The Waiting Game, Part II

I wonder if you
Are happy where you are now.
Far from here, with her.

The heart on your sleeve
Crushes me beneath the weight
Of uncertainty.

The Waiting Game.

I am sitting here
Writing you this stupid poem,
And agonizing.

What you choose to do,
With me or anyone else,
Is not his business.

I can’t stop shaking.
Two years of sedulous hate
Are now justified.

I want to punch him
In his motherfucking face,
But you’d be upset.

So I will just sit,
Calmly counting syllables,
Until the pain ends.

I Think This Might Be My Worst One Yet.

You hate poetry,
But you said you like haiku,
So I wrote you one.

Untitled Story, Part One, Rough Draft

This is the first part of a rough draft of an as-yet-untitled story:

Emme pulled her long, sandy hair away from her face and sighed despondently into the winter evening, her breath rising in a writhing, ephemeral puff to disperse into the darkened sky. The clouds overhead bulged heavy with snow, the first laconic flakes of a potential storm drifting slowly toward the icy ground to join a mass grave of their fellows, where millions upon millions of gelid crystals lay piled in a griseous, oil-polluted holocaust. An argid breeze whipped by from the south, caressing Emme’s broad back like a crowd of frozen, phantasmagorical fingers. She shivered. She pulled her peacoat tightly around her corpulent form, nestling into the charcoal wool like a child into its mother’s embrace and thought to herself, soon, the weather won’t matter.

As she stood beneath the vanilla glow of the streetlight, staring blindly into the vacant avenue before her, she ran the day’s events through her head once more. The exhaustive hours at her loathed job rushed past her mental screen on fast-forward, muting her customers’ boorish words and blurring the faces of her co-workers, decelerating to a dramatic crawl as she arrived home and unlocked the door of her apartment to reveal the hunched, thrusting form of her fiancé making love to a pair of slender thighs spread lasciviously on her sofa. The flow of time returned to a natural tempo as his head snapped around, ruffling his silken brown bangs matted with passionate sweat. They curtained his eyes, where lust quickly ebbed to shock and then shame as the owner of the toned legs beneath him emitted a shrill, staccato shriek and rushed to cover her divested form with their clothing scattered upon the floor. Her face was familiar. Familial.

Hot, furious tears cut down Emme’s cheeks, rendered erubescent from her shame as much as the chill, as the memory of her sister’s lithe, naked form groped for her purse on the endtable and tore wordlessly across her head to exit stage left, streaking out the door and down the stairs toward her car. Jacob spluttered as Emme continued to stare, mouth agape, her fair, yet portly features contorted with the rage only the deepest betrayal could inspire. Moments passed, the silence broken only by the metronomic ticking of a Bavarian clock over the television. As it chimed, “Cuckoo!” to mark six o’ clock, Emme found the strength to move, her eyes sliding closed in agonized disbelief as she worked the diamond ring from her pudgy finger. Jacob murmured her name, his voice pleading as he cowered, still naked on the sofa, with his dripping, flaccid manhood shrinking between his legs. Finally, Emme managed words.

“Get out,” she whispered, chucking the platinum trinket at his head as she lumbered into their bedroom and slammed the door, finally succumbing to sobs. When she emerged several hours later, the apartment was empty. He was gone.

Oblivescence

Or, the poem written in early September of 2008, about the gentleman who inspired “Kalopsia” and “The Marble Man”, that inadvertently sent every proofreader I’d enlisted to the dictionary about six times. I will save any further readers the trouble and explain the gist of it. It is a poem about the process of forgetting someone who broke your heart, and how romantic agony will turn even the most staunch nonbelievers to religion– at least long enough to beg for the return of their lover.

First the prayers begin to fall–
Pistic, pious words from immund lips,
To Mary, God; to Christ and all
To cloy this longing ‘twixt the hips
Now emptied of his phantom seed–
The nectar of love’s nascency!–
Each canting word mephitic with greed
To sate hymeneal fantasies.

Each breathless chant a supplicant cry
While prostrate in this empty bed;
The end’s “Amen.”, a ruminant sigh,
Repristinates the weary head.
The nescience! The acquiescence!
Beseeching saints long deaf and dumb
Effete in mundane senescence
To which erelong we shall succumb.

The Marble Man

A poem wrote over the summer of 2008, about the same gentleman who inspired “Kalopsia”. Note the difference in tone:

One algid day embraced within the arms of purification,
Held tight against incessant blows of winter’s flagellations,
I roused myself from uneased dreams and found myself imprisoned,
But the crowning of the nascent dawn brought with its light a vision.

A man sat there before me, his visage hewn of stone,
And beckoned me to sit before his gem-encrusted throne.
His marmoreal face ingrained– ’twas beautiful in spite
Of the sightless eyes and turgid form that would strike most with fright.

He took me in his frigid arms and in my ear he whispered
Words no mouth of stone could form; they’d lain so long sequestered
And now like water did they flow from in his marble maw,
Their tenderness of such surprise to leave me still in awe.

Once the flow of poetry had staunched from ‘twixt his lips,
And the hope inspired by his words had all my fear eclipsed,
Tears stung my eyes, and from my cheeks I let the crystals fall
In unison with laboured words; he would have me tell all.

When my pained soliloquy drew to a morbid close,
I waited for his anodyne response to bring repose.
But silent did the man remain, his face ever so still.
The panacea ne’er came forth to cure me of my ills.

Kalopsia

This is the first poem I wrote for a certain gentleman in the early winter of 2008.

Diamonds on the ground
Swirling at their leisure
In the ice-encrusted wasteland
Marking winter’s latest mournings
Each glisten like a tear
From the eyes of daylight dying
Down the pallid, frozen cheeks
Of a moribund remembrance.

The airy, lucid facets
Of these algid shards of Heaven
Reflect our moments spent
In escape from life’s pretenses;
Where in your arms,
The fecund piles of wasted time birth flowers
In this hothouse of embraces
Where the wind and cold abate.

And every passing second
Where the world races by us,
Spawning ants to march in silence
From the prisons of their nests,
Glimmers there untainted
‘Mongst the gossamer mosaic
Of the fantasies you placed within my head.

Lovesong of a Soused Spinster

Originally written for something I did in Achaea, so there is one minor reference I’ve changed, since it wouldn’t make sense to people who don’t play. The rest is pretty clear: liquor > love. This is, honestly, one of my favorite things I’ve ever written– the last stanza, especially.

The drunken flecks upon my lips,
Form drops like milky emerald beads,
Mnemonics lost with every sip,
And prayers, to forget my love of he.

Our spirits danced in harmony,
As one heart, our passions thrived,
And oh! To think what I have done!
Now naught but my regret survives.

And so, I pour another glass,
And revel in the melody
Of liquor ‘gainst the cup– alas!
This drink shall be the end of me.

Great Fairy Green, my dearest friend,
I beg of thee to make it swift,
Cloud my mind and stall my pen;
Free my soul for God to lift.

But Death, it seems this night is not
Compliant to my morbid whim,
So drink I must, though to drown I sought,
To banish reveries of him.

‘Gainst tabletop, the bottle clinks,
And echoes ’til its voice is dim,
Like churchbells; With each gulp I think,
This venom is worth more than him.

Each verdant drip burns to the bone
Ravishing my frigid corpse,
And warms my body with its own,
As bland reality it warps

To a world where fancy’s head is reared
With intoxicating intensity,
Giving birth to diamond tears
To the tinkling melody

Of liquor ‘gainst the cup– alas!
This drink shall be the end of thee,
Farewell to you, my dearest friend,
My precious viridian fairy.

Despair takes hold as I’ve returned
To the point at which this eve began,
Lamenting a loss of affections true,
And the myriad aspects of a man

Whose love, more precious than life itself,
I held for a blink in time,
And whom, for a moment I had felt
That beautiful fairy had sublimed.

I wipe the sadness from my cheeks
As in elation I explode
For the absence of absinthe it is that I weep,
But the pub lies just down the road.

But they do not carry my liquored treat;
The damnation of my evening ensues.
How is one to drown their sorrows
Sans a bottle of favourite booze?

Oh, to feel drink’s pain again!
It’s roughened touch so bittersweet!
So heady as to send me sprawling
As my mind betrays my feet

In much the way my heart did pause
When clasp of fear bound tight my hands
Mid-scribe in soulfelt declarations
Of fidelity’s unend.

A caesura in my certainty,
Thrust forth my despondence to rend
My hand from that which I held dear,
His heart is now his own to tend.

And while forever I shall cherish
The supple touch of his lips to mine,
The truth dictates that I shall perish
Side by side with the emerald wine.

So let it be known that while love is sweet,
Mortals betray; they are destined to fall…
But never a truer love shall ye meet
Than the tender caress of alcohol.

The Visit

A poem written about an eerie and peculiar dream I had, in which my dead grandfather came to visit me and led me to this dream-version of the thousand steps cemetery that has recurred in my countless adventures in the land of Nod ever since. The dream seemed to foreshadow something to do with my grandmother– I thought it was her death, at the time, but the next day we received a call from my aunt telling us that my grandmother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Ever since, I have had this theory about Alzheimer’s patients and the “Great Beyond”, so to speak– but I won’t elaborate here. Not at the moment. The poem:

He smelled–
The taint of ancient
His son is so soon gaining.
Olfactoral suspicions
Of damnable senescence.
I remember best
The arabesques, the pleats
Of weathered skin.
His jowls pooled
‘Round his short, defeated neck
To form an ascot of flesh.

He smelled–
The taint of ancient
That coheres to the moribund.
The noxious spice of Death himself
As he wheezes down their necks.
The redolence of rot
So long should have overtaken,
As an octet of years
Had hastened
To bury the memory of his grave.

And yet, he stood before me
On the pale of a sepulchre.
The hunch of his back turned indifferently
From the form ‘neath an ivory shroud.
And my query,
Is she there?
He answered
With an implicit nod,
And laconic feet again stole him away.

My eyes
From somber reveries
Snapped open to greying black,
And recollections of the twinkle
I glimpsed in his gaze long dead.
My mind half-cluttered with visions,
I inhaled to clear my head.
His smell–
The taint of ancient
hung faintly around my bed.

Inamorata

Written in 2006, about my first serious lesbian crush come to fruition two years before. I adored this girl, but the situation was very convoluted. As love usually goes, it simply wasn’t meant to be. Originally the poem was titled after her, but I changed it in order to preserve her privacy and anonymity.

She came beside my tired eyes
A Lilit in a dream,
In chambers where unbridled thoughts
Ran between the world and me.
O! Had recent quests to Nod
Held omens of her being?
Lost on I had been the signs;
The surprise unforseen.

Mere years have passed,
Alas!
It seems aeons have been,
And comes and goes the mem’ry’s flow
Spurned gently by the subconscious
Mnemonics,
I’d not known I’d set
To conjure up her form–
Her milky flesh,
And tender breasts;
Her silken hands so warm…

So penned have I this sapphic verse
In reverence of the day
The sun succumbed to night’s embrace
And in our arms each other lay.
Though asides were watching,
Only I held eyes for she,
Her scarlet locks of gold-spun hair
Fell to her hips unbound and free.

That beauteous nymph!
Lord forgive my idolatry;
If to worship her is sin,
Beelzebub has won me!
And though again I’ll never taste
The sweet ambrosia of her lips,
Glory shines eternally on memories of our kiss.

This experiment of fate brought my fantasy,
And to this day, I wonder if she knows…
Though a new love now consumes
My blazing soul’s desire,
A kindling spark will there remain
Of her ravishing fire.