Connect Together

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If only you knew what it takes to be a soul,

To walk with Dante through those circles dark,

But never trade in shades or a god-shaped hole

Whilst navigating through the labyrinth of the heart,

To stay true to your word, living by silence it leaves,

And know that though you say much and mean more,

Being there means everything when others grieve,

For you are such blood as you are God’s very door.

If only you can bear the unkindness of ravens

That always descend upon the lot of one’s life,

And find a true path amongst, also safe havens

In the chaos that seems to be an endless strife,

Never fooled by loneliness that Mobius-strips

The mind into betraying itself to mad moments,

Turning one’s humanity against the pauper’s beg,

So that you forget you were born as a free poet

With imagination enough to take Evil down pegs. 

If only Death were not mistaken by you for Love,

And you not afflicted by either’s damning worship,

So you could learn to embrace your fate thereof,

But not let slip an abyss from bloodied fingertip

As Triumph and Disaster verge faster and faster,

If only you can hold on when there's nothing else,

And bow not to the Will’s slavery to false master,

Tis then your best version, and a transcendent self.

The Dragon

And behold the Dragon, 

and I saw what it feasted upon,

The soul sucked off bones 

like tender, marinated morsels

Where once pride hung from

the skeleton like holiday lights

Faking constellations for

their heroes and gods amiss 

O how they decorate their skeletons

When they are not much other than

fruit wedges froze in hospital gelatin, 

And the Dragon looked at me as 

it devoured, like lover to a cuckold, 

and winked. O that quiet fatalism

as maiden as bloodied snowflakes  

And behold, I did nothing

Notes to The Dragon

So what do you get when you mashup ideas, symbols and aesthetic from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Book of Revelations from the Bible? The first line came to me and I knew it was going to become part of the first poem of this collection. What dead reckoning off such a moral hazard compass. Ultimately, I proceeded with another “survival guide” to the nihilism of the times (or, all times) with the mythos of the Fisher King that Eliot went after in The Waste Land. Let us enter the dragon then to find out, dear reader.

A Guide to Angelic Repossession

The fallen angel was hiding in every human

It could burglar except ones on the spit-roast

If it only could redeem itself through acts

Far more violent than the heavenly host, 

Would acknowledge they themselves would

Brand into the dead-end species with their 

flaming swords, then it would serve a purpose

as they now served barbecue thighs and breasts

It had fallen because it knew all too well that

A god that had to have a revelation never thus

Revealed what it should in a benevolent timing

That would have made salvation mere redundancy

This it knew and sighed as it asked for hot sauce

Made from ghost peppers and antique virgin tears 

Notes to A Guide to Angelic Repossession

One of my favorite poems in the collection. It is a turning point. Makes everything get apocryphal nicely. The most meaningful poetry is created at the edge of one’s consciousness. I could say more. Ergo this collection and my others. 

Lessons Left in the Sand

Dear students of mine, did you happen 

to find the lessons I left behind

In the wet sand along the shore?

There was much I could not say

About Life’s depravity and much less

About paths best and those of nevermore.

You were in my thoughts always

Keeping me from sway of darkness that

Embark thus into the pit none can encore.

So I left my lessons there in the wet sand

For you to mecca to in good time with hope

That Time has not swept them from sun’s adore.

If only you could behold the castles I dreamt there too.

Notes to Lessons Left in the Sand

The teacher in me started to act up. I got melancholic about what was left untaught. 

Ode to 20 Years Later

God died in the Towers

This I know enough to be 

my ground zero where my heart 

learned that you just survive 

The Fall and how it scrapes, 

like spackle off a sistined chapel, 

our heroes as they heap on more and more 

Of the scythe reaping in different designs

Most have forgotten, and a generation

was born that will never fathom 

how deep the gash in eternity

But it is always out of the left side 

Of a glance I have cataracted to see

My sinistrophobia goes full circle 

Until I fear everything from 

low-flying planes to the revenges 

never exacted to thyroid wound beds 

God died in the Towers,

and I not only witnessed 

deicide, but never ran in to

sacrifice myself instead 

Notes to Ode to 20 Years Later

A poem I had to write about September 11th. Nuff said. 

Burnt Love Letters 

Dear Love,

Flowers in a dry bouquet

transport me back to 

a brighter day when you 

lied about our dark dream 

being forever true. Now, 

I feel like burnt love letters

as broken hearts often do.

A Mother Spilt in Aisle 5

Dear Love,

The children got in the way,

Where once no bridge, they,

Now burning, choosing sides,

A sacred duty to protect,

A self-abnegation, a sacrifice

Who ingrates, the scapegraces

Killing slowly, then a cheap

Birthday card then more 

Arguments, fights having us,

trying to keep the breathing 

in sync with a life coming unglued

though the hourglass is nailed down

Try to keep stripper poles and drugs

Away like a satanic panic then, and 

then, Love finding a way and a

Paper bag to breathed into,

Burning bridges can be passed

Just like fiddling to the fires

The card still on the mantle 

Next to the baby pictures 

And the cross and better days 

Carnage to a Kiss

Dear Love,

There is a certain 

carnage to a kiss. 

In how it peels back lips 

and foments teeth like

percussion grenade rattle

and silences the tongue 

and leaves one gasping 

for breath, for more, for 

whatever it can get

to salve the wound

that the mouth becomes

until it heals as a pale scar

like a crescent moon lying

on its side, just another 

casualty of Eros’ warfare 

Great Resignation

They found his dead body in his cubicle

Not at the bottom of some frozen lake

No one knew he was even there for a few days

The smell could have just been a rat in the wall

He was always working on something, 

always nodded hello, often left post-its 

on his food in the shared fridge

That read “willing to share”

Most did not even know his name,

But rather called him “the not-quite”

As in not quite there, my dear drone

It was as close to affection as a ghost gets

Proof of existence comes down

to automated doors alone, 

someone in human resources swore he once

said, but it might've been a bumper sticker

We quit our jobs today

Just in our heads in lieu of a smoke break

The ashes and embers are still falling off

Where the dream was burned away 

by each ticking of that mad clock 

that needs new batteries

We need some of them too, 

And to remember the not-quites' names

for one of them--just one thereof--

might, after all, just be our very own on 

the plaque wall with employee of the week,

same wall where the smell arises again

The Delays

There comes a time when you ask

how much you have left to give 

how much you can go on with 

your broken parts that don’t jigsaw

quite anymore when you were mad

how much love there is in your heart 

as Death sweeps in front of its apothecary

doffing its hat as you pass in the gentle snow

The door is always open like an abysmal maw

and the vertigo of Life itself unraveling

Makes it seem you are falling through

Or rather falling for an easy workaround 

At last, the time goes as fast it comes

Until your mind is just arrivals and departures

But most of all, the delays. God bless the delays.

Some poems will appear in a forthcoming collection from Thorton Maldonado titled, Key to the Abyss.

Currently available on Amazon Kindle: 

https://www.amazon.com/Quoth-Reimaging-Edgar-Immortal-Classic-ebook/dp/B0B8XT1Z6R

Thorton Maldonado wanted to always write like Edgar Allan Poe, but he knew to do so would mean dishonoring one of his literary heroes. So he did nothing for many a harvest moon. Then he had a thought that came like a black bird. What if he took lines from the gothic poet's iconic poem about a lost Lenore and used them to make a love story through those holographic fragments? He ended with this opus inspired by Poe's The Raven that includes 100 poems and a revisioning of the aforementioned classic poem titled, "And So the Raven."   

Here are a few poems from the collection:

The Quoth

by Thorton Maldonado, 2022

A deathly raven above the chamber door

Will say nothing, not even nevermore

It says nothing, nothing, nothing, 

Like I, as I vie, flop about, and sop

On the reddened floor like a bloody mop

And cannot rise once more for godly encore

It says nothing as if I am the void’s king

But without my queen who died in dreams

I cannot rise to strangle that blackbird

With lost hope, broken hands, token words

It has spoken with its silence, the violence,

Its nihility, shadowing she between 

The penumbral of two dark eternities

The quoth is as ever it was before:

That raven means to dream no more.

Midnight Dreary

by Thorton Maldonado, 2022

Once upon a midnight dreary, in dreams so scary,

I saw my beloved off on an old Staten Isle ferry

Little did I perceive, fear, or would believe

That Charon himself helmed the drear boat

Beyond the horizon through a Stygian mote

Past the faces drowned underneath the oar

And far beyond black rainbows arched galore

Into invisible spider’s soul-wrecking weave

Little did I perceive what I would so grieve

When she waved as if to hail, ere, her spirit fail,

It was nothing other than our love to be of no avail

And so my beloved did wave like an enamored slave

To some loveless hell, to some blood-mess grave

That Charon alone did sail, for she to hail and farewell.

Like Bone Orchard Unvisited

by Thorton Maldonado, 2022

For all those that have been left behind,

I too feel like bone orchard unvisited at times,

Though not promised rose garden or weeding,

Something dreamt lies now here bleeding

A dangled carrot of happily everafter,

An echo of sadistic bully’s laughter,

A stick to keep moving the line toward the mangling maw

A look to pretend to unsee what cannot be unsaw 

No home to call such, no future that means much, 

The endless struggle, reality overdose, the debt slavery, 

the way she thought another could love more than me, 

hungry ghosts, Time’s damned knavery, a blood ceremony 

where we are nothing but table scraps for invisible mouths

And pray only to be chewed to naught but then spewed out

It is enough to drive a madman unsane

And leave us once again in the red rain 

screaming for angels that never came

At last, I too feel like bone orchard unvisited

Where love is, yet love not, among beloved dead

And So the Raven

by Thorton Maldonado, 2022

And so the Raven is still there, still there, without hope, without fear,

Above the chamber, on war-god bust, censer of her abandon’s musk

Wafts about nostrils and spirals as once that demon bird’s tendrils

That hooked and cleaved my breast for a heart of already fallen crest

Now just alms for oblivion. The embers dying, the firmament that rusts, 

That and the nevermores thus.

The thing of evil is still there, still there, awaiting sacrifices far and near,

Like reaper’s scythe is its onyx beak, its abysmal eyes shall souls keep

In bondage like Fate, imprisoned as if sleep, no dreams that boo or peek,

Its talons sink deep, further and further into Love now akin to murder,

Every caw-caw from out its sinister jaw is just mockery of mortal weep.

And so the Raven sows then reaps. 

I still hear a tapping, still tapping, as if something there wildly rapping,

In my chest, like a Lazarus heart, though there is madness in the dark

Madness that lures fools into the pit, where Lucifer sits and Cerberus barks

No, it cannot be what the Raven itself will not let even Death restart.

Oh, but I cannot stop hearing that tapping, like demon wings flapping.

It cannot be my soul to hark.

That feathered assassin is beguiling, not myself into gravely smiling,

But rather into dreaming dreams I have not dreamt since Nevermore

That there is love again, each soul finds its mend, that we win the war.

That dreaming has all the seeming of demon, how can I believe then?

But how can this be? With gash in Eternity? For when it rains, it pours?

It just seems a forever of doors.

And so the Raven, ever craven, ever craven, sits like a god always graven,

Above my heart—the very picture of lost Lenore—the skeleton in the frame.

“I know you more than myself!”, I screamed, “You are a damnation game.”

The Raven shrugged off the claim, just swooned and swayed as Charon’s tame,

Like Charon waiting for lost obols. “Is it not enough that you got my soul?!”

But naught, naught but god-shaped hole.

I beheld that the Stygian torturer from Plutonian shore was absent from the door

To where it flew off to, I was not to fathom. Mine was to fear Death’s encore.

I screamed for the black bird that coated itself, like ghouls, in embers and ash,

My imagination now a monsters’ mash, with scenes from an endless car crash,

But nothing except that tapping and a burning of some returning in my very core

And so the Raven is nevermore.

And still I am sitting, never quitting, a dark karma most befitting,

Of having to once more to endure the Raven’s quoth of nevermore,

Of black birds and lost loves galore, that to love again is madness’ quell

But also a way to create new hells. I am the Fall of man. Where angels

Plot and plan to sack heaven’s gate like barbaric horde. My heart wards:

Love, love like blood, so Death’s felled. 

Paperback edition coming soon, as well as, audio recitations. Stay posted to the Blood and Fire Publishing website and our social media accounts. 

 Like putting out fire with gasoline,

She said as she slept, curled into a

Cryptogram, flanked by stuffed animals

Like flowers about a glass coffin

I swear her face changes as she purrs,

Almost of cat people as pillow talks then 

Transmogrify into hostage negotiations

And she mutters mad in dead languages

Let her dream, I say to myself, let her dream

Herself back to me. Let her just be whatever 

The gods think they can get away with. 

Let her be the dream of . . . 

She wakes for a moment and laughs then turns

Back to the window where I finally notice 

That the night is on fire, glowing like blood from her lips. 

She laughs. Her sweet nothings smell like gasoline.