My heart leaks on the cold, lonely nights,
and neither my blood or my tears can fill the well.
I grab my skull through my scalp and press hard,
but no sound or solution or soul worth saving is found,
and I just sit like that in the middle of my too-big bed
laughing like a maniac or an asshole and tilting my head
like a brand new puppy looking at its master
who must be a statue or dead or lost or mentally delayed
because they never laugh back,
but the laughing never stops.
Love and
loss,
Or
Love and
lose,
are the bread and
butter
of being human.
The mirror betrays my false confidence as
the chiseled statue is now out of focus –
the panes of glass turned to waves of sand –
my eye catches more than normal as
the smoke has filled whatever it could not
kill,
and left my mind more and my being infinitely
less.
People will try to make you feel small,
and you can let ’em,
as long as you will be a little lion –
ferocious, hungry and insane –
on your comeback trail.
Disregard all care for your mind
and toss aside all small barriers to
success and love and living true
and roar and burst out into the jungle,
for the jungle is yours to command
and yours alone,
and you can watch all the little cowards –
the ant people –
pat your back and smile at you as your teeth grow.
I hurt all the people I want to love. I reach out to touch them and cut them instead of holding them. Edward Scissorhands. When the only tools you have are hammers, everything is a nail. It’s hard to hold someone with tender care when the scars of abandonment, abuse and alienation are fresh and multiplying.
I know they promised you the world, and the hurt of false promises carve deep holes into your heart and mind and soul.
I know I’m broken in all the tender areas I want to love with, and all of my busted seams can’t be welded back together again. Sometimes I reach out, and up, and outwards, only to feel the cold, razor winds of indifference against my infantile skin. I retreat back into my warm, comfortable persona and push everyone – off of balconies and ledges – away from me. Sometimes I feel the savage cuts of knives when I reach out, the mockery, betrayal and failure coming home to roost. Sometimes I feel nothing.
Half of me sleeps and
wakes up again,
The other half
laughs
all the time,
but hits like
a full punch,
a straight to the face
I was walking towards
that sits me down again.
On better nights I sit
and take it all in –
there must be somewhere that
feels like home –
the lights dazzle
and the crowd cheers,
the bed sheets hug me.
On worse nights I wake
still ordinary and plain
and corrupt from deep within –
every fibre of every inch of
bent, hammered steel of hatred
and destruction and cunning.
I am the two edges of excitement –
chaos and order –
dancing on one blade together.
I’ll cut you so you can feel alive,
and I’ll take every arrow fired at you,
to make my life feel less worthless.
There’s a king for every castle,
and a degenerate for every gutter,
but the world is filled with gutters and so few castles.
Man jumps at a passing star,
his own shot,
and falls through the sewers
much more often than catching it.
The history of human excellence is the story
of climbing out of the shit to build an empire
when everybody refused to pick you up.
Sometimes the blank page stares back at me,
Hello Whiteness, my old friend,
Isn’t this quite the view?
The stale, winter apartment air filters through my nose, entering my once-mighty lungs. The powerful, lean frame has become softer, older and scarred. The scars on the outside seem to heal stronger, but the internal damage keeps leaking and flooding the empty cavity of my soul. My heart is somewhere in that lake – drowning – just splashing around waiting for one pathetic donut of a life raft to stumble into my world. The off-white, beige-personality girls pass through my life – so many faces on that digital screen – without leaving so much as a pin-size scar. Nothing worth remembering. No one worth foregoing the precious sleep of life for.
A migraine begs my skull to cave, and depression begs my heart to stop. My wandering ambition is just happy to watch words vomit onto the page, hoping it can steel itself against the tide of indifference and neglect. The multitude of missed first steps and false starts shake an already-wobbling confidence. The bravado and brash nature of too many yesterday’s is lost in the blizzard of aged emotions. No path emerges, but the words look like a shovel and warm clothes. It’s time to start digging out.
The tides of winter licked the shores
of the unfinished ice on the River
reminding us that we too are incomplete,
alternatively melting or adding more frozen
dead
mass with the changing climate.
We accumulate layers of life
and time and cold pain as we move
or stay static hoping that pain dulls.
It never really lessens for long,
and it never leaves for good,
but temporary reprieves are
better than none at all.
Andy Veilleux 