"JANUARY, BEFORE AND AFTER" - a poem by Joseph Breitman
Repetitive sounds of winter skies
Slicing open
Descending their guts onto
Chaotic skyscrapers
And disorderly residents
Forcing themselves into each other
Outside, trees are slipping and dissolving
Like dreams made of mud
Spewing out of your overstuffed ears
Sickly beige church
Overburdened by wormwood
And scintillating, black centipedes
Wail and whimpers
In constantly irregular, nauseating patterns
Infecting the empty wanderers
With their primitive subconsciousness
And littering the already collapsing scenery
With prevailing tableaus of
Carnivorous gloom.
Do you remember any of this?
Across an ocean of scaphism,
Devouring insects pushing past evolution,
And sinking cargo tanks
Of discarded vestigial limbs drained of blood
Lies the tattered remnants of my home
Built up with miscarried
Fetal tissue,
Undead dangers of my unwanted becoming,
Lined with sick mirrors, inverted images,
Infected maggot eggs
Hatching malaise and lethal ideation
In my fabric of existence.
I can’t return here,
But here I am.
Anesthetize the last twelve months
Slash downwards, force the cavity open
Hold and fold back the tissue,
There we are,
Careened in a new human shape
Blissfully rotting away
Among a morose city of drunken industrialization,
Strewn with defaced graves
Of shared heroes we’ll never meet.
I’m tracing little whispering cherubs
Carved into your chest,
As phantasmagoric ballets creep through
Our frozen windowpane
Cacophonous delirium swells between
Thin, mold-encrusted walls
We swap and swallow our pills
Our bodies involuntarily dancing
To bells in a violent confrontation,
Ancient surrounding stone buildings
Resonating with madcap sirens
And overwhelming
Young adult decay.
You don’t remember,
I couldn’t ever imagine
Any of this
Ending.
Those unwanted last days,
My mind spun unendingly
With fear of returning to
The perpetual gray place of once abandoned home,
And nonsensical visions of love
Even after your still unbelievable betrayal.
To reach out and hold you forever,
No matter where in the disgusting, collapsing, meaningless world,
No matter our illnesses, upsets,
And compounding panics of the encroaching unknown,
The feeling I was forced to suppress,
Waiting for the anger to take hold,
Erase my intoxicatingly loving perception of you,
But it never came,
I’m stuck in a haze of rejection
And abandonment.
Caccooned in a barbed wire quilt
Of your making,
Grafting and bonding to my scabbed,
Infected skin,
Coiled in fervent, isolated nightmares
Not ready to leave
The place we once agreed to call our home.
Hollow deadness of winter descends,
I’m screeching my empty,
Frozen voice
Through the rolling plague of silence
You’ve infected between us,
Still unable to accept
That you’re long since gone.
It’s already been a year,
Nothing changes,
Nothing ends,
For the rest of my anemic, crippled days,
You’re nowhere to be found, and I’ll never understand
Why won’t you care?
-
Joseph Breitman is a writer who has always valued and utilized poetry, prose writing, and storytelling to channel and process a worsening and increasingly bleak outlook on the world and to find some small semblance of meaning and value in the dirge of existence. He hopes to bring a sense of recognition to those who feel similarly and to shine a direct light on the horror, nonsense, and existential meaninglessness of the human race to those who refuse to face the fact that human life may not be worth living.
_Instagram Contact:
https://www.instagram.com/prisoner_in_yr_skull/?hl=en