in septic tattoos,

His clicking dry tongue dusted 

With his last words to me;

“See beauty in everything. There is only love.”

Blanketed in his necrotic words,

I managed to break the dream 

Your influence still guiding me

Freeing me from this somnambulistic suffering,

I’ll remember your beauty all the same.

It ties around me,

Flayed bristles lock into my pores,

My neck outstretched,

Past the remains of the collapsed library 

Past the hideous density of all my failed words

Past the faith I put into you 

And past the wrongly rotting form 

Of the hero that served to mark our last days. 

I finally see it,

All possible beauty 

In every single tightening rope fabric 

Issuing me an invitation for deliverance 

From myself. 

Before I drop into isolated suspension,

I watch the noose come alive 

With the beauty 

Of the first smile I ever truly felt

Melting into each breath stealing knot

And all the unfathomable beauty 

Left to now properly flower

In my already overdue wake. 

-