two 350wrd pieces.

Horror
Just thought you should know:
there's red running down your chin
and reaching in a curved stream from your ear.
Despite your white-toothed smile
we are now
only waiting for your lips to turn.
Olive branches are actually quite brittle
prone to growing sharp-edged betrayal,
leafy undersides plotting against the fruit.

Ambitions burgeon into a silencing stance
and my body
(as well as my body of work)
can't give you any more ears,
your mouth having eaten too many voices
"it's about what's good, you see.
For everybody.
We shouldn't being advertising that it's okay,
to be
like 'that'."

Well.
People are like that
and in your righteous bones
I can see a creature coming alive,
the infection gathering to a head
My listening gets stuck
on the way you use
"everybody"
you see unless you mean to say what's good for everybody
is food, and home, and drink, and love, and freedom to be-
then we're not talking anymore,
because I am battling back against that crawling thing,
whose eyes are fueled by panic
its engine begins toothy:
bifurcating us and them

Your monster makes violence against photographs and scantily clad canvases,
and your red rhetoric will only be read as a prophecy
for the hammering death of uninhibited expression,
cracking voices shake and shatter down to plexiglass
and bolted down foundation.
Violence empties out the access
and after the images fall back to their base elements
arts is left one last valiant act:
expose the splatter patterns,
unapologetically open its cracked mouthparts,
bring sharp and close into focus
what's been done to the mechanism.

Broken voices should never be wingless for too long.
Red rhetoric is a halo for the inhumane.
So please before you hoist up your hammers
let us clean our mouths of any possible massacre.


Instability
I.
Before taking the stage there are those particularly terrifying moments of physical vibrations, when all your neuroses seems to resonate at once, moving loud through your bones as if you were a tuning fork. The contents of your mouth lose their anchors. Your teeth and tongue become soup behind your lips.
The stage is waiting for you legs unwobbling approach. With it's lonely microphone dare your stomach widens it's nauseous eyes. Certainty fluctuates dangerously like a chain-smoking barometer. The modifiers getting ragged around the edges as the incongruities lumber in the corners growing closer.
Physics is picking on you, or maybe your (un)luck is bending the rules. But your chair is not familiar anymore. Laughing legs criss-crossed against your support. These are the moments of insanity. The legion of over-stretched moments in which the stage takes you, rockets every kind of neon neuroses through your veins until your name comes up. The Stage opens it's mouth all black and bright.
And you take it.

II.
That's when your train comes in, when the rails stop pulling your wheels apart. The timeless spinning stops, and you catch all of earth's gravity between your fingers. Your word-plucking fingers, making poetry shapes in the air and slashing hieroglyphs into the microphone. You are a singularity choosing its corporeal form as a typewriter. You are a sparrow building it's nest in a boiler, a flower getting hot with heartburn, a hard-drive with a headache.
The equation of living gets broken by your teeth, the marrow hangs in the air, now hot with the infinitely possible permutations. Numbers running algorhythmic through your fingertips as the numbness palindromes itself out.

III.
Neither is safe or stable or committed to getting back into balance. Poetry isn't about that. Poetry is not a checkbook. Poetry is instability.