Tag Archives: hijackedamygdala

life, poetry, prosetry

Easy is the slip to nothing

Some have too little love

Like hunger they scrape and search

Pealing the skin from their fingers in want

Looking until emptiness becomes full

For just a glimmer of compassion

The thing marking human

Quick to turn to hate

Like a fickle madness

Or held diving breath

So alive and quickening

A carefully guarded amber flame

Proof of life

For if cold, we are surely dead

Dormant to feeling

Impervious and keening

Easy is the greased slip to nothing

Feelings a weary bead counter

Chanted prayers, wishes forging hope

Touch, warmth, caressing tangible

Not remote

We were not made to stand alone

Though if you set your mind

On climbing chalky cliff side

Be sure there is purpose

For some are made of granite

They release radium

And the unmoving possession of their heart

Is surely worse than never knowing

The hot dulcent murmur

Of poison with purpose

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life, poetry, prosetry, Uncategorized

Going home

Old and new

Play

Like friends who never liked each other

Standing here, I could be there

Laughing, lolling about Route 66

Your hair wax stained cowboy hat on the table

The clink of sweating beer bottles

I always did better striving than living

Being a pretend person, now . . don’t knock it

Has some draw

…

We laughed out of fear and the fear felt good

Like real life and grabbing things by beaded throat

We roared our mirth like tigers, at the absurdity and the sorrowful

It reminded me of my grandmother’s funeral

My dad and I weeping with hot besmerched giggles

She would have understood, she would have joined in

that Katherine Hepburn smile, and the outline of something sad

That’s just how this family rolls

We laugh when tragedy feels crushing and put reality on hold

A frozen picture on TV, static and unspoken

…

When the wake is over and everyone has left their condolences

In a nice row

Searching for your people

Coming up empty handed

Just as I thought I couldn’t give more away

You call me out of the blue

A stranger sharing my last name

Funny how life takes and takes

And then it gives

Like a hand on your shoulder

When you’re thinking of jumping

…

The both of you grew thin

I put on all your weight, inherited the space

Given away by years and wrinkles

You said; Now heed me young lady

You’re standing in for us now

Do a fine job and I saw in the line and curve of your jaw

The man you were, the man you were not anymore

Strangers and bloodlines, all running together

…

Now you’re both gone

I’m relieved and itchy under the skin with the lie

Pretended so long

I don’t know how to be, whatever I am

We were a tribe the three of us

Now I’m starting over

In my own land again

A stranger

Of familiar, unknown places wearing unreadable clothes

Sharing my bed with regrets and hope

Like nothing and everything has changed

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life, poetry, prosetry, Uncategorized

Exhaling grief

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

If you made a sound

This is the sound you would make

exhaling grief

Mauve in color

Straining to speak

What do you say?

Sitting at the family table

All my ghosts

In carried repose

And the new

Who replaces you

Has no power to stake

Your claim

On me

Because I am

Watered by indifference and throwaway cruelty

Fed on your critique

It is your bed – I like in to sleep

Integrating nightmares

Your brand of survival

So sore and foreign to mine

If you made a sound

Would it be a crow

Or a blackbird

At night when birds used to sleep

And now

Wary of rasping day

They call out

To their unseen maker

As I suppose

I call out to you

As I suppose

You hear and

Disregard

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Uncategorized

The purity of being adored or an ode to narcissism

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When the person you lie awake thinking about

is you

and you

are untouchable

you emanate an aura of inviolate

there is space around you in a crowd

despite your size you take up

all the oxygen in my brain

I think bad thoughts

I look at places I should not

in this I am

a typical, leering, shameful creature

you are a magnet

you repel those who don’t understand

and attract the rest of us

like mad things and late summer insects

we stick to you and you peel us off

disgusted by our lack of self-control

I wonder sometimes, what it must be like

to have that brand of intoxicate

what exactly you possess, that causes such insanity?

I try to pin it down like examining butterfly’s beneath glass

but you are immeasurable, in your strange beauty and your

angry wet licked lips

I think maybe it is not one thing

but an entirety, the perfume of you

something wordless and powerful

you scare me and nobody scares me

but I know if you wanted me to

I’d kneel

I’d bend to you

and I, am not in the habit of subjugation

or giving in without getting

when you stomp, the world quakes and we fall

it’s funny and it’s quixotic

how perhaps your greatest allurement

is that you want none of us

but the purity of being adored

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life, poetry, prosetry

Glinting yet unswept

jump

you and I

were never meant to age

or get sick

or fall apart like a moth will when you

touch its wings, rub off the magic

you and I

were supposed sway in the assurance

of that hot gaze we both had

it was as if the world were stopped

on its axil and only we two remained

entwined around the other like long grown ivy

from the first moment it was that way

affixed by some kind of telepathy where

even as the storm attempted to separate

we always came back

like magnets repelled and attracted

will find their centering

when I looked up

you were my first thought

in every aspect of life

I lived with you

to imagine this has shattered like a glass

unable to be mended, leaves behind shards of itself

glinting yet unswept

to prick the foot of unsteady walker

a reminder of what is fractured

what cannot be saved

I never thought it possible, to rinse you from my heart

or that I could truly exist without you

hinging my world

but there are some violences

there are some moments too ruined

and my shame in not knowing earlier

how long you had given me up

that undo even the strongest bond

so now, when I feel alone

I do not find myself yearning for you

when I wish to be touched

it is not you I imagine or want

when I cry over us

it is not with a full heart

or even bitterness

but something cold and twisted

that cannot quite remember feeling

it has done the unimaginable

and stopped calling out for you

(One Promise

when you had spent

eight life times and

nine nights

ten turns of moon

one promise

convincing me I was

yours

to want to throw myself

off the bridge we often walked

when your eyes told me

you had given up

was it presumptuous

when you had spent

all my life and half of yours

teaching me love

and its poetry

only to decide when something died

and kill it

headless and bleeding

there in the street

where pointing

people gaped and wondered

who is that girl

climbing the rail?

where is she going?

there she falls)

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poetry

Savage Dance

The scythe told me

Your depression is a choice and a weakness

If you are a writer there are no excuses only

Discipline

The scythe is a girl who has long been a cruel woman

She judges me worse than I judge myself

Her reason lies in anger

Not the rumpled clothes sort

The burning brand of not getting what she feels entitled to

And that is me

I have told her

But she holds me close and afar and plays me with her passive aggression

I am not able to exit the game

Though it exhausts me and is

A sharp tasting whip

Sometimes it feels like

She captains my life and I am a boat

Continually drowned by stormy seas

People would say

It’s easy … just break the chains

Walk away

Tell her to go hang

Lose my number

Go fuck yourself

But I can’t do it

I have a matchbook heart

Strike me once

And I’m in it for the long haul

The perfect patsy

A groveling bullseye

It only reinforces a sense of self hate

Which she stirs with bolognese

Sadists are usually unaware

Of how much they practice their art

In every card game

She pinches, pushes and pulls

I am a lopsided puppet

The times I tried to

Go it alone

Ended badly

Sometimes the Devil

Is the only hand in the dark

And not many of us are brave enough to release all toes

Fall away without harness

Especially when it takes most of what we possess

Just to survive

So she has my life in her rubber bands

Every day she yanks me to my knees

With the nostalgic ejubulence of a professional killer

It is I fear

A form of savage dance

And only one of us will survive

Sometimes I catch myself wishing

She’ll go first

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life, poetry, prosetry

The hands of the lost

Sometimes

You pick the sinking ship

Recognizing within

Carousel parts of

Your own visit on earth

There is much wrong

In repeating mistakes or

Returning to well worn habit

When outcomes have proven they are

Dead roads and broken boats

It is not that you are

A martyr

Or even a fool

You do not wish

To bring yourself lower

But if you imagine life

As a well worn stoop

And whom you should feel

Most comfortable sitting there with

Then you will fathom

The type who finds themselves

Supporting the broken-down and

The fractured

For the sheer honesty of their response

And that well earned familiar

That you have known over and over

In the apologetic eyes of your own

And that trembling hand teaching through time

Asking you to

Be patient with my mistakes

There is something

Comforting and real

In a flaw

When all the city lights try to attain pearly perfection

Something you’ve never related to

Another language for

Early risers without grime stains behind their ears

The kinds who are punctual and routine

And do not make shoddy excuses for

Why they cannot lift the weight of the world

From their shoulders

People who may

Go on to take office whilst you seek

To survive and advance by understanding

What keeps the world turning

Which

Can be discovered

In equal amount

From the hands of the lost

As those who are found

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