“It is a tiny thing to have your face touched. Isn’t it?
But think again of the burnt and unbeloved beasts of the world.
Think about the people whose skin cannot remember affection.”
-The Gargoyle
“Certum est quia impossibile est”
(“It is certain because it is impossible.”)
“Quod me nutrit, me destruit”
(“That which nourishes me also destroys me.”)
-The Gargoyle
“Alles brennt wenn die flame nur heifz genu gist.
Die Welt ist nichts al sein schmelztiegel”
(“Everything burns if the flame is hot enough.
The world is nothing but a crucible.”)
-The Gargoyle
“Asshole. Loser. Whiner. Addict. Demon. Monster. Devil. Fiend. Beast. Brute. Goblin. Has-been. Never-was. Never-will-be. Unloved. Unlovable. Un-person.”
-The Gargoyle
“I thought about Francesco working in the heat of his metal shop. I thought about Graziana eating pasts on her bubonic bed, just a little so that she would feel better. I thought about lovers in their time of dying. I tried to imagine being so thoroughly devoted that I would die for someone else; I, who found it difficult enough to live for myself. And then I tried to envision what might happen what I was finally released…”
-The Gargoyle
“Someday soon, you’ll walk out of here and have to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?”
-The Gargoyle
“Du bist min, ich bin din: Des solt du gewis sin;
Du bist beslozzen in minnem herzen, verlorn ist daz sluzzelin:
Du muost och immer darinne sin.”
(“You are mine, I am yours: You may be sure of this;
You’ve been locked inside my heart, the key lost, thrown away:
Within it, you must always stay.”
-The Gargoyle
“Monstrum in fronte, Monstrum in animo”
(“Monster in face, Monster in soul.”
-The Gargoyle
“Death is no fearsome mystery
He is well known to you and me.
He hath no secret he can keep
To trouble any good man’s sleep.
Turn not thy face from death away.
Care not he takes our breath away.
Fear him not, he’s not thy master.
Rushing at thee, faster, faster.
Not thy master, but servant to
The Maker of thee, what or who
Created death, created thee-
And is the only Mystery.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
“In the fields of life, a harvest
Sometimes comes far out of season
When we thought the Earth was old
And could see no earthly reason
To rise for work at break of dawn
And put our muscles to the test.
But winter here and autumn gone
It just seems best to rest, to rest.
But under winter fields so cold,
Wait the dormant seeds of seasons
Unborn and so the heart does hold
Hope that heals all bitter lesions
In the fields of life, a harvest.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
Life without meaning
Cannot be borne.
We find a mission
To which we’re sworn
-or answer the call
Of Death’s dark horn.
Without a gleaning
Of purpose in life.
We have no vision,
We live in strife,
-or let blood fall
On a suicide knife.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
Nowhere can a secret keep
Always secret, dark and deep,
Half so well as in the past
Buried deep to last, to last.
Keep it in your own dark heart
Otherwise the rumors start.
After many years have buried
Secrets over which you worried
No confidant can then betray
All the words you didn’t say.
Only you can then exhume
Secrets safe within the tomb
Of memory, of memory.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
To see what we have never seen
To be what we have never been
To shed the chrysalis and fly,
Depart the earth, kiss the sky,
To be reborn, be someone new
Is this a dram or is it true?
Can our future be cleanly shorn
From a life to which we’re born?
In each of us a creature free-
Or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without freedom, nothing matters.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
Love
As quoted from “How To” by Augusten Burroughs
Love doesn’t use a fist.
Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly.
Love doesn’t laugh at you in front of friends.
It is not in love’s self-interest for your self-esteem to be low.
Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.
Love does not make you beg.
Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account.
Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it.
Love does not ask or even want you to change. But if you change, love is as excited about this change as you are if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, love will go back with you.
Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses.
Love believes you.
Love is patient; Love does not make a point of showing you how patient it is. It is critical to understand the distinction. But when you see on the face of your partner or spouse an expression that reads, “I’m being very patient with you,” this could be the single detail that alerts you to the fact that you are in an abusive relationship. So patience is exhibited only by a lack of pressure. This is how you know it’s there. Patience is like donating a large sum of money anonymously.
What matters you to as the donor is that the charity receives the funding, not who wrote the check, even if knowing who wrote the check would wildly impress the world.
Walking Anguish
Waking up, another day
Is not a blessing.
The future rolls forward
But my body is tuck on pause.
A love virgin, Eros,
Nothing to be proud of.
Plenty have loved me,
I have loved none.
Love stories and movies
A love/hate/yearning romance.
A waking death,
A walking anguish.
Perpetually dying
Without the close.
The curtain never falls,
The tail-eating snake.
I grow weary of this dance.
The sun taunting me.
The moon as lonely as I,
Her kiss immaterial.
She kisses me in the night,
In lieu of she who I have not
To kiss me with moon and rain,
The smell of blossoms and youth.
She who is not,
Is.
Is there, a phantom conjured;
A prophecy summoned from home
And desperation. And love-starvation.
I, who have never loved,
Starve for the love of another,
My heart dying with every beat.
The perpetual dying, slow in coming.
I wish I knew nothing.
For waking anguish is walking death.
10/06/14
Illusions
This pathway I did choose in haste,
With inner sickness my soul doth waste.
Chains of lead cast as my feet,
The poison bile I’m forced to eat.
There is no crow knocking at my door.
There is no crow, quoth “never more”.
My hopes are like the shining sun,
Darkness cloud and sun is done.
The curving steel, the silent eye,
Wings from my spine, I yearn to fly.
Fly from here, the septic world,
Sun on my face and peace unfurled.
People brown, white, yellow, red,
Insidious hate and legion dead.
No more a world of green and light,
A world instead of human might.
Bodies stacked to make a wall.
The screaming children in moments fall,
At the feet of their wailing kin
To share the cup of human sin.
The human heart has turned to ask,
Away from God to their own path.
Bombs that fall and vaporize
All that stands and all that cries.
The land is now a barren rock,
The ocean an acid tide of rot.
The world is a planet of perpetual war,
Where all who live will grasp for more.
The human heart is never sated,
The final judgment is awaited.
You think you’re safe, the death’s not here.
But in time, it’s crystal clear.
Hide in plain sight and close your eyes
The truth will always evade your lies.
War and sickness are the humans’ lot.
Not gold and silver for what we fought.
A tide of blood laps at your door.
You think you’re safe quoth “never more”.
The crow is knocking at your door.
SO what are we really fighting for?
“Disobedience brought time into the world so that lives could thereafter be measured to an end. Then Cain murdered Abel, and there was yet another new thing in the world, the power to control others by threat and menace, the power to cut short their stories and rule by fear, where upon death that was a grace and a welcoming into a life without tears became no longer sacred in itself, but a blunt weapon of crude men. And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia, that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked , and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it.”
“Innocence”, Dean Koontz, PG 324, Lines 4-13
“Remember me when I am gone away.
Gone far away into the silent land.”
“Remember”,
Christina Rossetti
“Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?”
“On Another’s Sorrow”
William Blake
“The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.”
“Innocence”, Dean Koontz,
Page 316, Lines 21-22
“In every way,” she said, “You are so beautiful and you will be beautiful forever.”
“Innocence”
“Overcome by wonder, I kisses the corner of her mouth, where the bead had been and the nose from where the serpent ring had hung, and her eyes that no longer needed be concealed from a hostile world, and her brow behind which she lived and hoped and dreamed and knew God and loved me.”
“Innocence”, Dean Koontz,
Page 316, Lines 21-22 and 23, 27.
Your voice the ambrosial hum of butterfly
Wings against the silk of my spirit.
I can feel your soul.
It is blue. Like a robin’s egg.
Your smile is like a ray of sunlight in the midst
Of a blizzard when God’s eyes are blind.
Your touch is like the sunlight in a rain storm.
And yet I’ve never met you.
I see you on every street corner.
I see you in every car.
My heart is filled with hardened jade.
I have no chisel or hammer.
I want to wake to living sunlight
But there is only clouds in my sky.
What is love for someone who knows
Nothing but shadowy unfullfillment?
Mine eyes reveal the only candle in
A darkened northern waste.
Eyes of green algae in a lake of
Death where my soul shall forever drown.
I am the Angel of Death fallen
To witness the Destruction of
Earth.
To witness the human shades.
Aggressive, not assertive.
Impatient, not long-suffering.
Judgmental.
Snide.
Pessimistic
Rough edges.
An abstract.
A Picasso of mentality.
I feel…unhealthy…abnormal.
What’s wrong with me?
Why am I…however I am?
A foreigner…alien among my own species.
A life of spatial detachment.
I do not belong.
My self. It requires someone discerning.
But thus far, I feel anger
And aggressive hate.
Do you think you can do better?
You who presume to smirk at me?
The alien? The clown?
Why must I live
When all I ever wanted was life
Normal?
Pawn to c4 is all it takes,
The game comes to like with a risk.
Every move in 26 years,
Control with an iron fist.
White then black,
An eternal game,
A battle of minds.
I dance the dance
That animals dance
There are not that many kinds.
Here my sins outweigh my wants,
But my wants are never few.
With a cautious mind,
I steal a piece,
Another pound to add to the stew.
In the end I lose my queen,
It comes to a screeching halt.
When you lose your precious head,
You’ll know it is all your fault.
05/01/12
Your name is an enigma.
A quest for the grail.
The platinum chalice.
Like a mirage on the sand,
Your eyes are forever with me.
Pools of darkness to drown the souls of man.
I have traveled the world
Searching for the Grail.
I have seen many who hold no spark.
You are a queen, a might God.
I would follow you to the end of time.
I know not your face. I know your heart.
I have sought you for a lifetime.
My soul merges with yours.
My destiny is your own.
When will I receive
My just reprieve?
Do you seek me also?
Do you see the path of god?
I feel a great darkness,
A void full of all emptiness.
My god loves me and still I weep.
“Be filled”, says the book.
“Be filled” with what?
Filled with sorrow and anger.
I know nothing but suffering.
I wish for mercy.
My life is a prison stay.
A life of solitary confinement.
There is no reprieve.
I know only hatred and misery.
Chains of coal and slag.
I know naught but pain.
Bring me a glimmer, my God.
I cannot bear the darkness.
My name is Promethius.
The crow hungers for my flesh.
The gods can be cruel.
People can be worse.
What have I done to merit such a curse?
Is there no cure, no happily ever after?
No such thing as Unconditional Love?
No hope? No mercy?
What have I been missing?
Humor, light and another’s love?
And the love of self in selfless love.
Why do I perpetually weave seeds
Of poison vine
Through the skins of my crimson heart
Top fill with death the empty chambers of fear?
Why do I paint in bright colors & bead
The shell of a spoiled fruit that is black
And the toxins permeate all that it touches?
Pity & fear.
They prevent the apple or the pear
From being what is truly sacred:
An alter to the beauty of the world
And an open window to the souls of light.
Doorways and neon
Beds not my own.
A shadow that’s moving
With freedom on loan.
Begging for scraps
And riding the state.
Sleeping in garbage
With meth on my plate.
Parasite, virus, despicable cur.
Breaking up families and
Causing a stir.
Sleeping in rainstorms,
A friend at my back.
A warm living blanket
Of which I now lack.
Walls of stone and
Windows of ice
Monotony sunlight and
Sickening vice.
Simple pleasures
That keep me alive.
Singing me ballads
Until I arrive.
An invisible lifeline and
Windows of glass.
Shoveling snow
Is a pain in my ass.
Six years in chains
Leaves a hole in my gut.
Living in graveyards
Keeps me stuck in a rut.
Storms clouds built up
Of purple and red.
Spare the Earth
Strike me instead.
Vermin that run
Up the walls of my cell.
Closing your eyes
Will not work in this hell.
Sing of the light
That beaks through the clouds.
Keep to the righteous
That ward off the crowds.
Hear the music
That sings to the soul.
I’ll give you a shovel
To dig out your hole.
06/07/12
06/09/12
I am a shadow, hiding in shadows,
Longing for substance, to know
What it is to be human.
I see beauty in all its forms,
But I cannot touch this
For I am shadow
And beauty is in light only.
I have seen things you can not
Possibly imagine and yet I weep
For the beauty I shall never know.
Beauty in darkness that craves the light,
Wishing for eyes of green to look upon me.
To wake in sunlight from windows
Of the soul and the Holy light of Sol.
To see the eyes of another
Look upon you as sacred.
The deformity you call yourself
Rubbed as clay
Under a craftsman’s fingers.
To feel the soul of another
Is to never see the scars.
In a rat hole, thrice infected
In a sewer, twice expected,
A stranger’s scorn, always inspected,
A disgusted sneer that I elected,
To live in rat holes I infected.
11/28/14
Doorways and neon
Beds not my own.
A shadow that’s moving
With freedom on loan.
Begging for scraps
And riding the state.
Sleeping in garbage
With meth on my plate.
Parasite, virus, despicable cur.
Breaking up families and
Causing a stir.
Sleeping in rainstorms,
A friend at my back.
A warm living blanket
Of which I now lack.
Walls of stone and
Windows of ice
Monotony sunlight and
Sickening vice.
Simple pleasures
That keep me alive.
Singing me ballads
Until I arrive.
An invisible lifeline and
Windows of glass.
Shoveling snow
Is a pain in my ass.
Six years in chains
Leaves a hole in my gut.
Living in graveyards
Keeps me stuck in a rut.
Storms clouds built up
Of purple and red.
Spare the Earth
Strike me instead.
Vermin that run
Up the walls of my cell.
Closing your eyes
Will not work in this hell.
Sing of the light
That beaks through the clouds.
Keep to the righteous
That ward off the crowds.
Hear the music
That sings to the soul.
I’ll give you a shovel
To dig out your hole.
06/07/12
