Recent Poetry [September 2022 - April 2023]
An exercise in embarrassment.
Dispossessed - A poem I wrote and gave to Nick Cave
[written on September 20th, 2022]
String up my entrails, all my frozen fluids,
You stare at me through the clouding night
And the candlelight crawling up the walls.
And fragmenting tree branches
The sky fractures - ashen mist and soot-filled smoke
Chokes the very last night on earth.
A thumping siren, horses galloping and stampeding
Over the folding, boiling terrain.
The disintegrating church bells peal and succumbs to cacophonous madness
But all I can hear is the beat of your heart
Through the last remnants of
Frozen cemetery dirt I once felt left behind in.
And crumbles before my eyes, lined with the ghosts of tears.
You’re there beside me, I can see your pain crystalized
In pulsating amber,
Holding back all the light and warmth
And incomprehensible beauty
Flickering beneath and within, hermetically sealed up
But fortunately just within my reach.
As they celebrate the coming of the circus of the damned.
Candle wax spills and lifts our bed up, our forms surge and coalesce.
A procession of dead freaks rides out.
You carry me as I dissolve,
Your chrysalis cracking, transforming, freeing you,
Your breath into my breath, your shining tendrils of hair cascading
And spinning down into my once-fetid face.
You as a myriad of new masks for my destroyed form,
Our posthumous vapors mingle and deluges through
Each other’s merging shared body of flesh,
On that bed
Locked away,
Facing a window into the empire of cataclysm outside.
A soundtrack of unending music of the night as chaos overwhelms,
Surrounding structures and vile pockets of humanity
Sink and scream into yawning, scorching voids
And the splintering tree outside, with roots digging up the corruptive earth,
Hangs freshly carved beheadings, orange and ablaze, as jack-o-lantern ornamentations.
And eroded blood vessels,
Replace the falling embankment of night’s dying stars.
The sun now gone - graveyards and cathedrals rapidly overstuffed.
It all draws violently to a close.
Gently and lovingly around
My new attempt at life.
Your name alone is etched forever into my lips,
And wrapped around my entrails.
Your smile,
And perfect pale skin,
Patching up and holding tight every single gash I’ve ever felt
Or have done unto myself.
You float through my emptiness - I can only ever hope to help with your pain,
As I attempt to hold onto your revitalizing embrace till the very edges of eternity.
And for the abyssal, great unknowable eternity that follows after that.
Before a shuttered window where the apocalypse calls
And for once, I don’t wish to join it.
For once I desire to stave off death
And exist with you, within you, intermingled with you
Forever
As the rest of the world falters, fails, dissolves,
And falls away.
I’m birthed from a fatal collision.
Body fluids and self-destroyed flesh,
Smeared and splattered all over fragmented concrete.
Leaden guts color the horizon,
Great arches erected from twisted, pulled musculature
And spackled together with fetal tissue
Cracks in the ground bubbling over with embryonic fluids
My malformed, hairless head dangling from an erupting umbilical cord
Wrapped around a cloud.
Scrapped at and gored with dead tree branches,
Falling around my premature corpse,
The shredding terrors of existence pulls me in.
What is this?
A voice, a faceless presence, a sardonically dancing mask,
Weaving through the air without form,
Parading around the stars,
Fills my mouth with dirt
And pulls my loosening veins
Out from my dismantled wrists.
Pinned in the crumbling, tempest air
I’m made witness to the grand assault on everything.
The air in flames
I’m stuck in bed.
Piping through the moldy wall crevices
Comes an invitation to nothingness.
Legions of nonexistence march towards me at all sides.
The ceiling dissolves, birds descend.
My hands are stuck in the mouths of vultures,
Pulling out my own stream of gnawed entrails.
I stuff them in my pockets
And fling them, reeking and rotting,
Into the faces of anyone that even glances at me.
It’s building…
My night is vibrating with dissonant songs
Singing out litanies of war against myself.
And telling me of all books that lost their words
And how there’s no food anywhere
And how the children are drying up in the expanding sun
And how the parents are devouring their cured corpses
And screaming at me until my head ruptures and I see everything
With hate.
My cadaver is unzipped
Dripping, trailing behind fevered misanthropy everywhere I step.
My broken neck snaps back,
I look up at that atrocious mockery of the sky.
I want to grab the edge of the crescent moon
And cut my face apart from ear to ear.
Everything, every meaning, everything once felt
Pours out of my cosmic lacerations -
Spill it all into the failing patchwork universe
And let sunbeams of my hatred
Knock the teeth out of every single living soul.
Iridescent fungi grows from my splayed fingertips.
I’m cradling the filth,
The world on its pathetic knees,
None of this pain means anything to me anymore.
I kiss the maggots suturing up my wounds,
Let them nest within the vacuous caverns
Of my primordially ugly head.
With hatching larvae in my breath,
This is my true body, at last,
I’ll slip my tongue through anything that’s left.
Spreading the festering, heightening the agents of annihilation.
But there’s no one left.
There’s nothing left but…
All great structures and steeples of the world rise up
Continually, overtaking the stars,
Suffocating the melting hill of corpses of what’s been left behind,
I even hate the End.
The last human I see, I grab their diseased face,
Gray and exploding with pustules,
I bring them in -
Closer and closer until our decomposition melts into each other.
My flesh liquefying through them, their emotionless, sagging eyes set upon
My brain's graphic destruction.
Our lips wither and drip off our faces right before they can touch
Swelling, interlocking joints snap and explode with botflies
When I knead my dirty degloved hands through them.
They’re just as soulless as me, as it has ever been.
I take their melting form, their empty skeleton
And place them face down, jaw bone cracked open,
On to the moss-covered concrete curb.
Before I lose my ill-fitted fortification.
Before the songs of nonexistence
Ring inaction through my ears,
And right before the last remaining star drops…
I send my boot flying into their gnashing idiotic skull.
My one moment of fleeting peace,
When the last vestiges of humanity’s exploded skull fragments
And pulverized brain tissue
Rains down upon me.
I’m molded in the hate-filled rot of the world,
Smiling as my teeth turn to dust.
And in the name of the perpetually pulling nothingness
I let it all shred away at me.
I’m nothing but a breathing pile of evisceration,
Squirming in the torrent of human remains,
Squelching through the cracks of apocalypse.
There’s nothing left within me. That’s it.
This is supposed to be the end,
But when will it come?
The cold closes in - I’m put on the rack,
The wheels spin all their own
And keep spinning long after
I’ve been pulled apart.
 |
-
The shoreline is littered
With discarded monoliths,
Crumbling cliffs with acrylic rocks
Bursting out of the canvas
And stuck, jagged and bloodied, out of my dreaming head,
Where songs transmit from an easel stretched over living flesh
That pulsates and vibrates with crashing waves of sounds,
Writhing upwards within.
The heartbeat is dying, I’m left on the shore,
Slowly fading out after every solemn, calculated beat,
Until it dissolves and washes away
Into the gnawing great red eye
Of the bisected painted sun.
I’m all but dust beneath.
The sky splits open
Overlapping, crescendoing voices endlessly muttering
Guiding needles of hypnagogic messages,
Stirring winds and teeth-chattering seraphim
All descend upon me
With fist-fulls of radio-wire
And dissects my sleep
Leaving me to struggle to inhale the polluted bouts of air
That makes up my last breath.
I can’t even begin to tell where it all went wrong.
Every single day is eroding faster,
Disintegrating between my putrescent, blotting fingertips
And forming little scintillating sparks
Of void splotches
Against the ever-encroaching shore.
This is the only light left at the end of it all,
Inverted and vacuous,
As it was from the beginning.
Stop.
There is no rest.
The only possibility is to escape further into it,
Further cling on to the sounds that’s filtering through the festering pores
Of what’s left of my ears.
The sinuous, churning words
Outlines this mortal canvas
And enlightens it with a new causeway of veins.
The waves begin to accelerate,
Closing in the distance and
Washing away the gray, fading rocks
Where my windswept, transfigured body lays,
Twisted and mangled, vocal cords clogged with funeral sediment.
The sounds escalate, mutates around me,
Flashing agonizingly familiar emotions,
Causing dreams of unending solitude to spiral out
Of the whistling wound left in my head.
I’m left with nothing but comfort
In knowing the end will be devoid of light,
And that the beginning was much the same.
My dreams held on a threshold,
Pushed into it the fading, charred scenery
Of songs birthed from consuming tenebrosity,
Echoing caravans of disembodied angels
Continuing to churn the waves, as the painting
That entombs my remains
Finally alights.
Ablaze with synthesizers
And swooning backdrops of noise
That are now made flesh
In order to replace me.
These songs coil around,
Feeding teardrops to my dirt-stained bones,
And rumbling at my grave
Allowing the worms to swarm the shoreline,
Decapitated cherubs sweetly singing
On their squirming backs.
Small radial joints, painted in
Streaky burning sepia
And flayed nubs of knotted nerves
Where wings used to be.
My body, torn apart by the audio tempest they bring forth,
Left to burn eternal along with this island of the dead.
I turn to face the worm carnival
Delivering achingly beautiful reverberances,
And realize they all look just like me.
They’ve come to consume me in sound,
The heartbeat starts again,
Beats once,
Then
Stops.
I’m awake, the dream landscape aflame in my head,
I’ve felt the melodies surge through my masticated musculature,
I’ve felt it all consume me beautifully, to guide me to the end.
But I’m no longer dead. And the only sound left,
Is the piano inside my bones.
And as it plucks away.
All I have left to do is
To sit down and
Cry.
-
Untitled Failure:
Melancholic Piece of Shit Poem
The Burning Mausoleum (the end of a cycle) - written March 5th - March 7th, 2023 -
Bereft of any color,
In piles of pale flames,
Burning up what little is left of our surrounding forest.
Spiraling, dazzling structures crash down in slow motion,
And all the once fabulous freaks
Clog up the sewer drains
With their emaciated, bleached corpses.
Dried-out leaves are left stained with my blood.
The whole graveyard we built together
Tilts and careens further into hellish caverns of reeking mud.
The sky forever fragmented, the night buzzing with
Hovering sheets of shimmering gray flies
That descend upon my body
As eyeless vagabonds knot their rot
Through what remains of my bones.
I’m unable to believe in anything,
As my body sinks deeper into the puddle of grease paint
From the crucified performers left dissolving in the trees.
Everything around me is being taken away
Shifted suddenly back, beyond my control,
Into nightmare variations of terrible past familiarities.
Everything you’ve created with me now fading pillars of dust,
But you’re nowhere to be found.
-
I can’t let go of the silence
The ear-rending silent chasm
Of hollow unknowing,
And of losing all aspects of our pieced-together sky.
This pain makes me less than nothing,
All parts of me feel transfixed in death
And doomed numbness.
I want to destroy what we left of this world -
The only paradise I’ve found,
Denied me.
Our mausoleum burns.
All around me is noxious breath
And keloids reversing in time,
Snaking up and diverging,
My arms split back open.
Where do I go now?
The circus destroyed,
The painted children scattered
To be picked apart by anemic, crying wolves.
I can’t hold on to any of this.
A spectral wind makes your image haunt the falling clouds,
But all things are still forgotten,
You’ve pushed it all into the eroding mire.
I can’t crawl my way out, I beg for the rocks
To all sail down onto my head.
All the time I took
To die several times over for you,
But you never tried to prevent my collapse.
Spending years looking forward to the conjoining of our skies
And longing for what would become of it all,
Now the skies are shattered and crashing to the ground
Weighing heavily with the ghosts of your eyes
Slaughtering my survival
And binding my disintegrating laughter
To an unobtainable past.
All crumbs of what used to be
Disperse into the once-dancing shadows
That we used to stroll through,
But are now violently eating into each other
With overwhelmingly violent tenebrosity.
And yet I escape into the excruciating reminders,
So as to hook onto what remains of the shadows
And rend my flesh apart -
I’ll prove to the world that I wasn’t supposed to exist.
But it’s not your fault. I don’t know.
Maybe I should have swallowed more sleeping pills
The months before I met you.
I never wished to invite you
Into this long-standing conspiracy against myself.
All of this is too incomprehensible
And I never wanted to leave.
Now all metaphors fall away,
And the words flower into meaninglessness
And futility. There’s nothing to explain,
But I wish I could only know for sure
Why you stopped caring so completely for me.
We devoured each other,
And you spat me back out with venom and
Hatred.
But I don’t blame you - everything is motionless
The world, a disgusting lesion,
Unable to foster and nurture anything everlasting.
I can’t think of anything worth anything at all
Without you here
Or me there.
Struggling to crawl out of the ruins of the woods,
Escaping my body destined for an untimely death,
I find myself on the embankment
Of something I don’t feel I can face,
And hurl open the worm-eaten crypt I built for you
All that time ago.
Again.
These old scars mean nothing to me anymore,
My survival is NULL.
Drowning in the blackened pool of my own blood,
I’m bathed in your putrid moonlight.
Around me, all structures and carvings in our crumbling mausoleum
Screams with your name,
And of trapped memories, forever piercing through me,
Eternally bonding me to this place
Of inaction, immobility, and reminders of loss.
The great deceit.
There’s nothing left of me, and nowhere for me to go.
I pray for death to no one that will listen,
I can’t move on.
I’ve become something worth your hate.
Willingly suffocating under the brittle ash,
What little I hold on to
Of our burning mausoleum.
-
-
Envelops the world’s tiresome scenery
It’s all static noise in my head
And every experience,
And pharmaceutical intervention,
Further pushes the question,
Of what I am.
I’m less human by the day,
The hole in my head expands,
There’s nowhere to hide.
What’s left of my personality,
Is fixated on a rapid decay.
All rational thought is spiraling away
Into mocking clouds of dust.
My lungs are rusting shut,
Nothing escapes but a sharp clunky wheeze,
Words are either an onslaught
Of heavy nihilistic thorns of hate,
Piercing and weaving through my skin
With jagged inscribed messages
Of suicide,
Or
There are no words left at all.
Everything thought, feeling, or unwantedly escaped word
Is dried up under the vacuous sun
And perpetual unrest,
Looking to burn up and detonate,
To take the image of self
And lacerate it to no end.
I’m stuck in bed,
This decomposition is years in the making.
-
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