Scott Crain (USA) Contact the author
Contents:
Burning Words
I poured coffee down my throat
as if trying to burn away the words.
The words that were clawing and fighting their way
from my gut to my mouth.
Injected with the steroids of anger and the coldness of reason,
they shook of the fire that sought to quench them.
These are words of resentment and bitterness,
nurtured and fed
until I could hold them no longer.
Lethal and opulent words,
built with the metal of truth,
armed with the acid of lie,
and bristling with connotation, denotation and accusation.
My eyes searched for another target
but always they found only you.
I siphoned caffine and heat into my mouth
as I vainly hoped for a subject change.
Or better yet,
some other insensitive prick to voice my own sentiments.
But bypassing the blockade of food,
fording the river of heartburn,
and pressing on toward destruction,
that determination would not be stifled.
There was no going back,
only preparation for the aftermath was left
as the predators perched on my tongue,
prey in sight,
craving satisfaction.
Anxiously they sat, my breath held,
until your heart was laid bare.
They flew with the speed of sound and precision of a bullet,
ripping your countenance to shreds and piercing your heart.
Dismay and confusion bled from your body,
betrayal and shock poured from your face.
Your eyes, windows to anguish deeper than flesh and blood,
to a wound of emotional gore.
Eyes congealing into a mirror of my own
as indignation clots the flow
and the tourniquet of rage prepared,
and victory is a corpse,
rotting and maggot-covered in purging heat,
the stink of decay on my tongue.
Judgement
1.
A Stain has blossomed on the ceiling,
a hurricane of rainwater,
swirling destruction
in the satellite picture of my eyes.
The forces of nature always win.
I feel the heat of your stare.
Our fallen natures
circling like drunken boxers,
fists held ready, visions blurred,
feet unsteady on shifting sand,
the foolish builder's wreckage,
-beneath us.
I refocus on the desk before me,
the wood grain -- overlapping winds of a sandstorm.,
I long to sink into them and disappear.
Your pronouncements do not pass through me,
as my disinterested gaze might suggest.
They sting, they cut, they slice, they fester.
My blood loss is so great
I grow too weak for rage,
too weak for rebound.
Disoriented by misplaced accusation.
You have kicked-in the door to my mind,
knocked over my chairs, my lamps, my expensive toys.
My clothes and books lie strewn across the floor,
my furniture broken, my dishes smashed,
my walls defiled by graffiti . . .
I can find nothing in this mess.
My fondled axioms, rationalities,
creeds, memoirs, pictures,
my voice.
Lost to the whirlwind of your judgment.
I offer up empty resistance,
use my body language
to show I'll take no more today, and,
secretly mulling over myself, my shame,
we part.
Off to build more natural walls
to keep the other out,
and ourselves in.
2.
Can you see a contrite heart
in the eyes of another?
So certain are you
in the pictures you've painted,
that all words mean the same.
Did I ever have a chance?
Out of the overflow of the heart
the mouth will speak,
and, please understand,
my tongue recoils from the bitterness.
For with my cliched heart in my cliched mouth
I gnaw away at the ties which hold me together,
unresolved anguish amputating potential.
Guilty.
Yet, were you to taste my heart
you'd spit it out in terror.
Can your grand wisdom,
which so eloquently cut me in two,
solve the revealed twists and writhings of my insides?
.. . . . I doubt it.
I am weighed, measured, gauged.
A pig to be sold at market,
a meal for starving ego children.
So you have bought me, killed me,
fed yourself with me,
been gorged on criminal meat;
meat basted in the injustice
of true crime laying hidden
while trumped-up charges make headlines.
My true sin is lost to your angry mob nose.
And I will not succumb to your ideals;
unexplained, untempered, and bristling with teeth.
I will sit in the shadows and lick my wounds
while you emerge the victor
of a holiness war.
My fear is of dying
from deprivation of the Son,
not of being rejected as moral conscience,
of failing the everyday scrutiny test,
of stepping from the limelight
to feel the cold in my veins,
of coming down from a soap box
to know the pressure of thicker air
and no longer looking down to only ants.
Do not let your ears be swallowed by your mouth.
Trust me, my brother, my double,
I have to regurgitate every day.
Now excuse me while I pack my things,
I'm off to the penitentiary of your mind,
my life must stop, my progress must die,
for it seems you hold the gavel that shakes the world.
Back to Top
Two girls in a library: A sestina
Whispers of mayhem in the library;
Tall book-lined aisles annoyed with giggles and secrets,
Appalled at their competition in the war on failure
Concocted by ignorance in a black cauldron of dreams,
A cauldron untouched by word-filled pages
In page-filled books on book-filled shelves, now lined with horror.
Uncaring, unnoticing an old book's horror,
A self-satisfied cow-eyed expression defiles the library,
And an empty head with children's fiction the only pages
Its known, bombards, with pop-culture-twisted secrets
The cultivating words of world-moving dreams.
To the shelves around them go the disinterested gazes of failure.
She and her cookie-cutter cohort deny self-failure
And proclaim the absurdity of any other's horror
At seeing the naivete-soaked dreams
That they have the gall to whip out in the library
For show and tell, blaspheming the powerful secrets
That wait to be conceived in yellowed leafy pages.
From the shelves filled with books filled with pages
Filled with words, sounds the trumpet of the muse despising failure.
Rilke cries out to inform their little bored secrets,
Donne weeps to open some light upon the horror,
And Dante calls to Virgil for revolution in the library
While Poe and Kafka light the torch of dreams.
Would that they so cold could dream a dream
That overcomes their deaf ears and empty pages.
But they strut through the hallowed halls of the library
As out of place as any pristine virgin page, a failure
Within the Dewey-decimal society, which still cringes in horror
At those deaf ears claiming to know secretes.
Devoid of the sort of bundle of thick-volumed, characterized secrets
That Tolstoy carried in his arms/hands/fingers, or the dreams
Spawned to life by Coleridge and the Brownings, or the horror
Seen through Baudelaire's eyes, they have no care for the pages
That the Shellys consummated, or the witness to failure
Of Stienbeck or O'Conner . . . The blood of Able cries from under the
library.
And the now commonplace horror of shelves filled with books filled with
pages
Filled with words filled with dreams, walks out the door in a pair of
failure.
Their secrets undisturbed by silent wisps of pages turning in the
library.
Masked man
Whose words are these that run from my lips?
Surely their origin is not
in rational thought.
What is this spell of retardation
I have subjected to?
Did you hypnotize me as you entered the room?
Conditioning my responses to that of a fool?
Have I been trained to degenerate
At the presence of those sparkling eyes,
Those full red lips?
You intoxicate me with the spirits of possibilities,
The wine of romantic scenarios,
And the heightened awareness of my own loneliness.
My longing to touchcaresshold that special person
Is teased by our mere proximity.
You've replaced the me I thought I knew
With some one I don't understand.
-Like a teenager taught to shift on automatic,
thrown into a standard
with his dignity hanging in the balance.
Why did you replace the good old me
With a man whose controls are a mystery?
Your presence demands,
Demands a confident, self-assured me:
A sensitive scoundrel
whose humor commands your smile,
The philosophical barbarian
who inhabits all your fantasies,
the artistic jock and the passive aggressor,
the humble leader and the simple sage,
the inventive sex-machine and the unshaken oak,
the loving provider and the spontaneous clown,
who will fight for you rights
and yet keep you in line.
An amalgam of dozens that are just not me,
Become the me you inspire.
And when the glow of your face
and the sway of your hips
has departed back into the clutches of the competition,
I wonder:
Who was that masked man?
And why didn't he ask for her name?
Crying Streets
Outside, the streets are crying,
tears washing down gulleys and drains
like so many plans for a sunny day.
Under the cover of night
the storms have raged against us,
unable to get through our aluminum siding.
So we rest in our security,
knowing our strength in the whirr of the sump pump
and the snap crackle and pop against the windows.
My cereal talks to me.
It tells me that Rice Crispies can kill me,
can leave me without a mother and father,
can wash my dreams down a storm drain
with the tears of the street.
Back to Top
The Concert
Butternut jazz band groves
on my ground floor.
A Bittersweet opportunity
from armchair-comfort starting blocks.
Magical temptation,
sirens from covetous rhythms.
Conscientious rule-book fear
vs. overriding blasphemous courage.
My Blind step forward
is led by a musical seeing-eye dog.
The resultant new movement
is an unforgettably driven first spike,
knowing abandoned stagnant comfort
and open door excitement.
Bass professor,
Treble sage,
-body test progression.
Same world,
New eyes,
-audio soul ascension
Brazen flowing movement erupts
from Glorious dancing wings.
Back to Top
The valley of lies
All hail the power of our inverted eyes
to fuel the slave trade of treeless plains that surround.
We might get dizzy in this valley of lies.
I bow, the sovereign of my endless skies,
while brown grass sways over the next beaten child drowned.
We live and die in freedom's pale disguise.
My sin cracks the whip, though my tongue denies
all sense of self to the empty hills near and around,
soon to make me dizzy in the valley of lies.
To feet losing purchase, the chains surprise,
and eyes finding dirt cause questions to sound
about stalks that whip and slice in freedom's pale disguise.
Too late, the heart will go out of my spinning cries.
No master, all to slavery are bound.
Time passes, not dizzy in the valley of lies.
Unsure how long the sun will refuse to rise
I'll wake one day and only know the ground,
consigned to die under freedom's pale disguise,
no longer dizzy in the valley of lies.
Back to Top