silver hell
silver hell
by cerebella
my face is as pale as moonlight’s whimper
to add more novocaine to the sky.
starlight caught in a rapture, sun, thin as a rubies soul;
this in loud words crashed my
thumping foot and a wrist on the side
i saw dangling white fence posts haunting me
shaping their sharp sides downward
into a beating heart
bellowing out a cello from the root vegetable garden
maybe i’m dying
ghastly coral and sleeping sharks
headless white horses
abruptly distorted by a vortex’s hot breath
a stallion swirl dipped into infinity
shrugged onto a butterflies wing
lined with poplar trees
goose mother and her little chicks
smothered beaks in chicken shit
an unorthodox ocean breeze
shaped like zeus with a cane leaning on a misguided flea
slips its tongue in between my knees
(a black magick hymn
might’ve taken
a taxidermists hand
and stuffed my head with cotton
stolen from elliott’s southern belle).
dreadfully unconsciously,
mother becoming a quilt
stitched with antlers and wasp wings
broken tether string and a candle lit for every lover
tilting off the rocking chair
a creak. upward, a ceiling’s ominous stare.
a second creak. a tomorrow-preview, a cauldron of bubbling green clay, or molten lawn.
eye-traveling searching for new milk to pour
filling the branches
holy water for thirsty hell
the breathless autonomy of a stranger
their conviction of pain runs
a fan of fingers behind the peacock’s finesse
shoots out the knuckles
graffiti on the cathedral walls
incomprehensible gang markings on the rose garden path
and the dandelions roared
across your forearm.
(this loves me
this loves me not)
picking fleece for every zit,
mother gooses beak smeared in chicken shit.
One of your creepier poems, and I think will rank as one of my favorites. The asterisk poem is still pretty untouchable, but this one stands out because it too is different. A commonality of your poems in my opinion is how I can almost hear a narrative taking place, and as the reader, feel that I’m swinging along with your voice, or somebody’s voice, rather. This one here is a bit different than that. It has that quality, but it’s like a painting, rather, that takes its time unfolding its separate images. And when you step back I feel its Like a rainbow trying to fight its way out of a thunderstorm, and in the background was an eerily steady bass tone I didn’t realize had been playing. That’s how I felt reading it, as accurately as I could describe. Great stuff, as I always enjoy.
… loved the last couplet…
wow! thank you!
Like so much of Cerabella’s work, this piece reads like poetic prophecy oracle-ordained from a dreamlike sleu of coagulated nightmare/beauty fighting for their lives in fatal cacophonic imagery. At once visionary and confessionally exposed to the naked truths and naked lunches of our sleeping somatic psyches, these waking words in lurid lines in savoringly squalid stanzas reek of ‘an aquired taste’–it is the ugly duckling swan song of a prodigious erudite and savvy street urchin. Well done!