One-Eighty Degrees

So come home,
Where your skinny childhood friend pulls his sleeves to reveal
A lattice of deep blue strands spreading forth
From a single bulging point, an eye of something unreal
Pulsating with a slow jog
In-between forced breathing and coughs he mutters
Never again
With this specific trip, but with a smile, otherwise
We are all good
We’re cool
We’re smooth
We’re gliding on thin air
We’re laughing at floating things at two in the morning
Outside my home wondering how hard we could we laugh before
We woke up my mother and then seeing us so untangled
Unblurred
Whereas I’m hoping she wont see
She remains oblivious to the obvious
Me afraid, slowly expanding into tinted layers of something
Taking up more and more space and more and more weight
There is no color here
Where we are engrossed by the very chase
Of the daydreams of our youth
By our own poor choice of chemical subsitutes
Eating away at your edges
Hoping to soften yourself up, finding the innocent core
All the more confused and broken and discarded
So come home
Where former athlete sprinters lay stagnant on the monobloc chair
Their human form barely able to hold in their waste
Making rude comments to anyone passing, enraged
That he was so unceremoniously spat out
Asking how are you
To which you reply; okay
To which you say; you look great
To which you ask;
looks like you finally chased down what you were running after
You’ve settled
And you hope he takes it with a smile
So see the seething anger in the edges of his lips
We’re good
We’re okay
We are not inverted triangles
Starting off with so many pregnant permutations
Fading off into an obscure point
We choose our ride
And we choose well
We are not consumed
By the unlit, unused walkways
By the laughter and the sadness we paid for later
By the advancement loan
We do not feel regret
We move on
Where the street you grew up in
That left that gnarled mess of your knees when you tripped
While playing something you cannot play anymore
Is under surveillance
To the fullest extent of the law
There is no life nor beauty
There is no grand majesty to this ride
There is no constant kaleidoscopic enlightenment on things unknown
There is no bright fun life after the storm
There is just the surrogate
To whom we impregnate with our pains
Our hopes and dreams and other childish things
Supposedly forgotten but distilled, plucked from our very bodies
Taken into physical form, living on our blood
We grew thin
Emancipated
Smiles stretched across hollow cheeks
Take the distilled, the solid, and relive
You are not the surgeon of your own manufactured hopes and dreams
You are but a paying audience to a trite slightly amusing show
And the price is life
So come home
Where your only responsibility
Are hedonistic present tense wants, never the needs
Never the future, just the now
As sharks hungry for life, shall we then consume ourselves?
Put this on your heavy head, chasing the thin sinewy fume
Burn’t by the traditional rust-tinted candle-flame dancing to the tune
Of your own ragged, forced breathing looking for purchase
In your atrophied lungs, put this on your heavy head
So come home

There is But A Small Chance

Of failure when we first opened the box
When the machinery inside insists on being useless
There is but a chance, but we try
For the melody in the music box is something
We must hear
Eager to know if the little figure built
Of materials as solid as metal
And as flimsy as lace
Will twirl around with proper accompaniment
Of the sweet, tilting, music
We sat eager and afraid
Of the faces we’ll project
When the whole thing fails, but we gather
We gamble and we try
The chance is something small
And the box is something worn
Used and passed around to people
Who don’t appreciate the rusted music
And the thin, bell-like rendition of one of Mozart’s
Compositions
We try and push on
For we both realise that we need to hear
That shining music again, and so we wind it up
With concerted effort on both of us, faces strained
With effort, fingers grasping the little handle
And we place our fingers together on the box
Hoping we’ll like the outcome
Hoping we’ll stand again if it were truly broken
Lying dusted in an antique shop
Along with dolls named hopes
And trucks named dreams
Rusted, the figure will not spin that repetitive dance
That slow senseless dance that means only one thing
That it isn’t about something about aesthetic
That what the box needs are grease to make the mahinery work
And toil to turn around, along it’s axis
The dancer of our fates
So we wait
Along with the anticipation of dismay, but taunt
With the promise of the regeneration of something old
Something forgotten
Edging on broken things with nothing but a miniscule risk
And the ultimate payoff
But so we open it
And hope we are not dismayed

A Mere Strand I Pulled Too Tight

Dear Cupid
You cross-eyed, irresponsible bastard
How hard it is to aim an arrow
How heavy is your gilded bow
Who was responsible for choosing you
To carry such in your weak, giddy, fairy arms
Setting poor hearts aflame
Drawn towards cruel inevitable harm
Your aim does hit me true
But for my quarry you miss
The only consolation I have earned
Is but a trifle of words said
How have your godly heart been truly pierced
When the maiden you seek, you alighted
Should your masterpieces then be abject tragedies
An ode to your incompetency
We should have chosen a better marksman
Trained better to find their target
For your folly I have learned
To love is to hurt

There Is Hope in Little Things

There is hope in little things
Sprouting up when diligently watered
Buried in the warm embrace of thick soil
Talons extending deep for nourishment
There is hope of for frail things
Of the discarded, and unneeded
Shall I then bury the mass here
Of the unloved, and unwanted
Will then its talons stretch forth
To find the nourishment dashed
When we cut the living cord
When watered will it grow
And sprout a million others like it
Fruits indistinguishable from the rest
Or just one unique story
Whom is just searching for another
Warm, sunken cave
Another pregnant earth
In seeds with pliable bones
In cries never heard
In the soft plop of the red waste
Plant then those little things
And watch your sadness grow
Watch the despair bear fruit
Watch the haunting ripen
And eat the deceased flavor
Of the wanting seed

Here

Here
Stand here in the precipice
Bent, bowed, your knees shaking uncontrollably
Breath forced out, coerced out of your body
Here
The pressure of your bladder is wailing
The gaze of something terrible lies ahead waiting
Look meekly and be afraid
Here
A leaf amidst a torrential storm
A meat being fed to a chained dog
Be an offering for fear
Here
Take a step forward
Be horrified
Be brave