Splintered Love and other poems by J. B Stone

Our love used to be this cozy little cabin
Secluded from the irrational drama
The world throws at others

Our love wasn’t strong enough
As the cabin started to split apart
And transform into a giant casket

Cornered by a surface of splinters
Closing in like trap door walls with spikes
Ready to pierce through its victims

Our home sweet home
Descended into an over grown bed of rusty nails
Like living inside a 2×4 plank of cheap lumber

Our passion is now a mummified crypt
Except we’re still breathing
It’s just our love that sleeps forever

As our desire for each other
Sleeps in a sarcophagus of a buried love
I ask, where did it all go wrong?

I ask it every day now as I stay awake
Fore it’s hard to sleep soundly
It’s hard to sleep at all

When all you can hear is a gravedigger’s shovel
Scooping the dirt and gravel
Burying this corpse that was once our love

I could still feel the scars from the splinters
Which bleed regret every morning I try to wake
And every night I try to slumber

We turned our creature comforts
Into weapons of self-destruction
And that is where it went wrong

A combination of naive joy and a lack of communication
Became the combustible elements
To destroy this love

All of these moments are splintered reminders
Of the could haves, the would haves, and the should haves
Constantly haunting like ghosts burned into the etchings of my heart

---

Working Masterpieces

Our births were like the start of a painting
Except the umbilical cord was the paint brush
And our lives were its canvas

Our trials and tribulations
All brushstrokes to the scenery
Painted impressions from the gallery of our mothers womb

We are living, breathing portraits with imperfect tones
Almost like photographs
We try to re-focus our image

Cropping ourselves
Trying to fit into the frames of society,
But always subjected to the critique of others

When did we forget about beauty only being skin deep?
Why has our physical image
Become the only portrait one could paint

Because we started to see with our eyes
We stopped using our minds
To see the beauty within

So our visions were repainted in watercolor
Blurry splotches
Trying to eclipse our sight

I wonder when we will stop trying to match the scenery
Embrace our unconventional expressions,
And stop trying to impress the masses with impressionism

Maybe we could embrace diversity like cubism
Instead of clinging to tradition like baroque
Stop trying to engage is these neo-classical conversations

Beauty should not be determined by how others perceive you,
But how you perceive yourself
And know your beauty
Because each and everyone of us are just a gallery…

Of working masterpieces

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Egocentric Imbalances

5 feet, 11 inches, & High Rising
If I got any higher
My elevation might cause a nose bleed,
Or a fracture in my ear drums
Because limits exist for a reason
My ego might rip apart if it gets any larger,
Expanding to the point of implosion
A psychological black hole
Vacuuming any praise and glory found
With an exponential rate of cognitive damnation
Until everything is broken down
Chaotic fragments
Lost in a chasm of self-destruction
The ashes of arrogant thought in its most dangerous form,
The aftermath of mental Armageddon

---

Mischief night

The night before Halloween
As houses prepare to be covered
In egg yolks and toilet paper streamers
I fear the worse

Glass broken
Candy burglarizing
Carjacking
Murder

Okay so maybe these are just exaggerations,
But when you deal with enough bullies all of your childhood,
Expect them to still exist in the realm of adulthood
And expect their actions to only intensify,

Not everyone is mature just because they age
I fear mostly for the kids out on this night
Maybe I watch too many ABC family movies
You know the movies where the parents go out for a party
Try to enjoy themselves
Leaving the older sibling to watch the younger one

Both too old for “adult” parties
One too old to go trick or treating himself
The younger can trick or treat away
Then the two siblings both find themselves
Surrounded by a gang of bullies
This is where our adventure to somewhere or for something fun and magical begins

Unfortunately life isn’t an ABC Family Halloween Special
It’s cold and callous,
Happy endings aren’t impossible,
Just highly unlikely
Escaping your bullies is not as easy of a stance,
As the media makes it look

I know I could have used an older brother
Walking me from block to block as a kid
Hoping I would not get beaten,
Candy is a hell of a drug it can make these kids do crazy things
Even going it alone
I was one of those kids,
And lucky to be alive

The fear of getting jumped
While dressed in my charlie brown ghost costume
Never went away
Never stopped me from trembling
With shaky hands while holding my paper bag
Hoping for candy to spill instead of my baby teeth,
And blood dripping from my gums

Now I sit on these nights, like a worried parent
Pretending like he has a kid of his own
When he really worries generally
Hoping Mischief night
Has become safer for kids,
But hope doesn’t console me,
It’s just all I can do at this point

---

A Look Out the Window

I stare out the window
As a mix of cloudy and sunny are placed in my worldview
Re-imagining a future where ice frost covers the steel rivets of my window pane,
Until all I can see is snow slowly fracturing the glass

Some call it a winter wonderland, but I call it a “blunder-land”
Filled with ice slicks and snowstorms
Autumn leaves could never be this cruel
But these fall colors

These pumpkin patch visits
And ever changing leaves
Are a reminder of the next season to follow suite: Winter
Not before long the pumpkin patch will be a vegetation graveyard

Filled with dormant plant corpses frozen in icy tundra
Not before long all of the leaves will fall off of their branches
The trees will be exposed as wooden skeletons dried out by the season’s whim
Avalanches, blizzards, and snow surges

Plague my mind like a 10th century European village
As I fear the worst,
Maybe I am over-thinking,
But it’s hard to chill out…

When you fear the world as you know it is freezing up!