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79 · Oct 2019
Love & Lust Lost
Briscoe Oct 2019
Knowing only our words and dancing lips,
But not her thoughts, I pierced black with blunders.
Arrogant to assume our bright abyss
Between was traversed. As vein bells thundered.
Vaunting my vice and confidence as those
Weft waves vaunt of their temporality.
Great velocity bringing long shadows,
Charges, a Rhamesses' dream of history
Set surely towards shores of broken sand.
From an alien surface I see rings,
Like a silver tiara in her strands,
Divide black of night. My mind in foreign
Lands, where lust is lost among moondust streets,
Where I waltz alone. Memory's a wreath.
Sheets of Saturn, of silk upon the heat,
She was a white clothe upon our own teeth.
Flames of her furnace, her firmament crown
Hearth of my heart, I have forever found
To be somewhere between eternity and me.
"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
-Percy Bysshe Shelly
79 · Feb 2020
The Artist & The Agnostic
Briscoe Feb 2020
I don't mind my life
With an invisible brush
Behind every shade and light.
I like my life
With a blossom and blooming flower
In every manhole cover
And shooting stars
In everyone's headlights
Rushing by like fiery eyes or fireflies.

If there is a soul above,
In the heavens
With veins of silk magic and white,
If he has found me to love,
I don't mind him so much.

And if not, then now is enough,
Enough time not to mind my life.
"Be thankful that you have life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one."
-Richard Dawkins

"9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and **** and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."
-John 10: 9-10 (NIV)
79 · Aug 2019
Hot Fuzz
Briscoe Aug 2019
They all laughed beautifully.
They all smile with pearly arches.
Yet she moves me.
She soothes me.
She smoothes my scars
And she lets me be
And she, beneath her fuzzy tiara
Smiles for me.
79 · Aug 2019
Pairs of Men
Briscoe Aug 2019
Two men stand where a glade meets a clearing.
They hold their guns strong in the evening,
Shaking shoulders attached to their stern arms.
They pull triggers to **** and cull the calm.
Hence smoke ascends in burning fireless rings.

The forest begins breakfast before and
During and after, with simmering dawns
Breaking like bubbles on the sea.
Boiling to leave a smoke which stretches out
His hand to cover his yawn for centuries.

Two men stand where a clearing meets a glade.
Their guns raised as to secure security,
And yet one watches his father's smoke fade,
Lowers his gun and extends harmony.
So the other shoots and clearing takes glade.
78 · Sep 2019
The Greying Earth
Briscoe Sep 2019
Spontaneously another human sprouts out.
Another hair in the beard of the Earth
Who greys, wanes and weakens.
Only there because they fester too fast
To be shaved off in waves of hurricanes.
Only there to catch food with greasy hands
And a greedy grips to grasp the lands.
Lonely where they spill out.
Homely where the hills represent
An Earth they push from the planet.
"Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own ****

Come on Maggot Brain
Go on Maggot Brain"
-Funkadelic
78 · Sep 2019
Responsibility
Briscoe Sep 2019
Across black, my dogs run like stallions,
Stretching and contracting limps and tendons.
Then as I return from work, I find they brighten
Draining, darkening ends of evenings.
But the weak sinews of monkey's flesh
Compel us. To them it is the tempest
Of a thousand lifts and falls in a mess,
Indistinguishable barks in a mesh.
As we shout, dogs must think us mean creatures.
Someday, what will my wordless child observe?
"No one is born hating another... People must learn to hate" -Nelson Mandela
Briscoe Sep 2019
After antique whispers and thoughts, we are
Children of the Silver Millennium.
Slithers of light reflect on peaks out far,
From waves of a rising tide or Autumn.
The alchemy of notions, the cold ocean
Encircling, on our electric windows.
All our memories born in some fiction,
Projected out from within screens. But those
Glinting pearls of the ocean out beyond,
Shall defy gravity, yet we won’t dare
Go there, where we would be beyond our bond
To this mortal coil and this planet fair.
Lest this planet won’t always sustain us
We must cease to release black winds thunderous.
"Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century, it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both."
77 · Sep 2019
Welcome to Awake Time
Briscoe Sep 2019
Welcome to awake time.
Be disturbed by the peeping light,
Now night has shriveled and receded,
The hum of silent sleep ceases
And the thoughts no longer rhyme like
"Darkness reaches. Starless images."

Nine o' eight, you're definitely late.
It's just another note for mum's email.
Carbohydrates and fixing your tie on the way.
Punk rocks you from sleep again.
You have entered the shell with hives within.
You smell brick and baritone existence.

Classical music puts you to sleep.
"The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer"
-T.S. Eliot
77 · Sep 2019
Selah
Briscoe Sep 2019
I tried to write Selah on my phone
But the machine corrected me with delay.
The word means rock, the word means stone.
It means wait and ponder,
It means ache and ruminate.
The word means dry thoughts in a dry bone.
"Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in you own hearts on your bed, and be silent. Selah"
-Psalm 4
77 · Sep 2019
Hope
Briscoe Sep 2019
There will be time to rise and raise a child.
There will be the night to rise and write
Loves and lives that were wordless in daylight.
There's a season to Spring to life and wild
Bursts will bobble from our seas who simmer.
Blooming perfumes with flowering flavours
Will sway like winds in our trees who shimmer.
The grassy Earth coloured as it covers
Hills from place to place in grassy embrace.
When your enslaved pieces, break free from hate,
The glades all softly supporting your pace
As you walk toward the canopies gate.
Though this is not today, nor tomorrow
Those fires begin low, then they grow and glow.
76 · Feb 2020
Ignorance
Briscoe Feb 2020
Can life stop opening my eyes?
It's scary when I see.
Can life stop opening my eyes?
I'm trying to sleep.
76 · Sep 2019
The Dragon
Briscoe Sep 2019
I see it's black and I see those pearl eyes
Staring through caverns of caves and darkness.
Though withered, weathered eroded bone lies
Scattered, I must disprove my cowardice.
As it growls, between its teeth I see a furnace
With golden glimmering, shimmering flames.
Ancient and old, slithering tongues whispered this
Retreat, whimper, return to safer games.
This place is made of dangerous pieces
Shattered glass, jades and jewels like jagged blades.
Blood does not prevail, passed my scaled, monstrous
Tail, and men make no echo in deep graves.
Moving my living corpse round the corner,
I ask
Would you leave ashes for your coroner?
74 · Aug 2019
When Together
Briscoe Aug 2019
We were assailing city streets as was usual.
The pitter patter of passing feet all around.
A place solely described as bilingual
And beautiful, took her casual attention.
Acknowledging her distraction I asked, “There then?”
“I love the decor, all red, black and gold.”
“It is very pretty, interweaving
Fake, artificially antique and old.”
“But looks can often be deceiving.”

I looked to her, reading the sight before
Me. Her own dress like precious noire decor.
Dark tresses arranged in a precise mess.
Her faux french and her fox fur raincoat,
Clinging on with a concealing cologne,
The accent she had and the way she spoke.
She the precise princess of images
With a thousand evidences to say
That she was perfect in a way.

“Yes, I suppose they can be.”
73 · Sep 2019
Rhyme of Repetition
Briscoe Sep 2019
With each dusk, red recedes into darkness.
Empty desires echo like antique rhymes
Of Shakespeare, speaking of love fictitious.
Like apes to grapevines, up my desire climbs,
Incoherent growls of primal intent
For fruits. Perhaps a date among the thorns.
Gold light diminishing, as the moon's moment
Looms aloft, with a pale and nervous form.
The passage of time and carnage of thoughts
Project an old, desperate fantasy
On my bedroom ceiling. My feelings caught
In my true knowing none shall come to be.
The veins of time having washed off notions
That these desires could lead to devotions.
73 · Aug 2019
Please, Understand
Briscoe Aug 2019
There is no number of wishes
That can restore these images.
I could not feel it forever.
So I sequenced references together.
But no series of breaths
Or ink curvature
Can capture the experience.
All the same,
Tonight I felt the depth of our universe.

It cannot be imagined,
It cannot be understood
How far till stars end.
Yet if it could,
To truly know the sky's ebb and flow
It would bestow madness.
All the same I perceive and believe it
On occasion.

Tonight I saw brightness across the sea
I saw it was a ship's light shining towards the shore and me.
Opening out like Heaven's door
A ghostly poltergeist.

Vastly tired, I planned to retire.
Ghastly light sinking away into night,
As I surveyed the beach and conveyed
Myself towards warmer shades of home.

Then adrift the earthling wind
And dripping from the star's tendril pulse,
Came a feeling I have not yet determined
That emptied me of impulse.

Silence, moonlight and crumbling waves
All singing our seaside harmony.
Either way, I am free to fall
As synesthesia echoes through an endless hall.

Science, starlight and lunar cast shades,
To me, a piece between abyss,
Pouring consciousness upon me.
Gazing on I could not say
If I were on the seafloor or her surface.
Although why care? For I am free to fall
Home or away,
In any direction.
73 · Sep 2019
The Strange Way
Briscoe Sep 2019
The night drew itself across the scene
Like velvet over thin thighs and there was Ursula.
Her face drawn and painted like some artists scheme
Her round eyes the piercing blades of a peninsula.

The awkward moments couldn’t live long for some reason.
"You once told me you feared the ocean."
"That's because there's a place that steals and bends the light and offers no more, but a slithering flowing crystal. That dries and lies ‘I will quench the thirst and drench to drown away the filth’. But only chills flesh into a collection of bumps against the skeleton."
"It's strange to agree on such a particular decision."  
"And yet we agree?"
“We do.”
People can connect over things.
70 · Aug 2019
Walks
Briscoe Aug 2019
I think it's important to go walking.
Motion quiets motionless inner chaos,
Since nothing's as exhausting as talking
Myself to sleep or forces for focus
That fail to no avail like tests of maths.
Sleepless nights, reckless regrets, cowardice
All insights of my petrified past,
While my hair festers with blood like head lice.
I can't surpass the past as it passes
Through my mind in a myriad of grey
Clashing in the collage of mirages
From ages long gone into yesterday.
But when I walk, I see clearly that there
Is none to fear, I see I don't need care.
Briscoe Sep 2019
She came back in the afternoon.
Usually she leaves me my peace
Till after midnight. But she came too soon
And ruined dwindling light through spinning smoke from teas.

Ten songs ago, I saw her sway,
I tasted her cold shoulder and
Came back to receive her reprimand.
I never saw her voice and more
Never heard her face,
Only feeling some embrace
As we danced till twelve.

But she came back too early
I wasn't ready enough, nor strong nor steady.
She took me back to an old dance
And with bittersweet memories
Ruined my afternoon teas.
65 · Aug 2019
Unfairness
Briscoe Aug 2019
If only fair creatures played with fairness
Then I could have made this maiden happy.
She fair and far beyond me in finesse
And fitness and my heart proving feebly
That I cannot change my mind on her. So
I await when she will chide or charm me.
Choose if my flesh be cared for or hollowed.
For fair creatures are unfair as they tease
Evoking envy accidentally.
Jaded, jealous pieces of mess within
Swing me from fantasy to imagery
Of her and other men, in conclusion.
For this fair maiden has made my heart
Halt hopeless, then with her glass glance restart.
65 · Oct 2019
Sins Linger in the Smoke
Briscoe Oct 2019
The cigarette circumference
Is smooth against his face
And the smoke clouds precipitate
To tar teardrops. Pooling as a lake.
Before they all evaporate
Like decayed lungs of late smokers.

Last year
I found my uncle in his cave
Starved, greyed by paper embers,
Cursive scriptures and veils in waves.
As fires fade the way December
Eves into days of a brief fatherly presence.

This year,
I hear my cousin's down there too
With our brothers, under that wreath.
Round is the jaw of the their tomb
And jagged are the snaring teeth.
Like thorns that hook against sinew.

Round. Round and round.
They chant "It's not deep enough."
Down. Down and down.
Doomed to look, loom and drown
In tar teardrops.
The smoke lingers.
It remembers
It looms. The fumes and Hume.
How do I accuse
And can we agree
Which cause is true
Of that father's lesson.
Leading to the question,
To wonder if the father
Teaches to consume or fume
With incense or loss of innocence.
That commandment of his example
Vital as the signs displayed in pulsing waves.

A son of some man appears from the cave.
He turns back and sees that ember
Dwindling within.
Then takes a step toward the light.
"6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."
This is the word of the father
-Deuteronomy 6:6-7

— The End —