Nexus Liminality

Steve Blacksmith

©Steve Blacksmith

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for picking up this book. I sincerely hope that you like it. This piece was written as part of a larger project where I attempted to write 1,000,000 words in one year. The aim of the project is still a bit unclear, but I’m certain that it will eventually have something to say about the ephemeral nature of our modern literature. So much is being created that it may very well be that “classic” works of literature are no longer being cemented into the public consciousness, even though they are absolutely still being written.

With the increasingly widespread implementation of AI in order to generate new works of art with little effort on the part of the self-described “AI Artists”, it may soon be clear whether or not us authors are a dying breed. What I have given you is my blood, sweat, tears, and soul on a whole hell of a lot of pages. Everything you will read in this project has come straight from my mind with absolutely no AI assistance.

In order for this project to work, I need your help to let me know if you found and read this book. Please visit www.steveblacksmith.com and leave a little note. Once you are done with this book, please take it back to a Little Free Library or wherever else you picked it up, so that someone else may read it.

Thank you and enjoy!

Poem Page Guide

7. Nexus Liminality

8. In Search of Oasis

9. OCD Poetry

10. Bunker Down

11. Malpractice

12. Fonts

13. The Secret of My Success

14. Wake Up Call

15. Ceiling Fan

16. Time Loop

17. Artificial “Intelligence”

18. Cause I’m a Man, Goddamnit

19. Me, The Idiot

20. Booty

21. Snow Day

22. Resolutions

23. Of All the Things I Can’t Do

24. Letter to an Old Friend

25. Scintillating Scotoma

26. History Shift

27. Lichtenberg

28. No Ground Gained

29. Zed

30. Push Through

31. Time Well Spent

32. PenManShip

33. Frosty

34. Fraud

35. Makes Sense

36. Holy Fire

37. Paradoxical

38. Last Looks

39. Hit in the Head by a Falling Coconut

40. Content with Inaction

41. Since Time ImmeMoral

42. Kids’ll

43. World’s Fair

44. Hedgemoney

45. President Precedents

46. Careful with Wishes

47. Spark

48. Times Years Months

49. For Your Eye Only

50. Hand in Hand

51. AC

52. Monster F*cker

53. Find the Vein

54. Words Afire

55. Pants

56. Was Just a Life

57. Foil

58. Confession

59. Operating at a Loss

60. Wash

61. Body Aches the Spirit

62. When I’m Eighty I’m Sixty

63. Bold Sociopathy

64. Nestle Tolstoy

65. Roadside Dinosaur

66. I Forgot My Password

67. Hypochondriac

68. Lesson Learned

69. June Bugs

70. My Bad

71. Everything is a Poem

72. Off the Charts

73. Billionaire’s Plea

74. Meant Well

75. Wood Rot

76. Voting in Destruction

77. The Patriot’s Poem

78. Giving Thanks

79. Whoops

80. Time is Up

81. Take Heed, Captain

82. Do Me a Solid?

83. Poker Face

84. I Might Not be Human

85. Decimation

86. Held

87. In An Instant

88. Mist

89. Ding Ding

90. Stricken

91. Drunk Writing

92. Bougie Foodie

93. Just Two Guys Fighting for Love

94. Imput

95. Body Amour

96. Do You Even Lift, My Child?

97. Lunch

98. Requiem Infinite

99. Which One Talks to God?

100. Misaligned Gears

101. Garden Party

102. Free Fallin’

103. Finding Good Help

104. Cut it Out

105. NBD

106. Bloom

107. Hold It

108. Stand Up/Stand Still

109. Turn of the Wheel

110. Embattled

111. Tulpa

112. Mental Health Day

113. Make ‘em Sing

114. Kids Those Days

115. Don’t Lick that Terminal

116. Ode to an Actor’s Face

117. Extry Extry

118. Sharp Barbs

119. Storybook

120. Time Piece

121. Tesseract

122. Born to Travel

123. Grasp the Concept

124. Author/Fraud

125. Blacksmith

126. Change

Nexus Liminality

Walk with me all down the aisle

Past repast a present spree

Every step feels like a mile

Stumbling with two left feet

There can be no halfway point

A labyrinth of cans and meat

And slobbering infested joint

For rudderless soul lost at sea

The demons walk with no regard

My infiltration to be seen

With shopping basket faced en garde

Of Nexus Liminality

In Search of Oasis

A portal to another land

Would be an honest god respite

Dilapidate this hardened hand

With desert air and soul aflight

The moisture falls into the bone

A slick crevasse of marrow pool

Fill me forth and set the tone

Not just another sunstroked fool

I trudge across the wasted dirt

Nothing but dust and weeds at feet

In wind across the sands that skirt

The world that waits just underneath

Collapsed with no means comprehend

An eyeful cactus at my brow

With thirst too far to death suspend

I give my withered body now

OCD Poetry

Tick tock, goes the clock

Try and let the burden in

Ring ring, let it sing

Tango with the door again

Steer clear, when I’m near

Trust me with the beat inspects

No fear, disappear

Leaving me to right the checks

Bunker Down

I don’t want our love to end in a whimper

I want our story to end with a nuclear bomb

This cataclysm won’t explode above the ground

It will hit dirt and irradiate the wastelands for millennia

Malpractice

Some of us are trauma surgeons

Digging at your breast

Only later do you see

We left a scalpel in your chest

Fonts

My kink is where you see me

Bared and naked on the page

With a taut, positioned body

Showing every written line

See my punctuated indents

Format set to style soul

Bold italic reads the header

With a serif sold divine

The Secret to My Success

I got a billion dollars

Burning a hole in my pocket

Got a mighty big yacht

Got a mighty fine rocket

Got a mighty big crowd

With a mighty big wallet

Got a mighty big share

Got a mighty fine fare

Got a tiny man’s dick

In Prada underwear

I got a billion dollars

Burning a hole in the sky

Wake Up Call

I just dropped my phone

On my face

Man, it woke me up

Now I see the world

For what it is

Three dimensional

Ceiling Fan

My wife wakes up every night and claims

“The ceiling fan is about to fall”

It’s cute, but I haven’t the heart to say

“We’d be dead before we knew at all”

Time Loop

I went to the law store and got me a permit

I went to a home and I got me a hermit

I went to the bar and I got me a drink

I went to the lounge, got the same one but pink

I went to the hat store and got me a lid

I saw an old girlfriend who showed me our kid

I went to my car and I tried not to cry

I thought of how moments we miss pass us by

I went to the meat store and got me a steak

I went to the shed and I pulled out a rake

I went to the yard and I sorted the leaves

I pulled my old back from the trash bagging heaves

I went to my attic and pulled out a book

I saw the school pictures photographers took

I counted the sins of my life now and then

I went to sleep, just to do it again

Artificial “Intelligence”

Can you put your hands into clay

Look upon your creation

And breathe life?

Can you take a blank canvas

See what’s hidden inside

And paint its truth?

Can you rearrange a language

Form them into bricks

And build culture?

Can you take your little prompts

Freeze them into a solid

And shove them up your ass?

Cause I’m a Man, Goddamnit

I search for words

I stir up clues

I kick the tires

I pay my dues

I follow leads

I trust my gut

I break a case

I say it’s “shut”

The only thing I don’t do

Is ask for help

Me, The Idiot

I pushed your pull doors

And wondered why

you were unmoved

Booty

Kiss me with a mouth

Full of quarters

Sock me with a fist

Full of dollars

Throw me a party

Full of treasures

Entreat me a lie

Full of riches

Snow Day

I would rather

Fall into a supermassive black hole

Explode at the bottom of the sea

Witness the heat death of the universe

Then get out of this bed

Resolutions

I stand here on the edge

It’s 38 in days

Last year I promised me

There’d be no more broken promise

I failed in that regard

Of All the Things I Can’t Do

I can’t peel you off of me

I can’t scrub my mind clean

I can’t pay to hack this limb

I can’t grow a good one back

All I can do is write and wish

On every type of star I see

Letter to an Old Friend

I bought a leather jacket to remind me of you

I felt like a poser, so I guess it did its job

Scintillating Scotoma

Blinding lights cut through the sky

Like a tear in woven fabric

A factory edge exposing

Where the universe is wrapped

If reality could shimmer

And entice with nothing there

To a site upon I know

We can leap through with some ease

Can you take me to your mercies?

Show the world so underneath

Elucidate your mysteries

With a well-drawn, dusty map

But a chase of fading rainbow

Never did X mark the spot

And in time you’ll surely vanish

To the normalcy return

History Shift

I’ve changed a hundred times today

Of minute ways and sudden swerve

There is a tipping point somewhere

Dust along this stretch of road

Each pothole sheds another layer

Breaking off a broken flange

Like twisted alum all twist-tied

Enough for fiber bent and snuffed

A crumbled wall of history

Been patched and razed and paint anew

And when it falls, then here I’ll stand

A new man set in ancient bones

Lichtenberg

How we hail the lightning storm

With beaten drum of impromptu

Seeming like a calling card

Of maths beyond our comprehend

Oh, heavens fear we ever learn

To read the pattern splintered out

A tattoo to predict the rains

Displayed upon our figurines

No Ground Gained

Shovel off this mighty chore!

I dig for me and nothing more!

And underneath, to me restore!

This sense of admiration

A ballyhoo of forward for!

To leave behind this sullen bore!

But trudgen ice, I lay before!

A constant consternation

Zed

Kiss me like you mean it

And I’ll love like I do too

We’ll rehearse it to perfection

Just like all good actors do

Push Through

The grass is always greener

On the other side of pain

But the upkeep of that garden

Is a drain on resources

Time Well Spent

I can train for decades

I can hone for years and some

I can plan for many months

I can finalize for weeks

I can gather in mere days

I can lie in wait for hours

I can execute at any minute

I can fuck it up in heartbeats

PenManShip

Many nights, I lie and think

“When can I sleep?”

My whisper inks into an ocean

Floating forever and yet stuck in time

Carelessness of cost

A sunken graveyard of creatives

Every iteration of me

So sloppily written on the page

Frosty

I heard that you were fragile

Like a Fabergé Egg

It’s not in my place to test

All the lives that you have lived

If time were more general

And you walked on air of faith

That you’d be good here regardless

Therein lies my gift of trust

In a situate of ready

Keeping freshly pepper clean

As a hopper ripe for boil

On your feet, man. Steady go

Though my reputation harried

Like a whirlwind of intense

Either keep up or you ship out

A prerequisite of love

Fraud

I defrauded the church

By not tithing my ten

I defrauded the bank

By taking money out

I defrauded the city

By sleeping on a bench

I defrauded the cops

By not telling my name

I defrauded my congressman

By not supporting their nay

I defrauded your god

For not bowing for your king

I defrauded my heart

By living this long

I defrauded my mind

By creating so slow

Makes Sense

Grant me as audience

Sell me a show

Spin me a yarn

Weave me a tapestry

Paint me a bridge

Build me a Rome

Light me in ice

Poem me a dance

Holy Fire

I came here to kill you

So sayeth The Lord

With holy fire or a plague

Through famine, war or flood

I came here to kill you

To take you in a blink

All for your failure to stay

Below me and worship right

I came here to kill you

As a thank you for your acts

In your many years of service

For you made a golden watch

I came here to kill you

Though you took unto my cause

In the story of my love

Might they recall your name

THANK YOU FOR CHECKING OUT THE FIRST ¼ OF THE BOOK. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ THE REST, PLEASE EITHER FIND THE BOOK OUT IN THE WILD OR GET YOUR EBOOK COPY SOON!