Death groaned

From its hideaway hovel

Exiling Lazarus

To infinite pause

Painting

Blackberry blisters

Upon his scabbed flesh canvas

With welled droplet blood

Curdled stroke red

Over pulp skinned medallion.

And beastial sorrow

Shattered chancel eye windows

As he vainly blinked

Away death’s glass.

For the spread of these tears

Was once an ocean of dreams

Until the chalked crag

Gored his heart’s moulted eagle

And Larimar stars

Were plucked splashes of fever

Cast through nightshade’s

Hive rippled skies

Immured to rankling chain

Its storied oracles stung

Beneath black orchid seas

The salted brink

A steely knife

Cutting small

His wild breath.

And each dying ember

Was once crowned with love

Before the crucible of grief

Burned up halo sun

But Lazarus dug through

The snarling dark and fanged deep

To raise the feathered ghost

Of wings tombed at sea.

Dropped velvet curtains

Cannot shadow her blushed ballroom heart

Nor the taunting flame

That courted grief

Burn away her tapestry of stars.

Porcelain feet

A fragile mosaic

Of clawed glass tattoo

Thrash black blooded wolves

Into powdered allegory

And fangless ash

Into skinned robes of doom.

For the winged seedling gold

Of reborn dreams

Fevers a diadem sun

Which flowers her dance

All the way home.

The eater of dreams

Screams a thin haunt of ancient smoke

Into suburban bastilles

Tasting brimstone grey brains

And their blood sugared dreams

Dosed down rabbit hole pods

Where cottontail clouds

Frame a fingernail moon.

And he collects each dream

Piece by piece

Pocketing holograms

For oblivion’s feast.

The eater of dreams

Dips his rogue diamond chalice

Into mercury seas

To drink the drowsed void

Where wayfaring stars

Bleed glittery wonders

And Orphic veined wine

Toasting grape galaxy ashes

Swirling on deathbed paradise.

And he collects each dream

Piece by piece

Pocketing holograms

For oblivion’s feast.

The eater of dreams

Overdoses on neon delirium

As God’s widescreen soul

Colours the theatre marquee

With hypnotic spells of pink and blue

Announcing upcoming shows

And showers microgram mercies

To drown him in sleep.

And the war drums

Of embryonic heartbeats

Shatter his capsule carriage

Towards the wet nurse of space

Milking one halve with hope

And the other with faith.

January

Kisses halcyon sun

With snow leper lips

The gelid burn

A lipstick slaughter.

The pale horse

Eats hanging garden stars

Crystalline shrines

Festooned bridal white

A punch drunk blizzard.

The watchtower moon

Rolls a turncoat eye

Over leathered darklands

Her spun roulette

A chambered ghost cauldron.

January’s emperor

Executes the dawning menace

Flooding blackened cavities

The lucent pour

A diamond sheeted fallout.

Her shaded vault

A black knife through the heavens

Breached gravity

Helpless to starve

Her comet footed déboulés

Quickened to triphammer stun

The heavenward bullet

Of her sultry wrestle

With hiccuping zephyr

Sheeted in Hadean armoury

A black rainbow baptism

As her skin flakes to mist

Under nerves courting spark

Sluiced out from netted flesh

A blizzard of psalm freed from the dirge

The breathless crowd

Mounted butterflies

A riot of trilled charge

Hung on the untamable fever

Of her torrid romance with entombed air

Her crimson ribbons

Laced through a plot of ebony

A dewy tangle

After her broken swan bow.

A lonely tear

Is a ritual drop

Exiled

Through the needle’s unsparing burn

Bloodletting

A black swan’s netted beak

To gutter

Disquieting voices

Into bonfires of boscage

And spiked Sea-buckthorn snag

Across coral plucked seas

Where death’s priest can’t reach

And her skinned wing trauma

Heals its ebony feathered bloom

No longer a louring straggler

But sailing the sainted waves

And milky pearl

All the way to Byzantine.

The sound of youth

Leaps wild and strident

Martyring metropolis with supersonic fists

And bestial dirge

Like the awed tremor of kettle drum hoofs

Kicking open the dead bolted gut

Of pastel painted heaven

Crowning gaunt tenements

In acid rain grey

Nibbling away florescent halos

Eating up concrete castles.

And the electric eye of God

Blinks stoplight red.

The sound of youth

Cuts razored bedlam

Into electric city wasteland

Where street buzzards chew through priestly silence

Like wailing furies

Of ambulance sermons

Tattooing last chapters

And final verse

On coma coiled bodies

Vaulted to Phaenon’s chalk outlined ether.

And the electric eye of God

Blinks stoplight red.

The prismatic dance

Falls ill with plague

Raging at the languid adagio

For the speed of youth

Is peerless to the darting star

And its scream of ruin

Bullets mercury sky

With awful silence.

First, a mediocre joke:

Today my sister wondered where I get my poems (or as I call em “syntactic artifacts sourced from a bittersweet worldview”) and I joked that it was God’s way of making up for razing my once blooming garden of hair.

But, just wanted to add that today marks a one year milestone being here and it’s been a greatly rewarding journey that helped me refine my poetic stuff, and abundant thanks is due to Jeff and a number of you, who have very kindly liked, shared, commented on my poems and helped nurture a hospitable sensibility that I hope I’ve afforded the same to you.

I put my very first poem up on here early in the morning when I was visiting Savannah, Georgia and was so happy to get kind words and feedback from Jeff and others as I just unloaded each poem (later, discovering I was able to add pictures and tag people to thank them, which I was clueless about at the start ha).

There are some exemplary writers on here of whom I truly admire your artful craft, heartfelt work and daring literary exploration that I won’t tag, but your work and kindness to me, both are inspiring and wonderful.

I owe Jeff, Mariah, A, Andy Betz, Mnezz, Mavia, Mamba, Huck, The Naz, Rlove, Schatz, Dr.Semicolon (now renamed) and a number of others my great thanks for their earliest encouragement when I first started putting up my very first poems here in the first few months of 2024.

Of course there are so many other exceptional writers I’ve met since through last year to present that I actively enjoy and am awed by (I’m sure I’ve told you so!) and others who’ve left a nest egg of greatness that I still marvel at even if they might be hibernating new gems to one day add to their already curated brilliant collection.

I also appreciate every writer’s contribution here, and while my tastes lean a certain way, I’ve still read some captivating material on here.

Navigating the choppy waters of my struggles with autism on a platform with a lot of virtual people and personalities can be a bit of a challenge, but I have to thank my dear friends here (you know who you are) for encouraging me beyond the platform to be confident and sure of myself.

Your friendships have been of tremendous benefit and value that is perhaps the greatest joy that my year long journey on here has brought me.

Looking forward to 2025 and I sincerely hope this post doesn’t come across as self aggrandizing or anything, but just wanted to share thanks to the community and friends both here and beyond!

Very gratefully,

LDW

Where were you, when the world ended?

When the tin god machine went mad with power?

For he wears a mask of flesh burned away

His jester head

A piked halo of sickled flowers

God’s gold threaded sheaves

A wild wraith massacre

Burning spring voices into powdered sand.

And we laboured once

Before the imploding void

Before the machine erased its architect

In sieges of wolves and flame.

And our paper guns

And paper bombs

Became ticker tape parade

For the mechanical king.

Where were you, when the machine

Scaled our soul harboured walls

With web footed spidery crawl

To loose the black eyed chimera

And poison the well of Siloam

Dividing his spoils for the great devouring party

With funereal black balloons

Hospice hopping

Treading glum air

And rising to flame licked ceilings

In God’s banquet hall of fools and saints?

And we chanced dubiety’s troll

And rolled hopes with dice

Tumbling the teeth of lost dreams

Down charcoal choked caverns

Into Black Dragon mouths.

Where were you, when the machine

Opened night’s sackcloth cloaked breast

And showered fistfuls of inked stars

Like buttons of tumors

At the ready to burst

Trailing grief in dark circles

Through courtyards of fire

With death’s plume of smoked breath

Slaying amethyst sky?

And in the end

We never learned

For this machine

Was no different than us

A ruse of fools

At war with itself

Chasing cruel glories

And hologram avarice.

So we sold ourselves pawns

At Death’s chessboard bazaar

Our sooth swaddled tokens

His flatlined endgame.

The charred scroll seduction

A tawdry impasse of the damnable pith

Hot in crumbled hive hearts

Where the honey is boiled

While the bees are grasping at life

Attacked air

The buzz maddening

Rumble unseen

That once bunkered derelict

Whereabout whisper

At large and on the run

Smoke signal sighs sweep cryptic sweet nothings

Across the tangled feathers of night

And tenebrous shadow smothers fingernail moon

Her sallow eye sulking like an abandoned tryst

The unruly nerve blackening egg laying stars

A punch drunk mirage stung

Day’s cutlass drawn

White noise symphonies play on

Harum scarum belly crawl

-This sound has wings.