9:12 p.m.

tobacco stained breath

Dusky smoke rolling in nightly gloom

keyboard missing letters T, R, H, U

and that same sombre silhouette of a stranger poisons

the discoloured wall of his past poetic smiles.

Knuckles blue,tirelessly the words are drafted

Words born out of clouded memories,in the company of an empty liquor bottle-

Only he knows the magnetic seduction of his lies.

1:28 a.m.

the woozy smell of fermentation instilled in his tongue

is bleeding internally through the left saturated nicotine lung.

In that space he cannot romanticize a drunken-drenched word to call it poetry

Puff a cigarette ablaze again.

And again.

Another page has scorched

from the dying embers of cigar that slowed his internal clock;

contemplating those smoky memories,surreptitious in the folds of his mind.

4:00 a.m.

and the ardent absence of those memories burn in his mind

Like decomposed adrenaline coals

seething from his briny pen and contracted, sooty irony

dribbled across the unsung limerick of his narcotic poetry .

He sighs, a sickening sigh of discontent

coiled in the mouth of his stomach

aching to rumble with the thunder out in the cerulean sea

6:23 a.m. liquid amber morning and salty breeze

In his nostrils and cracked lips

He sits in his red wooden chair, wistfully

digesting the words composed in the furtive hours of the night

He once wrote with child-like splendour

upon the crumbling walls of his childhood home,

imagining what life could mean in mankind’s metaphorical eagle wings

How translucent is the delirious view of a child?

Believing in everything while knowing nothing at all

6:53 a.m. and it’s a cruel, cruel world when poetry tastes

like adder’s poison under his lips, down his jagged throat it slips.

Anemic fingers twitched on the computer screen, aching to be released

There he sits, in that red wooden chair smoking his silver fire of madness

combusting the paradoxical answers to life

He recalls, in the humid swirl of perspiration and thick formaldehyde

the click-click-clicking sound of his parched typewriter

knowing that art is sacrifice, love and hate

all in one breath

He inhales and exhales

Poisonous comfort to an empty mind,

his heart and lung,charred with black, rebelling in futility

The world grew darker, by the minutes,he saw his words flashing

The final glimpse of futile life lay bright before his eyes

An impossible struggle to just B R E A T H E

‘Yes,'he says- to the ethers,eyes ablaze-'It is the air of contradiction.’

The common human contradiction to adore what inflicts the most pain.

(Just breathe)

This town holds ten thousand lies,

Deeply buried in these catacomb streets,

Where a single metal detector scans

Awaiting the sound of static to appear

Telling me the metal gears are found

Uncovering the graveyard of the forgotten

Remnants of so many heart buried and broken

The cogs splintered with ember shavings,

Burnt sprocket oil tasting the sunlit sky,

Undecipherable whispers echo inside

The coffin of ghosts and past dreams.

This mire boils over with a scathing wrath,

Melting away the fresh shovel with ease

I dust the dirt from any salvageable piece

Collecting the worn metal into my palms.

Perplexity has always interested me;

Wondering how you survived so long

Sitting on the fringes of my bare sleeve

The thick humidity ate at your very soul

While you beat yourself into submission,

Now it is my turn to take the brunt of it

To bring you to safety inside my chest,

For now I will shine the spotlight on you,

Adjusting the magnifying glass correctly

To find the places needing reinforcement

The areas where damage overwhelmed

So that the tin lining is properly discarded,

Replaced with diamond encrusted silver

Ready to split apart the skin of this metallic camouflage,

To drive away the kisses of murderers

So that each rivet is firmly hammered

Into the holes that once occupied moths,

When the flesh eaters gather once again

They will find their meal ticket expired

So that the winding crack will operate

No longer to be held by the grasp of rust.

With each rotation you will awaken

Billowing out the dust of nightmares

The next time someone strikes a match

Attempting to burn my world asunder

I shall be your blanket of protection

Until your beat matches the rhythm

Of freedom and pulsating life.

I cannot speak because of lockjaw, self-imposed, cunning but that’s a given

so I let words love those I long to inform myself, never just the one

I want to write everyday, with chalk, with a keyboard, with pens stolen

I want to write on pages, on walls,on unfamiliar hearts

But I remain quiet,seldom speaking, sound dampened anyway

So I paint my mind with syllables, and play tic-tac-toe with the sky.

9:12 p.m. tobacco stained breath

Fuliginous smoke rolling in nightly gloom/keyboard missing letters T, R, H, U

and that same sombre silhouette of a stranger poisons

the discoloured wall of his past poetic smiles.

Or is that a sleepwalker writing epilogues on the sand?

Only he knows the magnetic seduction of his lies

Indistinct demarcations,

no beginning to poisonous fictions by his words