In the dark alcoves of the desolate world, there are stories left lonesome and festering. The ink sepulchre exists to house these dreadful tales and provide them with proper accomodation, because even the most putrid things deserve a home.
You never found the postcard
Taped under your makeup drawer
Stuck within the crawlspace
The foundation of your thoughts.
When they tear down those flimsy walls
Upend the refrigerator, pooling sour milk
The bandits and the buzzards
Could never even touch me.
My tomb will last for eons
Though that’s not your concern
My cheap indigo ink withstands
For I will soon stain your eyes.
Has this ever happened to you?
Jesus, what is that—
Forty billion years ago
There has to be a better way!
Just continue respiration
Buy Now!
Oxidise your rusty chassis
Please listen carefully:
Call now for special offer
I can’t feel my lungs—
Say that to my face!
Two for one man
It’s like fire
The man who can poisons
I’m not plugged in
Easy girl
My red tubes are twisted up
Before a live studio audience.
What love can burn
Those broad wildflowers tar
Drip to fuel the flames
Unrelenting
Petals spin updraft ‘til
Rancid fingers press down
On ‘play.’
Is it not bizarre
How you speak my name?
Like rotting meat
Human nature’s a shame.
Practice your smile
In the mirror next time.
Feast on the bounties
Celebration of crime.
That ‘thing’ was love
Seen stalking fields of corn
Her gut distended
Ever hungry for more
Let reason fall away
Turn over in the salt
Cured to perfection.
It’s time that we talk.
Your sink sings brackish water chunks
Boil chicken bones with stones to taste
The tufts of hair from battered cats
You chase the high or face the stake;
Dumb prattle peppers bitter stew
Your nape I grab to sate the tape
Feed me—
Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
Yearning to breathe free the wretched
Refuse of your terse, squirming shore
Compelled to fetch the scraps that fly
So freedom bare and naked hate;
You pry the floorboards free of pity
Feed me—
Silence so dense with fat it stings
And dances like stupid bumble bees
Across ceilings of steel flowers
Practical meat of luncheon glaze;
Drip-drop-drip-drop from ugly jowls,
Maybe just greasy brown bilge pipes
Feed me—
The stuck fatberg of peace disturbed
Too succulent, yet you ignore;
Portend and sail towards the tooth
You bore downward with such delight
And my new maw is taut and terrible
Grows slight while you just fatten up
Feed me—
That sweet morsel of simmering cement,
The eyes are bigger than my stomach.
There was once a bandit. There was once a knife. There was once an Axle. The world kept spinning. The bandit stuck the knife into the Axle. The coach faltered. The lady cried out. The world kept spinning. The lady spat her tooth on the ground. The bandit ground her horses into glue. The coach was rotting. The world kept spinning. There was once a lady. The lady had the knife. She spun the Axle and broke his bones on the wheel. The bandit looked upon a barren white mask. He could smell the roses. The world kept spinning. Those horses still breathe. The bandit saw through his window. He drew the knife. His white flesh lay in dry strips. The world kept spinning. The Axle is part of a great machine. It has no memory as it turns forever. Salt water seeps through the hull. Roses bloom as it grinds and rattles. The world kept spinning. The bandit is blind. He reaches for his eyes, only to find that he has no hands. He wants to call for help, but he has no mouth to open. He doesn’t breathe air anymore. The world kept spinning. The lady laughs. After millenia, she once again dons her mask. Her grasp on the knife is steadfast. She sticks it in the coaches’ joints. The world kept spinning. The Axle clenched its fingers. The Axle felt the cold air sting its new lungs. The Axle had eyes to see. Those eyes close in on the knife. The world kept spinning. The horses spread their wings and siphon the bandit through their proboscis. The Axle feels nothing. The Axle stands up in search of its query. Fingers lilting on the hilt of the lady. The world kept spinning. The Axle stomps on the rose. The Axle can see through the Bandit. The Bandit stuck the knife into the axle. The world fell from its perch.
There was once an axle. There was once a knife. There was once a Bandit.
His blithe runneth over on penchants of Kael
Buttery sermons read “glottis” thru ale
Dies Irae croons low in Sophocles’ tune
Picking his eyeballs out with a spoon.
Death of the author and buyer’s remorse
Frustrated galleon correcting its course
Brandishing dahlias and relapsing lyres
Portend a lady of scorching white fires.
‘Tis Nobody, and who could you be?
Ballast and sonnets drown out the plea
An iamb, a trochee, a haiku to boot
Geisel laments his clormataphone chute.
The critic prowl symphony draws to a close
Pack the tents up while clutching your nose
Turpentine pillows should fill up the cairn
Google for words and come up with “bairn.”
Remember the theory descriptive of craft
Not just a means to sort out the daft
All must decipher those matters of heart
This was a poem on the subject of art.
I see the space within the wall
Exceeds the breadth of stalwart homes,
And yet your breath can breach the pall.
Those eyes succeed the echoes call,
My other must have read the tomes,
The jump from bed’s a mighty fall.
The mortar sticks where letters crawl,
I fear the pain that steams and foams
This world of glass will cast my awl.
My love can only strike the hall
Of your self-construct catacomb,
What claws of stone might yearn to maul?
My flesh lies beneath teledrome,
Those eyes succeed the echoes call,
The veins distend and crawl to Rome,
This world of glass will cast my awl.
They found her there, you know—
She drowned in pig’s
Black blood at the bottom
Bottom of a metal bucket
She drowned with the
Pork shanks and feet
Engorged and just half-formed
Unloved, she was an un-
Wanted, putrid mistake
Name “Christopher”
A misnomer
A pathetic cancer
Unripe and low-
Hanging
Given to love
“Welcome my son”
Pale miscarriage machine
Machine daughter
Carried her dead sister
Through no man’s
Land of candlelight
And spoke of the murder
In the dark,
Despite the pain
The deep red hate
The only one who cried
“Goodnight, my sweet bastard”
Before the last of her
Circled through matted
Hair, and all went
Down the drain.
Today I’m born on the third rail,
Burnin’ like a neon back light.
The spark and smoke of my revival
Shall send the sun back into night.
Come laugh with me through gargled teeth,
And virgin eyes dethorned with sight.
Where carcass sleeps below the street,
Amuse yourself in shallow fright.
That searin’ sound is my red eye,
You catch my stomach on the freight.
Just singin’ tunes of bones and marrow,
The cruel hunger that holes can sate.
Ready the pistons, stoke the tears
Now lever up and down the slate.
Such roarin’ coal and flamin’ tongue
I seal the human up too late.
What can I say? I salivate
Those thoughts compare to future trail.
For the picture of apocalypse
Only ever so big to fail.
Then grip the rope and hold on tight
Some spout of salt to kill the snail.
What fun it is to have my blues
Today I’m born on the third rail.
The Artist wrote about a woman in a secluded home;
the woman spun genre fiction until she herself
was faced with a choice: Embrace the unnatural
or court it indefinitely. Whatever choice the
woman made, the Artist must make the opposite.
The Artist is not allowed to know the outcome
until she herself records it. For the sake of
argument, let us say that the woman leaves her
empty house and ventures into the woods. The Artist
fears the woods and hungers for her pages,
so it is a perfect destination for the woman.
there is a witch in the woods the woman
discovers, a witch made of pulp and a hard
metal spine. The witch sits alone and scrawls on
herself with ink that spills from the tap of an
ancient sycamore. The witch spells on her breast
about the Artist that wrote about a woman in
a secluded home; A woman that saw the witch
here before her, solipsistic in a world of
plant fibers. The woman asks the witch if she can
borrow her pen, and the witch nods because
she did not write herself to have a house, or a
will, or a mouth. The woman cradles the witch’s
head and writes there “Parable of The Artist
Living Through Her Work.” The Artist lifts her
pen from the page and looks around the secluded
home where she chose to stay; Or, perhaps it
is the woman that looks around now that the
Artist has taken up the practice of witchcraft.
The Artist must live with her choice, though it
was not her that made it. There is no house.
There are no woods. There is no witch. There is just
an Artist, a woman, and the page that she lives on.
A page—