Vox DOLORIS

Writings from someone who's never even learned a signature

[orionodes]

practice

If, in slight gesture or subtle twist

Of the wrist, a mountain would arise awoken

Steadfast and foolhardy, a thousand foot feat.

Soil becomes a clay pillow;

Imprints of laughter and wailing

Not so, but caverns and canyons of course

Now stand tall for no more musing

Than the ability to, than the power proved

Then to raise the earth to bend under fingnail

From the stars in the sky to the touch of horizon

And down to magma and the conceiving of earthquakes

Then to control but for a stupid game

In game, in jest, to assert the world your play-mate

In broken law, would woman cease, or merely ascend?

[orionodes]

Heidi Says

Heidi says

That she was born to birth

To clutch her baby’s ankle

As she is clutched by the ankle

Dangling as freshest fruits

In an evergreen tree.

Heidi says

She’s not afraid to fall and crack her head

She’s only afraid of waking up in bed

With the blood rushed to her feet

The bubbling arteries full of heat.

Heidi says

She doesn’t miss the sap

That applauded her with one sticky clap

Her fingers fold the air like paper

The atoms bend and taper.

Heidi sees

The air sees Heidi for atoms too,

Heidi says she’s an experience not to be

Missed

Heidi says that’s first on her

Long

Long

List.

19.09.2018

[orionodes]

Normal Sidewalk

A crushed cough drop

Is being swarmed by the first battalion of ants

Who venture out like witches

Creeping fingertips upon the reclaimed cracks

In the creamy, boiling sidewalk.

So baked in bare brightness

Sour sugar begins to crystallise

Bubbling and bursting into the grooves of boots

Stamping it back down into the concrete.

Side-talked and chatted up

Pedestrians dodge the mess with arbitrary

Grace and Astaire’s footwork.

Like ballroom seducers they intertwine

A most incestuous commute of cousins.

Trapp’d within wednesday’s morning webs

Skimming from A to Be a late guest

To monochrome sunset a billion milliseconds

Apart from this very moment

From this very cough drop

From this blazing charge of insects

They suck at the syrup spilling out

Like oil drills in candycane meadows.

11.09.2018

[orionodes]

Joking

I was the duke in his domain.

Then she walked in.

Then I was the duke in her domain,

Then the jester in her domain,

Then the village idiot in her domain,

Then the dead rat in her knicker drawer.

17.08.2018

[orionodes]

Untitled

If there’s anyone out there

In all of space and time

That is even nearly as

Indescribably ildyllic as you

Then I don’t think I wanna meet them

I think they’d make my head explode.

15.11.17

[orionodes]

Vagabonding

I was a passenger

I was vagabonding

With every other fella

I was in adoration of that motorway

It goes North and North and breaks

Over the levee

Shimmering sunset leaking

From the crack in the screen.

I could have taken control

Spun up and up to hurricanes

Of the endlessness of us

And then and those

Lovers and buddies along for the ride.

But I am a statue

I mind my own other people’s business

Empty threats of toppling.

I stayed and laid

Back home to my bedside table with sun

Bleached memories drenched

In candle shadows

Poster glares

And dead ivy overflowing.

I’ll leave

On overmorrows

Sunset

That massages the motorway.

15.11.17

[orionodes]

Oppeharmer

I’m the Oppenheimer of young love. I wasn’t going to write this down But she said I should.

[orionodes]

Shakes

At the back of my stage

I make the beast with one back

The back of their heads

As they head to the back

Out the door revealing a

Back-trodden floor boarded

Soot stamped into lacquered gore

Underfoot liquored lords and their

Hans gripping mares for sordid affairs

Reflecting glares and musty flares

SOS for a morbid guess

Lusty losses on necks

Glossed lips mark their next

Target before they call the curtain

And know for certain

My legacy blooms into my time to rest.

14.03.2018

[orionodes]

Still

Still I left

And still the birds flew

And still the trains marched

And still the sun came.

Still I stopped

And turned on my heels

And still the birds watched

And still the branches breathed

And still the jesters sang.

04.06.2018

[orionodes]

Sour Stay

Your kiss are so sour

I couldn’t stay

I cannot stay

I could go, when again could I go?

I don’t need a companion

I don’t need a splint or a crutch

I didn’t need one that night

I don’t need one now.

I like long walks through the clotted heart of the city

I like to pretend I’m the Duke

In his most glorious domain

Each step is a rising hallelujah

Upon the staircase of scaffolding

Keeping the cathedrals upstanding

Keeping the seats waxed and worn.

Truth is I’m an addled idiot

A whore for a midnight snack

A whore for a city to applaud

Dancing to the blues on the castle walls

Twisting around and pointing back.

Then she comes through my mind

The one who couldn’t stay

The one who had to make it home safe,

The cotton snake skin

The frozen fingers.

I could have stayed

I should have stayed

I want to stay

I’m staying

I should stay

And I did it

I stayed.

13.05.2018

[orionodes]

Cavernousman

You made me feel like a caveman

Funny and foolish as I locked

My eyes with the inter-wheezing wheels

Of the carriage that carried you away

Like the first torch being extinguished

In a descent down a deep and damp cave

Clawing my way out of the crazed impulse

To run down the platform as a hound

Chasing your trails and gnawing on the

Spinning steel, because I figured my figure

Twisted beneath the pumps might slow

Your departure.

I should have held you a second longer

I should have jokingly kissed you twenty

Times more, closing your cheeky chuckles

Funnelling your joy straight to my throat

Filling me up with bubbles of badness

Maybe grabbing hold of our hair,

Pulling out a bobby pin and waving it

In front of you, as if you had to come all

The way back to bed just to get it back.

My words didn’t slow the steam

My vowels didn’t crack the metal

And away you went

Into the black horizon

Your crimson cheeks the only light left.

10.04.2018

[orionodes]

Summer Love

We departed

I shoulda known

We only ever lingered in bed

And we drove each other out to each horizon

The lightbulb’s chorus grows louder now

Flashes of sane thought an sanitised memory

Stinking memory

Scents of mown grass

And ethanol

And a raincoat caked in smoke

My face a-washed with mercury

And cleaned with leper’s silk

A neck shaved with rusted iron

Eye drops of acidic spit

So maybe the cold water brings me south

Or the steaming jumper brings me north

Or I travel in circles around the London of the lady

I’ll be home

I hope you weren’t waiting too long.

08.05.2018

[orionodes]

Taken Squalor

A precious ugly

A heart constriction feels snuggly

Scrounging for a half empty cigarette

Out of the mouth of the boy you just met

Kismet, recollect, am image of a firework

Pollocked against a blue brick dusk

A husk of an embrace cradling berserk

But you could pull the rust off earrings

And turn them so silver

That your eyes reflect a million glances

Delivers shaking head, rejecting chances

Prances down a derelict memory lane

Burst asunder by a northbound train

Before another strobe light flashes

Another expected fright, dashes

An opportunity to speak unchained

And then her taxi drove off,

I alone remained.

25.04.2018

[orionodes]

Wild wild wind

Oh perhaps it is the crystal wind

That takes you down, hangs to your gown

After you sinned and touched my hands

To your plastic crown, to your empty town

Casting shadows through the sands

Bleaching meadows to the lands

Past the atlas and the skies

By the outcasts and their ties

To high society and taller lies

On satin sighs and bad good guys

Within silent hoods of lauded cries

Tear stained ear strained right hand tamed

All blames for near famed

Irises of oceans and wild wild nights.

25.04.2018

[orionodes]

Sunbathe Repeated

The brightest summer days

Cast the longest shadows

My shoulders hold me in the ground

To bathe in the glory of my despair

Begging attention, forgetting compliments

Only shame

For nothing but mistakes remains

I am an innocent man, I deserve

Happiness

Fulfilment

True joy

I genuinely believe I do

I do

I do

I do so so totally do

Yet it barely means a thing

Self hated still drips into my closest confidants

My lovers and exes need to be with better,

Better people

I deserve to be left behind, yet another

Hopelessly addicted soul

Hooked on soulless-ness

Without myself I am an outline

Within myself I am an outline.

22.04.2018

[orionodes]

Don’t ask me how I am

I want to kill myself

Commit consensual murder

I have friends

And a mother and a father

I suppose I can last another few days

Wait until everyone deserts me

I hope they do

I want to go home

[orionodes]

Execution

Execution

Guillotine

Blade

Scraping

Falling

Falling

Matter

Chopped

Six

Alive

Stopped

Rocking

Still

Still

A response to “Subject to Fits” By Robert Montgomery, which in turn is a response to “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

19.04.2018