Press the eject

My heart beats like a

broken Walkman in the

callous, eternal night -

night of how many million

lost demons, lurking, escaping,

crawling through tense

silently sleeping muscles and

tendons, knotted in unknown

anguish and almost forgotten

childhood treacheries  - 

numbed panic - alert and

wired alive, rollercoasting

over legions of unmanned bodies

ethereal spectre of the common

thread binding the mass of

inwardly, outwardly scarred dead

passing through this almost life,

The waking and wounded

martyrs of themselves,

not even realised in the

shattered mirror of morning

not even noticed in the 

hair of breath between

Genius and Insanity's vibrant call

not even wanted

between the unexpected cradle

and ever present shadow  of

grinning, shining grave,

not even rejecting the bitter

taste of everyday disillusionment

dragging weariness through millenia

of work, love and pain,

awaiting crippling old age

without tasting or realising

further than

ancient, wisened eye allows,

trampled insects

scattered unnoticed through voids

and voids of colours, harrowed

by migrating emotions and 

ever changing landscape phantoms,

A ghost in the wind - untouchable

to senses that never sense

and ears smiling reversible secrets

beneath blankets of fog, and fog

thicker than lunar imagined

mountains - a false sea of

hope, drowning homosapiens meagre

mark on the indifferent planet

of abode,

correcting and erasing inflicted

damage, with scant regard

for us, the antz

Reviews

[barleygirl]

There are a number of younger cafe poets who do a similar kind of bleak rant in a stream-of-consciousness style & to them I would say: look at this example of how it's done. I love your thought-provoking message, always crisp & stinging in your fomenting simmering intensity, but I must comment on the structure of the rant . . . here you provide the perfect amount of connective tissue, something many young rant-writers need to do more of, it can't all be hundred-dollar words, one after another. This reads like storytelling that's veering on the edge of insanity, beautifully balanced to let us feel how insane it all is while also seducing us into thinking it's biz-as-usual (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie

Killer title, too!

[gram linski]

haha, aye them young bucks better watch out, for I an the original upsetter, the OG of the café.com, and I will reap in rhythm and rhyme and no f****r is save from my sad decline, hugs and winks, fondly

[Eilis]

The unsleep of the haunted. The hours where the riddled spirit wanders through time and space in a ghostly way. I always think of those nights like desert journeys in a way. The expanse and thirst—it seems endless sometimes as the night hours pass so much slower when there’s only the movement of your own breath.

As much as I understand and get the dark tomes of this story, and appreciate the unique ways you have found to describe the state of loneliness here, I still don’t feel that all hope is lost. For any of us. Sorry, haha, but sometimes the dour dark is where the light peels away the layers and shows slivers of itself. And once the light leaks in, it's a powerful force.

So, in conversation with the speaker, I take away that there’s some fucked up s**t happening all around all of us. We’re a bit like ants, yes, but there’s beauty in their industry (as there can be in ours) and as the poem shows—there’s more in the mind than the eye can unfold.

So the world is falling apart—but it’s also covered in violets (to quote myself, haha) and things aren’t over yet. Despite the myriad ways we work against our and the planet’s good.

Maybe I’m stapling on the hope to your message. It’s possible. But there it is. Either way, this is an inventive and interesting journey through the sometime torture of being human. Love the Walkman heart beat especially. Wish I’d thought of that. But there are many standout tidbits in the poem. Good stuff.

[gram linski]

the title is a Bauhaus reference, haha, and the goth heart that permeates us all is stained by visions of history of memory of future, told unfold, damaging tape heads and refusing to rewind

[Eilis]

Well, I just lost a sliver of my goth cred for missing the reference. Don’t tell anyone, haha.

[John Alexander McFadyen]

This is a dour trip through time and space and earthly matters like abuse and the struggle with guilt and the confusion of anger that can be a monster inside us as we watch all the other monsters destroy the earth and yet we are as irrelevant in the scheme of things as ants are to us. Man I need a drink! (again).

[gram linski]

lol, I've been told my poetry drives people to drink, especially me, it is locked inside my head after all, seeking escape, egress points of some kind and finds the broken bloodied nail,

[Chris Shaw]

Pour me out a glass of whatever you are drinking. This is grim at its best describing what a disaster we are on this planet. Yes only the insects will remain. That's if they are lucky.

Chris

[gram linski]

Thanks Chris, see above, lol, if POTUS doesn't believe what hope do we have,