My room
Ouch ouch ouch
sore feet, antiseptic, echoes of retches
a booming train, rustling leaves
wishful thinking
The Train
Lights are dim
Roads empty
No water to swim
Nothing seems to sink
The night is dark
Even stars are asleep
There is nowhere to go
No one to lead
This scene is rare
Still I am there
Imagining a ray of light
approaching towards me
A late night train
Will Teleport me
Into the world of my dreams…
Falls
As her hand falls away
My world begins to crumble
As the hair lines her face
The darkness engulfs her
Left alone grasping at straws
I kneel left empty of all
The dreams of an age
Lay empty as death
As the pain fades away
Can I ever embrace it?
prompt #3 ~ something in the house
The net they caught her in is made of clay
White porcelain in liquid curves stands still
although she walks within the night (and sometimes day)
Exorcist of nightmares, her breath will
somehow infuse me in my anxious sleep:
a Buddhist dreamcatcher. Her slim hands hold
a stick of incense. The curling smoke seeps
into my nightly war, darkness controlled
and held at bay.
Childlike, I reject reason
although I know she does not really breathe.
Her quiet strength a graceful talisman
knife blade secret within a porcelain sheath.
In plain sight she guards me hour by hour:
Guanyin, at ease within her gentle power ~
Caregiver’s Lament (prompts 3 and 4, Hour 3)
My old mother sits waiting to die.
I walk around the house sleep deprived
Not knowing when her end will come.
On constant call.
Ready at any moment
to be there to witness her passing.
But wait! I am old, too.
Life is punctuated with death.
This house is too full of clocks.
All the Untitled Ones
The words that don’t come together
Smell like the freshly-baked buns
That you can’t eat
Because the scale glares back at you;
The bread sits in the oven
Like the Instagram coquette in the red skimpy boots,
Her shiny skin on the golden sand,
Captioning a tiny moment,
No me acuerdo.
She artfully rolls,
Giving you a glimpse of her light bosom
That must smell
Like the freshly-baked buns in your oven.
No me acuerdo,
But you remember.
Hour 3: Post 3: Burgundy Lips
Burgundy lips and rose petal hips
That’s what she liked to say about me
Oh what a lovely depiction of who I am
If only she knew my lips burned with rage to get their color
While my hips flew me into storm after storm
Of unapologetic lies and deceit
All while taking others prisoner of their charm
Oh how burgundy lips and roses petal hips sounds melancholy
Goldfinger
We look inside ourselves and see what’s still functioning. We constantly seek out these
inane obfuscations in the hopes that it will provide some sort of direction or guidance in an otherwise lost existence. We think it’s all lost and then we hear that soothing voice reminding us we still have time.
The whispers of the goldfinger warn us of the impending danger and remind us where we are.
“You’ve suffered sufficiently and won your unwinnable war. Stop pretending your failure is genuine”.
Rest up for the battle ahead. Many victories are won through passivity.
Treading Memory
what you had been
who you were
gone from me for
so long
the old you
dead forever like
you were never here
but you were
and you are
you still are. You are
in every corner of moving on
like a beast from the abyss
latched to my ankles, not
drowning me
just holding me back
from landfall, from docking
from being able to dry out
in the sun
get up
and walk away
Rainer Ep: 3
Rifles clanging to padded armor,
The screams of kidnapped people
The cries of burning victims,
The woman remembered how she lost her family
They were running in the streets of an unknown city,
Her mother was shot clean between the eyes
But she kept going as she held her brother’s hand
The soldiers picked him up like a plaything beating the woman in the process
And took her away in the blink of an eye
She didn’t know where they took her
But all she knew was that they intended to harm her,
The pulsating sounds of horns pierced her ear drums
And molested her cerebral
Everytime she cursed them, they sounded the horns again
They sounded the horns until her conscience seeped out of her mind
Until she couldn’t think anymore
Until she wasn’t herself no longer