A lonely tear

Is a ritual drop

Exiled

Through the needle’s unsparing burn

Bloodletting

A black swan’s netted beak

To gutter

Disquieting voices

Into bonfires of boscage

And spiked Sea-buckthorn snag

Across coral plucked seas

Where death’s priest can’t reach

And her skinned wing trauma

Heals its ebony feathered bloom

No longer a louring straggler

But sailing the sainted waves

And milky pearl

All the way to Byzantine.

The sound of youth

Leaps wild and strident

Martyring metropolis with supersonic fists

And bestial dirge

Like the awed tremor of kettle drum hoofs

Kicking open the dead bolted gut

Of pastel painted heaven

Crowning gaunt tenements

In acid rain grey

Nibbling away florescent halos

Eating up concrete castles.

And the electric eye of God

Blinks stoplight red.

The sound of youth

Cuts razored bedlam

Into electric city wasteland

Where street buzzards chew through priestly silence

Like wailing furies

Of ambulance sermons

Tattooing last chapters

And final verse

On coma coiled bodies

Vaulted to Phaenon’s chalk outlined ether.

And the electric eye of God

Blinks stoplight red.

The prismatic dance

Falls ill with plague

Raging at the languid adagio

For the speed of youth

Is peerless to the darting star

And its scream of ruin

Bullets mercury sky

With awful silence.

First, a mediocre joke:

Today my sister wondered where I get my poems (or as I call em “syntactic artifacts sourced from a bittersweet worldview”) and I joked that it was God’s way of making up for razing my once blooming garden of hair.

But, just wanted to add that today marks a one year milestone being here and it’s been a greatly rewarding journey that helped me refine my poetic stuff, and abundant thanks is due to Jeff and a number of you, who have very kindly liked, shared, commented on my poems and helped nurture a hospitable sensibility that I hope I’ve afforded the same to you.

I put my very first poem up on here early in the morning when I was visiting Savannah, Georgia and was so happy to get kind words and feedback from Jeff and others as I just unloaded each poem (later, discovering I was able to add pictures and tag people to thank them, which I was clueless about at the start ha).

There are some exemplary writers on here of whom I truly admire your artful craft, heartfelt work and daring literary exploration that I won’t tag, but your work and kindness to me, both are inspiring and wonderful.

I owe Jeff, Mariah, A, Andy Betz, Mnezz, Mavia, Mamba, Huck, The Naz, Rlove, Schatz, Dr.Semicolon (now renamed) and a number of others my great thanks for their earliest encouragement when I first started putting up my very first poems here in the first few months of 2024.

Of course there are so many other exceptional writers I’ve met since through last year to present that I actively enjoy and am awed by (I’m sure I’ve told you so!) and others who’ve left a nest egg of greatness that I still marvel at even if they might be hibernating new gems to one day add to their already curated brilliant collection.

I also appreciate every writer’s contribution here, and while my tastes lean a certain way, I’ve still read some captivating material on here.

Navigating the choppy waters of my struggles with autism on a platform with a lot of virtual people and personalities can be a bit of a challenge, but I have to thank my dear friends here (you know who you are) for encouraging me beyond the platform to be confident and sure of myself.

Your friendships have been of tremendous benefit and value that is perhaps the greatest joy that my year long journey on here has brought me.

Looking forward to 2025 and I sincerely hope this post doesn’t come across as self aggrandizing or anything, but just wanted to share thanks to the community and friends both here and beyond!

Very gratefully,

LDW

Where were you, when the world ended?

When the tin god machine went mad with power?

For he wears a mask of flesh burned away

His jester head

A piked halo of sickled flowers

God’s gold threaded sheaves

A wild wraith massacre

Burning spring voices into powdered sand.

And we laboured once

Before the imploding void

Before the machine erased its architect

In sieges of wolves and flame.

And our paper guns

And paper bombs

Became ticker tape parade

For the mechanical king.

Where were you, when the machine

Scaled our soul harboured walls

With web footed spidery crawl

To loose the black eyed chimera

And poison the well of Siloam

Dividing his spoils for the great devouring party

With funereal black balloons

Hospice hopping

Treading glum air

And rising to flame licked ceilings

In God’s banquet hall of fools and saints?

And we chanced dubiety’s troll

And rolled hopes with dice

Tumbling the teeth of lost dreams

Down charcoal choked caverns

Into Black Dragon mouths.

Where were you, when the machine

Opened night’s sackcloth cloaked breast

And showered fistfuls of inked stars

Like buttons of tumors

At the ready to burst

Trailing grief in dark circles

Through courtyards of fire

With death’s plume of smoked breath

Slaying amethyst sky?

And in the end

We never learned

For this machine

Was no different than us

A ruse of fools

At war with itself

Chasing cruel glories

And hologram avarice.

So we sold ourselves pawns

At Death’s chessboard bazaar

Our sooth swaddled tokens

His flatlined endgame.

The charred scroll seduction

A tawdry impasse of the damnable pith

Hot in crumbled hive hearts

Where the honey is boiled

While the bees are grasping at life

Attacked air

The buzz maddening

Rumble unseen

That once bunkered derelict

Whereabout whisper

At large and on the run

Smoke signal sighs sweep cryptic sweet nothings

Across the tangled feathers of night

And tenebrous shadow smothers fingernail moon

Her sallow eye sulking like an abandoned tryst

The unruly nerve blackening egg laying stars

A punch drunk mirage stung

Day’s cutlass drawn

White noise symphonies play on

Harum scarum belly crawl

-This sound has wings.

The diamonds from a killer moon

Punch a neon dragon tattoo

Across bone parchment sky

Powdering kaleidoscopic gore

Culled from angel dust stars

And cherry bomb hearts

A billion miles high

Where I am a suburban homesick astronaut

My lonely dance

A floating seizure.

I spy through diamond chipped eyes

Mercury’s mouth

Eating molten kingdoms

Draining watercolour souls

The flesh canvas sea of charred stick figurines

A skeleton cortège

Pulled through plasticine boneyards

Into zen voided pale.

I spy through diamond chipped eyes

Carnival cities sleeping in coma silence

Until the spindly piper of murdered galaxies

Plays a wealth of screamed horror

As serpentine satellites

Hiss electric funeral hymns

Through white knuckle air

And my lonely star

God’s tumbling victim

Of another amnesia cloaked day

A disconnected dance

A fatal ballet.

I feel my blacked out worth

The way a burning Polaroid eats violence and ash

And I see your scrawled pitchfork graffiti

On the bruised apple heart of my underground wall

As your sidewinder trains

Parade boiled kettle screams

Inking black hearted laughter

Across scalpel slashed skies

Soured grey

Perfuming the air with mothball apathy

For your circle of sycophant mannequins

Who eat up dust and hail it king

While some of us still bleed out

Every last aching drop from our souls

But your barbed wire hands

Can never mutilate the simple worth

Of unshakable pearls

And on rampart or page

You will never black out my name.

Camera shutters whir with interloping urgency

And studies the stilted ballet of mankind

As vacant eyes stay tethered to LCD prisons,

Capitulating to neon overlords

While the cathedral menace of metropolis

Is an ogre of sentient watch.

They sway with the flailing grace

Of storm punished trees,

Limbs a gauche dance

And broken tangled weave,

The consortium lost in the stern riptide

Of counterattack,

These roving red dragons

Horned and at the ready

With tombstone teeth

And bloodlust.

Bruised bodies cluster in proton fusion,

Heads bowed to the worship of Gottam’s flare,

All moths with clipped wings

Hypnotized to the heated rhythm

That glibly chants through speakerphone,

A dry calling of station to station

That will whisk these lead foot patrons

And cloven hoofed souls

To their domestic bastille

With embarrassing precision.

A turn of time’s page

Mottles ink like boiled blood,

A lone chilled ember

Congealing into scrawled laments

That chase the shadows

On bone walls

With rote declarations

And mawkish sympathies,

As demigods round up the haunted herd,

All glassy eyed frailty

Pantomiming the futile dance

Of compunction

Under Moloch’s faint strains of whispering deceit.

Bewitched shock

Like a cannonball assault

Arrests the quiet air

And they remember the tales of once upon a time,

With blue mold brains

And a call to arms,

A faded frontier of humanity’s

Feckless defense,

The seize of Zion

By satan’s entry,

These stinging memories

Like hornets of wrath

That they buried deep as midnight is dark

Into the culled heart

Of sullen earth.

A stingless hive’s buzz

Becomes babble for Babylon,

Laughable kitsch

Of terrified betrayal

Still vainly humming

Under the ruins of God’s wrath

And above the crimson jester.

Canticles stung with black dog sorrow

Hush rage roused beasts unholy

Poacher of dreams

Biting the feathered catcher of tears

Gravity’s plucked lamb

Victim to the sullen collector of lost songs

Crowned king in the helix

How they weep a pained heart’s whimpering bid

From cracked eggshell eyes

The whiplash furies

Ready to burst the tombstone walls

Out tabernacle heads

All concrete caldera grey

Flooded stained glass red.

Delia cuts arrowhead form

Under half etched moon

Her infinite dive

Down robed oracle sky

Breaking in halves the lazing chalk white cloud

A sinking zeppelin

Like the scurfy footed bird

Sailing clawed doom

And Delia wears night’s cape of shadows

Hanging up the sun’s blood rusted burnt halo

Over this transfigured seance of light and murk

As she drowns her coffin caged care

In bittersweet baptism

Beneath black wave chokehold

Where the rippling laughter of electric tongue seas

Mock the nightjar’s trilled song

That hang their eidolic enigmas

Somewhere between spiraling static

And ghosts of runaway stars

As night yawns out unfinished symphonies

While Delia sleeps Valhalla deep

Lulled by lute to hushed opiate calm

And her silent film dreams

Pray for technicolour glories

Where night’s shambling pale horse

Dances bloodflower dawn.