Sermon from the Priest Of Crows' Beady Eyed Pulpit

 

This is... Sermon from the Priest Of Crows' Beady Eyed Pulpit

Come and suffer.

Come where there is no lyrical dealing in faith.

Come where there is no offering of uplifting hope.

Come where there is no lesson, no matter you need to be taught.

Come where there you are seen: glorious and tragic.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit sees you: tied to the stake.

When ideologue flames meet you, let them know you'd rather burn through

Crucifixions, auto-eroticisms.

Only you can ever be you.

Wherever you are travelled.

You're going to get travelsick.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit watches you: message in a sea-glass.

Wishing letters could be bottled up, tossed into colourless tumult.

But the current always pushes back to shore.

Only you can ever contain you.

Always near sinking below

horizon's sight.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit views you: beautiful as liminal space.

Sighs emptiness between words not more than uttered.

Lovers, saucer-eyed, under the same moon phase in a countryside

A mass of land between.

Raspings of the rushes

A reminder of the distance.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit recognises you: duality of man.

Uncanny out of body sensation: the feeling of magic before you knew the trick of it,

yet present as steel between a hammer and an anvil.

Only you can ever be you.

On instamatic film: it was once all real.

Layers of flesh, Ruby gemstone, bone-shells, crushed hormonal states of mind.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit waters for you: demigod.

Mankind worships only what it sees itself in.

Acts for a purpose it can't say what it believes in.

In the atomic light a steady beady eye can make out self-destruction.

Even on Sundays meant for heads to shake at sin in.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit stares at you: wild with your bounty.

Foaming and dissolving clouds, texture of time.

All the while taking liberties with your crops and berries,

You are taking up the prognosis with the doctor at the bedside.

Discussing costs of being turned on by pump and valve machine.

Eating warm peaches out the bowl.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit sees you: as you intended.

In pursuit of relativity: mixture of passion and vulnerability.

Existing to push molecules around. 

Only you can ever move you.

A beautiful curiosity; Flowering like a galaxy.

A spectrum of consequence in fuck-up-ability.

Shapeshifter

 

A crow lay one day quite dead. The late afternoon clinging to it.

Its imprint on the window pane, shocked into being.

The stars above me are screwed up scraps of paper.

I threw them way up there.

On them, written previous indiscretions.

I glued them so they stick in the air.

At night I look up and stare at all the constellations.

Here on the earth of my limitations.

I once crushed a lady bird.

I once told someone I had no choice.

Taking my comfort the dead can't be disappointed.

Passive aggressive Ouija.

Granny always proud but concerned about money.

I don't think my ideology is healthy.

I need belief in me the dead can't be disappointed.

One day I can't be disappointed in me.

I once buried my bodies in you.

I once stood soaked through to the sin.

 Crossroads on the highway say "your place or mine?"

Chewed honeysuckle and geranium.

Fish feel free to swim but they're still in an aquarium.

Sometimes divinity doesn't seem so divine.

Sometimes humanity shows itself as being human.

Every climax casts out a confession.

I once thought fire was sped up time.

I once wanted to burn the history, all my failings.

Pureed into test tubes for unusual experimentation.

Don't think it always was this way.

Concrete alien crafts with square tiles for carpets.

Probed by grey suits beside photocopiers with tablets.

Morning abduction meetings require Geiger readings.

Absurd language lacking meaning.

I once didn't give something I should have given.

I once read a science fiction story from nineteen thirty seven.

A time traveler pinioned a prehistoric bug specimen.

When he returned to his own denizen:

 Fascist pessimism was the political scene.

People added jam after their cream.

A rain of heavy night swept the land of the King and Queen.

No one much cared how this came to be called living.

I once shocked an unhappy memory into being.

I once wondered if disappointments cling to the dead.

A shape out of town, counting down

This took me the longest time to write. I wrote a whole other piece just to pick this one out from the dust it left.

This is...
A shape out of town, counting down

I deal in moonshine truths.

Love and Loss are the only meters of the soul,

Where the scales are counting chambers.

There’s a very old shape out of town.

And it is counting down.

I don’t do whimsy, or metaphors told.

It is my blood that’s bad.

My heart that's dirty.

It’s my skin that craves.

Confusing lack of sleep

with keeping thin.

I’m a believer,

Just not of what you are in.

Was this it? 

Was this all you could muster? 

Was this all it took?

To sate your bad blood.

Jump your dirty heart.

Satisfy your craving skin.

This is meant to be temporary, you know.

The Red Drenched Hill

This is....

The Red Drenched Hill

Lit by low-slung sun, 

This is the red drenched hill, 

I am going to die on.

 Like a moth 

in a trial of fire. 

Until all love and hurt is gone. 

Because 

Everything ends up used. 

Scattered and ever abused.

 And you keep on coming 

Round to play. 

As if you’ve not got the news: 

I feel nothing for you

still. 

You see I see you from way up here, 

Wonder if you can climb high, 

Now I’ve cut my hair short 

Let the stormy clouds rot. 

I’ve no need of them 

in my eyeliner sky. 

When you cannot reach me. 

Gravestones sewn beneath me. 

And the weakening sun ray.

 By the weary sigh on 

sigh. 

If you want some advice. 

If there’s any left to give. 

Dismount from your high horse. 

It’s dying in pain of your loss. 

It doesn’t make any odds. 

When all sunlight leaves us 

Don’t think darkness frees us 

We intertwine like lover’s brides

 And call out

 To our gods. 

Even while Hell is in our eyes. 

You know, 

We’re too busy feeding robots 

Because we’re all just robots 

Programmed to eat donuts 

And self-destruct a wish that we die. 

Make no mistake 

I feel nothing for you 

On this hill. 

Time heals nothing around me 

No cure has yet come found me.

Loss is never found. 

It is never more healed. 

Alone, watching all down below. 

I realise the carnage 

See the tragic damage 

Smell the smoke of Carthage 

And there’s one truth that I know: 

When everything is on fire 

That can catch on fire 

My love lies still beside me, 

Burning. 

Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said: 

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain. 

And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human.

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.

I am - was - grief

This is the final hymn from the Hymnary of the Church of Crows.

It is grief: living with grief, becoming grief everlasting. Grief is all that we leave on this mortal coil. Grief is what we become. This is the belief. This is the belief of the congregation of the Church of Crows.

This is.... I am - was - grief

The feeling is now artificial.

Needs concocted and mixed.

No longer muscle memory.

A veteran of what was ever seen.

“That must have been awful”

It truly must have been.

You shall be the same.

Great fish bowl tears for ------,

turn aquariums for blue fish.

Budding hanging clouds:

listless and nowhere near inclined.

“I wander drenched, I’m lost”

You’ll find a path, in time.

On ash crackled lines

disconsolate creatures call:

wail out over raw grey lands.

Concerto of night sea inconsolate.

“Do these creatures fly?”

In murmurations inchoate.

These spirits move around.

Moulding, taking misshapes.

Them: I venture through

what’s drawn as easy from a quill.

“If they lose shape entirely?”

They cannot; never will.

Priest, Mortis-infinite,

perched among the gods.

Appreciates performances,

proffers down thorny roses.

Cheers and jeers our little show.

“Is that the sound above?”

Yes. Cawing of the crow.

Scythe reaper of our harvest.

Warm in the August dry wheat sun.

Laid and aired as stickling sheaf,

Creatures for other’s grief.

We’ll pour our ink to the inkwell.

Swoop in dusk-lit-batic feats.

In life’s rafters we’ll take a bearing beam.

“Has this always been our purpose?”

It has truly always been.

Death Knell

After the beauty comes Greville and the Tombstones. This started out a little bleak, but lightened up as it went on.

Death Knell

There is no hope.

But it’s the hope which kills.

So that’s alright then.

The shock is always unforgiving.

No matter that what is known is certain.

It was all for all this nothingness.

It was all for all this nothingness.

Never so alive than near death,

so that's OK then.

I suppose,
I guess.
Because that's what they say.
Because that's what they say.

Real death cuts off the fuel pipe:

tragic humiliation;

creation of mess.

Leaves everyone lonely, feeling alone.

Leaves everyone lonely, feeling alone.

The sunrise is aflame,

winter will be soon.

And cold will be less.

Tried to convey my eyes to other human beings:

it’s a chaotic emptiness.

A chaotic emptiness through me.

A chaotic emptiness through me.

Why does my body keep on operating when my life keeps on killing me?

I won't see all history

and what might do for me

is a failing single infinitesimal artery.

Pre-programmed to go involuntary.

Pre-programmed to go involuntary.

Intravenous me, hydrate me.

Strip the enamel from my teeth.

Wheels, cords and sticks is all I am.

Bless me as I run.

Moon up-lights rain from underneath.

Rain like silver razor blades.

Razor blades slice like this rain.

I read and I read and bleed until lines

sink deep through the pages.

I write and I write

and I write and writhe until

lines are thick bars of cages.

We are standing on the death knell.

We are standing on the death knell.

The flowers I picked for your hand hold the scent of other days.

I wish there were other flowers for other days

There will be other days.

There will be other days.

There will be other days.

There will be other days.

A meditation on wonder whilst knowing the end. Or: Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer is dead!

I've tried to write something beautiful. It just about caused me go mad with the headaches. I'm not cut out to write beautifully.

This is...
A meditation on wonder whilst knowing the end.
Or: Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer is dead!

Narrowest morning:

Paint blot moon in the cyan.

Sun blazed rising on a razor.

Swept pastel ribbons of cloud

gently compelled to flutter.

Storm line settles some distance away.

The cemetery always

in the grip of some chill.

It might be how it’s exposed:

On the hillside; trees far off.

Nylon flowers serve better here.

Concern glowers from oblong dull stones.

Bones lay evenly for all.

Lay flat a hand: see it.

Restful peace: a harmony.

Never lift another book.

Not another desirous grasp.

Let me pass without a touched wonder!

Lace of theories

do gather in the cemetery.

Colour of snakes’ skin.

Sharpness of citrus.

With chisel cuts to the day.

The truth: “No happiness before death”

There: a moment where,

wishing failure on despair,

dreamt stood on dust plane.

No soul shone round fair.

Compassion was my Hell

Birds left in massed shrieking squalls.

Bridge arched in wood.

Creeper branches arborescent.

Red berries dropping

like notes from piano keys.

Onto deadening wires.

Their music ruining everything.

Blood pouring out.

On paper, blood-slipping,

words shifting as they soak.

Dropping like red berries.

Gloominess of thought.

Not particularly caring for this beauty.

The glorious verse

This started out as a series of unconnected lines I wrote.
This is as close to a philosophical tract as I may muster.
I imbued it with malice.

The Glorious Verse...  

If I can’t get a muse,

An archenemy will do for me just as well.

I walk beside the river,

Through the membrane, fingers reach for me.

I’m a collection of atoms.

Put together to witness astrophysics and cruelty.

There's a crack in my ribcage

To put a cassette in, to playback my same position.

Like a pinned moth on a board

I’m uncomfortable and in need of a physician.

[Break]  

In this lecture theatre

We are both the studious and the studied.

A flash of the Pale Cutter's needle,

Neat stitching transforms us into what we are. 

A last exhale

slipping its mooring rope, roadkill, a cadaver.

[Break]  

If I require a reason,

I am surrounded by a past so have to not seek any further. 

I know, I know, I know, but you
and your woe can go right on ahead and fuck one another.

I try to claw at time.

Tremble as she shapes her legs along her parallel universe.

[the glorious verse]

I'm well aware.
I'm only too well aware of this.
After love there is loss and God only knows what we miss out on.

I’ve found no redeeming qualities in moral redemption:

They place a jar, ring a salt circle, make a flame small.

I've discovered no hopes in falsehoods masking desperation:

A world of physical tenderness
is the most mournful gift to the lonesome of all.

And I know about it,
I know only too well all about it.
Won't expect your mercy in your all enduring judgment.

And I know all about it.
How people shift into better; into worse.

When she steals my gaze in amber, I hear the glorious verse.

Ghosts are real

This is... Ghosts are real

Dead relationships are dead.
Ghosts are real.
Haunting the old haunts.
Some people contact them.
I don't believe in them.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead. 
They float silently by my eye.
They never age, but rot.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead.
I hear the shrieks.
I hear the sound trees make.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead. 
I think I must be dreaming.
I hear them in my bed.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead.

There's another ten verses I could tell, but everything I've said covers it just as well.

A Perishing Lament

Greville and the Tombstones are not very good at Halloween. But this little one seems appropriate for reading on a Halloween night. Listen and you might hear it through the wind, through the window, through the wall, through to morning.

This is:
A Perishing Lament

It’s not what fleshes our costumes.

It’s not the glow of a lantern,

flickering a face through a windowpane.

It’s a peculiarity which consumes.

A gothic, sloshing, formed within.

It’s an invisible foreboding without name.

It’s joining in a parlour game,

All silk dresses, paraffin lights and warm. 

And sensing not all is tomfoolery intent,

Disguised by cinder toffee scent.  

And the spirit moves on from you. 

And the spirit moves on

Because of what you have done.  

Watching players all sat in the round.

The Medium’s fingers of reed,

Flickering in refined ethereal breeze.

Listening out for your mortal sound.

The channelling is meant to mislead.

The panting in breasts as breaths freeze.

We’re joining your parlour game.

All creaks, knocks and earie manifest.

And moaning out eternal undying torment,

It’s a perishing lament.

And the spirit does rest with you.

And the spirit does rest

Because of what you have done.

Terminal agitation

I wrote this fast in a bath. Greville and the Tombstones appear to take the most melodramatic baths.

This is:
Terminal agitation

I cling to the side of the pool.

My naked body in supine pose of the tormented Jesus.

Knuckles grooved rivets.

A fleshy sac: loose yolk exposed.

My modesty slapped in oil.  

I consider dying.  

It's been two summers.

It’s been so much longer now.  

I wanted ovations.

Men punching the air.

Women falling into arms.

To be beautiful forever.

I wanted certification of life.  

I consider dying.  

I’ll not find ways back.

I’m alright with how I am now.  

Blood lacerated in the dance.

My hair, slippery and lank from the steaming pool.

Hanging willow branches.

Creating little concentric ripples.

Vulnerability coiling fingers.

I consider the pain.

A hymn for a nihilist

This was an interesting piece. I tweeted a couple of early drafts as I worked on it. Then it disappeared, deep into the well. Now it has resurfaced, the stones out its pockets. It is much changed. It went in a therapy and came out a hymn.

This is: A hymn for a nihilist

Wipe clean your eyeball on a sleeve,

This is not a benediction for your strife.

Pick up this note of mourning on cold days.

Days when skies are nicotine yellow lit life.

You could be happier, I’d say.  

What claims victory in war,

when you’re only fighting yourself?

What case are you trying to prove,

when you prosecute your own defence?

You want to watch some drown,

but to do it you must wade deeper in.

Don’t pierce that voodoo doll of yours,

you’ll only prick a finger with the pin.  

Young romantics, youthful dead.

Though who can truly tell the difference?

The trophy on an arm and another

skeleton cluttering the cupboard.

Rattling bones hush the screams.

Out of car windows, Time discards you

like empty tins, rattling on the road.

Seeing the car get small, you’re cut free.  

Velvet, burst stuffed heart cushion.

Dead fragile, vein thin leaf smoked pew.

Wallpaper peeling from humid stress,

Everything needs a redecoration.

Every bit moulders in ruins.

It’s complicated and it’s ridiculous

how decomposition is natural.

Come to terms with whatever the point is.

The perished, holly berry mildew,

worn out as a coat that really suits you.  

Years poured in, paper thin.

All the people are junkyards,

corrugated dolphin companions in the surf.

Wipe clean your other eyeball on a sleeve,

See through your ghosts giving up.

Wring out the excruciating tone.

View terror under grief within.

Creep towards The Word like medication,

Take it anytime, whatever dose,

It won’t cure your mortal bone.  

God, how did you get so old?

Trauma keeps from feeling the years.

Stolen act of misguided kindness.

I sense works growing cold in my warm core.

Watching tornadoes touch down on the ocean floor

make it worthwhile to endure.

Is this good therapy? I’m really, very, not so sure.

Hard where it counts

Anita Berber by Madame D'Ora Atelier 1922

Inspired by a line which resonated with me from David Lynch in Twin Peaks, this is...

Hard where it counts

You can’t have rainbows without rain.

I can do without rainbows.

To err humanity, forgiveness divinity.

Lord knows I was mistaken.

Getting soft all over the damn place.

Bless you, we are all dying.

I’m still hard where it counts.

Night of the encroaching thoughts

I've been listening to a lot of electronic beats lately. This is the result.

Faith Bacon

Night of the encroaching thoughts:

Mechanised dust enters by window crack, 
Leaving trails of sawdust self back
In circular tracks
on the sill.
I think: This must be Lucifer!
 I curse.
It flips on its back:
wings pasted down
Weak dust legs cycling upwards
growing stiller
and still. 
Dust is dust.

Smokers with their ointments for pains.

Rubbed fastidiously into veins.

Flowers, bushes and earth

Scent the humid, coarse air.

Reminiscent of a hospital.

And, of course,

this

persistent rain. 

I must remember to take a second breath.

I’ve hidden too long in death.

Clung to it like a balloon,

won at a fare

by a lover,

tin rifle

and
dead dog stare

Move Heaven and Earth for connections.

I mistrust how

Angels sow seeds to grow affections.

I can’t see why

They’re

not

considered demons.  

Flesh beats as wanting, death is a bone.

Existing is lonely, dying is alone.

I’m hanging out in the water tank trick,

denying help.

And I’m painted out as the lunatic.

On the fringes

Of a social circle
I can’t get out of.

Playing with rotting corpses of people I once knew, behind.

Day-freak phantasies in period costume read rehearsed lines

I re-animate in my mind,
wasted embodiment, weak limbs hardly attached.
Dust is dust.

I must remember they’re

All longing acted out
by loathing heart.

I must remember to take a second breath.  

I find five million ways to get over you.

Then given five million and two,

To leave you dangling tie high over

Suffering pit

Sky scores thunder, darkens azure

I cast forsaken

Shadow

with pitchfork

and

arrow tail tip.  

I must remember to take a second breath.

For these memories so final

That they live in death spirals of narrative, which weaves

Intricate tooled fragility into individual grieves.

Each little melancholic cog fastened to me.

A tree

Weighed with rusted scent leaves

In the autumn

heavy dew,

I draw up my fatal position.

My time passes, oh it passes.

The grieves glisten, oh they glisten

in the narrowing light

dejected I see

my
cracked

human condition.

One day the light will no longer turn to meet you

I don't think this really is about a lighthouse, y'know. I'm not even totally sure the lighthouse keeper is even employed as one.


One day the light will no longer turn to meet you

Drowned books.

Dashed on broken bones,

Split out at weird angles.

Corpse shallows.

Heaving in seaweed swell.

The Sadness took them.

Can’t you tell?  

The sky is falling in, isn’t it.

Someone should check outside.
Where's light?

The lighthouse keeper says:

"One day this turns away from you"

"One day you will be left in the dark" 

Wound tracks.

Silver laid ice spines.

Over laid down sleepers.

Paper cliffs.

Words rubble down below.

Fell off trembling hand.

Spider ink vibrato.  

A happy pose for a photograph.

Smiles keep only on the film roll.
  No blinking.

The lighthouse keeper says:

"One day this turns away from you" 

"One day this shines on you" 

"One day this leaves you in the dark" 

"The smile will snap closed. 

The sky will fall in.

The lid will snap closed

The earth will fall in" 

The lighthouse keeper says: 

"The lighthouse shows us pulsing as what we are"

"One day the light will believe you"

"One day the light will leave you"

"One day the light will no longer turn to meet you"

"One day you will be in the dark"

Light blinks across books,

Corpses, travels and paper cliffs,
Collapsed skies.

The lighthouse keeper says:

"I am getting older, and I am in pain"

"I will one day go and leave you"

"You’ll think the sky is falling in.

You’ll have to go outside to check" 

"Go outside and check"

"The sky is where it has always been"

CODA

Everyone ends.

Hasn't a chance.

Still, you are the sunrise in me.

A Tempest breeze.
Rough ground in a church yard.
Detached trusted light.

Betrayed song of a strained life.

You are the stone sunrise which gets me up.

Time paces

I've looked at this for so long I hate it. So it seems it is as good a time as any to put it out of its misery.

This is:

Time paces

Sometimes there is a hell of a lot of time.

Far too much of it.

Immense plains of time.

To be found bloated in echoing waiting rooms.

The chance embrace at the sand dunes

Has gone,

So move on.  

Lord knows, it’s breaking me all up.  

Time is not on my side: yet steals nothing.

It paces, tick to tock.

A switchblade of position.

Wound back in typewriter’s bluebottle ribbon.

Struck letter spooled, once hidden

Has gone,

So move on.  

Beautiful sadness, it's breaking me up.  

Time is no protector, it sanctifies unease.

It’s chewing me up.

We are all done for now.

Cut to the end: all this: the pulpit faced,

Faith with whatever it replaced

Has gone,

So move on.  

Shifting sadness, it's breaking me up.

You'll have to wait a while for broken me

A fight to death.

Time will win the last bit of me.

It feels like there should be a chorus now.

Time lined up tick to tock preaches only raw howl:

[optional]

“Time is not on your side”

“Time is not on your side”

“Time is not on your side”

“Time is on no one’s side”

Aristotle’s potentiality and actuality

This might be a story about death. It might be about dragonflies.

This might be a poem about death. It might be about my recent mental health.

This might be finding comfort in knowing I'm not accepted or not accepting. It's OK to not belong because others don't belong too.

There are no dragonflies on me.

This is:
Aristotle’s potentiality and actuality  

Saturn would float in enough water.

I Imagine its discs would dip and roll barely under the waves.

Like a capsized craft.

Or an underwater entity from way out of the depths.  

This silt sunk and settled down here.

A deathly knowledge, then, all can be excluded.

Electrical buoyancy.

Destined for displacement from some deep oceans.  

Under the water is welcoming coral.

Hold a soul-sized breath to be at the bright of the coral.

To be an added colour.

To forget so much of rejection to believe in it no longer . 

I visited the coral and saw myself.

Under grandiose waves I swam as part of its eco-system.

A bone vibration.

“I too am of shell”: held tight to your ear, tales I will tell.  

My bones soon compressed tho’

Turned oil slick, know fear of the water between the coral.

As life exhales death

The deep quietly excises oil, keeping coral unchanged.  

An oil slick trying. Slicking and trying.

Trying to dive to reach the coral lighting the water’s bed.

“Must be close to coral by now”

Only eyes like discs dip and roll barely under the surface.  

Fragile as bubbles. Thin and nervy.

Balanced finely on the very merest edge of water tension.

I cannot convey how mere.

More spheres floating on top of the ocean.

Existing together.

Loving in a lonely scape away from submerged coral.

Without atmospheric pressure.  

Was this death growing tired of life?

Floating gently from dreary acts laid way to new lifeless

Is this a push or a pull?

The jagged coral grows tired of the roundness.

The orb orbiting,

Sees the coral as jagged and can’t understand.  

Can’t stand the touching.  

Marble blackness:

Above the heavy dark water, emitting psychedelia.

To the corpse scape:

Iridescence spectrum swirling beyond the upwards

To the coral scape: 

Up from below grandiose waves, only the oil slick sky.

If I lay still on this couch, will you tell me if I’m a sufferer?

It's been a slow process to get back to writing again.

I hope you don't mind.

This is:

If I lay still on this couch, will you tell me if I’m a sufferer?

I need to know if I’m a monster,

The reason I ask,

I’ll tell you why

I don’t seem capable of dying

But I’m so far from alive.  

I seek dreams of the blessed

I sleep with arms crossed on my chest.

I awaken tired, nevertheless.

I rip others’ history and give it away,

replace it with magnetic tape memory.

Relentless failing abject misery  

I need to know if I’m a survivor,

The reason I ask,

I’ll tell you why

I don’t seem capable of dying

But I’m so far from alive.  

The turn of my situation here

Leaves what is left as traits too near.

Transformed into what I appear,

My virtuous principles do betray

Smudged and shaded outside their edges.  

What if pain of grief sharpens my teeth and weakens my nails?  

I need to know if I’m a sufferer,

The reason I ask,

I’ll tell you why

I don’t seem capable of dying

But I’m so far from alive.  

I feel it all, decay, all the time

Every single conceivable angle and line

All at once and again separately

I’ll write an unforgiving play

And perform it with dolls, painstakingly  

I need to know if my silence makes me a monastery

My counsel a sermon of scratched out names

A lectern of suffering preacher

Held clasped books laid on darkened shelves

High in the tower of the cranium, quietly a wretched creature?  

Through all the trouble

I keep on functioning

I keep on being.

Fluids keep on agitating

And I keep on strangling others’ sentiment

As gentle as sunset  

World of bones, dread of feeling

Lightbulb eyes cast upon me beaming

I need to know if I’m a monster,

I need to know if I'm a survivor,

I need to know if I'm a sufferer,

If what I am, I am not being.

The reason I ask,

I’ll tell you why

I don’t seem capable of dying

But I’m so far from alive.