Do you feel it? Or am I the only one here in the predawn dark with my shuddering madness? STOP SHAKING please please please.

I wept yesterday morning. I can feel myself cracking and shivering into fragments, to be lost amid hours and the touches of fingers.

BURN, GODDAMNIT. Burn. The cry grows weaker and less intelligible.

Oh wreck,
Sister Ravenhair, you're killing me, Sister Ravenhair.

Jesus oh Jesus is it so easy to find? Was it that simple, was it so replaceable? A shot in the dark, were all her fumbled cries shots in the dark.

Whisper--I love you.--
Lies, lies. I never heard more lies. Love is not so easy to find.

It is not so FUCKING EASY to find.

NO ONE EVER LOOKED AT YOU THAT WAY BEFORE.
Surely not, since every faded one of us shaded himself into the black of your ravenly memory, a singular vision of one pair of eyes. You can only see the carcass you're picking. All else is gone, all else is none.

Jesus jesus where is my razor, where is my solace? Where is my blood, where is my fire?

Hey God, remember when I bled like Jesus against his tree in Gethsemane, when I rubbed my bloody cheeks against the mulberry and sobbed? Did you love me more then than when I believed?

Oh fickle, fickle love: you did not/do not/will not exist. You are the teeming betrayal of my imagination.

She throws her head back and shrieks -Oh you drive me crazy.
The wanton black of night sucked into her nostrils
-Oh you drive me crazy.
She cradled and forgot, writhing with -Oh oh you drive me crazy.

Cup it to your mouth and drink every sickly sip of it. Drench your deceitful tongue in it and grin. I have seen your paintings, too.

Will it never be day? The Everlasting may have fix'd his canon 'gainst self slaughter, but doth he forbid my hand to wreck me? Nay, I shall hurl myself into the full face of my pain. We will see what comes of it.

I will wait for it to break me. And it will break me. But oh God, I swear, I would rather be the thousand bloody myselves that I will see than one of those who has no memory of sin, insisting that I am pure.

It is useless.

Where is my razor?

Oh, your violin is slaughtering me.
There is barbed wire in my lungs, sucking up inside my throat each bloody damned time I breathe.

Oh God, I keep shaking, I keep shaking, I cannot stop shaking.
My skull is thundering in upon itself, and my ribs are imploding. My hands will not cease trembling.

HELL! I CANNOT SHOUT LOUD ENOUGH TO DROWN HER MUSIC, the murder and sway in her HELL in her shifty trauma in her tattered voice in me.

It will not cannot stop halt die Oh God Oh God Oh God. No words will keep my teeth from chatter-clattering together like nervous bones.

Do you suppose think accuse that this is hyperbole? Come to me, look at my red eyes my wracked hands my crawling jaw my spasming muscles me.

Run run run find someone--find it before it mixes your songs together in a vinyl cocktail of our sweet blood, of our black blood, your guilty circus of blasphemy, your niggardly calm of death. Red red red.

Keep speaking talking writing fleeing Oh God Oh push it away louder louder. Run Oh Jesus Jesus damn I cannot see anymore. I want to crack I want to burn I want to drill a Goddamned hole in my skull, I want my brass requiem. Will you play gunshots at my funeral mass? Will you cross yourselves and cry? Will you pound at my coffin and beg me to come out with bruised hands?

You will do none of these.

Here is leaving here is dying here is my only solace.
You are still here, you are still wringing my tears from my flattened eyes. Do you see my dullness, do you see my sorrow? Do you see me? Louder, louder.

If I keep writing, will it leave? No no no it will not go. It will rise like a fiery vengeance and spit in my fucking face. It will strike me like that, oh Father of Mine, oh Sweet Father who wrecks me and breaks me over his thumb. Can you not will you not have some jesus mercy, some crying mercy on broken I, on swindled I?

Suavecito, I liked to dance. I liked to dance, oh my love, to an unchained melody. Dear God, I am sorry. This is the last bullet. The hollow sulfurous cylinder of me is too much. Today I say, today. For Christ's sake--did he die for my sins, did he?--they are bloated and floating up into my eyes on the bent spines of tears. Oh my God.

Morning sounds her keening death knell. Mourning sounds her weeping horn. Tear me JESUS or I will tear myself. I will rip myself and I will burn like the ashes of me did before I was ashes.

So sleep on, sleep on. It is better to bleed in silence. Take me, you crows, pick my carcass and take me with you, scatter me.

Scatter me.

Forget it.

I have nothing to say to you; what will you hear that has changed?

Every time I come to this place, I feel myself shaking on the raw, bloody threshold of anger and despair.

"Come with me under the shadow of this red rock."

Forget it.

Oh burn me, burn me down.

Fuck this. There is no poetry left. There is only the dead clutch, the shrieking grope of nerveless blood reaching for...

Nothing. Nothing again nothing again nothing.

FUCK.

Good morning.
Is morning not glorious? Is it not the great awakening of our potential?

Here is to our potential, foundering and suffocating in the fluid of its black-slicked lungs, thrusting tarred hands into our mouths and eyes. Bitter taste, bitter sight.

Here is to us, blissfully pressing ourselves into night, spilling the syrup of our eyes into the asphalt that clogs our veins, the slow Vatican chant of suicide, of smoking brass cylinders clapping our wrists in blood. Oh, but can you feel it? Can you feel that iron edge of life? What flavor! What a fantastic blend!

Here is to us, a toast to the white guardians of nothing, the keepers of no knowledge. To our jaundiced lips. Touch me none, oh speak me none: I've got a yawning grin on my throat, ear to ear; a violin slit me open while I lay twisted in the morass of my two-cornered unroom.

You read, read, you do not survive. Your eyes flicker and your hollow chest doubts, your fingers freeze and your skull shouts Wrong! Wrong! Something must be wrong!

Blindness is the only illness.

Have you ever sat, bludgeoned into silence, with Van Morrison on your headphones, on your summer radio, with the sun baptizing you whitely like God, like morning? It makes your heart baroom and seize up, makes you dead like God, like morning. It makes me want those things I used to want, makes me feel like I used to feel, tragic and so fearfully alive that I can't give it to you. You won't see it.

Those hushed horns and that furtive guitar climb the mountaintop. That scent, and my arms thrust outwards on the triumphant summit, like glory, with that god-wind haurring through me. Just an image, a thundering movement in my dry bones, an eloquent music and silence tendering within my ugliness.

"I wanna rock your gypsy soul...And magnificently we will fold into the mystic."

I guess I've got that dream, that one from me, the one where I take that nothing face and slake it on the walls before you. It looks nice when I point it the other way, when you see the piano shadows in the cusp of the hills. And sweetly, you cannot see me.

I cannot give you my visions. Or, I may, but for it I rupture quiet air like a stifled wound; oh, make me whole. I just need a song, I need you to see, as long as you don't look at me. Look past me, look at my inner eye, unscarred, unmarred.

I knew you would understand.

Ha.

"I wanna rock your gypsy soul."

borderline


Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla



How horribly true.

A TIGER WITHOUT CLAWS


You left today,
A golden day, and the mulberry shadow was gray.
The sun hung hotly on a dusky string,
And it felt so damned good
Until you died.

We were pressed with grief
Into a dying room.
You left four old hairs on my shirt,
Lit against black, because oh baby
I carried you,
And you did not fight,
And you always fight,
So I knew you were dying today.

You spent the day anciently
In the roses and on my bed.
It was hot, and I know how much
You love the sun, thumping stonily
To yourself in bars of morning,
Like a diesel, baby, like an engine
You always did.
So when you would not speak to me,
When you cried only once
In the weeping car,
I knew you were dying today.

I left you quiet behind me,
Widely eyed and oh God so hush-hush
On a the metal table where they toss
The ones they know are dying today,
And you did not glare at me
The way you did, the way I wish you would;
Come on, baby,
At least be angry with me.

There is no more lurk in the porch,
No more sway in the summer shadow,
Only concrete and rustling.
I am not my baby’s keeper,
Not no more, no more, no more.
I left you on a golden street,
With your sweetest sun dipping down,
Like iced tea that slurred in me
When we jived without sound, without movement,
Only with summer purrs,
For those are different from any other.

I left you on a golden street,
I swear; I knew they were your favorite,
For they are mine,
And I hooked one for you
While I was crying, because I love you,
When I heard
That you were dying today.

Tiger's gone.

Do you remember me?
I don't.

She is dying. She is suffocating. Aw, God.

I strove through the stagnant verbosity of my words; I would have spat down a poem upon this page for you to read and say, "Ah, I know him now. I did not know him, but the ruddy truth of it is laid down blushing before me, I see him rawly and redly. And I know him."

THAT would not happen.

I had no vinegar meditation to lay upon you, no distilled bitterness with which to touch you. I have only myself to choke you with.

What are words?
Empty, empty.

What are words?
Sorrow, sorrow.

What are words?
The paper herons with gallow throats; stalk on.

What are words?
A humid fall, a quietude between windy teeth.

What are words?
Cold and hoary drips of doddering morphine with thin blood.

What are words?
A shivered portrait maimed in drab.