Smoken Word

I write poems, prose, fiction, non fiction, songs, take photographs, play instruments or basically anything that I decide to enjoy. I'm going to share some of these things here if you feel like reading it. Don't think too much.

[tjevans-blog]

Writing Desk Drawer

All around me

People are finding

What they’ve always been looking for.

I try so hard to see what they can,

To really live

Through their easy smiles,

But when I open the desk drawer of my adolescence

There’s only a broken cigarette case with my name on it,

An empty pack of matches,

One inch of dust,

And that letter you wrote about us,

You know, the one I was never meant to read.

[carryustothestars-deactivated20]

Mentally ill people are not the problem.  Inaccessible, unaffordable health care is the problem. Stigma is the problem. Lack of treatment is a problem. Lack of understanding is the problem. Lack of compassion is the problem. Not taking people seriously is the problem. Lack of honest conversation and open dialogue is a problem. Using jails as a housing facility for mentally ill persons is a problem.  Do you understand me. Mentally ill people are not the problem.

[tjevans-blog]

No More Good Dreams

My bed is cold

Devouring in its emptiness.

Tiny memories might stray

like pinholes burnt into the mattress,

stinging like fire.

I dreamt of you last night again.

I don't know what that means.

I awoke suddenly

feeling the vacuum open wide.

My bed is cold and lonely,

devouring in its emptiness.

[tjevans-blog]

Apathy Poem for November

All those years

I was never really there.

You only cast away a memory.

  Overwhelmed by the urge to disappear into

Gentle waves of poppy fantasy,

I eroded the foundations of my social sanity.

  Everything you said was reality put in a cardboard box,

Sealed without a kiss, just a casual glance

Passing through our paperback romance.

  A maze to wind a way out of here.

Amazed that you don’t really care to find out for

Certain if anything ever has been clear.

  Bad November attitude, you’re

Still ten years ago smoking like a cannon in the setting sun.

I’m settling down over the ruins of our secret town,

Slipping away, free from bricks, numbers & poisoned memories.

[tjevans-blog]

Morpheus’ Children are Dream Killers

  Floating disembodied through townhouses.

Shimmering in ten million false lights.

Creeping into bedrooms and under dark basements.

Shabbily dressed houses leer down from all directions.

Smudged windows paint still life landscapes of other people’s worlds.

Graffiti covered walls and abandoned doorways tell the story of a clock-less twilight,

Murmuring of power struggles, children’s toys, prescriptures and personal pains.

The hot sick stench of people rises to a milky crescendo.

I consume my deity in a garbage-strewn grotto.

Refuse, empty liquor bottles and creeping vines murmur sermons

To the rusted ears of clotheslines, ragged reminders of the family dream

Stabbed and strangled in the City’s silent, suffering streets.

Drunk and spiraling libraries lurch like stone giants out of storm drains.

I take shelter in the urban forest, shivering behind stainless steel bushes,

Scribbling threatening unsent letters to the God of Dreams.

Bright figures twirl in silhouette,

Half-remembered sensations drifting like the smell of storms at five years old.

Now stumbling through the mirror again,

A neurotic prisoner of lonely highs and bright blue visions,

 Shocking reminders of the inevitable future.

Erotic, tense, brooding, the first sharp gust of a sentient summer storm.

Spent so many red capsules stretching, sketching, serving, and seeking.

Now I smile to watch my abandoned body suffer,

Running full tilt away from the day

 The Great Dreamer wakes up

To agonizing opiate withdrawal nightmares,

Clawing at thumping hearts, clutching vomit stained memories.

Disoriented. Disconnected. Devoured.

Dependent.

[tjevans-blog]

Confusion Poem

I'm trying hard to smile through the pain,

teeth grit, grinding against nature.

Voodoo doll, polysporin, isopropyl alcohol

thick chemical scent vivisecting the poisoned air.

Music, meaningless promises, alone in double bed

sweating with nightmares of you...

I dreamt we were naked together

like the way it used to be

nothing between us but love,

no open sores, scars or bloody, dripping flesh.

I touched your skin, it was silken soft, milk white.

we both trembled.

I awoke in cold hot flash of sweat and lingering opium eyes.

She is with someone else now

And I'm forced to watch them together every day.

It hurts like a white-hot iron rod

piercing my brain.

Not for their future, your future

but the happy times passed

that died and you left forgotten.

[tjevans-blog]

Lost in Transition

A future long forgotten

To visions of free roaming,

And lazy bohemia beneath the maples.

A disguised outcast cast in

To a cage of expectation and investment.

Ice cube in a bonfire, moonflower on a January afternoon.

Seeking a home that was never known,

Mourning a home long lost.

Dreaming of young love and free cocaine under the looming shadow of failure.

Asking sense from the senseless,

Drawn by unanswerable questions.

Silently pleading to leave this hometown nowhere.

[tjevans-blog]

Guaranteed to contain at least 30% homo sapiens sapiens

It’s a tough process, going through the meat grinder,

The packing plant, sandstorms of industrial media,

Blowing and tearing at exposed flesh and thought.

Is the sun even real?

Or just another ugly fluorescent warehouse slaughterhouse bulb?

Hints of bleach ripe ammonia hang in the air

Between endless rows, towering shelves of purchasable products

Stretching on and on for forty years,

The biblical desert distance at least.

Lights flash and blind and strobe by

Buy buy buy buy buy!

Masturbate to the holy dollar!

Offer it years and surgeries and retirement plans!

If you qualify at the end of your lifetime

You’re eligible for a slow and protracted death

Hooked up to respirators, catheters and colostomy bags

In the palliative care unit of the closest hospital to the burial grounds.

Just down the shivering  streets

Freaks pull sense from piles of pills,

Geriatrics don tinfoil helmets from outdated books and bloody magazines.

Butchers sharpen their knives and polish their hands

Where they cup the tiny, huddled masses,

Sweating, suffering, fornicating, expiring in this civilization’s suffocating grip.

No war was declared but the casualties are mounting.

In suburban bathrooms

Sweet teenage girls fill up their soft veins with winter

To freeze the suicide memories of their sisters’ dead bodies

Hanging always behind every closet door,

Popping up every time they close their eyes.

Robins fall from the sky, brought down by grief soaked feathers,

End up crawling blindly through the cold mud

With horny, hungry worms,

Pumped full of Dexedrine, ketamine, Thorazine & benzodiazepines.

Tiny twigs to repair her frail nest and failing dams,

Pure survival instinct trying to hold back the agonizingly inevitable

Deadly flood of emotions, feelings, and reality.

[tjevans-blog]

More Distortion

This is Grunge.

This is Gehenna.

This is downtown at 2:45am investigating every ashtray.

Lost explosive, too many bad ideas and too much cheap whisky to drink.

Fragile white nose sniffs my naked cards,

Nods out to Lou Reed in the gutter and makes crude toasts to the stars.

The great divide gets greater, ink washes off,

The roadmap is ignited for a few seconds of warmth.

Piles of pictures burn holes in iron clad pill cases.

Psychoanalysis forces out visions of involuntary voices,

Breaks the barriers of memory,

When black was born and colour hid away.

This is life in its most pleasing form,

Dancing barefoot in the grass, amongst jagged shards of the One Love.

Circuits switch and snap with talk of flying and running away.

Prisms reflect the sun and give the moon secrets of divine inspiration.

Perfection is the beauty of no more buildings to burn down,

Walking in half remembered fields and exploring elusive ice caverns.

Spring is banished underground.

Can you still hear it screaming?

Now they teach to bow and fear,

To sacrifice the thoughts we think to the monsters in the mirror.

Ice blue pinprick pupils, tiny portholes into the abyss.

This Morphine Angel is the, river, the bedroom, the road.

He snorts away his ennui and cries “Hail Eve!” to his empty glass phial.

Solid, captured, horny as hell and never been touched by love.

Coming down but it won’t be the last stop.

 Forgetting the bottom and rejecting the top.

 Locked doors and white washed windows stretch the dream until it snaps.

This is Gehenna.

This is Grunge.

This is a goddamn good time.

[tjevans-blog]

Glass Tattoos

Everyone has a breaking point.

There is no unconditional love.

Promises expire like milk

And elderly lonesomes. 

Similarity is like a lightbulb

Drawing in moths, butterflies

And other creatures of the night.

Then the bats come, 

fleeing from the mourning dawn.

Everyone gets lost at least once or twice.

Every grip starts to slip away like time.

Promises fade to memories,

Memories fade into photographs.

Friends that stand around

asking you to call them for help

turn away indifferently as the great spinning wheel.

Everyone has a breaking point.

[tjevans-blog]

More Haikus About Death & Orgasm

The amount I take

Depends on the hunger pains.

Trees tremble, monsoons come.

*

Young hands scars, pits, lives.

Paint past punishments scarlet.

No god will listen.

*

Vinyl Blood on the

Tracks spinning quiet sadness

In a smoky room.

*

Mist coating shy love.

Damn you North America.

Restless. Cold. Awake.

*

Your uncertain smile

And tentative agreement

Raise up dead emotions.

*

Carry me away.

Holding on to happiness

 Is harder than steel.

8

[tjevans-blog]

Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.

William Blake

[tjevans-blog]

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

William Blake

[tjevans-blog]

Orenda

Cruising down ethereal roadway

Illegible amphetamine ideas snapping at odd intervals beneath the blurring lights.

Humid summer air summons the sickly hot stench of gasoline and burnt rubber,

Rising up and drifting over the endless hum of burnt and broken Suburbia.

A man’s frail shadow lurches ungainly steps down the sidewalk

Muttering nonsense and occasional wisdom to the spirits of fluorescent night,

His crack cocaine destinies mapped out by the moss between bricks,

Brown and wilted in the hot white glare of asphalt purgatory.

Grieving girls sell regrets at a discount hourly rate.

Desperation thrives between dark cars in cheap motel parking lots,

Pumped into a near-sexual frenzy by the rising white noise of the city,

A constant throbbing counter-beat to the callous ticking of the clock.

Wide-eyed fallen angels twirl like toddlers through sinister apartment buildings,

Taking vicious car rides with their few day fucks, pouring boiling water on rodents, Punching holes in the wall, dancing ginger steps of joy around soiled syringes,

And melting down decades for a faint hint of the ultimate fix.

Blue and red spinning lights announce the arrival of bad omens.

One more bust, one more broken down junky’s life falls apart.

One more plaster eyed little kid goes silent,

Sacrificed to the gluttonous gods of steel and concrete.

[tjevans-blog]

Crown of light.

[tjevans-blog]

Excerpt from Echoes

Spoon fed on Hollywood we know that the good guy always wins, and we know that he always looks like us. A bunch of princelings raised in a castle being told they’ll be eaten by monsters if they go out at night. The committee has created the perfect sculpture of happiness and we know that any deviation will result in permanent damnation and the revocation of all forms of transaction and identification. Nowadays if you don’t go to college, don’t get a good job, don’t get married you’re treated like a sufferer of neurosyphilis. Who could possibly not want to live in a suburban bungalow with their dog and two children and go to work every day so they can buy little Jenny the iphone she desperately needs to survive? Clearly only sexual deviants and mental patients.

I'd rather die than live that future. Hanging on to the drooping back of white western culture, consumerism, misogyny, racism, capitalism. 

 I scar the earth,

Sicken it,

Poison it.

As we all do.

As we all do.

Forgive us.

We knew what we were doing all along. Now before Then.

Forgive us & watch us go.

[tjevans-blog]

Birds & Machinery

I know you know everything

And you know you’re always right

But just take a moment to understand

That if we were birds none of this would matter

We would fly our arguments in circles around the sun

And baptize ourselves in rainwater

For the joy of being wet

I know you know everything

And you know you’re always right

But just take a moment to understand

That we can’t be free like the birds

That everything means nothing to me

And I don’t really mind saying

You were wrong