End My Shadow World

My insides become soft, organs melt, when I think of you,
Time's slow flow tortures and I turn blue,
My heart pounds, asking me when?
When will I be in your loving Zen?

Your smile memorably glistens,
And I enthusiastically listen,
To a song of secret joys,
Greatly soothing my chaotic noise.

Now our lives have crossed again,
Bringing the light from heaven,
Into this shadow world.

Quicksand

The thousand cries,
Of memory,
Pester me,
As I ride,
Through,
Dark mentality.

The horse foams,
Sweats,
Eyes rolling,
Ready,
To collapse.

And when it does,
The rash rider,
Is thoroughly thrown,
Off his leather throne,
Into the suckling swamp,
That awaits,
Like a patient cannibal.

The sands,
Suck,
And overpower,
The rider,
In his darkest hour,
Who screams naively,
In a child's,
Pitched voice.

Grained fingers,
Grasp living flesh,
Savoring,
And rise rise rise,
Drowning out,
Pleas for mercy.

Yet in my last moments,
Of desperate consciousness,
I glimpse,
A friendly rope,
Through,
The adrenaline haze.

My slimy hands grasp,
The taut rope,
And I am pulled,
From the raging mire.

The Air of Freedom

The air of freedom,
Flows through my veins.

Its unpolluted taste,
Tingles my tongue.

I breathe with clarity,
My satisfaction abounds.

Life seems limitless,
When it's tyrant free.

Of new beginnings,
I embark.

Of the same acts,
I expect.

Thankful for free choice,
Thankful for pride.
Thankful for the relieving end.

Hysteria

Oh hysteria,
My literate enemy.

You,
And your vast esoteric logic,
Astound me.

Your disordered sense,
Confounds rationale.

The homes,
You infest,
Weep magnificently.

Their wooden structures,
Rot,
In your black fungus.

Fate

Who among you has not shaken fate’s steely hand? Its cold dry, grip will haunt your thoughts, making them dreary. The comedy of its uncaring hardness is known only to a privileged few: the underclassed intelligentsia. The fate-injected life is filled with vacant control, and blank minds skip happily under its carefree caress.

The fate-purged life requires a rock to anchor it against the battling breezes. A particle in the air will not satisfy the fate-purged life. It must bond with its disgusted opposite, who seeks to deify and hypnotize with willful wakefulness.

Writer's Life

Part of the true writer’s life is enduring loneliness. It is a self-induced curse. Friends become secondary to our literary children. We are ever concerned that they are well behaved. This occupies our thoughts and actions much too much. We sit at our keyboards or in front of paper pads gripped by an anti-social monomania. And when we are not developing our aging infants, we open our dusty mole eyes and wonder where time went. What outlet did the days bleed to? When did the passing seconds leave? The loner’s life is our shifting happiness. We walk around with a drink in one hand and a pen in the other. Our minds are locked in a desperate struggle that none of us will ever win. Our accomplishments are lasting, but they are a woeful form of self-worship. The only god we have is our own morbid souls, and our eternity lies in our printed words.

Toward What?

Toward what do we aspire,
Striving higher, higher,
Like smoke from fire?

The great tower looms a thousand stories high,
Its gruesome steel pierces the wounded sky,
And nature feels humanity's gone awry.

Vacant itinerant ghosts flit past,
Their ambition not built to last,
Wandering, wandering inside their caste.

Toward what do we aspire,
Striving higher, higher,
Like smoke from fire?

We merely roam,
Burning with want,
Our faces gaunt,
In our familiar haunts,
But never at home.

Experience Poker

The multiple sides of identity: some are underdeveloped; others overdeveloped. Within the complex and multifaceted chutes of existence, personality sides are strengthened by pure experience while others are left dormant, barren.

The human mind is vast. When you step inside and take the tour, observe the furnished rooms first, widely occupied with their delicate, lived-in fashions, tasteful decadence, peculiar hangings all of which reflect identity. Then, after your protruding eyes have drank their fill, walk through the abandoned wing. Cracks litter the walls; doors hang on broken hinges. Neglect is the sole inhabitant. Never will you find a mind whose rooms are all filled, where sleeping dust does not lie. These empty rooms are unlucky cards in the somber deck, dealt out in the unavoidable game of experience poker.

Let The Insane Blood Flow Freely

I have flown through the corroded veins of insanity, perched on swimming blood cells. I have watched the cholesterol build, and I have worried over hardened clots. My path is swift but brief. Normality is a transparent illusion, wafting away with the slightest breath, leaving alien, indefinable objects glittering newly. The dreamy mind takes control of the wheel, and it shifts gears unpredictably, speeding like a Freudian fugitive through a wailing reality. Fiction thrives and the third-person sense grows into a titan. Inside the insane blood, the red world smiles heroically. Let the insane blood flow freely.

Chocolate Splendour

Oh chocolate soul,

Holiest of holies,
Scintillate my senses,

With your stripped down simple laugh,

Pearly in the heat of want.

Euphorate my downer mind,

Casting new verbiage,

With your black torch firing my tongue.

Praise the substantial swelling in my loins,

Guilty to some,

Innocent to others.

I shirk consequence,

With a death-induced guffaw,

As I consume your energy,

Raw.

Blossoming Skeleton

I never thought I’d live to see,

A skeletal tree blossom,

The idea of rebirth,

Portrayed on its morbid mainframe.

Calling colors emit strange duality,

A living plague torturing death.

Calls to question the selfish stubbornness,

Of mother earth,

Who insists on new life,

In spite of old.

Dripping Faucet

Drips the faucet,

With steady persistence.

Drips the faucet,

In tune with the ticking second hand.

An inane song,

Sung sadly amongst insomniacs.

Unstoppable,

Mindless,

Relentless ,

Is my auditory company.

Drips the strangest enemy,

I have ever known.

The Well-Lived Life

A life well lived is a quick and subtle snake slithering camouflaged through the cloaking reeds. The ruck of men can glimpse its shed skin eagerly discarded on its unseen path, but they never behold the living skin. They use the old and the dead, the spent past, the lowly and the ugly, to imaginatively puzzle the lively and beauteous artistic second, that vivacious and energetic Now. They are tremulous detectives, and they stand by while others innovate, watching and regretting as impulse evaporates into the regretful realm of vicarious wonder. It's the game of detachment, and the only constant is stagnant death. All you need is a tombstone and a telescope to play.

But you who glimpse the vapid reptile do burn and scream in its pleasantly corrupt venom. And your toxic heat is exothermic; it wells from within in waving rivulets. It spreads outward, and some of you trace its eddying path with joie de vivre engraved on your countenance. You who glimpse the vapid reptile know what feeling is. For pain is the birth of happiness, as all true philosophers know. You who glimpse the vapid reptile: take solace in its lasting immortality for you are part of a whole, an alive face in the flourishing family tree...

Taming Love

The maiden confidently conquers the jagged path leading to the dragon’s den. She steps with grace, avoiding crags and pitfalls. She beholds the lair and senses the challenge. Numberless female corpses litter the daunting opening. Yet as she approaches, no fear grips her loins.

Do her female eyes tear when they encounter the dragon’s volatile smoke? Does her heart flutter as she beholds the dragon’s fierce form? Can she douse its reckless flames?

The dragon rises before her, hateful and menacing, threatening maws agape. Its eyes reveal vicious intent; its malicious claws sharp, set, and ready to strike. Lifting its massive head to the skies, it bellows deafeningly.

Before the beast can attack, she unsheathes her magician’s flute and fills the air with the mesmerizing music. The notes float in the decayed den, disturbing the dark, silencing the poised and perched dragon. Its gangrene scales absorb the dichotomous melody and imperceptibly alter. The lizard body sways hypnotically, seasonably controlled, enwrapped in love. Wings shorten, fangs dull, skin waxes fair. The head eerily takes on human features effectively ending its reptilian ferocity.

The song ends. With a rapid jerk she breaks the flute in halves. She keeps one end and hands the other to the newly metamorphosed man who proffers his soft, slender, claw-free hand in thankful acceptance. The two leave the rotting crag arm in arm, bathed in sunrise.

Desert Search

Sand and sun all around. Sand sun-bleached and white as a sheet. The man drags through the resisting land, burning his caked and bleeding feet. His esophagus wheezes particle breezes. His heart pounds like a snare drum. His glum face is set like a rock, mouth firm and mind pondering. What is this man’s purpose out in this cruel, anti-human waste? To where is he wandering? Is he being chased? We must enter his brain in order to ascertain this end. Let us descend with our deductive minds into the corporeal, and nest as unwelcome guests inside his ignorant privacy. Fly with me, readers, in the authorial spirit, and let us solve this disturbing jigsaw. For jigsaw it is, as his mind is delirious and monomaniacally fixed on his own thirst.

“Please for water. Water from an imposter for a curst man. The word ‘man’ fits strangely inside my mind, like a round peg in a square hole. I am immortal, but I live forever waterless. Am I going in circles? Which way is north, and where is my shimmer? I was a star, but I shine no longer. The demon has hidden my shine. He has cast me to this aching desert in the hopes that I will not find and unsheathe my omnipotent rays. I am a stubborn flea tickling the earth’s baldest spot: this vast loveless desert. I feel its heartbeat in my body starting with my feet, shimmering up to my legs, up my waste, through my arms, fingers, fingernails, nostrils, pupils, earlobes, through every vein and cell within my body. And my heart, where is my heart? It is the desert heart, the godless heart, the dry and sandy and coughing heart. The impure heart. The intemperate heart. The barren heart. The pitiful heart. It is the heart that is all fire and flame. My heart is the only bloodless heart under the cursing sun. Its veins are shriveled and burning winds flow through, making horrible whistling sounds on their path to destruction. My heart is the heart of waterless vengeance but will never die for spite. My heart is the heart of pride, and once it learns to pump with health, divinity will tremble. But first my waterless metamorphosis, but first my grueling rebirth, but the first the ongoing search for my stolen shine and its obscure shrine.”

Now back to your seats, lovable readers, and ponder: Who is god?

Hazard Lights

The hazard lights of existence blink hopefully and steadily in the interested air. Their red hues hiss at hardened consciences who speed by with excuses on their brains. The cry for help is a danger to the suspecting nowadays. The polarization of the world is the diseased root. As a result, we live in the wary days. The time of trust has passed. We saw its departing shadow, and we spat. The trace of our scorn lies stained in time’s linear cement. We have only to look down to observe our bubbling shame.

Words of Thought

I curse the culture of destructive habit, but my self-hypnosis renders me reason-free. There's a certain glory in irresponsible actions, but they tend to evaporate self-respect. The world has a way of troubling me, but I am not alone in this worry. It is written in the underlying curvatures of the human figure, stitching together the generalized-but-collective cares within each of us. So spill the salt's grainy probability. But do not toss it over your left shoulder. Let repentence die. Let it lie on the grimy table: a testament to destitution, a symbol of courage, a destruction of superstition. And when the primitive time of trial strikes, cry for second, rage for a minute, then carelessly chuckle at the great Irony. In this wise let your mind grow. I know my words may sound mystical or cryptic. But the words of thought are rarely otherwise when detached from clear experience. So welcome to my town; the town of mirthful mystery. The gates are open, the ramparts bare, and the townsfolk wait for you in the dining hall with flagons of wine and beer. Their smiles are genuine and the celebratory night laughs eternally. Welcome, stranger, and take a rest.