Nightmarish poems in modern online poetry collection read4free

Nightmarish poems. Weirdo? Sicko? You be the judge. If you wanted something a little different, tired of reading that same old LITTLE BO PEEP SAT ON A SHEEP, then maybe this is the exotic homepage for you, an innovative page of readfree texts.

Read free online and access modern free verse poems on subjects such as war, death, cancer, nature, school and city life. This free reading site is by Hugh Cook of genghislotus.com, author of the poetry book GENGHIS LOTUS POETRY COLLECTION. For e-mail details click the following:
Hugh Cook
To access novels and stories online (fantasy, SF, horror) click this link:

hugh cook

NINE STEPS TO CALIFORNIA

The rambling sky is racing from ebon to violet. The traffic cops have infiltrated my beer fridge. My gravesite has migraine. The bony hands on amnesia have their claws on my memory.

Your calligraphy is beyond me, indecipherable. The highways have encrypted our organics, have enforced their algorithms upon us.

Before I did drugs, the loudspeaker was already there, lodged within my head, broadcasting from Egypt.

Let me smoke your milk. Let me roll it. Let me rise from your thighs, whey-faced and exhausted, to face the unadulterated impetus of the sea.

NIGHTMARE

My flesh hangs upside down
In the dragon's dungeon.
Pregnant with stingrays,
I vomit up cheese.
My white thighs leaking.
The Malatroon grins,
Dissecting my kneecaps
For the hysterical laughter of adolescents.
All this is both live and on prime time.
The fan spins faster.
Liquid flickers from the blades.
The spiders, the alcoholic geckos,
The scorn of her syllables,
The scorn of her breasts,
Inflict on me their worst.
But dreams are for waking, right?
Waking, I find my wings
Clipped to a nub of nothing.
My feet have no claws.
I have lost all my colors in translation.

LIFE IN THE DEGENERATE WEST

Before the purifications of the Caliphate,
Life in the degenerate West
Was a carnival of the aberrant.
We mainlined toilets,
Got drunk on fermented sputum
And bowed down in worship to our television sets.
Now we are ramrod,
Our lives setsquare,
The calipers of a perfect circle
Domineering us.
In our achieved utopia
We have abandoned our melting lipstick,
Our octopus cavorting,
And live clean,
Waking to the Alhambras of prayer
In a world
Where every horizon enjoys the grace of Mecca.

CLOCKS

Sitting in my hospital bed
I can hear the hissing scalpels of the clocks,
Appetites steaming,
Itching for incision.
Time is the great vivisector,
Actual, potential, unavoidable.
But I will outlast at least this hourglass.
Fingers crossed.

THE ERASURE OF CERTAINTY

[i]

The erasure of certainty
Was never quite announced
But has arrived.
We start the day with accelerated rainbows,
The bitter colors
Frogmarching the fractured seconds
Raw to incineration.
Before coffee break,
We're recapitulation evolution,
Transforming seed capital to IPO.
By 9 pm,
We're still at it,
Selling the Andes,
Renting the benthic depthspace,
Mortgaging Japan.
Arbitrage:
Those Dead Sea thirsts, that Canadian water.
Brazilian sunlight to central Alaska.
By 2 am, it's getting hectic.
The temps are dancing upside down.
The boss starts speaking Tibetan.
A disenfranchised stapler turns carnivorous.
And this is only the beginning.

[ii]

Another midnight
Brings Saturday.
Our fingernails are shorter but our jobs are still here.
Days off? Oh, those got exported.
Somewhere in distant Mekongalota
The company's vacations are getting done
By vivisected members of the wombat tribe,
Working for the minimum.
And we are here, at deadline,
Trading options in genetic bingo,
Leveraging Iraqi chihuahua patents
For prime-time shares in trans-Plutonic orbits.

[iii]

Sunday,
The stockmarket makes a surge,
But we are trashed by the cockroach derivatives,
By the prolapsed bonds,
By the dollar's brutal allergy to the eggplant.
The famished roses
Suck the taste of steel from the dead.
And so we're struggling.
It's downsize, downscale,
And cut, at all costs, our costs.
Yes, we're economizing,
The plumbing vetoed, the sanitation
Outsourced to a morgue in Ulan Bator.
Waste not want not!
Recycle!
Telephone conversations
Reprocessed five and fifty times,
Blur into rosebuds.
The full-grown famished roses,
Which we by now are far too poor to water,
Suck the living liquid from the dead.

[iv]

Marvelous technology, the dream compressor.
Three hours of sleep
To crush the rehab into us.
We dream communally
And swap our vital memos as we dream.
Then Monday morning cracks the world awake.

[v]

Monday shoves me awake,
Cracked to five dimension.
Transmogrified!
The turgilator, evidently,
Has been at work.
I'm sprouting voices, I'm linking
With the Higher Powers.
And find more turbulence.
Gravity
Insists it must renegotiate.
The photon
Wants to default on its transcendence,
And, with this treason,
The whole foundation package,
Time and space,
The basic deal,
Is up for grabs.

[vi]

As the TV news reports,
In the headwaters of the River Thames,
The wings of a butterfly are beating.
Ominously.

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