The LionThe WarriorThe Prince. by kirbear, literature
Literature
The LionThe WarriorThe Prince.
In my room,
Through the window poured drops of rain
on sunny days, showering ticking clocks and building blocks
With that tangy taste of noon
And OH! – How my curtains would swoon!
If the sultry wind would whisper-
so sweet and bitter
-secrets into her lady ears
Only to tweet and flitter gently above the ground
And inside my room my friends were found
And they numbered by the many
Bears and dogs of beaded eyes
Plush stomachs, hearts – now fantasize
a friend who simply never dies
My hearts and theirs to mend
Now in these walls I'd play pretend
Where else, but my room, would
Heroes escape from certain doom?
Singing
RIP Romance - and all the headstrong lovers
Who lie here 'neath the earth making love
Under gravel covers where prying ears
Won't hear them scream
Or mourn for a metaphor, some small allegory
A simile to make them smile
They killed the poets – choked them on their own sonnets
And watched them bleed roses
A dozen at a time until they were all cliché
-That was the day that no-one cried
When reality won and romance died
Here she lies – before giving into night
Beauty asked Bread for one last sip of wine
Love letters she imagined he was always too busy to write
Before she died 'a taste of sweet romance'
but Bread was too pre-oc
Love is a lot like a favourite song - in way you feel every time it plays
Wasting your days with the old wireless and make-shift antennas
And singing wildly out loud to every line – belting it out
Windows down and driving in your car
Running on a single slide or crashing likes waves on the snare
Shouting how completely in love you are with the base of his voice
The tremors in the air vibrations in the ground
And the chords of her hair
And many years later when the radios have all moved on
You find yourself smiling
When the grey man on the metro begins to hum
A song you've long since parted from
But who's gentle wood and stri
I know you recognize me and you're
not sure from where-
But you can't escape the haunting familiarity
Of my fly ridden rib cage or my look of despair
And you swear
you saw me last night
Running from two towering infernos on channel three
Covered in dust and in debris trading coke for shoes
and bleeding on the evening news
Scraping bones for meat and drowning down on Bourbon Street
Where saxophones and jazzmen smoked the blues
And all I ask is pennies a day
Less than coffee and a little more than what will fall
from your pockets into the couch
And just maybe my frail arms are long enough to reach you
Turn you upside and
What I Hate Most About Work by kirbear, literature
Literature
What I Hate Most About Work
We are not casualties
We are not the five minutes
Between nor the credits
Nor a paper blurb; we are bodies
In life we were commodities
Bred and fit for trade
Bread and orangeade passed off
As heroes
We die as ones and zeros
On a computer screen excel spread field
Stats without names or faces but
Numbers of bodies in camouflage cases
Were we better then?
When we were pawns instead of men?
To finally rest my arms
And the hands that bore them
To soak my cuts in iodine and
Drink myself in turpentine and gin
These strangers
These 'appointed dangers'
Could just as easily have been my friends
As they were my enemies
If only
Today was a lovely walk in the park[ ]
In the distance I heard the familiar hum of motorists
babbling down the interstate, running down so many rivers and highways.
The tiny birds searching for shade under parked cars and tufts of cat hair
still lodged in tire grooves, like moss finally growing over a rolling stone.
Even in the broadest day, the spider's woven stars stared down at me from column
corners at a ceiling's safety, inviting flies for lunch and shaming the lowly cockroaches
on the floor.
And the rotted chewing gum pebbles (long since grayed) pattered beneath my loafers
and filled great gaping crevices in the asphalt – m
THAT WHICH DOESN'T START ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON
I got a phone call from my wife. She was dead. I was a couple of hundred miles away and she had the misfortune of lying cold and still in our city morgue when she should have been signing a check to have the windows re-paneled or sitting on a couch opposite a painting of two abstract people we didn't know, wondering why the framing isn't parallel to the crown molding. She wouldn't go to church (until tomorrow) or do any of the things she normally does on her Sunday afternoons, but would be creeping secretly beneath the floor boards and along the scalpels of an autopsy. You think you know a pers
Have you ever heard the footsteps of fingers
playing a dirty masquerade in your throat? I have
Or tried trading skin for skinny – taken bites of your own body
begged not to sink when you just wanted float?
Looked out on the faces of grim
(a fountain of fat who would die to be slim)
And I've shaken their bloody knuckles walked among them:
from star studded glosses to a toilet bowl rim
And back to smiles
with chunks of my stomach
still caught in my teeth
Get beautiful
(because it must be that easy) Because love doesn't come
To the fat and the lazy you disgust me
Feeding your face like a pig in a trough
And suck in your s
Daniel Cleaver had few friends and none he could remember
Those he had were cautious, and ran away in late December
He sat alone on his sixth grade curb – eyes down and being good
And if somebody teased him, he stood up for what he could
He swore on every bone he had, that in fact he did exist:
Reindeer gifts and Daniel's name, atop that good-boy list
That he would come that Christmas Eve:
Bringing toys for girls and boys (well, those who still believed)
How other children can be cruel, as they knocked Daniel to the ground
And then they were upon him – as his faiths all held him down
They kicked him with their feet, and beat him wi
I remember the colour red. I remember red as pungently as hot dogs on a salty pier, and as vividly as those hot dogs passing through her very red lips. Oh! With those lips she used to pucker straws, and kiss her spoons, and sing her hallelujahs. A bed full of tulips held no candle to her two lips, red as hell. She was red. Everything we were was ablaze with red. We wrestled beneath red sheets and ached for each other with hands of fire. I wanted her. I wanted her and her red lips on mine, her and her raw, red flames. I wanted her and her love that burned red inside me. Did she know how red she made me feel? How alive every ba-bump my heart ba