At Eternity's Gate

I came to a clearing at the edge of the woods
Leaving behind me the arboreal blanket
That had mostly shaded and hid me from the sun.

The sun, unrestrained, beat down oppressively
A stifling heat misjudged, catching me unawares
As I, tremulous, gaped at the tremulous scene.

Standing upon the edge I saw, looking ahead
Infinity playing at my periphery
And some distance from the woods I'd only just left.

At first I quite eagerly made my way across
Spurred on by the temptation of exploration
Lost in the hold of fantasies of the unknown.

But I soon grew weary and my footfalls slackened.
Sweat dripped from my brow; I saw my spirit blacken
As I burned beneath the indomitable sun.

Oh, how I wished to turn back knowing I could not
I had gone too far now from that which I once knew
And knew that there was only forward: nothing more.

So I trudged on and after an eternity
That seemed too brief, my quest ended but in its stead
I could only see a different forest ahead.

Commence to Begin

Dear god please grant me sweet nepenthe
As the sinners in outrage cry out “Repent, ye”
“Little of faith, less of heart and soul,”
“What blasphemy you utter, you do not know.”
And yes this began in medias res
If this midlife is my half-life I'm less than blessed
This is where your aimless faith will get you
Unanswerable questions do not beget truth
But this is all a ruse I'm sure you'll see through
Fuck these bitches and let that money accrue
If we're lost when we die I'd rather not cry at rain
This total perspective vortex will destroy your brain.

Yo enough stalling, let's commence to begin
This'll be the first track I say the title in -
And the first I assure you, where I'll be direct
At least more than you should've come to expect
Let's go way back when to when all this shit started
Woke to a gray morning, weak and broken-hearted
Rubbed sleep from my eyes but nothing was there
There's no rest for the wicked or so I hear
But the steely gray sky like life past prime
Belied the warm morning that met me outside
And as I breathed deep I knew the sleepless nights
This illusion of time ends with the sunrise.

We're all like Prometheus – we know too much
And try to steal things that are hot to touch
Each little moment like we're thieves of time
Each day we awake to confront our crimes
But there's no eagle coming for our livers
Just one before whom we'll stand and deliver
So count the hours that you lose to sleep
And count the hours that you lose to people
And count the time that you spend on yourself
Does the weight of your soul slowly tip the scale
Or would the weight of the world borne on your shoulders
Look any lighter to another beholder?

Let me ask you, would that balm in Gilead
Finally conclude this unending Iliad
Or must we traverse mountains and valleys of shadows
To find a Pyrrhic victory in these hollow battles?

Winter Wondering

The ground is covered with crack cocaine,
With the same upon cars' window panes
Yet the streets are black and dull as coal
Look! Modernism and chiaroscuro!

The winds hold softly the dancing frost
To places where they are found or lost.
Entropy in times of stagnation;
References and personification!

This is the start of the end we fear
To die is to have resolved affairs
For living is just like to splinter
Pretensions! This ain't just about winter!

Arboreal

The seedling too small to sway in the wind –
How frail is life when it first begins! –
Will as time flows and it grows and swells,
Hear the tolling of countless funeral bells.

The sapling's first halcyon snows –
A tremulous life in the bone-white glow –
Will, if it braves the bitter chill,
See a time again when all is still.

The flowering tree in the rising sun
Before the harvest has even begun
Knows that the fruit it will come to bear
Can not last long despite its care.

The summers gone and long since passed
Though slow to go never seem to last
And so hearing the end of another season sing
The tree marks off another ring.

It stands amongst the grassy graves,
Roots entrenched against the end of days,
But a stump and rings is all that's left,
They came and went and the tree is dead.

450 Degrees

The wind whispers, how trite it seems,
Broken words through shattered dreams -
Stained glass shards upon concrete -
Who cares if they'll ever be complete?

No more will shine the colored lights
That once was God for proselytes,
And now with no one left to see
Who cares about what we believe?

The scent of ashes: heavy, cloying
Like playful sprites, more than half-toying
Upon these dead and empty streets -
Who cares without hearts to skip a beat?

If any souls looked, flying by,
Upon this beast that's slowly died
Upon the threshold of eternity,
Who'd care for thoughts that none can mete?

Weightless and hollow in an empty world,
Who'd care if all this sand were pearls,
Or who'd care for burning memories,
If the city were razed to plant more trees?

Tique Toque

Spreading shadows cast by a melting hand
Over the blank alabaster face
Briefly darken its pristine countenance.

Softly, the fragile facade obscures
Obscure reminders of potential times
Burying them in the growing night.

Silenced voices grow monotonous,
Overcoming the stifling sounds:
Broken and inevitably entropic beats.

Soon there is no hint of it remaining -
Only a blank intangibility
Bearing heavily down upon me.

Don't Go Swimming With 40 Dollars In Your Trunks

I've never skipped pebbles from the beach
Onto the waves into the sea
For I know that on that final dip
I'll have let more than a pebble slip
Into the timeless waters where
It seems that time is always there.
It never changes but always moves -
We can never find the things we lose.

The shifting sands feel warm with life
Beneath the sun but dead at night
Or when they're scattered and torn apart
As I dig for shells and natural art
And ignore the paintings my fingers make
Of their own accord - but they quickly fade.
By the time I can truly understand
What is lost I have only empty hands.

The waves, the ocean, the sea air
If I were told that they're not there
That I could step off from the sand
And plant my feet upon dry land
I'd head to the horizon and then no more
Then walk myself back to the shore,
And only stop to tie my shoes
Or pick up a pebble that someone threw.

Life is good sometimes.

I decided to clean off my cleats at 12:30. My eyes felt like they were filled with molten lead - burning and heavy as hell at the same time, and the world tilted alarmingly with each step. I opened the door and stepped briefly upon a wet welcome mat before clearing the threshold to my home. I was struck instantly by the brisk night air and a disquieting moist sensation on the sole of my foot. With cleats still dangling weakly from both hands, I breathed deep and felt the night within my lungs for the first time in weeks. I'd forgotten how electrifying the night air could be. I stepped away from my door and loudly clapped the cleats together, dislodging a small clump of dirt. I heard the clap echo through the streets, weaving in and out of the houses and shadows. I was struck then by the incredible beauty that is a tranquil urban setting, and for a while there were no cars to intrude upon my musings. I struck the cleats together again, and heard the sound like a clap of thunder running wild through an empty city. Still no cars.

Diving Board

Stare into the abyss and wave to a philosopher
Don't you know if you disseminate your observations to a gossiper
They will propagate mindlessly the agenda of the void
Slipping in their insecurities like their names collectively were “Freud”?
When did the word of mouth become something other than language
And take on deeper connotations while the literal languished
Are we not just simple animals aspiring to something greater
Are we not just existential crises rebelling against their creator?
But hey lets not get heavy handed with the conceited rhetoric
Pretensions are just pretending that verbosity's a successful shtick
Dive deep into the meanings and ignore the aestheticism of words
It's the shallow end of the pool but you can still drown, ya heard?

You can call me opaque, assert I'm obtuse
I'm just circling and angling to try to get at the truth,
Stretching and skewing before your very eyes
A professional doctored image worth at least a thousand lies
Or a hypocritical oath sworn before an iatraphobic
Court to protect and serve, twisted around a broken rubic's-
Mind-fuck, Necker, abstract and subjective
Cubist insanity but be sure the primary objective
Of the rambling words is to get at your soul
The encultured byproduct when men were first bought and sold
Not just as property but as what made them the fact
Humanity isn't worth much but it's worth more than that.

At Five

My eyes open wide but my body's dead
My mind's alight in my matter's stead
And this stark sobriety from the nascent draft
Is my perception cleared or have I succumbed at last?
Is this the awakened senses of a primal beast
The instinctive struggle to die on my feet
Or am I just insane when my thoughts are clear
No worldly influence to keep me here?
But I see through the gloom that I'm not alone
Another empty soul in an empty home
She's as dead as the grave on a moonless night
Is this what is meant by a “waking life?”
But the grave's at peace I can see, god damn
That's how she is, is this how I always am -
More wasted potential I don't understand
Another byproduct of the ascent of man?

Once again I'm off to the daily grind
How trite, I guess, but I no longer mind
Numbed to the disappointment of reality
Cut off from the fantasies I'll never see.
But I see her smile as I wave good bye
And beneath it all I smile back inside
Thinking how well her Sisyphus bears its load

Incredible. Indescribable. I just. I don't know what to say. It's humanly impossible for me to convey the incredible joy and affection I feel. I can't say enough. And I can't thank you enough. And nothing is enough. You're worth more than the world can offer.

Life's happy pursuits of liberty.

I don't LIKE this.

Her criss-crossed, tangled, fucked up mind
Had failed to leave the past behind
Where it was she couldn't find
And without it she was not alive.

He tried to see with his own eyes
The world as seen by other guys
And completely failed to realize
That he had given up his life.

I worried that with man's demise
He would be forgotten by space and time
But then it hit me that when I died
I would no longer be alive!

A Final Disposition

I saw a Cheshire grin as sweet as sin,
Golden in Glasgow when it first began;
A forced smile wider for a friend
Than lips would part for me again.

I saw a renaissance grin of smug delight
Enlightened by an ephemeral sign;
A worse smile had at my expense
Than I would ever see again.

I saw rapacious grins as black as night
Take to my person like a deadly tide,
Their smiles betrayed their intents, alas
What I saw next was what I saw last:

I saw bullet-teeth in a leaden grin,
Golden halos around a violin,
Or silver coronas like the angels' wings.
And it was a fitting passage to Heaven's end,
More than I would hope to receive again.

Thoughts on science (ignore the TERRIBLE punctuation)

I've recently been reading H.P. Lovecraft and while I've greatly enjoyed the strength of his writing and his imagination with all things horrific, macabre, and science fiction-y, it was not his Cthulhu Mythos – the reason I looked into him in the first place – that most impressed me, nor was it his attempts at writing “scary stories”. The single piece of work in the collection I currently possess (but will not for much longer) that had the profoundest impact upon me is, interestingly enough, one of his least-liked stories by most of his fans: “The Silver Key”. Now, I must admit the actual story itself is not particularly well-written, and the rising action, denouement, and ending truly left quite a bit to be desired, but uncharacteristically I was able to overlook these flaws, their impact mitigated by my identification with the protagonist who, as many have suggested, in based upon Lovecraft himself. This character is described in some length as having once been fascinated with the fanciful and the fantastic, with worlds far beyond the understanding of modern man and with things that, truly, man may never have been meant to know. However as this character grew older and supposedly wiser, he was indoctrinated in the sciences and logic, a process that eventually stripped him of his foreign landscapes and credulity surrounding them, replacing the childlike wonder with half-hearted skepticism. This is a process that many undergo in their lives, and had the story stopped there, I do not think I would have been struck as I had been by the sense of fellowship I felt for the protagonist who's name - which I neglected to mention previously - is Randolph Carter. However Mr. Carter did not strictly adhere to the scientific and worldly mentality, recognizing that the constructs of man were inherently flawed and uncertain, perhaps even more so than fantasy. This is a thought that I've also often entertained, wondering why is it that ancient knowledges that were once so certain have been replaced by sciences which make unfounded assumptions and indeed even expect their subscribers to accept in faith that what has not been discovered eventually will be. I can not, though, say that I am a follower of ancient ways and beliefs, raised as I was on a curriculum of modern-day logic and science, but recognizing the shortcomings of both, I've come to adopt an unskeptical view of antiquity. I maintain that there are things man does not know, and that everything man has discovered can be quite different that what he believes, or simply incorrect. I've often wondered anyone can be sure of the formulae they place so much stock in, or in the truths they believe they've discovered. Newtonian physics were once the accepted norm until Einstein, working patiently for years, shattered those long-held tenets with a radical conceptualization of reality. Then Einstein too was dethroned by radical re-imaginings of quantum mechanics, which created a world of uncertainty and probability and, in Einstein's view, improbability. My point with the very short and extremely incomplete history lesson, is that each time the workings of the world were made anew, the concepts and formulae used were vast departures than those previously held, though they undoubtedly stemmed from their predecessors. How can one be expected to do anything more than take these new developments “with a grain of salt” as it were, understanding as they do that if the foundations are weak, that eventually the entire structure must collapse? I've often wondered how we know that the systems of primitive man are worthy of developing vast empires of knowledge upon. Another thought that worries me is the homogenization of knowledge and scientific pursuit. True there are many conflicting views and beliefs, but none of them deviate from the accepted views of the world. There are none that are truly revolutionary, simply derivative-yet-dissenting. In the end though, I am forced to admit that while I have entertained these notions, they do not trouble me very much. Arithmetic may be wrong, and the entire foundation of mathematics be full of incredible holes as a result, but what of it? If two and two does not equal four, what does it matter? If logic and the like are false, what would change? They suit our needs and in our current lives major upheavals in knowledge may not be met with much personal change or indeed much gravity. The point is, regardless of whether or not microphysics is based upon a dice roll, life still prevails and no one would be duly concerned. How many of us notice the effects of the machinations of atoms? How many of us are worried about the location of electrons? It may affect us, but what can we truly do about it? And if we could tamper with it, would we want to? In the end, the questions that Randolph Carter reminded me of were all answered simply with: It doesn't matter if the world is run by science or magic, because in the end there isn't much differentiating between the two and so why worry?

P.s. I would like to clarify that I am not advocating apathy or disinterest, simply suggesting that man should not be so jaded in his beliefs. Nothing is certain, nothing is concrete, but that should not cause undue worry. Life prevails, does it not?

Moths to the Light

For each brave astronaut,
Each intrepid explorer of unknown realms
That dares trespass where none have before -
Into the blinding light of knowledge
To flutter fitfully before enlightenment,
Then lie exhausted and wary -
But not defeated,
I notch a roll of newspaper
With the dusty smear of broken wings.

More Weight

Sunlight plays into my waiting pupils -
A school of eyes blank, unseeing, open wide,
Receiving a tender caress and a warm embrace.

The lingering miasma soon dissipates;
The sun is left to beat a tattoo on a blank board,
Stifling without the comfort of the shade.

Shielding my eyes from the glare,
I traverse vibrant desert places,
Seeking shadows and knowing
That if the day does not kill me, the night will.

This Still Life is Electrifying

Crazed scribblings of rotten minds
Dance across a porcelain canvas,
Dripping venom from tarantella footwork.

I ask the primordial brew for entrance,
Exhilarated by the nascent cosmos
My mind is taken to pieces by the darkness.

Shadows being devoured by shadows
Flare novas before a tremulous stage,
Shunning allegory in stark colors - contrasts.

I send my soul out from a hollow shell
Feeling its ascent into the world,
Leaving its insane dreams behind.

Ephemeral jaws fleck the cosmos -
I see the flash of rabid organs detonating like depth charges;
This still-life is electrifying.

Men die as the army
Soldiers on, stoic
As the holocaust dies down.
Excited by the flames of victory,
It marshalls its
Obliterated limbs,
Ignoring the knowledge that
By tomorrow its life,
Limbs and excitement and all,
Shall be spent.

WIP: 99% completed (Revisions Possible)

Watch the clockwork losing time
On gears of glass and teeth of light.
Worn smooth by their consistent grind
Scarce can they catch a brief respite.

Watch the machine's unending dance -
A mesmerizing, unsteady affair.
Its peculiar, almost arrhythmic romance
Turns slowly upon the autumn air.

Watch the gears grind on with dread
As the facade eventually shatters.
Its final act before its dead:
Its immaculate innards scattered.

Watch the hands grow limp and and cold:
As its face reflects the world no more,
And though a clock will cease to toll
Time continues moving forward.

Narrow Streets of Cobblestone

Our progress on a narrow road
Is patient with nowhere to go,
And though the earth quakes at our feet
(Just cobbled stone and not concrete)
The path we walk will never yield
Its treasures for our hands to steal.

Believe me now, you can not leave;
There is no stopping or reprieve,
No going back to times before
There's only forward, nothing more,
And though you twist your neck to see
There's nothing out there you can reach.

Now ev'ryone we know is dead;
The only path we knew to tread
Led us astray into the night
Can you imagine what that's like?
We only have a single way
And it's just leading to our graves.

Well still walk on, we'll soon be there
Beyond all time, beyond the years
Beyond the coming end you fear,
When even nothing's disappeared,
For there you'll see the one-way road
May have a better place to go.

"I wouldn't call it a song" of Myself.

I’ve a father like a broken record
A dusty vinyl to a needle
He keeps repeating himself on and on again
As he gets old and it gets old.

I’ve a mother who I can’t really say
I know well enough to love
But I love her more than I love my dad
Who I know even less.

I’ve a brother who I wanted to be
For reasons I never knew
But I grew older and more cynical
And he grew more human every time I saw him.

I've friends who I know I don't deserve
But who don't know who I am
Because I'm different around each of them
And they're all different around me.

I’ve a mind that’s warmer than it seems
And cloudy as an autumn day
As the wind blows I grow colder
And catch people unawares.

And this mind of mine asks questions
To which no answers can be found,
But the funny thing is, it seems to me
I never ask questions about myself.

Mother

The sun and earth waltz round and round
The size of earth goes down and down
Until our mother, breathing hard,
Is flatter than a playing card,
With the sun still going round and round.

In the darkest night where horrors lie
We dream of what it is to die
And what it’s like to fall and fall –
Our mother can’t be seen at all
To whisper to us soothing lies.

But where are we falling if not to Earth
For Hell is not our place of birth
And our father lost in paradise
From where we are is cold as ice
So who will catch us if not the Earth?

All Men are the Same

Dead men tell no tales they say;
They’re silent as the grave.
But it's the funeral bells in the depths of hell
That drown their voices with each beck and knell.

It’s said that no man listens well
They’d rather tell than hear a spell
But one man would listen and he’d heard it all:
He heard the voices on the wind in the fall.

They came from far to come and call
The hale would walk and the butchered crawled
They came and went to beg for aid
From a man too kind to turn his heart away.

He helped thousands but they did not fade
Their voices shook him night and day
But he saw within them men in need -
Their sorrow unending ‘til their souls were freed.

He closed his eyes and in his dreams
He heard their pain and saw their screams
They could not rest and they could not sleep -
Until his quest was over, nor could he.

The voices rose to a cacophony
And he found HIMSELF yearning to be free
Free from the spirits who like a spider’s thread
Trapped him, enslaved him, in their stead.

They would find him later in his bed
A message written could be read:
“They would not rest until I bled,”
“All men are the same,” it said,
Even when they’re dead.”

Apples to Oranges

They cut the grove -
My garden of Gethsemane
where I planted my apple trees,
And watched them grow.

I can still see them reaching out
From severed stumps;
They strain then slump.
Like hands - their trunks, fingers – their sprouts.

I watched them die,
Wither like flowers and decay;
Bursting in the heat of the day -
the apples of my eye.

An eye for an eye
Leaves the whole world blind
and so I was told,
To grow oranges next time.

Erosion Poem (Take Two)

They spoke of a split near the end of a road
With two distinct paths to where no men dare go:
There’s one bathed in shadows while the other drinks light
One cursed by the sun while the other by night.

They say one holds nothing while the other holds all
One road to the void and one road to the sprawl.
They say one is blinding, but the other one blinds -
These roads I desired and swore I must find.

I encountered a stone when my quest first began
Worn smooth by the ages in an unchanging land –
Where the sun scorched the earth with its infinite faces,
And the moon stood alone over those cold desert places.

With the sand long behind me I came to a dale
Cut deep from an ancient and mountainous veil
By men I first thought, but I soon saw the truth:
‘Twas carved by the rivers of the Fountain of Youth.

And I found that these rivers led to a shore
Where once there was life but now lives no more
For the land had long fallen away to the sea
And the sea was left barren by unforgiving debris.

I thought of the stone that was once jagged now smoothed
And I thought of the valley whose life had been soothed
By the rivers that fed into a dead sea
And thought how complex the simple could be.

But at long last I came to stand at the path,
That diverged and became the first and the last,
They’re said to be opposites, but differed in none -
The division: eroded, and two roads became one.

it's still rough, but i may decide not to edit it simply because editing shit usually goes downhill for me.

Erosion Poem (Take One)

Endless shifting sands of night,
The sky unmarred
By the intrusion of stars,
Mirroring the still-life
And forever-dead,
Of the world beneath.
The wind is biting and dry;
A bitter cold that cuts anew,
But subtly as not to numb
And not too quickly kill.
A sand-blasted rock stands,
Worn smooth to the touch,
A queer venture into the world
By something a great deal more complex,
And a great deal more simple.
Give it the ages gone by and it too like the sky,
Shall return to a nothingness unmarred,
By the intrusion of the stars.

The Invisible Man

He sees nothing he should not see
And thinks nothing he should not think
And is nothing he should not be.

He’s trivial in every way
The layman’s layman’s everyman;
The face forgotten every day.

And this man is queer for you will find
He’s both invisible and blind.

Literal-Minded

Lo! In the sky you see the bear
And sisters Zorya in perpetual fear,
Or a menagerie from old and far
But as for me I just see stars.

Look at the inkblots upon the page,
Is it a wineglass or is it a sage?
Do you see memories of your past?
For I just see a black-white contrast.

And the seasons who are ever long,
Do you see them or Demeter’s mournful song?
For all I see is rain and snow
And sometimes Apollo’s golden glow.

How It's Made

Imagine I wrote a piece of prose
And not knowing how it would go
Sliced everything-
The sentences apart
Just for the sake of flow.

Imagine I then took that prose
And innocently enough at first
Switched the wording
To be less direct
And placed it into verse.

Then imagine I called it a poem
And I was as proud as I could be
To have been for once a poet
And to have created poetry.

The Land of the Free

They asked what was America
And what it means to be an American
And fed up with history and philosophy
I told them I had no idea, nobody did
And so they asked me then are you proud
Proud to be an American?
And I told them my parents were Chinese
And so am I it appears,
The son of unromantic immigrants,
And no one calls me American
But I’m called Chinese a lot.
And they said You’ve got to be an American
You were born here right?
And I told them, no longer fed up
With history and philosophy
What they already knew
That America was a land of immigrants
And that while people see me and say “Chinese”
And see Jews and say “Jew”
No one looks at the German-Irish-British-Scandinavian-Italian-Pole
As anything but American,
But hell
The blacks are still called Blacks
And African-American.
American simply means
That’s where you were born
Or that’s where you’re living.
American doesn’t mean who you are.
So I’m proud to be an American I guess
Or I’m proud to be where I’m living in America
Where the housing rates are steady
And the people are good
But I’m not proud of who I am
And no one should be
Because who you are is made by other people.
And the people who asked me about America
Gave me a funny look
And all walked away
But the last thing they said was
“Fuckin’ chinks don’t know what it means to be patriotic”
And I guess they were right.

Recycled Relics

Believe me they will find Excalibur
Or even the Honjo Masamune
But when they find it they will say
“You get don’t metal like this these days”
And they’ll melt it down for scraps.

They’ll one day find Christ’s crucifix
And cut pieces from the cross
For the wood is holy and not much is lost.
And they will recycle whatever they can
But the rest they’ll toss.

They will cut down the trees at Gethsemane
And at every other sacred grove
For the trees all filled with the people's love
Will make more books and Starbucks trays
Than the Amazon.

And at the end, when the treasures are all gone
All the recycled paper all up in flames
They will burn the countries and they will burn the land
They will burn the states, the constructs of man
They will burn the buildings and they will burn the cities;
They will burn the cities down to plant more trees.

Fucking ENGLISH Major, Man

Who IS this talentless four-eyed fuck
Whose words flitter listlessly upon a page
And who without his Pulitzer prize sized crutch
Would never deserve to take a stage?

Who IS this burned-out druggie cunt
This gonzo-douchebag piece of shit
Who writes between hard-hitting blunts
As if sobriety is holding back your wits?

And who IS this raving lunatic
If not just a wino with a pen
Who thinks that keeping just one shtick
Will win him a fucking prize again?

Who ARE these arrogant pissant sods
Who think they’re witty when they’re just verbose
And worship none but themselves as gods
And suck equally in verse and prose?

They’re nothing special, just worn out hacks
Running on empty and weed and crack
Who somehow make the words seem more
Than overplayed, overused, overestimated WHORES.

Head Into the Light

It was a darkness unlike any darkness
Any darkness ever seen before,
For it was complete and in its starkness
In its starkness there was nothing more.

I was swept and drowned in colossal waves
Waves that would never crest before the shore
That lay where there was only me
Only me with nothing to wage war.

I could see naught and I could feel naught
Not even a soul within my core,
For the darkness had spread within myself
And within myself it spent my ore.

Though I was blind I heard the silence
The silence that grew to become a roar,
Which would take my body away from me
And from me would grow to spread and soar.

I knew nothing then and it knew me
Knew me more than I had known before
So that I was nothing in its heart
And it was nothing I would abhor.

I saw a flicker and knew myself
Awakened by some force of yore
That bade me head into the light
So that I may not suffer anymore.

But the light was blinding; the contrast too stark
So I turned and sought refuge in the dark.

:Inspired by the flash game Closure.

Bzzzz!

In a blur it strikes
A tiny blight
Upon a dozing giant.

Wake, you fool,
For fate is cruel
And you shan’t be defiant.

It drinks your blood
And steals your love
Are you to be compliant?

It’s kill or die
Before the mosquito bite
*Something that rhymes with giant*

more or less intended to be humorous. it's kinda late and i don't write well unless i've been clean for at least a few days

_EZ

You’ve been
Here before it’s
Nothing you’ve never seen but
Somehow
It’s still different now.

It sounds
Weird - more hollow
Just one speaker
Playing music
The other’s
Dead and silent.

All so
Distant and yet
As you’re fading in and
Out it
Snaps you back to life.

Open
Your eyes the wider
You’ll see
Nothing that you
Thought that you would
See.

Keep on
Reading your book
The other
World will just look
More real than this
Life you’re living
Now.

Do things
Work the way you think or
Do they all know
Something
You’ll never figure out?

Fever Pitch

Waves dancing over
Crashing slower
Oceans burble in
White noise circles
Droplets like white
Tidal waves might
Burn like fires
For drowning pyres.

Smolder, flaming,
Sulfur’s raining
Burning on edge
Water looks red
Lights so abstract
God in all black
Let the world die
The end is nigh.

Pulsing, shaking,
Throbbing, quaking,
The earth moves slightly
We die nightly
Nothing more and
Nothing at hand
Nothing less for
Them to cry for
Nothing in store
After this war.

Where’s your rapture
Christ is captured
Your cathedral of lights
Is just a blight
Sacrilege like claiming God’s touch
In your soul like you need a crutch
Descend into chaos and order
Fuck the blind-sight on the border
Look in hindsight, just a quarter
Of what we are lost as mortar.

On and on it just gets longer
Growing weaker, never stronger,
More complex with less to say but
We’ve become more afraid of what?
Life moves and nothing changes
Life moves on and we’ll be strangers
The metronome is off beat but we’ll
Finger frets and still turn that wheel
‘Til the day when it all ends and
We’ll be left without our dry land.

Break down
No ground
Clover’s
Over
Luck of
Above
No more
No love.

Single Serving Life

One tree
Surrounded by ashes
Its leaves flutter
On the warm spring wind.

A wolf
Howling at the full moon
Memories it will
Never understand.

A boy
Crying in a park
He doesn’t know
Who he’s waiting for.

Cities
Full of cars and buildings
Where nothing stirs
And there’s no life at all.

One world
Surrounded on all sides
The infinite of space and
Yet it’s all alone.

Deus Ex Omnis

I know of god in every paradox
Every lie that becomes the truth
Every evil from Pandora’s box
Existing to be good.

I feel god in the frigid air
Of a warm spring’s eve
It’s perfect scent, as I stand there,
Is chilling and killing me.

I see god in my city sprawled
Lain out before my eyes
Above the chaos, above the brawl,
I see no order in its life.

Within the calm I see the storm
Of my ambiguous, faithless thoughts,
In their struggle to be born
I know and see and feel my god.

A Happy Painting

Your life’s a picture
A pastel painting; a fixture
On an empty wall
Next to nothing at all.
So picturesque it’s
Perfect in every way
And time won’t mar you
Won’t burn and scar you
Just leave you hanging alone.

An empty museum
With just one exhibit
You have it all
To roam the halls
Late at night when you’re alone.
Day breaks; no one ever comes
Why would they?
What do you have to say?

A happy painting has no appeal
A happy painting isn’t real.

Time is leaving you behind as
You grow old it’ll just get worse:
It’s been too good
Far too good for the likes of you.
Nowhere to go, to run away to
The paint, as it’s dying it cracks.
Perfection rarely ever lasts
So end it, end it all before you,
Lose control; you’ve peaked
There’s nowhere left to go.

End it, end it all now
You can only go down.

Iatrophobia

How do you tell a doctor that
You don’t care if you live or you die?
How do you tell someone
So afraid of death, who’s purpose is
Just to prolong lives
That longevity is not the driving force
Behind what you do
That living longer is not why you do it.

How do you tell a doctor that
You disagree with what they do
That they’re just playing god
Deciding what’s good for you
And tampering with nature
And tempering your free will,
How do you tell someone so hell-bent on doing good
That what they’re doing is bad?

How do you tell a doctor that
They’re arrogance goes beyond
Pride of a job well done,
Pride for their charity and altruism,
That they now lack the most fundamental
Human feelings, that they see us
As no more than their quarry.
How do you tell someone, anyone,
That they are evil, obsolete, mindless,
Pointless?

More importantly,
Will you believe it?
When you are sick and dying
And pain wracks your body
Will you give in and make amends?
Or will you just let it run its course
Knowing that if its time
Then it is time
And you won’t let no damn
Hindu in a lab coat
Be your god.

One World

One event seen twenty times
Is twenty memories in twenty minds
Of things not happening the way that they say
Cuz half of them weren’t there anyways.

It was misrecollected and blown out of proportion
A victim of their cerebral distortion
Reality warped whether they knew it or not
Folded and molded to fit their own thoughts.

The world breaks down and their heads reassemble
The fragmented bits until it resembles
A semblance of the world that they knew
With tiny touches they each misconstrue.

They say frame of reference or personal preference
Cautious and trite, it’s done out of deference,
Too wary to doubt that it happened that way,
Even though you can't trust the things that they say.

Of World Eating God Whales

Logic tells you that everything was made by something else, and for the most part that has been true. But because of the way we are structured, because of the way our lives work, we can never understand that some things, inexplicable and ancient, were never made, and just WERE. Long before atoms and energy and things like that, there was something else. And there was nothing before that. I don’t mean to say that the “something else” appeared out of nothing, I literally mean that there was nothing before it, that the concept of “before” does not apply here. What I mean is that this “something else” always has, and always will exist. It’s not God or gods, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, it’s so ANCIENT that nothing really knows what it is. It’s just one of the THINGS of life, undeniable, unquestionable, and unperceivable.

Earth was not one of those italicized THINGS of life. In fact, Earth was tiny and completely insignificant by comparison, and though no one living there would agree, its inhabitants were too. But they thought they were important. They feared their own deaths as the loss of something great, not knowing that once they died they will have always been dead, and would have been in no condition to ponder the implications of such a concept. Once the World-Eating-God-Whale had eaten the planet and all its inhabitants, it had always been eaten and would never be missed or seen again, at least until the God-Whale felt the need to expel waste, as all living creatures must.

It was a hard concept to grasp, that the invariable “truths” of the universe found after eons of development did not apply to the universe at all, but only to the miniscule microcosm of the finders’ existences. Basically, what I mean is that the way things work in one planet doesn’t work the same way on all others. There are planets where energy can be created and destroyed, just as there are flat planets orbited by suns. Like I said, it was a hard thing to understand, that nothing was under your control and that you really didn’t know anything at all. It was particularly hard for the people of Earth, because we were, if nothing else, immensely proud of what we knew. So proud, in fact, that mere moments before the W-E-G-W devoured the planet and killed everyone on it, the greatest minds alive were all joined together in an attempt to disprove the God-Whale existence. Imagine their shock then, when they found themselves slowly and painfully being digested by WHAT WAS NOT THERE.

I know what you’re thinking, all of it, and I’ll address the questions one by one. The first question you have is, “Why was this quaint little planet destroyed?” Well let me explain. The God-Whale was hungry. That’s it. On earth we had two abstract concepts known as Good and Evil. I expect you people also have similar concepts. Well the God-Whale is not evil, far from it in fact. Evil requires a sentience and a distinct knowledge of “Goodness”, both of which it lacks. There was no malicious intent in the eating, and once the world had been eaten, nothing was thought of it. These things just happen. The second question you have is, of course, “Who is this doing all the talking?” Well, I am an earthling, and the only one to escape death. It may seem to almost be a betrayal of my kind, surviving while everyone else dies, but I say in mitigation that it would have been impossible to save anyone and that trying to do so would have resulted in failure to save myself.

Addiction

Smokey spirals
The smell is viral
It has you once
And you can’t let go

It’s what you know
You’ve been brung low
You hate the bitch
But you can’t let go.

In blinking cursors
The time grows worser
Where’s relief
When you can’t write?

It’s not coming to light,
It’s a sad, sad sight,
‘Cuz you were prolific
But now you can’t write.

Imagine cliffs
And Mafia stiffs
You’ve done it all
And it was better before.

Your ideas are poor
And you're not getting any more
So you recycle the old stuff
But it was better before.

The cycle is vicious
But oh-so delicious
Like another cigarette
After failing to quit.

Sometimes it’s just shit
At least you wrote for a bit
Even though you told yourself
That you’d try to quit.

What you couldn’t say
For days and days
You put it all together
On one single page.

Cuz you’re so happy and gay
That the block went away
You forget it’s just temporary
And fill up the page.

You lose some stuff
Some ideas are gone
And the end result
You feel is just wrong

But whatever you know?
It’s real at heart
And that’s all that matters
When you suck at your art.