POEM ROUNDUP FOR OCTOBER

POEM ROUNDUP FOR OCTOBER

Number of poems written: 56
Average number per day:
Longest poem: Quiet Destroyer 52.333 (46 lines)
Shortest poem: The Wait (3 lines)
Total wordcount: 5,509

Quiet Destroyer Vol. 2 3.45

That day I woke up, wakened
By my butler telling me
"They are dead. They are gone."
My parents died; killed by
Some alien power, some 'Flux'
That no one can explain.

In my dreams I was the Quick Defender,
Hero to the people, drunk on glory.
In my dreams, I did no wrong.

I told him it's all right, that
Sometimes heroes make
Mistakes; they're only human.
The voice was quiet, removed.
I loved them enough that I
Could not hate their killer.
He told me: "No, it is an alien.
A monster," and stories
Of the Harf invasion of '62
ground under his words.

I remembered those stories.
I grew up with tales of loss,
With the hate; victim
Of his fear. I am afraid
Of Flux, of the alien, of
Things I do not grok.

A hero conquers fears.
But the wise man destroys them.
In my dreams, now, I am
Quiet, conquering even death.
I Have no tears.

On Dreaming

White crows
gliding under auburn sky;
my grandfather, dressed as Pan
(Peter and the other both) flies
overhead, telling me secrets
between leathery wing beats.

Rainbow birds and foxes glitter
gliding between tree and wood
(not sameness -- in dreams, here,
the tree is building itself from bones
of the dead, and the wood is just)
speaking without wordsmithing.

We float and we burn and we speak
all the great and aweful things
we forget on waking -- words become
animals and animals become real.

And everything makes
a little more sense
than it does on waking.

Silences

Silence speaks a language all its own.
The pull to part, weighted under
The burden of the unsaid, the veil
Others place meaning into, reading
Your wishes from your body,
Saying: "If you aren't angry,
You might want to tell your face that"
Or asking what is wrong when
Nothing is that you know, only
That the silence scares them so.
Even more than the words we
Can fill it with, with also cannot
Be unsaid; at least in silence we
Cannot come undone.

The Bus Stop

Small things out of order,
A failure of certainty:
Waiting among the silent
      Wondering
      -- Did I miss it? --
      Unable
To voice the confusion
If the bus did not come.

Comfortless rain-soaked world
Huddling hunched as delay
Stretching, knowing another comes
      But
      Under it
      -- What if it, too, does not come? --
The wondering: of questions
Without answers remain questions.

Single, not a double. Not normal.
Perhaps the last bus passed that way,
Eyes skipping over; or perhaps late.

No answer is given,
No, but --
No question is asked.

They Say

They say he has a slanty way of looking at things
They say he used to graft rats with moth wings.
They tell many stories, most of which are gories,
About the things he's done and the awards he's won.
Talking abut his Findings, they whisper softly of his sins
Of bodies stacked in basements and people without skin,
Of different combinations of his terrifying equations
Scrawled upon his bed sheets and what happened to her feet
They talk about his wonders: their words are full of awe
But their smiles are the most jealous things that you ever saw
They talk of his gruesome ways and unhygenical displays
What happened to the children, that he used to be a woman
But most of all they talk in wonder they can't disguise
And try to fathom how he won the coveted Nobel Prize.

The Smell

Domesticated water
Chlorine over urine
Chemical blue.

Sometimes angled in mirrors
Under cool light
Eyes remind me --
Leprechaun green forests,
Laughter under trees;
A brace of fairies caught.

Victim

Victim of your suicide
Finding you hanging
Dangling dead from the overpass

Lost wages are musings
On underpasses, underworlds,
And my headlights finding you.

I thought you were an angel
Your body
There
For a sudden moment.

Shaken by the quake, I
Have yet to heal, do not
Know yet who to blame.

Hollow Watching

Meth addicts
speaking, dying
on video -- but
nothing happens
or feels real.

There's a music score
And many people crying
Cameramen are blurring frames
Making it a movie -- but
Nothing false can feel real.

As The Wind

One life, regimented as the wind --
Boring man plodding boring things
Until the moment
of wakening
And then drifting through night
Skies with a mind so soft and sharp.

Gifts

I brought you flowers
Wrapped in cellophane
(really saran wrap,
and the cheap kind)
Ripped screaming from the earth.

Something that dies is better
Than stones that never do,
I explain, and you call be cheap
But - but even so, what dies
Is more beautiful than what
Never does, is immortal;
There is a beauty in mortality,
In the sun burning out in the sky,
That perfection cannot reach.
I am only glad I did not get you
The snake eating its own tail.

Shame

Your hands flicker flash, harsh,
Choppy, the paper between us
Scrawled with arguments.
I fight the urge to look away
And not listen, to ask
And not sign: "Why are you angry?"
At the implant, my new life.
But you are ashamed that
I can hear now; you cannot.
As if I have betrayed you, everyone,
Our "culture", with the cochlear
Grandma bought as a gift.
I am too young to understand
But my sister signs: "Freak"
When you are not looking
And I already say insults to her
When no one is looking at me.
It is my only secret anymore.

Babyhood

The last time I died it was not like this.
I was important, someone somewhere
Loved as in the womb,
Warm and cherished as if by angels.
A whole harem praising me in soft whispers
Saying: what a beautiful baby,
Pretending my mother wasn't crying
Oh! even the pillow pressing down
Was warm with her tears.
Here everyone stares with eyes
Made to judge and not care;
Old ladies drive-by motherings
Screamed out of car windows
Saying: you're too young to look after me.
Insolent men ask you for dates,
Assuming you easy to get into bed.
Your tears are angry, bitter and not warm,
And you wonder why you allowed
Me to be born.
I just want to be loved again.
The next time I live, it will not be like this.

Losses

I wonder if our hopes and dreams
Have knocked and come and gone,
If the perfect people who always seen
To never lose have finally won.

Last night I had a migraine,
There was pounding on the door.
I wonder if opportunity came
Just once and will not anymore.

Karma

We save ourselves in simple ways.
Every time we laugh that's one
disaster, one calamity, one sin
averted by the karmic universe
that balances all accounts --
but, only, like an accountant
would, drunk, siding with
the debtors and the deadbeats
and all others who, needing,
give it names, beg them for aid.
We only pray to our gods
when our accounts come due.

On Your Mother Minding...

A reply to this poem

There was this way, you know,
she had, of staring, ringed in smoke,
stabbing out
her cig on her father's arm, saying to me: "would you do that?"
And I'd say no, and your mother
would just laugh at that; maybe asking
if she'd mind is just a game
I'm playing with you. I find it hard
to think she wouldn't mind
anything at all, your mother,
who would cradle you when you returned
from the battle, dead, with the noisy neighbours -- and
like Grendel's mother, like all mothers who ever deserved the title,
would kill them all.
But not for you.

I do not think she would mind.
I might mind, though, that she'd laugh
especially knowing we were still together.

Called To ...

Called to witness yet we judge
Staring with dead uncaring eyes,
Changing channels with a blink
We look and fail to truly see.

They stand bereft of all disguise:
Under our gaze a wonder dies.
"Odd," we say, garnish with labels,
Condemning with empty hands.

A Defence Of Plagiarism

Everyone telling me
to think is
a fool -- why should I
waste my time doing
only what so many
have done before,
and better? I will only
repeat what I was told;
and was told what
was right -- why
waste my time on this
when there is
a better answer
-- here!

Titled

But what are we with titles gone
But faceless before another dawn?
For all the burdens that we bemoan
There's nothing else that we own.
Silent we make no pleas for justice;
Only this path we choose defines us.

The Sea

To watch the sea come out, fall in,
Dashing itself against the shore
Is to see all wonders, works and wisdom
If we are trapped in metaphor.

The Wait

I am waiting for eunoia
A flash of eureka, euphoria
Or a hint, a hit of ecstasy.

Youth

There is a time when we are young
Before the song of reason's sung
When we can be quite assured
To the meaning of our words.
In that world today follows today,
We always mean the things we say:
To say things we don't believe
Is for wonder to quietly leave.

Ghosts and Gods

The world is filled with ghosts and gods,
Drenched in symbols, shadows of the mind:
We search for Truth but all our myriad signs
Post and posit nothing for us to find.

All we have is trying to be kind
In a world of words as rods and lures
Cruel for the times, none seeming to mind
And Truth is replaced by Sucker.

Systems, so small

The narrowness of our universe is
Linear time, bound space,
Seeing as believing:
Blue skies &
green fields:
What use vision that
Cannot see either extreme?
Infinity is the silent, making holes
in
Our souls.

Space

In the space inside my head
Where all things fit together
We'll learn loss has limits,
Finally love each other.

After An Ending

If it is worth doing, worth doing badly
Is possible too, and as worthy a thing.
There was the way you looked
At me, seeing only me, and
Nothing more.

I looked in vain for proof you'd seen beyond me.
That you'd made up myths and loved me
As I loved you, saying: you are my one, my only,
The last star I see before each day's dawning.

But you, resplendent in gold
And silver, green eyes frosty
Chilled as the champagne glass
Lick ruby lips and tell me,
"It is over."

I wait for a laugh, something to break the ice
In your gaze and the hold in my world.
You just handed me pages, and papers,
And the lilacs were blooming as I wrote.

And I know that everything
Ends, that time takes from us
Even love; but never our memories
If we are careful, and treasure them
Too tight.

We Pray

We pray for blue and empty skies,
Free of clouds and promises of rain.
We pray for skies so empty and pure
Devoid of gods and shadow dreams.
We pray, even if it means a drought,
For empty skies where no one flies.
We pray for an end to occupation
And the terrible ways you aid us.

We pray for the freedom to do and die.
We pray for the return of hurt and pain,
For a reality not to bound and sure,
We pray for things to be what they mean;
for a world where things can be bought
And the sun is not pulled through the sky
And you looking from your high station
Reborn again on Mount Olympus.

Marriage

I understand the vows now. I think.
What holds us together when the love
Is gone, you asked, and I blinked
Trying to find an answer for you.

No answer truly satisfies the question
So I said: "God." And then: "Duty."
Was I joking, you asked, no hesitation,
And I could just whisper: "Yes."

Morning

Every day, paper and coffee, at the table
Sitting as close as lovers, as estranged as strangers.
Our children talk as if our lives were fables,
And I turn to you, and wonder who believes it's true.

Every day, we smile by reflex in mornings.
Every day, we sit in the same places, and repeat
The same phrases, neither of us mourning
Who we used to be before we were you and me.

We gave up love for contentment,
Pedestrian friendship all that is left in the end.
I hid all the Valentines I never sent --
When I see you I don't see how they're true.

Diary Etching

Everyone thought I was terrified,
after the accident, hiding out in
my room, secluding from the world
like a mad monk. They heard tears
in my laughter and saw sorrow in
my smile. But I was mostly relieved
you were gone, because now
I don't have to find the words
to tell you I never loved you.
I didn't even like you much. It was
just biology, and nothing special.
I can always find someone else
and get married again, and have
more kids -- there was nothing unique
between us, not even this relief.

Zombies

The zombies crawl out at noon,
Staggering under weight of sunlight
And exams, slouching to coffee
And libraries; trying to wrestle
Meaning from tuition fees.

"dead programmer's society"

We shall program as the druids did
on stone computers;
Star signs refracted from stones
meaning bled from nature
We shall use knives, and blood, and auguries
before we write with pens.

The Psychology Of Bullies

Standing up to bullies is
reading too many articles
is too many magazines
by grown-ups just trying
to pretend they should've
stood up and bee saved.

But mostly it's hitting
the cement, and blood
coming from the nose
and laughs and words
after that hurt more
than bruises, only where
you can't see them.

Quiet Destroyer 52.333

[A reply to This poem.]

Of late I have been worrying about money.
where it comes from, where it goes --
I could rob a bank (that is where they keep it, after all)
but it would not pay for all the workers, the henchmen, the inventions.
(Even illegal aliens cost money, if only to feed;
especially the Martian sandworms.)

It comes, it goes. Things happen, or they do not.
I do terrible things, but I seldom make the news.
A stock crash is a crime, but white collar, hidden --
the problem with being a shadow player
is finding out the shadows are real.

Sometimes, in the mirror, I see myself in a prison uniform now.
I am not me, do not even look much like me, but it is I.
I am him, he is me. Who was I, before I was born? This stranger,
with my name if not my face, in the prison uniform
never removed, even when he is free.
Do I have a mind to lose? I am losing something.

The problem of brilliance is the fractures,
what happens when you think in ways people never have.
Not before you; polymathic wisdom meets reality
and says: you were you, before you were.
And, thus: you were in a prison, are in one still.

My own mind. The world. My hatred of Flux.
Prisons, all.

I am afraid of a word
I do not know the meaning of,
the taste of, the name of --
the edges, they tease at my mind,
void on either side.

I try to change; absurd, but so --
as if tomorrow I may never be, or be just
a man in grey suits seen in another life's mirrors.
Flux says the word: "Retcon," knowing it because
he is Flux, not because he understands. The universe
is a giving of gifts we never understand.

The word comes to me, as if
It was the Logos, "FIAT LUX"
but a dark counterpoint.
"A different light," I say, "for a newer world."
And, suddenly, nothing matters,
especially the things that do.
I suggest, into the brittleness of the old world,
we go get drunk together. Maybe fuck.

He agrees only to the drink.
I wonder how much he understands
that nothing matters anymore.

Lost words

Lost words are faces without names,
knowledge dissolving like bitter tea on the tip of the tongue,
the silence between the words when
words will not come.

There is a void where there should be
Synapses firing like Russian roulette, a magician conjuring
nothing. The hat, when
the rabbit does not come out, the silence that is not silent,
the soundless enlightenment of broken illusions,
of old dreams lost and nothing, yet, replacing them;
this is where lost words come from.

The inability to correlate our data.
Not getting dates. This is where they go,
what they become, moments between meaning, growing like static
to envelop noise.

Lost faces without proper expressions,
rubber smiles and the pause before we get the joke, to laugh.
This is what lost words leave us with.
Not silence, but the inability to cope with silence.
Not solitude, but having nothing to connect
to other people with, only what fails us.

We use so little of our language that we
are always failing it. There are more words lost
than made, more wonders not worth the name
and too much still to be found.

Shamans

The path of the shaman is a way, not a truth.
There are as many ways to walk it as suns in the sky.
More: as many as all the souls that will ever be.
Everyone makes their own way, walks their own steps.

And this is the magic of the shaman: only, just, to see.
For a name has power, but to be known it must be understood.
Must be seen, and the way is seeing things as they are.
This is the heart of all knowing, of all magic, of all lore:
and it must be forgotten, to be remembered anew.
And every time it is a little different, as the stories we tell
are different, every time: no one tells them quite the same.

This is the price of magic, to see what cannot be unseen,
to look, and bear witness, and not look away. To judge,
because too many are scared to; to dream, and keep
the dreams alive. The heart of all ways is the wisdom
hiding in the heart of every child, sleeping
in the soul of everyone who looks at the world, and sees
what is really there. The trick of magic lies in this:
knowing it is real, and not, and moving between both worlds.

Suffer The Highest, For A Change?

thinking there is more
than survival is a luxury,
like fear, laughter, hopes

stars -- cold and bright
as remote as God
almost as uncaring

under You the children are burning
thrown into pits, shot in schools,
discarded by people wanting sons
-- You only give us silence
watch faith break against stone.

If we can draw tears from stones,
surely blood from God's heart?

Surely give voice to mute rage
lodged inside our chests?

I am so scared of myself,
of love, hate, everyone, of You,
my God, and this world we made.

I now understand a world drowning
in tears, for forty days. I do not
understand why You stopped crying.

If I was cursed to live as long as You,
I would never stop, always reaching,
and if the world fell through
my fingers, it would only be justice
for my silences and my sins.

Genesis of a God

You said you could read my mind
But there's nothing for you to find
Just the remains of aborted dreams
From another life, trying to be kind.

The world would drown in screams
You said, testament to love supreme.
For me you'd make a newer world.
I said I'd rather have some ice cream.

You spoke the words of Power, hurled
Fire from the sky. Made mountains twirl
And fall apart, made Time itself unwind,
But you couldn't make us a better world.

And this....

And this is the heart of all magic,
The turnings of time and space --
A terrible grief to make and shape
The world to a deeper place.

This was a world of loss and pain,
To take away and to sunder;
But to see the world as it is
Is a true way to wonder.

And this is the way of miracles,
The finding of true friends;
Dreaming with another's dream
And knowing nothing ends.

Nanowrimo '06: Plotting, and the title too!

Ah, the infection/excitement begins.... Having done nanowrimo 3 times so far, there isn't that much to do -- except switch genres entirely and see what happens. Three years of nanowrimo has taught me one basic thing: the resulting novels are NOT publishable. I hate editing. Hates it, my precious. It burns! Or, to be accurate, I like doing it if I don't have to tear the novel apart and rebuild it. Which is pretty much the result from nanowrimos.

So, midway though the drek of last years sci fi one that didn't work well, I decided to do something different. (Aside: the story I told was so far from the one in my head it was laughable, but the kitchen sink was cool.) So I decided that, for '06, I would do pure nano. Go for word count and to hell with quality. I doubt I'll be able to, but I'll try anyway -- effectively regurgitate up 50K in a week (or two) about the narrator getting up in the morning after. After what? Well, I'm not telling. Somewhat because I don't know yet, but still.

At least, courtesy of Fennec, I have a title: "My Cat Used to be a Buddhist"

Now to get literary and swamp it in foils and aluminium wrapping and saran wrap and symbolism and allegory and alliteration and aadvarks. (For the alliteration, y' know?)

Little Miracles

The miracle of love
Is that we do at all;
It's so easy to be trapped
In visions of a fall.

When there's so many ways
To hide behind our pain;
When there's so many people
We feel we could blame --

The touch of another's hand
Is proof enough we care
And all we need is laughter
And memories to share.

And when the light is failing
And we feel we cannot cope
There's always love to show us
That faith is more than hope.

La Fin De Siecle

The problem of a hero is that the saving's never done.
No matter all the wars that I have fought and won
Sometimes it seems as if I've only just begun.

Though my heart's as pure as a virgin mirror
The world's full of lies, of deception & disguise,
And I wonder once more: what am I fighting for?

Every gift's another burden only weighting me down,
And everything I could be is a sea in which I drown:
A hero without ideals is like a king without a crown.

Though my heart's as pure as a virgin mirror
The world's full of lies, of deception & disguise,
And I wonder once more: what am I fighting for?

But at every night's ending there's another dawn;
I have to believe there'll be one when I'm gone
For the sky is filled with dead stars that once shone

Though my heart's as pure as a virgin mirror
The world's full of lies, of deception & disguise,
And I wonder once more: what am I fighting for?
But when death is near the real hero need not fear.

Quiet Destroyer 52.302

aka: The Rise and Fall of YOMANK

The villain, calling himself super,
Posted on Flux's message boards.
There were pixelated pictures of me,
Crude jokes and hurtful little words.

He said he was greater than me
(Probably was, some fat greasy man
Barely fitting into a chair, piggy eyed)
And challenged me, man to man.

Me. Quiet Destroyer, the terrible one.
The only villain to defeat Captain Flux
(in battle, if not our war), but this pup
Said: "Your method, lol!, it sucks!"

His goal, so juvenile, so - so plain,
To cause someone to spill a drink,
Owe the other a new keyboard. As if
Anything in that required him to think!

He just posted things from the Simpsons,
Stole gags from Family Guy; and the fool
Flux, he laughed, typed YOMANK!
And was nothing more than a tool.

Afterwards, I found my foe, garroted
Him with an extension chord, but I
Had still lost the battle, Not made
Flux laugh - but I could make him die.

Candy Floss

In all our reaching outwards
In all our searching for,
Trying to find the gods
To mean more than we are.

We die and we are buried
Reclaimed and are dust
Vainly hoping we believe
Something will outlast.

To hope for more to life
Than the living of this one
Is just a wishful dreaming
When all is said and done.

Scientific conclusions

There is uncertain movement
Between dreaming and the now
Unable to find the reasons why
We settle again for the how.