A thin slice of life
Covered in whipped cream,
A silver spoon searching
For sponge finds only cream,
Cream,
Strawberry jam,
And hard-whipped
Cream.
A thin slice of life
Whitewashed as the walls,
Right hands reaching for bread
To dip and divide among the dead.
A thin slice of life
Partitioned.
Lives – severely severed.
Intemperate the soul that walks
Your skin along meridians blocked,
Along the remnants of a stagnant
Life once lived;
Eager the infant child to walk anew
The same paths unforgotten;
Intemperate the souls that roam
The eternal roads, in search of
Other victims, of other beasts
To tame;
Eager infant children walk anew
The dusty roads never ending.
you beg me to say more with less;
scant the expression
of a pervasive void,
the princes of Serendip
served chilled without a die,
succumb to echoes
of a dawn time morning,
scourge to tame
the beast before you;
you beg me to say more with less
and this is it,
more or less.
I sing my songs as muffled truths,
As knitted comforts in her presence;
With her nails like icicles beneath a
Shadow moon, I sing my sad songs
Alone by a fire long expired:
Like a hell that never came to be,
Yet a hell continuously begging:
Unleash me with your fire eye,
Thaw this frozen hell; but I sing
My songs through knitted socks,
I keep the aching feet frozen
As I sing my final hymn in joy;
Never again to ponder incineration,
Never more becoming less than
What I was sent here to be: free.
Snakes in the womb, in the forge
Of life; cold – abandoned it answers
No questions, no arguments sold
Of right or wrong, of pride or fall.
Worms in the wound, grim the pace
Of life; warm – pulsating, festering
Questions and flawed arguments:
We are masked, betrayed, tools
Of a master race; No! Merely tinsel
Shuddering in a cold winter wind,
Finding purposeless dreams
Along the way to meaning.
I compare and contrast all things,
Every moment of every day
I place a self in relation to all
Others; every otherwise imagined
As a better, a taller, a thinner
Life in this snowstorm of raging rain.
I compare and contrast all words,
The attempted, the written,
Some silently spoken in torrents
While others howled in halcyon
Chambers; all better than a self
Expressing the unspoken.
I compare and contrast, and find
A self lacking.
I overheard my words speaking
Of starvation; of their utter lack
Of most vital nutrients.
I lined them up, and spoke at length:
Of metaphysical fonts, of angles
On glyphs, and their most likely
Audience; I spoke of enjambing
Lines, and they – in unison –
Chanted their reply:
‘Caesura! Caesura!’
I promised I’d try: in hiding, place
A volt, to amuse as the words
Rolled on.
I overlaid my maltreated words
With an echo from times before;
Let a tempest howl between each
Syllable; added strings aplenty
With distortion – for the masses.
I overheard my words speaking
Of moshing metaphors
And slick similes;
Of being part of something sweet:
The world of song
And supporting Music.
Live a life worth living
Be a gift worth giving
Put love into everything you do
Be kind to all
And be kind to you
Unknown – in search for life origin:
Undiscovered slivers of divinity
Left, and their right to pursue a clue
In a futile mission
Among random stars.
Known – in search for life ending:
Uncovered shades of docile truth
And the false hope of another go,
A further road that might lead to
A final home.
Non-binary – the search for truth,
The search to escape the fools,
The truth as evidence and means
Of avoidance, a searching mind
Clueless yet going – ad infinitum.
I’ve been waiting for someone to crack my head open,
Spilling all of its contents across the pavement
Like a bleeding Sunday morning yolk.
Please transform me into a shell of my former self
So I can be trapped in a perpetual state of nostalgia.
Tales of another man shall echo through the northeast corridor,
All the way out into the faraway mountains of Northern Jersey,
Where people will mistake these stories for some newly unearthed prophecy.
You and your sterilized eyes and mind
Shall become consumed in the ecstasy of better days,
When we’d sit dazed and stupefied, catching solar flares with our retinas
Waiting to see which one of us would blink first.
The opalescent nature of our sundown conversations
Will forever be memorialized in all those photographs we forgot to take.
I guess those moments shall become rumors too,
Known to be true by no one aside from you & I.
We were bound & blinded by our desire for unrestricted flight
Away from this city whose burned down buildings only made us colder,
Shuttering as life’s cruel sense of humor flew way over our heads.
There was so much suffering brooding from the dim-lit doorways,
Men & women tossing around on newspaper beds, searching for inked stained comfort.
Some of them must’ve come from the corners of the country,
Hoping that life here would be better than out west.
The coasts will always serve as polar opposites to each other,
With the same ol’ chaos lurking beneath the skin deep change of scenery.
The journey is the closest we can come to disconnection,
Placing ourselves in an environment completely alien.
Yet, no matter how far we run, we’re surrounded by oceans,
Nature’s barrier between us and our wildest imagination.
Across the waves lie unspoken taboos, ritual serving to further misguide us
From that sense of understanding we’ve pieced together,
Like a quilt of singed fabrics, with each thread serving as a reminder
To a part of life we wish to be left behind.
What are we now but disheveled casts of our former selves?
We let the struggle get the best of us
And now we climb alongside Sisyphus,
Helping him push the boulder to the top
Convinced that it takes two sets of hands
To conquer our man-made concept of death.
