Into this Dungeon - Into this Haven
Poem by Joseph Chambers // art by Thuy Ngo

The blood-streaked skies were a red silhouette
That cast a shadow three shades deeper than death
Sleeplessly, I crept through a maze of metaphor
Over potato sacks of similes that fed these whores
...over garbage until I met a door
It's uneasiness spoke in triple cadence, on poor hinges
Furnished by the descendants of men who organized lynches
Inches gained meters, I ran through the catacombs
Up the spiraling staircase of knowledge til, at last at home
...his frail, pale self sat alone
He pressed the remnants of his pen's ink to a page
And groaned a few passages older than his decaying age
You hold the definitive orchestra's tune in which sacred
And then he withered as a dried rose upon the pavement
...left a ragged cavemen of this matrix
Escorted through this gloomy dungeon by curiosity
There was a frame and a blade, a boulder's quiet ferocity
A pile of compositions positioned next to lifeless bodies
And frayed  strings attached to the last of the godly
...two dust contaminated wings
As I peered upon these miraculous specimens of men
Faint piano keys spoke with internal muses within
The Rubick's cube inevitably twisted into the last color
And the poltergeist images of these soldiers were smothered
...the grey turned to the green of summer
Flashes of the adolescent in me holding hands with you
And working to overwhelm myself in life's take two's
Liquid flowing upon paper, blinking eyes and flashing cameras
Stroking your hair, staring to the stars bashed and hammered
...-broken- the articulate stammered
I succumbed to your every word, the love was bottled
And I decided to saturate our poems and burn the novels
To intoxicate my bland taste for your lips, drown roses
Symbolizing it was in your eyes, before the stuck-up noses
...in my embrace, your sorrow ghost is
So, now I return in bleakness to this dungeon and knife
Your severed,  disconnected angel wings and ripped life
The post - mortem love words we exchanged as soldiers
And here I sit, penning suicide notes on this rigid boulder
...a jagged past heavy on my shoulders