Tag Archives: national poetry writing month

Poetry

The Absence Epic, 2

9.

 

The zephyr came, blew the breeze into the flame,

the searing halo I cannot put out – it knows me,

how my wrist is held by the hands of petit mal dames

playing tricks, sprinkling embers on my ear and nape

The wind and the fire crown made me a wicker man

made from sticks of an origin that, had I known existed,

I would have thrown into the sea, along with my body,

but the omens never help – they always want a sacrifice

 

10.

 

Too small, the pills fall away under the stove,

My stomach numb, it gnaws and churns

But all I feel are my knees scraping on the tiles,

My arm reaching – clean, dirty, depending on

How my skin reacts, or if my arm will light on fire

I sense them and let the panic subside

They are in my hands and I am safe for now

The slow damage is eating away at me already

The pills are on my desk now – they are already gone

 

 

 

11.

 

An instruction manual –

First, let me go, you know

my struggle and need

no obstacle for the writhing

Second, when I am turned

to the side, hope to god

I remember I can make it

through the next few hours

Third, my heart is a knot

tightening from the absence –

I will loosen it, do not worry,

She will come eventually

 

 

 

 

 

12.

 

There is no water here and I am still drowning,

sound of voices muffled in and out by the wake

I am passing through choppy consciousness

treading thoughts, barely, lying and floating

words between polite dinner and brief liquor

My lungs are filled with panic and swimming

to sure smiles and standing, what my legs

refuse to do, are meters away from rest

 

 

13.

 

I fell on the subway on route to a party

chatting with a woman against a pole

The aura formed the swell in my head,

my body is surfing on the turns of the train

The idea of my location is irrelevant now,

the direction is a hope I do not pass out

She keeps talking, I stammer, I-

-I-

-I-

Wipe out

Here comes the EMTs

 

14.

 

I sank and felt the mind blast

Maybe this would be the last,

Or not, who knows – the tank

Is empty, where I think, grow

fantasies and the average shrinks

 

This crash of faulty brain staggers,

A battle of flash fires on grey matter,

Home to silent pains while I assault the

Absence, until I tire, barely breathing

And then, seething, return to the fray

 

15.

My sick head spills out the boundless ambitions in my dreams

face down, profound and abstract, a thousand years a second

shattered when I am awakened by your attacks. I need sleep,

take in Nyx’s breath and whirl in the night’s missing pieces.

 

I am not alone in the bed – the absence, the complexity

make a trio of nightmares and verges of night terrors

so predictable, I want to snuff them with all my pillows

but they leave, as always, lying to me they won’t come back.

 

I want my dreams unending, and to this day miss its haze.

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Poetry, Writing

The Absence Epic, 1

I decided that, this year I would make the attempt of running the National Poetry Writing Month gauntlet. I have something that is helping the journey – my seizures.

Short story: I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder in early 2009. I have it under control luckily, but I do have the occasional bouts of absence seizures. When those started coming, sometimes I’d jot down  whatever the hell my clearly messed-up brain was coming up with.

As the years have passed, I’ve decided that one day I would write those pieces into something larger. At its current incarnation, I am calling it The Absence Epic. I’ve posted the first week-plus’ worth of poems (0- 8) on Instagram, Tumblr, even the old DeviantArt daily. However, I decided it would be here where I would put the poems weekly. So, here is the first week. I have no idea where this will go, and how many of these will actually stay in their current forms.

 

0.

In my dreams, forged from mother’s stories of that day,

I see pieces of the infinite, supernovae and flares,

Planets I did not know the names of at that time.

As a child, I gave them titles of my choosing.

Now, when I wake up, I know their true names,

Losing all memories of the ones I gave them.

 

I wish I could remember their names every morning.

 

1.

 

I am litter on the floor, eyes open,

Bent, twisted turned as a crumpled can.

The only thing that holds me are drunks

called friends and freaked out passersby.

 

There is no stopping the absence,

the fear of staying asleep in my mind

forever with the memory of a mind on fire,

a pain deep, rending me comatose.

 

2.

 

How do you give a voice to a silent rumble? Do you fall,

convulsing, attempt and hold it together, failing,

is it

…just…wait…

…stay here and grab my hand…

…this absence is all I have left.

This absence is all I can leave behind.

Please, let me leave it behind

Please –

3.

 

I spin out, wheels without,

feet on the ground

with no direction

 

I feel the pins from within

rip through the epidermis

harder than the sound

 

I walk in haze, mind ablaze

but stumbling is better

than giving up to delirium

 

4.

 

I met the complexity the follows me

Now that cold morning in Lima,

And it rested within me, patiently,

Waiting to be reborn, for decades

We did not shake hands, or kiss,

But I will tremble to its control

 

The maturing deformation,

The real pain? I feed it to this day,

As it is my new and everlasting muse –

Not the women, the anger, nor the drink,

Just the absence, and it will always be

At my side, eternal, until I blink into dust

 

5.

 

No activation response for my senses

my head is taking in cold breaths –

I cannot allow

disappointment,

a breaking point –

but the chill seeps in

and under red storefront lights, I align

my shame with growing suffocation

 

6.

I fear the sliver between

awareness and the great abandon

Within that crack lies a beast

that gnaws on my left arm, caressing

my head, anticipating a devouring

of my direction and spitting me out

into open neuroses, disintegrating me

I will fill that space between myself

and the crack, or the crumbling begins

 

7.

 

I should make it my muse,

its touch moving my fingers,

writing in its trembling diction

of stammers and repetition,

the quiet chant of reticence,

the hymn of failed resistance,

the melody of sweet absence

ascendant where disorder lingers,

and scattered divisions that it chooses

 

8.

 

No joy, just presence and memory,

a constant night breeding a will to drift

into the “what ifs” and “who’s to know”

that I am in persistent loss of control

and that my fears are fed powerfully

 

 

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