A Strong Dose of Poetry
LANGUAGE
fraud,
liar,
artist.
self-aware,
narcissist,
present.
alone,
alien,
solitude.
manipulate,
psychopath,
navigate.
seven billion keyholes to seven billion worlds:
just three in
Candace,
James,
Ana.
Death.
Darkness.
Daring.
fraud
My whole life a fraud,
Imitating nothing.
A plaster cast moulded to wind,
A few loose words and memories, throw-away jokes and summer plans:
Unique to everyone I spoke to in life –
Equally vapid, equally endless,
Dancing upon my own empty grave.
Painfully aware of my own cliché:
Far from unique in my inability to love,
Yet very much alone,
Never to share with another our cosmic solitude.
Never to ignore, or learn to live with,
The whole infinities left unspoken
In the dead air between us.
All that’s left in that air is my own outstretched hands,
Sculpting the shimmer to my blank face.
Manipulation is what I’m good at;
There are over 7,000 different versions of Candace Williams
I’ve crafted since the age of seven,
Since I learned that involuntary impulse, manipulation,
Programmed into the art of being alive.
7,000 – yet I know none of them.
Not in life, not in death.
I don’t know what lies beneath my own mask:
A paper-thin smile stretched across my forty-year skull which
Waits impatiently to rot.
I don’t know if I exist.
liar
You can hear the blood pumping through your ears.
You peel the skin from your cuticles,
Watch the blood pool in the corner of your mouth.
You think it makes you honest:
Skinless, eyeless, shameless,
Liar, liar, liar.
There is no one like you.
You soar from the crime scene and circle it like a hawk.
Watch the blood pool on the tarmac.
Was it theirs? Was it hers? Was it mine?
It was yours – cool and black, inhuman.
Alien, you’re an alien.
It was too much for you, wasn’t it.
Here, hold my hand. It’s cold.
Watch the blood pool in your soul, you were too much, weren’t you.
Swirling deep and dark, glistening in your upturned eyes.
I am, who am I, I’m missing, who are you?
You think you’re Lady Lazarus?
You’re all, Miss Narcissist.
That’s you up above, gloating in the dark.
Risen from the ash, you eat men like air.
Watch the blood pool in your long red hair.
I can’t, I can’t, it’s not me, it’s you, I never meant to hurt you:
Your jabbering mimics dust the lining of your skeleton.
You are Psycho, you’re on film.
You are James Goodwell, torn in four.
Split and spilled like milk,
Watch your blood pool in your own black,
Salty and desperate.
Evaporating on your tongue.
That’s all there is, no me, no you, no James –
Dark is you, all is black, black, black.
artist
A single teardrop in the black
Glistens like crystal,
And sinks into the sand
Between her toes.
World of sorrows rested in her sigh across the seas.
A paint brush in the black, a pen in the fog,
Colours streaming and meeting beneath her eyelids:
Blue horizon, white sun.
She is alone, but she is not.
She swirls in her own infinity,
Until its edges brush up against another’s,
Meet like the film of bubbles,
Foaming like a spidery dome, a dense, murky web for two
Becomes one infinity.
Eyes set forward,
She sets her name aside.
She is special, not important.
She is important, not special.
Her heart numb from being held so tight,
She reaches her hands forward
And breathes freely.
She is one, she is small.
Ana Johnson sets forth
On a long and winding road:
Words and hands and vipers crossing,
A web of errors and spikes.
Remembering her name,
She grasps his hand,
And they clamber together
Through their shared infinity.
A dimly-lit path
On a jagged cliff.
They are covered with bruises and scars.
Yet there is nothing below,
So they dare to go on.
Editor's note:
Goldrush Magazine is blessed with Silvia's chilling short poems. You can also find her short story on our website. Keep an eye out for our online updates!
Kind Regards,
Grace Huo
Editor of Goldrush Magazine
