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
I am Uh-lone
Lost in a dry, gray field of it —
Emptiness
Draping over me like a long, invisible cloak from head to toe
Offering nothing
Causing the kind of pain only Nothing can bring
Shocking
A great, dark, Impersonal
Void
One can only scream silently for so long,
alone
I am so totally Uh-lone
Sharp in my sobriety
That the masses lack
Preferring to believe that
“It’s all love and light, baby, love and light”
Bullshit
I don’t know your experience and you do not know mine
I only know that we can try
To understand –
And we’re lucky if we can –
Or find someone who really wants to
Who does not run away shrieking from our carnivorous pain
The way I hypocritically do
I never could relate
To those who haven’t been to hell…
To those who aren’t awake
I’m in that place
Where there is no try
Where desolation goes to die
No more questions, no more why
I’m in that place
Where there is no try
Only wishes and desperate pleas
Like winter’s snow falling silently
Melting before they are received
In this place one hopes for sad
Depression, even, not so bad
Joy a distant memory
The reining King is Apathy
He watches over fields of numb
And clouds of pain
Rivers where lives end in vain
His eyes are blank, a little grey
No one home
Nothing to say
His last try was a million lifetimes ago
Disconnection here the status quo
I’m in that place
Where there’s no reaching out
Or an inner voice who might cry out
And yell, “I do not wish to die!”
No, he is not here
There is no try.
It’s just Fear, I tell myself
The dynamics of my own mind
Keeping me in the tall glass tower
Thunderous Fear words booming through my flimsy glass walls
Shaking me
Threatening breaking me
All the fishes in the pond below have gone
They done swam away
‘Cause Fear had His say
And I have to admit that I’m afraid
Ego petrified
Exposed through these glass walls
Do they see me?
Will they eat me?
Or hate me?
Or beat me?
Or treat me like a leper?
What insult will be thrown my way today?
How will I be maligned —
Vomited on by a Better Kind
Oh, the sad dynamics of my own mind
It’s just Fear I say
Just Fear so you can either
Walk out the tall glass door or stay
It’s just a choice you make
With crumbs of food in my trembling hands
I close the door behind me and feed the fishes
Calling to them,
“There, there, “ I say, “It is safe.”
It was just Fear.
It is back – it is back:
That heavy, Heavy Black.
That feeling that Hangs, everywhere.
That lifeless Black Heavy in the air.
Like barren days preceding rain,
Gray-cloud Apathy masking Pain.
Oh, yes, Those Days –
You know the kind –
Seeking something you just can’t find.
You try to Try but the Heavy wins out.
Smashing your tiny, pathetic ‘try’ all about.
So you stop the fight, you put down the try.
People, they judge you, they can’t figure out why.
They whisper and snarl, say, “Depression’s not Real.”
This coming from people who never learned how to feel.
Not deep down in their souls in the Dark Birthing Black
Where the pains create life and the joy cycles back.
Oh yes, that part we forget when we’re stuck in the bog,
When that Nothing feeling hangs thick as the fog –
That if we can Hold On and just get through the black
We might say,
“The joy! The Joy…
It is back.”
ariaphoenix 