Collected art and poetry from January 2022

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Don’t you see how I bleed for you?
I break myself on my love for you
On bleeding feet I’m lead to the gallows
Suffering each step in silence
It’s what I deserve
It’s what you want
To see how far I’ll go
Showing you, telling you
With these actions I choose
That I’m picking you
Putting you before me
Ready to accept my fate
Staring into the abyss
No face can catch my eye but yours
I stare as tears overflow
You aren’t moved
I can’t speak
I chose this fate

The bruises before
Are nothing compared to this
Self loathing
Endless wishing
How you healed me
To break me in a different way
I can’t get the air in
As I’m swept off my feet
Overwhelmed by feelings
They strangle me
I’m falling, I’m panicking
Nobody’s there to catch me
No arms to be held by
It’s safest this way
They say love is brutal
It will make you bleed
Still I gave everything,
But I couldn’t be loved for me

— Jaime Knight

Bones

In the rabbit hole
Your deft, ferocious fingers contort my mangled spirit
Slicing with appendages, sinuous and toothy; Trimming
Slivers falling away, gluttonous lunacy deposing
You paste onto my eggshell bones your menagerie of lovely brooding
Tender strokes in corners and crevices…
Where pasting is futile —
Needle and thread are married with bone
As I lounge in your sultry, libidinous cocoon…
My demons loan their wailing to stillness, when your eyes become a bridge
Reckoning passage through my smoky, sooty debris
The wet earth rubs my skin, coats my scars with clay motifs of warriors that move —
Each time my ashen flesh furrows…
You lift my bones to wrap my spirit beneath
Pluck at a corner snagged on a splintered fracture
Then line it up against nettled ribs, your breath lilac sweet against my face
You bend your head, pasting and suturing —
Dabbing at blood, woe and darkness lovingly
A silent seer of the obscure
Your innate knowing
Epochs in the making, formed from the cohesion of brutal and divine…
A chosen one, witness, ancient synergy of all and none
Your ministrations to my desolation like a warm, numbing prayer, and I
Weary, heavy in my bones
Gaze at you with loving, revering eyes —
As the last stitch is gathered, the last remnant pasted and your beautiful lips lure me…
You are the need in my want
Your petting warming my cursed, barren spirit
Your blood washing away the foul damages of my dusty bones
Your eyes flashing, provoking spark to fire —
Incinerating my achromatic existence
Your breath against my skin an homage to dismembered desire…
In the rabbit hole
You tend to my savage needs
Scour my ravages
Assuage the rampage, before my wretched spirit canonizes this devastation
I feel my wild (long ago dissected crudely)
Climbing through my bones
Spirit and bones in a lovely mess of carnal wonder
And my demons digress
In awe, I am finally quiet
The bleeding cools
And my bones kiss the sun

—Faul Fraust.
I write dark, poetic surrealism for beautiful, brooding eyes.

love

you:  baby why is there a little green buddha in the freezer
me:  you watched FRIENDS
you: why not a crucifix or dashboard madonna
me: he is judging me
you: anyone else would say you were bugshit crazy but i kinda get it
me: i have never loved you more than i do right now

—dre21357

Main image: welcome by Adam Whittier.