Leah Johnston Poetry

and then the emptiness reached out it’s infant fingers
and tugged on your sleeve

as if to say
it wanted to be looked upon
to be spoken to

i guess
even the emptiness doesn’t want to be empty.

I searched my computer screen for hours
only to find
I had nothing to say anymore

the day was as placid as a xanax
the californian sun
swooning in smoggy bliss
over the hillside
lulling my desires
into perfect atrophy
but god-
my ass is tight.

I should
do something-
be someone-
this youtube channel is endless
did you know
there are dogs that can dance on their hind legs
just like people?

Your lips mute the noise
like sticky bandages
that announce their immortality
before flipping you off
in soapy bathtubs

easier to crawl into a
word processor
and close my soul like a coffin

less painful
this way.

I am but a backspace of white linen
the wisp of a fractured kiss
the eulogy of a butterfly’s wing
stomped out
on the foot of an angry August

Oh, that there were some different ending
one less beautiful-profane
than to bleed out
like a tiny punctured dream
writhing in tortured ecstacy
beneath the expletive of your limbs
your mouth splitting the skin of my hunger
like lighting splits the bark
bleeding forth
these propane-secrets
like toxic rain
from my eyes:
all my life
all my life
I’ve waited
for this moment
to be held by you
to be swallowed up
consumed by the hurricane
of our consummate desire

Such is the beauty and such is the cruelty
A love worth living for
A love worth dying for

The day had gone
Unnoticed
For several years
And the incident
Which they do not speak of
Had been hidden like the innards of
A morgue
Slipped between the pages
Of some old dusty book
That they never cared to open
Again

Years had passed
And still she was
Amazed by her capacity
To weep over
That unformed remnant
Of herself

The incidental one
That visits
Like the ghost of a distant cousin
Who never was that close
In life
But just pops in
Every now and then
To tug on her skirt

While she’s doing the dishes

Or prod her side

As she watches a movie

About women in aprons

That dimly resemble

Herself.

This incident

Must be swept

Back under the rug

With the dust
And unconscionable truths

Too big

To drown out

With the Asprin.

Some things

Are better left

Unnamed.

Some things

Are better left

Forgotten.

Once you’ve lived there long enough
you start to hear
a slight scream
piercing the plaster
distressing the scrapbooks
pressing against the gullets of those
that would conspire to keep it
silent

adamant
as the high-pitched fervor
of electrical wires
germinating
in the clinking blanks of dinner table conversation
in the midnight drone of television static
and the vacant rhymes of storybook fables
that always seem to know
more than they are letting on
it demands to be known
demands to be heard
even by those
that would conspire
to keep it silent.

It is the
the ontogeny
of futility
passed down
through generations

a
quiet
and pervasive
knowing

it is all
in vain.

We curved together as though love were circular
As though time were a question mark
As though existence were some kind of liquid virus
That could be transmuted
Between two tongues

Around our heads
Our infant deaths blossomed like malignant tumors
Spinning crystalline cobwebs
Wherein we fluttered
Like moths in asthmatic cookie jars
Wrestling the sighs of ever-after
The illustrious illusions of limitlessness
Asphyxiated in a rental gown of bone

Tomorrow I will set sail for a distant city
Where once again, I will be a refugee of my own design

In a few years time
We will meet in a cafe
And gaze into each others eyes
Only to discover
We are always
Alone.

You are more alive now
Than you ever were in life.
More beautiful in breathlessness
Than a china doll
Propped in a toy-shop window.

Night after night
I reach out
As the hand that reaches for a pocket that isn’t there.
Your beauty burns like a mirage on the horizon
My flesh is aches like a desert
Dreaming of the sea.

Oh nocturnal whisperer,
Will you stay with me this once?
Will you consummate our souls into constellations
So that we can be reborn
Like stars in the night?

Or will you wane like an echo
Fainter and fainter
Til at last
My idle tears are spent
Like moon pools in the dawn?

The soliloquy of self
serenades the funeral procession of my life.

Now it is time to bid our farewells.
Now we must craft some meaning from
This heap of dead dreams.

I linger
In the cocoon of my breast.
I see my face
Only through
The distortions of my own lens,
And through the glass of midnight-delusions
That shatter
Every time I open my eyes.

Truth bares no hope.
It is a drunkard’s cold shower.
It is the undertaker
That carries your childhood ashes
Off to the grave.

I gather myself within myself
And watch the world through a plexiglass of pleasantry
Longing to break through
Like an unborn cry in the lung.

Like a footprint slowly fading,
like a snowman in the heat,
you will leave me,
softly,
gently,
just like
dying in my sleep.

Your love
Like suicide
Has its sinister magnetism
That draws me to the edge of the blade
As I’m cutting through the carrots
Or pulls me up dangerously close
To the side of the freeway
Where I can feel the breath of violence
Chase along my skin
As the Big Rigs rush recklessly past

Your hand
Between my thighs
Brings forth that kind of violence
Shaking me
Like a baby
And then filling me up
Like a breathing tube

It leaves me hungry
At night
Gazing into the open refrigerator
Or pacing
Through cold quarters
Like a corpse called up from the crypt

So when you tell me to
Give up
Or give in
Because it isn’t working
Because it never was
We both know
There can be no
Absolution

Like a toy boat
Cast into an angry ocean
We never
Had a choice.