poetry from the twilight zone

Weird people and weird worlds. Poetry sideblog of gloriousmonsters.

[mangledmouth]

SEVEN YEARS OF POETRY IN A BOOK

Destransformation

49 poems about the people that live in horror movies and fairy tales, real and imaginary; a flooded world, a haunted house, a damned town, a

HELLO ALL! I've been working on this project for a while; copying a lot of poems from my blog that had broken formatting from the old days, collecting the ones that I was the proudest of, adding in a number of poems from the archives that never saw the light before; and the result is this, DETRANSFORMATION, an extremely transgender anthology of forty-nine poems, which is 7x7, which I literally only realized now. What can I say, I went for quality over quantity over the years.

Do you like horror movies? Fairy tales? Complicated feelings about Lovecraft? Do you have familial trauma? Depression? Long slow years of regaining life? Do you like it when poems are about a specific ass situation? Do I ever have the loosely grouped into five sections that create an arc that's about 7x as clear in real life poetry ebook for you!

Gumroad was the easiest platform to upload to, and set a 'pay what you want' price of $1 and up; I wanted to prioritize people being able to read it if they want, with room to be more generous if you feel like it and can afford it. If you don't/don't want to use Gumroad, or want me to get the money without Gumroad fees, I've done my best to make the thank-you email for my Ko-fi a link to download the epub; the base price of a 'coffee' is 1$, so you can set your own price from there on up. This is my first attempt at both making and distributing an epub, so if anything is broken or inaccessible you can get in touch with me on here. If all else fails I will literally email it to you. I will convert it as needed. We will make this work.

that's it! I wrote a lot of poems and put them together (and made the cover! look at it it turned out so good!) and I hope you check them out. 🪦💚

[mangledmouth]

it'd feel a bit odd reposting some of the more recent stuff, so I might leave that for a bit, but note to self that I really want to get to salvaging all my old poems that formatting changes royally fucked up and reposting them lookin' prettier

[mangledmouth]

spider in the corner of the bathroom, r.m.s

plain text under cut

yes, you have a right to be here

as much as I. yes, your ancestors spun webs

between trees in the long ascension of the century

yes, I am new. Yes, this house is

about a century old—perhaps your ancestors

spun webs in this same corner, while I

came from cold New England on a bus,

a paltry human decade ago.

yes, I cry sometimes until I rust

thinking about the small lives

the small deaths, the mice that I heard die

in my bedroom next to the kitchen

the snapping, the instant kill, the noise

that lingers in my head while half-asleep

get up, like a murmur from a past life

a gravedigger’s imperative

get up, time to give another body

back to the ground.

sometimes I spoke over them,

landfill blessings, heavens of yellow grain

sometimes I merely slouched, like that beast

out and into bed again, with the snap

of the lid on the trash the only eulogy.

yes, I give you a world in my head

imagine the line you came from, the inheritance

of delicate work, the good hunt

the patience you must have learned

if you didn’t know it at birth.

mythology, I dream, that echoes ours

warnings that you missed, this is not a place of...

or ignored, too bold to heed them.

knowing in the shadows, the giants in the sky

might overlook you, and even when

the great bright beam of alien eyes is fixed upon you

you might be left in peace, or snatched and taken

to a greener place, an unfamiliar world

where yet you might survive.

perhaps you didn’t want to believe,

the great white smothering cloth, the shoe’s sole

the legend of how you lose your soul

that is, your life—

to the indifferent and incomprehensible.

but, you see

my brother is scared of spiders

and my brother is first

of all the lives in the world.

knowing this, do you understand

why I must become a legend?

[mangledmouth]

Everyone saw your son fall, it seems Everyone saw him soar Everyone knows he was trying to get closer to the sun Everyone loves him Pilgrims to his grave hate you for the fence for the clean stone replacing one Worn anonymous by fervent kisses Everyone who dies in flight belongs to everyone everyone swallowed by the sea Icarus, more and less than a name is eternal. Your son, the sun in your prison cell, irrelevant. He who coaxed feathers from the birds, who always fidgeted under a fitting like he did at bedtimes, curfews, borders trying to escape from everything The guards were suspicious the time short. You gambled on wax, you who built the labyrinth impenetrable All joined so smooth as to be a single piece You, who built the labyrinth For another man's son Lightless and desperate, they say the minotaur Chipped at the walls with cracked bones and you gambled on wax. Your son hadn't felt the sun in so long Another warning, maybe? A little less impatience? How could you have prevented this beautiful story? Perhaps disorientation, not disobedience was the hand on his rudder Perhaps the sun off the water Or the strong wind near the sea Or the clouds piled up like hills Or the slipping of some vital pinion Or your own birth Birds from their nests, even Break their necks among the leaves Everyone saw your son fly, saw him fall, but you Useless Daedalus, only you close enough to hear him scream.

icarus is dead, r.m strange

[mangledmouth]

I'll crosspost it later, but for the first time I've posted a poem on ko-fi! partly because while I'm not in the most dire straits, a bit of money would not go amiss rn, so feel free to just check out the poem or wait to see it on here, but if you want to tip me any amount on ko-fi (and get my poetry collection in return, there's an e-pub in the thank you email) that'd be much appreciated 💚

[mangledmouth]

just once, could we be blessed with lenient and lingering years? with the slow sunrise the honey-sticky afternoon, the bright nights worked in your mouth until they dissolve like candy? you know, the kid-river-summer times, the early-morning-lover times, the house-snow-silence times where the nothing-doing is sweet and guiltless. where you wait without waiting where you make the world around you with your body— two days and twenty weeks in debt still paying off May when November rolls around still sick for summer as the winter's long tongue rolls a red carpet for the marching, dragging days. pray God, we'll make a festival in January blowing heat on our stiff hands, trading calenders outrun our bitter debtor Death with one more cycle. good intentions gather minutes, but in the end we'll fritter them in waiting rooms and traffic— fast-slow time, stopping time, impossible-to-joy time broken off in little pieces like a cracking tooth. all this to say, in the stolen hour: when I turn up at your door, late for a funeral please don't ask me if it's my own. keep me idling; wake me through the night like we have time in our hands, wrapping round like yarn rolling up into a ball to play with. dearest, nearest closest to my heart, let's borrow against our corpses for an extra hour—make me your timepiece. See how slow I run.

latecomer, r.m. strange

[mangledmouth]

nighttime un-cures me, sends the aches like Prospero’s imps to prick my muscles. I can only be romantic—the alternative is malaise. I keep on living a life I didn’t want, slowly determining the edges. The phone scares me. The dentist, needles, pressure cuffs, white coats insomnia, the click in my joints, the stiffness wrenching my neck askew. Numbness in my fingers, cold feet, head too big for my spine spine too willow for my branches. I live, I swallow pride and medication. Count blessings hot showers, a patient doctor, every new development Pandora’s box is a paper sack filled with orange bottles. My arms remember wanting to hold up the world my legs once belonged to a child who ran who knelt, who took in the whole sky with his eyes. But still, praise be. Praise the warm days the stool, the compression sleeve, kindness a bench at the bus stop, the way their arms felt when you finally asked to be held. With your eyes take in the whole future, and praise evolution and love what you will never receive— In sixty years, they will cure my daughter.

a dull pain that has lasted at least three months - r.m. strange

[mangledmouth]

I call you, and autumn crowds back against July Dead pines stretch their skeleton hands over fifty-cent, eighty-cent, hundred-cent price hikes. I call you and the plastic bottles multiply like cancer. I’ve been trying to reach you for an interview— if that makes any difference. Yeah, I traded in my hands for a microphone. I burned the cross necklace. I just want to know what long seasons you lived what abhorrent changes you saw as a child. Child-eater, my editor corrects. Child-eater. To be so eager for the future you get knocked back to the past, I know that to be out for your own stomach, yeah. I swallow it. I call you. On tropical beaches the rich men must still be living summer in your crackpot hermit house, you might be too. christ, I’m hungry. I’ll do what the TV taught me and cannibalize, tracking down my inner child with knife and fork, call you over the blood and ashes in the hundred heat. I want a remake of your life, the director’s seat a distant Halloween and a poem for the future. —outside the sagging Christmas display Nostalgia catches Life in its arms. Presses frantic kisses on the fading corpse.

saturn's son works retail - r.m. strange

[mangledmouth]

SEVEN YEARS OF POETRY IN A BOOK

Destransformation

49 poems about the people that live in horror movies and fairy tales, real and imaginary; a flooded world, a haunted house, a damned town, a

HELLO ALL! I've been working on this project for a while; copying a lot of poems from my blog that had broken formatting from the old days, collecting the ones that I was the proudest of, adding in a number of poems from the archives that never saw the light before; and the result is this, DETRANSFORMATION, an extremely transgender anthology of forty-nine poems, which is 7x7, which I literally only realized now. What can I say, I went for quality over quantity over the years.

Do you like horror movies? Fairy tales? Complicated feelings about Lovecraft? Do you have familial trauma? Depression? Long slow years of regaining life? Do you like it when poems are about a specific ass situation? Do I ever have the loosely grouped into five sections that create an arc that's about 7x as clear in real life poetry ebook for you!

Gumroad was the easiest platform to upload to, and set a 'pay what you want' price of $1 and up; I wanted to prioritize people being able to read it if they want, with room to be more generous if you feel like it and can afford it. If you don't/don't want to use Gumroad, or want me to get the money without Gumroad fees, I've done my best to make the thank-you email for my Ko-fi a link to download the epub; the base price of a 'coffee' is 1$, so you can set your own price from there on up. This is my first attempt at both making and distributing an epub, so if anything is broken or inaccessible you can get in touch with me on here. If all else fails I will literally email it to you. I will convert it as needed. We will make this work.

that's it! I wrote a lot of poems and put them together (and made the cover! look at it it turned out so good!) and I hope you check them out. 🪦💚

[mangledmouth]

as the kids say these days, is this anything

the contortionist, employed in horror movies, is getting old  allen, look, i can’t crawl out of the vent today didn’t want to say it, but something’s slipped from place and won’t come back. i could crawl regular, that’d just be pain pain’s nothing. still. for now. but if you wanted someone  hands and knees, head down, you’d just’ve hired a man.  you wanted monster, wanted the glued jumble of limbs  i used to scuttle in like it was nothing. but not today i know, schedule, i know, i called the doctor, twelve ringing into nothing i’ll get him later. first thing tomorrow. i’ll be back on it. come on-- how long have we been friends? i know, we got the basement let’s shoot the, you know, the scene with the leading lady  where i whisper unheard horrors in her ear. just a splayed hand  a minute of popped jaw. hope she doesn’t jump this time  i saw her earlier, reading ligotti in the shade, fresh from makeup nursing her sprained wrist, doctor’s note torn up in her pocket.  clenched jaw. i told her, take some ibuprofen, we’re all going to die anyway. she flinched and smiled  like she thought she was going to die right now. she’s nervous, sweet in the way of the nameless, eager to please the named she won’t mind the change. say, allen-- i go on shows, now and again, and i just sit there these days have to save up my body. so i get invited less but for now--i’m rambling on. i walk off, sometimes  people see me leaving, and they get angry, people with kids with old movie t-shirts, with girlfriends, with normal things.  they say, you used to roll up into a ball, you used to  turn your head around like the damned, do the exorcist-walk off  you used to pack yourself in a cabinet and disappear.  i tell them, i’m sorry, i know it’s like a building kit,  the toy that comes together perfect, that suffers reassemblng  snarling face and perfect claws, that does this again and again but worn, it loses a little shape, it won’t go back in its packaging. i’m sorry i can’t put myself away when you’re done, not anymore.  what’s this story about? just that-- i think i’ll whisper it in the leading lady’s ear.

[mangledmouth]

i got a gig, telling stories to a gang of witches they sit semicircle round me, cross legged and i tell them every mundane detail of my day, draw out my fears and shakes and angers and small, desolate disappointments like strings of sugared candy. recount momentary crushes on strangers in alleyways, on buses, in half-open coats they're all like---500 years old, give or take a decade they don't get these things anymore. some part of you dries up so they just listen, and then they take me to the door and they put eighty dollars in my hand, from a chest in the corner piled high with cash, in layers of color, some older, some foreign and i think about breaking in. but they could kill me so easily, and they pay me over minimum wage, so i just smile and cry on the bus, and feel odd thinking about telling them next week, about crying on the bus.

i've got this girl, a couple weeks now, and i didn't even mean to swore i wouldn't date when i got into this part of town it's like being a chip in a hurricane, marveling at the massive unable to get your feet on the ground. but i got this girl she's got teeth made to pierce the important veins, but she swears she's seven years dry and she has bags of red stuff in her fridge so I believe her. but, you know, they say vampires can do that put thoughts in your head, so maybe i don't believe her.

i think a lot about love how it gets in your veins, parasitic how it fucks up your brain i think a lot about how it comes on you about how it pulls the rug out how it blows foundations open for the marrow i think a lot about how i don't want it i think about that while she puts me on the floor and puts her mouth on my neck, but doesn't bite

love's always coming for you. it's an invisible force sure and utter as the divine right of kings as the bus charging fifty cents more every year

against my will, i am sent to bring you to dinner against my will, i am in love with you against my will, i am opening, i am opening against my will i am opening the door

- urban fantasy; r.m.s

[mangledmouth]

you know all the reasons that you're in pain, but not how to fix it; in this way, you have kinship with a doctor in a small town running out of vital supplies, nothing but a mind full of solutions and no practical answers, no materials in hand. you both take a smoke break, him out by the split pine you on your rotting balcony, holding the morning carefully between the leaves of your dying rosemary bush. everything is going to be dying, in the world and in that small town and in this poem, until somebody comes through with the right raw materials, and finally your idle hands will unfold in capable relief you lie to yourself about the prospects of the future. in this way you are a young man watching the rising bloodied water a preacher of a dying faith, reviving it with every word and knowing that your breath will run out, not knowing if another tongue will take up the task, but you say---it will. someone will. and you say: the train will come. and you say, we will know what to do when it comes. and you say, nothing truly dies. and: nobody has to die. and: we'll make it and: the rising water shall, eventually, run clear again. you consider endless dramatic situations you keep yourself close to the chest you taste pain as nearly sweet in your dreams you yearn for the clean cut of a knife in this, you are not alone sometimes you want to be held, even if you are pinned down, sometimes you want the black train to arrive late, so you can weep at the railroad crossing. sometimes the water isn't coming fast enough sometimes you want to be a front-line soldier as long as it's any other war sometimes, you want the bad ending. the miss-the-train-and-forget ending. the water-over-the-rooftops ending, the come-to-Innsmouth ending. the quiet-world ending, the no-applause-in-the-theater ending, the endless sitting on the park bench ending, waiting-for-the-things-to-come-that-won't-come ending. the long, unedited one-shot-one-camera ending, where you look into the middle distance, and the inevitability sinks in and through the fields your body comes toward you, arms out and open.

i was pretending i did not speak their language; r.m.s

[mangledmouth]

these are the days of the wary and wise carrier balanced on my knees like a prayer emaciated white rabbit, on sale from the petshop breathing its last sighs of semi-free air one has a car and the other had the money so i'm the one stuck with holding the knife we're the last three people not sick in our town Goodness knows it's time to do something right sharpened the kitchen knife all damn morning want to be as kind about this as I can my religion preaches a judicious lack of cruelty they only specified to not harm man brave scent of pines in the air of the morning wearing the jeans I dyed my hair in, just in case abby keeps a lookout for the cops at the copse edge almost wish I could take her place don't draw a pentagram, cause that's not our style but we are the people they'll tell stories about skin to the open air, I complete my work in one very small place, I turn back the drought run like scared sons of bitches for the car wipe the blood off with an old grease rag on the news they'll say the doctors cured the crisis but it was all us, baby, giving all we had

small animal sacrifice; r.m.s 

{buy me a coffee}

[mangledmouth]

*tries to write poetry*

*writes several things I’m deeply unsure about*

*finally gets extremely inspired*

*writes song lyrics instead*

[mangledmouth]

burn things if you have to burn things be the better man if only so your mother will never by known by her works let her die let her die down in the quiet words you spin saying she never did much of anything saying to open the windows and let a little light in wait for the bus in the cold blow summer air into your fingers tell yourself you'll only be sick a little while longer lie and lie and lie and lie and lie until you get around to something real eat enough to make your starving ancestors a little more proud of you find the gray battlefield between feast and famine build something there live until something comes and kills you live until something comes and kills you live until something comes and kills you--- at least until next year.

new year 2020, rms

[mangledmouth]

there's a cold tired in the October air tonight, it says the places we live are just where you can sink a blade home there's a wind in the October air tonight, it says we who are not like God, what will become of us? there's a rain in the October night, it seeks with small fingers saying here, here is every crack in your house's roof here are the places we can find our way in. all hallow's eve, it walks up the drive in slow bones, it says all times are terrible this one merely pierces closest to your heart ah, if that only helped—that's the trick, isn't it? knowledge doesn't soften pain, it just mouths it over makes it something familiar and close. the lantern tells a story, but only so far as the light falls. Beyond it— sit by the fire with me, while it still burns, and tell me a different story make the light last for a thousand years even as it dies between my hands.

weird autumn, cold october - r.m.s

[mangledmouth]

when you put your hands in the earth, wrist-deep, you’re saying eat me and spit me out as something incredible. you don’t know this you only know when the first flowers bloomed out of the dry stalks in your mother’s garden you put your cheek to the damp ground and breathed on the petals, thinking something you’d heard in science class about what green things eat, about what you breathe, about what they give back to you; and you think maybe if you share air with something this brave— six years is not sufficient to express the desires tumbling like fire through your mind.

when you sketch the air, you’re saying: my bones are full, my heart overripe my lungs expanding, this thing is too much for my body. your hands move like leaves and shadows do. they talk to you in a language you, their technical owner, cannot understand. they flutter impatiently waiting for your slow head to catch up. the townspeople watch across your garden wall full of the primal urge to sharpen pitchforks.

(when the townspeople come, they say many things)

when you pulled yourself out of your shallow grave, with your unquiet hands your beloved roots entwined with every fiber nerve and splinter bone, you said: I am more than worthy of breathing this air. you said here I am, something incredible. and the garden breathes, & down somewhere all your enemies shiver in their beds.

i am not there, i do not sleep; m.t