[thisislife]

All those dresses with their pretty girls
Washed up in summertime,
And twirling ‘round the ankles like tides in the spring:
They’ve come choking down the hillside–
Lungs filled, mouths filled, lips bursting berry red–
Choking down the hillside, rolling in their little breezes,
Tongues bursting berry red
And fringes whipping like pinwheels down the grass.
Got hair in clumps like weeds in the wind, dandelions
Grown in rock and such pretty dresses–
The soft scratching blue of them–
Splattered daintily in the roll and the roll
As they go limply down the hillside,
The daintiest dolls in the evening
When the sky rolls red like summertime
And around they’ve come down the hill
With porcelain in their hair.

All that red like fingernails,
Leaving lines on the stone
And stains on the frills of those beautiful dresses
And stains on the faces of all the pretty girls
Wide-eyed staring into the clatter
And leaving cascades in the pebbles.

I could never know them all,
Toothsome things that they are,
But I watch from a distance while the blue rolls
And all those pretty dresses tumble down,
Half-choked in the evening,
Lips and cheeks bursting berry—
Until I can no longer watch
But instead turn my head to the sun
And there, splayed in my eyelids, is the bright
Redness of the west as I bear witness to the evening
And all that it brings in the summertime.

There are a multitude of maladies that I might surrender myself to–
In truth, the names of despair are legion–
And seated in their long yellow rivers I would wallow my way
To the inevitable confession,
The repentance,
Punishment,
Short, nasty, and sharp;
Deep-seated in my mid-brain I can feel that this is what I crave.

And would it be that I could call out from my lolling tongue:
“These are my bloodied hands!”
And at long last, wandering eastward with every passing winter,
I might return to the seat of purity, the wonders
Of those flowing boundless hills.
But what thirst is left to be satisfied when none remains?
And an inkling in my battle-brain shouts at me to repent
While every fiber of my being roars back in a tidal wave,
A sweeping deluge,
Ripping upstream and apart, through rapids and rip-tides,
And into my eyes whereby I conceived of the strangest things.
And upon waking could remember none.

The names of despair are legion, but the harshest is paradox,
From whose scorn I flee.
But while I quibble and quake between the highest glistening walls
And the gauged sloughing pits, I am starving in the midst of an abyss.
In this space it is the fruit of the basest mind which blossoms,
Unfurling,
And although its nectar is poison
I must eat.

I can see my feet walking in the darkness,
But they are not on the path.
They must not be mine, I tell myself,
But there is nowhere else left to go.

I have seen the world and it is burning;
I have seen my flesh and it is burning;
I have seen the topless towers of Ilium come cascading
Down down down
And burning
To the deepest pit
Is burning
And my eyes
Are burning and opening wider than I have ever known.
But these sockets–
They sputter sparks like an engine
And scatter cinders in spirals.
All this is burning
And this is truth.

I believe myself to be carrying acrid fire.
I can feel it on lonesome days when the rain falls
And my sadness seeps through my legs
Until I cannot get up any more.
Drizzles of gold leaking through my window—
Fear death by water, wreathed in poppling boil.
I smell like dust and ancient things, I like to think,
But perhaps that is merely the bedsheets.
They hold me like tradition.
They are sure in this world
And this is truth.

But my mind is aflame and quivering still;
Take these thoughts from my head: they are burning.
Take these breaths from my lips: they are
Burning.
Take these words from my tongue: they
Are burning
And eating of me
Until there is nothing left
But the vicious want that spits from my lips:
The guttural consonant,
The streams of molt.
This burns me new, but I fear my hunger
And I wish for something to hold on to
Yet still know that nothing is certain.
I have seen the towers of Troy fall
In unwavering defiance to their majesty,
And in short, I was afraid.
I am scared of what might be real in this world,
And this is truth.

I remember the horror in Priam’s eyes
When his world was toppling down.
And on some nights I wake, sultry,
Damp with fear of the fire.

I once had a thought wherein the slaughterer swam
And echoed hallowed gongs throughout my throat,
And wept to me: “I bear the bloody gown, my love;
I bear our bloody gown.
And if I were to melt away from these etherized corpses,
To toss a bid for salvation down the clattering throat of God,
I do not think it would shake even the smallest lot in life.
So I wear this bloody apron, love;
I wear these blood-stained gloves.”
And amidst the thrum of the sea washing across those sandy shores
The slaughterer swam along the coast, battered to the right of him,
Battered to the left of him, stormed at with undertow and cable,
Drawn back to his murmuring inevitability.
“I wear the bloody gown, my love;
I bear our bloody gown.”
I once had a thought mottled with bits
And festering on the lakeside.
Therein the slaughterer stumbled through his home,
His own hallways cluttered and dusty
And smelling of something he had removed long ago.
Fine wines and cheese and sausage strings,
The unspeakable parts wrapped for taste:
The delectable inners of beasts and fowls
Devoured with a certain relish.
The slaughterer sat stained at the table
Chewing on the edges of my mind,
Drawing the spaghetti strands as my head unravelled
And he could spell out his name in my leaks.
I once had a thought that I was being eaten,
Myself pouring out of a thousand cuts
That stung with lime like a dead man’s perfume
And all the while the slaughterer sang
With his throat echoing in the crags of his memories
And he near-drowned amidst the cacophony
Until all that I could hear in the pounding tide of my mind
Was the thought wherein the slaughterer swam
And it was strung with his voice half-chanting:
“I wear the bloody gown, my love;
I bear our bloody gown.”

Until I opened my eyes on the wedding day
I had not thought it was true.
This was not the honeymoon I wished for
In a villa by the sea.

Toothless men keep visiting me,
Chattering up and down these rusted halls
As though I am I a recording booth stretching into infinity
And they are begging me to take their voices from them.

I could store them in boxes and seashells and little vials on my walls.

Men keep visiting me with their hair falling out,
Pretending they are snakes and this is only a rebirth of the flesh
And proffering themselves to me with coughed-up voices.
They think I am an oracle.
I would want to be anything else
For I have seen wise men crumble to ash
And I have seen time sweep away still whispering
And caked with dust.
I want to tell these wandering things that I am not salvation
But I haven’t the heart to deny eternity;
So I sit while they drift to me, caked with infinity, searching for something
That none of us can remember any more.
Did we leave it behind in our one-night lives?
We haven’t the will to go back and check,
Only to wonder and wait and waste while whispering
And chattering in near-silence
All down the hallowed halls of where we have forgotten its name,
Where we have filled ourselves with a timelessness,
And where we are imbued with the hope of sleep.

The only difference is that I do not wander;
Yet we are all visitors here.

Almost my entire existence in this place is being stirred in a teacup:
Dirty. Haven’t cleaned it since I got here.
Cheap chinatown tea with spittle spilling through it
As though my backwash were the ocean’s tide,
My lips some insurmountable force,
My hands the moon.
And the dusty lamplight does no justice to me,
Not to my glory,
Not to my majesty,
Not to whatever I have left behind to be here;
My head’s now gone musty as though moths are eating through it
And I am a cheap sweater decaying in the closet.
My limbs some ancient thing,
My flesh the fabric.
This place does no justice to me
As I stir my existence away.
One more cup until dawn.
One more dawn until day.
By then I will be drunk away
Into the darkest places which curl warm and lovely,
Musty in the bluest nights
Beside bedside lamps half-heartedly twitching
And the empty halls of still inhabited homes.
Maybe then I can leave.

How I would wish to be aflame and unquenched–
My thirst legendary amongst these dried dunes of desert lands–
Rather than slosh amongst this purgatory of promises,
Frothing in my impotence.
I would wish to be the burning man
With split ends screaming in my marrow
As though my hair were on fire
And this world were on fire
And my eyes were blood-buzz-shot-blank-wide as anything I have ever known;
As though I’ve been screaming for miles.
I spill myself.
As though I were a bucket, I spill myself.
How I would wish that I could if I mustered the strength to leave this place
With all its blinding light.
After these thousand years east of Eden I am no longer mineral nor vegetable,
And a garden just doesn’t feel like home.
A lawnmower and a box of matches;
I will turn this place into my own flesh and blood
And in the cinders I will smolder,
Burning.

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

O Lord Thou singed Thy fingers

And to Carthage I came on wheels of flame
And not even I could stop me.

This was dropped in my ask box anonymously. I think it might be a response to this, but I’m not quite sure. In any case, I thought I’d post it up. Enjoy. (And thank you to Anonymous for taking the time to write.)

————————

you type an email to the future, like a time capsule detailing everything, everything you want her to know. [space]

when it becomes the most important thing that you lie to her, you start to believe in a certain purity, you start to become your lie, because it’s the only way it can succeed.

there are moments, like when the clock reads 00:00 and your collarbones are pained from playing solitaire on your elbow all night, that you doubt the worth of the lie, yourself, the self-assurance and positivity – it feels like unfounded optimism.

and you keep losing.

you throw up like her, but for different reasons. she has panic attacks when she’s sure you’re going to break up with her, but really that’s the last thing you want, and that’s why you live perched atop a shell of calcified drinks.

and even when you win, it doesn’t mean anything because you need to keep playing.

you lose again.

you send out an email, but not to her, to a service that will store it until the specified time and then deliver it to the recipient. this is just in case it all crashes down and you lose your footing in the swelling of the waves, so at least she can read it and have some proof, some visual evidence to help her try to convince herself you weren’t stringing her along all along, and yes, you do feel this, felt this, that’s why you have to lie… [space]

and if all is right, everything’s perfect, then it’s just vague enough to simply be a love letter from the past.

I am the sagging man, the hollow man,
Who skimps and scrapes and masturbates
In discreet washrooms — alone in my lovely hollow
Where the thoughts of the world cannot reach me.
And with a dwarfed dick I splurge myself upon the walls
Until they drip with love poems and the grisly scent
Of perdition.
Ah, the toothsome lick.
I would like to hereby condemn myself to eternity;
What horror to wander these halls indefinitely,
What horror to haunt these walls forever,
What a horrible thing it must be to repeat oneself over
And over and over and over until you have forgotten who you once were
And who you might be
And all that is left is black tile washrooms
Gas station washrooms
Motel washrooms in which you reassure your existence through lurches,
And late night binges, and drifting through half-empty streets in search of something
That you feel you’ve left behind.
Ah, I lick my teeth.
At last, a purpose.
I will vomit myself up, hold myself dear, drape myself in whatever parts of me can define me,
And label myself so that I might become a name – as terrible as that is – and
Drift endlessly.
Until at last I fall asleep.
But I am leaking! Leaking!
I dribble from the tip, slurp at the lip; I am leaking the best parts of me into
The long expanse of ravenous time which has come to take me home.
Ah, my teeth lick back.
So I condemn myself to what I am.
Wandering, dripping, indulging in the rotting of myself,
Eating myself when food is scarce,
Drinking myself when water is scarce,
Lolling through the days in a haze and shifting endlessly through the seasons.
But perhaps I have already left myself;
Perhaps this is only a memory.
Ah, I have bit my tongue.
I condemn myself to fate of fates:
You may eat me alive if I may be alive
Once more before I am devoured.
I will shiver with each confirmation,
Each biting pang.
Ah, this is the taste of truth,
Blossoming in the spring.

And perhaps if we were dandelions we would know cruelty;
The wanton children popping heads
And laughing at the scattered seeds floating down to concrete,
That sit unfulfilled
And float like the smallest caskets of the sky.
The wind has borne death on its tongue
In the saplings not grown, but rather lost
Somewhere in the gray-plated glory of dominion.
And perhaps if we were clouds we would know peace;
The absolute surrender to the caprice of the breeze,
That billowing breath of all directions.
We would spend our afternoons treading softly in the blue
And saying to each other
“How lucky we are to be unpinned
In the unfathomable places that Man cannot hold.”