Red Ink Stains

The wall is a wall.
Sometimes it traps me here
in a one wall room,
nothing up and nothing down,
only my toes touch the ground.
The door hides from me
and whispers “You have no love.”
No love to share,
blank wall stare.

Others find the door
from another stare,
another place,
another face,
and correct me,
my inner space,
a lonely face,
until I lose my place,
and fall through
the invisible floor.
Till I am no more.
Loveless whore.

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© 2014 John Allen Richter

 

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

Rudyard Kipling

Hydie-O-Jeckyl-O

Never a day, a moment, a glimpse
of love.

Only fractions of people,
splitting their Jeckyls and Hydes,
feigning interest to
laugh at my demise….

My lonely spiral – a staricase spin,
down and down and down.
How dare I, they say, to speak,
when I should but honor
their piss stained lives,
soaking in the grisly fat
of their murdered meat.
Stenching, stenching, stenching.
I smell them,
therefore they stink.
They stink,
therefore they are.

Nothing, nothing, nothing,
but Jeckyls and Hydes
spackling and cackling themselves.
Trapped in their own grandiose minds,
a width a thousand miles.
But to be buried in a hole
less the size of Whoville smiles.

Down, down, down the hole,
Hydie-o-Jeckyl-o….
There’s always room for jello.
Goodbye to you and you….

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© 2014 John Allen Richter

My Reason to Breathe

Lo my heart be still,
tho should shiver still,
that words as these –
mere fallen leaves –
upon your altar,
so Heav’nly…..

That I, mere shapen soil,
true now but love spoiled,
that her tenderness graces me –
her presence replaces me
into the man
I need to be.

And I pray, dear lover,
that nary time, nor any other
could touch my heart as you.

Oh lord Eros, bless this time
with her ever frozen in my mind,
that her soft lips,
and sweet tenderness,
forever be mine…..

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© 2014 John Allen Richter

Dandelion Grave

Other cities,
other places.
With passing streets, all in rows,
with names that rhyme in my little prose.
Shadows fall on the sidewalks
in cities I should have been.
Cities that have always been.
But never there.
never where
they should be.

Houses all in a row
swallowed by the same grass.
Some cut shorter than others.
Some with stripes that say
“Look at my yard,
how happy and merry
we look today.”
But really only to say
the sloth next door
is not as good as I.
All that effort nigh,
for only to die.

And then what will the shadows say?
There lays he of pretty lawn.
A man of greenery –
but no dandelions.
Never a dandelion
in his world of stripes.
How masterful was he?

Well la dee dah….
You’ve spent your life in a world of
“who gives a fuck.”
Congratulations Stripe Man,
man of city I never knew.
Man of places
that were never really true.
and nobody cares
that your grave is covered
in dandelions.
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© 2014 John Allen Richter