Recent poetry. Part two.

Plant the suggestion
You’ll learn your lesson
A hundred stares of disrepair
Within one day will merit
The presumption you’ve inherited
Disease worse than consumption.

Stumped to find out of my mind
I felt just fine just yesterday
Or did I? Such a malleable...
-- dreadfully -- mind will say.

I don’t know who planted the suggestion
Who invited her
To feel that one emotional transgression
That could have delighted her

Would, like a Sin, send her to hell
And the only hell she could fathom
Was one in a lunatic’s asylum cell
Where she was haunted by herself as phantom.

How malleable such a mind
Can be when it’s not governed
By the heart
What terrible a pity
Just to see someone
You want to free someone
Before she
Even starts.

Looking down a wishing well
Unable to stand it
When she was young, she could stand
On the ledge
And brother then would dare her

Don’t fall in!
Preparing her
For her cardinal sin.

Now she’s taken up the bucket.
Saying to herself, Well, fuck it.
Now her foot is in the bucket
Now her hand is on the rope.

With a sigh, she says
Growing up is going down
I could try to say
It’s just another day
But I know better now.

She knows
That she is mad
With certainty
Right now

At the bottom of her wishing well
No one can hear the sounds
They all tell and in the hell
Of her own cell it does resound

How malleable the mind is
When it’s pushed into the ground.

dm.A.A.

 

 

I know I didn't always feel this... sedated.
There's some spirit I used to know that's been drowned out by the radio.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you have to rise above
Welcome to the new age
radioactive
That's been drowned out
by the radio
You once talked to me about love
And you painted pictures of
a never-never land.
And I could have gone to that place
But I didn't understand.

The idealised Madrigal
singer sung my friend
of several years

was at that point only
(and still is)
a beginner

Full of fears.
...
She had claimed to be a sinner
She saved face among the saints

But she was a sixteen year old fanatic
Leaving no complaints.

The idealised Madrigal
singer I hadn't realised

was mad.

That was the beginning
of the quickest fall

from Grace

I'd ever had.

Now I am in love again
What will become
if I proclaim it?

Someone coming back from
desert plains would claim
you shouldn't name it.

Will she see that I'm the same?
Or will she hear the stories?
OR will the ghost of war
haunt her more
and fill her more with worries?

Probably
but little things are big
as big things can be and vice versa.

She may feel adverse to me
BUt that will not make me less versed, sir.

Dm.A.A.

 

In Your Power

An hour of your time
would have spared me
several eternities in dreams
and several doors which
never will
open
for me again.
...
I was in my prime
And then you stared me
down
and shook me
(by the knees)
to the ground

How could I not involve myself
in schemes
beyond the days of our dismemberment
Now I cannot be me again.

We could have
discussed it
But you lost your
trust in me
and I'm frankly
disgusted.

Three years
Damn right, I'm still
thinking about you

It takes three years
to think it out, you
never took a second
look

You felt your life was reckoned
and I read it like a book.

Love beckoned, wrecked us both
and look how long
it took.

You could have been how strong, though
just to see me
for an hour.

But I suppose such sanctity
was never really in your
power.

 

You dreamt the kids of twenty-two
could save the older people
with their eyes in adolescent view
fixed upon the steeple

So you spent your life as a crusader
Parading in delusion
With the naive hope you could dissuade their
Pain and their confusion
...
But the vision of your present's growing
like a rose unhindered
And all the while your friends, uknowing
Focus on the cinders

So grow like the rose, go with the flow
You won't be disappointed
We only ever really kniw
the future we've annointed

But the river has a different plan
though fools, they will despise you
If you don't fight, the river can
and will always surprise you.

if you insist on living
on a world so unforgiving
that trust is not merited
until the veil's unfurled
or unless it's inherited,

If you live on an Earth
wherein one's worth is parroted
and one's treasure's measured
in carats...
I only wonder how you bear it.

You say to me you cannot know
someone except behind the mask
But I say it seems up for show
that knowing one is just the simplest task

I do not feel that anyone must
become a parrot
And so the only one I trust
wouldn't ever wear it.

 

Mother's qualities infringe
Private holidays unhinge

Knowledge of the past: our curse
discourage for the future: worse.

Drunken morning everyone's
irritated at the Sun

Why am I drained? I strained
so hard
but strained too hard

too hard

Something lost within a mist
Some face that I might have kissed

obscured behind mother's image
it's so hard for a mind to resist

but my heart persists
this time like a drunken mess

Blowing kisses to the wind
Every day, caring
less.


okay fine i'll tell you

freaking Sebastian

Apparently I'd called him Sebastard

and he didn't take particular note of it early on

but the next time I saw him he disregarded me

so one day I followed him to the NS buildings

and I was walking alongside him

and he did a pretentious-ass "can I help you?" kind of look

and I asked upfront, "Why don't you like me?"

and he replied

"You called me Sebastard. I do not appreciate petty name calling. And I would like it if you would leave me alone."

Well I ended up surmising that they had moved from the "terrace" to the second floor of the NS building

so I approached them one day

and wasd of half a mind to leave

but despite everything in my mind saying "bad, bad, guilty" everything in my Bones was saying "this is good."

· And she alone didn't look up at me

but everyone else, Sebastian included, did

and then there was the guy with the creepy glare

whom I'd never met

and the bad teeth

and I'd never met him

and His was the worst

it's just like, "I could kill you, if you were wirth the time to."

but anyway I mumbled a "Have you guys seen Kevin Zavala?" or "...Ryan?" and some bs to that effect

· and sat down on the floor

within a minute the majority of the group got up to cross the floor oto the elevator to go to the "cafeteria"

and Marissa said the One Thing she ever said to me

"We'll be back"

and my chest was on fire

* heart

and i hopped up onto the bench

and started talking to this one blonde girl

whom I'd never met

who hung around at the foot of the bench to watch their stuff

and she mad this mechanical look in her eyes

behind these glasses

· she looked German

and I started spewing the bull at her

and saying "You know, my parents are Russian scientistsm so I'm very emotionally open to the point of being overwhelming"

and "The rule for all horrors is that you march right into them"

and she looked up at me

and asked me my name

and I said "Dmitry" and couldn't tell at first why I felt like I was name-dropping

and she kind of looked off for a moment and said,

"Oh."

like she'd heard it before

· and I grew more suspicious

so

I said, "Yeah, that Sebastian guy doesn't really like me, does he?"

and she replied,

"Yeah, I don't think that anyone in that group really likes you."

to which I replied,

"Well, I think that Kevin and Ryan like me."

"Yeah, I think that they're the only two who like you."

but anyway

as you can imagine,

I walked away from that,

THRILLED

· BECAUSE I STOOD UP TO THAT

AND I DIED MORE PRONOUNCEDLY THAN WHEN I FIRST HAD A DATE TO THE WINTER FORMAL AT MY MIDDLE SCHOOL.

and there's this

fellow in the hallway that I escaped into

and this guy is

like

ultra-nerd

but incredibly adept. Has worked several jobs and scraped by to survive

· I'd talked to him on the train

he always has his Gameboy

and I told him what happened

and he saidm "Yeah, I learned a long time ago to stop caring what people think."

and I was at peace.

Fin.


No regrets.

My husband and I
met

after a long courtship
And I do not regret the
year he spent in
idle worship.

The first few months that
he would not
approach me

out of sheer stupidity

The next few
out of fear,

the last
out of humility.

I used to go through men
like cigarettes

But now that we're together

I have
no regrets
And I don't
think I
will ever.


Regrets.

If there is any
poison from which
all of this has
stemmed, it's
the unthinkable thought
of being for virtue
condemned,

There was a time
when men would
wait, the weight
their solemn
burden. But now,
like a scapegoat's
fate, they are
hated. It's absurd
and wrong

and who would dream
that rather than
weighing feelings
weak and strong
we shall fall for some scheme?

There was a time
when men admired women
from afar

In their minds, a
star enthroned in
unknown depth

and it was not to be
that they alone
had slept as
women stayed
awake

For should a man's
eyes ever
drift from
wonder, he would
undertake
a plunge upon
the stake
and for the Underworld
and not only the
undertaker's sake.

That was the snake
that Venus bore about
her fruit.

But now, any
asshole with
a suit
can assault
a bar
and hire her, firing up
her desire like
a car.

There was a time when men
did not mistake the fire
for the
star.

There was a man
with an astronomical plan
He said, come along
and join the Ultimate Revolution

There was a woman
and my heart fell into her hand
unwittingly
like an apple from a tree
and we discovered gravity
that day

But I was dismayed
at how this man
had so much to say
I asked, 'up whose tree
is he barking?'

And I had a friend
who unhesitantly would defend
him: 'Only 99.99 %
of people
will see the light
towards which he
hearkens.'

ii.
And I agree:
The faces all darken
when I come to show
them my light

And in those noble
reliably stark
expressions is now
a fixed impression
of fright at my sight.

iii.
I have a friend
who will not defend
me. A wolfish
and jovial clown.

Curing the well-
wishing tragedy
with the trivial

Turning that frown
up-side-down.

I tell him, unbridled
and vulnerably

About the only one
whom I want to
see

He looks at me frankly
and tells me, quite blankly,
'I guarantee
99.99% of the time,
you will
be shot down.'

as the body
formally known as Dmitry
takes his break,

it becomes clear.

'Everyone is a drug
addict' is an apt
statement

and what we call
'Love' is merely
[and I repeat]

embarassment made
tolerable
by sentimentality,
infantile dependency made
bearable by
idealism,
and sexual obsession
made pardonable
by bullshit.


in other news,
an anthropomorphic
Radish

drifts through (and parades
(about) Escondido. [at night.]

Bleeding everywhere

And its blood
upon touching
patrons,

Turns them
to pomegranates.