LIFEFORCE

This is the B-side to:
To be treated like an author discovered off the prescribed student reading list 

It was not meant to be, but it quickly developed into something which had a voice and something to say, so why not let it breathe now? It seems an apt negative to the A-side.

This is... LIFEFORCE

I’m torn apart nightly. 

My love. 

Pull pieces together each and every day. 

All sound and contact and light and motion 

hurts me in a different way. 

All seems useless acts of attrition. 

And to what end… does it flatter. 

To live. 

More hours to kill and with a flourish scatter.

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

At the bottom of the wept green sea. 

Shells for teeth. Coral for hair. 

Rocks in shoes to keep me underneath. 

People on the shoreline talk on behalf of me. 

But I don’t trust their laughter there. 

Sounds of tides crashing over pebble and shale on the beach. 

I’ll be dug, 

dug deep underground. 

The horror. 

Trinkets for archaeologists will be left to be found. 

And I know 

I’ll lose all I ever had. 

Is what is 

God’s plan to make me unbearably sad. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

I’m the House of Usher. 

Foundations cracking up. 

Fuck your struggle and bluster. 

It’s ludicrous to think about 

just how insignificant but all consuming that you are. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star.

To be treated like an author discovered off the prescribed student reading list

In this summertime, I appear to have written a gothic love song.

It came from first trying to describe the feeling of the first discovery of a book no one else is reading and falling in head over heels with it. Becoming obsessed with it. Wanting more of it. Hiding it away from others. Protecting it from others.

This is... To be treated like an author discovered off the prescribed student reading list

Hold me as you do a book.

Suck on these new found wounds

As you do on words of lust.

Forbidden, now tasted first.

Read me as bones up at the church,

An outlier with your youth.

A connection to something other.

Grip me as I grip you.

Attached by our unreliable truth.

Part of the Altogether.

Turn pages like lips in pulse.

They draw a guilt from paper

Kisses like a poultice

On the body.

An unremarkable body nonetheless

Beats and writhes - ugly thing -

on pulped, bloody sadness.

The way we like a sadness.

Take slow licks up my skin.

The salty spit reveal papercuts.

From sharpness written.

In your blessed annotation.

Letters bladed as birds' beaks.

Peaks scratched into the surface.

Untie the ribbon which you have me bound.

Crack my spine to lay me down.

 Then open me as you do a book.

One outside the prescribed reading list.

Guest poem: A cold wind will blow

While Greville and the Tombstones are in the studio (#thereisnomixing), this blog has been a little quiet.

Let me bring the noise back with this rock guest poem.

This is A cold wind will blow, by @peej.