Bad words

Bad words, bad breath, what fumes you spread
Accusing life of being dead
That tills your crusty soil to seed
Promoting growth where you have need

Apparent in your tumbleweeds
Your petite flowers quick to bleed
Your dust is mad and lost and free
Your scorched earth called destiny

You’ve named your desert beautiful
Serene because it’s unfruitful
Your peace devoid of life’s murmur
Sun baked, deprived of rain’s whisper

Yet you would tempt my tears with yours
Sucked from your cacti flesh, its store
And trade for my monsoon your dew
So rare it disappears from you

For what – that you might be refreshed
And bathe in what you choose expressed
The nectar you do not perceive
Discarded through your un-bowled sieve

The lost will tolerate the stench
Of what they drink in ignorance
If thirst has bored their holey mind
So shadows fool them desperate, blind

And they will protest, curse aloud
And feign offense until they’re proud
And insist that they have been wronged
And answer none who come along

With bad words, heard words given meaning
Spent and meant for your believing
Bleeding through your faculties
Experience escaping thee

Call it nasty, call it rich
Call it vulgar innocence
Offensive to the shaded eye
Unsophisticated cry

I'm sick because I know desire
And bare myself to sun-pure fire
Absorbing all wavelengths of light
Reflecting truths that tear through night

Obscene because I speak my mind
Piercing hearts deaf, mute and blind
Awakening that consciousness
Which screams out from its dark abyss

The tear pulls soul thoughts scraped through cracks
Contentment’s sediment broke back
Where sentiment has swollen pride
That warps the floor on which you stride

Emotion paints pictures benign
Flashback’s experienced design
And I’m condemned, constrained by rules
To be what you would call a fool

Uncouth because I entertain
Beliefs that make the world insane
A rage consuming common trash
Scorching the earth to reap the ash

Desecrated blasphemy
You judge meant to soil beauty
Bad words ugly to the spoiled
The truth unfortunately coiled

Pupil of the universe

Nothing is ever quiet
Not even the night
Whose irreverent spawn
Mock the weary day
With a cacophony of incessant chatter
An audible static mirroring
The billions of microscopic starbursts
Which give black its color

Still nothing
As compared to each galaxy of thought
Filling the bowl of my soul too small
For such violent moon tides, spilling
In waves of deaf insects
Pouring over the landscape of my sanity
Immune to the wrath of my attention’s vehement protest
A flood of filth
Corrupting my peace with the stain of its undeniable being

And when the moon is absent
I cannot see the forest
Not for the trees
Whose roots hold the earth upon which I stand
But for the shadows of my mind
Whose insatiable hunger often turns on itself
Shadows strengthened by the brilliance of my insanity
Attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible
For what is man at most
But what he is at least

In this time of darkness
I desperately climb through the soil of history
Starving for the virgin air my spirit would breathe
Never-minding the stench of defecation which clings to me
Or the blood I spend to make my sky a new ground
Ever seeking love’s light
A pupil of the universe