At night
He comes
Obese, gray-black
Anger so repressed He is shaking
Below, like Earth’s been doing lately
Quaking
His eyes blank, mouth soft
Head knows nothing of his rage
Below
Trauma can split a person in two like that
So he sits
Heavy
Thinks he’s empty
Squashed
A car in a junkyard
Abandoned, forsaken
Crushed flat, fat
Like an overgrown gourd
Bulging, tumorous
At night
He comes
He speaks to me
An untrusting “hello”
Though
It is my voice I hear
Obese and gray-black
Black Poetry beats in me like a painful yellow fog
Murky, pungent, sucking life
This is garbage, you think
(Or maybe that’s me)
For Poetry is the thing Dickenson speaks of!
Hope singing, and the like
I bring a different kind of Word
Self-indulgent, maybe
But not if you really knew…
Well
Some of you do
Some of you do
We are the artists, yes the long-suffering Clichés,
Whose works, year-after-year-after-millennium,
Somehow still rings True
Life strikes down her yellow-gold-silver-blue
Splitting us all open, cracked as we already are
Shattering and shattering
You can almost here Zeus laughing in the skies while
Children are dying down here in spades
While so-called Gurus spew
Unrelatable but somehow edible
Spiritual vomit
People sinking knee-deep in it
Eyes wild, wide
Heads nodding, bobbing like Robotrons
Mouths lapping up regurgitated chunks
Hungry
Starving to ingest the One-Sided
Disguised as Salvation
Hands dripping with acid stench
Shoveling, scooping
Inhaling someone else’s excrement
Proclaiming it delicious
Denial is a Siren
A sweet Goddess of affliction
Who is so annihilating-ly believable
We all think we’ve got gold in our palms
Ever-fooling ourselves
So I take on the role of The Outcast
I must
This painful yellow fog beats out of me
(Go ahead and find it disgusting)
Not because I wish to be different
(Though, fuck you, I’m different)
But because mainly
I must be a Counter
To all the golden puke we cling to
Pretending that it is Soul
We’re not so different
You and I…
All these goals and dreams
We’re not so different
You and I
Some days our Sirens scream
The struggling, the striving
The overactive mind
The ADD
The BPD
Depression and the like
Begrudgingly we take a pill
Or emphatically refuse
Some days our hearts eat up the hate
But other days
They lose
We’re not so different
You and I
This fabric of our fears
Woven with a matching cloth
With wounded matching tears
We all insist so fervently
What’s wrong with This or That
Throwing stones at those who wear
Our own ever-changing hats
I, for one, I must admit
I am a humble hypocrite
But hope one day to try that hat
Say, it no longer fits
You cannot make me like you
Nor I make you like me
But God knows we try like children do
Force incessantly
Wonder who first had the thought
We all must be The Same
Wonder why we’re still playing
That stale, soul-crushing game
Inevitably the boomerang returns herself to Truth
And then our Pointing Fingers
Only make us Fools
Hero meets the Villain now
They make a brotherhood
The mirror sheds a brand new light
The way a mirror should
So let me gaze into your eyes
You’ll gaze into mine
Not so different after all
So different
You and I
I think I used up all my chances
For loving this life
Or light-hearted romances
I keep on choosing the red pill
Fantasies dance with me
My imagination runs with me
Occasionally
But I have come to believe
That what is Sold in this world
Is just not meant for me
I can’t live in Reality
(said sarcastically)
The way they do
All blindly
Though, I know it’s a ruse to call
It real, ‘cause reality’s not kindly
Eyes wide shut to The All that lives
To exist instead in the Matrix of illusion
A fusion of merely meager things
They are capable of seeing
I see the Unseen
Constantly
My heart splits and splits again
They ask me things I can’t ever answer
Because one can’t Explain the Deep Mysteries
Then, when I attempt, they think, “She’s crazy…she’s inflated.”
Full of myself, perhaps, or maybe inebriated
But I speak My Truth whether I’m sober or not
While they’re held hostage by illogical thought
Dismissing me away
Even as unconsciously they are asking me just What It Takes
But they don’t really wanna know just
What It Fucking Takes
I must resist the temptation to tell them
The answers they don’t really seek
I must toss my need to try and connect
Into the Humble back seat
You can’t sell Soul
When they live to forget
When they’re just not ready
Or it’s too deep to get
So I walk my journey alone
Yes, alone
My fantasies only an escape from my home
A home lived in Shadows
I row my small boat
Though my mind sometimes serves me
I eat
Alone
Disbelief, my own believing
Chop down the Cherry Tree
Remembering’s deceiving
‘Til we find who we were meant to be
Another lifetime lost in dreaming
Another spent in fantasy –
A lie, which claims it is revealing
A lie who swallows you and me
Reality’s the tougher dealing
They feed us all these toxic seedlings
So find some kind of healthy healing
Turn off your flat-screen TV
———————————-
One foot steeped courageously
In all Life’s Deepest Mysteries
The other pulling desperately
Never quite releasing
Entrenched in sand – heavy, quick
Mud-like, glue-like, sticky, thick
I built this bridge brick by brick
Now I’m standing right on top of it
Straddling two different lands
One foot stuck, one foot free
At least I’ve got these hands
I dig on in; I loosen things
Attempting Hanuman’s mountainous leap
Disbelief was once concealing
The inner faith that I’ve been feeling
Experientially
Never keen on blind following
I’ll take Shraddha, please
———————————–
Illusion sheds
It burns away
I turn my face towards
Today
I whisper to myself —
I say, “Allow…allow…allow…”
“Look!” I exclaim, right out loud
To no one in particular
The Cherry Tree’s alive, I see
It stands quite perpendicular —
Blossomed, fragrant, heavenly
I taste the fruit it offers me
The truth of Life where it belongs —
Back inside of me
Stupid fucking people everywhere
You see them out there
Small talking about the weather
They don’t know any better
Rattling on about the latest sale at Marshals
I hear a neighbor’s voice waft into my living room
Cloying and gossipy, “Oh, it’s allllways about HER,” she says so nasally I wonder if her nose is doing the speaking
I get the distinct feeling she’s talking about herself
Just doesn’t know it
I tried to get to my gmail today by pressing the “gm” buttons into my browser
Accidentally took me to female genital mutilation
I guess I pressed the “f”
Women in other places get their clitoris and labia scraped off
Their vaginas sown up
Sometimes without anesthesia
Usually before age 5
They see it as a rite of passage or a sign of purity and honor
I see it as men in fear trying to control women’s power
I see it as the symbol it is – women mutilating their femininity
How long do we suffer blindly?
How long do we fool ourselves to make the shit we eat taste more palatable?
So what kind of poem is this, you wonder?
Where is it going?
I don’t fucking know
People in Ukraine dying and bloodied by government for fighting for rights
In 2014
How are we still this barbaric?
HOW?
There is too much pain in this world
Covered up shoddily by our daily purgings of false importance on Facebook
Or our video game playing addictions – 5 hours a day — or
Anything, really, to take us away from the horrific truth of what is actually going on
All the time
Because we feel helpless
So we hide
Until consciousness again finds us and we are thrust into action
Until we stop asking “how are you” and not giving a fuck about someone’s answer
Until we stop talking about the weather
And start discussing our souls
Trust is a bitch
Disguised as some Perfect Thing
Trust is a trick
Bound by human weakness
Trust I think is meant to be broken
They tell us so many lies but
Trust is like anything else –
Susceptible to human foibles
And therefore, imperfect
We try
We take steps
But inevitably something breaks
Trust is broken
Perhaps True trust
Real Trust
Is staying with each break
And putting it back together again
This blanket made of Nothingness and Impudence
Woven with Depression and Resistance
Created just for you
Wrapped in it at birth
Hanging like a dark film over your shoulders
Under your feet
Must have felt like Home to you
This painful quilt of failures
So many excuses
It’s not that bad
People have it worse
And some do
And who cares?
I am interested in what happened to you
Tell me of your precious, unnatural cloak
Tell me how it’s home and you never wish to leave it
Tell me how you hate it and beg someone to rip it off
Let me know the fight in you
It’s not an easy feat
To start to choose the Unknown over Home
Even when home is unbearable
Oh the burden of a certain kind of familiarity
But
You are not the thing you wear
Nor whatever you were born into
You are underneath
Pure and unbroken
I believe
If we’d never seen the sun and suddenly it appeared
We’d fear annihilation — hide deep in our Darkness
Rather than welcome the soft warmth
So do we live from Fear…
Or do we Risk when it’s hardest to Risk
Who among us is brave enough
To take the cover off
Or — with new thread —
Begin again…
A blanket made of Happiness and Mindfulness
Woven with Compassion, Love and Peacefulness
Created just for you
Tried to love you a thousand times
But I gave too much of myself away
Been scrambling like a maniac
To get all those precious pieces back
Slow-going though
(And some decayed)
They tell me out of rotten things…
Yeah I’ve heard that out of death?
A brand new Something’s born again
Better than what’s left
I wonder though – about those pieces
The ones I’ve tried to grasp
And breathe life into once again
Make meaning of my past
Is it worth it when I’m so alone
While my heart just hopes and hopes
Going on and on like It don’t see
The rope around my throat
I tried to love you a thousand times
And a thousand more than that
Was I doing Love all wrong?
Have I given This for That?
I have no answers as I move
Step-by-adjective-Step
There are no fairytales, methinks
Oh, what a crushing childhood lie
No prince
Nor knight
Nor one true love
But only this lonely
“I”
I don’t know why you affect me like you do
Can’t even write yet without sobbing about you
Had three of my best friends reach out to me
Told me of your passing because they knew
They knew how I loved you
How can it be
That someone we don’t even know personally
Affects us so deeply
Touches such Humanity
That place in us all where we feel Divinity
And we felt yours
Not just the other day
When the car burst into flames
When the joy ride of your life
Took you away
No not just then
Your life was felt while you were here!
Could there be anything that matters more
Presence being felt
Just knowing you were Here meant something to me
And I only understand that from the sharp realization
That now you’re gone
I was out buying a curtain rod
Looked down at the text I got
“Paul Walker died.”
Felt my heart drop
It wasn’t about your fame or your beauty
But the light that shone through
Your humility and honesty
And blue-eyed speaking truth
And that smile
Oh that smile
That when you graced us with it
Everything else melted away
I promise I will carry it within me
Even as I ache
There will never be another smile
Quite
The same.
ariaphoenix 