Category: Poetry

Words, the blood of poets. Slick, wet, hot, pouring over the page in a curtain of sultry satin red.

Abandoned Angel

The funny bit about this poem is that I actually knew exactly what I wanted to say with it. A lot of times I just start writing and sort myself out as I go along. Here…it was different. I wrote it while driving one night and managed to hold it in my head long enough to get home and write it out.

A couple years ago, a friend of mine put it to music and recorded it for me. I can’t do justice to describing how it sounds; if you are curious, there is a link at the bottom of this entry.

***

Some abandoned angel
laying in your bed
will weep within your arms tonight
and wake the voices in your head.

Offer up your promises
Offer up your soul
Offer up salvation
But don’t offer up control.

Offer up your angel’s wings
That she might stay with you tonight
And wrap you safe within her arms
Where her kisses curse and her whispers bite.

Offer up your songs
Sung by the voices that she has stirred
And watch the tears fade away

Some pay in deeds like desperate heroes sent
To save a girl from a devilish bent,
Some pay in fear of another lash,
and some just pay in cold hard cash.

Pay in sin
Suffer again,
All those sad young lives,
Won’t quite fit,
on the head of a pin.

Regret, regret
in words past made
But it won’t get you much
For the silver paid.

For some abandoned angel
Lays weeping in your bed.
For you offer up your angel’s dreams
And gave her yours instead.

You can listen to it here:

[audio:BenScarborough_AngelsWings.mp3]

Stilled

I don’t let myself fall in love anymore.

I never have less control over myself and my surroundings as when I am in love; such a lack of control leaves me confused, disoriented. Vulnerable.

It is beautiful – beautiful in the way a dark terrible storm will rage and thunder but in it’s wake is a world cleansed and changed. Leaves torn from trees are scattered across the doorstep but those that survive fairly glisten with green and life. Nothing quites feels, tastes, smells as clean and right as the world just after a storm.

And yet it scares me. It scares me where little else does.

This was a goodbye letter that wasn’t quite goodbye.

***

4-27-98

Stilled.
once this

favored my quiet need
but now it follows
another man

and
what little left is
here?
When all is said and done.

I’ll tell you what it is to fuck
I’ll take you to the wall and nail you there
Leaving us to grip
our heads and hair and gnash our teeth on the unforgiving drive of a thing dispossesed.

The cold hard press of wall is the only support for two cruel wanting bodies. If we bite the edge and teethe on the bare honesty of two souls in heat. Perhaps the naked truth will be found in the blood and sweat left smeared against the wall.

Terror is in the eyes of one who can push you over into this, basest of all indulgences. On your knees, on your fucking knees, perhaps you will find what is left of our torn and tattered paper personalities because only animals can understand what it is to be taken so completely in a moment, crushing all else in mind, body and soul, to make them yours in a manner that leaves no question. Speak of one, of self, and you deny that there exists, in the rough grip of our most disputed and hidden desires the truth that the only absolution might well be found in the last copulation of this moment. Maybe fucking is the only absolute, saying in the most certain of terms that there is nothing more real.

I’ll tell you what it is for me to love

Love is in the middle
Of a place with no middle ground

Love is acquiescence.
Love is accepting the impossible.
That I can hold something so pure as trust that there is a tomorrow where the only thing that has changed is
how I choose to like you that day.

I cannot believe in love for me.

But the proof is in the doing
And you were there
And I was there
And perhaps I am wrong.
Perhaps it is just a beginning.

And there are worse things then being absolutely fucked

And to unknowingly love.

Baptized by Music

Music is life to me. In my youth, I led a relatively sheltered life in regards to music. My first three tapes were gifts: MC Hammer, Paula Abdul, and Janet Jackson. I listened to MC Hammer once and threw it out. Paula Abdul lasted a few weeks beyond that before getting tossed.

But I listened to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation so many times that I wore the tape out.

The part in Iron Eagle where the kid flying the F-15 has a hard time hitting targets until he puts on a headset and blasts a mix-tape and suddenly hits every damn target while rocking out? Loved that. The love scene in Lost Boys where the choir of children sang ‘Cry Little Sister’? Blew me away.

I’m preaching to the converted of course; most blogs today have a ‘What I am Listening To’ blurb somewhere. We understand the importance of music. It saves us. It condemns us. It understands us. The right song can rip you apart. The right song can be an oasis of sanity in a day of hell.

Tonight, I’m drinking to music.

***

I want to be baptized by music.

I want music that will fuck my brain so hard I have to crawl out of my skin to feel the tension.

I want music that will make a slut out of my anger.

I want music that will make me cum.

I want music that will make me bleed.

I want music that has an aftertaste that will make me vomit it back up as poetry.

Glass Angels

No need to worry; I’m not obsessed with angels. To me, the Celestine Prophecy sounds like a bad plot device for any number of fantasy novels – and the five people I meet in heaven will likely be wondering how I escaped hell.

That said, I do find angels to be a useful metaphor. Starting with this poem, and going for about four years after it (putting me a year or so out of college), I used poetry to explore what it means to be human. If ‘animal’ is our baser side, then ‘angel’ is what seperates us from the other creatures. What is it that makes us different from other mammals? Is our love purer? Or needs greater? Is it self-awareness and an opposable thumb? More then that, why do we struggle so hard between our base desires (such as procreation) and our need to be…civilized (however each culture defines it)?

This poem was the beginning of my thoughts on this – although it is just barely hinted at here. This was the start of my new writing. It made me write into places I had thought too dark to see into.

It? She. I wrote this for her. And this post is dedicated to her.

***

Fragile eyes, weeping urns
whose only tear
is found in the heart

glass angels kneel
and weep because you failed
to make them out of steel

I can see in them all the imperfections
and yet they are truly
Angels

and so few of us can make angels

Seed or Egg

Of the two, seed and egg, I would rather the egg.

The planting of a seed within the mind will quickly lead
To roots that bury deep
In memories
Bear fruits of new quandries
And other plausible metaphors

But an egg will hatch a serpentine, sensual succubus
Insidious in form
That will slither, slip, silent
Never content to rest
Rummaging through forgotten questions
And astounding observations
Down the spine
Taking shivering form
Ceaselessly hungry
Within the belly
Carelessly pressing
In knocking lose old morality
Cautiously expiring
Only when still

Of the two, sturdy tree and ghostly conniver, I’d rather the one that admits no false stability.

Shown

Show me what darkness lies behind your eyes
And I will show that behind it, there are no lies.

If you curse me with your love
I will love the naked hunger
And hunger for the innocence.