Under Inner Core
Poetry EP
Magnet : Poetry Collection
Journey
The kingdom was like a parking lot. I breathed in the overarching perfume of consumed gasoline. The people’s faces looked like family vans with no destination; no expectancies
of new life or new movements. The only dance was in the way the wind had cried. I walked towards more and more emptiness, and empty is where my feet began to sink. The white walls dripped onto the tar-dark road. I searched for a voice to lead me to where the people were, but the echoes were my own, and the kingdom was like a parking lot. The woes - bouncing off the little vehicles that led me to nowhere.
Shortly thereafter, I stumbled across the carcass of a train by the river. The track-bones sprawled out on the surrounding damp. I put my hand to the rusting decay of the body and felt the body breathing. The stories reeked. They felt heavy in the sky’s hands. I entered the dome in hopes of carrying the bits. Bit by bit they carried me deeper.
I grew terribly afraid.
I lived there for a few swollen months. The train never moved the way I had intended. The mold began to engulf the steel like a python. I waited for the mold to make its decision on the remnants of my body. The quietness was her answer.
I decided to abandon the old child I had found in the gutter of the river. I walked towards the path that had forsaken me. It looked a bit different. Yet I still felt my feet sink as I walked towards the emptiness; I still felt the way the wind had danced. The family vans were still parked near the empty sidewalks. I could still feel the echoes kiss my cheeks.
I had found my way back to the kingdom.
Blood Orange
The skin unraveling from blood orange
Raveled round bitter chunk and churning
Juice will gush from the Falls.
Quiet.
I think there is disruption here.
Does fruit die before feeding The Body...
Does nectar whisper a desperate prayer?
I’ve brown flakes to peel from the base
Lips, a burning chapped at 2 A.M.
A little pigeon on my windowsill is in my bedroom
I know that she is.
She’s got fruit’s blood on her beak
Sweet; rise your head over the pillow, over the
Chirps that scurry through the sheets, the walls,
The chromosomes.
There is a pigeon in my bedroom,
Nesting and housing
Thousands and thousands and thousands of eggs with
Cracks and discolorations and impurities and
The heaviness of a song.
The bags underneath my eyes;
An unconsented nest
Pecking at my fruit into the deepest winter.
Winter
Evenly dispersed weight on a winter boat.
Trudging through the dirty bleach.
Under the heavy swamp of stringy mass --
Eyes; blue, brown, black.
The pupil-hole; soul coal mine
The wet lumps meet the widened light.
We sit in a huddled cave. I pluck the mirror from its
Socket.
I try to shave the white fluff off the living dead.
My mirror reflects the mirrors in their sockets.
Our infinity nestles to rest in a cell.
I wondered if my arms could lift the underbelly of the
Whispered Whale.
Gathering with our suffering in glass containers.
Display cases fill with demented and dark dentures
With white clouds plastered like paint or dirty bleach.
Eyes; blue, brown, black
Who was there to watch the mouth on that
Blood-colored apple
Did our mirrors go against our own endowments?
I wait for the passing of another Whale
To weed the shards from her stomach.
With the heaviness of the eyes on eyes
Eyeing who may have done it.
Living Room
The wind is discarded warm breath on our Saturday’s.
Melted people, melted things.
Carbon-dioxide rings on our fingers,
Around our planets
No one is home tonight.
Ice-door abused by fire-hands,
The water cycle beginning in my living room.
I try to pick the lock until I stumble
Around the corner and realize
I’ve fallen into a forest.
Spring green smells like Morning Sun
Bouncing off the chloroplast cells that
Dwell inside the couch
Inside the television,
the old radio that no one dare touch,
the little warm-toned lamp that flickers on its own.
I have a forest in my living room.
The winds are quiet sighs on our Sundays.
Frosted people, frosted things.
Oxygen sings,
Pours out of the trees and
Freezes the love-seat,
The yellow radiator,
And the scratchy rug that tugs under my feet.
I have a living room in my forest.
I ask for mercy but
No one is home tonight.
I sit and watch the furniture crumble into its origins.
Garden
I dug my heel in the cow manure.
The shoe, like a slimy serpent,
Sunken pedestal bloodied my toe
And yet, my rose needed the blood like water.
Her throat gulped the vermillion rain.
I wondered of the last of the sustenance
Before the plague.
Skin petals dropped on a holy ground.
God decayed like the garden, whispering to the Farmer.
My ears filled with
Muck, Muck, Muck.
The Wild Wheat arched on her spine
To lean towards the unruly wind
Making the love that shows violet in the evenings.
My arms elongated like bending straws on martinis
Wet plastic hung and wrung on fold-out chair.
Where the garden sits, legs folded, under thigh burnt sandpaper
Lit match like a dry cough on a summer ‘noon
And yet, my rose needed the blood like water.
So I waited until the wheat whacked the warmth from the whisper
The living plucked for the crisper.
Mystery Man
The man that eats fires on weekends spoke to me today.
It's Monday.
He told me that he spent the majority of Sunday setting the abandoned mental hospitals in his head in flames.
I asked him where he lives now.
He said that he was homeless, that he'd rather die labeled abandoned than insane. He said he roams the streets with nothing else to blame but the
Fires.
The fires.
I asked him "What happened when you were younger?"
He said that his mother and father were fire starters,
and that when he screamed for firefighters
his parents would never answer.
I said, "Well you're a big boy now. You know how to stop drop and roll now."
He screamed, "It burned my brain!"
He said, "Nothing was ever the same when I had adopted their traits."
When I furrowed my brow he knew I didn't quite understand,
He held my hand and said
"Daughter of pain,
When you become me as the world fades
And I disappear into the ocean,
You will be the one I
Pass the flaming torch to.
Don't run.
Poltergeist
The One Who Makes Love With Flame creeps under the sheets.
Slides up the leg as The Ghost of Gravity holds me close.
Scorching the untouched parts,
We sleep for hours, under the night.
Blue Waterfalls float above our heads.
The Watcher Who Knows’ cheek flushed, wet stained
Hover above us, Blue Waterfalls
We ascend up to wash ourselves.
The One Who Makes Love with Flame is perennial
But The Wet Blue Waterfalls whips off my bandage.
We descend to the basement’s basis.
The Honest Slitherer hisses to us the fantasy of life
As we are surrounded by The Ones Who Snack On The Dead.
My skin - sweet chocolate melted by The One Who Makes Love With Flame.
We wind up here on a winter day.
The Warm Winter guides the route on the road
With a single candle, Our feet hitting the stone
The Singer Who Knows Doom leaves us a beautiful melody.
With violin and shattering glass.
As we drag our feet towards the empty hole
The One Who Joins Bodies mumbles the final word.
The One Who Makes Love With Flame leaves his final blessing
Red patches on brown paper bag skin
We elevate to the bedroom.
The Humming White Noise greets us
Whispering the disconnect of a radio.
Untuned to the shrieking serenade.
We are meant to make love tonight.
The Windows that Obey shut themselves, cutting the cool wind
The Lights That Radiate flicker on and off like pecks on walls’ skin
His hands, my body, raging
The Ceilings That Flinch rise, my soaring escape unfeasible.
The Bed That Holds the Dead narrows itself to bring us closer.
His hands forcefully imprint themselves onto my rotting flesh.
His body has reached a new entity. Our bodies have reached
The Last Day.
And I have become The One Who Makes Love with Flame.
Suburbia
Pruned purple hands under wide-mouthed waves.
Bubble-gulps waft and rise to surface
Mosquito bulbs bloating on the skin in the summer
Lugging the saccharine letters that dissolve,
The waste finding solace in the drinking water.
Where we pour from, we lay,
On a stream that slithers down deserted arteries
Street light reaches her hand out for the Sun,
Plucked like a dandelion for its dead wishes.
Rows of gold cages on street staircases
Gold dye permeating the water we drink,
As if the Sun liquified the skin on its back.
And we - bodies composed of the source,
Pulls in our muscles from outside our planets
I thrash in the ocean that sits on the sidewalk
My sociable limbs weigh down the rest of my body.
The mosquitos will give the crickets a piece of me
So that I may still be and be still
In the breath of the waves;
The humdrum of voices qualified to say
Nothing and Everything.
Gallons Of
Cigarette fingers hot glue-gunned to wrinkled hand
Second-hand cloud snatch the blue from the upper level
Just white, white, gallons of white!
Color drips from the pupil, down the chin, past the neck
Hueless eyes - better for the drive.
The horizon can be a dead fog to marry our tunnel vision.
We go to the graveyard to kiss the corpses.
Their lips taste of Daniels on an autumn afternoon
Their cheeks- stretching, sweet gum
Forbidden swallow.
I eat fried orange that has fallen from the trees.
Just orange, orange, gallons of orange!
Stick of white
Natural sugar high
Hot syrup burns
Cold pancakes stacked - block the cartoons
Block the radio noise, block the breaking glass
Bruises in the bathtub are sugar brown
Just brown, brown, gallons of brown!
Pitch black isn't the darkest sound.
Compressions
The sand composed of withered groans
pushing its stream through my
Uncovered toes.
I felt the hard soup heavy like
The Boiled Star that tells us if we
Live or Die.
The Sahara melts under the sweltering safe
Where the emerald paper forms compressed armies
Forcing the weight under the core like where all of the
Splinters hide under dark, dead skin.
Chestnut land rises and falls under the stomach,
Past the burnt lines where the Sun hits more
The air making indents in the palm like
Rice on the knees. Heavy,
Hot.
Sand at the bottom of the pot.
Earth
The spinner top of dirt and dust
With hollow openings of water
Conqueror of red hot burns that
Slap themselves onto a navy-blue nothingness.
Mineral Molds
Mending themselves onto the tiles of the Mother.
Seasonal scents falling from the abyss.
The coloration of earthy green, orange pumpkin,
Coffee-colored worldly hands.
The ones who toss and tug, the sheets matching
Reckless sleeping patterns.
Four-legged servants scurrying around the
Corners of our existence.
With crumbs of the gratitude being planted into the crevices.
Wine-colored fruit sustaining our drunken prayers.
Biting broken skin on the lip and tasting the crimson elixir.
Humanity rejoicing with the soaring songs
Hand to hand, hard to soft
Wood to feather - fingers entangled as vines do.
Stallions at the races eager for the draw of luck
As the Moon and Sun place their gamble.
The victor wins and the
Gust of wind blows out the
Single candlelight.
Melanin Mentality
You have no cross.
You're imagining it.
The blood that fills your mind
As it collides with the addictive wine
You're imagining it.
Let me breathe
My brown skin inhales, not exhales
They tell me mental illness is a sin.
They tell me mental illness is a sin.
You have no cross
The alcohol is hot enough to burn wood, to burn you.
Black man must not speak.
Black man has been spoken for.
But let me breathe !
The melanin souls that have been damned to a society's hell tell me that mental illness is a sin .
Yet my weary bones only have the energy to off what is already off.
My sins are merely directed at the sinner,
And as my color fades to transparent
My brothers and sisters will tell me that colors are just an illusion and sins disrupt society.
And so I sit at the edge of the world
As the lighter tells me that they are colorblind,
As the darker are blinded by their brightness,
Then the illnesses that we are both now blind to become my invisible cross.
Mental illness is a sin in their eyes.
The hell they have created is a silent one.
Past the fire, Past the sky,
In a world where black boys weep in their gang signs
And black girls weep in their promiscuous suicides
You have no cross.
Nomads
Wave Men
Curving the sidewalks with
Wheels of water
Cemented rivulets clash with the rolling runners
Colorful wonderwheel of men
White garment with black shoes gliding in an anatomy.
Oversized orange on the blackened ocean.
Drums grinding against the hard pathway
Musically inclined scrapes and booms.
An Ocean blue shirt leads the slew of travelers
Lining one by one as ships dock.
The line mends itself -
Spherical gathering on the tarred waters.
Hitting the waves like drums, cymbals, tree falling in the woods,
Bowling balls hitting the smooth lanes for pleasure,
Whirring surge of energy
Stretched like rubber banded dentures
Smooth on the Thursday wind
The Wave Men
With confidence ripples down the back of their neck,
Down their legs, pouring soul
Feet gripping
Board to the pavement
Snickers like barking sea lions
Cruising through the final summer song.
Water falls from the top floor-
Where the watchers end the
Travelers’ go
Drowning into the sweet music.
Clockwork
It's 2:31 a.m. and my mind is almost as calm as your body;
the breathing is a soothing monotony that lays two hours away.
Dreamland.
In a bed all your own, in a world all your own,
Where the menacing giants roam, and the fiery dragons fly, cutting out the air from around you.
Breathless.
I wonder if you're drowning in your sleep right now.
I wonder if the blood wounds you show me in your smile
Reappear under the quiet pajamas,
In the awkward silences of your corridors.
I wonder how you feel the pain
When you're asleep.
I wonder if you feel unconscious chest pains
or if you shudder in your dreams.
I wonder how you feel the pain
When you're asleep, when I'm awake.
You're seemingly alone in your state.
If your temporary absence met my restless writings would we be
The sun and the moon as you suggested?
It's 2:50 and I am drunken from sleepiness.
I wanted to write of you, to write of us together as a warm unified body breathing,
But you and I, we're on different time zones at this very moment,
And as the demons are dragging you to the grave in your dreams,
The angels promise to hold me hostage until the morning, sinners don't deserve to sleep..
Sinners don't deserve to dream..
But I need to find you.
It's 3:00 a.m.
I think of how I feel
I don't feel anything accept the fact that I need to find you, find our future,
The demons hold you hostage in your dreams,
The angels rightfully try to keep me from the heaven I don't deserve,
You.
I don't deserve you.
But I wait until the morning rises,
For the one split second in which
the moon goes down as the sun is going up
And I lock eyes with the Sun
You lock eyes with the Moon,
And I lay my head to sleep,
Leaving you to wonder how I feel the pain.
The Best Way We Can Describe It
Bathes the bone in mournful ownership. A quiet word of honest chaos.
Birds fling their young right out of the woven nest. Mother’s boiling soup-mind pouring onto developing desires. Nine year old hands carve the meat for Yourself to eat. Cutting off the burned skin for tonight’s evening dinner. Rotting flesh on fine china. A feast for you and a slew of mirrors.
Clenches the vessel for dear life. Grasps the withering rocks of the Falls. Slippery fingertips on the indifferent cobblestone. Father’s hold on despairing airways. Attempting transfusion from a noiseless child to a dying, ear-biting man. Hold holds rock to rope. Feel the end of the ocean. He treads water. I don’t.
Heaves me to heaven’s embrace. The laughing shark and the singing hawk. The wild wolf and humorous lion. Stands me up on the tips of my toes. I don’t know how to say no.
Lends us the particles of particles. Enlarge themselves and become the army of quiet misery. Immersed in beads of sweat. The war between the crumbs and the dustmites.
Doubles the dosage of shards of glass on my spoon. Refleflectively sharp as twins whose eyes pierce the ones who can’t seem to look away.
Jerks the ground and scatters the broken pieces of cement . Silent night as I walk towards the echoes and the remnants.
Grabs my waist and pulls me into the rabbit’s hole. To sleep on a hard wooden bed in the soil.
The impulse to run. Hands piercing the ground and gripping legs, as the dead screech out my troubling sins. Immobilizing my everything.
The soft musical whispers. The sudden surges through the trees.
Pupils dilating at the sound of movement. Widening irises form a circle around the ones waiting for the signal to act. Glossy and dead eyes, unforgiving on new land.
Purpose does not begin. We dig through the origins to find the emptiness within the photographs. We can’t seem to remember what it means.
The maze where the fractured rest their tired heads to sleep each night. We can’t seem to fall.
Lonely howling in the forest. A raging human figure in the forbidden dark.
Soft creature. Misunderstood language of forsaken love.
Living Sahara
I bellowed to the mountains.
Prayed the cacti sprout mouthpieces,
Or feet to kiss.
Sweating, violent green-yellow lady.
Subtle things.
I whispered to the sand, caressing the goosebumps
With my knees red and peeled.
The water well rang
I tried to answer as the cord rattled.
Crept through my thighs,
Loved on me with meek nibbles.
Venom can be beautiful.
I saw the heat in the air glisten
Like the word-oil sliding down my back,
My body wield into a vat,
Carried the heavy heat as if I were my ambience.
The knocks on the sanded door grew nauseating
I felt the knocks on my body’s abnormalities
The subtle things
They walked through me and yet I kept them.
Memories of when I coughed sand.
Sometimes, the mother isn’t too far from the land.
Eroded Badlands
Eroded dunes peeling on colored particles.
Plum ether, warm melt between fingers.
Between toes. Sole red like the sandwiched
System that bled above us
Pouring on our organized puzzled tunnels.
Television static tastes the same each time.
My mouth washes well in the burnt siena chlorine,
Yet my tongue burns its etches into my mouth.
Shadows swim towards the subtle dips
Black ink spilling on the bronzed mounds.
I planted my face in infertile grains
Face hot, blistered hills.
The rain lay by other troubled waters,
Loitering around little heavens and small deaths.