Poetry

Haunted

/ wordsforghosts / 3 Comments

Bite off your tongue,
                spit out the blood
& say something more than
                any word ever could.

Seal the wound with white-hot metal
& stuff with wire wool, stifle
a scream & feel a weak
edge where laughter descends
into desperation or cruelty;

                ignore
the words that form & try to force
open your mouth.

Let no sound out.

& in silence
find the patience to discover
an unspoken secret;
the obscene foundation
of everything keeping us safe
                from what awaits within.

Waits like a swallowed stone
to kill or be expelled
from these bodies haunted
                by language:

a ritual sacrifice;
                necessary
price to be paid, ridiculous
offering made
to satiate the infinite
                & the horror it brings…

Open your mouth,
                let it all out:
without a tongue
                all sounds are one.

The Animal

/ wordsforghosts / 1 Comment

To see and be the ugly things of life.

To know there is terror in the sublime.

To be
a biological organism,
a bipedal mammal
with opposable thumbs;
 
witness the animals as they come together
to gather round the fire
& make their greatest mistake as
they take the communication system
moulded from noises and turn it
into language:
                a feed-back loop into which members of the group
                will descend when
                they discover how
                to talk to themselves
                & not others;

necessary lie of grammar, to anchor
our respective first-person perspective  
it gave rise to the lie that is the “I”,
                the insistence
that there is something different inside of us.

Can you appreciate sensation: the feeling
of vibration;
the harmony of eternal energy
composing & flowing through us?

Is there hope to be discovered
                            of escape
from the day to day
after day after day
of feeling dull & repetitive
& dull &
the same?

Acedia

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The frayed remains of two daydream decades
listlessly slides glass beads across
an abacus
            one
                    by
                        one,

            some
are so delicate that they break
upon contact
& the shards are lost to the permanence of
            forgetting:

the day walks away toward the West as
each sunset colour elides the other,
            leaving behind
a blue creeping twilight
            & shrouded moon

like
        a widower leaves flowers
at the grave of a secret lover.

Ignorant of all but their game,
the frayed remains
see nothing but the broken glass,

trapped

in a present moment
       empty of all content:

a skeleton
 
with hollow bones.

Doubt

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So bored of throwing stones
around the glass house of consciousness;
of exalting or bemoaning
        existence.

Too many words already written &
even more waiting to arrive,
so why continue to
        write?

Is it only to kill the time,
or find some way to bridge
the vast divide
        between us all?

Or maybe a failed attempt to deny
that the Rise is really the Fall;
there will never be a way to
        escape alive.

& the words will continue regardless,
unmoved by constant confusion & doubt.