One intentional STOMP
A spurred boot slamming onto an iced-over lake
Sadness breaks through me
the cracks begin slowly
reaching their jagged, frozen fingers through my skin
they quicken
Frigid waters rising
I hear a whisper somewhere
Don’t fall in
Don’t fall in
Those waters aren’t meant for swimming
30 seconds til hypothermia sets in
But then, a different voice speaks:
There is no danger here
I reassure The Whisperer
I am the lake.
And The Thing breaking through me
Is only
Letting Life in
Do you feel Her — Our Country?
She is weeping
She is desperate that we come out of such wasteful dissonance
Our Ignorance
I blame you and you blame me
But we are on the same side again This Evil
All this violence erupting
Volcanic bursts of killing
Have we become a nation of amputees?
There is a fine line between waiting and deteriorating
Between Consideration and Paralysis
Have we be become the goddamn avocados of the world?
Too ripe or too rotten
Can we not call a spade a spade
But leave the spades who are not spades out?
What is so hard about that?
Who lies there, in the corner, covered in blood today?
It is your mother and my mother
It is your friend and my friend
Our Nation
Our Country
Our Earth
Our Selves
We cry out in reverberating wails of frustration and sadness and anger
But Know This:
Evil does not only not listen, It thrives on our painful confusion
And so I might remind you now —
Jesus came with a sword
The good warrior knows when to retreat and when to draw
Differentiation is key
You are not the Evil
So listen with me
Let us act in consciousness, together
Let us be These United States
Or tomorrow will just be
Another Today
— KH
Eyes burned wide open
can’t cry anymore
Numb to emotion
’cause I’ve seen it before
Nothing tugs at my heartstrings
No harp strings to play
’cause the instrument’s broken
Strings are all frayed
The bird that is Hope can’t perch or sing
an’ she’s getting so tired of flappin’ her wings
No heart to land on
Just bits on the floor
No respite, no Inn
Then
No Hope anymore
I’ve been in love with brick walls
Most of my life
Not sure why
Those sturdy stones, beautiful and strong
Built to last
And red
But I mistook the wall for something so much more
than it was
My hands crumble to dust in front of me
I stare at my own abandonment
When did I leave myself
How did I imagine this could love me back
My legs buckle underneath
Turn from bone and flesh and fat
to smoke
There is only brick and cement in front of me
Bouncing my thoughts back into my own head
No arms or legs —
I’ve become the brick
That makes up the wall
That gives nothing to me
Nothing at all
I lie in the gravel street
and hope someone takes me
and builds me into something great
Since I could not
Since I got so lost
On my way home
I am at a loss
For This Much Sadness
An odd wah-uh-wah-uh-wah sound penetrates my ears
Alien
Foreign
My eyes sit like saucers in a dirty Beijing sky
Hazy
Spacey
Where the fuck am I?
I am at a loss
For This Much Sadness
Who knew It existed
Like This?
I am a shaken, empty vessel
Robotic
Devoid
I am a Veteran now
Lost
Perhaps forever
In these Post-Apocalyptic eyes
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
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
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.
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
ariaphoenix 