April in Exile
The Morrigan soars across emerald skies.
Devilry will only join in doom.
Madness mixes as much it can.
Harpies hover above my barren mount,
They shit tar and turpentine.
Depression and Delirium struggle to reign supreme.
Sloth, my deadliest sin, blasts them both.
It owns me now.
My cloven tongue licks its bloodied lips
An unshaven cheek peels away,
Its barren rotting skin.
This face may show decay,
For none who care shall look upon it.
My sluggish hands slowly get to work,
The cogs cough and moan, as dust rises
And cobwebs are torn by movement;
Black smoke rises from my nose.
Exile tastes of mouldy bread.
Envy projects scenes of joy,
I miss the play, the party-lights.
My nights glitter with the spectre of artillery fire.
I anger and confuse my former friends.
Forgive me, Jocasta. I am blinded by bitterness.
I am hollow.
I cannot join your merry nights
Without defiling them.
Forgive me, Medea, I will bleed for your craft.
Forgive me, Flowers. I will not disturb your bloom.
Forgive me, classicists, for leaving your velvet fold.
I am weak, but will return.
I am woken by battle cries.
The homestead shivering once again;
The ravings of an old Ogre,
Whose self-righteous mania
Makes even the dogs cringe with shame.
How cruel, for Dementia to curse this hold a second time.
Academia appears to me,
Her patience is running out.
Mild, she once was.
A golden Minerva for whom I knelt.
Sloth now stays my hand,
And she grows darker every empty day.
She is Nemesis, fuelled by the furies’ zest.
She will have my blood before summer.
May now crawls upon the stage,
A month before the horrid trial.
Academia and Sloth fight without an end.
Depression is a man-eater with crimson manes.
He tears my flesh,
Bit by bit.
In exile, I cannot bring pestilence upon the blissful.
In exile, I can diminish in desolate dreams.
As a beast peels off my skin with the utmost patience,
I await my doom.
The way is shut,
All paths will unravel soon.
May Meandering
I
This is the prologue to my obituary,
I write it while lashes ring in my ears.
No more scribbled shit will further burden
Your tired eyes, reader.
I stroll betwixt sand and storms,
Waiting for Damocles’ blade to be released.
Don’t worry, it won’t be long.
Maggots hollow out the flesh,
Carving caverns into bones,
Carving homes for bugs and beetles,
Rotted beneath the sun,
Rotted beneath the rain,
I lie slain in meadowsweet.
Destined to be a den
For crawling creatures of the night.
I slew myself for the greater good,
For shame, for honour and such toss.
Ajax-like I plunged a blade into my chest,
Oedipus-evoking I gouged out my eyes.
A hollow husk to house the gnawing ones
Is what became of me.
Blood spilled in idle crying,
Flows deep into the chasms of the earth.
Gaps and fissures open up to swallow me.
The black soil shows its teeth,
Its vampire-like grin.
‘Desde abajo te devora
Desde abajo te devora.’
And none around to bury me,
None to cover my bloody tears with gold.
None to take a scalp or a bone,
A token of death.
None to sprinkle lilies, to sprinkle blooming death,
None to mourn the eternal dead.
And I awake from a maddening dream,
To see death without a grave.
The earth vomits me back out,
And I rise in the moonlit night.
Claws and spikes grow from me,
And I remember how I passed.
I see faces I once loved,
Through the midnight hour
They glare, now unloving.
I sow the seeds of absence,
To reap hatred in return.
II
The miasmic mist mingles with humidity.
Mingled is our mind, our sense.
We close the soil and salt the earth.
War is waged on cyber fronts,
Digital domains raided again.
Chechnya drips into the mind,
Love is being murdered there,
Another silent genocide.
Eurovision slouches on the screen,
Gasp, laugh, gloat and applaud.
Trump whines and weeps,
The pustule always keep erupting.
We are walled in with cardboard boxes.
Wotan’s host crossed the border,
This time passing past the hills.
They tamed the salient and brought us rain;
Hooved stampedes and hissing iron.
The hammer falls,
And zealous floods spice the panting air.
The triple-faced Diane rises from the rain,
Hounds howling as she ascends.
Youngling’s blood flows as her libation.
She slides across a sleepless eve,
To show me white cliffs,
The Demeter landing on ravaged shores.
A beast disembarks,
Lashed limbs left in its wake.
Vapour crawls beneath your doors,
Lidless eyes pierce the skies,
They watch us as we sleep.
The worlds were poured
Through my waking hours.
In the night,
I am poured through them.
I return on the snake of steel,
The land is not what it was.
Sociability, a maze,
Crooked walls, cloaked in black,
Curling on the horizon’s hills,
Plunging in the valley’s depths.
The sky wears a scarf with violet tones.
Sighing in silence, I retreat.
This is no place for a pariah.
Forgiveness is a godly gift.
Unworthy fools must make way.
Forgive me, friends, for I have sinned.
I pay in unshed tears,
In absence and in cold.
In silent faces frowning.
In powerlessly texting first,
Against an ocean of silence.
My soul shows me deserts,
Earth cracked by drought,
Citrine skies blazing
With whirling clouds.
I see rusted metal ridding.
Rotting citadels of steel
Tower above ashen lands.
The furies pave our barren roads.
Skies are burning above our graves.
The killing of the world,
No future for the wicked.
Morpheus tells me to prepare,
Forsaken, I stand before an envoy of divinity.
The gods of godlessness have abandoned us,
The old alliances are fucked to bits.
The blade sways above me,
To fall
On Ascension Day.
March in Ending
I
March, in ending
Becomes the gravedigger of last year’s ambitions.
Spring is the true season of death.
For as Autumn and Winter peel away
The life in nature,
They do so gently.
The slowly balding head
Of Gaia
Does not provoke
A tear in time.
Spring, however, disrespectfully
Blasts its way through the gloom
We had become so familiar with.
The beauty of the blossom
Caresses the eye,
The explosion of colour shakes
The jaded soul into summer sentiment.
But in the tremors of rebirth
Lies the realisation of death.
How long since we gazed upon
March’s caressing sun.
How many things have died since then.
But unlike the flora,
Many of these things were not made for rebirth.
Time has passed, alas.
The sweet warmth of the sun,
Leaves the bitterness of loss
Upon our merry minds.
Thus March,
In its final days, covers
The lost with fertile earth,
And allows for new life
To grow upon them.
They disappear beneath
The carpet of colour
And sink in the soil
Of faded Memory.
II
March in ending,
Summons the hounds of hell.
Demons take a hold of me.
Not the paralysing
Not the self-loathing
No, Anarchy now inhabits me.
I cover Time with a cloth,
I turn of the power to the social leash,
I knowingly abstain from Duty’s emotional blackmail.
I answer to no one.
I renounced fancy and its tricks,
I renounced the grey pantomime of sociability,
I renounced it all.
Lectures on Woodrow Wilson’s great aunt’s aching toenail,
On anecdotes concerning curry and self-indulgent wank.
Seminars on the structuring of souls harvested from
Their now dreamless livestock.
Drunk on our blood, we are judged by the ivory towers
Of sycophantic sociability in the name of scholarship.
Academia,
I am Judas to thy Christ.
I am Brutus to thy Caesar.
I am The Confederation to thy Union.
I must the betrayer to thy cause,
Serving a cause before which even you
Should kneel.
I lie,
Loveless,
Bleeding,
With my thirty pieces of silver:
Buying books I have not the courage to read
Writing poems that will not be read,
Wasting my time with self-indulgence
That that sustains and destroys me.
Occasionally, I leave my row house cave.
I look at the world through coloured glasses—
Literally, not metaphorically—
March frees Persephone from Hades’ clutch,
March heralds Ostara of the Dawn,
And all those who resurrected by her.
March must be the season of war,
As old grievances bloom accompanied by flora,
As old hellish creatures screech next to songbirds.
All beasts do the dance of death
On blossoming meadows filled with life.
I dig the grave of my academic future,
And the guilt wains, day by day.
Day by day, a few hours of work
Undermine my self-sabotaging whims.
Cut the flesh and heal the wound,
Cut the flesh and heal the wound,
Not for pain,
Not for guilt,
But because we must.
If Sisyphus was happy,
Why not Tantalus?
Why not us?
In the end, it matters not.
Fulfilling duty or opposing it.
All seems equal.
All echoes with the same resonance,
The same fickle tremors.
Anarchy is master
When no one else is.
III
March in ending
May end me,
May end the me that was.
It tells me nothing,
Shows me nothing.
But the fickleness of time,
The treacherous nature
Of Nature.
Thus we end,
Like March
On a pointless
Sour confusing note,
As my anticipation of serendipity
Resembles a less brilliant
Less existential
Less poetic
Less humorous
Waiting for Godot.
Bio:
Tuur Verheyde is a twenty-four year old Belgian poet. His work endeavours to capture the weirdness of the 21st century; its globalised art, culture, politics and problems. Tuur’s poetry seeks to further cultural, spiritual, political and emotional connectivity on an international level. His work is personal and outward looking and seeks to accurately represent the blurred boundaries between the real, the surreal and the hyperreal, as well meshing the personal with the political and the spiritual. https://tuurverheyde.com
Fevers of the Mind 
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