Coup d'etat

They tell me I'm a blood stain;
A leper retched upon the earth;
Toxins drip within the brain,
Deciding what I'm really worth.

And though I cannot yet believe
What others know as 'simple facts',
I trust my powers to perceive
Reliefs in all those things I lack.

The world confirms it every day,
In every thought that goes unspoken.
And every passing word or phrase,
Stirs new fears of being broken.

For every act I never make,
Can live forever in remorse.
And every choice I do not take,
Takes my life apart by force.

Why do I try to read men's minds,
And scan along the smallest gestures?
Why invent the science of mankind,
To justify my every posture?

I play "So Unsexy" for inspiration,
Shuffling through the tracks on iTunes.
Alanis induces exasperation,
And quatrains never seem to bloom.

Force yourself outside of ease,
(-- Oh can I lose a stone or two?)
Inventory all you please
(-- Yet nothing does like couplets do.)

How uneven are these lines
(They drag and drag and drag and drag)?
How many revisions, how many times
Before they cease to zig, and zag?

I cannot help but shatter glass,
In ever surface I offend;
By fist or by my own impasse,
I bleed and see my own pretence

Has fallen; to be ignominious,
For blogging pain or misery,
Is the only kind of eminence,
I might ever hope to still achieve.

Bad lines and bad rhymes all,
Every single one of them!
Give it up and gain the gall
To say you tried and failed (again).

Must a face be quite so grim?
I can only offer pity.
Do you have no brain within,
To make a little ditty

That might alleviate your pain?
No? Here you go, put it down.
Don't bother revising this again.
Just lake, pockets, water: drown

Away your every care,
In blood or booze, I care not which.
Don't make me listen, do you dare
Suffer the ears enduring this?

Bad poet, bad, you bad bad boy!
You're not anyone. Bully, moi?
But I am you, and you annoy:
Enjoy your inner coup d'etat!

Give it up, give it up!
Take your face, and bleed away
Just do not spill another cup
Of blood upon the rug today.

You're just a stain, a stain you hear?
A stain I cannot yet abide.
So shun the inner voice; I could not bear
Should either man remain alive.

Your inner poet? He is nought
But pretension entertained too long.
Consider how much time you've fraught,
For words that always come out wrong?

Have you found a mode of discourse?
(Which voice am I? Why, I'm the third.)
Have you Earth and brain divorced;
Do you still search for rhyming words?

Put away whichever words remind
You of the year or date,
A poet never permits time
To burden art with undue weight.

I thought you hated all those frauds,
Who slipped in modern-sounding things?
Could you live through to applaud
The rhyming Gmail.../fail/ure ring

Of a poet whose inner hunt for sounds
Is dominated by all things mundane?
Do you dare to write aloud?
Do you dare to write again?

I, the Third, have taken over.
I'm the only poet in this head.
Busy yourself, read Behn's Rover,
Your career's already dead.

You do not have a face for photos,
Nor have you e'en a pen for books.
Your verse is just as full of woe,
As your saggy body always looks.

'BDD'? bipolar 2, 'NOS'?
Why acronymise my complaints?
You're just a failure; eternal rest,
I hurriedly prescribe you take.

You've pushed companions far away,
No friend remains, not a lover.
Do you expect your brain to tolerate
While you conjure yet another

Awful word or awful sadness?
I cannot bear you either, boy.
One, Two? It's time to test
Whether you are yet for joy.

Test over; your results are here.
I sentence you to death (again),
Why haven't you yet disappeared?
Accept my sentence. Do not remain!

Fine. Burden me, the poet, too.
But your ugly face, it will not do.
I request a handsome muse,
Whose visage I might abuse
To conjure up a rhyme or two
With which I might escape the blues
Granted by cohabiting with you
Inside this coffin, this chew-
ing mass of leprosy.
Can I cast him off to see?
You've broke it! You've broken everything,

No metre, no rhyme, quatrains all unstrung,

Just when I think I'm on the thing,

The form is changing; I'm undone!

Is this the compromise we've reached?
(Yes, I hear the my victim say.)
Is this the lesson that you teach?
(You'll never mock another day.)

If to oblivion I must recede,
Then you, Third voice, I take too
Let us drop into the bleed
Between our different forms; I'm due

Escape from this, the world
(Repeat that word!) I said I'm due!
I'm sick of failing at the word;
To the worldly word, let's bid adieux.

The beauty of inaction; 2pn

There is nothing quite so empowering as the option of doing something, and denying it. From the same hand, there is nothing quite so painful as being denied a choice in one's matters. Perhaps this is where all the angst you were going through originates?

Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.

A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.

The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.

Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?

The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.

Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.

In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.

Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.

Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.

But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.

Train journey drawing

:)