A Key to the Cage My Dear

Jay was only 12: he wasn’t rich he wasn’t poor

He had some friends from the house—the house that stood next door.

Old man really loved his whiskey

One day he caught them kissing,

Two kids reported missing found dead in the Mississippi River,

Neither could deliver, two lips that stood to quiver

Intertwined in agony growing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

So god got off his knees, cleaned his hands and shivered.

J.Garrett c.2012

Maybe it’s the buzzing in his head
That makes him so still.
Locked in a coffee shop turned
Execution station
Where the chairs have become electric.
Maybe it’s the fact that his head must buzz.

… I mean, I’m not going to say the word, but you probably know what I’m talking about. It just doesn’t seem like something you should have to grapple with in silence while everything that you care about floats away. It could be a discussion—I could finally expel from my torso this feeling that writhes like an army of locusts; I could finally wake up in the morning without dew in my eyes.

You just pour everything you have into it. Start building your life around it; planning your life around it; it becomes your life and suddenly it’s overwhelming. You don’t even realize do you? You don’t even realize how dire this situation could be? Oh you could lose it all my friend. But that’s just the point—it’s worth it and it’s frightening. 

Where the desert creek fizzles to a drying puddle;

as the last leaf falls from a dying tree;

at the foot of a crumbling bridge;

underneath a tearing sky, I rest.

Where I rest, my clothes drip ink onto concrete.

c.2012 Josh Garrett

A seed called Campore

grows two heads. 

In the light of day we juxtapose;

in the night we sing to it’s destruction. 

Whispers after lovers; lovers after whisper.

There’s a house at the bottom of the street.

It sits beside a river that carries the drunken dead

to a bed of sunken nests,

where rests the foolish. 

In the basement is a creature with no mind for silence.

It wants to hear applause, smell appraisal, taste acceptance;

it wants to get out.

The skeleton of beauty is found at the cage doors:

picked at by gnawing jaws.

Blooming trees which bear fruit burn under it’s gaze

and progeny are strewn to a wind. 

It’s been spoken of to burn it down.

I want to burn it down.

But it just needs taming. It needs taming

and a little blood to grease it’s teeth.

But I’ve been blaming my grudge against the weak;

the weeks of straining beneath the beast. 

A game called Sisyphus

played in the house at the end of the street. 

c.2012 Josh Garrett

What I had been was good; good enough.

But here I see the choices—they’re beyond me,

and my lip quivers.

The draw is natural but I’d rather be blind.

c.2012 Josh Garrett

It grumbled deeply.

Like the flinch of the superstitious when 

the leper—at midnight—threw 7 horseshoes 

through 13 mirrors.

It was a proving ground.

Where the oil leaked from my mechanized heart

and damaged the delicate white.

Where hypnagogic imagery infested

the landscape,

painted your senses,

drained your senses,

destroyed the landscape.

Reincarnated the world as a shard of glass

that only reflects little pieces of what you truly are.

You are a proving ground.

You versus you versus you.

c.2012 Josh Garrett

After isolation the air is fire to my skin
but before administration I’ll retire to Within. 
I’ll feed upon the hungry and drown the thirsty kin
so the the war Within will more pretend
to be your only friend.

c.2012 Josh Garrett