Keep the faces within
disembodied voices crawling
a shattering of skulls behind eyelids
peeping to tomorrow’s byline
author unknown
hatred the tagline
the other freaks are calling
Finger pointing
‘Not me, not I, look there at Them.’
contortionists contorting
fists clash, skulls smash
twisting, cavorting
freaks on freaks in blood
sheep calling sheep sheep
over the fence and mawing
grazing on the zieteigests distortion
groomed into war and extortion
And so the chant goes
‘Not me, not I, look there at them‘
‘Not me, not I! Look there them’
Poetry
A scribble in my chest
‘Write down your inner monologue when you’re feeling the heat.’
but all the words are just one jumbled mess
A scribble beating in my chest
The stallion and the misunderstood
Do you know what it’s like to feel like
At any given moment, they’ll take away your rights?
When all these people keep on arguing on either side
and you’re just trying to keep from dying inside
trying to be unknown
in a landscape of hatred
keeping to the edges
I used to think I hung around these places
cause I wanted to be alone
but now I think I was pushed
pushed to the side
Sometimes I think I’m strong
but mostly, I just think I’m wrong
my stomach churning with all the news
as they preach to all the masses in their pews
I laugh at their ignorance
and then it all burns in my lungs
their fingers pointing to all of us
and I hear their teeth clash as they speak
hungry for the blood rushing to my head
and I think of the look in that horse’s eye
tangled in barbed wire, the flare of the nostrils
as fear curdled his blood
and I think we are brothers in blood
The stallion and the misunderstood
The long black train
Trying to learn to be captivated by the moment
but
All these thoughts get away from me
and I give chase
never catching the momentum of now
but all the tomorrows
like how one day
someone I love will slip away
And I want to fight against the indifference of the universe
but it wouldn’t fear me anyway
I could bend and break all the rules
But time will still etch itself onto my mother’s face
I could photograph all these candid moments
light capturing my father’s face
but in the end, even the lights paintings will fade away
and I wear a mask of calm
But these butterflies are held
each flutter pulls a different trigger
and time keeps rushing
The long black train that can’t be stopped.
The sound of mourning
The snowflake falls indifferent to it’s own impermanence
just as the greyed feather glides from its pyre
heedless to the swan that carried it
the world doesn’t mourn or care for all that we carry
and the wind screeches only what the listener tells it
We are asteroids
Springs symphony stirs
but nothing compared to that which spurred
the machines to toil away
Clank, clank
never the hammer of a woodpecker
but the clang and bang of the extractors
the green has all but gone
no weeds to straggle the edges
no brambles for Jenny Wren to nest in
the fox lost its hunting ground
and the owl’s hoot grows ever-distant
perhaps they liken us to a storm that passes through
when they glance us in their beady eyes
but soon, they’ll learn the truth
we were asteroids
plummeting the earth to ruin
Look at us
Look at us, our crimes loiter in the air
dangerous with intent
but we’ll carry on
skuttling along in our exoskeletons
It’s true, we haven’t really got much choice
so we speed along
looking out of our windows
we undo all that was said
every day
A great forgetting
making plastic hearts to preserve
the life force once organic
and in the stale breath of a museum
the heart of a whale
consumes us
as we pass
A reflection on what makes us human
fading fast
how can we know ourselves
when everything we are connected to is imprisoned?
Sisyphus shrugged
We struggle with the world’s indifference
the percussion of rain only background noise to existence
no God breathing chance into the dice
everything just is
apart from you and I
carrying the world on our shoulders
breathless and tired
Is this what it is to be human?
‘Looks what way,’ shrugged Sisyphus
Plastic death
There was a rustle
before it dipped, plopped and clinked
and the sound made me think
of our lungs laden with this tarred air
as the bottle rattled, one last breath
and I thought about the remains of us
littered among this plastic death
Tomorrow’s tomorrow’s
Do you ever stop to think
maybe there is no more room to grow?
we’re made small by this incessant need
always on the go
nothing is valued unless it can be sold
when we’re renting air
I won’t tell you what I told
We should be scared
but tomorrow’s tomorrow’s are too far to care
meditation teaches us to live in the moment
but the future is for sale
in a ruin of our own creation.
So I’ll take this breath now – glad it’s not tomorrow.
silverbackgorillapoetry.com 