A Brief Failure of a Poem After Intense Writer's Block

Although everything I write will always be centered around similar themes and similar imagery, this one feels, in retrospect, to be a sort of final little closing chapter in response to the last two poems I wrote. A centipede runs through it all, as does love - or lack thereof. This was cobbled together painfully from small bursts of semi-conscious writing and random bits of imagery that occasionally, without warning, grafted themselves onto my brain. There's more, but I chopped it all away. Butchered in small chunks in dark corners of my room possibly to be revisited and molded into some other Frankenstein monstrosity of pitiful expression at some unspecified date in the future. That is all. 

William Burrough's last journal entry before his death

 

No Painkiller

Machines dissolving into bouts of organ-pink steam 

Falling apart in forgotten pockets of earth 

Snow screams out of blown-out tires

My car, in suspended dismantling 

Surging impossible light like a moaning pulsar

Worming through the furrowed, heaving 

Highways of your corpse

Palid, anorexic night leaks 

From your rising torso, housing a graveyard 

Of shattered glass,

In search of your last words 

A mere exoskeleton of evidence 

That this maddening infestation 

Once lied within you as well

That my protoplasmic 

Ugly metamorphosis 

Into insect automaton of devotion, 

Consumption, commitment

On a path of assured destruction

Pumping volcanoes of blackened directionless 

Electrified pangs of connection

With nowhere to go

Into my inhuman perpetual heart attack

Was all for something more than servitude 

To chronically dying time.

I’ll never learn,

There’s nothing I can do.

Awakening within 

Returning with half my eye chewed off

Flittering blob of white jelly

Hangs from my upper eyelid 

The rest, atrophied away 

Dripping malodours fluids

In an oscillating pit of sunken abyss

Left behind in subconscious routines

A lack of results, a translucent thinning effigy

Mere unsuccessful recreation 

There is no you aligned with my past 

A coiled, smoldering husk of my harvested flesh 

Seated inside the cold remains of our fallen moon 

Empty factories still choking the horizon with scab-red smoke

Ceaseless manufacturing agents of grand excisions 

Machines, dead animals, and cauterizing masks,

The only accompanying populace,

You even took the insects with you

My chest falls open. 

With my face a color of gray

Only obtainable after the mushroom clouds 

Are through washing your skin, 

I slaughter my shadow

Trying to force myself out of this 

Sorrowful IV-drip of dreams,

But I can still hear my stilted heartbeat

Rising through the blasted walls,

Engines clunk away 

Processing broken, disintegrated bodies

Stuffed lazily into my cortex, 

Waking into another blodlet day

Into dizzying, circulating, nauseating emptiness

Trapped in the rusted history 

That you chose to leave behind. 

We once lived inside

The same burgeoning dream,

But your memory cathedral collapsed,

Turned to melting wax

Where my haunting, unrequited shadow

Took shape

As I slowly and quietly burned 

In newfound isolation. 

I feel nothing else, 

And I wouldn’t take any of it away.

There’s only Love. 

-

Love is the Primordial Centipede

Eating away at my spinal column 

Replacing my structure

Hooking each of its barbed legs

Into my neurological receptors

Stretching through and out of my skin,

Piercing spiraling, liquidy tendons 

Into the mockingly starless sky. 

Love is the parasitic infestation,

The Centipede possession

A throbbing, vacant insect mind;

It is the Centipede

Puppeteering the corpse I inhabit

Which I lost control of long ago,

Dancing me closer and closer

To the ultimate collapse

Making sure I drag you all with me,

Every failed connection that was 

And will be, 

On the pitiful, shameful, uncontrollably vulnerable

Long way down. 

The Centipede 

Is the only beautiful part

Left of me.

-