The Labyrinth of Life

Four Poems

Everyone, say hello to our latest debut contributor Harley Claes (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.

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Collage by the poet herself.

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.

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