asterfires

With one swipe of the blade Or a couple more in succession of a restless fury Unquenched by the fraudulent appearance of purity against a harlot’s face My long hair fell with a sigh down my shoulders, kissing my neck in false ecstasy I lean into its false narratives, it is beautiful to be touched Oh to be beautiful again! But to be beautiful you must be admired and I have ever been the admirer

I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw it for the first time My propensity for corruption My hypersexualisation in androgynous display  Most pornographic of connotations Was my sex hair- in the most crudest sense of the word Finally the innocent demeanour was brought down with the cut The purity I held onto wrenched apart and the truth finally revealed And all look and all stare and all comment At my beautifully sexual and pornographic short hair

Call back to me poets Send me back the muses From me you have taken my inspiration And dotted me with bruises

Send back for me, friends Foes or enemies The precursor need not matter I need the spirit in me

To lift a pen, again To write with a metaphor trail To be inspired again To not watch every rhyme fail

To live, to fall and to fall in love To give, to take, to observe Infinite possibilities, oh muse If you would be of use

Can you hear my echo, In the cave of the dead? If all the poets died together, Where is the disease bred?

In the mind, the soul, the body? The pen, the sword, the tongue? Is it bred anywhere and everywhere Or maybe for those special ones?

I'll die among the poets They'll welcome me home We'll be buried in flowers  Face turned to the liminal

And if they ask who I was The words will speak my name They will tell my story I will have my fame

Achilles was a poet,  Bathed in full glory, Died in full blood, And yet we know his story.

I will be just like him I will seek my fame Call it kleos or not In the end it's all to gain

Come, inspire me muses. Let me see the lakes of the poets Let me reach the mountains of the recluses Our country's geniuses

Crown everything in full gold Full splendour and radiance Let nothing ever age Let everything be momentaneous

I will speak of the flowers in the fields I will touch the river bed I will give way to nature I will give way to death

Let me speak And, oh poets, may you listen! I want to be among the greats I want to be reminiscent

Of the whisps of the past That whisper sweetly in our ear Of the haunts of the future  That stand so close and near

And last of all Of the sight of the present And all the action it beholds:

Hold the flower, lie down, and take your last breath

Your face echoes walking among the chasms on highways of wind and silver. Misery and discordance awake like dust from footsteps reverberating through a forest of emptiness

The air is weaponised with arrows of besiegement And I am like Lady Godiva, clothed only by Saint Chastity Stimulated by the Cold to run

Trip and tumble down each causeway paved in sugar memories; those that only briefly linger on the buds, but cause toothache Too momentary, like the scenes I trundle pass Doll house recreations and manic situations And a hallucinatory voice void of souls

With that husk of resolve as the crescendo plays --

And the instrumental marks the art

Of my heart

And the violence in all it displays

Was it Apollo who named me after verse?

What's in a name, if life is a tragic chorus

Of repetition lacking in definition?

Define me, clouds, sea and earth.

With the delicate callaused fingers of Medusa's lover I sift through riptides of thoughts The overconfidence of Poseidon, I know I cannot keep them at bay

Was my titular rhetoric a faint prophecy?

To how I'll govern words in a one-woman autocracy

Or do I mistake myself

And the definition of it is a cacophony

I am white-ankled Daphne running through water Stealing through Ino's domain I gurgle thoughts and sea Sophist though I am - I drown

Sing on singer! Sing on, I pray!

Am I not doomed to play as they say?

What am I without instrument or accompaniment or soul?

The water here below has gotten too cold.

Decadence, engorged and choking

It almost ran needles through the eye

Stitching you to stare

I don't know if beautiful were the words to echo

When it looked like something just below

What is natural

The white was of that corrupted colour

Only noticeable if you were hypnotised

By the hemmed delicate petals

That eve;

I played the part of Marie Antoinette

Demanding cake and ribbons

Paid in blood labour

But pleasing to the eye

Oh yes! The dress was thrift store cheap

The jacket pre-owned, the model unloved

With those un-plentiful hips, the shape of a cereal box

Illusions, illusions of a masquerade ball

Dreams of running away with a prince

And not away from friends

Converse trainers walk further than heels

But the blisters of loneliness never heal

Fraudulent sister! Did you enjoy your dance?

Gasping for air instead of beauty

Because your dress dug into your ribs.

Was it worth it? Would you give it another chance?

Father, brother, son or lover

Make Faustian bargains at the debt of my youth

They coat their hands in period blood

Before wrapping around my teddy's throat

I know not when the reckoning begins

I eat the grit of other men's sins

Dance pretty marionette poppet and puppet

Strings threaded through intestines and eyebrows

Pins through uterus and hair

I rip them out as I prepare

In the mirror I see Jephthah's daughter

Her father's sacrifice

She drank the music of the hills

And feasted at a banquet of tears among friends

Before she died- a young virgin maid

I bite down her righteous complacency

I will not kneel in shame

You, who has brought on my fury

I know I am behind, starting uni is crazy. This is an old poem so I am sorry it's not as good

★

Let's stop seeing flashing colours

Red and blue bleed with eachother

And every time I stand

It feels like a command

To give into the temptation of distortion

Let your mind give up from exhaustion

Shatter reality

And watch the walls bleed

Red

Blue

Taking over

These walls can't control it

What is real and what is fake

Will make sense when I wake

Memories

Kept at bay

Repeat what you say

And let the walls say the answer

No one else took a chance, they're

Whispering secret lovely lies

To lull you to rest like a lullaby

They say don't believe them

But what's not to believe son

Take a rest

Among the mess

As reality cracks

Like shattered glass

And when the walls cave in

Maybe you will wake up then

And know the line between the two

Do you know what is real and what is true?

The prosaic lies in your hands

Awaiting your command

But the supernatural calls you in

And like the cold air it brings

It is attacking at all sides

But you say that if you just get inside

You will figure it out

There is no inside that even counts

But you don't care

Not thinking is better than being aware

You numb up when it overtakes you

And zone out as it takes proof

Of your concrete everyday

Ask yourself if you're awake?

A poem in seven parts

Part V: Choice

And his words instead of his cry finally are brought into my mind:

“Hark a horseless man,

The groom of dutiful life,

Her golden potent tresses,

I caress during Nyx's plight.

In a land where dusk trips over dawn

Ever treading on its heels

Nightfall's eternity cloaks you

And forces you to kneel

"You seek a deathless land

A place where heart and house hum out

A chorus of desire for my lovely bride

A different difference where sun blesses

And souls push against the night

Where your tempest calms against the ocean of sky

Here you massacre peace against the twilight

Awaiting dawn's chariot

“You seek a stainless hand

Clenched in a fist of steel

With nails as long as harbinger shovels

That can plunge into a guiltless heart with zeal

You try and reconcile yourself with wishes

Of a life that was well spent

A speck that will result in nothing

As if it goes away without my dissent

"Worst of all you choose a partisan

A fellow comrade to walk you to your grave

Together you share a child's pigtail plait

With a trio of red thread fate,

Blended tangled veins and angel hair

Suspending your future into the cobweb of air

Of course: all that lives must die,

A response to Christina Rossetti's 'Echo'

Image credit: Studio Grafiikka

Response:

I walk to you in dreams with bitter wormwood trenches

My feet drag up the weight of memorial public benches

I long to walk the bridge between life and death

With a hand reaching out for your soft cheeks

Clear eyes, lemon drop breath

Real, prosaic, alive but archaic

O memory forgets itself when the years are assassinated

Oh endless noise, endless noise, tidal wave so sonic

Screaming into the recesses of my last drop tonic

I long for the sweet honeycomb of sleep, but am forced to amble

Walking past, walking through, walking transient

My soul sieved out when I walked through brambles

And conscience shut like a door

Which once let in, lets out no more

Yet I walk to you in dreams, that I may see

The life that invigorates and separated you from me

Come to feed me and donate your

Pulse, essence and directive

Coveting is a small fee, I freely pour

I lost my voice from desire

I know a goodbye has been missing from my tongue

The word rolls up into public toilet gum

And like the empty paper dispenser in the stall

Your missus has been missing a part, of something she can't recall

And if it were any other day than this

I could say the word and punctuate it with a grimace

But certainly not tonight

For tonight, the outside sky has posters of clouds

Which search and shout out for the missing light

And the vinyl floor holds the stars incarcerated

My friend gave me the cutest gift of an aster necklace for my birthday! I didn't realise that aster was my birth month flower. That's even more perfect.

Aster flowers symbolise love, wisdom, faith and patience. Isn't that so cute and poetic?

"Am I now more beautiful to you?"

An exhausted Poet says,

"Hasn't my suffering morphed into its ekphrasis? 

Did you not recognise that I speak out lamentations instead of cry?

And should I do so, the tortured ululations that tear through my lungs 

Still hold a metre I cannot escape from.

What is beautiful about these iron-barred stanzas

When My Heart is dry from pouring out my innards

Like a dirty washing-up sponge."

His face is now looking directly into theirs

Pore to pore

Breath to breath --

"You who have chased me through to my hiding place 

My domesticity replaced by complicity 

To make my own abode a gallery 

The bathroom its most prized exhibition 

For in it my insides are purged

My true emotions revealed

My most shattering screams drill into the walls

With nails of ink and spit and tears."

No reply to the Poet, but he continues,

"You dismembered me, limb by limb,

And called it blissful 

For the sake of the art.

But this art is not a canvas

If it can breathe out its own self-perception."

Silence for a beat, and the poet cries,

"Speak! Why must you remain dumb?

I have chiselled myself into Galatea,

As I look into my reflection as my muse.

Narcissus am I, who drowning in my own depiction

Perceived marble flaking off my skin, instead of chunks of flesh."

The Tormentor smiled, but the Poet ploughs on.

"Why must my torment be your bliss?

Let me speak about the beauty of the firmament

Which encases and envelops the stars in its thick blanket

About the sun, which gently dips the world into honey

Even when it is recently born into the day from milk

But you always remind me that all flames gasp out smoke

And all stars die

And the shattering of both takes--

Time and patience."

"Why must I do one and not the other?

Why must I wait until my lust becomes akin to sadism

To talk about the empty throngs of pulsing desire?

You remind me that I am never enrapturing, enticing, intoxicating 

But I remind myself of my equal failure to describe the few months 

When I was at bliss in love."

"Always the bad, never the good."

The assailer finally replies.

But the Poet hears not

For the voice that speaks is the very gurgle of the chasm

That lies below him

Like the swallowing of water from a dying thirsty man

CW: violent imagery

Look at my hands laced with blood

My eyes projecting pictures of murders

As they reverberate through my psyche until the pictures are distorted

And exhausted

The blood in my veins is cold, but on the outside of my skin

It's warm and fresh and never-ending

Float in the blood river

Punished the people for millennia, but it's warm to the touch

I can feel it pulsing as if it were alive

My death is its life

It stains

Leaving my whole body to a permanent red dye

As if a warning to others; to not come nearby

Not that there are others, of that, I can be certain

The blood stretches out to endless abandon

Abysmal

The treachery done by my hand

My knife still strapped to my thigh

Even the river of blood cannot wash off the blood that's dried

A decade old, almost two

It weighs me down even here

And the previous river that was my oasis becomes the thing to drag me down

Who can breathe in blood?

Who can see in blood?

Breathe in the blood, let it overtake and shut down your lungs

It's still warm to the touch

Open your eyes in the blood, the liquid stings, but it's thrilling

To feel something

Down and down it pulls me

I try to remove the knife

But a chain from the nothing comes from below me, and what can save my life?

Sinking

Not wading

But drowning in blood that tastes metallic

It stains me red; a beautiful symbolic

Maybe a warning, maybe a sign

I'm running out of time

But the abyss swallows me whole

Monitor lit but still self-same

I implore you:

Erase me and my shame

My memories and my name

For, I cannot recall well either -

But I have a certain distrust of both,

And of you and the ether

That lies beyond the window,

Beyond my reach.

I clasp air instead of inner peace.

And you laugh with the door closed.