sadoeuphemist | Entries tagged with bad poetry

Now listen, that's my mother's name,
the name she used before she wore a face.
I can't pronounce it properly anymore,
not here, out in the sunlight, out in the open air.
It should be spoken in a cavern, in a lagoon,
and echo off the mossy walls, be half-swallowed
by the dark. It should falter from your tongue
like an eddy of translucent scales, like
the discarded skin of something plunged
beneath the waves, something deeper now,
and gone.

These things don't work like blood, you know.
There's no trace of her name left running through me.

Maybe we might see the ghost of it, written
with a finger over poured concrete,
tracing the raised ridges of the fossil in the shale
deep beneath the earth. Or hear her name whispered
through the rattling of the pipes right before
the shock of icy water against naked flesh - a reminder
of huddling defenseless, scared and cold,
before walls, before the foundations all were laid,
before our kitchenware, the refrigerator on at night
with its electric hum. As if we were naked, still,
in the darkness, blood set in our veins; in
the home we built our bedrock on.

I walked widdershins, back against the grain

And blade of grass, against the light, the sun,

Giving in to the gleeful urge to run

And circle back to childhood again.

I never thought to cause them any pain.

I circled the church, and the deed was done.

There, clad in all the raiment of the wood,
With retinue of laurel, leaf, and lind
All drifting at his train and with the wind,
Astride the church's walls the Elf King stood.
A shadow crossed my heart, and yet I could
Not for my life imagine how I'd sinned.

He took my hand, took half a step, a half
Step more.

appropriated from Elisa Chavez

The Siren and the Fisherman

The siren was lifted from the seas
to find her place on dry land.
By the beach, the fisherman came upon her,
a beautiful unnetted catch.
Her tail, still wet and glistening; scales
running down her breast, her arms, her face,
a veil of waves that followed in her wake.

The fisherman took that trailing tail,
shortened it, divided it in two.
"Now," he told her, "these legs are your own.
Will you not walk with me?"

The siren began her song, telling the ocean
that she had found aid, all trace of blood transformed
into rainbows amidst the shore and sand.

She sang to the fisherman, "I forgive you,
I forgive you, I forgive you."

Perfection

A woman built a house
on nothing.
It lacked all human comforts, but was beautiful.
She tried to grow a pear tree, always
left the door hanging open should her
darlings wander in. The windows stretched high
and the sun glared through. The roof leaked
in torrents after a storm,
and she was trying to repair it.

The man, who had not laid
a brick of its foundations, saw the house and
exclaimed, "How can you live like this! The windows
crooked! The lamps
burning dim. We need to
burn this house down and build again."

The woman looked around and knew
that he was right, this man
who'd had no hand in its construction:
in none of it had she found perfection.

She humbly said, "You're right, sir.
But where would I live come morning?"

Do you ever worry about getting fatter? Like,

absent any immediately threatening concerns - you're not unhealthy, no,

nor is it visible on your frame. You look, when clothed,

much like you always have. It doesn't weigh on you. You might not,

by strict definition, be putting on weight.

You've always had that pudge on your belly, the creases

when you slouch; you could take a pinch of your gut and get a handful,

let the rolls slide over each other -

You're healthier than the average person, I want to reiterate that, thinner, just -

Soft. Fleshy. Undefined. Of an average build. You're used to it.

You really should be used to it by now. And yet

you think your jeans are getting tighter - still perfectly wearable, mind you.

You don't need to change, that's the gist of it. You could eat

just as you have been eating. And yet -

and yet and yet and yet - you

can't stop squeezing at your stomach again and again, in an

absent-minded attempt at revulsion. You have learned

to appreciate hunger, that gnawing sensation

that tells you there's a hollow somewhere within all that fat,

something being eaten away. You manage your portions. How much

do you need to eat to stay alive, really? How many mouthfuls, how many

swallows of water? Take a nibble, and maybe

that'll satiate you. There's no strategy to this, no calorie-counting,

no rigorously-followed diet, no numbers, you see, no

weights on a scale, no tape measures. Because you didn't do this

to lose weight, you see. You didn't start this with a goal in mind, a summer bod,

an old pair of jeans, a body you would like when you looked in the mirror.

All you have is the creeping, unconfirmed sensation that

you are getting fatter.

these are the bones of it

purposeless, needless, left bleached out

in the middle of the desert, removed from any causality or blame

we could trace these bones back a hundred years

(or fifty, or forty, or ten)
and find your ancestors here, or mine -
what face did this skull once wear, what
quivering brood begat here once -
we could argue over the history
of this place, the tribes that fought and conquered
whose bones these are
and what killed them, what broken path
led us to this

(we could imagine something living)

but I tell you now these bones
are no different from the rock or sand, worn into
their shapes by wind and grit and time
I have cleaned these bones myself and made them
sterile, scraped the meat from them until
my fingers bled, I have dragged them
into obscure designs
I have labored here
to make them unrecognizable

a living thing is too much yet to bear
too fickle, too vacillating in its intentions, too uncertain
(I cannot adequately defend it)
too much prone to revision

there is nothing left to understand
but the bones of it

a thing that once here died

My first impulse would be to say that I was "violently unhappy"
always that particular phrasing,
"violently,"
as if I can only understand unhappiness through demonstration
as if, when left untreated, unhappiness lashes out,
resorts to violence, makes itself visible
in form of lash and tear and welt,
as if it forces its way out through the skin
as if we had moved past the usefulness of advice and frank discussion
as if I had to be restrained somehow,
placated,
pacified
through urgent intervention,
made unable to hurt myself or others
before any further progress could begin

You'll note the subtext here
"as if,"
meaning that I was lying
not just about the nature of unhappiness, mind you,
but the idea that I was ever unhappy to begin with

If I had been unhappy
instead of just malingering
surely I would have been able to identify, however vaguely,
the source of my unhappiness,
surely I would have had some conception of something lacking -
this absent happiness, what it might look like,
and how I might achieve it -
instead of just these fantasies of violence,
of wanting to be unhappy,
to be helplessly, uncontrollably, congenitally unhappy,
just to have some irrefutable evidence of my distress

If I had been unhappy
surely I would have wanted something better for myself than that

Lightning strikes.
Lightning spikes.
Lightning spills and stains the sky.
Lightning crackles.
Lightning shivers.
Lightning spasms, shrieks, and dies.

Lightning sings.
Lightning stings.
Lightning cleaves the world asunder.
Lightning threads through gale and thunder.
Lightning strips the leaves from trees—thin bare branches, stark and grasping
at the wind in helpless tremors.
Lightning sets down roots and sighs.
Storm is coming.
Lightning sends the people running, lights the raindrops,
draws a jagged line between us
and the darkness. Lightning flickers,
shows the world in all its glory
right before the gloom moves in and
lightning cracks the vault of clouds, makes the rain come tumbling down.
Lightning, fine-veined, many-fingered, writhes and reaches for the ground.
Lightning hangs untouched, inverted, looming rocks far overhead.
It could kill us.
Just a word, and lightning plummets
from the heavens,
torches burning for the dead.

Lightning shatters.
Lightning scatters.
Lightning bathes the world in fire.
Lightning flashes.
Lightning lashes
out obliquely, groping, seeking,
churning air into a frenzy. Lightning quickens.
Lightning rages in the distance.
(please don't see us)
Lightning punctuates a chorus,
echoes through the world unhindered
in the great and lowly places.
Lightning stoops to kindle fire.
Lightning leaps atop a spire, splits the crown
of tree and tower, tears stone down,
anoints the sacred site with ash—
Lightning lingers
for a moment,
imprints itself in afterimage,
as we huddle, glancing skyward,
waiting
for the storm to pass.

He sneezed six times in quick succession
Like waves breaking upon the shore
Each time the buildup, then the crest
Then spray and salt and nothing more

He drank two glasses of water with dinner
Like pouring it all down the drain
The glass sat empty in his hand
Ready to be washed again

He set his shoulders and clenched his stomach
Trying to will himself to piss
A dribble came, and then a spurt—
All water was reduced to this

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Give them something to eat, and they'll bite at your hand
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
You've seen this play out, why don't you understand

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Show them the horizon, and they'll want to fly free
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Sure as the shore's worn away by the sea

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And there are only so many more miles to claim
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Pace out your borders, let them to do the same

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
You'll measure in inches the progress you'll make
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
The least you can give, the most they can take

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And be not one inch closer than you were before
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Still a mile between you, a mile and more

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And you'll be left wondering at how far you've gone
In the space of that inch, they imagined a mile
You gave them an inch, and the lines were redrawn

Hold this, she said, and I gathered up
a fist of her hair, undoing her frame from behind,
unbuttoning the knobs of her spine,
unlacing the tendons in her neck and shoulders
to the musical twang of her ribs popping free

Her lungs escaped her like a sob,
unfolding, spilling out like a rumpled dress
that I arranged atop the tiles,
one hand smoothing out the wrinkles,
gliding across her skin until she sighed,
divested,
exposing her pale back to me in its entirety

It's amazing how much there is to a woman:
silk and bone and a thousand scribbled notes inked onto her innards,
unwritten love letters, angry scrawls,
knots of twine and rawhide that I fished out
and laid delicately against the tiles like a diagram,
careful to memorize their places

Her heart, sluggish and warm and tough as leather,
and indistinguishable from
all her other organs,
years of padding and upholstery unseamed until
the bathroom floor resembled a butcher's palette,
and she hung loose and slumping, dozing gently,
with so much of her to still unpack

There's room for happiness in there, I think,
there's so much else in her

There's room for everything I lack

My parents did not raise healthy children.
There's nothing to be done about it, I suppose,
just a quirk of genetics.
A new malady would periodically surface, each
removed from the last, as if
it was simply in our nature to be sick, absent
any particularities:
insomnia,
violent allergic reactions that burst
out in hives across
our groin and thighs and the backs of our hands,
dry eyes,
asthma of the skin,
UTIs,
sensitive teeth,
depression,
sudden pains in our knees
that kept us from the gym
for months on end,
tendons tightening in our necks,
inexplicable bald spots,
open sores that we scratched into our skin.

And each time, our parents would schedule a doctor's appointment
after it became clear
our condition wouldn't go away on its own.
We'd sit silently in the waiting room,
waiting to give non-committal answers:
"No, I don't know what caused it"
"No, I don't remember that far back"
"It kind of hurts"
"Sort of"
"Not really"
"No, I haven't eaten anything unusual"
"No, here's been no change in my schedule"
"No, no undue stress"
"No, this is - you must understand -
"There has been no change in our lives since before this started"
"This is how we live"
"This is how we have always been living"

And the doctors, faintly puzzled,
would scribble down their prescriptions anyway and
treat the symptoms.
Our parents paid the consultation fees, paid for
the MRIs and the urinalyses,
the blood tests that revealed no proximate cause,
paid for the physical therapists and
the sedatives and cortisone creams,
as we hovered around
all the while unable to shake
the conviction that we were wasting
time, bleeding away money,
that this was all bearable, somehow, or had progressed
to the state that it was bearable
by the time our parents had brought us here. That we were
too far removed now from sickness, from dysfunction,
that we would heal on our own,
or grow used to it,
or progress to the point that our suffering
was unmistakable;
that despite our parents' urging -
"Be specific. Tell the doctor
what he needs to know. You can't get better if
you don't pay attention
to what's going on with your body."
the cause of sickness was so inherent
so as to be invisible, that we might wake up the next morning
having forgotten how to sleep, how to eat,
how to look at things without crying,
how to breathe unencumbered, how to walk, how to
not tear apart our own skin.

We'd take home our tubes of creams and our
artificial tears and neat rows of pills and
we'd smooth this patch over.
We'd wait to get better.
We'd wait
until everything
was normal
again.

All I want is
All you want is
All I want is
To live without restriction.

Let's pretend we're improvising,
Say, "Yes, and" to everything:

Yes I love you and
Yes I need you and
Yes we'll be here for each other
And Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and -
Until we're overflowing.

No scripts to follow, roles to play,
Generations' worth
Of learned behaviors.
No more hesitation, waiting
For a prompt, a cue, anything
To tell us it's okay to act
Or what to be afraid of.

Just Yes your hands and Yes my hands
And Yes all hands reaching out to us
And Yes your lips and Yes your thighs and Yes teeth Yes throat Yes tongue and
Your voice my lips and Yes each other -

Let's pretend we can't say "No"
As if that's the only thing between us;
As if all I want is
All you want is
All I want is
You.

Some books (and I mean this)

have greater worth as ashes.
People underestimate the value of a fire,
both practical, as in for warmth, and
in a very real way beautiful, more so
than a mediocre novel could hope to be.

Myself, I like to destroy books.
I like to compress them into pulp, the back cover
peeling off into rolls of dead skin as
it rubs against my palms. Oh,
I love to devour books, warping pages
with the imprint of my fingers,
darkening pages with my drool
and snot and sweat and
everything clinging to my dirty little hands
until the words run and become nonsensical.
I've digested books like fiber, shitting out
their words, rearranged.
I love books. I own a library.
I've never read the same book twice.

So I can understand burning books.
You get the light, yes,
and you get the warmth and
the scent of smoke and the roar of the flames.
Whereas if I'd read them
I'd have wads of yellowed paper taking
up space on my bookshelves,
full of silverfish nests and mildew and
the dumpy satisfaction of having been read.
But the fire! Oh -
but the fire, all-voracious,
needy, guttering, maddened with hunger,
devouring books whole to survive.
There could be anything in those ashes,
in those pages, in those burnt
and blackened imaginings.
There could be a monster in there.
There could be an apocalypse in there.

There could be the worst thing in the world.

Greetings, traveler! Know no fear.
Know no known foes are nosing near.
Know no dread and know no doubt,
Know No-No Noam will help you out!

No-No Noam's a gnome, you see.
Know gnomes all labor knowingly.
A gnome's nose knows, note that down,
And No-No Noam's the best around!

Gnomes know things decidedly.
What gnomes don't know - now that's the key.
Noam's nose knows no need for rest.
Know known unknowns? Noam knows them best!

"Noam's a no-no," some gnomes say,
Know some gnomes judge poor Noam that way.
Known unknowns? No way, no how!
Gnome know-it-alls no-no Noam now.

Know those gnomes? No, Noam thought not.
Those gnome unknowns just stir the pot.
Still, know this, if doubts gnomes pose -
Know no known gnomes no-no Noam's nose!

Love's a logo on a placard
Love's a neon rainbow sign
Smile, love, and be a braggart
Tell the world, and let love shine

Love's a barrier, love's a mask
Love's a question yet unasked
Hold your love, and say you're blessed
Love's not even happiness

Love's a lie that we all fall for
Love's a neat tautology
Love's a lie that there's a call for
Love's the thing that'll set us free

Love's a smile, love shows teeth
Love's the thing that lurks beneath
Love, and keep your lover near
Love is love is love is fear

Tell us love will be forever
Tell us love will fell all foes
Tell us all the lies, but never
Tell us what a lover knows

Love won't feed us, love won't warm
Love can't keep us safe from harm
Love me dear and count the cost
Love is love is love is loss

Love's a body on a dance floor
Love's a word that rhymes with hate
Love's a hope we took a chance for
Said 'love' out loud, and faced our fate

Love is cruel, love is blind
Love is frequently unkind
Love draws blood and love draws breath
Love is love is love is death

Love's a split lip, love's a suture
Love's a routine tragedy
Love's our past, and love's our future
Love is love, inevitably

Love is burning, love is brief
Love is joy and love is grief
Love is struggle, love is strife
Love is love is love is life

One coin to cross the river
Two coins glinting in your eyes
Three coins to bribe the Father
Four coins settle all your lies
Five coins to pay the Piper
Six coins more to pay his son
Seven coins chime in laughter
Eight coins buried serve no one
Nine coins full to count the cost
Ten coins, and one is Lost

Expanded Variant:

One coin to cross the river,
Tasting copper on the tongue.
Two coins upon the eyelids
Keep your sight forever young.
Three coins can buy three wishes
Freely given, never spent.
Four coins, by blood anointed,
Pay a humble sinner's rent.
Five coins' return investment
Is still halfway to being done.
Six coins to pay the Piper,
Seven coins to pay his son.
Eight coins to make a dollar,
Treasure still not worth the cost.
Nine coins present a problem:
Ten coins, and one is Lost.