The Jack-O-Lantern Metaphor and Other Poems

By John Maurer

The Jack-O-Lantern Metaphor 

As soon as I let myself in my head
I tear it to pieces
Gut my childhood memories
Toss the liver of my birthdays
Into a pan with coconut oil
Harrow my hauntings with a hatchet
Find my heart to be a puzzle short a piece
Throw this into the rubbish with the liver
How this happening of these objects
In motion that don’t stay in motion 
Makes me see sick
And how my eyes glow by light
Of a candle clumped in salted seeds

The Self-Planning Funeral

If you wake up and your garden is dead
Bury yourself in it
If you wake up and you are dead
Your garden will bury itself

The imperfect world has lost more loose screws
Flat-landers have scrolled maps into telescopes
Dilated their time piece pupils; crossed their eyes
Before we were taking a  look at the whole looking thing

Take your dimensional diet
Give Sally two 
How many do you have left?
Well, a diet pill and an after taste of blood
An infinity of alpha to omega infinities blotted on a dot
All the markets of tongue twisters and brain blenders
of the bards trying to talk to spirits they don't believe in
They look pale
And I'm blue too

A Jainist in a Shopping Mall

Trying not to find myself getting lost in the looking
Looking at myself trying to lose myself and finding it beautiful
Finding you in it and this looks like what my vestigial parts must
Musty; smelling of smokey bones left alone too long she says
About that you must be right because you are the only one left talking
My wall wishes it could do this just to express its careful disinterest
I am disinterested in the rebounding spitballs that find my face
That kiss me with my own drunken slobber, do not repeat my performance for me
I danced and drank it on my own and I suffered through the splitting of brain cells
Death has always been known to be a relaxing way to spend one's life
I have heard from those who have practiced it
Sell everything you own starting with your thoughts
Then your time and your passion and eventually if you do this well
You will fall to dust in the wind off your rebar skeleton
And you will be a statue, a death that everyone can't stop looking at

John Maurer is a 26-year-old writer from Pittsburgh that writes fiction, poetry, and everything in-between, but his work always strives to portray that what is true is beautiful. He has been previously published in Claudius Speaks, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Thought Catalog, and more than sixty others. @JohnPMaurer (johnpmaurer.com)