Tomorrow’s Tree

by Nick Gisburne

---

Perhaps this is the nothing we desire,
The emptiness of love we’ll never need,
But if we fall, forgotten, into fire,
At least the flames will burn what cannot bleed.
We never will be, never were, the same.
The contrast makes us all of what we are,
Two predators, impossible to tame,
Two points of passion, bursting from a star.
No souls could seem more opposite than we,
But every coin must share another side.
Together, let us climb tomorrow’s tree,
To look upon the love we have, but hide.
    And if we cling to any doubt at all,
    Let both of us, but not together, fall.

A Piece of Peace

by Nick Gisburne

---

Upon a lake of perfect liquid light,
A surface even steel could never slice,
Two peoples on opposing islands fight,
Despising any peace, at any price.
Two disenchanted daughters disagree
With what their feuding families resist.
These proud, precocious children meet, for tea,
Two furtive girls, beyond their borders’ mist.
“We must,” they say with certainty, “survive,
And war, with all its darkness, will not do.”
Returning after curfew, they contrive
To circulate a special, splendid brew.
    Discreetly stoned, each frosty island finds
    A piece of peace to melt their mindless minds.

The Shiver of a Dance

by Nick Gisburne

---

Imprisoned in the shiver of a dance,
Her body lashed with nauseating light,
She whirls within a hot, hypnotic trance,
Tormented by the never-ending night.
The music burns with misery, despair,
Her efforts to reject it wild, but weak.
In labyrinths of rhythmic, twisted air,
Distortions steal the twisted bliss they seek.
Her tortured spirits straining, starved, they spin,
Bewildered as her soul begins to bleed.
Engulfed, the madness strips away her skin,
And on her breath perverse vibrations feed.
    The dance of death she suffered to survive
    Could never keep her life, her light, alive.

Your Butterflies Are Dead

by Nick Gisburne

---

I don’t know why your butterflies are dead.
Your tragedy, your mourning, is not mine.
Be thankful that whatever dreams they bled
Will never steal the starlight of your shine.
The silver in the stitches of your soul
Is coloured by the psychedelic stain
Of butterflies, bewitched to claim control,
To permeate your purity with pain.
Their broken bodies, littering the floor,
Are tainted with malevolent disease.
Without their poison, perfect, you will soar,
But still you seek them, pleading, on your knees.
    Your butterflies abandon you. Go on.
    Their colours and their cruelty are gone.

Eat the Earth

by Nick Gisburne

---

Emilio, my interstellar friend,
Is partial to a planetary lunch.
Their cities, sweet, delicious, break and bend,
A tingle to the tongue with every crunch.
His ultimate ambition - eat the Earth -
Is tempered by his tummy’s trainer, me.
To gobble it, his gastronomic girth
Must multiply. Expansion is the key.
Consuming plumper planets, piece by piece,
Emilio is confident, at last,
A slathering of sauces can release
The monumental stomach he’s amassed.
    He squeezes Mars, like ketchup, on the feast,
    And hogs it, whole, a champion, a beast.

The Monocle of Mystery

by Nick Gisburne

---

The Monocle of Mystery is mine,
A queer contraption, pilfered from a prince.
It passed along a sleazy geezer’s line,
But somehow not a soul has seen it since.
Composed by seven stinky, kinky scribes,
The mildew-moistened map before my face,
By crooked hook, by wealthy, stealthy bribes,
Pops all the puzzle’s pieces into place.
Fermenting, fishy knickers, in a box,
Await the frenzied fingers of my hand.
With twisted tongue and teeth, I rock the locks.
A shiver. You will never understand.
    The Monocle allows a mind to see
    The optimum trajectory to pee.

Sisters

by Nick Gisburne

---

Belinda thinks her sister strange, insane.
Melinda shares a similar belief.
So Bel and Mel deposit equal pain,
Upon their sibling victims heaping grief.
No mercy now accepted, sought, or spared,
The toxic twins try anything, and all.
To certify each enemy impaired,
Towards a lethal climax, crazed, they crawl.
They settle it with derringers, at dawn,
Two pistols, pointed straight between the eyes.
Two shots. Two sisters lie upon the lawn,
Contented to confirm the other dies.
    Their triplet, sweet Lucinda, safe, is glad.
    She always knew the other two were mad.

Too Cold

by Nick Gisburne

---

A fallen fairy shivers in the stream,
Her wings no longer glittering with gold.
No nightmare, no intolerable dream,
Predicted such a feeling could unfold.
While humans hunt with slow and simple wits,
The Fey are quick, impossible to catch,
But this one, faint, in freezing water sits,
Lamenting, on the day she met her match.
On high she spied the struggles of a fish,
Exhausted, somehow stranded on the bank.
Too wild to waste her magic with a wish,
She pushed it, paused, and, from the shallows, drank.
    Inside a simple snare, the fish its bait,
    She cries, too cold, a lesson learned, too late.

Impenetrable Dreams

by Nick Gisburne

---

I violate the carcass of a queen,
A necromantic crime I must commit,
A trespass even Faust would find obscene,
A grisly resurrection, soiled and split.
Her screams are silent. Sick with every surge,
With pain I pound her primitive mystique.
Together, two convulsing magics merge,
A murderous crescendo, bloody, bleak.
It shatters through the shadows, to a slave,
Imprisoned by impenetrable dreams,
My sorcery the only way to save
The human at the heart of such extremes.
    The soul, my son, knows nothing of the spell.
    I take his place, descending into Hell.

Delicious

by Nick Gisburne

---

I love the way your skin, so perfect, peels;
The sepsis in the sores between your teeth;
How creamy every leaking lesion feels;
The contours of the cancers, black, beneath.
I love the way your eyes, resplendent, rot;
The crackle of the maggots as they feed;
Your filth-infected fluids, quick to clot.
I worship how you suffer, how you bleed.
I love the way your fingers, fragile, break;
The mucus in the marrow of your spine.
Your body’s bile coagulates to cake,
A foetid fungus, festering, divine.
    I love the faecal flavours of your heart.
    Delicious, every bloated, blistered part.

Sold

by Nick Gisburne

---

A serpent sold your soul to me, for change.
How truly unremarkable you are.
My other pets are sordid, striking, strange.
You thrill me more than all them, by far.
Behind your quiet eyes I see a spark,
A smouldering. It speaks to me of rage,
But nothing, yet, illuminates the dark.
How patiently you wait to break your cage.
Perhaps you know your moment will arrive
When I, or those who follow, least expect.
Be careful. Live, my little one. Survive.
A fugitive is painful to protect.
    I promise you the shelter of this place,
    Unless you stain my honour with disgrace.

A Dream You Never Doubted

by Nick Gisburne

---

Is this the scale of misery you seek?
To see me die? To watch me, blinded, bleed?
You bring me to my knees to wound me, weak,
But, on your future, I, your fate, will feed.
A pale, imperfect creature of the night,
You find me in a sick, submissive state,
My crippled spirit paralysed by light.
Behold the frozen focus of your hate.
Remember what you think, and what you feel,
A proud, pathetic moment, nothing more.
Tomorrow, when I teach you how to kneel,
Remember what your pulse, your pain, is for.
    Remember, always, closing on the kill,
    A dream you never doubted. But you will.

A Yellow Pearl

by Nick Gisburne

---

I catch her in the wastelands, in the wild.
A single, careless moment seals her fate.
A rarity, a bootleg, bush-born child,
She spies my interceptor net, too late.
The razor cables penetrate her face.
They drink her deepest memories of love.
Deceptive dreams, inserted in their place,
Were blended by directives from above.
I nurture no compassion for the girl;
Recoded, she will boost the body bank.
But, at her throat, a pulsing, yellow pearl
Entices my attention. Blackout. Blank.
    Awakened in my flesh, a force, a flux,
    Her counterstrike, sadistic, softly sucks.

The Fey, Betrayed

by Nick Gisburne

---

The devious collector feeds the Fey,
A favour they delightedly return,
With fragments, secrets, stories to convey
A cryptic clue, or two, from which to learn.
The promise of unfathomable wealth,
Beyond the reach of any human hand,
Is bartered with extraordinary stealth,
The feckless Fey too slow to understand.
At last the seeker seems to see enough.
The pieces, pulled together, twist and fit.
The Fey, betrayed, are still content to stuff
Their cheeky little faces as they sit.
    But none would mark their magic on a map.
    Tomorrow it will take him to a trap.

A Faded Plaything

by Nick Gisburne

---

Too heavy, hot, her head must lean and loll,
A droop, a dip, the certain signs of sleep.
She suffers, sick, a drab, discarded doll,
A faded plaything no one thought to keep.
The fairest and the finest of them all,
Her face a prized and perfect piece of art,
The tracks of time, the scars, however small,
Defeated all that saw her stand apart.
Though paint remains in patches, blistered, thin,
Her eyes betray no traces of their blue,
But still the tiny, ticking heart within
Refuses to acknowledge what is true.
    If dolls are born to shine with light, then why,
    In darkness, failed, forgotten, do they die?

A Force to Fear

by Nick Gisburne

---

My negative potential as a child
Descended into darkness, into this:
A force to fear; a psychopath, reviled;
A creature who would kill you with a kiss.
Analysis is meaningless. Too late,
You try to twist my evil into good,
But chains are cheap, ephemeral. I wait,
With confidence you never understood.
Observe the steel, the metal as it melts;
The walls, the rubble, littering the floor.
Pathetic padded jackets and their belts;
Are these the best you have, or are there more?
    Imagine what your future might have been
    Before you built a sentient machine.

You’ll Die

by Nick Gisburne

---

You’ll die, because you’re nobody I need.
I wish there was another way, but no.
You’ll die, and I will smile to see you bleed,
The method of your murder simple, slow.
You’ll die, in ways you cannot comprehend,
In fifty thousand screaming shades of pain.
You’ll die, and when I kill you I will spend
The greatest care to open every vein.
You’ll die, but not before you dig your grave.
I need to see you suffer in the dirt.
You’ll die, a soul too sickening to save,
In hideous, interminable hurt.
    You’ll die. Your death was always meant to be.
    The mother of the son you stole is me.

The Con

by Nick Gisburne

---

Beyond the world, the circle of a sun
Does nothing to rejuvenate the sky.
In solitude, the planet, dying, done,
Surrenders to the heat, a desert, dry.
Rejected for a sacred, somewhere place,
Humanity, to sate its greed, is gone.
The zenith of a dynasty, no face,
No trace remains to counteract the con.
So many souls are stacked inside the ships,
And all of them, deceived, believed the lie.
The terror, from a prophet’s poisoned lips,
Unshakable: the home they hate will die.
    A few perceive the folly of their fear.
    Too late, they see the sunrise disappear.

Butterface

by Nick Gisburne

---

Repulsive, but I see the joke. I do.
The body of an angel, but her face...
Imagine, for moment, she is you,
A target of derision, blatant, base.
But such a simple statement steps too far.
Compassion? You will never understand.
Too selfish to consider what you are,
Your mind is too constricted to expand.
Lean closer to a mirror, once or twice.
Is that the pure perfection women seek?
I would not take your place at any price.
Such arrogance is wasted, wanting, weak.
    Perhaps I need a moment to explain.
    The body filled with butter is your brain.

A Never-Spoken Name

by Nick Gisburne

---

Ambition. No belief too broad, too tall.
A hunger, for the glory of the game.
He soared above the sky to seize it all,
But could not beat the bully he became.
A thousand changes, subtle, simple, small,
Together twisted, squeezed, to stake their claim,
Until his fury fought the world, to fall,
Delirious, without remorse, or shame.
The histories, rewritten, won’t recall
The momentary flicker of his flame,
But scribbled slogans, seas of spiteful scrawl,
Immortalise a never-spoken name.
    The face on every poster, every wall,
    Beyond such hate is powerless to crawl.