A Week of Poetry

I tried to write a poem everyday for a week. It took two weeks, but I got 7 done! Here they are.

The Floor

Enveloped in ancient wood panels
Every creep a raucous creak
As legs press thunder into the ground out of nothing.

Cower in the darkness trying to supress
Into wool and waste, flower and dust
The thunder still comes.

Huddled in the black
carbon blots out the stars
Until the thing goes bump in the night.



loneliness stops being alone.

I drip through the wooden crevice into the soil of skin and vermin
Every pace the neighbor takes.

Clock

The clock in the corner reads five AM. I watch the minutes burn away.
I can’t close my eyes. If I could, the images would still be burned in them.
Naked men dancing across spreadsheets of numbers too low.
Articles drowned in mercury and rare earth metals.
Digital forest fires rampage in front of me.
Don't go into the light.

5:13 PM
There is placenta on the carpet.
Afterbirth squishes underneath dress shoes.
Screams come from every direction
Through the stillness of the stale cigarette smoke that has become my anxiety.
Stare forward.
Stare at the clock.

Midnight.
7 AM.
Noon.
4 PM.
See them all pass.
See nothing change but the faces and numbers.
I can’t even dream anymore.
The only hope is drowning.

Cowboy

The Cerebral river bursts through the dam of bone and leather plate
 Red and grey cascades down the neck of the valley, sparse and sinister
It carries the debris built up for decades without a drainage pipe
Schools of rotten fish and forests of decayed pine
The viscous sludge of metals and plastic
 All ooze out of the dam's burst hole
 But the soul left long ago.
Left with the smoke and the salted mist
From the burning of incense and innocence
As the Laramie townsfolk polluted the space
With the waste of promises to return to virginity.
The only truth for the failure of a dam is that all things must die.
A reservoir can’t survive being fed crumpled bills
 Forty years gone in an instant
Out of the mountains and into the sky
The useless poured out on the ground.

Bowel Movement

Turbid turmoil in the sludge of my inner swamp
The boil and roil a deep brown of a rejected microbiome nowhere seen on earth
Apocalypse inside me, the swamp needs to drain.

Here I am destruction.

Squatting over the edge of nothingness full of the energy of creation I am ready to unleash my
begotten bacterial universe in my own brown big bang.

On this porcelain throne I am god.

The release begins.
Every nerve carefully crafted by mega millennia of evolution surges and pulses as I participate
in the oldest process of what it means to be animal, what it means to be alive.

I am incarnation. I am life itself.

The end has come. I can return to the pack. I erase my shame with the push of a handle. That simple flush of what we all together experience and all endure alone.
I am relieved. I am whole again. I am a shitter. I am human.

Flight

Stuck in the salt lake city airport
Navigating the labyrinth through piles of people
With the goal of moving bodies faster than they were ever supposed to go
All in search of love, connection, compassion, a new start
Strap me to the front of an airbus or the tail of a boeing
So I can experience the insanity of human innovation at full blast
In order to hug my grandfather for the last time.

Throwing our bodies at hundreds of miles an hour
Obliterating birds in the sky in metal canisters
Burning the sky , scorching the soil, gassing rabbits
To be reunited with those that birthed and raised me
Molded my body and soul into every ounce of who I am today

What would the ancestors say?
Those vikings and those pillaged?
Those conquerors and those oppressed?
Those whose culture has been decimated and forgotten?
The pious and righteous
The rapists and murderers
To see me perform the impossible and be with their offspring?

Fuck them all. I want to see my mom.

The Relaxation Trap

Fixated on the logs roasted and crackling
Either in the hearth or out in the ring
They burn me alive when they are meant to comfort and nourish
I can only stare as time turns to ash.

My body is trapped in between the sheet and the lazy boy
While my mind grapples and ascends the dread faced cliff
Nothingness that should bring bliss breeds the craving of oblivion and drowning
I've kicked so hard and fought the invisible so long I’ve forgotten the ground beneath my feet
That the strength of mother earth’s love hugs us so deeply
We can lie on her chest without disintegrating into the vacuum of darkness
I wish i could nuzzle in her gravity and be comforted
But even under a weighted blanket
I shred my mind at the possibility of what can be donePlease bury me in white noise and black sand
And leave me until the need ceases to be

Summer

Summer sweat trickles into every orifice
Blinding my reason, judgement, will
From the springs of my higher thought down the rivers of pleasure into the ocean of doomed habits and addiction
I can curse the sun and the radiating heat of the pavement on the back of my neck
But habit dwells in the winter, thaws in the spring, and comes out rotten and smelling in the heat.
It is not the fault of sunshine that it reveals shame
The rain is not a hero for washing away the stench
The mud burial only cowers.
Sweat is the only way through this
Burn out the rot with magnification
Concentrate rage into heat until the skin crisps
And the putrid fat and flesh melt into the bones
Leaving a forgiven husk, pure and free
With nothing weighing down the soul