Brain Scramble

This past Saturday my good friend Subconscious Colours let me basically spew out some of my work with him on stage and I personally want to thank him for organizing the event, being kind enough to include me in his musical sorcery and shenanigans, and for being just the sort of creative whirlwind I really need to feel inspired.

The other artists at the show really blew my mind out of the water, and by that, I mean I think I've lost a bit of my sanity and hearing after the madness that was summoned out of their instruments and gear (as this was a noise show, this seems to be an indicator of the success, not the failure, of a performance). I wrote a poem inspired in part by Derek M. Poteat's performance that really evoked feelings of the beliefs people have about how the rapture is suppose to occur - fracturing, earth shattering loud. 

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the bassist went on stage

and in the orchestra pit, my brain was prepped for surgery,

he played the end-of-days anthem,

a lowly tone slammed against metal

that is destined to deafen the sinful

into soundless purity

And the volume, the bassist knew, must be so enormous,

so palpably huge, that it forces one’s atomic structure to break down

and align into new shapes

after hearing all of this, we are spiritually new beings

but I still am scheduled for a nine o’ clock brain scramble

because there exists no galactic level of soundwave

that can compel me to give up this angel

I’m holding hostage between my teeth

She has the four letter word she robbed from me

stored in her vial of Debt she collects from those

who have paid their due to the Almighty

but I never gave her a penny, and

she took my verbal talisman against evil

because no mortal should have such power

So the Angelic band of Assassins figured

if they can tooth pick out my brain,

as though preparing the meat for a sandwich platter,

the part of me where all of my words are gathered,

would spill out into my skull,

losing motor control, my jaw would go slack,

and the angel, with my charm against the devil,

will return unto God what I stole

from the good book’s footnotes.

Fuck.

When Ghosts Become Mermaids

And sometimes I have really absurd dreams, which in turn become poems. Forgive me.

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In this king of nightmares, I married

an old sweetheart who knew

the science of laughter

but not the magic act of lust,

a stocking gone one minute, the skirt

vanishing the next, how to make

all those blushes turn into good old blood

broiling in the heat of touch

And so I, just as clumsy,  

on this day of holy matrimony,

wore a turtleneck beneath a fabbed up

white jumper

an exercise in the poor Victorian gothic

and every time I passed him in the prep

before the ceremony,

anxiety tore across his face

just as my hands released an ocean

all on their own

all of this was swept under by dos “I dos”

His mood changed from fretting to elation,

and he led me by the hand to a pond behind the church

here was our consummation bed,

he said, “do not be afraid”

pulling me down beneath the algaic green surface

Great, a marriage unwanted seems to have been giving

it’s rightful omens

murder is never so poignant as it is at the first

of new beginnings

but soon, I found he was shoving pills into my mouth

upon submersion,

and I swallowed,

and breathed

“here, we must have our children.

I did not tell you lest you ran”

He implored, with a flick of his tail

and so I finally had the upskirt magician

I always wanted,

but inseminated, now I could not

leave, or the air would kill the unborn

and so this nightmare had me chained

to my worst fear

trapped, sedated by the light hitting the gentle

windblown current,

and full of babies

I cannot even fathom as a part of the pronoun

I

I am the mermaid’s slave

And modern medicine

is the surest way to tie the knot

on aquatic abduction

How The Heavens Do It

I made love to the known universe and it wasn’t easy

as what I could fathom as lover appeared

as a two faced moon & sun

one to the east, the other ever facing west

And sexual escapades were reductive

down to mere attempts at birthing nebula fish eggs

the sun, ever trying to get up his heat,

but the challenge is to not sear the female

into another Beatrice redacted in orange

And the moon face left craters in my skin

where our dimples did not quite parallel each other

her mountains on my plateaus,

her canyons crashing into my black hills

Then came their harem of constellations

and my cum cannot find enough

of it’s own bravado to infiltrate Virgo

or even Cancer and Ursa Major left me tattered and bent

but ready to fall into dippers that are fountains

draining into galaxy’s ambiguous black dot of a center

I am a salmon amongst stars

But I am the only one that dies for painting the sky a bruised purple,

an infernal red,

and for what? A school of suns and cracked out planets

I will never know

Celluloid Cigarette Burns

This poem was inspired by the first fifteen minutes of the 2014 film The Scribbler, which was quite boring and its pacing awful, but it posed enough of a feminist problem involving using multiple personality disorder to justify a young woman’s lust that I couldn’t leave it unpondered, even though I left the film itself unfinished

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I watched the camera obscura play back the scene of a woman

claiming dissociative personality disorder as a reason

for finding the crimson flower in a man’s bed

only when she was possessed of this new age demon

of psychology could she fly to the summit in her mind

which let her breathe out the phrase “And god said it was good”

We let this serpent coil around her in terror,

the one that whispered, “even here, you are not your own,

even here, you can see the hues of regret

coming to stain your picnic blanket

violet red”

Like a child’s maze toy, she is the silver ball

that a baby will never allow to go home

If the Toddler wills the winding,

she will be the Moses of this Legion of Self

she divided so that no one would truly know

who built the hollow golden calf with which

she plotted her escape into the desert night

When pleasure needs justification,

especially those which involve breaking the mirror

to decide which fragment looks best under black light lust,

then we know our heroine is losing

we have to send in an air team of deus ex,

a package of girl scout cookies with fortune

scrolls reading some speech about Amore

sustained under a rainless sky

Kardashian Krystal

All the “previously on"s have taught me one thing

and that is how we have allowed our weeks to turn into

a uni-calendar obsessed with eating its tail

instead of sliding past the screen door to slither into the amazon

that no longer patiently waits to fade past parody loops

faster than our cable vomitoriums allow us to recover

And so, here you are, doped up on soap time hash and Ultimate

Fighting Molly, with Kardashian Krystal for good measure,

How will you recognize yourself in the mirror when all you see is

the back of the news anchor of channel nine telling you to look out

for a forecast of humdrum static destined to rain morphine drops of HBO

and Cinemax, all the while, Japan has a race to coronate their champion

with a crown built out of A and B buttons, a blue screen center and front,

with the coding for ambrosial pleasure entered on it’s face.

- July 16, 2014

Slothcake

Sloth Cake is a chemical composition

resulting when the electrons of apathy and omniscience cross

You know the forecast is abysmal

why even bother to sled when the snow is destined

to be drunk by narrow vacuums of earth

so quickly the joy of white becomes the sorrow of melt

Sloth cake is all of this

and none of it really tallies up to anything

but a taste of sugar waiting to be whipped

into cream blown away by some ferocious wind

Slothcake spells “I” - which is a lonely half of an equal sign

it was left behind by the calculator’s frenzy

Sacred Heart

Those rimmed in halos of gold are often devourers of hearts

Why do you think Jesus’ heart is wreathed in the divine flame,

held in the hands of every saint who has touched the ecstasy of the madness,

of knowing that god is ultimately a love so pure that it is actually

indifferent

your coffee house minutiae is nothing,

what do monoliths of heaven care for your desperation to buy black market plan B,

they much prefer if you approach with all your jewels of perdition

the diadem you scraped together from tips singed with cigarette stains

& long nights where your back was arched like a tent over a papyrus

too often burnt as offerings to the hallowed face of NO

So they burn you alive, a consequence of you wanting to touch deity

you might not come to them with the American Dream guard dog by your side

but you will be loved, even as  the cerebellum creaks and cracks from the threat

of too much spark

too much of the rush of the drunken starlight

too much of the sensuality the trees imbue when

they carry the whispers of the sky’s love for earth

So to fall in love with sacred hearts

is tantamount to suicide

but when did the expired flame of the Teresa

appear less than sex concentrated

but my snuffing out comes on the wings of LustAweFear,

These gods of the humors

they transfigure crosses into bridges

and even though to know them is to know another

Little Death

I welcome the moment’s closure

the breath stop

when the orange comes flooding in

To know love is to know the belly of the great Incinerators

It feels like Joan of Arc

It tastes like charcoal

It ends like nebula in miniature

February 2015, Rachel Ford