Teone | poems

EMPRESS OF TEARS

Deep within the walled city, through tightly weaving streets and snaking roads of prattled jeers, in some cold corner, a small sound sinks down to a throbbing muffled pain. Soft-spoken through a cyclone of wire, whispered hooks of hope lunge out and hover, cowering under God's stony hill, in some snatch at love, from anyone.

Destruction's prince staggers, smiling in a stolen tryst with such pure bitterness to break through phantoms of desire. Love passes. Again it leaves and again refuses. She waits.

The distance between them remains constant. Their desire is a tiresome ache that never ceases for either of them. She follows his gaze, seeking, demanding, reaching out to him. She is Goddess, queen, and his brokeness forever spins in great arcs of desolate waste.

He turns away as she cries out.

"In this blind fog, I hear the moans of souls, imprisoned by the deepening gloom of your grim desperation. Who romps in the muck of glittering coldness, untouched, unseen? I hear the dull roar of hollow dreams. Withered, I am sleepless through endless curves of rasping breath and dull strokings of vacant skin, I am haunted by the twisted sweat of such cold convulsions.

I am alone, dry inside my timeless mind, waiting like a snake of grief for some touch. Each dance of rain into our open mouths marks us with unending joy and suffering, as those who thirst and carry the flourishing dream of life into light and shade. Such sufferers still fall, swooping to the ground of their own free, bleeding and blessed will.

You’re love? Some wisp, remotely floating, as I walk with your slow death in my hands. Your form is drifting, but I am grimly staked and burned in your metallic aftermath. You want my score for a pale act of annihilation, who gave you such bitter keys to my awakening? You have wrought an iron in me, a desecration of simple loving and I cannot breathe, nor find a peace in your ghastly mask."

He replies

"Sucked in. Viral. Fodder for fodder. Meatmeal for pigs. Swine before pearls. Signing on the dotard line, I inject myself with sweet tender cuts. I drink my mother’s blood and cry in. Globalisation is my shiny new Messiah. Death to Choice. Free will is a Running Dog with open weeping eyes. My blindness buys me tickets to a joyride. I am lining up to be strapped in the furnace of a cattled humanity.

Here in the gut-space, the tube of what I’m not, the passing of my choices, this fisher casts his net for deeper suck, sweeter flow and the promise of more and more.

More tasteless crap? Same as always? Yes please!"

She whispers

"I am the hand that summons with a twinkling, knowing smile. I know what you really want, I heard your prayers, I keep the velvet nipple that fits your fist and embouchure. Go on, suck here and feed, feed and feel how much I love only you."

Arise

I beckon to you, come, truly step into our world, awaken, arise from the paltry game of fear and flesh, for we may clamber upon the wonder of waves. This mountainous attrition, this sorrow's sound, sighs, soft and humid as milk's udder-touch, to sour all time, as mottled mortals and monsters, we shudder within the ire of driven hearts.

Embittered beasts and bleak deities of the doom, dispassionate and sated would yawn and fondle us, thirsting for shallow sips of our grace and laughter, bawling in brazen openness to grip and swallow joy. Stiffly dank, damning the darkest hounds of our human being, doffing the cloak of might to wander the wizened halls of all our weariness. Spirit languors, dreary under spite and reckons not...

Awash with fright not freedom, we hunger forthwith, lonely births into emptiness, framed in callous imperfection as lovers, luckless, learn of infidelities and sicken to the core, ohh... what end to sweet innocence did money bring?

Swarming we rode, broad and high as every stream, flushing and rising with lunar goading, quickening, swiftly upon a deep and urgent swelling of primal power.

We must now to nature come, abreast in shapes of wonderlight, or lie, listless in loose perspectives of the known debate, aloof along rivers of night, meandering in timidity, stunned as soulflight.

Watcher wait,... hear my cries, love has left a measured breath for us to find. You, carry the train of brides, lifting eyes and arms slow and steeply in these windy woods, alive I shall strum the tunes of hearty men, come now new to the altar of choice, reaching, stretching.

Yet we may conquer these dreamthieves, bind them in salt pillars of pious denial, for none may fashion this dawn of bold change, save here, striding free upon the wetlands of life.

from the SERPENT's BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS

...unashamed of seething darkness, I curved in raw arcs, borne on the whittled spine of an alien genius. I bartered hard for my place at the mystic moment, I roamed under the world and found what others chose to lose. I knew your limbs, ever the tentacles of your hedonism.

Did you feel my soft and promising coils? Could you take me into your self, delivered unto your deepest need? Your flesh hurt, that proud and persistent hostage to fear and I would not inhabit your sour temple of ugliness, your bleeding tomb of terrors. I slithered, free and sweet, fresh in earthly gardens of wild root and wondrous loam. You showered me in the wetness of your scorn.

Now you are weighed down, stoppered by an indolence of soul. I grimace at the wickedness of your foul and pious march of destruction upon the glorious path, and yet, I am deaf to your ecstatic madness. I banish the buried, muffled cries that whimper from under your savagery, I sever my eyes from the sight of you. My Earth quakes at the blight of your days.

Make way, dispassionate wisp. Victim to the illusion, you are truly Fallen! My end is a silken fold of purest drifting shimmer. I devour me in the void of your heavy silence.

Mother! I am returned unto your stone. Bury me in this blanket, dead as they who walk, drugged upon artifice, startled by the elegance of allusion. I feel your body beneath me and I know an ocean of loss.

Father! I am the Path! Following none but the voice of my own creation, I am here and well away. Not once upon this skin did I find affliction, nor do I hear the snarling of your monstrous rage. See me! I am a radiance of emptiness mind, seeking guidance from furious light, onwards and upwards, breathing, clear, fostered by a dream of compassion. Resting in such vacant joy, I slide into the skies.