Everyone, say hello to our latest debut contributor
(and when I say ‘Say hello’ I mean ‘Go check out her Substack and subscribe to it, or at least read some of her excellent work’).Harley- in what I think is an extremely impressive and classy move- has not only provided four genuinely excellent poems for her submission today, she has also nonchalantly handed over an original artwork of hers for the image. These kind of statement making moves do not go unnoticed by me.
So yet again the STSC has pulled off another coup and secured another Real One to join our roster. Lucky us. And lucky you, too.
Enjoy.
TJB.
The Labyrinth of Life
We are all hidden gods Actors in our own theatre of neurosis Heads full of mental caricatures & brine We craft our own cruelties Foreseers of innumerable tragedies With mere glimpses into the shadow of the soul We alchemize our condition And birth the world around us Based on generational landmarks of chaos Rooted in an acute awareness The underbelly of life Is the trajectory of fates lessons Acted out in the forest of a minds corruption To know one’s power Is to become the god of one’s own life Wielding the puppet strings of psyche Invokes the willingness to strive Indefinitely, with destiny derived In the chasm of Our unlived lives
Gutter-Sweet
in a cartoon society nameless lovers make pop rock paradigms haunting phantom arcades, partaking in drugged anarchisms they initiate secret states in hermetic irony, void of vision, made in milk-sheen shrine of a shattered christ, sitting on the dashboard of a throttled SUV smelling of sex and fetal fugitives, feral cults, and degenerate regimes this is the apocalyptic sorority of filth initiates, gendered sleaze & puppetted profane religious street junkies in narcotic farmlands brewing up holy and tending to it making habit of the enigmatic, living life as a land of expired timestamps ticking time clocks and tethered, tied to cell blocks & lasting glance congested streets of anglo-angst with lungs full of huff and analog narcotics they chug and they thug around tattered burlap stolen side-eye and melancholy droop seraphic incantations of inherited stale muse all blood and guts, all diagnosed love slut and sexless glue fumes they are amid filth, penalized for extinguished dreams dead set on tv dinner doom & fermented disease
Bye Bye Baby
Girl leaks umbilical honey at the stillborn motel An endangered species, a woman’s wrath unfolding She hatches out of her cocoon a new existence Blushing battered, forgotten men congregating Bliss as grotesque, the bliss of mental freedom, Ribbons of the unknown unfurling In ancient texts from the suburbs of sludge The sea is impregnated With the lost hopes of girlhood The embryo of coral babies Swimming in innards of butcher sap Sipping on pagan milk of the mythological mother Who aborted fate It’s the unborn pruning of inner sickness Soaked in the sugar cult of infants flowerdeep Mind of seance, mind of depravity- bridled with artistic disposition Creating a newborn trauma from the soft rot of disaster Fertile lands of flesh untethered Fragrant from living Dead structures of delivery parcels A returned package of plush A childhood never delivered
Every Day is Armageddon Day
It was only a matter of time before the battle became a bruise in the innards of heaven Where I stooped to my knees and steeped my sorrow in tea for the betterment of man. God forsake the shitty city down where I was born and raised on the relic of old values, and taught as a tease. Men deemed to intimidate me- and strip me of my vocal chords till I was a music box replaying the same old sensations. I was wasting away my time sitting, simmering, complaining like a sickling who formed her own sickroom. Cease the fire- I’ve earned no sympathy behind these closed doors inside of me Where the gas has lit, I have laid.
Great poetry. I read 'Gutter-Sweet' in Jim Morrison's voice as per 'Horse Latitudes'.
These are such great poems, one after the other. Everyday is Armageddon Day really hits hard for me. Amazing, amazing, amazing.