thought – Page 2 – Kevin Trent Boswell

Zing, Pow

Nothing stings in quite the same way
As when you sting yourself
Forgetting the purpose of your boundaries
Casually placing them up on the shelf

You had them in hand for a good reason
And that good reason, you’ve still got
Once you remember why you need them
You’ll marvel at how you forgot

Area 25 by Trent Boswell — Available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more

Sweat

To strive with the burden
Of what the next hours might bring

To have wrestled daily
With the fear of losing life

To be saddled with the dread
That there may be
Some indeterminate sentence
Of interminable, inescapable life
That one is somehow
Condemned to endure

To flounder helplessly
In the drowning pool
That sits between
These two feverish fits of delirium

To have drunk the madman’s wine,
That laced broth which inspires
And conjures those horrid devils
Known as fear, hope,
And love

Available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more

Throat

I only want for you
To feel the warm waters wash over you
To drop down deep
into the well of experience

There’s no need to touch the depths;
It’s only down there
For those who truly desire the taste

Will you drink of the fountain,
Before you feel the insatiable thirst?

I don’t know when
The need will come

Or how you’ll work in
The solution,
But you can,
If you really want to,
Ride the whole wave down

Right down to the bottom,
Where the most
Pleasurable monster
Is waiting
To slurp your entire being
Right down its
Hungry throat

You may find it easier
To surrender to the creature
And its complete
Consumption of you
Than you had previously
Imagined

storage space

it does not require
very much square footage
to store melancholy

it fits neatly
inside of an eye

discouragement will
fit perfectly
in the bottom
of one shoe,
ennui in the other,

and you’ll still have
wiggle room
for your toes,

as you walk around
no place special,
all by yourself

loneliness doesn’t
take up much space

it fits easily
into a single
empty hand

thrust

make whatever you like of this,
but know that it may, likewise,
make whatever it likes of you.

thrust and struggle and burn
loudly feign, but ever so quietly,
an attempt, in the corner,
through muted silence, to enunciate

struggle with the reason
why is it that one does so yearn
to take the difficult lesson
one cannot be brought to hate

twist and then don’t,
because of the can’t
and moreover, he will not,
exactly as they were never told

a question, wide-eyed, receives
the penalty of the question’s answer
and it stings, being cold and hot,
enough to make one shriek and pant

a perjured testimony, it will recant
a tortured, and elated dancer
flailing there, on the dance floor,
it joyously thanks and aching, grieves

the hatches all battened down
and lashed to withstand the wind;
the wind begs contritely for more
claims not to know instruction

the end result, ruby red and sore
scoreboard racked and tucked away
nothing else to buck, or smartly say
all done for the night, playing the clown

make it into anything whatsoever,
anything that you want it to be,
for it won’t be made into something
that it isn’t supposed to be already

it has always known what it is, steady
to be whatever he chooses to shape
to make it speak and twist and sing
if only it is able and willing to see

locus

weighted dice spilling from broken jaws

tainted allegories and
flawless renderings of the invisible

dry beans pour out of sacks
onto tables of diamond and ivory

an abacus of emeralds,
strung on strands of horsehair

a tiny pewter coin sits
atop a scale of solid silver
resting on a column of solid gold

pristine smudges of chocolate
on acrylic peanut butter tapestries

buckets full of comets kicked over
and showers of sparks
falling on the floor

it’s enough to fill
the silos of the universe
top to bottom

but is it enough?

each individual grain of sand
grates against another;
all are dutifully counted

the hourglass is emptied
of all its inexorable empires

excuses are forged from breath,
and hammered into the sacred elixir
of nothingness

there is no motion
in this river’s torrent

the asphalt streets stole it all,
sold it to capricious eels
who swim in desperate candlelight

germinating helixes
bristling thorn vines

funneling promising poisons
into the infant mouths
of ageless behemoths
who rule small places

culmination is the beginning
of the termination of endings
and the siphoning off
of all the intermittent middle bits,
the ones that,
as an afterthought,
we tacked onto the ends
in carefully coordinated haste

the endeavor,
doomed from the outset

thank goodness
we never embarked upon the journey
and that we saw it through
all the way to the end

we can scarcely contain ourselves
from raving about
what raucous ecstatic bliss
it was, from the pistol start
to the razored end

steal the serpent’s fangs

replace its venom
with politesse
and useless smalltalk

watch giddily
as it pathetically
gnaws and gums
unproductively at its prey

we dare not speak
of our elusive mysteries,
not to the droll, sour, uninitiated brood,
lest they discover our secret formula
of beginning in the middle
and ending at the front part
of the second third half
of each hind quarter,
but only on Thursdays,
except on leap years of an august May

the excitement would surely
be too much for their frail constitutions,
and over dead, they would drop down,
into new incarnations
of ceaseless wonder

and when, if so,
would any of it
ever cease?

take care,
that none of this ever occurs,
except for those precious few times
that it unavoidably does not

dial back
the wilting clock
and try not to
try again