The best...and worst of EvilToasterElf

EvilToasterElf

Welcome to Fyffe

Three miles down country road 402
smiled Satan
His face was painted four meters tall
on the front side of a white water tower
hovering over the largest building in town,
the firehouse

as we left a sign drifted into the rearview mirror
welcome to Fyffe, Alabama
Home of the Red Devils

Where the volunteers shoulder the burdens
of Hell’s Firefighters

EvilToasterElf

The civilized basement

A collection of spent cigarettes
gathers in a basement corner.
They whisper to each other
in a language of ash and footprints.

They speak as small brothers of volcanoes.
They join a conversation
in the bubbly tongues of beer caps,
a language beyond five cent redemption.

The cigarettes are convinced
in the absence of God
when they build their lecture halls
of dust.

They writhe like severed fingers
among the mold,
under the savage death throes
of boilers and aging pipes.

The bottle caps grow restless
and steal away cigarettes for axels.
Two caps joined by a cigarette
roll slowly away,
metal against concrete.

Some made pacts with the bloated spiders.
Others fed eternally,
on their reflections in the puddles
dripped by the water pipes.

They lived immune
to the bursts of dawn outside.

While weeds and vines crept
through the crevices of civilization
they passed stories,
in the languid dialects
of creatures unhinged

stuckinline

evil toaster elf....good stuff! i like your interpretations of life.

EvilToasterElf

Meteorology

I rode to the end of the last ocean
it does not satisfy me
The wind nudges me backward
to the top of Cherry Hill
Where my Huffy with a broken kickstand
lays beside my skyward stare
Two hundred feet above Oak Street
hunger rises in the dark
I reach my destination and knock
on a black door of space
and ask the stars to grab their bikes
Instead I enter, it is too
late for them to come outside
I am a corkscrew at dinner, writhing
to open a fine merlot
I spill it
Red life runs across whitenoise tablecloths
staining the chaos
I sit in a coriolis chair
legs hang derelict above the floor
My expanding iris inhales
the faded magenta that still spirals
through gouges in the balsa wood
dripping off leaves, added
to the table, when guests join the feast
in that dysfunctional house
Filled with dusty probability
from which the comets still yield calculations
and the brown earth trembles
like winter children before the weather forecast

EvilToasterElf

twin2 wrote:

EvilToasterElf wrote:

She’s come undone

"she sings in the shower to sold out crowds."

I liked the whole poem, but the line above made me smile.

That poem holds a special place for me because I don't think I've ever tried to write when I was that drunk any other time. But different perspectives lead you down different roads -

EvilToasterElf

Southern Fire

In the middle of an Alabama forest
we needed firewood,
so we bought an axe,
and chopped the fallen oak
until the blisters on our hands bled.
But we are no boyscouts,
we used a starter log to begin the burning.
As the sky darkened,
the forest closed in
on our small campsite,
the fire grew as it ate.
We rose from our chairs only
to poke the loose wood,
sculpting the flame.
Wicked faces appear in the center
of the fire’s stone enclosure.
Not the faces of torture,
or the eyes of pain,
but the open mouth of hunger.
For four hours we stared
into our creation,
unwilling to let it die
but knowing how little it cared
who had made it.
When the profits of our axework
were spent, we played tic-tac-toe
in the black and orange embers.

On country route 402 I saw the frame of an old house,
black and scarred.
Five brick pillars survived,
standing with dark plaster at their peaks,
fingers through which the burning roof
had fallen like loose sand.

twin2

EvilToasterElf wrote:

twin2 wrote:

That poem holds a special place for me because I don't think I've ever tried to write when I was that drunk any other time. But different perspectives lead you down different roads -

Very true.

EvilToasterElf

tchaliz wrote:

Those parts are very great!
T

Thankyou sir, the best parts are usually the endings- I try to tie most of the endings into the title

EvilToasterElf

Stanley

his suit was an irreplaceable appendage;
his personal foliage of dusk,
it absorbed the morning glare on the walk to work,
and refused the illumination of street lights on the way home.
In between was reserved, the sign on his breast said,
do not disturb.
His personal religion was the quietude of numbers,
he has almost no memory of names and faces,
only voices attached to phone numbers.
His mind has no room for solstices
the year is broken into a chain of opening days,
he has an empty seat reserved in every tri-state stadium
he gives away season tickets all year, just in case
they make the playoffs.
These are the trap-doors from tedium,
he has no time for hatred,
existence and sanity require no more
than his minds empty space of ambivalence.
He loved a woman once;
and he was very honest with her,
she was a close friend for 3 years,
and a voiceless stranger for 17,
but their marriage was comfortable for 20.
His children were just graduating from college
they have never even asked him his middle name.

Stanley

They found it through wet, blurry vision,
etched into a granite slab,
above an empty coffin,
above an empty grave,
two months after a 747 crashed into his corner office.

twin1

EvilToasterElf wrote:

She’s come undone

as dusk enfolds the trail.
She climbs until starlight melds
with the canopy, and severs
flashlight spectrums into silver coils
that bathe bare oak limbs.
Her foggy breath became memories
of skinny suburban kids
camping in backyard sing a’ longs
chanting guns and roses to an audience
behind sliding glass doors,
where smiling parents swell with lemonade
waiting for children’s dreams to reach murky fruition
in college dorm rooms, energized with hormones,
slaves to unknown thoughts that cling
like beer stains to white shirts.
Before professional entropy grips
that cubicle of the mind,
she sings in the shower to sold out crowds.
Imagined audiences scream her name
in voices that rise and fall to the stage,
rolling like quiet waves at a vacation getaway,
dancing in the air, like
the five pointed oak leaves that glide,
playfully to the grass,
outside her window.

I really like this one ETF. It is very good! I really like the variety of what you write. That you cover so many topics. Thanks for the good poetry!

Being Enlightened

Very moving piece, ETE!!!! Wow! You really made me feel for Stanley and the fact that he just coasted through his days, in drone mode and then, all of a sudden, one tragic moment and he's just snuffed out! Well, kinda leaves me feeling like my life should be lived to the fullest every day I'm blessed to be gracing this planet. Very sad stroy and just fantastic, IMO. I'm glad you want to publish your work, ETE, it really is great!

EvilToasterElf

Gluten, BE, Twins, Tchaliz - thankyou

BE - if you think that one is sad you should read the big one on page 2 - and I was working on one last night that might hit you pretty well -

stuckinline

wow, just wow!

twin1

ETF - Stanley is just so touching. I agree with BE on this one. I just love how your poems give a glimpse and sum up someone's life. Good writing.

EvilToasterElf

Stanley is a fictional story about 9/11 but if you guys want the real deal - that one is on page 2 of the thread - A distant survivor

EvilToasterElf

history bleeding

In Tuxedo a broken furnace smolders,
like a pile of ash molded into the shape of a tree.

Wood braces straddling the façade
have started their slow decay.
Its surface is pockmarked by missing stones,
chiseled away by age and indifference

A cross of steel poles block the sagging entrance,
a forgotten offering to the gods of manufacture.
Stones tumble to the earth in front of me,
and I hear the echoes of boots, of processions like
corduroyed funerals, praying with those
blasted workman’s hands.

black footpaths wind around the base,
raked with shards of coal.
I imagine the people who worked here
piling loads into the mouth of a monster;
as some find themselves shoved
into the dark rectangles of the earth’s hunger
to help compensate for those displaced chunks
of black rock.

Vast tarps cover the roof, a shroud
the sparrows kneel on to pray,
to chant their hymns to the forest
that overfed a demon until it died.
If this furnace were a history book
it would bleed, the dark words of
leaking from chapter to chapter.

EvilToasterElf

The Alignment of Planets

I roll out of bed when remnants
of dreams pull like an aching
lover back to the sheets.
There I remain speeding
down moonlit highways
on motorcycles I’ve never learned
to ride.
I pass cars with vanity plates that
will never exist, filled with tired
motorists going to dream vacations
that will never end, but never began.

As I put my feet on the ground
and tear away tapeworms
of nerve impulses,
I do not feel a violent
disruption of worlds colliding.
One world fades slowly,
like a depressed swathe of Earth
rising to meet the mountains,
after the weight of a glacier recedes.

As the spray of a shower
splashes my face, I begin to lather
my body, my eyes remain closed
and the world of sinks and toilets
disappears for another fifteen minutes.

My body finds itself among the
tropical fish, blindingly colorful.
When I peak my head out of the water
and swim onto shore to towel
off, I find myself dressed in winter
clothes on the sandbar, and from that
beach always drive impossibly
back to class, on a cold day
in upstate New York.

twin1

EvilToasterElf wrote:

The Alignment of Planets

I roll out of bed when remnants
of dreams pull like an aching
lover back to the sheets.
There I remain speeding
down moonlit highways
on motorcycles I’ve never learned
to ride.
I pass cars with vanity plates that
will never exist, filled with tired
motorists going to dream vacations
that will never end, but never began.

As I put my feet on the ground
and tear away tapeworms
of nerve impulses,
I do not feel a violent
disruption of worlds colliding.
One world fades slowly,
like a depressed swathe of Earth
rising to meet the mountains,
after the weight of a glacier recedes.

As the spray of a shower
splashes my face, I begin to lather
my body, my eyes remain closed
and the world of sinks and toilets
disappears for another fifteen minutes.

My body finds itself among the
tropical fish, blindingly colorful.
When I peak my head out of the water
and swim onto shore to towel
off, I find myself dressed in winter
clothes on the sandbar, and from that
beach always drive impossibly
back to class, on a cold day
in upstate New York.

Very nice ETF...I just love your poems!

EvilToasterElf

twin1 wrote:

Very nice ETF...I just love your poems!

Well thankyou - there's one line in here I particularly like, it's based off of a geological principal called isostatic rebound - essentially the Earth bounces back up after it's pressed down by a glacier

FinsburyParkCarrots

Put more up and I'll crit it for you via a PM.