Seconds scrub our life away like
waves scraping down the coast
or rain dragging away the earth.
We watched time eat our clasped hands,
falling away one fragment of skin after another
and never said a word about it.
We felt the approaching wall coming
but could not seem to put it into words;
the beauty of an ageless love had become
the tragedy of the leaves,
aged, dying and passionless.
White walls were
are
always ruined by dirty finger prints
and
the bleach scrubdowns never made
any difference.
There’s a filthiness to living that no one
ever talks about or
mentions
we all just watch the slow decay of the fragile
innocence.
Fear had its claws pushed through the skin
that coiled tightly around my veins and muscle,
a failed attempt to turn me away or bleed me out.
I was not dying anytime soon and the only thing
scarier than love was a lack of progress towards it.
The fear hung on like bats waiting for night to fall,
but I was the only falling piece on the board.
I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
I remained in the bed, sitting,
staring where love once was,
now some dark shape that could have been a corpse in the bed remained.
All that was special and magical in life
had suddenly become commonplace and tired;
there was no remedy or break from it.
It seemed as if the gold paint had flaked off
and now I was left staring at a mud statue.
Life was crawling by and all I wanted was to run,
and I waited so long to get out of the gates.
I wish I never looked back.
The ocean-blue of my eyes are a playground
or a death wish fulfilled.
My soul pours out as a waterfall,
splashing cold, sobering torrents of surface tension
into the warm, still air,
disrupting the peace of inanimate nature.
Come swim inside of me,
float around until the storm comes,
and then flail in the tidal waves of my consuming hatred
in an attempt to survive and maybe find your way home.
Nobody ever makes it home whole again,
my soul weakens those it does not kill,
and most with mortal wounds as my Spawn always hungers.
I always eat,
always consume,
always am.
You will feel the warm injection of my embrace,
the heat crawls down the back of your neck like the first hit of a
steaming hot shower
launching pain into your nerves that you tell your soul will soon be fine.
Your soul will stop squirming soon
and it is too late anyways,
as you will crawl home or we will die together,
rotting,
decaying,
returning to our choiceless, freedomless nature.
Behind the glass wall of my eyes is a killing field
many have fallen into it
and I feast on souls.
Your eyes were still
drowning
in your completely average face
with your pedestrian, modified, hair,
and only a paragraph this ugly could describe you.
Fleet of heart, passion and loyalty,
void of meaning,
and as rudderless as a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
you are.
These painful, broken, cumbersome sentences
strung together like memories from all your nights before,
could not accumulate any meaning or shared worth,
just like your life.
The last goodbye was as real as the two of us,
because it never happened.
Sometimes the universe winks at me.
I watched the purple clouds barrel over
The outlying hills that crowned St. John’s
And knew at least hundred
Maybe thousands
Of others were watching too.
The sky was something we had in common,
every soul on the Earth,
We could always look above at it for direction
Even if we didn’t believe in the omnipotent.
The sky was something special on the coast
Because we watched it tears clouds out of the sky
Like steroid-crazed bouncers making impressions
On too-young, too-drunk or too-stupid girls, and the wind impressed us all the same way.
A brand new dawn is always clouded,
almost by its own optimism
if not by the optimism of the others.
Every dawn brings a promise with it,
a promise it could never hope to keep,
and the weight of expectation bloods it.
Success is impossible in the red glow,
and we crush ourselves upon its cliffs
trying to cling to the first ground we can
before the waves of water end us.
We floated in barrels like Tolkien’s dwarves,
occasionally choking on the water,
but not quite drowning from the trip,
but something changed in us from it.
I can feel every second passing like chunks of sand
Falling away from my beach-side castle,
And rejoining the inanimate that we once breathed into being.
The clock slashes away one second at a time
Like it were counting filthy coins into paper rolls
And something in me takes each tick like the
Smiling end of a razor blade come home to play.
I remember feeling awake sometime before these
transmuted nightmares became dreams of someone else’s’ design.
Now only the numb minutes remain,
The hours we could never kill
And that drown us as we choked for more life
Only to taste more boredom.
The people pour themselves into imagined containers
Of who they believe themselves to be,
But every construct has its holes and we never see the truth.
We keep leaking out of personalities
And building new stories to catch our watered souls
Until we finally run out of our liquids.
No fountain of youth restores the waters of life
And we excrete ourselves through our sweat cum blood saliva
Until we have nothing else to let out.
The clay people dry up fastest,
Even though time with them feels longest,
With their terracotta personalities –
Inflexible, choking and stagnant –
And those who become the tides of change
Live fastest and best.
Andy Veilleux 