Monday, August 29, 2011

Creeping Vines



The crevice between two walls
rasps with electrical currents, like whispers
passing between twinned breathless masks,
devoured by their own creaking substances.

And crackling in morbid consummation,
gravity takes hold of the red-eyed wonder,
inch by fateful inch.
When the night is harsh

and the audience has already boarded
a mode of transportation hardly worth mentioning,
two actors slam headlong into what might have been the end,
as iron beams cooperate like only animate objects can.

The cornered cavern yawns in delight, outside of which
so many lives scurry about in hopeless disillusionment.
There are no turns to be taken; no reason for sparks of order
to gleam beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Spattered with time, a shiftless figure holds the cold air
tightly between its pulsing fists.
Indebted to the bravery of a mountain;
wood-worn and golden-bright.

Flickering with the lit wicks of half-conscious souls,
the days will crawl, enduring the shame of early dismissal,
boldly seeking a raft beneath the greedy glare of the sun.
The ceiling of a dream bears the weight of life;

hovering, hesitant, no-one quite knowing what to say.
Avoiding the object that soils the frame of a snapshot,
all heads are full of woozy dread.
Like gashes across the moon, they deform love’s purity.

Unable to veil their secretly sneering smiles,
and rejoicing with mock approval,
the pack howls in unison, as their tamed exteriors
revel in such games of irony through the drapes of their silence.

Where once resounded music, now there drones
the whirring of machinery frantically cutting order
between two beats of mutually exclusive heart-waves.
Hopelessly devoted to the disarray,

and fretting over varied phases of disapproval,
the night smoothes tranquil to ease the guilt.
Dual trips are applied like double brush-strokes,
but we hope you know that thick paint never dries.

A phrase of fruit depicts the dawn, and
as season carries on, the lake gapes in shock
at its own sordid reflection. Meanwhile,
a new seedling is planted every day.

When one freezer-burned memory flies across the stage,
originality creeps out a window that never locks.
Bass-beats chop swiftly, fiercely against so many people
seemingly together, yet individually alone in a miniature space.

Their minds have been ground down to the heart
of a melon like piles of soggy sawdust, 
but distance is simply an illusion; that’s what they all say
as they turn their fleshy backs on the fanged monster.

What an astounding triumph to curl crescents
in the park beneath the rain a few paces prior to dawn.
A hollow chest, pillaged by invisible sound-scapes is quick to forget,
though aftershock resonates like the rib-harp of slumbering beast.

And reality is as hard to come by as a ride home,
when the drains don’t function and the shingles shift.
So with awkward mortification, the tide subsides
suddenly, as if for an instant,

all has been made clear.


Jennifer Burnside

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