Wax Doll Dream Cycle - A Confessional Cycle of Poetry
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| art by Joel-Peter Witkin |
Wax Doll Dream Cycle
(excerpts from A Personal Apocalypse)
- A Chance Encounter With a Fellow Undead - written April 28th, 2023
- An Invitation to the Fall - written May 14th, 2023
- North Adams, Massachusetts - written June 15th, 2023
- A Hole in the World - written August 12th, 2023
- Untitled Psychic Dream Siphoning Experiment - written September 10th, 2023
- Wax Doll Elegy - written June 5th, 2023
- Continued Undead - written August 12th, 2023
- Trapped - written August 18th, 2023
- Untitled Grief - written October 6th, 2023
- There's No Me, Anyway - written October 19th, 2023
- Same Old Shadows - written October 30th, 2023
- Slip - written October 22nd, 2023
- I'm the Only One Left Alive - written November 27th, 2023
A Chance Encounter With a Fellow Undead
My right arm is disintegrating to the bone
Tied up in coiled razor wire
Left high on a fence in a lonely field
Stretching out
Into the great devouring horizon.
All my surroundings are scabbed over
With a bioluminescent rust
Breathing into night’s many tendrils
Every muscle grows unbearably taut
I feel myself resigning
Declining into my destruction
There’s no control
My crackling fingertips cling to the fading light
Headwound gash obscures my vision
Does time mean nothing?
My left arm is fully devoured.
Gnats bigger than my bisected joints
Swarm around my leaking, exposed veins
The sun slit its wrists a long time ago
What was left of the stars seeped out
And tore a multitude of flesh-burning holes
In my tilted, evaporating head
I bleed nothing but cold air
And memory dust.
Memories are all I had left,
Burning screeching holes
In the back of my dispossessed skull,
No other means to populate
Distorted and graying days.
Dancing marionettes, wearing a mockery of your face
Slash away at my eyelids,
Piercing at my strung-up carrion.
I wish I could at least be witness to my own end,
But I’m disabled and blinded by
Nonstop paralyzing visions of everything I loved
Becoming consumed, crippled,
And feverishly dropping dead.
-
Something shudders out
Of pummeling shadows
And flashing hospital sheets.
Stand in line and watch,
Something wrapped up in inky gauze,
A chemical head,
Spiraling bouts of venom
And carnival barker shouts of sharpened hate,
Foaming fluids pulsating off of gray flesh
What’s in front of us all commands,
Shaping static and violent electricity
It’ll consume us all
So it goes.
I stop,
I see you somewhere
Among the dancing voids.
You’re ripping the skin off your fingers
Picking into wounds to the frantic beat of the drums,
Same dirty nervous habit as me.
A palpably understandable unease bounces off
I want to sink into the gnarled, resonating voice
And rip my flesh away
When I realize I don’t know what to say.
Chaos is imprisoning us,
A stinging urge to reach out,
But my tongue is dead flesh trapped in cement,
And I know I don’t belong anywhere,
Except for ensnared in razor wire,
Left high on a fence,
On a hill of anemically held hopes,
Festering in the swarm,
Filling my lungs with the smoke of my own sorrows,
Till I make my useless self drown.
Why should you be the one to help?
Something is calling,
Permeating the room, flooding us with noise.
Hissing and snarling
I can’t find you
The screaming alien skull explodes
A gathering storm cloud of blood
That I want to be lost in and allow to
Bring on a premature end to this unrelenting existence.
Stampedes march toward my head,
What am I going to do when this is over?
Too late for the habitual recluse,
Someone, please turn that taser around on me.
An ocean of applause,
A possession silently takes hold
The freakshow buzzing in every corner of my head,
I watch
As Smothered Hope makes you melt.
-
We expunge each other
Of all our weighted-down disturbances,
And keep the rain from dissolving us
Into the endless slipstream of midnight city grime.
Moonlight on the suicide steps,
You understand.
I should have never gone home.
The canvas of your eyes,
As you follow my wild gesticulations,
Lies a brief respite,
In there, I want to remain.
Now is the only thing that’s real.
A foreboding embankment of steam
Rolls off sickly green lights
Swirling the perpetually starless industrial sky.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around,
Either way, I don’t care.
Nothing - not the frolicking filth,
The noxious night dwellers,
The thrashing rain caving in my head,
The speeding cars beckoning me to collide -
Nothing exists at all outside of you.
I lay awake at night wishing to recreate it all.
My mind, an unraveling, uselessly thumping muscle,
My limbs strung out and incessantly buzzing,
My stomach, aching like a whipping torrent of acidic barbed wire.
Sleep exists only as infinitesimal explosions of panic,
Littered with all the aching imagery
Of derision, coalescing nightmares, and fervent worries,
All the agents of my demise.
I’m shaken awake before sleep truly overwhelms,
My entire body,
Still a twisted lump of discomfort
And randomized sharp twinges of pain,
Purely as reminders of broken humanity.
I repeat - I should have never gone home.
Never back to dissolving useless chemicals
To patch up my obliterating, boiling brain.
Lost in the downpour,
Fading away under ugly shadows
Of endless skyscrapers and airborne trash,
But alone with you.
For the briefest moment,
I could have fooled myself into believing
I was where I belonged -
I dream of watching Smothered Hope making you melt.
Waking up with pharmaceutical nausea creeping up my throat,
An ice pick placed firmly under my liquefying eye,
My sheets stained with decomposition,
My rot left on the fence to fester into eternity,
I ask the fatal question,
Where are you now?
An Invitation to the Fall
Facing an inevitable disaster,
Leave this place with me,
Downpour beating down my head,
You’re looking through my exit wounds,
Somehow seeing electric sparks
And moonlit shards of glass,
All reflecting back to you.
Sick to death of simple imagining,
I wish to tie a knot around your twisting manifestations
Cascading out of my empty eye sockets.
Empty from watching the bisected sky
Folding over and swallowing the remaining anemic trees,
Legions of insects erupting
Struggling for shelter
In my moss-covered corpse.
Dirt below is eating itself,
Sheetrock and steel swallowed up
In the void chained to the earth.
We’re beyond strange times.
Buildings reversing through time,
I’m filling my lungs with polluted rubble
And radio wire
Trying to maintain a grasp on the construct of your elusive form,
Please don’t disappear from me.
The night trickles in harmful filaments,
My mind creates a ceaseless pursuit towards
A consuming necropolis,
It’s all going to end.
But you’re there, I have to believe you see them too.
Children dig themselves out of desecrated wombs,
Their fingernails slipping off,
Piling into concrete foundations,
Only a momentary glimpse of what’s to come.
Futile efforts cracking open this blighted sphere,
City streets are lined with malformed teeth
Grinding through umbilical cords,
And with discarded intestines,
The nightmare children pound away at membrane drums
Echoing into an autopsy of the heavens.
I’m beckoning you to join me
In every crippled corner
Of my disintegrating dreams,
As my eyes fill you with visions of dead stars
And memories of total eradication,
I paint your sadness onto my remaining flesh,
Colored by a night of connection,
A veiled nexus,
And inoculated uncertainty.
I can’t control my spiraling brain
As it cleaves open,
Musculature and veins lying in strips
All along my exploded skull,
Lost in the rising walls of phantasmal nonsense,
I can’t hold on to anything.
Now the solstice is crucified,
Dangling with pockmarked skin
And cascading inverted shadows
From chewed at cosmos,
Decaying everything it touches.
Your twirling and glimmering through the rebirth,
All surrounding structures rebuilding
From the mile-high heaps of human dregs.
A causeway of pneumatic tubes
Weaving up and around steeples and belltowers,
Whistling incomprehensible chants
Through great churches to the new mechanical flesh.
Pale sea-green light bathes a city,
Giant test tubes fixed to the faces of newfound buildings
Of bones and scalpels.
Impossibly enormous jarred fetuses peer through the empty night
I’m reanimated through your gaze
As I see you subtly glowing in this nightmare city
Of a glorious and inviting apocalypse.
And through the hypodermic stars
And screaming edifices shouting out
From xenomorphic stone,
The irregular drip-drop of scrap metal IVs,
The heaving and crackling of polished porcelain earth,
Through synthesized tufts of toxic clouds
And the dull green rain, glittering through all the pores
Of the painted martyrized dead,
Comes a lovely little degloved hand
Unfurling out to me.
Flesh blossoming as it gracefully scrapes
Against my maligned existence,
Kneading through my poisoned bramble of struggles,
Waves of static and unrest converge, overlap, and disintegrate
At the frontier of your permeating gaze,
You’re my invitation to the fall.
-
The world breaks, the day blinks in cold isolation
There’s nothing left from the dream.
Traversing through puddles of cigarette smoke,
Makeshift razor wire tied around my throat
Mockery of self-executions
Playing vivid dances amongst the fog in my head.
I still smell the formaldehyde whitecaps,
Burnt images of H.R. Giger horizons,
Unborn sinew boiling in the brine,
Lighting up the twitching, spasmodic night.
And you were there,
Bewitching me to fall into you,
An unfolding apocalypse.
I’m making myself sick on ambition.
A temperamental yearning,
Struggling to trust at all,
But trying desperately to lock my trembling fingers
Into keeping all those dream visions of you
Forever close to me.
The end is surging and coming on fast,
I don’t want to have to face my own annihilation
Alone.
-
North Adams, Massachusetts
There’s music piping
Out of the smeared guts of roadkill
Descending into discarded highways
Long-forgotten circus tents billow
In the breeze cutting open mountaintops
Shadows of lightning
Ready to assault this atmosphere of dejected gloom
Where you sit,
Rain pierces through vibrantly humming leaves
Centipedes falling into your smile
I yearn for the taste of your tongue
As the sun before us liquifies into night
And clouds overwhelming with sickness
Gorge themselves into darkness
We’re happily imprisoned, surrounded
By overlapping hills of careening tombstones
All my hopes and desires smoldering
Our faces cascade into each other
Maggots tying themselves into knots
At the precipice of our conjoined breath
Outside, insects play pandemonium noise
Inside, our twitching scarred bodies
Ache to collide
All our delirium is encased
In century-old marbled inscriptions
Night parades toward the end
What I once was left on distant shores
There are no words
As I try to siphon the energy
Of your becoming
My hands rejoicing through
Your obsidian tangles
All fears rising to the shaky surface
Maybe just for a moment
Once I saw the way you moved
Can I trust this end to my rot?
Tumbling through razor blades
And blankets of cigarette ash
The motel walls whir and bubble
Mingling together
All else
Falls apart.
Momentarily lost in your weeping
Watching blackened tears escape backward
Into the pockmarked swirling ceiling
We’re both barely hanging in there
Wrap yourself around me
Take me down.
Leave my fractured skeleton
On the open road.
Outside, a festival of nocturnal masks
Pass by the plume of factory smoke
Blinking lights scream
Through the wavelengths of passing cars
A nightly carnival of sycamores and graveyards
Blaring with sound through fits of rain
And beckoning thunder
Inside, I’m leaving my humanity behind
With your smile
Alone, I’m again fit for the worms
A squirming nothing flitting through filth
But I’m here now
Chasing the light dazzling from the whites of your eyes
As they rolled back into their sockets
Your mouth agape, an inviting chasm
My hand wrapped tightly around you
My teeth
Enclosing your neck
Your name bleeds
Thick and sweetly from
Scarred confines of my throat.
The world spins
Commands us both
To return to our natural-born states
Of primordial inhumanness
And disastrous unrest
Do I really want to be snuffed out?
In this pocket of earth
Of rolling, overlapping hills of tombstones
And marbled faces turning to flesh
Toppling over each other eternally through time
With the promise of a great flood of rain
To shred all my old flesh away
Your tragically ephemeral hand slipped in mine
As the ancient train
Overflowing with circus children with little porcelain screams
And rattling animal bones
Echoes its industrial roar through the titling scenery
Your gaze kneads through me
Your lips intertwined, revitalizing
There’s no more decay
At the sound of your measured breath
In the trance of this burning night.
But inevitable disaster overwhelms
Sourced from past failures and archives of personal holocausts
Reminders of the way they’ve all changed
Their confused hatred and learned indifference
Still haunting my every step
With you…it’s not fair,
But I just want you to remain here
Your head in the hollowed crevice of my heart
And return to sleep.
Why can’t I stay?
I stare into the river
Where you entangle with the current
All I want is to reach out
Hold you in this place till we're dust
To reciprocate those words you uttered
From your laid-bare heart
But all I can think about
Is bashing my head
On the rocks.
-
A Hole in the World
Fading hues
A monochromatic slipstream
Is all anything is
In this searing void of your absence.
Muscles loosening to a pop
Bloodflow slowed to a crippled crawl
A cacophony of cracked necks
I’m holding fast to the fleeting sensations
Our bodies aggressively dissolve together
At the foot of the mountain motel
Bed of nails for my lover
Rising into the fragrant haze
I’m held between your scars
Your face expands.
Watching you dress
In damp fog and cigarette smoke
A glimmer in your rictus teeth
Reflects my planned exodus
Gnawed lips part
“Eyes the body”
I can’t wait to escape into your dust.
Forced away from our “special place”
Of careening carrion hills
And grease paint dripping from weeping pines
A nightly bazaar of abandoned gas stations
Happily ignored starvation
And carnal desire distended to the brink of mania
Your raven hair communes
With angelic obelisks
Their faces inverted and sucking in
Our catastrophic starcrossed shadows
Leaving us in our own secret domain
Only just for a moment
To spit us back out
Alone.
Now I don’t know how to exist
Ink smeared, I’m coughing up narcotic phlegm
Lining myself with paper cuts
From the pages I wrote for you
Dejected attempts at expression
Time will sink us all
I just can’t do it on my own.
Everything slips away
I’m pulling my hair out every chance I get
Hoping one of these putrid strands
Will pluck out my brain
From the polluted mire, the nightmare chasm
The grand bone structure of emptiness
And unending self-doubt
Perched uneasily atop my withering spine.
No more of this distance
Target the source of misery
And saw the head of the world off
I’ll crawl inside the oceanic spurting wound
Curl up in fetal position
And await you to join me
In the hole in the world I’ve made for you
Let mortality gnaw at us
The final cosmic implosion awaits
Close your eyes, I’ll consume all birth and death
Of anything left moving
A plight to steel myself
Against the infested rot
Seeping from the dregs of this disgusting little sphere
Disintegrating in devouring space
I’ll drown in it all
So you don’t have to
We’ll test the limits of eternity
Toiling with our limbs interlocked
In the hole in the world
I forced us in.
Shifting my blood-stained pillows
In my little cradle of apocalypse
Watching skipping kewpies
Bloodied in the torrent of your eyes
I look at you
The flames close in
Snow falls, burning skin I’m offering up to you
Everything becomes impossible to explain
My hands lost
In the crisscrossing sinew
Trying to pull out the last threads of my heart
To feed this fading image of you
Do you even exist?
[I’m terrified to the brink
Of panicked collapse
To utter I love you,
Striking an agreed commitment
To the fall].
Governed by the past, events that
Still possesses tortuous ghosts
That assail all my dreams and bore their fears
Into all my reopened keloids
Like a starved army of botflies
Ready to marionette my hollowed carcass
Move past it
Eliminate the issue
All I want is to dream of you
In our cyclopean cities
With our tongues deliquescing
Under mountains and graves
And gas attacks
Welding our flesh together
But it’s all so tragically short-lived.
So look for me instead
In the enfolding pocket of collapsing earth
Submerged in the weighted air of opium
And gathered limbs piling around me
Broken at obtuse angles and spinning the gears
Of these painful final isolating moments
I’ll wait forever for you
The only faction of my violently bisected reality
That has made any sense
I’m rotting in the last hole in the world
Small enough for the two of us to become entangled
As we gauze up the multitude of gashes
We’ve found each other with
On that fated night
Of trauma hounds
And smothered hope
Please join me in this final escape,
I can’t do any of this alone.
-
Untitled Psychic Dream Siphoning Experiment
Click of a faraway machine
A razor-sharp puppet string
From your ailing skull to mine
Pulls me in
Life in reality has gone on long enough
Slice my eyes open to impossible landscapes
Bludgeon me with your mania
Toiling in my corner of the void,
Searching for signs in my bed of broken glass,
And gnawed fingers,
That you still exist.
Dreams splayed out on bloodied slab
Hissing IV pumping gravel in the circuitry
Monochromatic waste of sleep
Subconscious assaulted
And brought to its shivering knees
Slice open your brain stem
Drown me in whatever pours out.
A flash of significance
My memories burning in your mouth
It all unfolds
I’m helpless
Predestined to the fall
And lost forever
In images spiraling in the wake
Behind your sickened somnambulance.
Surrendering to the vision-bearing wraiths
Tripping into the chasm widening between us
Speeding down spectral highways
Witnessing the change of seasons leaving weapons
On the collapsing obsidian cliffside
Wrought-iron fences growing
Into the dwindling, blinking orb of the sun
Beams of metallic light squelch,
Six feet of leeches
Sucking up the sky
You’re stuck in flowers careening into themselves
Spotted with dead fireflies and faded grease paint
I’m drinking your nosebleed
Siphoning in the slaughtering images
Of high school rejects, with purple masks of decay,
Swaying from weeping willows,
Lighting up the catacombs of night,
Blinking orange lights trailing out of their plucked eyesockets.
Somehow their fingernails bleed
As we pick and masticate them.
Interlocked necrotic tongues,
We feel icicles growing in our lungs
Narcotic amusements as illegible embroideries
Frankensteining our brains.
Dead leaves plastered on our scabbed faces,
The festivals must come to an end,
I’m filling your pierrot eyes with viscous tears
As we descend further
Into the quarry of blackened weeds
Stretching out with screaming little gummed-up faces
Squelching and squirming on top,
Dancing madly in painful jubilation
Against subzero winds
And rapidly aging entrapments.
I shed my skin
Take apart my ribcage
And guide you down.
The path forward
Is paved with stopped time
And fossils of dead stars.
[Your naked body emerges from
A wooden doll’s red velvet head wound
Bathed in sweet, dusty smell of decay
I plunge my graying lips towards your severed throat
Wrap my thinning, pockmarked arms
Around the maggots puppeteering your form
And inhale your shivering
Until your nightmares become mine.]
Eyelids stapled. Teeth falling down my throat,
The headlights give out - identities suddenly lost
I breathe amnesia, I know nothing lasts.
Calcified horns hermetically jutting out of my shorn scalp
Try to blink in and out,
Rust spills from cobwebbed pores
Your voice like a cemetery
With body parts overturned from their coffins
In a great serpentine flood
My name is no longer anything
Your words drift into nothingness
We’ve lost control of the dream,
The night stretched out before us
Is a botched skin graft,
A haphazard vertical slice down the wrist,
An ugly patchwork of torturous imaginings.
Nothing good may come,
As long as we both shall live.
-
Wax Doll Eledgy
Starcrossed underneath a napalm sky
Theremin eulogy plays out
Walls stretch out into trick-r-treating stars
A cackling and grinning imprisonment
Destined for decay
And reformation into impossible geometry
Haunted by the primordial ache
For connection and shared silence.
Forced into existence
Out of the ruins of my own fractured brain folds
And cured, strung-out veins
I can do nothing but watch
Oranges and sickly greens blossom
In the infested clouds raining down
As cloaked figures with sharply exposed spines
Churn my guts
Out through ancient typewriters
The incessant clicking and corroded letters
Floating and stinging
At the spelling out of my fate.
There’s no gathering,
No one’s left
My brand-new eyes float up through
Shapeless dreams
And scan the puddle of wax
Burning and shaping a new horizon
A desperate plight to reach inward
Claw my way through the incineration
And find your becoming
But my waxen face crumbles
The wind sings out through the voice of death
Formless apparitions hold me at a distance
Crucifying me in the abyssal depths
Of my own making.
The dust on my ceiling is churning
In whispers
Urging me to cut in deeper
Decline further into my planned nothingness
Go for the throat and eviscerate this life away
Sail into the budding napalm sky
And hang my neck from mocking signs in the stars
She’s poisoned my dreams eternally
I’m happily slicing my veins with her breath.
Then the panic covers me
Like a pulsating blister
And rolls my mind into a search for destruction.
I want to want nothing
Cancer is hopefully awaiting me
A shorn scalp, IV drip of mud
Resting my swinging head on the
Cradling lap of the abyss
Is it so much to ask to no longer be here?
The increasingly hopeless curse
Of being awake
What am I after all of this
But not me at all?
In desperation, I clutch at a rusted nail
Pinned in the deepening chasms of my porous heart
Dead cat teeth wrapped in the wire
Tied around the remaining tendrils of my nervous system
Replacing my collarbone with scrap metal
The room sinks into the expanding puddle of wax
Dripping celestial trees, laced with blackness
Burgeoning out of what will become your eyes
What inhabits you
Is a wandering soul flitting through
All the gloom leaden mist
Weighing down into the earth
And populating the resurrection of the beautiful dead.
You are bleached animal bones
And perfumed twine
That I need to stitch up the bisections of my flesh
Where I shoved rotten metal
And cigarette butts into the open pathway of my veins
I’m unforming, liquifying
Burdening the creators of my maligned form
But you’re somewhere on the margins
Of the everlasting night
Beckoning me out of imprisonment
And back into the world.
Grab my face
And let me swallow ink through the holes in your head
Allow me to tattoo the note you left for me
Into my knotted-up insides
And tell me,
Once you’re here
And you find my decay lost in the woods
What will you create with me?
I saw the way you looked at me
With screeching moonlight
And windswept foliage in your doll-black eyes
An embrace of inseparable, entwined sufferings
I’m hiding within your haunted house
Searching for a way
To transform my head
Into your brimming anticipation
And the boiling, sometimes troubling, elation
I gleam off of your gaze
Despite it all.
Nothing is consistent
There’s always an intensifying flood
Flowing into the jagged edges of all of my fears
Drowning me in self-immolating sludge
But you’re on the edge of it all
Vibrating and dazzling
While I’m lingering in apocalyptic nightmare nonsense
And a past that ceaselessly shreds my sanity
I know this can’t be it.
My little wax doll
Help me go on
Eradicate what I once was
Burn all the stars into my remaining skin
Unfold and bloom out of the pores of my hate
May my void find solace in the tempering oasis
Locked away with your impossible existence.
As the universe collides into
The chemical dawn
And my world and self fall away
I stare into the puddle
And fear nothing. There’s no hesitation
When I reach in and voluntarily burn myself
On the wax of which you’re formed.
-
Continued Undead
Her trembling hand is vibrating with light
Raining down in filaments from her clouded mind
Veins running up to her palm electrified
The pile of pills shines
She clutches tight her void dark eyes
And tries not to submit to her suffering
His flesh hangs off in jagged little strips
The ceiling fan churned slowly
Filtering the stale air with the dust of his blood
Stainless steel drops from twitching fingers
He too buzzes and yearns with intensified electricity
Conjoined in her dominance over his dying dreams
The light’s flickering, giving out with remorse
Words are not enough.
She sinks into her mattress with a chemical glow
He slips off his mattress into a turbulent crimson pool
Helpless again
If only there was a dream city
For their stitched-together minds to escape into
A blossoming unreality pulsating underneath
A feverish bulwark
Of unobtainable sleep
Words are not enough.
To successfully reach out
He wants to enter a new dawn
Wrapped up in her gentle slumber
And stay forever in a fostered eternal comfort
She wants to patch up her porcelain self
From the disintegrating floor below
And spend eternity in his dreams
Of cyclopean structures
And floods of undead
But their brains are on fire
And all the world’s rivers have dried up
He’s terrified to the point of exhaustion
Convinced he’ll lose her in mercury-scented smoke
She’s focused on preventing her collapse
He’s decomposing on a mountaintop
Spewing great bouts of pink fog
Choking the air and holding tight the limits of apocalypse
A manifesting hothouse of planned death
His limbs twist, his body convulses and heaves
Trapped in a rabbit snare
And laughing the rot out of his gums
Veins enlarge and pop open, sinew and muscle wasting away
Sizzling and shrinking and screaming
In acidic moonlight
She’s on her hands and knees beside his premature corpse
Gravel and discarded viscera
Piercing through her palms
Her tears are cleaving the funerary grounds
Her black hair is sewing up
Broken and bleached notches of his skull
She digs into his chest
Inhaling the source of the fog
At the threshold of his masticated heart
She shapes the moon into pieces
Their cyclopean city titles and careens towards her head
Her face unfurls in a decadent smile
His ribcage juts out
An inverted basin for the downpour of
Their horrid shadows
She traces the curvature of his bones
Underneath her grinding teeth
Tracing new flesh for him to fill into
Pale green lights explode
Dirt rises up and howls
Their fingers interlocked as the skin sheers off
Locking empty eyes as they’re devoured by the worms.
Graveyard wisdom
Outcast isolation
Malnourished existence
All instincts bleed toward self-destruction
An affront to human creation
Shifting through elation and terror
They’re there through it all
Plunging into each other’s sorrows
A rosebed of wilting misery
Never wanting to be apart
A shared destruction into a beatific, nonsensical union.
She looks at him
And swallows the pills
He looks at her
And slices his throat.
Words are not enough.
-
Trapped
Discarded black lace dances
Across the rain-soaked windowsill
Once used to shield your escape attempts
Numbered steps to ease existence
Gasping for swift release
His hands are clenching them closed
He’s tasting your blood filtered through twisting necks
And ink-stained bed sheets
Your tongue slipping through flecks of skin
Trapped in his blackened gums.
Pills scattered across your cut-up desk
Xanax lodged in your drying throat
Poisoned spit is your only resource
Overburdened by the new familiarity
Memories stand on the precipice
Fireflies made of lead
Assailing them from all sides
Your breath gives out.
Stuck with desperation for dreamless sleep
But a life without her
Beckons you
To the place where nightmares always wait
So each night brings on a colorless room
Suspended by rocks and cloud-piercing ship masts
Where you watch as barbed apparatuses mechanically snap forward
Covering the melting whites of her eyes
Interlocked in drooping skull craters
With a deafening click
It’s all doomed to cascade in endless repetition
Try to reach out to her
But your words slip into warbled, industrial-crunched nonsense
Shouting in fried radio wires
Antennas soaked in ether
Transmit the last echoes of your annihilated heart.
-
The fleshy, pulsating antechamber sings
We’re trapped in the machine of fate
I never know when to follow
And when to quit
Refusing reality, I twist up into you
Dislodge your roots
Our sweat pouring into each other, devouring the pounding sky
A stifled and shared voice escaping our entwinement
Porcelain and candlelight burning the image
Of our mangled shadows
Into the black-mold-encrusted walls.
I stop and finally dream
Kissing the new lacerations down your arm
That open up and breathe like blood-engorged gills
Tufts of perfumed silence and anesthesia
Blossoms out
Encroaching gloom at the cruel embrace of wakefulness
Hypnagogic shrouds you’re left in forever
Desire unrequited
Every dream thrown on moon-bleached alters
Smashed to infinite pieces in the sharpened edge of night
I’m pulled through the ruins
Your image painfully coiled around my head
Before the fall, I force my hand inside
Unfurl your tongue and watch
Dead moths, exoskeletons, and wine
Pooling at my feet.
Our previous entrapment
Was only an endless march
Of broken ventilators
Heaving forth an atmosphere of broken glass
And rusted metal shining
In the captured deadness of your smile
Our Eden barely kept alive
I’d throw my life past the threshold
Of decaying oblivion
Just to see it all again.
But you don’t see what I see,
The dancing carnival creatures
With hooks distending their painted faces
Wires operating their jointless bones
Waves of inflamed insects as scarification
In their loosening flesh
Blackened wormwood growing from
Their needle-marked scalps
Flashing spotlights trailing behind them
Stripping the earth bare below their feet
Their voices dazzling in my head
Telling me of all the ways it will end
And how I’ll be worth all your hate.
I gifted them the heads of kings
And let them take control
They foretold the curtain call and the grand decapitation
Of me and my love
Long before the inevitable took hold of my throat
And shoved me into six feet of dirt.
I gesture wrongly to my towering pallbearers
With their crumbling masks of uncanny expressions
And cloaks undulating in the mud
Skeletal hands succumbing to dust beneath,
Begging them with a medicine cabinet stuck in my throat
To bring you here
Force you to be face-to-face with my becoming
My cosmic undoing spiraling towards
And within
The screeching unnamable vortex of your absence.
But you were never really there, were you?
-
Untitled Grief
The path through our consecrated grounds
Obliterated.
Last remaining dead trees uprooted
Or in a state of permanent immolation,
Softly rumbling storm clouds gather
Never to depart,
The dirt is nothing but frozen tears and
Dried-up, crackling entrails.
It all died so long ago,
Yet a distant, solemn heartbeat
Still occasionally pulsates
And echoes back to me,
I look to the ground and see my world
Disappear.
Visions of the first time
We watched the moon rise
Past disintegrating brick buildings,
Illuminating stagnant rivers of
Stretched skin and
Severed bridges weighing heavy
With our unexpectedly numbered days,
Embraces my sleep and pollutes my shadow
Trained to look away from it,
Let it fade,
I stupidly refuse
And reopen still-unhealed cuts
Where you reside, gazing at me
With your draining light
And venomous whispers.
“Come and rot”
This lingering, drifting desire
Makes no sense to me,
It's permanently entwined in
Shredded robes of pallbearers
That follows my every step.
If I could shatter memories and
Scatter them into the most privative
Corners of this dying world
And free myself from this pain,
I don’t think I would be able
To fully let you go.
.
There’s no choice
But to follow into the vortex.
With a razor blade wedged between each tooth
I slam my face into the jagged
Marbled effigy
Of how I wish to remember you.
On the other side,
Past the flaming tree branches
Raining from the sticky red sky,
Weaving between grimacing kewpies
In frozen acts of cannibalism
Rising and twisting out from
Weeping mires.
An intoxicating haze hovers and combs
Through flickering wax beneath my feet.
Further down lies the all-too-often resurfaced catacomb
Harnessing what you can not bear to face,
But as long as it still haunts my dreams,
Agony exhausted to the very end of this world,
The old age will never stay
Buried.
Sysmic tears begin
To ripple through the forest walls
Waves of scintillating bugs close in
As I dig my frayed, eroded hands
Into the tainted earth.
Your small footprint as my marker,
A sudden flash of your beautiful, tenebrous teary eyes,
I know I don’t have to do this
There’s no control here
As long as you continue to occupy
The grand chasm expanding in my howling skull.
Ignoring the collapsing sky,
I pull the malformed yet beatific still-birth
Out of the burning dirt,
Long after the life support machines
Fizzled and sang into the final sunset,
The last patch of graying flesh
Now dissolving on my tongue,
The past forcefully degloved,
Engraved on its star-speckled bones
Are the lyrics you wrote
For my death rattle.
Fog horns and swirling feedback
Soars through the stifling air,
Scenery bleeds and falls away,
Nothing but me on my knees
Cradling the failed emergence of
Our maligned lives pulled fiercely together
Only to be torn apart.
After severing my lips
And aligning myself with the destruction that abounds,
A commitment to baroque suicide,
I plant bloodied kisses on
Its softly singing hollow eyes
And wrap this feared creation of ours,
The dreamer of my steadfast nightmare wasteland,
The only vestiges I have left from you,
In a blanketing shroud of my extracted veins
And send it back through the hidden vortex
In a dire,
Undoubtedly futile,
Attempt to reach you,
Knowing full-well
That it’s all too late.
-
There’s No Me,
Anyway.
Ringing of insects
Through scabbed-over stigmatas in the sky
Night boiling over with sarcophagus steam,
An abandoned station in a cloud of dead prayers,
A rotting arcadia lies within
Where all great-horned animals
Gore themselves
And mindlessly breed in their entrails.
A pink quivering nothing
Coiled in shameful, forced existence,
Cosmic accident of birth,
It crawls its way out with burning limbs
And fails to drown
In the flowing river of decomposition,
Wailing into inescapable psychosis,
Calling for the welcoming talons
Of anemic vultures.
Reared in a caravan of lepers,
An endless ballet of depravity,
Rhythmic flash-bangs of black-out anger,
Canvas stretched over the imperfections
Painted over with a menagerie of
Other’s compounding sorrows.
Waiting for the parasites to fill in the blanks
And finally take control.
But a quarter of a century has escaped
Down into the necrotic sewage,
With nothing logical
And nothing resembling humanity
Able to form out of this elusive facade,
This desecrated blank slate,
That makes up me.
Now nothing is left unscathed
In the wake of the blossoming,
All-consuming rose clouds
Of boundless misery,
Fumbling with my legion of cicatrix,
I bear my atrocious shadows
Calling for anyone who dares to approach,
Cleaving open my ribcage
Awaiting you to lose yourself
In my cobweb of sickly sinew.
We’ve only accepted the invitation
To perpetuate the fall.
Grand Guignol swallows us in,
Denying the light,
Drinking deep a shared malformed life,
And vampirically transfusing our poisoned blood
Through bullet wounds we plan to share.
Lacerated bodies collide in carnal madness,
Fusing dreams of pain,
Injecting each other with slowly festering decay,
Mocking a hate-filled grip
Around writhing throats,
Trading bites with hypodermic teeth,
Gnawing our insides
And willfully yanking out tufts of hair,
While hollowed eyes devour each other.
Our interlocked, surging bodies
Careening towards a reckless oblivion,
Unknowingly awaiting departure,
An agonizing
Heart-rending
Numbness
Is the only guarantee.
It’s doomed to repeat
Until there’s no one living left
For my disease to feast on.
Death will surely always flow,
Nightmares forever bleeding out of my ears
Like spoiled milk
And worm-eaten, calcified honey
Staining the indentation
Marking where you once laid.
A phantom silhouette in my sheets,
I’m twisted and suffocating
On your death throes I pulled from your lungs.
There’s no means to properly apologize,
There’s no refugee I deserve
After all I’ve done.
I can’t pretend to understand,
Perhaps a simple submission to paranoia
Blinded by previous scars,
Dedication to destroying
Anything and anyone that comes near.
No one can manage to intercept
The cold something marching through my feverish mirror,
Creating maps of failure down my wrists.
No one can witness my unforming,
For a razor blade salvation
Will eventually claim me.
I loved you.
But don’t deserve
An audience for my destruction.
[Jaw-clenched in a desolate bathroom stall
Somewhere hidden in the nonsense
Of our now collapsing cyclopean city,
Do you still remember the rain?]
Shotgun blast across the hypnagogic highway
After your parting.
Putrid arterial streaks
Evaporate into the ensuing firmament,
“Your blood is my blood”
Left frozen between the car crashes,
Succumbing to flashes of your panicked weeping,
I unzip my scalp
With your painted fingernails
And await the crimson rain
To flood my unworthy skull.
After all, it all started with the rain
And reverberations of Shattered Hope.
Now it too has ended with the rain,
And it’s all too late.
I should have told you from the start,
You couldn’t have possibly brought upon the fall
Because
My world already ended
A long time ago.
-
Same Old Shadows
Pig masked martyrs
Dissolving to diseased bursts of rose petals
In a synthetic wind
Isolated patches of primordial forests
In manmade stasis of destruction
Wearily creaking inwardly,
Asphyxiating the contemptible soil.
Scars of bleeding hierophants line the spiraling path
Sky above, a boiling black mausoleum
And haphazardly stitched together
Expressions of mockery
Watching on the wings crashing into
Worm-eaten remnants of the sun.
Burnt leaves suspended in choking dusk
Dead branches stretch out,
Growing calliope-sounding bells
Beholding erratic cacophonies, violently turning all surrounding animals inside out,
Screaming in cold destitution.
The localization of all confusion,
Empty space,
And compounding hate.
It's at least now clear enough
That my eyes are still fixated on
The same welcoming arms of viscous shadows
And painfully flickering nightmares
Assimilating all irrational thought.
All I can remember is this place,
After all of you faded away,
Where I stood in a tenebrous,
Unbreakable haze,
Mouth overflowing with static
And bleeding gums
Left desperate for anyone
Willing to siphon it all out of me,
Weaving together a new set of puppet strings
To replace the ones sucking themselves
Into my black smoke-filled arteries,
Forever remaining on the unending precipe
The ceaselessly devouring chaos,
Wondering how it will all end
If I yet again allow a new vessel
To accept my fading ghost.
A last regress - I plead
Bleed for me,
Bleed for me,
Bleed on me.
Getting close now,
Dissolve your skeletal hand in mine
Join me in my bondage to a falling world
Torture yourself with the reality rattling through my inverted head.
Look for yourself;
Series of scalped children
Perpetually rotting
In moonlit concrete pools,
Sparking green radio wire flowing down
In tangles like thick knotted filaments
Of oily hair
Out of punctured holes in their pallid little faces.
Their eyes are voluntarily smashed inward
Reflecting the unfathomable depths
Of permanent night,
With crowns of stapled tongues
Tilting perfectly off their exposed skulls.
They couldn't scream even if they wanted to.
Rain of hot metal and formaldehyde
Tears through the swirling atmosphere,
Clouds of frolicking plagues shifting in
And out
Of the thinly masked worshippers, with their unique displays of dazzling deformities,
All eager to flay away at themselves
Discover the root of their emptiness,
Feeding the permanently sinking maimed children,
Weeping together a haze of broken dreams
Joining chemically burnt hands
Through the duration of
A miscarried love.
-
Why can't you see?
I'm only trying to show you
That it'll only ever get worse.
Twist and slither above
Close your eyes
Bleed on me.
All the parents are long gone,
Consciously never to come back
To rescue the parade of infant scalping,
Left to fill the expanding arcane cracks in the last pockets of earth
With evolving acts of depravity
Succumbing to each other's
Backwards fetishizations of their created forests
Of discarded stone babies.
We can never reverse any of this.
It's not my fault these images champion
Every last one of my remaining dreams.
No exit anywhere.
Machines puking into each other.
All the stars rot.
Last born child;
Harlequin baby melting out of it's heavily stained swaddle
Infested mother cradle her exposed guts
Surge of maggots on her anorexic thighs
Spelling out the new millennium.
All she can do is look down
And count all the deadlines
In the baby's squelching remains -
It's still there, it's undead.
Eternity stabbed and gutted
Pavement below her bare feet crackling and exposing
Dead tree roots, termite bombs,
And nuclear waste in bird nests
Wither and escape upward
Into the lone-surviving mother's
Falsely promised womb.
Don't look at me,
Bleed for me.
It's not my fault, it's not my imagination growing dim,
This is the only reality left,
The only one to ever exist.
Let it all end here
And
Bleed over me.
-
Slip
Spiral expanding,
The long way down
Finally catching up
Swallowing cavern of barbed shadows
And acidic flares
Corruscates beneath
The expanding desert snuffing out
Malnourished flames of rationality
Left burning behind my dying eyes.
Sleeping to armageddon
Carefully manicured porcelain mask shattered
Carve me out a new face
A grimacing pierrot
Something able to properly emote
As a noose of knotted black hair
Reeking of rotten cherries and tongues laced with tobacco
Stitches its way through the leech-like
Laceration across my neck.
Regression setting in
I’m ready to let everyone down.
There’s only one coping method left.
Deliver me from the irreversible,
Erase my scars and gift to me
A brand new canvas of flesh
To slice repeatedly into.
I’ll always return
To a thousand faceless, weeping gashes
And comfortably gleaming cold steel.
Pale light spins
Wraps itself around the world
And wrings out all meaning,
Anything logical, nothing able to properly get through.
Stability erupts,
Melting into starry pools of dangerous ideation.
Nothing effective against
The tyrannical itching urge,
While all shards of pain and uncertainty are
Felt too drastically
As faces screaming for the end
Ooze out of my closing-in walls,
Ushering me closer and closer
To my transformation
Of self-mutilated remains.
Lungs shrink and sing a last goodbye
Head succumbs to a squirming, overthinking
Pustule of panic,
No more flesh left on my aching fingers
To shred and peel away at
All the chemical nonsense tablets evaporate
To ineffectual dust
Long before they reach my already contaminated bloodstream.
My brain is left as a malignant lump,
Wrongly wired at its ill-fated inception
That should have never been
Only to perpetuate an infinite assault against itself
I can only hope for the compounding regrets
And pangs of self-hatred
To ultimately cause this shrieking tumor to finally cease to function.
Time and again
Reopening the keloid gates,
Letting the crimson pollution slowly
Deliquesce out
Has proven to be the only momentary cure,
A fleeting silencer
Mockery of a moment of control,
I already know it’s futile
And largely pointless,
Just something more to be ashamed of,
Long before I commit to
The attack on my veins.
After all these empty years and
Graying, pock-marked months,
An unhit vein is becoming difficult to find.
Every scar
An associated failure
At cutting off my longevity,
A pale remainder of an inability
To exist.
Trained to believe that nothing will last,
Everything ends,
Even these gashes only provide an infinitesimal fraction of release,
There’s only one lasting comfort left;
Between the gradually blurring vision and
The forever-expanding void,
In contrast to the countless faceless entities prophesizing my collapse,
At least I’ll know
That one day
One swift, deep cut
Will be my last.
-
I’m the Only One Left Alive
Scrapping my teeth against
Graveyard of scrap metal and reflective saw blades,
Plowing desecrated land
Bleached with mustard gas and opioids
In order to make way
For skinned Nephilim to descend
And build a tilted nightmare cathedral
Of new biology,
Sharpened stained glass windows
Painting all personal failures and sickly light
Flickering the last image I have of your eyes.
Inside
Organs hiss and wheeze in preparation
For my final transformation into
Nonexistence.
Green river of medication residue
Flooding my skull
Moaning with rising bile
Face to the stained floor,
Attempting to embrace a sleep that never comes,
Left wondering
How did it all come to this?
Make it go away.
All these years,
It’s slithering up the wilted walls
Framing a perpetually shattering embankment
Forever verging on destruction.
Dark storm clouds of hacked-up cigarette ash
Bleeds into devouring radiators
Trumpeting screams of vivisected rats
Calling out to me from jangling bars of fermenting bone.
It’s swarming down the abandoned highway
Dripping thick filaments of broken radio transmissions
Squealing from blasted streetlights.
Yellow static off your gnawed lips
Stitched haphazardly from star to dying star
I know it will catch up.
Watch the gray, anorexic moonlight
Scalp the long-stagnant horizon
Your face - festering and reeking - closes in
On my shadow drowning in
A new torn-open chasm in space.
My face - dragged across a field of bent nails
And bubbling lesions -
Refuses to let go the sight of you.
With withered, lacerated arms
Wrapped tightly around my shivering head
I’m waiting for the tossed-aside corpses
To rise from their piles along ancient Roman cliffsides
Snap their empty eyes open, create a symphony
Of crackling unhinged jaw bones
And look at me,
Flow their centuries of rot
Into the accepting caverns of my necrotic brain folds.
There’s only pain in reaching out.
Unleash genocide on my thoughts,
I can’t stand the world
Devoid of your voice.
Guide my hand,
Famine overflowing the syringe
Clutch the hollowed carcass twirling on a rope
Await the flow of wretched-up animal innards
Coming down from gashes in the air.
Buildings suspended in the enlarged malignancy of night
Staining the churning, haunted deserts
With fresh pink fetuses birthed from melting mortar
Forming the bricks of
The great hospital cathedral awaiting
The end of days.
Imploding cosmic surgery
Humanity in desperation for renewed scarification
All dreams crippled and maimed at the knees
Punched-out teeth creating
Breeding labyrinths for man-made bugs.
The howling absence of you
Is now all I have,
Once again leaving me no choice
But to embrace the apocalypse.
Dragging you around as a bloated tick
Still scurrying your way
Inside my many overlapping shallow cuts.
Idiotically, I’d still choose to feed you
If I had any blood left at all.
Feeling my skin too heavily on lashed bones
Knowing there’s no possible immunity
For any of this.
Staggering into the slaughtering unknown
Seeing your lost, fragile expression smeared across
A cocooning tapestry of personal executions,
Sharpened shadows etched in your sallow cheekbones
Guides my way toward the final construct
Losing all sight of who I am
But I keep wondering,
Do your joints still swell?
-
Nephelim Cathedral spreads open for me
Fused to their veiny pews, attendees fail to acknowledge me,
They chant out from their bisected chest cavities
Incomprehensible commands
And perfumed psalms of obsolescence.
Ceiling caves in,
Orbiting hand of the leviathan surgeon
Points a gloved claw at me.
Liquidy gauze spills from
Opening stitches failing to
Hold tight my now infected slits for eyes.
Frenzied crowd disrobes their form
And suction their disintegrating bones
Irrevocably into each other.
Rising noisome piles of manipulated human skin
Squirm into a pantimonine of
A grand, watchful smile
As the giant scalpel descends
Ready for the final cosmic defilement
And total skeletal reconfiguration.
Pooling and evaporating all around
The pulpit acting as my operating table,
Human race devolves into nothingness
The world outside the isolated cathedral
Wailing and wasting away
Ensuring that there is nowhere to return to
And no other solution left.
Seraphim surgeon prepares my exit
Sharpening tools against
My peeling flesh,
My face finally draining of light
As the swirling, welcoming void of nightmares
Awaits to suck me in and mold me anew.
But the scene collapses,
Everything stops.
A failure,
I’m alive
And wake up screaming
With the reminder that
My final thought before my next attempt at suicide
Will be of you.
-
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