Mirror

Peering through the milk layer of gathering dust,
Only pupils moving,
Flexing with the failing light.
Each breath a lifetime,
Long in coming.
Drawing in the dusk,
And making it mine.
A thousand days fallen into innumerable nights.
No aging finds me, no searching eyes,
I feed only on hunger itself.
Desire for her image,
Thrown on the back of my eyes,
Reflected in cold reversal.
Awaiting her coming to this silvered glass,
To gaze at her own image,
So I may throw mine upon it,
As I wait forgotten,
A once feared specter
Waiting remembrance


Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Unhindered

I stacked Jack O'Lanterns high like a cairn,
and filled them with fire, faces ablaze
a Mephistophelian choir singing in flame whisper,
and laughing over some jest that only the hollow
can understand.

The bottles, empty but for droplets, left
for ghosts and insects, inverted over broken branches
the alcohol gone to calm me, quiet me,
slow my vibration down to yours, so I care
enough, just enough.

Licking your photographs, eating the dust,
over the glass, over the cloth over your tense
nipples, taut stomach, pale throat and lips,
lips that would scream if they knew, felt
or even remembered.

I glide from garden to garden, room to room,
no sound on the stairs for all my bulk,
my wings keep me light, and block the light,
that would wake you, because I wish to watch
you sleeping safe.

I can kill them all around you, silent, dead
hollow like the jacks in the old playground
stack them like forgotten dolls bloating
while you and I have our fun, our dance,
that you prayed for.

I can wake you in a vacuum, show you pleasure
such as your system cannot take but you will know
before I am done that I am older and more connected
with the intimacies of flesh than any creature
that has risen since.

And when the synapses crack, tiny lightning
that screams for help and more in a single breath
I will give you both, help and more, for only more
can heal the overfilled cup flooding it until
it is empty.

But I will let you sleep on, dreaming of what if...
and what might never be, but you will wake alive
and filled with the knowledge that I was here,
and that you could have been broken, but I left you,
for another night.


Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Listening to him

The drum heart can scarcely keep up
with the intensity of his staccato guitar
and half whispered voice
and the smoke veils him, the mist from the bay
or ghosts perhaps, drawn by life
so intense, so bright, even in its misery.

I have tried to do something else, talk
drink, or scribble something into my book
about how his songs make me feel but his voice
will not allow me that brief rest, that moment
away from its desperate hypnosis, I can listen
and I can feel, and I can move, as long as I move
in tribute or sacrifice to the song.

I cannot understand the words, not all of them
but that become less important than the shape
of his tenor that reminds me of others, but
never imitates them, just hints, pretends
lures you in and then spreads a cobra hood in challenge
and bites into you before you can react
and the poison stays, long into the following silence.

Its raining, so he will be there, in the alcove
that tiny speaker straining to hold his darkness
and the architecture of arches casting back the song
like bats and memories, and his witchcraft guitar.
And when he sings, you have to make way for ghosts
that come by to listen...


Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Dead Poetry

Great, just great, another poem about brains.

Barkeep, you best just leave the bottle,
its going to be a long night,
and I really should leave,
but I can't resist,
because the concept is brilliant
but the execution, if you pardon the word play
is a little shoddy.

I mean I push it further, dumber, darker,
"Fuck, its dead in here tonight."
I mean come on, at least I'm trying,
to be clever and witty here,
not just throwing out any old bones.
Heh heh, that one was pretty good,
I know, I know, Shhhhh!

I feel out of place, my pulse, renders me
an outsider.
ME!
The great rebel, the darkest sheep,
the man who put the laughter in manslaughter,
and when none of my fingers hit the floor
when I clapped after the last poet
I was definitely in my minority.
Made even more weird by my very breath.

Did you see the Asian girl that is waiting in queue to read?
She is so hot in a very fucked up, sort of closet necrophilia
sort of way.
She is like a room temperature piece of ass.
And if her Non-Contagious card is up to date
and she doesn't recite about eating brains,
or stand up there and try to rhyme "Unnnnnnggghh!"
with "Mmmmmmgggahhhh!
I might actually hit that,
but not too hard,
don't want to have to go across the room to pick it up.

And this guy is spouting, spitting (literally) about equal rights
for the undead, "Beyond the grave is not beyond the law!"
he keeps intoning over and over, through his gear mesh
green teeth, and he might have actually had us
had one of his plosives not blown his right eye
into that woman in the front row's drink.
She should have ordered the highball instead
of the eyeball.

Shhhh, shhhh, she's up and god damn,
she isn't bad, even under the lights, a little flaking
and a couple of skin tears, but still nice and tight.
Fuck! She's trying to rap!
Can't hear her words over the popping of her joints
as she tries to dance a bit,
though you have to admit, the the rigor mortise
makes it easier to do the robot.

I heard that Russell Simmons is here.

Next Season, Dead Poetry Jam

and I will still be trying to get laid.


Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Overcome

I am overcome.

Spinning in this space, this place, this open field.

The moths and I, anticipating rain, twirling

in the pale pools cast by the weakening headlights

and my time in this place is limited by their shine.

When they die, I can walk away, breaking into sparrows

bats, particles of dust, subject to the restless whim

of breeze and breath.

I rose from dream in the fantasy of prose

to teach and sing, and see the specters of passing lives

to hold and comfort and speak with the voice of legion

but I fell for you in the glimmering moment of moonlight

cast down or fallen like a cadaver of reflected sun.

I fell in love, bathed in it, soaked and sunk until I was forced

by the need to cry to breathe it in and then I became love

a canopic jar holding the heart, but the heart of metaphor

not the throbbing gristle of anatomy, but the soul of emotion.

And the clouds are piling up, like grief and wishes

on the horizon that recently swallowed that very sun

and within them stir ions, flashing, flickering

like thoughts, across the surface of my mind.

Building toward Havoc.

You are poetry to me, unspoken but by the very voice of joy

and the moment you entered into my forest

I could have gone into the ground knowing all.

Fifty thousand years I have walked in the moonlight

and in no language, no tongue, no art of man,

no glory of nature has there ever been a word

or image to compare the feeling of you

so as to make anyone else understand.

So I have failed, and have become overwhelmed with the trying

and as the words dried up and only the love remained

I realized that I could not stay here, and pretend

that the world and its tragedies meant anything

when compared to the weight of the orbit of my heart.

Its begun to rain, and the lights have failed,

and all that I was, is nothing

and I have become only love....



Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Ashburg

The storm over Ashburg, bellows from beneath the engine,
as the steel Basilisk slides into the station,
sighing heavily, breathing, panting, pausing for us to step down
before inhaling Stygian flame, and uncoiling into the pre dawn.
Only two of us on the platform, a soldier coming home from war
and me coming home to start one.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher's come home.

Not quite a standing man deep she lies, under stone
and shifting soil, made fertile by a hundred years of shitting cows
and ewes carelessly fenced. The goats stand on the grave markers
like Luciferian angels of blasphemous mourning.
And the farmhouses stare out of indifferent, gingham lidded eyes
as I take my first, long stridden steps along Colfax road
since they drove me out of here in a van, marked Medical Examiner
Beecham County.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher's come home.

The mission bell rings as I cross the bridge to Ashburg square,
no hand pulls that cord, but it rings in memory, and my cassock
blossoms around me, like wings, the fins of some great skate
or ray, and I glide silently through the gathering faces.
Older whispering my legend, my epitaph to the eager young.
all come to see the Butcher carve me up again.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher's come home.

Beyond the crowd, another grows, a diaphanous legion
of ghosts, swaying to the dance of the other side, as the scarlet
leaves of the season of fire pass through them on their way
to the October brown grass beneath. It's Sarah's birthday
and she dances on the hill where the Butcher's grandsire
used to hang people, that kissed outside of the dark of their rooms.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher's come home.

Butcher Teague stands like an oak on Priory hill, waiting
arms corded of leather and iron, arms that can take the head
from a steer with a single swing, or crush the life from a girl
that kissed the Preacher on Halloween night too many years ago.
I don't even remove my collar as the deal I made
had already damned me, and the blade that rides my hip
has killed gods before, on my way here to settle a score
that has even the devils and the dead holding their breath.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher's come home.

But above us, Sarah dances, like she danced that night.
And the Butcher and I dance too, steel strikes sparks
ringing blade to blade forcing the mission bell into silence
and there is no mercy, no hesitation, no quarter asked or given
between the man of god and the Preacher he murdered,
that turned to another power in the black bag that day.

Wake the Butcher, the Preacher’s come home.

The heavy blades cut mouths in our flesh and at the grunts,
Sarah pauses and raised her milky hands to her mouth,
Remembering the last time, remembering us dying
Right in this square, right where the Butcher’s blood is drawing
Circles around us and my hands make mockery of his flesh.

Wake the Gravediggers, the Preacher’s come home.
He looks smaller on his back, empty of his hate, his need
To punish those that could have what he was denied, long ago
By birth, by god, and by his own horrid voice, his hunger
To see joy slaughtered on the streets of Ashburg across the years
But no more, no more, and the ghosts come to see, but step wide of me
They gather about him like the angelic choir that he nor I will never see.
And as they look, I kiss her once, and turn for the station again.

Wake the Devil, the Preacher’s coming home



copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch

Hoodoo Boy 2

Aw, there it is,
d'ya hear d'at rumble, d'at sounds
for all tha world, like tha devil
clearin' his throat?

D'at is tha thunder of dis place
where we all sleep in sweaty rooms,
chilly rooms or rooms that slide
back and forth between tha two
at tha whims of machinery.

All tha ol people and the others
that wasn't born round here,
get them all bothered and nervous
bout that ole hurricane comin'
but me and my kin, we don' worry
bout it so much.

That hurricane is jus' nature's broom

Not that I don' feel bad fo dem people
dat got themselves hurt up in that las' one,
but you can't rightly fret too much bout
what ma nature gonna do,
now can ya?

Mother New Orleans is blessed
and she blessed by some dark things
let me tell you. We ain't all sweet an holy
you kin bet all you got on dat one.
Naw, we a little different
with our talk and dreams
and relationship with the nasty.

You ever kissed someone
as they eye of that 'cane
come over you like some temple
of peace on a raging sea o madness?
I have, I kissed and a whole lot more,
but I guess you kin imagine.

Y'all don' believe in the darkness too much
unless you right smack in the middle of it
do ya? We do, we sing to it, pray to it,
call out to it when we cummin
after all the thrustin and moanin
has brought us to our own storm.

Y'all come on down to Lafitte's
afta ten on some stormy night
and look back in tha corner
where you hear them jackals laughin'
and that'll be me and my brothers
waitin for the game o tha night.
And you might jus be it.


Copyright 2009 Cutter Murdoch