Lost Cause

I've not liked any poem I've written since my cat died...and I've been through a long spell of depression... my brain doesn't work the same way? I don't know. But at least I wrote something...

Midnight

In a city that closes down at dusk.

I hang on the mind’s window ledges

Like an onyx spider dangling

From a spindly web of gauze.

Shell-shocked and cell-locked

By my thoughts – a lost cause.

Mid-flight,

Insanity spreads its wings,

Becoming the mundane.

And hope?

A cigarette flame, its ashes to ashes

Twist and turn to rust, turn to dust.

Smoke-fuelled, hope dissolves like whispers,

Drifting through dead air.

The knife always slashes.

The axe always falls.

Misanthrope -

Yet one part scarred romantic

Though clearly that’s in vain.

Asphalt

Suffocating with bleak swells.

Grotesque raucous families

Congregate on sunshine-y days

And seem not to obsess with churning guts

Over life’s decay while I always dwell.

I do still laugh at strange things.

My own fault?

I ended up here,

I don’t know why.

The Fortune Teller

Pt. 1

The clatter of crates packing up for the evening clacked through dusky air, interrupting Milandra’s nap. Cat-like, her stretching limbs reached for nothing, undecidedly, languidly, as the wash of a dream dripped from the corners of her mind. Again, she had dreamt that curious dream, always of the same man. Inevitably, the man’s silhouette lingered, but his identity- the details – remained burrowed in that ungraspable, uncertain dream-state.

Slits of dying sunlight slipped through heavy Egyptian blue curtains, zebra striping her skin as she lounged on scattered cushions in the nook of her shop. She realized in spite of her sleep-addled state, her heart was drumming against her ribs, its pulses beating in flustered, disjointed rhythm. Her hands fluttered towards the little metal pipe on the floor: would there be enough to calm her down? Perhaps. She struck a match and inhaled as the last glimpses of sweet, tarry smoke poured into her lungs.

“I would die this way,” she mused. She thought it was coming many times, every time. At this point death was a waiting game; but wasn’t it that way throughout life anyway? The grey hollows ravaging her once-plump cheeks told her so; the gnawing knots in her guts told her so; those strange aches in her bones told her so.

Amber embers curled and faded in her pipe as remnants of smoke burned down into tin-trapped air. She carelessly threw the pipe into a massive jet-black ashtray, and stood, swaying - ever so slightly. Practiced like a drunk teenager feigning sobriety, her movements were a little too precise, a little too exaggerated. Smoothing her skirts, she felt sharp bones underneath, jutting through softened fabric, the skeleton making itself known. Hours would go by without customers, and certainly no visitors, although she was thankful for this in her modes of exhaustion. As she walked over the creaking wood floor, her mind sank down into waking dream, as the lingering lull of smoke flowed through her throbbing veins.

Outside, carts and cars rolled up rusty dust streets and the last calls of working men wavered in her ears. The familiar sounds did not distract her from her undistractable state, but rather became an extension of her internal thoughts. The mundane is taken for granted by those in in the throes and thrust of life, but perhaps she would, in death, miss street sounds and men’s voices, no matter how tobacco hoarse or sun-parched their grate.

Milandra parted another set of curtains leading to the back of her shop. A cracked slab mirror leant against the wall and she stopped to study her reflection. The only face she had ever known gazed back, yet, marked by time’s change, in another sense it was hardly recognizable. At 46 years old, she appeared ancient beyond her years, with creases marking complex emotional road maps around her eyes. For the past few years, every smile, tear, and wince seemed conveyed and betrayed on the canvas of her olive skin. Each morning she lined her eyes heavily with smoky kohl and their pale citrine colour still pounced playfully with youth, in spite of her near-constant suffering. Rose petal lips had thinned to a pale pink crack; blooming no more. The pang of their sternness in place of kissability affected her, and a deep-set yearning for love ached, even though she knew she'd soon be dead. She remained somehow exotically attractive – but she denied such knowledge, because any love discovered could only end tragically. Pulling her glossy onyx hair, strewn with strands of wiry silver, away from her face, she half-frowned, and turned towards a heavy chest of drawers.

Nestled inside the top drawer, folded in amber-scented fabric, was the only tangible reminder of him that remained: a seashell he once gave her on a gloomy-evening beach walk. She could still sense the drifting mist dancing on her skin, the touch of his hand: fainter, but with that reaching, desperate clarity of a re-lived memory. Over endless time and rolling waves, the shell itself had been worn down, smooth against her fingertips as silk, yet one side was jagged and snagged like a witches nail. The symbolism wasn’t lost on her – as this reflected the eternal emotional state he had infernally left her in. Typical... luckless. She carefully folded the fabric around the shell, returned it to the drawer, and traipsed back to the front of her shop.

In the centre of her shop stood a round table covered with brocade cloth, upon which lay a tasselled pouch containing her tarot cards. Knowing herself to be perpetually damned, she gave up reading the cards to shed any light on her own life long ago: well, what was the point? However, many in town still flocked to her for glimpses into their futures, whether it be through the cards or palmistry. Some visitors were anxious, some dismally disengaged or sulkishly skeptical, some excited - all because time had played or frayed them one way or another.

Lost in thoughts and her waning high, the tinny jangle of a trio of bells was nearly missed, and it wasn’t until the young man cleared his throat she noticed he had entered her shop. Neither startled nor necessarily surprised at his arrival, she avoided eye contact and gestured with a coarse, almost exasperated motion of her hand for him to take a seat in front of the card table.

However, as soon as she looked up into his eyes, she knew she was damned.

Part One of Something I Won't Finish

Stream of consciousness, or something. Very pointless. 

“I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky” - Virgina Woolf

She awoke, ghostlike, to walk the streets in soles so thin the cobblestones caressed her feet. No need to wait for the sun to rise, because the touch of chilling air divulges a sense of feeling to remind her she exists. Existing, however, is not living. Dishevelled sheets that wrapped and entrapped her limbs were cast off with reluctance and dismal sighs, imperceptible enough that only the dead could hear. Conscious humans mostly avoid consciousness, and reject screaming signs of personal suffering. Alone with everybody, we strut in our own skeletal, flesh-bound cages, in isolation so strained we only feign anyone else is ever permitted entry.

Plunging fog hung with inevitable thickness and her sharp spirit had lunged, long since trailing off, as the years coiled around her heart like a deep, dragging anchor. She had become nothing, and in a sense that led to numbed contentedness, maybe somewhere, merely unfelt. Her mark on the world should be as silent as possible, erasable and untraceable. But how could emptiness feel so heavy?

...No one knows you – but you long to meld consciousness with another: quite simply, you can’t. No one understands you – except you – and you spent your entire life trying to figure yourself out, and now that you have, you wish you’d never bothered...

There is no truth except perception. Perception is always distorted.

Errant raindrops flicked across her bare arms like intermittent tears, driving another smattering of sensation against deadness. Tears sparkled like diamonds against her skin. Nothing is forever, and they slowly disappeared. She wanted to laugh but it would always ring hollow - and if her tears mixed with the rain no one would know.

They wouldn’t want to know anyway.

Empty streets yawned before a tangled blur of faces rushed by with post-impressionist madness. They left no impression – yet each one could be lost in their own mangled confusion. Perhaps they were simply better actors. Perhaps they were terrible actors in bland roles. Authenticity’s nonexistence could be ignored for decades because ignorance is more comfortable. Never open your mouth because you may say something someone might not like. However, if we never gave a piece of our minds and followed the crowd there would be anything but peace.

Her decaying mind was in pieces, like dirty shattered glass, stained glass, strained glass lying in a back alley – as she picked up a shard on the street it bit her hand. Feeling to push through the fog. At some point we become our own joke – we just aren’t in on it.

...I will have to teach myself to smile and say “hello” again, like a dim, careless child. Nameless, faceless, I had to stop learning to haunt myself. I knew myself so well I couldn’t turn it off. Over-thinking and over-feeling leads to the opposite of those things, and now I am shrouded in numb confusion...

Singing clock chimes remind her that time is nothing but a conveniently inconvenient construct, because her mind flings towards the past and projects towards the future with unhurdled ease. Minutes in pain hang like hauling eternities, and those tiny gems of joy evaporate in moments.

The only reality is the mind, and it’s a flawed one.

This is everyone's truth.