One Might Ask

Author's Note:
Uncharacteristic lines discovered and eradicated.


Roll Call of the Lesser Devils

102.
Bleeding tears and crying blood
My eyes awash with unpurged emotion
I am torn across the wasteland.
The wreckage of my life I see
shattered attempts at stability and peace
Thrown back in my face by the scorpion winds.
Standing out in the crowd
I see a regal lily.
Dare I seek solace from her?
Flashback to the last
The rose with the poison thorns
Soul deep slashes pumping out my life’s blood
Somehow even now I seek to clasp
The delicate flower to my breast
To accept the pain as well as the pleasure
For beauty in bleakness is to be cherished
Though sometimes it wounds one sorely.




[102 is dead to me. How many times can a teenager compare a woman to a flower? A lily? I couldn't come with something a little more complicated? Yeah, a woman is just like a flower because see, they're blossoming out of a plant that's rooted into soil. Exactly like a woman.

Moving on from that failure there's, you guessed it, another flower metaphor. This time it's about a girlfriend who dumped me. She's a rose because I got stuck by one of her thorns and bled. Aaaargh! That sure makes me out to be a wimp. The big man got stuck by the tiny flower and it hurt, bawww. Now that I'm grown up I want to go back in time and say: Put a fucking pair of gloves on, dumbass. You got dumped. Be a man."

There's at least two lines of the poem you could spread on crackers to make chesy finger foods for a New Year's Party. Bleeding tears and crying blood. Rage! What does that even mean? It's like I was auditioning to be a screenwriter for a terrible soap opera. "My darling, since I left you my hot coffee has been lukewarm, like the urines, except black, like the night and the stars that look down upon our forbidden love. Hold me, Rose, oh thorny, thorny Rose."

Besides that 102 is fine.]




103.
A Life In No Chapters

Another roiling cloud of thoughts
Passes through the air,
Slightly tinged with the taste of sea salt,
Passes the altar and no on cares,
flickering candles as it goes.
The altar of fading, forgetfulness
In a room nowhere in particular,
Off a hall with door after door,
Scents of somnambulism heavy in the air.

Before the altar
A young man sleeps
Prostrate before a vengeful god.
The room was small and dark and carved from rock
In every way his own,
A home to the horrors of time.

The tale of the titans is sad and long
Beside the rolling oceans it has been told
Again and again.
Night sets.

The gods still rise, and still they take away.
The misty sunshine closes in
The brightness burns like a crucifix
Somehow he could tell
Though he no longer could see
Out in the void there must be others.

One came to him,
Emotions snapped and ground
Thin ice under heavy treads,
Spoke as if the heavens had fallen
In the voice of an angel, soft musical tones.
The comfort seduced the man,
But then it passed away
Long ago
Before anyone could remember.

An epitaph to a small world
Passed away with everything simple
Out in the void there were others
With eyes like lasers,
Gazers, penetrate through
Charade of charades, the reality.
Forever clung to weariness form
Decay of structure
Tantamount to animus prime.

The man prayed for release in desperate words,
Prayers sent in vain to a god who hates prayers.
He woke up in an ocean of light.
Pulses of visions too bright to see,
Too important to ever forget,
Solar flares from a million transparent suns,
Cascading blips of color washed clean away,
Waves washed over his drowning form,
No perspective to latch onto,
No up or down or past or pain or life or wonder
Nor wonderful irony
And all he could do was let go
Just let it go and watch it wash away his own
Small sins, begotten in his own
Bathtub gin
Where once upon a time a man lived
Before the creature he became
Snatched happiness away
And left him to die
All alone.

The strange floating daydream of newborn morning
Swallowed him alive, atheist dreams and all.
The damp dew spewed forth a myriad of thoughts.
On that morning
He was sure there
Only nothing could be more pure.
His savior was garbed in white flowing robes
Cresting waves of thought bowed down to Her freely
For She was like the moon on a warm summer night

The stars were Her friends and lovers.

With a knife that symbolized truth
She purged his desires,
Snickety snackt click clack,
Cut out his disbelief with the blade.
When no more black ichor poured out
She filled him with a desire
A lust potion that allowed him only to love Her and life.
At least for a while he was happy
Though on a leash did She keep her young man.
At night he was let loose to play
Amid the warmth of closely pressed sheets,
In a bed made of clouds and pheromones
Perpetual wanton gluttony of pleasure
The main event, the only event,
The end and the beginning
The alpha and the omega
Yet somewhere people scoff at sex magick.

Even a blind man may see on occasion
Through a veil of deception and lies.
Somehow this man caught an inkling
A barest glimpse of the tiniest of truths.
When his mind finally listened to reason
He quite suddenly went mad.

He fell from the grace of his graceful goddess,
He fell from his heaven to earth,
Like a seven second virginal birth,
Like there was no law 'gainst heaven and hell
Or monsters at the gates,
It was simple, evolving, all at once
The dead man into life fell.
Through flashes of fever and delirium
Through altered mental states.

When at last the man woke up alone
Naked against a bleak backdrop
Shivering from the cold
He was baptized in uncaring
To the silent sound of a battle hymn
Written by the lords of the underverse
As some men have once had it called.

He had become both predator and prey,
No salvation, no damnation
Just hollow memories and the sounds of waves,
On that long forgotten shore.
His body had aged until nothing was left
But granite and his will turned to stone.
He had seen the horror
That one can not unsee,
The doom reserved for the seeker of Taboo,
The forbidden knowledge
That tears the soul from its home.

Before a simple altar
Of pine cones, sticks and shiny stones
He kneels in submission,
Hoping beyond hope to forget,
Not praying, not hoping,
Only empty, he wishes no more,
In a room that is dark, and small, and him.

The man, if that he could still be called,
Found the end of a long, painful life,
And there was nothing, no light, no more.
Like a toppled Titan
Chained in the darkness below
The sands and the mountains and the fields.

The wounds never healed,
But persisted into eternity.
Even in the greatest days
There was no goal, there was no god
There was nothing but fever and dreams.

In headlong flights through fancy and fiction
The man lost even his own identity,
And then, of course, there was nothing at all.
His life had occurred in no chapters.




104.
He had fought the good fight
On a hill amongst the multitudes
He held off the forces of evil
As they washed towards him.
The soldiers had become
A sea of blood and death.
They died in waves
Uncaring in their ignorance.
He had fought the good fight
Like a stone in harsh winds
In a desert of wilderness
He wasted away through no fault of his own
As the wind blew on.
And it blew through his heart
It chastised him in his solitude
Blew him away like dust in a storm.
Yet still he had fought the good fight.




105.
The Transit Station

Sitting quietly in the transit station
On a bench in the sickening throng
-People walk by him
Unknown to the masses
He stares like a hunter in a forest full of targets.
It is the stare of crimson ages past,
Gleaming on like an eagle’s eye
And the ignorant people just keep passing by.