Dear Reader,
The poems below are from a collection called ‘Songs from the Bubble’ - which may never see the light of day. Setting them free here on the abyss to find their fate - hopefully, in your embrace.
Always,
~TS
1. Shooting Blanks
Why does it matter so much
How people get their rocks off
When polar bears tiptoe on ice
And girls are shot in the face
For knowing things?
2. Bourgeois
There’s a little bourgeois
Treading on my tail,
Even when I cross the bridge and
Pass up the wilted kale.
It followed me to school one day
Despite my plugs and boots,
I fear it even shows itself
In my birthday suit.
3. Blind
Is it really because
we’re quite blind,
that we slip up on moonbeams,
and sit trapped in sunshine,
like bugs in smooth amber,
with nowhere to clamber to
even when Everything says
jump in, the water’s fine?
4. The Puppy
Unperturbed by if they wash
Or what their annual income,
The puppy chewed on passing humans,
Wired to pull heartstrings with overlarge head
Mewling rejoinders, and slip-soft skin,
Calming the itch of teeth breaking,
On any biteable heart.
5. Shrapnel
It stings
Like shrapnel.
Or a million edges
To think that you will never
Gather my splinters in your mouth,
Un-crease me with your tongue,
Collect me in your eyes.
It stings
Like shrapnel.
Or a million edges
To think that we must lie
Scattered
Several
Separate
Star-like
In their brutal sky.
6. Try, Try, Try Again.
Oh and the desire
To stave off this hunger!
To fill the piranha jaws
That romp around viscera…
Little monsters, Garden shears
Devil scissors, leave me alone or
Eat each other, midget cannibals!
I’m here to run the triathlon,
Please stop tripping me.
7. Lobster
Flesh under fingernails,
crackling exoskeleton in
fiery spices orange as lust.
Sucks and swallows,
(charming smile)
eating death with silver.
Sips crystal, charmingly,
perfect lips in a perfect ‘o’.
Backwash with flesh floaties
imperceptible to the naked eye.
8. Vodka
Throw it down a sewer
and it turns things silver.
Emerge from the Ugly, and
burst into small talk
with a flick of the wrist,
and a broken shotglass.
Splinters far-flung
seep into the night.
Tiny bubbles rise, like
goldfish waiting to get out.
Shards of home, like deadly
little slivers of silence,
watch the metamorphosis.
Crunch, beneath my feet.
Evil ice: you never melt.
9. The Afro
‘Everything is a metaphor for itself’
I heard someone say, a life away from here.
Then today I saw a boy with curly hair
And an aura of anything that pleased him –
And I got what they were on about.
10. Chimp Sneeze: A Koan
If a chimpanzee sneezed
into my bloodstream
And Peter Singer
wasn’t around to notice,
Would it still be wrong?
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties… Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another
lovely bite-sized snippets to start a dull thursday morning 💙