Aley's Amazing Atrocities

Freedome hard won
hard lost and hard fought
We scrapped like rats
over a piece of cheese

begging for it to be clean
paws swiping, claws digging
and teeth noshing on fellows

A fight hard won is a fight worth
dying for.

Tell me finally you'll fall from my ears
drift into oblivion so peaceful and silent
like hiding beneath the waves
farther down than your heart can travel
and resting there, relaxed, quiet.

You whisper in my ears all day
digging in with your claws so sharp
I know you're here to stay, crawling deeper
inside each time I try to inch you out
and you're resting there, relaxed, screaming

your show tunes through my teeth
until finally I try to change the channel
since I cannot turn it off. You have to move
you have to change. You're driving me insane
and resting there, reserved, quiet

is not an option! I'll pull a gun on you
before I let you ruin this reprieve.
Get out of my head, get away from me!
but you're just sleeping there, content
like there's nowhere else to be
but singing these tunes in my head

stupid ear worms.

The darkness whines at me
like a broken vacuum seal
slowly losing it's perfection.

His cold wet nose bumps my cheek.

And poetry is a formula
What is the subject, what does the total equal
What are the parts, the x, the y, the z,
Focus on your fractons, your syllables, your words, your lines
your stanzas. Learn to lay it laterally
vertically solves it too fast. You're not there yet.

If I had to call capitalization a part of math, I'd say
it's the communitive property. Punctuation, the distributive,
sending each part, to it's place. And Multiplication would
have to be rhyming, as everything gets so much bigger
everything's affected when you rhyme.

Division is a hard one, because it touches so much which
is the opposite of multiplication's verbose boisterous nonsense.
Perhaps we can quotent like we allusion. Both are easy to miss
hard to remember, and require a lot of work on both sides.

Exponents are Refrains. They have to be. How could the repetition
of a variable not be the repetition of a line? Of a phrase? Of a quote?
Of a ... well, you see Of a t.

I used to think ...
this was all nonsense
that poetry was just a formula
you mash together in order to get a great result
that anyone could do it well.

I used to think ...
there was an invisible velocoraptor hiding under
the end tables in the living room
and if I went out at night they'd eat me
mountains were always adorned with clouds
distance was what made air possible
that the earth was a flat sphere, the mountains
don't portrude into space because how could they?

I used to think ...
I was smart
for a while that I was stupid
because I couldn't read, or didn't want to.
short stories were a nightmare
it took everyone an hour to read ten pages

Growing up, I learned these things were lies
or misconceptions, or even that some of them were real
The earth is a ball if you look at the ozone,
and a hilly craggily thing if you look at mountains
and at some point in everyone's life, it would have taken
an hour to read ten pages. I was just there when I was older.

And short stories are still nightmares
because composing them is like a gunshot
The only moment that matters is where the barrel
was aiming when the hammer dropped
The rest is repercussions of physics.

I saw this cherub dancing around
the school like a soft feather floating
on the wind, drifting aimlessly through the halls

until a loud obnoxious puppy came
and decided he needed to see what it tasted like
Crunch crunch crunch, oops, can't eat that
spit spit spit. She was distraught, to say the least.

Lead me gently by the hand
your fingers grazing mine
as we walk among this fire land
enclosed in my hidden shrine

Our minds are gently swaddled
together like twined chords
but it behooves us to be coddled
when our backs are stiff as boards

and we wither in the sunshine
like twin spikes of ice
each melting into ship brine
as you throw on us our vice

Sweet, sweet mercy. I am not
the killer at large
Sweet Sweet mercy. I am just
an alien on your life's barge.

I hiccup like an elephant is trying to ram
it's way out of my throat
bashing into the one way door
and falling down with a yelp
each time
again
and again
and again
until it dies a painful death
from internal bleeding
and head trauma.

You are
the drifting dreams
on dreary summer days
down to below freezing
as the sun dances away
hides behind the hideous clouds
and hoards it's warmth.

You are
my one light in the dark
a little flame flickering when
the electricity goes out
a safety blanket from the ankle
grabber below my bed. Hide my head
protect my ankles as I race to you.

You are my
dream light, my only
thought bright, you make me
chilly when days are hot,
You'll never know, Love
how much I adore you,
please don't hide it all away.

Sand

I saw you dance like glistening snowflakes
across the arid desert tricking my eyes
into believing I was home.

You danced like naked fireflies
among the blades of grass that
where brown as wood, and brittle
as a piece of graphite nude.

But you were hiding among the stones
drifting down to your bed again as
the wind died, and you settled in
for the next flight in a few hours time.

You startle me awake like cold fish
drifting sightlessly at the bottom of the tank
a gentle hit to the ground, and you're tail of nose
without a twitch to correct this vertigo-inducing sight.

I feel the dread crawling up my bones
like frost crawls across the grass, and
up the driveway in the shadow's inching.
It comes over me too soon, snuck up
as a spider does on prey despite the slow
monotonous pace and obvious incroching.

The thing is, you're the reciprocal of my waking world
as you rest beneath the surface of my thoughts
and yet you creep around, crawl closer with each moment
eyeing me like a dog who knows I drop my crumbs
and all too soon you are upon me
wrenching me from pleasant wakefulness

a cool reminder I am mortal
as my eyes drift
and my head lulls
down to restful
sleep.

Did you know that 12 out of every ...
Have you ever heard ...
When I was young ...
The subject I'll be discussing with you today is ...

and still I'm not off the ground,
not a word written, not a subject uttered
not a balloon tied off, but this one blade
of grass, one idea, simple and concise,
has turned into a mountainside of friends

They mill like conspirators ready to overthrow
the government of me and my time with boy.
Their weapons most supreme are laziness,
a sense of dread, and a simple question:

"Wait, did I just write s*** or is that good?"
more spill forth like a cut vein
and suddenly I'm writing twelve, fifteen
articles for one subject, one idea
and the third one is never written.

In all these years
I never once saw the ticking clock
as a bomb to the end
as the last moments before I lived

Can you imagine if we saw our death-tally
if fate was predetermined like
the weather seems to be? All pre planned
and controlled by this magical force
every nation, every creation, has deemed
relevant to life and made a god?

She sits stunned to silence
from rampant overconfidence
struck down like the Titanic.
Murphy is never kind.

The paper's in her hand
a column on the ostentatious failure,
fractures deep within, the crumbling of
the buckling wall, every rivet ripping.
Murphy is never kind.

Last year she announced her maiden voyage
offered tickets to the show, guarentees
she could never keep, not that she knew that,
but it's true. There were so many microfractures.
Murphy is never kind.

Those decimals rounded up, rounded down,
purifications faltered like how much salt,
and soon her Titanic is ready to sail.
Murphy is never kind

to those who taunt perfection
and as she listened to the cranking
of the metal wrending free, she remembered
Murphy is never kind.