Puppet show

Greetings all. Today, I have another semi-mechanical poem, inspired by the below picture by the lovely and talented Sarah Hogman. Enjoy.

Puppet show

Mimes in the form of god on high,

wandering, wishing at the will of the one,

the one who rules from the clouds and the sky, the one holding all the strings, commanding, controlling all these misbegotten earthbound things,

this battalion of half-baked, blank-faced creatures on wires,

hanging slumped, jaws slack,

joints swiveling, like someone started building toy soldiers, someone had a dream of something great ,

something that could lift earth to the heavens, shine brighter than an immortal soul, and talk to gods.

But the toys turned ugly, and their creator could not stand to look at them, so he abandoned them, twisted his dream, and started trying to drag heaven down to earth instead.

And now these half finished crash test dummies hanging like a world full of incomplete suicide attempts,

and all the demons staring up at a torture even they couldn't devise:

Hundreds of marionettes hauled up by the strings and made to make war on each other, no evil in their minds, no goodness in their hearts, because they have no minds to manufacture good intentions to pave the road to Hell with, no hearts to be pure of to ascend to heaven with,

so nobody wins.

Except for the termites feasting on fallen toy soldiers, littering the rocks, because eventually when you make puppets dance long enough, kill for long enough,

they cut their own strings.

and eventually the termites will devour all these puppets, and nothing left but sawdust.

and eventually the demons will find other worlds to corrupt.

and eventually all the gods they made will fade into failure, just like their string-bound servants.

But those marionettes are laughing in whatever afterlife they may be occupying, singing:

"I've got no strings, to hold me down,

To make me kill, to make me drown."

and the gods would be enraged if they hadn't disappeared when their minions had.

and eventually in this empty land of sawdust,

new rulers will arise over all others, simply because they are the only ones left.

and eventually every world ends in dust,

every mechanization ends in rust,

and the crown always falls down to those who are willing to survive after all others have died.

and, eventually, in a land of wooden warfare,

the termite is king.

Yet another mechanical poem

If you are wondering, yes I do have a fascination with things mechanical (although I have virtually no knowledge or experience in the area) and have several poems on the more philosophical side of machines, and which I have made an effort to explore in my writing recently. So expect to see more in this vein in coming weeks. Enjoy!
Wired

Electric connections hold us together,

I've got my own animatronic birds of a feather,

We're past the point of now or never,

now it's nevermore.

Like a bird made of wires, it all comes together in an engineer's mind, an artificial world of perfect clockwork, always ticking, never talking, mocking all the real things that never rust.

Combust, all the metal in the world will melt, and the heat will be felt by the sun, the son, the one, and still the engine never stops moving in slow-motion towards the furnace of failed attempts at steel immortality.

Free, from all those pesky things like breathing and blood and body and mind, mine, mining the depths of the very surface of a home sweet home on the ranging from cities made to build themselves, to a clockwork mosquito that steals the iron from your blood.

Flood, of liquid gold shining like the fires of Hell in a hall of mirrors, reflections of reflections of a world that could be drowned in steel, steal, stolen the dollar signs from our eyes, used them to build an empty room with walls lined with lead so the sound of the silence of all the things once alive can't leave.

Believe, in something more than life itself, a land of barely remembered ideas in the engineers scrapbook, where lizards lay in wait for their gears to rust, for all the creators in every holy book to come down with screwdrivers and make them again, men, sending spears of misinformation in formation flowing through the veins of an automatic homeless man with a tin cup,and a sign saying:

fix me.

Angel

Angel

She is light shining off of a picture window

she is soft sleepy-time moments and held hands

she is steam rising up from a mug earl grey and the haze of an early morning

she is bees buzzing in the bushes between backyards

she is the patron saint of spiritual silences

she is words that are left unsaid because you don't need to say anything

she is sunshine on a rainy day

she is a smile when everything is in a downward spiral

she is the song on the radio that makes you sing along

she is love letters lost in the mail

she is time well whiled away

she the best angel you'll ever accidentally fall in love with

Transparent

Hello all. Yes, I'm finally posting again! Apologies for the long sabbatical, but there should be more post as of now.
Transparent

All I am is just another transparency, another set of developments of store-bought bones of somebody I never thought I never knew

I am just another X-ray of a bedtime story told to a Chemo patient bombarded by searchlights trying to find what's out of place

Just another photograph of a ghost in somebody's machine

Another see-through messenger who got shot by accident by a somebody with a loaded tongue pointed at the man in the mirror behind me

Another spiritual spirit praying to something I know doesn't exist except in my head, but my head is all that's real to me and my invisible self

Just a monkey wrench in the cogs of life, a spanner in the works of somebody's daydream of a better world

A scanner darkly viewing my own insides like the covers of a book by Philip K. Dick telling of a see-through skeleton in a glass coffin that nobody even knows is there

I am everything you cannot see, and neverything you never wanted to

I am all the small things the experts say don't exist

All the toys in the attic of your mind, tossed into a cardboard box and forgotten but not lost in the shuffling card game that is the mind of its own of the mouths of children

Just a lost soul in a fishbowl on a bookshelf in a library of obituary notices in an empty house

I am a man made of glass who throws stones at himself

I am a photo negative of a holy ghost's imaginary friend

I am transparent.

Shadowtown

Hello all. This week was the end of my teen writing group for me, as I'm turning nineteen this year, and the age limit is eighteen.

Sad as it is, it was an awesome experience while it lasted, and I have to show for it, an entry in a chapbook created by the group, titled Elemental::.

Here is that piece.

Shadowtown.

In Shadowtown, where the sun beats down,

and there’s not one leaf on the trees

there are things ‘neath the stones

that would chill you to your bones,

and make you shiver despite the heat.

A friend and I were passing by

when we came upon this land.

The heat made it shimmer, and I had just a glimmer

of what I would see firsthand.

The people didn’t speak, their faces were bleak,

but what made us stop and stare,

was their feet hit the ground, but made not a sound,

as if they weren’t really there.

Then we looked at the trees, and went weak at the knees,

as the branches seemed to grin,

for there, hanging loose, from every bough was a noose,

empty and blowing in the wind.

They creaked in the gusts, caked, covered in dust,

Mocking us with groaning bones.

For though empty as holes, the ropes they hung low,

with the weight of a ghostly death row.

The tumbleweeds clawed, the crows they all cawed,

as our skins began to crawl.

It looked as though this is where you go

if your evils are dreary and small.

We staggered around the silent crowds

until we reached town square,

where our eyes found another surprise,

in the dry and dusty air.

A statue black, to us his back

was turned, though we could see

it was of a man, his charcoal hands

were reaching to be free.

And then it turned, and my vision blurred

as this silhouette lurched near.

Its face was gone, its limbs too long,

a ghastly silken smear.

Its hands reached out, and it looked to shout,

though it had no voice it seemed.

We ducked around it, and we could feel the sound

it would have made if it could scream.

And out of the gloom more shadows loomed

like puppets without wires.

The people ignored them in silent boredom,

like trees ignoring fires.

We ran through the street, the sound of our feet

in the silence unnaturally loud,

until my friend said ‘We’re as good as dead’

and suddenly turned around.

He said ‘Why bother to run, when what we run from

could catch us before we could blink?’

I put a hand on his back, and his mood seemed so black

I felt my hope starting to sink.

And then he turned to face me, and I’ll never erase

the image burned onto my eyes.

My friend of ten years, his face disappeared,

a creature, blurring, and blind.

I let out a cry and ran until I

was weak, and my breath came in chokes.

To the ground I crashed, and I thought, at last

this was it, and then I awoke.

I was safe sound and home, in my bed all alone,

no silent people, no shadows, no ghostly trees.

I lay back and sighed, thanked God I’m alive,

and finally remembered to breathe.

Swung my feet out of bed, and then shook my head

to clear my ears as I rise.

For though my feet hit the floor, I could have swore

that they didn't make any noise.

In shadowtown, where the sun beats down,

and it never turns to night,

nothing ever grows, and though it always glows,

shadows are darkest in the light.