Apocalyptic foreshortening

Documenting the proportions of illusion: distorting reality in words TW: Dark thoughts

Seasons of being
How were we raised in different summers?
You missed the sweet, sad smell
The smell that time makes as it passes
Passes as water through brooks

I missed the disproportionate heat waves
Lying on grass and watching clouds
Feeling not the color of the sky

A good burning filled my days
Falling proved I was still there
Even as blood dripped down

I did never find peace in the water
But I did on the shore
While they all swam in the shallows

Circles and chains were keys to locks
Unbinding my limbs to fly again
Ignorant to appreciate being

You never saw the light of bridges
Towering over swift rivers
Breaking everything to feel

I’ll never see the weight of before
When youth still lightened your face
For we’ll never change

I trapped myself in the middle
Now I am paralyzed in forever
For summers are no more

Clouded eyes
Translucent skin stretched over a visible soul
Even the deepest layers need only a penlight
A microscope might provide too much
Because of overwhelming bioluminescence

Trained to see by years of fear
A mind transformed by apparent radiation
Colors and lights warped by overexposure
Constantly remembering the forgotten

A life spent reliving the untold
Eerily predicting chance happenings
Ceaseless alarms dulling perception
Missing the details of commonplace

Lost capsules revealed by irrelevance
Finding the rafts but not the drain
Stone gates sealed by candle wax
Covered in vines watered with lead

Discovering things that no one can
Only to be told that they should stay hidden
How are locked doors meant to be ignored
When only one can see the red


Cyclones
The weight of a thousand bricks
Crushing and flattening my chest
Stuck, buried in a casket
Six feet deeper than dread
Continuing to drown on land
Building walls and stretching sight
Tears that will never fall
Continue incapacitating my eyes
Dark figures swirling together
Pricks of thoughts snatching my teeth
Voices growing farther than should be possible
Hurrying, worrying, trying to find the occupant
Touch feels like snagged, fiery nylon
They’re trying to rip me back out
But I cannot resurface now
Hyperventilating when they do not let go
Everything is spinning, reversing
The blur is refusing to clear
Resorting to the never ending rocking
Clawing at my skin to feel
I can no longer even appear fine
Dying wouldn’t feel this fast
The apocalyptic preparations of mind
The wall nets not even explanation out
I have let them all down
For I can no longer pretend

Soapy water
The skies seem greyer today
We’d been walking for hours
Patrolling what’s ours
Before it began to rain

Petrichor filling the air
Some feelings within
Matching our skin
Dreary and wet as the day

No one can outrun weather
But with an umbrella
Light as a feather
Softening the harsh impact

But where can this shield be found?
Deep in a pile
Not for a while
We’ll make do with newspaper

Use of the empty
Stripped screws and
Broken hinges and
Frail floorboards make up my mind
Worn stones pave the streets
Burnt out bulbs light the way
Rivers of ideas that once
Flowed with the wind now
Are dammed up by
The presence of illness
Libraries of mothridden books
The shelves groan with
The weight of years
Years not yet passed
I’m too young to
Feel quite like this
Frailty is to be questioned when
It becomes a state of being
Unable to live without a lack
None can thrive in a vacuum
Unable to find the day when
The spring will dry up and
All the ideas will stop to
Mark the use of all ideas
Mere humans cannot think as
Fast as artificial compilation
Nor as deep as
The most connected webs
For a veil must be worn to
Conceal fragments of purpose and
Weave together the shattered glass to
Fix what was always damaged and
To live in conceptual desertion

To be a writer
drafting plans in a notebook
people usually plan for the future
while some plan for the lack
not writing goals
writing letters
to those who care
outlining plot structure
not for fiction
but the short remnants of life
scribbling on pages
in the place of flesh
with a bladed pencil
crafting dialogue
of last words
not character development
using descriptive language
to explain how they might see
the broken lifeless body
imagining
the shock
when they dress it in funeral clothes
and see the marks
how many more marks
will they find then?