gandalfthegreyt

[gandalfthegreyt]

Take all your pain and put it in a bag

Hide it in a place where no one knows it's at

I save all our memories and store them in my head

You saved me once, I remember that

Photographs we took scattered on the floor

What good is looking at 'em, when they're not worth looking for?

Life is just a battle, everyday forever more

Separated by the sun and moon, I feel ignored

Like light beams off lighthouses

Whose shine catches no eyes at night

Sent out a bottle and got no reply

My message inside

Sent out a bottle and got no reply

My message inside

Idk how many times I’ll share this song here before these ears can’t hear. You can strike two tallies this week though, and you can strike me dead whenever.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Ugh

[gandalfthegreyt]

Parts and Labor

Frustration mounts in the heat of the mechanical room.

Bolts chip at my nails, boiling water drunk pipes sear my shoulders,

Sweat and anger builds within, easier to purge relief valves on pumps than the one in my heart.

Get in fools. We’re headed to the scrap yard.

Fill the truck bed with those early mornings, awake before the alarm, ruminating on love.

Painstaking texts crafted at regular intervals, determination,

Insistence on learning, knowing, climbing inside this girl’s brain.

Toss romantic strolls to the left, they aren’t recyclable.

Throw those darkest secrets shared in too, garbage that should have been gutted long ago.

Wind up those loose love songs, bunch all her playlists and place them on the scale.

We can get 25 cents a pound for those.

Leave the skeletons where they lie. Halloween is just around the corner.

Part out her number, your delusions of grandeur, count them.

Cut your bed in half. Split your dining room table up for kindling to burn what’s left.

She’s never coming home to you, so free the space.

It’s minimalism on the horizon, no hearts, no heads.

Get back to the gym. Get back to your pills.

No one’s reimbursing your labor, so you’re gonna eat lean for awhile.

Somewhere across town she’s kicking what you gave her under the rug,

Dead, self professed, coiled like an adder in the ribs of some living rot,

Watching goodness pass like rain through the empty sockets in his head.

[gandalfthegreyt]

This silly little boy and me = 🤞

[gandalfthegreyt]

Dead Lovers' Waltz

Descending my steps this morning, an hour late

In blessed, wakeful morning light shown the glinting carapace of a dead cicada.

In the road, another crushed. At the outer door to my office, another still,

Silent.

Yesterday as we bathed in the late afternoon sun on the hill,

She reading, giggling outwardly but swimming in turmoil,

He, I rather, exhausted by the unspoken knowledge of things to come, slept beside her.

Above and all around us the harbingers of fall screamed their song of impending love and death.

From the trees and the bushes and the tall grass they cried,

"Find love! Seize love! The time is drawing close!"

It would in fact be the only time that I would ever slumber beside her,

One of love's simplest and truest gifts, peace by another.

As the night crept in they withdrew to a private place to mourn and part.

All over town the little iridescent monsters of love were wrapped in forever's choking embrace,

Something to envy for the broken girl he fell in love with,

Something to hate for the lost boy that would not win.

[gandalfthegreyt]

L. V., i found this poem stuck between wakefulness & dreams

[gandalfthegreyt]

And there it ended at the foot of the stairs. The next real romance of his life never to be, aborted over a river of tears and discarded with a bad play for an empty kiss, one last breath of ego dashed on the rocks of conviction for a man he would never know. He might as well have called her champ as he shuffled his dreams out the door, the click of the lock heavy and final.

haiku #14, tathev simonyan

[gandalfthegreyt]

Everybody Everywhere But You

In another universe entirely

Narcissus gazed transfixed into the pond below and said, “in fact I hate myself. I hate the world and all its inhabitants, all they stand for that I am not, all they have that I cannot.”

As if a spell was uttered the pond began to swirl and bubble, the ground around it cracked and twisted in a great upheaval,

And there before him suddenly was a woman, with shadowy eyes and velvet skin, jet black hair as fine as silk thread.

She bore her eyes back into the pools of his and replied simply, “I know,”

And without another word, the mirror of Narcissus, her form pulsing with the whole universe of his turmoil, calmly and quietly walked away.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Bedfellows

Mourn with me stranger.

Spread out your scroll of woes before me and I you,

Let us feast on lost love, love stillborn, lines of tragedy scrawled in ink,

Parallel to those on our arms, scratched in blood and

Washed winter white by time.

Tracks in the sand left behind by the losing,

Sleep walked out of my eyes too soon today.

Was it anticipation? Or a nagging fear. A grim prophecy offered recently,

That by the end of the week we’d not see the dawn together.

The tears that welled at such a prediction, were they of fear?

Or, I fear, foretelling resignation.

[gandalfthegreyt]

🖤 Moody 🖤

[gandalfthegreyt]

Two Bits A Shot

While life teases me with what could be,

Life haunts another with what is not.

Between lies the mundane, trivial pursuits of flesh and forgetfulness,

Outings and innings,

Clocks turning lazy tricks of chance in hallways and information corridors,

Stomachs empty, neighbors call,

New senses of self are built high on sticks over melting canyons.

In and after these collisions we ponder where reality ends and begins,

What can we hold onto?

In the carnival stall, the shattered bottles reflect the prize wall 100 fold.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Just sharing music today, two sweet ones by Athens, GA’s very own The Glands for a friend who is hurting. The Glands is a fascinating and humorously vulgar band name I think. Their frontman Ross Shapiro owned a record store in Athens when I was growing up, and he used to scowl me right out of the store some days. Intimidating man, brilliant musician, rock trivia legend.

And one dubby club banger for mid afternoon mania’s sake. Strange days at hand.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Disparate moods this morning. The season’s in flux.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Forging another meal I have no appetite for. I wonder why?

[gandalfthegreyt]

One To Rule

Walking out of the office today, the vastness of the sky,

Crystal blue jockeying for dominance with towering, silver monoliths,

Momentarily awe-strikes before I recede inward.

Like a brick in a blanket, this leaden heart sinks me below the event horizon of even such conspicuous beauty.

I’m transported backward in time, back to the central western steppes of Russia, Mari El,

Flat, expansive horse country, the biggest, bluest, loneliest sky I’ve ever spied.

There, 22 and stranded among strangers, I fumbled for purpose and sanity,

Finding neither.

Days spent hiding in books, nights hiding in warm,

Plastic bottles of ale,

There was nowhere I would not drown,

And above me, when I dared to look,

Was the deepest pool of all,

Limitless sea of atmosphere fit to swallow Tsars, hordes and horsemen.

I must imagine they saw heaven every day there above,

Divined answers in every cloud and color,

But I would have no keeper but myself.

To this day still,

No vista can center my tempestuous soul, no beauty can distract from what roils within,

Unshakable in my captivity, utterly self-enslaved, I cannot be undone.

I will have no other master.

[gandalfthegreyt]

I intend to revisit my collection of Calvin and Hobbes moving forward and will be posting some hits on here. This comic strip was a cardinal contributor to both my vocabulary and worldview growing up, and I could not be more grateful to Bill Watterson for his work. I’m eternally grateful to my father as well for his introducing of this strip to me early in my youth, one of the many intellectual gifts he bestowed upon me in his time.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Kedi (2016) dir. Ceyda Torun