I have often read the sparking souls of rare, bold men.
They have fed me pointed words
running red with blood
and thunder, staining
everything I've said, everything
I have. Often read the sparking souls of dead old men,
their flaming, spitting thoughts.
When your tightened lungs are stirred
fill your throat with coughing birds,
put your thought into an overwrought mouth as
I have, often. Read the sparking souls of dead old men,
the trolls in their cluttered dens
surrounded by the scrimshaw bones
of ravished brides, of wasted wives.
Soapbox words scrawled across the same bodies
I have often bled the hearkening souls of. Dead old men
have
High atop that bleak stone beast,
Two hands stand, never noting
Hour or minute. Looming, squatting
Dimly over primly painted lawns
And streaking red cars, those dead-eye
Windows lie and wonder how
The night was torn asunder by
The suburbs and the dying of
The old, old Hudson silence.
All along it seeks a man,
Some handsome soul to stand and see
That there’s no face at that dark window,
No trace of feet upon the stair
And no bells to tell the minutes, hours,
No hands to pass these leaden days.
Someday you’ll walk beneath its face,
Dead in autumns gasping breath,
And at some place stop and, silent, stare,
Or sit within its langui
There is nothing in this world more beautiful
than someone talking about the things they love:
The way their eyes fill up
and sink inward, mile upon mile,
year upon year, word upon word
until that secret soul lies naked,
trembling in nervous joy;
The way their gaze's gravity pulls you
spinning and wheeling into their most sacred tale
(The shaded curve of a lover's wrists stretched across white sheets.
The dying fall of a laugh from the farthest corner of the bar.
The glow of scattered stars hanging above a windswept hillside.
A swollen red sun falling shrieking from the sky.
The last sip of wine on an October night.
This is my body, given up for you.
As your fingers brush the corners of this page,
Keep your fingers light.
This is my soul splayed before you
In all of its patchwork glory,
The sum of the voice of the West Wind
and the cloying sickness of fleeting flesh.
Be gentle with this, my soul.
Let it slide through your fingers like sand,
Let it sink into the ball of your thumb
And the black of your eye.
And there, let it be.
Let it dream.
The Devil Sings the Blues by SuburbanSon, literature
Literature
The Devil Sings the Blues
I like to think the devil sings the blues down in his hole.
His is a sorry soul; he hides behind the shadow of a day,
Darkened by the weight of some forgotten sin.
I like to think he misses his father.
He only ever wanted to be seen, to be heard.
What son has never broken his father’s heart?
I like to think the devil is quiet and slight of frame.
If he slipped into your room you just might miss him.
Perhaps he looks a bit like your brother.
He cries sometimes.
I like to think he sits in hell painting pictures in the sand,
And that heavy damned heat turns his dreams to glass.
They are brittle, but they are bright, they are clean
Just
He spoke from the seat behind me.
I never saw his face.
"I don't really know what I believe.
I mean, there's Buddhism and Islam
and Daoism and whatever, but how
do you decide? You know, how do you choose?"
I turned to gaze out the window just as
a dead yellow leaf fled from the nearest bough,
swooped across the sky in lazy mournful loops
and disappeared into the impenetrable blue of the sky.
"How do you know what to believe?"
The sad blue veil of the sky,
shrouding the world.
A curtain, strung over our heads
to keep us from going mad
as we search the spaces between stars
for a friendly face, or the weight of a mother's arm.
I picked up a closed book today,
Rifled through the pages and pages
Of shadows thrown upon a wall;
A hand twitching, twisting to life, calling to life
All manner of forms and shapes in brilliant
Dark and light.
I recall a certain uncle of mine
Whose ink-smudged image is beginning to fade.
His face is a cloud, his name a secret.
I recall how we would sit in his basement on the day after Christmas
And he would cast scenes upon a white sheet
By the light of a blue plastic lantern.
He made dogs, rabbits, birds, snakes of all sizes and shapes
By the light of that bright white double-A glow,
But his greatest trick, the ultimate illusion, was
A gre
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here;"
There is no place for me inside her house.
The sunlight through the window stirs and swells
To fill the space with warmth and subtle shade.
It compliments her curtains, sweeps her floor,
And deigns to touch me not at all, though she
Has let me in this place; the sunshine falls
Upon her whims, and feels nothing for me.
And every chair is turned to meet her gaze,
Receiving her when rain pounds at the door;
The storms that shake her quickly sink and die
As leather folds to hold her trembling weight.
And do these rains arise with me? I know
They cannot rise of their own power here,
F
You were born
On a Tuesday afternoon in December, 1992.
Bright, pink, squealing, perfect,
Your mother took you home and held you to her breast,
A boy at rest.
For years you looked just like the rest
Of your twelve brothers and sisters; bright, pink
And running beneath your mother's skirts,
Clinging to the steady limb that lingered there.
She fed you, she hugged you; you spoke to her
About the tree in the yard and her Sunday blouse.
And then there came a night, one hot summer night
When you began to shift.
You peeked out from beneath the skirt and saw a girl,
A girl who was not your mother.
She fed you wine and shared a cigarett