My Modern Surrealist Mind

The beer has drowned itself in the cask;
I'm pulling brown air for punters.
The fridge is baring its teeth to my throat;
its inner cold works wonders.
I'm falling out of love with myself
and rising into bad karma,
slipping in circles into wrong holes,
the maelstrom enfolding this drama.

The house is talking in beats, not language,
the mirror is crying in rhyme in its frame.
The mother in my head has crawled inside my womb
and made childish mess of my brain.
The past and present love interests
I keep straddled like ties in my veins
are singing for their freedom
like birds trapped in a cage.

The tea leaves have turned to ash;
I'm swallowing soft, rotten bone.
The roads outside have become a map
and there's no symbol for home.
The waters of my birth are breaking,
I'm drowning in lost promise and hope,
where the shore has fallen from beneath my feet
and the umbilical cord is frayed rope.

The art in my bloodstream is off,
I'm living on sidelines and introversion.
There is mold between the folds
where my ego basks in perversion.
The sun and the moon are trading light
yet I'm always lost in the dark,
rubbing together my splintered wounds
to try to create a spark.

I'm sane somewhere in my sanity,
there is logic and sense between lines,
normality and formality beneath the works
that will one day explain these times.
There is mismatched dogma, plagiarized faith,
somewhere in my dignity and poise,
a dark and unseen solitude
within this frantic noise.

I'm a twenty-first century slave,
a model for commercial misery.
There is only joy and light in that
which lives solely to serve me.
There are flies birthed from children
inside all the eyes of my friends -
I'm telling these lies to preserve my life
as the means make sense of the ends.




Shaunna Harper's picture

ABOUT THE POET ~
Shaunna Harper lives and works in the UK, and is an avid writer of both prose and poetry. She has had poetry, short stories and a novel, Homelands, published.


Last updated March 14, 2014