A Poem a Day (115): Joker

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website – head over there to write, read and comment every weekend... I watched The Joker on Friday. Dark and uncomfortably brilliant. 

Joker

When the deluge breaks he lets it sweep

Over him,

A burning caress he once yearned for

And now despises, invents a name.

These emotions he keeps locked inside,

Beyond him,

Feelings wretched, still wrecking.

In this fiery red glow he will dance,

Papering limbs in this cold numbness

Scourging through him, day in, day out,

Inside him.

It is his tempest, his alone; a jumbled mind

Cast adrift, signing, searching for insight

He can never hope to find.

And he knows he cannot be helped.

The murmurs will never calm, be quiet.

These blurred echoes of long jagged days –

A boy, a lost mother, a yard stripped dark,

Doors locked, pain, pitch black pain

Upon him.

This rain whips, cleansing scars etched so

Deep, reminding him of what was once,

Who he was once, the man he failed to

Become. Becoming a little less each day.

When the deluge calls, he dances a little,

Edging away from the fire serenading him

To come outside.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, November 9, 2019

A Poem a Day (114): Cobwebs

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website – head over there to write, read and comment every weekend...

Cobwebs

Dust and sound,

And sound disintegrating

Into dust,

Buried, hidden;

Only a silent scream,

Extinguished,

Voices starved of

Oxygen. Dumb,

Silenced, suffocated,

The words stolen,

Reiterated anew to

Spiral out of context,

Trodden and stamped

Upon. All these forbidden

Days watered down,

Streaming, where

Sound exhumed dust.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, October 18, 2019

A Poem a Day (113): The Grudge

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website – head over there to write, read and comment every weekend...

The Grudge

Again, and again, and again,

This repetition strikes us dumb.

Sensation shifts where it was not,

Where it stalks, singing lullabies

Of the dark, where it talks the talk,

Spinning a web as a spider does.

The wasp keeps its guard up,

This misted time is not for us.

These things fall loosely cluttered,

A word count of naught unchanging.

Laughter lifts where it finds itself

Loitering in a pause,

A semi-colon stumped.

We read of the silencing today,

Where caustic hues come to merge,

Seeping deep into the margins

Washing sprightly across the page.

Jumbled words seek order,

A pattern to emulate a song,

And sung, we remember it always.

Where the Grudge stalks by day,

It will find the pitch secreting in,

Raw dripping walls drawing closer,

Its path narrowing and narrowing.

Jump! It says jump, but this falls flat.

Walls come down when sanity prevails.

This dark-coiled snake eludes itself,

Stealth-like plunging an illusion of teeth,

Ego twitching, forever finding fault;

This delusion confounds us all.

The lost wander through gristle churning,

Vomited forth from the Grudge’s hate,

Thirsting on twisted entrails, gouged without.

Just a stab in the dark, it growls.

This veil reveals and conceals the wolf

As the crowd grows weary in conceit.

They hear the sirens wail,

They hear the walls thunder in.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, October 26, 2019

A Poem a Day (112): Spiral out

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website – head over there to write, read and comment, and be inspired/inspire...

Spiral out

Torn nerve lines of cabbage leaves

Trace new countries, waiting wounded

Silences leave me dead, fluttering,

The wings of the butterfly seared

Accompany me into this red desert

This place of dry, unwilling longing

Spiral, it spirals, it yearns, it burns

This colour corrects, consumes, replays,

So we drift within it, seeking out

You play the fiddle as the sky opens,

Flinging tears across this battlefield

Where times sleep, ravaged, open hands

Still grasp this earth, a sense of self

Spin, it spins, it feeds, it curls

And I see what you have lost, where

You turned wrong, unknowing, unseeing

I feel the desert cry in wrack and ruin,

Disobeying you, turning its back

The rain lies heavy, sinking, pulling you

Down into the mire of autumn’s breast.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, October 18, 2019