Poetry
Issue #2
A self you don't serve
Sarah my dear your stream is bruised,
and you haven’t his leg to stand on.
For years and days you’ve bristled this way
and not been a friend to a self you don’t serve.
Is it because they didn’t service your self?
That they left it to cry a pretty book on their shelf.
Your narcissism is a false smiling companion.
The pit you can’t see so can’t look for a ladder.
You hold its hand as it picks the pockets--
of your lovers, your mothers, your city and psyche.
An elephant ghost you mistake for your savior
a child of doubt and self loathing behavior.
Lovers scurry behind you, blinded and charmed,
three, four at a time you make them alive.
Until apparent truth slays their coming up,
and the peak crumbles into a bed of jagged teeth.
Your companions only half healed still cling to dress--
they are those that can’t heal, you hold their distress.
As if it’s yours to keep and bathe in,
the proof that you’re alive and that you mean.
A moment breast and a blanket, but only pity holds.
And they’re not enough for the hole in your chest,
you keep filling your box with the women and men,
the lonely and cold race down your scorched dust bowl fen .
High Street Ego
He’s a green house mop top façade,
running from face to face to steel their charisma.
Face to the floor at half the response,
red cheeked complexion battling to spit words.
The corner caresser in the room of the at-ease-
face up, breasts out, laid down, chinup chaps.
The room hugging, gaze steeling, face lighting girls.
The clouds and the stars make him wet,
And for that he knows he is a privileged peter.
But the real peter holds the lovers and shoots-
the shit with a smile legs astride.
The real peter is a son and a worker,
a city away from this social deserter.
The real peter sparks with the strangers,
every house is his home and he heals.
A real peter he is not,
His home is a song, a book not a human.
Stagnant strangers are judged so to collapse the pain.
Condescension soothes the chemically castrated ego.
The dopes that broke the mould-
have scratched and corroded at the grey grease.
Now the organ groans and jars or floats;
theirs no happy medium no content seat.
A blooded river bourn never to pause.