Peter Lilly: Poems

It's all broken skin: this bravado. Your nature would never callus against these brutal impacts, it feels more solid now because they have worn you down to the bone. Insults ricochet through your tender brain and bite the feeding hand for feeling. The shared spikes are gone, and now obsessive compulsive diet sets your rage flaming chasing so many shadows, and projecting all neglect onto any nearby face. Its all broken skin: this bravado, and you're worn out and stripped to the bone needing only family and a wall to beat on a neck to throttle while your anger subsides Written, beginning of September.

Packed in, suspicious but unsure: the smasher and sweepers; the igniters and dousers; the displacers and displaced, all confused about the week of unbounded greed and how the familiarity of commute dulls emotion from the memory of raging riotous streets. Back to the amnesia 'normality' of bubbling oils waiting for another spark. Where the proletariate subconscious philosophy is that satisfaction is both a basic human right and completely unattainable and contentment in now is an abhorrent insult, and all ambition is filling the gaps in the mirror's foreground with empty plastic. 'Normality' of incubation of a bacteria that eats foresight and excretes lack upon lack, and the kinetic chaos was this; merely the poorer outliving the conclusion of opportunistic capitalism blatant, because it is more obvious and less dignified than the thievery of the wealthy. After lust of nothing-things and the violence of attempted justifications no hungry now has food, no depriv...

One day I will find, my love, the walls that throw my voice back at me in angry echoes, and I'll understand. One day I will find, my love, those twisted bones that splinter as they bend in reaching for sustain and I'll feel nothing. One day I will find, my love, the shards of words you coughed from behind frosted glass, wrongly convinced of your naked solitude and I will know you. One day I will find, my love, a voice that bleeds and forces take from the hands of the thick-necked sighing affluents and I'll never want again. One day I will find, my love, the foresight that grasps the profound linguistics of sorrow before it incapacitates all movement and I'll smile as I write. One day I will find, my love, the ability to access every shadowed corner, damp and destitute in bourgeois denial of the existence of thirst. I'll  breathe slowly, the warm smell of death and lying elixirs and...

Commitment that drains the blood from sleepy eyelids and masks the rotten suggestions from pleading fingers of all the junkies left with nothing to do but lie for spare change. Young minds broken yet malleable, unlike brittle glass, can be re-jigsawed together. Maybe I'm just tired of trying to dissolve crushed glass in water. It will not taste sweet as it lacerates your larynx and refuses to be transformed hear, hear this you tasty morsels of forgotten fruit, forbidding that your skin be broken by virgin teeth and your juicy flesh, oozing flavouring from their exotic entrapment. That in the unconscious memory as a dust lined ornament, but breathing, wait: wait for nothing but to be desired and burning lustful eyes will strip your dust clothes and greet your exposed beauty. You, though beautiful, are not the meaning of life. Greater love than physical union of delighting personality exists! And this existence predicates priority upon its perforated limbs; renewed more solid than im...

Diazepam dribble stains your off-white shirt the colour of the skin it sticks to. The contraption in your hand should have been a book, any book. What is this aversion to the light of the sun and it's reflections? All these artificial sources are sharp strings scraping the backs of eyes; wired- open. Despite the depressant. Class A prescriptions, yellow like sodium lights, douse anxiety in the calm before unexpected withdrawal. Mangled mind, confused by wires and rigid unyielding from the IQ-sclerosis of salty sedatives. Just floating on the surface of society approved sanity with the buoyancy of benefits and the opinionated ignorance of contentment in vicious complaints. Saturated by a lack of depth, a rebel made a drone by needless needs; absent family; fake independence; medication; and the denial that there could be anything more than symptoms. Written mid-June 2011.

Fall out, shadow blows your hair back. Chase the ground with your solid pupils, full of the blood you've failed to forget; blind balls of platelets. The scales that cover them have blunted your claws and even so, the stench of rotten, stagnant ocean will always cling to your hair and skin; matted and filthy. Rugged beauty decomposed needs only to be cleansed and who you are as putrid eyesore will change and no nostalgic sickness or golden-framed rose-tinted memory-cleansing goggles will ever make one regret a change such as this: A freeing of the limbs to life, and a hope that all had thought died in infancy is the flourishing epicentre of life. The resurrection of pure touch and talk, to perfect contentment, satisfaction and belonging. Written Mid June 2011

The fragments of shattered homes pick up static from the friction of the streets and each story clings to the walls of a fully-laden heart. If this is how I feel how much more must you suffer at the sound of this shivering breath and at the silence between estranged family. A plethora of poisons burn the pockets to rags and coins leak like blood from a severed artery, searching for the phantom of hope that lies beyond the recovery-relapse cycle. As much as you are my motivation, When all ears are plugged with crime and drugs I ask that you become the hope that changes the perception of dependancy into a self-giving freedom. Circumstance can tap the heels of honest men and make them fall. Pseudo escape of killing braincells can drain every aspect of life. A misdiagnosis can dilapidate the mind and leave one submerged in the chaos of over-responsibility. An upbringing of violence can crash kaleidoscope crime and dehydrate any opportunity. We must stand with our own stains on our skin and...