She caught me on the street.
She wanted to say,
“Go fuck yourself”,
But
I beat her to it.
And so she did.
life
The USS Towers: A Sailor’s Lament
There she is,
Rusting under the fucking waves,
Our eternal mistress sleeps,
steel heart still.
We’re topside now,
but her ghost still raves,
In the depths where our memories chill.
Her engines’ dirty growl echoes in my head,
stale AC’s sour breath,
salt on my tongue.
Our small destroyer,
pitching, we bled,
Puking our guts out,
God, how we are wishing we were young again.
Mess decks,
a cesspool of stories and grease,
Hot, nasty coffee could raise the dead.
Shitty midrats barely kept the cold at bay,
Bitter sludge burning holes in our head.
Tossed us around like goddamn rag dolls,
Yet kept the enemy away,
our steel mother.
After long watches,
fucking dead on our feet,
She’d rock us to sleep like no other.
They sank her for practice, our old girl,
A fucking exercise,
that’s all she was worth.
Silent rage burns,
as memories unfurl,
Of our home, our hell,
now in the earth.
One by one,
we’ll ship out again,
Join that endless fucking Westpac cruise.
No more bullshit,
no more pain,
Just the freedom we finally get to choose.
She sails on through the starry night,
Her crew aboard,
forever free.
No brass to polish, no watches to fight,
Just us, our old gal,
and the endless sea.
M.Hatter
Girl with Dirty Feet
Me and my girl,
the girl with dirty feet,
We used to pass the days by sitting on the porch,
the evening wind satisfying and warm.
She draped her legs over my lap
as waves of orange and purple
washed over us,
cleansing us from
the hard day.
Not a sound could be heard, except the soft
snores from our old dog
and an occasional giggle.
I lay in bed now,
70 years on,
I can still smell the
old wood of the porch.
I can still feel that warm wind
and hear the soft snores of
a friend long gone.
Most of all, I can
feel the weight of
her feet.
Oh, how I miss my girl with the dirty feet.
Road Rage Romance
Out on the highway,
crossing the great American landscape,
I had a girl with me, hungry and eager.
Pulled in, took a piss, had a cig,
got her some food.
Back on the road, she excitedly opened the bag.
“Where’s your food?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
Truth is, I wasn’t.
“Well, then I’m not hungry…” she said, crumpling the bag.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’re not hungry?”
“Here, let me have a fry.”
“No,” she said, throwing the bag out the window.
“Fuck you doing?” I yelled.
What the fuck? Ten bucks down the drain.
She started to cry.
“Why’d you throw away good food?”
My vision blurred from anger.
“Fuck you! I want to eat with you!” she screamed,
hitting me upside the head. “Why can’t you understand that?”
I reached over and slapped her,
she slapped me back.
We’re both slapping, and I miss the blue lights in the mirror.
Siren kicks in.
“Jesus, see what you did now, you cunt?” I yelled.
She hit me again.
Trying to drive, pull over,
while she’s hitting me,
I’m blinded by rage.
“License and registr- Hey! Stop hitting her!”
“Fuck you! Do you know what she did?”
“He has weed in the car! And he abuses me all the time!”
What the fuck! My anger’s off the charts.
“Out of the car!”
Gun pointed at me now.
I smack her one last time,
the last time for sure.
I never saw her, my car, or my personal belongings,
again.
Joe
Joe was a boy of 12, big for his age,
they sure did make boys tough back then.
His head was as large as a basketball,
greasy hair parted on the left,
swooping down, covering one eye.
A scar on his lip made him look mean
and deranged.
Oh yeah, the jury was split on old Joe,
right down the middle.
Half the class adored him, the other half, hated or feared him.
At recess, he made it a point to choose one of the boys
that didn’t sing his praise,
or he just didn’t like,
and beat the snot out of them.
I never understood his selection method,
nor did anyone else.
There was no way to know when your time was up
and you had to square with Joe.
You needed eyes in the back of your head,
and when you saw him,
you ran.
On one sweltering Chicago day, in classroom 107
at Public School,
we learned that Joe died
while up at the lake with his family,
swept away by a strong current and drowned.
The future gone for this boy.
They say, when they found him,
his body swollen and his lips blue.
There were sniffles and sobs,
but hard to tell if they were sadness
or joy.
Sitting at my desk, staring at the door,
I let out a sigh of relief.
I don’t think anyone heard me,
just like they couldn’t hear the desperate cries from Joe.
12 years old and relieved of duty.
I remember looking out the window at the playground, knowing
that while God didn’t listen to Joe’s prayers,
he definitely heard mine.
poetry #poem #free verse poetry #free verse #dark poems #free-verse #dark-poems
Memory
In a dark, smoky corner of a forgotten bar,
Where the neon lights flicker like dying stars,
I sit alone, with a drink in hand,
A man whose life never went as planned.
My fingers trace the rim of the glass,
Each scratch a memory of a love that didn’t last,
The stale air heavy with tales of regret,
Of dreams unfulfilled and debts unpaid yet.
The bartender, she nods, knowing all too well,
The stories this man’s weary eyes could tell,
Of days spent toiling under a merciless sun,
Nights lost in shadows, nowhere to run.
My laughter, now, is a crackling radio, static and spent,
Echoing in a room where hours are bent,
Where hope is a coin tossed in a wishing well,
And fate, a dealer with nothing left to sell.
The lines on my face, a roadmap of sorrow,
Each wrinkle a path I’d tread again tomorrow,
For in this world of steel, smoke, and grime,
I’m just another soul, lost in time.
So, in the end, I raise my glass to the ghosts in the room,
To the dreams that died, the love that met its doom,
In a world that spins too fast for those who walk slow,
Im a man who’s been everywhere but has nowhere to go.
Longing
In the quiet of his solitude, beneath the sky so wide,
An old man sits and thinks of youth, of love he’d cast aside.
Back to a time when he was young, in the heart of Chicago’s glow,
Working at the local Denny’s, where life seemed to move slow.
Her name was Sherri, fiery and bright, an autumn leaf aflame,
Her beautiful eyes sparkled with life, he whispered her name in vain.
They shared their dreams over sizzling grills, in coffee’s aromatic swirl,
He, yearning for the world’s expanse; she, a Chicago girl.
He loved her spirit, her laugh, her soul, she was his song of songs,
Yet the call of the horizon sang loud, to distant lands he thought he belonged.
He packed his bags, kissed Sherri’s cheek, “I promise sweetheart, I’ll return,”
Sherri chose to stay behind, in her heart, a silent yearn.
He wandered far, he wandered wide, letters penned with care,
Each ending with a whispered promise, hanging in the air.
The years rolled on, his heart grew tired, his dreams began to fray,
The world once vast, now seemed so small, he yearned for yesterday.
Now old and worn, he sits alone, his heart heavy with sorrow,
Missing her laugh, her spirit, her love, and the promise of tomorrow.
He missed the girl who never left, the city’s familiar hum,
The simplicity of Denny’s days, before the world had come.
From his chair, he slowly rose, to his desk of aging pine,
To pen a letter to his love, his sweet valentine.
“I miss you, Sherri,” he wrote with care, “I regret the day I roved,
My heart was always in Chicago, in the city where we loved.”
His heart beats on, in rhythm with time, beneath the sky so wide,
An old man sits and thinks of youth, of love he’d cast aside.
A letter sent, a promise kept, to the girl under neon light,
An echo of a memory, beneath the star-strewn night.
How I wish I never left you…
What would you do
I often wonder what happens at that precise moment when someone passes in their sleep.
We are quick to say they went peacefully. Which implies they simply went to sleep, never woke up or had any understanding of what was happening.
But…what if they did?
What if…
You’re asleep and there’s an interruption in your dream causing you to become aware but not awake.
You’re aware that you’re dreaming. Like an interruption to a regularly scheduled program. Your conscious and subconscious suddenly juxtaposed and you’re in both places.
Imagine how frighteningly strange that would be.
As you start to get used to this new sensation, the landscape starts to change. You look over and notice a place, at the edge of your subconscious forming.
You walk to it and see a clear black line like a seam splitting two realities.
Ahead of you is a reality that you couldn’t quite see clearly. Only colors swirling but nothing more as its being blurred by some gaussian filter.
The space between these realities is big enough for you to step into. Without knowing why, you step into this black seam without fear and can’t move but feel safe at this point.
You turn to look behind and see a ribbon forming with the starting point of your birth. You can see events in your life with exceptional clarity and if you focus, you can almost relive them. The urge to relive your past is strong.
However, something keeps you rooted and aware of what’s ahead of you.
Still, you can see your life clearly and are aware of the feelings you had then. While powerful, these past emotions do not affect your current state but you feel them nonetheless with the same intensity.
Except for now, you are feeling at ease. No fear or melancholy. A serenity washes over you.
As you look at your life, you start to notice branches forming. As if your life was a main distribution line and these branches were veins shooting off into different directions. At start of your life, the veins were not so many. As you progressed in life the number increased significantly.
The veins were connections and impacts you made to other lives and intertwined with other people. The length of the veins depended on how long and much of an impact you made. Some are healthy and vibrant, some are not and some look dead. And for the latter you feel remorse, regret and apologetic.
In the end, you can see the accomplishments of your life and its impacts. You cannot change what has happen.
You notice there are some veins that are vibrate with color. They are so beautiful that they flood you with intense emotion and make you cry with joy and sorrow all at the same time. These are your loved ones. The people who are connected deeply to you by love.
After looking across your life which seems like an eternity and reliving every point, experiencing every emotion and seeing every face of those you impacted, you become aware that ahead of you lies there is the unknown and you turn to face it.
You slowly raise your hand to touch this imagery.
Then a voice booms from everywhere at once. The voice is warm and familiar but you’ve never heard it before and it speaks one word “choose”.
It is the voice of God and it becomes clear what is commanded without a feeling intimidation.
Choose between going back. Waking up in the morning with a vague recollection of what happen, a small tinge of regret for not going forward.
And an optimistic thought that maybe you can repair some of those unhealthy and less vibrant veins you saw.
You can tell your loved ones how much you appreciate and need them too.
Or
Move forward, never wake up again and step into the unknown. To set out on an endless exploration of the afterlife.
It all becomes so clear to you that once you step forward into the wall of swirling colors you will embark on a infinite journey.
An eternal journey where a universe of mysteries stretch out beyond mortal comprehension. The simple questions/mysteries we experienced everyday are inconsequential compared to what is ahead. There are no dangers ahead. No traps or pitfalls. Just a quench to our natural human desire to travel.
You feel a swell of excitement and no sense of loneliness. You know that all pain and suffering would be lifted immediately and never come back.
You are also aware that you would be able to watch the continuation of everyone’s life as you travel.
Which would you choose?
BlackDayz 