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Literature Text
I awake in horror
From a nightmare-killing
In which a childhood friend is lost,
Bleeding away into a pool of invisibility,
Murdered by my dreams.
Misha —
In reality
He departed from the living world
Years ago;
Spirited
Into the shadowlife,
Pulled upwards by the rope of despair,
Years ago;
His suicide and the letter
Written with the invisible pen of depression,
Faded on a page of blood,
Years ago.
Somehow I kept him alive
Sustained on the milk of imagination,
—Diluted, vivisected,
Disembodied, wraithed,
Estranged from time and age—
As though death’s angel
Stuffed into a bag
All my friend’s Being,
And relocated his perdition inside
The satanic school of my head;
Like a wet blade,
My brain remembers the wound,
A warm flood
Of images that drown reality
With
Black nights
Patched in gold, ghostly light.
Down a highway of lost thoughts,
Floating under the flickering street lamps,
I have gone,
Shadowing the movements of emotion,
Abstractions painted by a lunatic;
I have contended
With these maniacal feelings
He’ll never experience,
Images on a page
Forming a disconnected collage
Of memory and magic.
In the impoverished houses
Of suburbs under siege,
He was
A descendant of Bakunin,
A card carrying member
Of the unserious intelligentsia,
Of insignificant, teenage anarchies;
With his meaningless passion
For the meaningless destruction
Of dysfunctional bonds,
Or the private gulag of his mind.
I think of him
Paying out his last dollar on misdemeanors,
Drunk on a neighbor's smoking couch,
Pawning other people's stuff for coke
(The drugs later pawned many friendships too),
Broken radios that drifted off their stations,
Vhs players with shaky, incriminating movies inside,
Mixed cassette tapes with the alien voices of our youth,
The adolescent music of rebellion
Damped down by corrupting age.
I press rewind
On a portable cassette,
And listen to clips and cuts
Of recovered memory,
Listen
To him
And me,
The hum
Of marshall amps,
Vibrating drums,
Intermittent power,
Broken chords,
Playing dead anthems;
In a vagrant’s garage,
Our brains out of tune
Like a pair of pawn shop guitars
Abandoned to the dust of time.
Dropping sunshine
In the schoolyards of insanity;
Our eyes were sugar cubes
In a spoon of menacing want
Melting into the green glass of addiction.
Walking past the brick
Houses of birth’s master plan,
Death draws my image next to his shadow
—It follows me like a violent omen,
A name written into stone,
A buried space
Where nothing save pain resides.
I cut Misha’s character from remembered life,
That doll house of disappointments,
And paste it into a poem;
Old friend lost,
Dead soul departed,
Preserved by hand and writing
—I write this as though
I could ink him back into existence;
But ink is neither equal to flesh nor spirit.
Night's horror,
Shadowlife.
From a nightmare-killing
In which a childhood friend is lost,
Bleeding away into a pool of invisibility,
Murdered by my dreams.
Misha —
In reality
He departed from the living world
Years ago;
Spirited
Into the shadowlife,
Pulled upwards by the rope of despair,
Years ago;
His suicide and the letter
Written with the invisible pen of depression,
Faded on a page of blood,
Years ago.
Somehow I kept him alive
Sustained on the milk of imagination,
—Diluted, vivisected,
Disembodied, wraithed,
Estranged from time and age—
As though death’s angel
Stuffed into a bag
All my friend’s Being,
And relocated his perdition inside
The satanic school of my head;
Like a wet blade,
My brain remembers the wound,
A warm flood
Of images that drown reality
With
Black nights
Patched in gold, ghostly light.
Down a highway of lost thoughts,
Floating under the flickering street lamps,
I have gone,
Shadowing the movements of emotion,
Abstractions painted by a lunatic;
I have contended
With these maniacal feelings
He’ll never experience,
Images on a page
Forming a disconnected collage
Of memory and magic.
In the impoverished houses
Of suburbs under siege,
He was
A descendant of Bakunin,
A card carrying member
Of the unserious intelligentsia,
Of insignificant, teenage anarchies;
With his meaningless passion
For the meaningless destruction
Of dysfunctional bonds,
Or the private gulag of his mind.
I think of him
Paying out his last dollar on misdemeanors,
Drunk on a neighbor's smoking couch,
Pawning other people's stuff for coke
(The drugs later pawned many friendships too),
Broken radios that drifted off their stations,
Vhs players with shaky, incriminating movies inside,
Mixed cassette tapes with the alien voices of our youth,
The adolescent music of rebellion
Damped down by corrupting age.
I press rewind
On a portable cassette,
And listen to clips and cuts
Of recovered memory,
Listen
To him
And me,
The hum
Of marshall amps,
Vibrating drums,
Intermittent power,
Broken chords,
Playing dead anthems;
In a vagrant’s garage,
Our brains out of tune
Like a pair of pawn shop guitars
Abandoned to the dust of time.
Dropping sunshine
In the schoolyards of insanity;
Our eyes were sugar cubes
In a spoon of menacing want
Melting into the green glass of addiction.
Walking past the brick
Houses of birth’s master plan,
Death draws my image next to his shadow
—It follows me like a violent omen,
A name written into stone,
A buried space
Where nothing save pain resides.
I cut Misha’s character from remembered life,
That doll house of disappointments,
And paste it into a poem;
Old friend lost,
Dead soul departed,
Preserved by hand and writing
—I write this as though
I could ink him back into existence;
But ink is neither equal to flesh nor spirit.
Night's horror,
Shadowlife.
Literature
We Do As We Are Told
Do you think that you are free? Well you are not free
Freedom is just an illusion designed to control
I ask myself why some people live their whole lives
Believing every single word that they are told
From the teachers who were brainwashed themselves
But there is no cleanliness in our education
School comes too soon with agenda fueled answers
Before we have even learnt to ask the question
Do you think that you are free? Well you are not free
It's just the bars around your cell cannot be seen
You're enslaved while ministers commit crimes so sinister
And feed you thoughts directly from the machine
The grinding dark forces that control the
Literature
white rabbit
alice had her rabbit hole
and i suppose you could call me jealous
that her path to insanity seemed so straightforward
my white rabbit lead me to you
and then, you didn’t look so dark so dangerous;
it took me too long to realize i had
fallen for you fallen into you
and i kept falling, blonde hair, like alice’s
blinding my view, disguising the depth of my rabbit hole—
when alice landed she got to eat cake;
when i landed
my ribs collided with the ground
sure, my body shrunk,
but shoulders and hands and tears
folding into themselves,
broken bones, and bruises
don’t exactly scream wonderland
Literature
the sun, the moon
she was wise,
with the sun in one eye,
and the moon in the other,
and she looked at the world
as the universe would;
she looked at the world
seeing it as so small
standing in oceans that were only knee-deep
and in deserts that were her sand boxes
with the sun in one eye,
and the moon in the other
she looked to the stars as her friends,
but she couldn’t wrap her mind around
how far away they were
the darkness scared her—
so she never closed those eyes,
never put the sun, the moon to sleep.
sometimes she would cry to the stars
her friends—they weren’t listening,
she was flooding her sand box
she was wise,
but she d
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Written by Frank Jaspers.
This is another in a growing number of connected poems about my teeanage years. I had several best friends who committed suicide. One of these friends was extremely close to me. One never really gets over that sort of thing.
This is another in a growing number of connected poems about my teeanage years. I had several best friends who committed suicide. One of these friends was extremely close to me. One never really gets over that sort of thing.
© 2016 - 2024 Frank-Jaspers
Comments13
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I'm very sorry. 
Emotive read.
Emotive read.