Rhetorical Questions
You answered my rhetorical questions.
A search for certainty that
Thieved my rhetoric
Replaced it with yes and no’s
You turned my world binary
Made my epiphany quotidian:
A tropical disease that
Denies the feverish
Rush of frenzied surprise.
Mercury trapped in glass.
Exotic escape turned to pallid sighs
Ringtones in bed
Turning poetic polyphony
Into turgid technology
Until feelings seem synthetic
Tapped on a keyboard
Where a question mark hides above a slash
Messages reduced to texts that obscure meaning
Memories crammed into gigabytes that flatten expression
Arguments over the controller
Nightly
We dilute the question of power
It does not match the furniture
Is this really love?
The question hits the corners
It is a thought that can shake the bed
-Yes,
you said.
And turned out the light.
When I look at the world,
I do not see through the pupils
They are too untrustworthy, too distractible
Too passive a thing
Wooden desks, bony knees, a hand raised,
A thirst for knowledge, accepted innocence
Reconstructed Incidents
All for a teacher’s smile
Learning to beguile
Tall knees no longer fit under those hard-oak desks
I have grown tall and culpable
I can no longer see the world through a set of eyes
Eyes are too beautiful
An admired thing
That presumes a soul
They are the thing that gets doodled,
The pencil delights in the perfect curvature,
The joy of a circular thing,
Like writing the O O O of first love
Whilst blinded by the lustre of it all.
When I look at the world,
I see through the tongue
Strong and oozing
Dripping with greed
I see the world through the cage of growing teeth
Primitive tools
Sharpened for battle
Spears of survival
They need no lesson in how to devour
It is only when the lights turn off
That they clutch together
Rattling in their cavernous chamber
They were stuck together that night when you cried
And I couldn’t open up.
The words you
Needed could not find their way
Past the betraying tongue
That guards the gate to the gaping chasm below
Please do not go looking for that place.
It is a place of hidden words that are strewn with bile
Beware my gnashing gnashers
You were too kind
When you said I was lost
A lone Cry
A lone cry for the tear-spilled timber
Where scars trickle out of simmering stars,
The moon howls and the ash unearths
Where the skyline blurs with a fanning of sails
Hand-held and stupid, the curtains fall
Far-flung fools of a once-upon start
Memories probed for the shallows thrusting
Melting in thunder and rheumy-eyed words.
A temple of hands still seeking a steeple
A memory creased in the back of a car
The tyres ingesting the rubber soaked road
Signing again for the stories untold.