Poetry

MIRAGE

In shadows first, these forms coalesce
Detaining my presence
With a fortunate word
A pause to savor silence
A distraction breathed
On my companions

Their images do not follow the rain
Nor enter into sunlight
But instead appear
Particled and faint
Sharpening into view
A radio transmission
Garbled once and clarified
Into resurrected dreams

Wept on the tongue
Saline rain
Falling
Like a cold benediction
The sanity of relapsed thoughts
Coloring my eyes
With a gray scale vision.

Her eyes
Breathing ether
The slow simplicity of this
Falling under
She escapes
My sanity bleeds into permanence
The echo's rigid self
Mirroring me

I swallow an opening
It fills me like warm
Water falls
Strange
This strangulation
Her eyes gape
Bleeding tears

Suffocating words
Rejection in this aria
Serenading my ultimatum
She settles for less
Or all of the above
A scratching
A scrabbling dismay
Am I awake?

My fingers distress
The edge of this page
Hope does not live in silence
But these words burn bridges
Stone withheld
She believes
In fairytales

And their small voices
Promise things I never gave her
And things she didn't know she asked
Until now

Wonder was enough
Once
Now it's not
Enough at all.

slowing down
presently
pulling to the shoulder of
this empty street
gravel crunches
under the tires
like small voices
whispering
more felt than seen

the door opens to a breath of cold air
seeping into the warmth inside
draining it

stepping out
the chill
wraps around your shoulders like
a familiar coat
settling its weight

you have been here before
in this silence
breathing the same air
again finding your way
seeking the tools of this oblique mission
in memory

the taillights glow red
through a faint film of rain
that starts to draw itself over your eyes

the metal implement
is heavy when you lift it out
dragging down your hands
as if it knows its purpose
no reason to wait
there is a pause here
as if the night draws breath too
gathering strength
and you say hello to all the voices
littering this path
and goodbye
to one

the road curves to the left
shrouded in mist
wreaths of vapor trailing around the
vertical metal spectre
a sign post
rigidly versed in silence
it speaks no words
yet commands
that this journey end.

Falling all over itself
So, late and little
For this fortunate man
His eyes describing
An arc of paramount importance
Receiving this-
He saw his echoes converging
He felt his emphasis diverge
He tasted the static electricity
Tonguing the clouds with
A lost sense of sanity

Deceiving himself while he wept
Opening these eyes
On slow suffering

And what did he find in the arrival
Of all his lost hopes
Returning like slighted suitors
Tails between their legs
And heads downcast
Licking his boots in mute appeal
Such a lonely story
And ten stories wouldn't have cleared
Out his mind

The suck and rush of gravity
Wrapping around him like a pelt
Wind between his teeth
And one last happy thought-
That this was all of it
The jarring impact a period
On the sentence of his life.

Silence drips
Like tapping of branches on a broken windowpane
Fingering their way inside
Parting pardons and breaking
Through this doubt
Am I so far gone that this
Sustains and liberates me?

Only the hourglass
Freeing its sorted sands
Temperate and perfumed
A slow fall sifting their way into
The corners of my eyes
And out of the corners of my mind

Time, perchance
The direction of winds and of waters
Slowed the lucid swell of thought
And brought its burden down
On solace
Fortunately I cannot see
And being alone comes easily

And what prior artifice
Would have found me here?
A chance to breathe in
The scent of my own alienation
Willing and unrepentant
And above all my own

So lately have I seen
This bird, perched
Dark winged and arrogant of head
Shaking rain from his
Ashen wingfeathers and cocking his beak
As he contemplates my end
And is this my fate?
Like Prometheus,
Chained to the rock of absence.

Solemn the light
Pouring purity into the hollows
Of her skull
Bleached bone and ragged drying grass for hair
Open to the hillside,
Her smile is eternal
Without warmth

Bared teeth
The grimace of prey in the drawn back
Half-smile
Chalk white and adhering to this crust of loam
Memories
Oh, please

How many raindrops fell on this
Bony peak, dripping from the sockets
And contusions
Milling like tears down her cheeks,
If she but had cheeks to hold them

So altogether then
In the pretty light of day
When her smile was as fresh as she was
And the earthside here
Had not yet claimed her young bones

Deermice and beetles
Chewing the antlers of her ribs
And nesting in the hollows
Where once her lungs did their perfect work
Who left you here?

To be the hillside's boon
An Autumn token,
Your grinning skull waiting to surprise
Young lovers
Or berry-picking children.

A second
Running down her cheeks like melted wax
Or tears
This bittersweet
And had I only known
You
Before this impulse
Borne of ill will and some vagrant breeze
Fleeing into silence
Here beneath the
Voyeuristic oaks
Knee deep in fallen leaves
And falling deeper

And she breathed in sweet
Air of summer
With every Autumn breath
Dying to live and I said nothing
Watching her leaves fall like rain or
Like blood
Bought bitter,
Spent upon this stone
And for a promise I would have bled
An eternity
But she could not be more than this

And I want to feel this burn me away like ash
Tearing into the wind
So soon, this burning light bends
Into an extinguished pallor
Breaking on the dusk like a myriad wishes
And she could feel it slipping away
So slow like summer slips
And I could hold onto that last bit
A breath, a sigh
Her fingers cool like wax again
And then
Release.

The umbrellaed raindrops plume
In my vision
A vertigo-inducing plunge
Each one a descent
Measured in perceived distances

Opening before me
Static
And these unfounded accusations
Impelling me
To you and this sustenance
I follow

It occurs, in this density
I am succeded
In my own approach
And you are blind

On this plane
Of averted eyes
And systematically I am receding
Into falling.

And it will
A part of you moves inside
Shifting planes
And levels
This folded self to transmit
Secret thoughts

And antennae brushed
Against the sky
Feather-soft
Moth's eyes and small brilliants
Glowing inside

She opens wide
Her appetite is a distraction to the mind
And the insubordination from within
Burdens me
With dreams
She falls for me

The sweeping broadens
Across the patterns here
Relevant
And withdrawn
And I am emptiness but she can't see for feeling
This broadening
And what she wants to be
To me

Enclosing all of it in this
Bubble of hopeful impossibility
And don't you breathe
It won't hold
Won't hold

And it didn't hold
And somehow the coldness has gotten inside
And I'm trying to remember why I pushed her away
And trying to forget that this isn't the first time
I tried
So long.

And I am
Seemingly in contrition with my flavors
All apart
And my favors have come to stay
And my time is ticking
And I am
All here
But there is this hollow thing that feels like
December on a warm day
And fills you up with emptiness
In a sudden way

And I can't hear myself breathing
For the sound of my own escape
Uncoil this barbed wire knot inside
Unclaimed
Lost items
And hat check girls in short skirts
And what the fuck does any of this have to do with me?
I'm on a curve
And I can see the verge
Of slipping off
And I'd like to take some time off of life
If you don't mind

I haven't got any change
And I think some change would do us all good right now
I'm no whisper
Second away from falling
But I can still feel this skidding sense of
Danger
Drive slow
Ice may be present on roadway
Stop
And if I don't yield
You can believe it's because I don't care.

my vision rises
finding focus
on this span of rubberized black metal
strung between you and I

into the wired birds,
these singing voices numbed,
the soul of winter coalesced

my eyes found remittance in the frosted windshield
of a car doing 70 on a back road
snow singing from the tires
I am wired
my applied attention fragments
this velocity appeals

wind knifes through the narrow space
between my car's window
and its windowframe
licking at my cheek like the touch of a dull blade
it's half-felt,
wholly remembered

echoes
the doppler effect of passengers
a fraction of connection that resolves into

memory

departure

the angles of the road are joined to me
curve selection curve
dissolution

I follow the wind
revolutions per minute
miles per hour
I can hear it fading
into the swallowing vortex
left behind by my travel
collapsing
into the small silences
spun beneath my wheels
singing to me of passage
and of the obtainable desire
to be found in the outrunning
of this human condition.

So, slow lacy evenings
And afternoons with fireflies
Lanterns dying
And breezes full of little fingers
Combing through our hair

The skies have eyes
To see you with and all the trees
Have ears to hear
And we are walking through a speaking wood
But these lips are sealed

Night sounds, and all around
The apple moon
Is mist
And the wavery wind bleeds a coolness
Into the stillness here

And we are at peace in ourselves
And in each other
And in the November embers underfoot
These whispers of forgotten voices
Laughing to a new revelation

We can see our reflections
Playing in the water
The gateway to another world waiting
And it's all
Ours, let's hold hands and fall.

She was wearing kill me
Her eyes are wide and blank like plastic tokens
You win
This trickle of sensibility streaming down her face
And welling pure perfect in my mind
She is
And I said, now is the time for pardons
And this petrified will you
And now here we are
My dance and hers
The knifeblade arrogance of security
Breached one cold inch at a time
Are you laughing or crying?
It's hard to tell anymore, she said
And we started down this road to nowhere
Walking a slow mile at a time
Eat this minute
She said
I think its done
And her tongue stumbled over the last word
Like the blood stumbling over her lip
And she coughs a little more time up for us both
And we're feeling it
All
She was wearing kill me
When I sat down and asked the time
And she made a show of looking at the watch
She didn't have and we both laughed
Two souls on this road to nowhere
And we're burning daylight
At both ends
And I said why don't you
And she said maybe I will
And that's how it starts
So easy to see how we ended up this way
She has my hours and I have her minutes
To spare
And we're both watching the clock
Run down
Funny how the time looks
She said
Funny how the time looks
Red
And we're applying all we know about
Mathematics to understand how we got here
And yet it's simpler than that
When you think about it
Isn't it?
And I just wish she'd stop talking
And start breathing a little harder
See this?
I asked her and she tried to smile
Through the glaze on her eyes
Cracking the web of saliva and blood that's trickled
All the way down her chin now
And she said, funny
How the time
Looks
Isn't
It
And I said, why don't you tell me.

solidified the rainwet parameters
drenching your consciousness with periodic shadow
the correlary of your drama scattered into the
periphery of your
sleep
flash
the electric mumble of trains nursing a grudging
passage through this score of laddered darkness
flash
delay
walking in the railyard
staccato burst of light
gravel underfoot
the trains wait like hulking beasts
backlit by red and yellow glare
waiting
steaming hiss of breath
the scent of cinders and warm metal
standard differences revealed in this cautery
burn
step closer to the track
the rumbling crescendo of one charges past
whipsnap of uncountable tons of steel and cargo and lives
flash
seen and by
here is perspective
then silence.

I was cold
Lowering this selfish part of me
Beneath the ocean
Blue-black reflection
Castles in the sand
Decay under sallow skin
Bones like wax melt

She watches me with plastic eyes
All these little pieces of who she used to be
And I saw them all
Fall

Scar tissue burning like a candle wick
Smell of tar
The vortex inside carries me down
My heart is empty
This little waste of time
Hollowed out until there's no intensity
And nothing but this
Willing mistake

A sucking chest wound of the soul
And I said
Couldn't you come back later?
She took my hand
I felt her fingers like twigs beneath her skin
So warm and full of life
She couldn't breathe fast enough
She couldn't breathe
Fast enough
And I said
Wait
And she fell

I tried not to follow
But I can see her face below and she knows
I can almost breathe through the bubbles
They fill my mouth
And all the little pinholes are bleeding
And I'm aching inside
And outside
Can you come back later?

An area
A silence
A broken wing
Flung wide across the expanse of this decision
Straining for a different atmosphere
And are you satisfied with this collision?

And she bears the breaking words
On broken skin
The elements to wound
From her suffering
Despised relief
To feel this pain
Strung
Inside herself

And she eats coals
Trying to put out the fire inside
Suffocation burned
Like desolation scars
And no one intended for it to go this far
But just say when
Drowning isn't enough

And falling through the focus
Of an unseeing eye
This snowflake melts
And she cries out
Beyond compare
As she becomes herself:
The illustration of her own despair.

And he would not have seen her
Had she borne a thousand miles in her hands
Nor had ten thousand windows sprung open
Between their eyes

Only an age is in this falling
From all the divided parts within

She wept for tears that cannot halt
The flow of this confusion
And she weeps for all the silences
That build upon her tongue

And she holds the will to change
If she could only find a way to set it free

Oh, a thousand wishes
And he would not have broken this breath
Upon her skin
Nor ten thousand dreams to shatter

One more time for loss.

She waits
Between the stars
A tapestry of light and dark
In her violence
That restrained the eye

And you saw burning clockwork figures
Dancing on the covers of these books,
And reaching for the linear modesties
Of this conspiratory dream,
Fell

Words can't explain
The mysteries of this hollow wound
To the inner workings of your mind
And the scarred walls of your collapsing heart,
Closing in on providence

Not for them
Did you take a step,
And the pendulum swings back
To half-eaten remnants
Of yesterday

And you can't quite see,
For this breath-woven shadow breached,
Beyond the revolutions
In her whispers.

Scarlet traceries
Run in tendrils of red-reflecting light
Down rain-wet window glass
Through the reflection of a stoplight
Glowing pause

Beyond, the skyline is in smoke
Smoldering ruin
The reclamation of rage
Despite resistance

And intensified,
The howl of sirened wolves
Freeing the streets of anarchy
And feasting on the bearers
Of ill news.

Oh, I'm all hollow
And these broken words fall from a severed tongue
I've been trying not to tell you
What you can't hear
But all the things I couldn't say
Have said themselves

I didn't mean to make you cry
But I must admit
I like when you feel pain
Better than when you don't feel anything at all

And I can't remember
How to keep afloat in this sea of changes
When we can't say what we mean
And we can't see each other for these clouds
And there is no more clarity to be found
In silence.

September's smoke-hollowed glaze
Mellowing evening's purchase on the day
This light fades slowly
Draining color from below
And giving it all above

The shadows of trees
Form a density of blackness against the edge
Of my view:
Sunset settling into swathes of color-
Aquamarine, lilac, peach, salmon, flame

And one bright star
Pinning a curtain of purple cloud
Over the horizon's last lamplit glare
Where the dying sun has gone to rest
Between earth and sky.

Her hollow eyes hold the rain
Dim reflections
Waiting to spill like tears
Here,
Her empty hands hold stems of flowers
Dried and petals gone to dust

Do you know her?
She is a solemn lover, and she smiles seldom
But her touch is kind

Would you know her,
If I told you that her skin is cold
But her voice is like black velvet
And she moves
With a temperature towards Winter
But a warm spirit

Perhaps
If I told you that her breath can kindle fires
But more often lays the frost
And that her wisdom is greater than the sum
Of her betrayals

And it might help
That she is hard to please
But I would ask for no other

And if that is not enough
Then, this is her garden
Where no plants wither
For none grow
And beneath the soil
Other things lie buried
If you only have the eyes to see

And she is mine
For she asks no more of me
Than that which I can give
Yet what she asks for
Is everything I am.

These shadows
Dissolving into themselves
Forced the premonition of a storm
Survived
And, what does the rain taste of?
Only bittersweet
And the wind tastes of ashes
Dry and crumbling on the tongue

Taste the dust of ages
Forgotten now
One breath
The gasp of empty tombs
From this grave-scented shroud
And all of it
Commingled in this residue
Of honey and of blood

And find what knowledge
Seeks its witness now
An understanding here
A frail remnant
All too soon unburdened
Within the limits of mortality.

In the wounding prison of your mind
In this illusion of space
The chapters of self reliance
Are unfolding like pages
Black-marked with scars of words

And we are exploring the boundaries
Of what you will
And will not do for me

So, what mystery lies in a hidden sadness
Dissolved now,
But waiting to approach
Like a beckoned moment
Only these dry shells of former loss

Here,
Waiting to be filled
Bid memory stay

One step beyond resistance
A subjugated prelude to dissent
Not for this pale period of mourning
When all the angles have your shadow
And all the echoes have your voice.

Strength for burning
Violence for pain
An ethereal whim and you are frozen
Here in substance

When your breath falters
Burdens are dropped
Eyelids lift
An inscribed arc of permanence
The calisthenics of resolution

Will you or
Will you not
Decide?

In this aeon of introspection
For a curtailed dream
Bitten off before the roots could spread
And you tasted this bitter apprehension
To feed a cellular dissolution

Spreading
Like wine
Like oil on water

Ache this
For a moment of feeling
A thawed celebratory grimace
To echo the agonies and ecstasies of birth
And you breathed in
A spark

And you fought for one solemn
Single moment to describe this
And you failed utterly
Remember that?

An elegant distraction
Feel this
Blistering innocence
Augmented power
And in this arrival, take notice
Of a departure.

Here, the scrabbling rustle of dry leaves
And things best left unseen
Yellow eyes glaring like small full moons
An October breath
Hastening to chill

In this field, a secretive perfection
Torn open beneath an indigo sky
In the waving grass
Ink-dark shadows pool, full of fingers and faces
And dreams

Above, the chill disk of light
Burning gold
Winter's touch
A handsbreadth away
And you sleep

Starlight extinguished
By the cusp of dawn
This vital hour's end
Gray sky
And you're not breathing.

Where eyes seek view through dissipating light
An angel statue watches over the dry fountain
The soft sound of shuffling feet through autumn leaves
He bears her here
Her cold hands
The scent of dried flowers
And shut up rooms

Their whispering voices
Soft, dripping verse condensing shadows
Encasing this dispirited fatigue like coffin glass
Pining for a cold remembered moment

Scattered crumbs on snow
He holds her hand
The stiff fingers chill within his
In his head, faint music
The strains of violin

Scattered thoughts
Flocking like the small birds
That peck their offerings
And he remembers
When this season had not come

What do these eyes see now,
Where his cannot follow
And all too soon
Where she will travel too?

Forging ahead hopelessly
Burden and injury draining
And grief closes like a shawl
So that nothing else can be seen
And he knows

In this first of the last days
The length and depth of his emptiness
A space that waits already to be filled

Snuffed like a candle, her smoke retreats
All things will change state into something new
And in that distance he sees her form dissipate
Into nothing to become merely a portion of greater presence.

See this witless parody
A sad relic of forgotten days
So long before,
His burden falls to the floor
There is no smoke from the pyre

Drawn into the same delusion
A separate fantasy
Dispirited sacrifice to missing gods
And you can see the altars on the table
But the candles burn with no flame

For a moment all is clear-
An implicit wish
A crimson tear
His fairy tale denied
Sleeping Beauty's withered
And the frozen swans bask aimlessly
On the dry lake
No more.

This particled view through shattered glass
My provision in a secluded place
At that vanishing point where sky meets water
When the scent of isolation becomes a solace
To take the blame of broken promises

Words lost to four winds
And one sigh
For these watermarked shadows
That wait to plead remorse
With no escape of longing

Then this calming breeze sleeps
And slowing down is an easy dream
A sweet relief
To pardon misery
Scattered breaths
A sheltering cloud
For deliverance

The suffocation of sound desists
In melancholy reluctance
My sentiment for burning bridges-
And amid the ash of celebration,
And the chorusing voices of forgotten songs,
Silence waits.

Below a fabricated calm
Bereft of resolution
My will entails surcease
For the contemplation of leaving-
Dissection performed
On the sleep-induced parturition of dreams

And I'm choking on denials

To depart this attempt with my crime intact
Lack of emotion,
A single-celled organism
Passive in its penciled self-absorption
A planetary shade
Ecliptic, to dissolve the limbo of unutterable words.

And the cogs of this motion have stilled
A repressed sense of discordance
In the mis-angled view of a shifting plane
Through the shuttered windows
Of my haunted separation
The purchase of fingertips on glass
Fingerprinted with the indelible effort
Of remembering and remaining still

And I was faltering to see
In this distracted light
The frozen shattering of broken glass
An element of surprise at this sudden departure
The visitation of a solitary hour
To depend on time

There is no heartbeat in this ashen column
Counting minutes for a reprieve
And the dim striations of allowed ignorance
Scratched onto fresh bone
As scrimshaw etchings
Depict filtered light through water
When the air smelled of wet seaweed
And half-formed plans

And I saw paradise
In the patterns the leaves paint on my bedroom wall
Drawn in shadow
Their rustling whispered implicit silence
Our secrets shared

Will you take a moment to taste the sea-change?
Oh, half-forgotten irony
And don't you half-remember
Listening for whippoorwills
On twilight scatter missions
When their voices called out an answer
To something no one ever asks

And wasn't that not quite yesterday?
Everything was still new
And all this heaviness hadn't yet settled on our hours
And we still had time to take each breath
As if there'd never be another.

Solemn langour
The penetrating light of morning
Breaking through the wistful summer leaves
A sweet breeze freshening on the air
No taste of rain in the aching serenity of this cloudless arch
Spread wide to hold the sun

What, then, could bring this heaviness to bear
On somber witness
What foretaste of an impending storm
Bend my will toward despair?

Out of this perfect span, no darkness could descend
Ravenous like winter wolves
Nor the cold breath of the north wind
Rise to tear this dream to shreds
And leave in the rent tatters of my security
The bolting lines of nature's blight

Only I see the weakening of boundaries
And the falling of temperatures
In the solidity of life around me-
A liquid-color view
To embrace the vaulting curve above

And it is painfully clear
That the sky is falling
When I can see it stretching still
Unmarred horizon to horizon

The birds and insects tell of summer
And the leaves whisper of it, too
And only I am trembling for winter
Unseen and unfelt here
In this piercing blue.

In the stolen hours before dawn
When all is still battened under the cover of night
And truth seldom falters
A breaking measure of innocence dies
And a pattern of self-denial
Wars with longing

In the gray light of morning
When all the voices are stilled
A sense of purpose is lost
To the fractured wisdom of my deviating path
And this isolation brings a fog of consequence
To bear

Still,
Which snowflake morsel of melting time
Is one that I can live without?
No second's regret
To take root in the ashes of our history

I find nothing
But this foolish tendancy
To see the best in all your efforts
A weight around my neck
Feather-heavy
And so welcome.

You'd try forever if I asked you
But you'd drown an hour at a time
You know I didn't have to
But nothing could ever have stopped me
From falling this far
Nothing but you

And I'm so afraid
I've gone too far
(That's why it is so perfect)
My hopes were always burning
The bridges of our journey
Now why would I
Want to do something like that?

You told me not to worry
These flowers have to wither
Something written in their leaves
Some self-destructive code
And we could both see our way to leaving
When there was no going back
That's why it was so perfect

I broke my voice
Trying to tell you not to call
And we fell so far
When the sky came down
It was like learning to crawl
You had to start a little at a time
Now why would you
Want to do something like that?

And I think I have to let go
With both hands
Because I'm too afraid to hold on
With just one

I think I can see my window
And something to break my fall
If you'll just tell me one more time
That's why it was so perfect.

This disapproval to scar your emotions
Yesterday's torment
The fortunate revival of a common goal
To seal this imperfection
In a tomb of its own design
Still, your mind is heavy
Weighted with the passage of a solemn year

Following the ghosts of past days
The enemy is within
And we are our own burdens
And our own shadows breathe this silence on our skin

Halt, who goes there in the misty dawn of future hope?
Soldiers of fortune
Our dusty grins and scarred battlements
Approaching the break of day with a new and distant innocence
In monochrome separation

The absence of a chromatic scale
Blocking the view of a larger part
And we are the sum of ourselves
And the sole value in these empty eyes.

Yet, an impulse to be born-
We greet this failing portion with a weary hand
To still this alien concern,
A regard for outside means
In the chaos of arising motion,
To bring illusion to a close,
Sanity whispers sweet nothings
In a dreaming ear.

A jarring emptiness
Stealing all color from my eyes
Crystalline vision
What is this power
That can halt the step of time
And let me look forever upon the moment I most regret?
The spare clarity of black and white
Frozen, photographically clear
A stop motion view
To immortalize forever
The final destruction of my pride

I am characterized by rain and emptiness
The graveyard resolution found
In the stark outline of dead branches against a winter sky

Stumbling cold,
Too late to see this faltering shadow
Spread jagged beneath the ice
The whipcrack dissolving of solid ground
Into a stationary hour
A question of denial
Firmly resolved

I found a missing moment in the sound of my own breathing
A filtered sigh
For lost chances and forgotten emotions

Your touch, filling vacant spaces
So cold, pressing on my lungs
Is all I desire
No second thoughts-
I am willing to fall a mile
And surrender to the lightless place that waits inside
Only let me sleep beside you
Beneath the solemn coverlet
Molded in black ice
And in the arctic secrets of your eyes
I will find my peace of mind.

This discourtesy is a sanctioned release
A willing hand to light the match,
Their disregard
Altogether dimmed now
The windows of retreat
Damnation's touch
The smug, cream-fed arrogance of their grins
Dissolving into shocked, bloodied innocence
What could they see in this non-existant future?
Their own demise was written large upon your face

They took it for discontent
Fools, now they see the error of their ways
For they see nothing
Their eyes reflect shattered images
They have painted the walls with their own feeble minds
And with the violence of life that they tried to repress
It drips now scarlet from their curled fingers,
From their questioning mouths
Seeking an answer only you can provide

Only this lonely sign
A distant landmark calling the ships home to paradise lost
A broken minute for these burning clocks to count
Destruction
In the anguished echoes of an archaic and forgotten voice
Mute in suffering
Isolated by its own subjective meaning
Dissonance
In the ephemeral touch of passing thoughts,
Paused to watch the flames.

Soft on the strains of morning air
A dew-bedazzled fragrance
Blown from sweet longing
To seek the touch of stolen sunlight

This craving wakes-
A tenuous strand
Stretched towards the intimations of desire
A fragile offering

Frost-kissed intentions
Severed
A wilting scorn
To be refused.

And I want to hear your sighs,
Only singing to the silence
With silver echoes for breathing,
Calm me with words to seal this wound
Survival is a mandatory sin
And shadows lie soft, on this lightless work of art

They enchant me with a faint sound
Songs for leaving
Chance melodies alight on blooming lips
Choice morsels of communication
The velvet caress of textured words
The character of serenity to please a trembling ear

They witness the downfall of love, relapsed
This lament
An architecture of melancholy purpose

Only longing could take this moment
Frozen in time
Your ashen heart crumbled to dust
My fingers spread the powder,
Mute actions for a specific want
Searching for a reason to depart

In escape, a realization
Devouring chapters of my life
How many wishes blew dandelion seeds of hope
On this breeze scattered near and far
To take root as wisdom
With lessons learned from loss.

Charming desertion
Your echoes for my crime
Burn this penetration on your mind
The jagged edge of retribution
Chose to swallow hours
They delineate this faltering breeze
Swollen with anguish, salty-sweet

So ask me how I've fallen
Occasion solidifying this desire
To taste the essence of destruction
A solitary wish
No product of collapse
Thorns in the tongue
A bleeding word

Ask me not to do this
On your lying breath
The scent of fear
Oh, ask me not to fall
So far
This motion stilled
A perfect instant

What is this rigor?
It's only a vision
Your grasp limits growth
For a germinating scar
And you would feed my hunger
An action to betray
All for a chance to sway
This slow ardor for licked wounds.

Solemn, this patient disregard
For stolen moments
The play of light, vapor and relief
Concord for delaying structure
An appetite freed

And you fell for this ecstatic sedation
Numb for prior wounds
The cultivation of an imperviousness
Choosing not to feel
What mars the subtle light of paradise?

A scarification on honeyed flesh
The firm arrival of truth, a proven disease
So, this was innocence
Not so precious now

The return of chaste violence
Sections this plaguing whim
With veins of discord
Here, separating will from desire
Bloom the flowers of concealment
Nourished on falling hope

A frozen weapon for deceit
Turned away the fallen one
And laughed in the face of defeat
Now, where is that drowning vessel
Full to brim with self-assured mirth?

Crawling pity
Now sustains the hours of your trembling shadow
As it stretches across the borders of deception

Laughing still?
You should weep for discovery
That cruel mistress,
Bridging the chaos of termination
Her cold hands closed fast
And found you in a shifting world.

There is an elementary lesson to be learned
In the focus of decision
When the burden of grief falls upon me
A derivitive curse, pale for lack of words
For this, I would not weep
But the time to stay has passed

Space within space
Where once there was a sense to fill
A temporary permanence
A jest of eloquent remorse
For the bitter brow of silence
Touch not my bereavement with a solemn word
As I am rendered incomplete

Strength burns
Imperfection realizes a shadow
At sea with itself
And I am at a loss
To taste this sudden freedom

Guilt wraps the mercurial turnings of this mind
Tension riding the standard musings
Literal impact
Willing not to see what can't be seen
For the future adversary,
An intimation of despair

Light falls serene
Weeping statues gain a brief innocence met by dew
And in the falling stars and fragile wars
Between myself and an inner knowledge-
That this is what's to be-
I am gray with emptiness.

And you would heat this element
With blood for warming
To taste the rise of sundering
Down among the devoured ones
It's a question of language
The gestures of mistrust
Lost windows of opportunity to staunch these wounds
Bleeding for a formality

The scales have fallen
Vision clarifies itself like wine
The succulence of truth revealed
To the taste of discerning tongues
What is this frequency, suddenly applied
A perfect instrument
To delay the chance particles of survival
For frozen tissue?

Cadmium blue serenity
I am disappearing into willful submission
The ministry of sorrow for common dreams
Will you encapsulate this impermanence?
I want to save it for a rainy day like this-
A destroyed perfection to illuminate souls
Down through ashes
Subterfuge and disarray
A mortal pardon for a sealed window

Bleeding eyes, scars for wounds
Shifting relevance
Amid future skies
A terminal direction
For the serrated caress of evidence
Bruising force and focus on this frame
History beaches itself, the wave formation of demise
A decaying semblance of artistic license
For a fabricated prize

Lost in formation
To the craving of innocence
As demonstration ratifies the treatment of subtle loss
And we are mourning doves sentenced to eternal failure
With nothing left to mourn
A static state, screaming words no one hears
Your fragile lies burned the bridges of futility
In essence disturbed
The rest of me.

THE RUSH OF SANGUINE ENERGY

Candlelight spills golden
Ferocity denied for a moment,
The innocence of dreams
Saturates this brief span
Instant for a sensation
Powder-soft
To caress the curve of innovation, immolation

Dangerous intentions
No will to deny this falling
Yet you love this startling descent
Fainting solid
Mingled in a frantic panic pulsebeat
Statues regained motion
A formula greedily given to appeal
The sensitivity of respite

To reach the focus of your desire
The concept of immortalty foretold in ashes
Bitter on the tongue
The tang of blood illuminates this mystery
Eloquent, to despair of sleep
In my fading garden
The dreams of chaos
For delusions
A natural seclusion.

The dying of an hour
The feeble stifled cry of a last resort
Tell me, why would you open this window?
What foothold would you offer?
My emptiness can only be filled by this moment
By the opening of this doorway
So open to me, your regret
I want to be whole
Let me take just a little piece of you
And in return, I'll give you all of me

What do you see in me?
Widow-black fur to sanctify this unity
The innocence of your welcome
This isn't too real for you, is it?
Not too real for your sweet denials...
Just let me take a little more
And you can feel this too
So slow to breathe...
You can be a part of me
And I'll be all of you

What do you want?
What do you need
In this sacred silence
In this unfolding of petals
And of fingers
In this broadening of horizons
And in the uninflected turmoil of your mind?

A cascading light of memory
Prior witness to this falling apart
Ignoring Autumn's tokens
An echo to forget your name

You didn't see the tears of November
Break the fragile hold of summer's loss
To poison the breath of oceans
From a distant shore

Falling for suffocation
A crimson wave of population
Downplaying its own role in the society of dreams
Like waterfalls of motion

In solemn rhythyms, this pattern kept to itself
Fought the confusion of communication
Made disoriented and fruitless
By the despair of modern invention

Grant the dead their right to silence
You're a willing victim of your own dispensation
Sweet-tempered lies and bitter pardons
To sustain your weary soul
Lit by the coloration of desire.

Elements of misconduct
Black nails and smeared eyeshadow
Perching like crows along telephone wires
Vindictive words spilling from painted lips
Vertical discontent lines
Between the gunmetal stare of your jaded eyes

What have you seen that I haven't?
What lies have you told that I'd believe?
Down here the art of self-preservation
Is all a false bravado anyway
And we all want what we need
And need what we can't touch

My scars for your burdens
An even trade
Don't even try to tell me you wouldn't sell your soul
For a moment of liberation
Innocence is a precious commodity
And desire keeps the commerce moving
We could make this exchange and seal it
With a mutual need

And if it's not too personal
And if you wouldn't mind too much
I'd like to see where you've been
And the things you've done for a back alley fix
Because it's stories like that
That keep us both alive.

Collision
The architecture of this descent
A black-souled mortification
Amid strains of muffled protest
The dim illusions of what could have been
Before this isolation
Rendered incomplete
The sore art of mutilation

Deny me this instant of retrospection
The candle burns
Wax and dried petals
The scent of flower-smoke
Drifting through this room
Fresh rain-wet breeze
Blowing through this open window
Through the caverns in my head

Emptiness
The enemy of second thoughts
To devise the ways of this release
A sequence of clotted moments
Frozen sighs for focus lost
This view defeated in prior recollection
A cameo
Forget this
No suffering

No solemn window pane
Breaking glass and ashes raining down
Below, the frightened scurry of departing secrets
Won't you call me back?
The edge is too close this time
The drop too distant
Down beneath the window ledge
Crawling with broken nails
A slipping hand
A loss of balance

Taken away from this
Opening weightless in the air
A distraction falling to embrace the ground
Molded to my body
The melting freedom of this departure
Spreading crimson
Swallowed rust and loss of innocence.

An island of sweet silence
Breaking waves on a dark shore
Dawn is the intruder here
Will you sigh?
Branches stark
Against a charcoal sky
Will you sigh
For this existance
Brought to shadow

Fine rivers
Dark pathways of the soul desire
Chance this
You have found your loss
In the songs the leaves sing
Stirred by dying breath
A whisper for oblivion
A serenade for parting

Stroke of midnight
Velvet on the skin
This hour's aperture
When innocence lost its verdancy
Here, in the slow shuffling of ancient cloths
Skin crawls
The cold hour approaches
Dewdrops fall
Rose petals weep
Back tears and red

Embracing this
Mine is the tender patience
The dissolution of regret
Willing to accept destruction
These tears I wept
For your naivete.

Mourning Cloak spreads dusty black wings,
Ragged with sunlight
Jeweled eyes
A quiver of loneliness
Misspent sadness
A dim frozen pane of ice separates me
From all that I see
This fainting song
Weeping cherries
Their blossoms fall, clogged with tears

In this time of losing hold
The arch of innocence-blue sky sustains me
And aches the spill of golden sunlight
Illuminating fresh green leaves
Seen through a cloud
A swallowtail flying over marble
Butterfly-shadow on stone
The letters freshly incised
This date
Only yesterday

Dark polished wood
Hushed voices
Violins and roses
Words for the dying
The diminished caress of frail breath
For a fallen insect
A beetle's shell
Shiny black to cover me

Carry me to the river on tensile wings
A powder of black dust
For mourning ashes
Butterflies drink from dead lips
A sweet kiss
A fragile parting
This moment
Yesterday sleeps.

What is the departure of silence?
An echo's broken skin
An aeon to destroy within
Willing souls
To despise an hour of the unforeseen

What is the embrace of shadowed solace?
An enveloping chill
A sweetened breath of satisfaction
Frozen here
The chosen isolation of your dreams

Swallow the apples of grief
Bittersweet honey to hide the mold within
Spores of permanence
Impotent wishes
The freezing brilliance of exile
Bursting on the tongue
A breaking strand
The last call

Black wings of dissonance spread
The sky falls
For this arrogance
The shades of dispossession
Swallow the air
Inverted raindrops descending,
Tears of willingness

Aching to dissolve purpose
An egress
This windowless shell
My discontent
Breathe poison air
Will you accept my condolences?
Your loss is too great to bear.

In the midst of sanctuary
My eyes burn
A freezing light emanates from within
The scores of this delusion
Evoke my suffering
The direction of sadness
Leaving room for disappearance
Victorious bleeding
For a lonely instant
Faced with surprise
This moment
For a truth to lie

Foreign mist to overcome seldom
The art of perfection
Derelict, the chill of neglect
Forgotten whispers
Sleeping details
At the heart of deprivation
This pressure has eaten into revolt
To only delay the inevitable
An orgiastic mistake
Time slips
Stains resolve on the focus of my vision
Interfering with breath
A plague of minor ills

A waste of time
This breath shattered isolation
The falling of silence
An elegiac witness for the departure
The arrival of obsession
The angles of mourning
Purchase desire
The soul of creation
Tear this web
A shroud of folded wings.

The inheritance of dreams
A twisting shape rife with deception
This permanent hunger awakening desire for unreality
The deluded courtesy of solemn recollection
Your escape

Tell me the sound of the wind's reply
To a lost question
The sudden decree of willful mischance
The issue of a swallow's tongue
To the sincere serpent of gravity,
For a disenchanted prisoner
This collateral satisfaction
A misery of betrayal

Your eyes are wounds
The surface tension of your smile breaks
Curtail this hope
A passionate seclusion for derivitive presence
A pallor of uneaten flesh
The feverish brilliance of marginal intention aborted
Your eyes betray

Tell me the soft whisper of rain's pardon
Breaking through
A slow leak
A sealed decay
The midlevel growth of subterranean altitudes
You thought you knew all the ways to say it
There is only one

Tell me which way the wind blows
And what words are exchanged in the dimness of rapacious mortification
In the solemn silence of these loam-dwellers
Tell me the answer they give you
When you ask which way is the light

Bonemeal and suffering
These roots thrive on lies
Sweet air of morning is lost to the intentions of servitude
A half-remembered fragrance
A taste on the tongue of forgotten Spring
Smothered by Autumn's weight

Would that the dead could speak
And that you could feel this too
A sorrow aching for a moment's reprieve
I asked to see your face in the mirror
A second's replay of an aborted moment
A frozen following of time
Breach by the touch of empty hands,
This border line.

What would you see in this-
Features frozen
A view of descending lines
Silver tracks on panes
Lines of dispensation
The disintegration of a cell

I thought I knew the virtues of silence
The fatigue of salvation
For a dim view through trees
I saw it all in the leaves
A foreign dissipation
A solace in delusion

Calling your name on the wind
Voices return like echoes of a suggestion
Vanity laughs in the face of dispute
Would you see in my longing
That hesitation binds
This decision for freedom?

Images of direction
Sere for burdens left
A form bereft
For a frail minute
The soul of decay blossoms

These bones reach for sunlight
Succored by earth
Fingers thrusting upward
What have I unearthed,
Crawling for your memory?
These features mock yours
With the grin of immortality

Bone remains the same
Beneath the flesh
It waits beneath the soil
For passion's last song

An echo of remorse
For a last gift of silence.

Standing water, draining remanants of illusion
In contaminated awakening
The causality of this dismal solution-
The strictures of vibration-
Are clear in these degrees of separation

Devoid of resistance
A solitary suggestion
Saturated witness greets the dawn of disrepair
With a fragile suppuration
Echoes of delusionary succor

Hello, silence
This is the permanence of dying
For a sad view
Narrowed on bloodstained reliquaries
And missed appointments.

My permanence is suspect
My fevered intuition chelates my serenity into devouring warmth
In this locale, disinterred bodies of evidence
For a formal request:
Could you
Would you not allow me to feel this

I devoutly wish not to encounter these bruises
In any instance of my former self

Reverbs of bilateral suffocation
In exhausting detail
Relapsed heartbeat
Deceleration
And I am not real

A dirge for melancholy ills, the satisfaction of a want fulfilled
To terminate my existance

My perceptions are gray
Forcing me to realize
A set precedent for mortality
That these cratered areas of savage discontent
Form rules of engagement

Defloration of pretext, entering into the roots of awareness
Please harness me to hindsight and allow a small measure of regret to surface

A manufactured penance
Deviant for revealed state
Catalyzed adversity
And I am not grounded.

I wonder what you would say
To this broken mirror
Abstraction of light repressed
For a different view

Look inside this shell
What do you see here?
Fall deeper
Wish you could see yourself this way
For a single purpose

Your reflection blinds you
An archive of rejected dreams
You said they weren't yours
They belong to no one else

Tell yourself you don't feel this depth
Lost from sight to descent
Leveled down, these walls
Did the earth move when you said you could?

This will not give you what you need
Time burns away the wick
The room grows dim
Would you stay
If you could leave this place
Would you wait
If you knew it was for me

This attraction for your regret
This perfection of your denial
See the patterns for yourself
In the ways you fall
I saw them all

Loss of purchase for survival
Can't recall the last time you tried to slow down
This awakening for choice
Can take you back to the start
Find it inside yourself
A missing emotion
A permanent scar
You couldn't watch this

You didn't want to see it grow
So sell your soul for a moment of clarity
Anything to take away the lesson
What you touch becomes a loss
Did you see, in this haze?
Did you see the faces of dominion
Their voices whispered
All the things you can't hear
They ask for more
Tell them you've fallen
They ask you to fly

Impossibility for this action
You couldn't see the way to freedom
You couldn't bring a purpose to yourself
And in this evasion
You found a reason to refuse
Words betray
I asked you to stay

Your mirror is mine now
I try to find an image in the lines of division
This is part of me
That was part of you
My hour is broken for a concession
To depart on my final direction
You couldn't stay.

This day is gray
Solemn for my view
You came
You satiate my appetite for pain

I can't find a way through this grove of sacred trees
Their branches entangle and choke
Falling through levels of suffocation
My breath escaping

This November solitude
These fractures in my eyes
Open wide
The colors bloom.

You absolved yourself
With a montage of sophisticated lies
This highway of deserted numbers
Calling sufferance upon themselves

Missed stop
Ego trip
This parachute failed to open
Frozen here in place of desperation

So removed from grief
So diffused from longing
Your startled vision whips perception
And dissolves

The is is not what you had in mind
Your idea of bitter silence...
Smile
Waiting for this entertaining moment to fade

You forgot to pay attention
I only wanted a second of realization
You thought you knew me but what you knew was just a mention
Of my former correlation

Induced by lack of affection
I ate my lungs to feel this breath of revelation
I am what you never saw
And now I want a piece of your perfection.

Carnivorous devotion
This falling free from isolation
Feeding on mixed messages
A willingness to feel
A permanent distraction for the art of conversation

Hello again, my perfect timing
Stolen view for growing
I had no plans to evaporate this
See my devout wish in willingness to fight
Just a little grey stamp of approval
Just a small remand for this slowing

Hold me back from gritted teeth
Growth is an elevation
I had no way to witness this place
Incapable of feeling
What had fallen from the wings of castigation

For your garden
Greenhouse effect on my skin
The pace of afternoon stills
No nobler purpose than this- I would save your life
If you would let me in.

Criminal animal, starving for attention
Your future abandoned in the fog
Threw it all away for a taste of this imperfection
Swallowed the only solution
No one to blame but your own defection
You were crawling over broken glass to feel real
Slowed down at the intersection
It was a premonition
Should have seen this coming
No recourse
You thought you saw the echoes in her smile
The afterimage burn
Too late to see the start of satisfaction

Trace the scars she left in your eyes
Misfortune is your friend
Collapse is imminent, so disregard advice
This permanence is not calm
Do you feel it?
Sleep has become a battle you fight to wake
Somnolent wave carrying ashore the burden of remorse
You lost it all for her
Didn't you know?
Oh these occasions are few and far between
When you see clearly through her eyes
A view described in rust and battery
Solemn state for adoration
Broken toys

Couldn't see the stop sign in her smile
Saying, only take me so far
Only trust me so much
The night cries out in voices you've forgotten
The effect of waking dreams to lift your eyes
You said it was the fall
She said it was the fallen.

Fixed velocity
Descending car-wreck syphilitic impact
Pathetic human remains discarded in some dumpster
Parkway
My mistake I thought the light was green
How am I ever going to get my truck clean
Bruising misanthropy characteristic of diluted subhuman ordeal
Issued by correlary contempt
Controversy systematically destroyed
In cascading lines of fluid cascade
Delayed minescule perversity
Residual misinterpretation
Skewed priorities
A denuded victim of self-propagandizing lies
Collate incandescent festering greed
Wrenching display zeroed in on
Feature dim red flagrant ecstasy
Inviolate stature
Rapid frenzy scraping dichotomy
Grew the lines red in the skin
Falling naked
Revolving doors serrating edges of cardinal impulse
Aggrieved violence for abbreviated purpose
Force fed future defect
My silent argument
Shark-jawed impotence
Aggravating futility
Folding chairs and scarred lamp post soliloquys
Asking parked cars for advice
This nightmare castaway crawling up the shores of some deserted island
Permanent disarray
Embolism catastrophe
Tripped over my ideals
Tore this skin
My enemy ate flesh
Her screaming echo for the last dance.

Are you sorry this is what you want?
Don't be
Teeth sink
Arch back in one breath
Desire
This permanent fire
This delectation
Savor it
Liquid velvet languor
The prelude to unconsciousness
My bones are liqueur for you
Drink

Slow fashion this colliding metal
Runs through my skin to pool with yours
Flashburn
Chemical fire
Purple reagent lifting imprints of past fingertips
Your thumb on my collarbone
Your touch trailing down my spine
Seductive curiosity
Taste this

Would I devour your sentiments
Dissolving on my tongue
Acid sweet
Like wine or chocolate
Fragrant melting crime
I love you
Your hands burn.

A cancellate creation
Formulating insubordination
Freeing the impulses
Of an alien sensation

Carnation cremation
Slitting throats to fill the station
An aching favor for this falling freedom
A paralyzing revelation

Collapsing discipline
Serrated edge of altered-will negation
Feel your surface tension
Defend a violation

Impossibility bends
The force of this elation
Witness defeat-
Encompassing permeation

Sacrifice sentience
Derisive divination
Faltering forbearance
The stamp of isolation

Somnolent reception
A last renunciation.

I am a falling icicle
Spearing the back of a scurrying fieldmouse
I am fervent blood, hot arced in whitened air
From the deer's torn throat

I am winter's maiden love, the demand of slow illness
The caress of wind on frozen cheeks
The last struggling sigh of razor-edged breath

I will carry no burden heavier than sorrow
I, who stop the streams in their beds
And manacle the trees with ice

I cannot be touched with plaintive words
All blood chills before me
And all warm things become cold

I drop the small birds from their branches with frost-locked claws
Pin the hearts of rabbits in the owl's gaze
And muffle the footsteps of the stalking lynx

Without animosity
I bring for the end of all seasons
A final and irrevocable freeze.

Is it me?
Sweet disregard
I felt nothing
Something breaks
Someone falls
I didn't see

Wracked missed moment, this
Terminal impulse
I want what kills me
I touch the flame that burns
And lick my scars

Console me with poison apples
And fragrances of decay
For I am sick of this mildewed ration
That formulates my arbitrary longing
Into want

I want
What I need
What I can't hold
What pulls away

Dogbite snapping at proffered fingers
Reject the hand that heals
Only wish for the one that hurts
Foolish creature

You weep in denial for what you already know
Lost this
Couldn't have it
Lost yourself for it

Is it me?
Why not me?

Salt my wounds and make me crawl
This chokecollar love is for you
Beat me
Leash me
Never release me
And when I turn on you
Bleed for me.

Radiation burn
This simulation of an erasure
Answer fear with internal bleeding
Take time to smell the wound
It's a small consolation

This viral immolation
Dizzy in this atmospheric swell
Barometric pressure dropping
T storms and precipitation

Urgent merging satellite mistake
Formulating pardons for an unfamiliar break
Tell me why I'd want to eat
Your photogenic fake

Take off my head so I can feel the rain
Washing away this stagnant silence
Enter in to greet the skin
Desperation driven under
A fortune cookie sin

Lucky number sodomy
Cast-off ruins of fleshly devastation
This catastrophy involves itself
A paralyzing fascination
You thought you saw enough
When you reached ignition
Now you've seen the worst in us
Chemical superstition

Sanctified with water and with wine
Mischance lost steps
Tripped over the grand design
Fruitful favorites catapulting cave
Reach for this inside of me
Devolution wave

Rip out my stitches let me bleed
Blood mixes with water
A feature of this progression
Exhibits of cohesion
Through physical aggression.

Open wound IV drip failure
No connection to this direction

I am not comfortable
I am not starting to...
I am not
I am not okay

Articles of discoloration
Bruise this innocence
Nothing inside

I am not broken
I am not falling
I am not pieces to put together

Confusion of lacerations
Contusions on this meaning
My armor for you
Bleeds.

Velvet iridescence on gray
Bowed neck
Small pink feet
(Fragile)
The solemn red eye
(Welling, tear-like, in a rim of pink, thread-fine)
Walking in a stumbling circle, one foot in front of the other
Why?
Head bobbing
Sleek and plump, incongruous here
Amid cars and exhaust, the zebra-stripes of a pedestrian walkway
Invisible
Soft bubbling
Head-cocked question
Cajoles
This broken form splayed on asphalt
Wings spread
That will never fly again.

The aftermath of suffocation
Turned me blue
A last chorus for rejected dreams
Avoidance steps carefully
This slow dance
My final indecision
You echoed my lies
You offered me too many songs

Drowning fingers play with bubbles
Bereft of longing
Mated to desire
Incapacity
Greetings from the depths
Mayday intervention
No sustenance in this salt-eaten forage
Swallow rust to alleviate fear

Construed as pardon
Surface level defection
Interred beneath the soil
Beneath the water
A velvet solicitation
Wept tears of ink
Drying on the sores
My stain dissolves
My illusions wash away.

Sweet springtime
Lavish messenger of light
Portray my serenity in your altitude
Sachets of lavendar and lilac
This craving beauty
Salutes my temporary fever
Bursting to be free
Exquisite cultivation
Twined like columbine around my heart
This spark
This perishing dream
My swan unfolds
Pearly effervescence
Delight

Fill me with dandelion wine
Playing like kittens
A dew-sweet innocence
Simmering sultry fragile breath
Dance this gavotte
Play this melody
Oh, rapt in this fragrance
You are mine

Glissades of passion
Drunk on this cider-sweet nectar
Moth-heavy
Moonhung damselflies and dreams
Feed me on love and liqueur kisses
Sweetly-ripened
I am replete
This feast is charmed
And famine sleeps.

Melancholy, this passing moment
Make it not so
Your words sculpture me with razor blades
And teasing candleflame
I burn for you
You burn for nothing

Our communion is not clean
Yet I am clarified by it
My worst instincts fill me
I have it inside
All of it for you
Take it now

I ask only to be your sheep
Let me die for you
Blood-drunk wolf, tear my throat
Choke to death on my feverish cry
I want it all

Sweet iron on my tongue
Lost and drowning for you
A black lung disease
Can't breathe
Don't care
All of you

All the way down to darkness
Silver bubbles and all the little fish
Swimming in tears.

Carven, this still face
Features bleak and ravaged
Question not
The answers of time
Their toll is taken while you sleep
Wakened to an age you do not know
Worn by this slumber
Your moments an aeon
Your solace to be found in echoes
Sweet

What hand touched these walls,
But to stay
A shelter, breached now
Rain runs through these holes
Long grass and other of Nature's
Scar tissue hosts
Seek your stones with fumbling fingers
Insects and small animals nest
Where once a home grew
Better to sleep
Silence is your burden now
What things you've seen
What ghosts you hold
They must sleep too

Weep for lost hours
You who do not know the price of tears
This dereliction is your justice
This abandonment your prize
Sweet reward for the sun's caress
Must you tarry longer here
Weep with the rain
Harvest past
Time moves on
You stay.

Candle light
Burn low
Sear this effigy
Your demise
Written scarlet on the wall
Sweet lullaby
My goodnight kiss
This

Tragedy unfolding
Page by page
You ate the relics
Now you must pay the ferryman
With coins of sleep
Fragile
Aren't you, sweet one?

Your cries delight
Sacred love
For you
My catechism
My catalyst
Oh for you I can be anything
For me you can be everything
Let's dance

One more
Sweet slow
Body language
Take me down
Take me up
Press this flower in your book
Freeze this moment in amber
You cried out for me
You sighed for me

In this silence
Taken away now
The attendants have gone home
The words have been spoken
The rain has begun to fall
Even the doves fly
So goodbye

It was sweet enough
For now
Until I'm lonely again
And then we'll see
If you dream
If you feel
Beyond this hollowed shell
What you once were-
Mine
Perhaps you'll dream of me.

Lie down, timid child
This thing called sleep
Is only the prelude to a deeper silence
Caress these cheeks
Rounded and sweet
Untouched by terror or triumph
For you, the moon
The stars
The worms and bitter fruit
To taste still
Only everything
Sweet dreams, don't cry
I'll be back, candy love
Eat my teardrop wishes, they fill you up right
Sleep tight.

Cancer consumed viral pestilence
A damaged bleeding screw penetrating sanctity
Dissolved into remission
Remiss, forceps cancelling future doctrine
Sensitivity failed inertia
A dangerous disease
An escalating perversion
Scarify my infection

Feed a secret trap, can't breathe
Scream down, sucked up
Fire! Treason! Traitorous action
This cursive demand, squeezing
Feeling, seeking nothing
Angles, fringes ferment coma terror
Terraformed freezing moon
Carbine sleek ravages casualties
Screen delete

In this cavern my enemy sleeps
Dormant slime for truth
Crying features, creatures flying
Trauma scoffs these fears
Try to sleep, aching, falling feedom
Torment tortures dying animal breath
Tried suffocation
Lesions, legions, reasons
Frantic panic, static attack

Reckless broken balance over able crimson cable
This terminus frozen cradle
Eating sacred surgery
Only this to know I'm stable
Crazy craving, counting, chasing
Motion dazing, wracked and taken
This chosen formula, wretched craven
Are you ready to be raving?

Stop this rat poison
Broken glass nightmare
Stake itches, catching vicious crawling
Suture burn in tiny echoes
Sand falling, slipping, sliding straight into studied stain solvence
Not to see my applecored worms
Feeding certainty in scraping chaos
Frenzy, armored scramble issues
From frequent frail and fragile tissues

My drug store tin soldier siren elbows screaming rape victim
Framed, this altered view relates violence
Written in a street light's silence.

Has this feeling become obsolete?
This melancholy light wept
Rain
Dripping trees
Dripping conscience
Falling to a slow measure
She laughs at innocence
Slow parceled drops
An elemental frequency
Small concentric circles repeating
Gray, gray

I thought it was forever
She said
I thought it was you
That was forever

It was a second
It was a minute
It was a broken clock
Ticking these hours, these days
Endless
Dali melting time
Not for us
It meant images on our eyelids
Violet light refracting
Black
Rain on the windowpanes

I thought it was forever
She said
I thought it was you
That was forever

Does this commotion die?
Ask the rain
Falling softly now
An elegy for love
Bitter
She weeps at innocence,
Who thought there was forever
A slow journey traveled by glass
Drop by drop
It was an hour
It was yesterday.

This pyre sanctifies me
An imperfect entity
Transformed by surface formation
Mist curtains details
Of selection, natural and otherwise
My direction sung
By deluded sympathy
An escalating coherence
Subversive divinity

Solitary and melodious
This symphony of pain
My decree ultimate
Presentiments of ravaged choice
Echo delusions fallen from favor
To cradled sufferance
Find in this scorn
An excoriating sustenance
For a void moment

Resistance
Scraped and forced
Fed on betrayal
Honey-sweet poison tongue
Witness my change
Only for this one

Tomorrow, future security
Bare-boned and stark
Carmine, this revelation
Scarlet, traitorous deceit
Yours
And mine, these catacombs of craving

It decries mistake-
My regret
Your reluctance
This damaged pavane
Serenades remorse
With morsels of finger-bitten scrutiny
A cavernous, echoing emptiness

Shine, for celerity to demise
Scratching scintillation
Clawed misery
My festering desire apes pardon
Joyous novelle machinations
This god,
Dead.

My new requiem elates:
Don't you see?
Castles in the air
Formations of gravity!

Unbind this maiden truth
Set free her wings so she might fall
Weightless
Plummeting
Gone
Oh, gone.

A chemical corrosion
My skin blister-cracked
This fungal remedy
A mass of debrided flesh
This wound, spreading

I am vitriol-dipped case study
My soul harbors a nest of transparent crabs
Their tiny clicking claws and waving eyes
Produce throat-swelling anaphylactic shock
They all have one name

Convulse me your paradox
Lance this bleeding
I can't breathe
It's spreading

This infection
Transmitted
Terminal.

Nestled in perception,
Secret views
Arrogant, presuming wonder
Collects me
This semblance
Elected to perjury
Solitude in warmth
Loneliness in virtue-
Seductive reason,
These colliding mirrors

Formal brushstrokes
Black ink on rice paper
I want to be yours
Sacrificial wine
Drunk on passion's doubt
Sleep now
Sweet fervor
Dedicated to my sentence

Dressed in crows' feathers
With tattered black silk wings
Spread over me your shade
Devolve this sunlight
Piercing tender
Soft and silent
Would you cage me,
Would you carry me home?

These dark desires
Misinterpret my question-
Crown me with daylight
I delight your senses
Embrace this moment
Cursory petals falling
Rose red
Lost in cherry blossom snow.

Black disease, this caress
Turning
Slick fever
My agony, fuel flares
Burns my flame inside out
This darkness

A creeping seduction
Curling slow like smoke
Lazy hunger
Devouring this warmth
This light
Consumed

Blacker than coal dust
Choking like carbon suffocation
These needles
Anthracite misfortune
Your affliction
My desire

Danger here
Seeping dire malformation
Black fungus
Eats my light
This penetration
Scarring me

This enclosing shadow
Absorbs my radiance
It falters
Damaged, this weakness
It collapses
It flows
Killing me

Eat my light
Make me like you
Sweet rotten pain
My disease
My dedication
Paint me black.

Cartographers do this
The purposed composition of lines
Spaces and divisions
These make up our significance
Creating the patterns we will measure our journeys by

Astrologers do this
Collating the evidence of illuminated dust
A perfect symphony of light and dark
A bestiary of stars
The lion and the crab
Here we are now

Several thousand years of existance
A second
A flash in the pan
A spark extinguished
The sun lives longer than all of us
Yet it won't live forever

Moments succeed moments
Introspection dissolves
We are powder
We are light
Limitless in the empty dark
We are stars.

Ponder loss of self
This shape twists into itself
Not mine
My form contraction dissolves

Sedge-gray
Fog fever breath bursting from confines
Escaped
Sulphur yellow burn visits consciousness
Irradiates me

Devouring future perfect angles
Color of delight
Surface-waved movement, extending scenery
Black and white
This brave focus

Fever bright
Sweet coronation of darkness
Perceive this faltering dream
To be secure
To relish existance in shadow
I entertain, just briefly
Passing lupine

For cherished selection
Ultimately deceived by longing, my refusal
Now
In this exquisite suffocation, please deny me
This collapse

Harnessing this feral product
Necessity endures hunger
Pain lies on snow-fall
Delerium
Sacrifice

I am black wolf losing the moon.

Waves crash, the sand is filled with hoofprints
Their depressions capture reflection
Although the sound of hoofbeats has faded
Long since

I can't see the sky for salty tears and blood
I can't feel anything anymore, but I feel this
Now my flesh is cold like this sea
That beats upon the shore like my heart beat
Once

Brother, I asked you why, when I saw what you meant
And you said, 'Because.'
And you took my life, like a gift
I can hear the seabirds calling, crying
Their voices echo mine
An eternal question
Never answered

Why have you done this to me?
When did your love turn to hate?
Such a bitter rivalry, between the two emotions
Such a fateful meeting on this shore

Your sword and my heart, we came to an agreement
We signed it in blood and pain
We promised, this day
Never to part

And yet we have parted now
This separation aches like love
It's cold like death
There's a piece of me that's empty
There's a piece of you that will always remember
On the seashore.

Lashed by your scathing silence
A venom-dripping sufferance
Miserable pardon-
Capitulation is an offense

Your metallic rape laps blood from my wounds
Your hunger not satiated by pain
Yet my pain feeds your razor tongue
As we resume this sado-masochistic embrace

Your barbed words
Elucidate a mutilation
Until cut and bleeding tears
Drop from severed meanings

I am better
Seen but not heard
This victim, delerious
Seeking punishment.

(I feel)
Dripping melted secrets press down on my irises
(I feel)
A sutured finger dipping into scattered fragments
(I feel)
These cascading rivers of foreign sensation
Bringing down the brittle structures of logic
Rapid projection
Has dispensed with eager knowledge
A bolted necessity
(I want)
To escape this pressure
Driven project, applied fortitude
Arguing the density of this mirage
Incapable
(I feel)
Imprint
(I want)
This sequence contains a second filtered path-
Secure nerves crammed
Scan frenzied sweep of captured radio tone delay
Waiting as this defense mechanism deploys
Scrambled connection
Static erasure
My energy
Departs
this
favored
segment.

Rabid caresses of arbitrary change
Oh
Delicious, refusing tremor
Bite down
Remorseful decadance

Taste alters sundered demise
A scrabbling hunger
Faint
Shrunken submerged remembrance
Of delighted seduction
A ventured reprieve.

Vivisected archetypes of preliminary serenity
I'm reduced to this bile-bitter starvation
Cultivating a semblance of immunity
To your previous terminal solution

Oh, a secretly edifiying yet paltry misconception,
This disdained severance of flinching pride
Subjective dispossession-
I have no relevance to this defaced presence

Final direction aborted
Disease has rendered visible an ancient scar
Prescient particle feeding on damaged skin
A red formula dream of sorrow

Pale screen, dividing surface of this existing scene-
Crescent folded downpour on your funereal pelt
Silent jaws decisive
Entrance collides in sadness, fixed

Object significance, the sculptured placement
Of my broken glass ego
Salutatory to your narcissism.

Devoid sentence for violent slide-
Ultimately, a faded biting wound
In this soaked, viscous pool of preempted sensitivity
Savage echoes of formality deny sarcasm

Concise external frequency
A deluded downslide pattern emerging
Partial distortion remnant
A catapulting landslide of emotional code

Focused perception, conveying anguish
Saccharine perversity, a forced precedent
Seeking relation of consigned meridian
In a diffused period of contentment

Vacant, serene tokens of wishful purchase
Chosen the feral induction to satisfy peril
Camphor-bitter taste of ravaged elegance
A shocked stumbling nail slash victim

Rain-fed dismal solitude, a distant period
Bloody-tongue, wrenching absolute courage, hopes perish
Collapsed channels scream a video pulse
As sandman deepens, gouging razor wings

Dazed as forceps peel and crush an urgent serial volition
Prodding suffered torment of finger-drawn salt
Calm feed destroys purpose to fix this ache
Abolish fervor to demonstrate solaced casualty break.

Particular woe
Mortified
Predatory
Ambiguous

Awaits in the defeat of consciousness
Conjuration of this hag-ridden, pale-eyed nightmare

Transfixed, now
Cold-sweat
Incoherent
Suffocation

No bearer of opiate dreams, she
This grim horse has a darker ambition than sleep

Hers is encompassing fear
Absorbing
Consuming
Devouring

In this nighttime visitation, she will carry the burden your guilty tongue cannot speak
If you would look, put out your eyes.

Fear-ridden motion,
Electric fever,
Rash atrocity defined

Sacrilege abdicates relief,
And disenchanted freedom
Is sacrificed to defeat

In pleading remnants of choked belief,
Anguished and subdued;
A pressure
An alliance

Collapsed into sentiments
Porous, this object
Condensed so-
Compliant now.

As cherished focus severs perception
Destroying possible containment of this deviating sector,
Spreading spores of knowledge
That refute this devoted persistance,
Reducing vehemence to feeble noise
I see-

As a paralyzing incongruity derails simplicity,
Fulfilling the sacrament
With stained plastic images of degraded portent,
Your words become
A peeled fumbling element,
Vomiting rejection.

This frenzied feeding
Filtered by appeal
Predicts a growing percentage
Of consensual consummation
Commanding inadequate ideology

Demanding this pinhole perforation
Of what I want, what I need
Tortured into topiary shapes
Please you
Please me
Please, I'm bleeding

This feverish desire
Feeds on its own energy
Generates
Recreates
Feeds on itself
Feeds on me

There isn't enough to go around
Symbiotic suicide-
Clean the tank
Dispose of the refuse
Feeding time is over.

This profundity does not sit well on you
Your brow is more suited to the slight dishonor
Of selected sins of omission
Seeing you like this, I must disbelieve

Guilty as you are
Of prior offenses of morality,
These denials of intent bear the taint of pity
Come, now, this shames both of us

Bitter truth can seek its justice here
Honor binds itself not, to the seal of vicissitude
And if they break me, these shallow words
Who is to blame?

Preface this
The blind worms of impetuous grief
They find these caverns of veracity
They know the secret pathways of your loss
They feed on the detritus of your betraying memory

Clarify your perception thus-
The decay of desire
Forecasts the decay of self
It is all mulch for those that wait
Here, in the dark side.

Watch now
Pressurization...
Changes
Where is your equilibrium now?
You are falling

This loss of balance
When you reach out but there's no one there
It's being betrayed by your own intentions

This is no mistaken journey
No chance misstep on the path of deception
This is impact

And it's yours
Embrace it
And it will devour you
Reject it
And it will obliterate your will

Dance with this
It is your seducer
And your killer

Say hello to truth
And take the floor.

Razor wire intrusion
Votive mercenary offerings
Of bastardized goodwill
Hawked on streetcorners with all the trappings
Of righteous intention-
Fuck that

Zero tolerance
Castigate your own selection
Of fumbling butchered mercy
Couched in residual self-doubt
Feeble tendrils of misinterpreted hope
Crawling up the flagpole of self-interest

Kneel down and pray
This submission becomes you
Parasitic philistine
Behold the revenant
Will you sacrifice me to your father?
We ate your son.

Resilient tissue, this
Accepting of willful destruction
Even welcoming
In it's purposeful distraction
A violation

Ecstatic reprisal
Perceived in static discordance
A conundrum
Mysterious in it's fortuitous
Lack of resolve

Impermanent, fickle will
Choosing in this category
Of solemnity
Remnants of determination
Paralyzed.

This formidable lesson
Existing in soliloquized rage
Forces coherence
By benefit of saturated decision

Stand your ground
Disarrayed, pardoned
Your pleading memory of diluted projection
Foreign and remittent in this possibility

Oh, suffering of the pains of indignity
You are so focused and restrained
Hold out this frozen pressure
Passionately refused

Now, hectoring and devoured,
A bounty of pretentious plentitude
Axed and abused by silence
Ever betrayed by bitter breeding

Oh, maggot-ridden progeny,
Festering freedom,
Vile sophisticate,
Please repent
For your realistic identity

Misaligned and devoid of trust
This union betrays its own issue
Intensity feeds on fear
Infection cannot be delayed

Destructive commitment of gain,
Formalized in frequent perspicacity,
Has defenestrated priority
In this prolonged resistance

A victimization of future prospect
Features in existing decay
Questions of egotistical viral worship
In coincidental conveniance

Critical mass attains this abducted innocence
Dismaying anchorage of febrile vision

This inviolate shape,
Bleeding lapidary insight,
Conspicuously absent.

Bloated and decayed attributes
Of this corporeal existance
Defying twisted ranks of spectral innocence
Features, they do revolt

Missions of succession
Freeze-frame scatter grenade
Bolting for assured safety
In and out

Wishing for their death,
Suffocation satisified
This infantile frustration
Until the actuality

Oh, no, too late

Parry and feint,
Futile-
Against these shadows of soiled, shed skin,
No defense holds weight
Oh, God, their carrion-crow laughter

They have gathered now,
Excising this betraying organ
Their clawed fingers
Pull it from the cavern in which it rests,
Dripping their regret

They feed it to the dogs,
Those hounds of remorse
Their black-winged arrogance
Feasting on ashes and blood

I see their ophidian eyes
Inducing oilslick vertigo

I see darkness unfurl
Falling, I see shards of distance rise

This inevitable result won't illuminate me.

A preliminary prediliction
Flocking to conform
Amid angry sermons of reactionary fuse
See it now-
This blistered harmony!
Their identities are fragmented and concealed
In selfish demise

In witness to this indignity
My own ingrate agony
Issued from fissures
Of catastrophic contempt
For what, were we forewarned and forearmed
To turn against these swarming legions
Of frustrated offense?

Betrayed by this capillary craving
Crystallized in our genetic code

How it illustrates our condition of cadaveric collapse
Malnutrition of mind and purpose
Swallowing defeat
And wallowing in inertiac fatality
Feverish and sequenced
In consolidated occlusion

Oh, for evidenced delusion
Amid whimpering miasma of fetal reluctance
In and above this vision of
Fortunate refusal
So conditionally despised.

Cowardice-
This consuming reason
Born of reluctant change
Enters into transparency,
Vectors of forward moving creation
Paralyzed and proficient
In denial of self

In sustaining direction,
Finding predicted prisms of extracted idea
A chaotic congregation of insight
Like a constellation of scars
Tripping into these
Frozen and frequent
Chasms of disrupted dismay

Equal and unallowed
Frightened focus of self-inflicted individual
Crying out for connection
A persuading and perceived
Fallen serenity.

Existing
I
Seeing
I
Wander the pathways of conscious desire
Fortune formulated in schematic will
Desist in unknown advance
Positions of entire loss
Amassed before
Selective doubt

Willing
I
Knowing
I
Format the perceptions of illuminated decay
Retired before me
Conspired around me
Saline introspection
Viciously redirected
Into these eyes

Can you see?
Will you ask?
Heretics of illusion
Processing questions of semantic sleep
Answers confounded between cumbrous thought
All too soon devoured
Singularly and silently
Into the issue of deceit

Oh, no
You saw the faces in the mirror
Their eyes are your eyes
Oh, and their mute tongues yours too
Deny it now
This revelation
Denied it then

Voiceless, you wept
Blinded, turned away
Embracing now
The shattering delusions of conceit.

This arcane mystery,
Explored and existing
In myriad motion,
Prioritizes my occasion
In a split-second of analloyed
Geodesic clarity-

I am brought to this moment
And aligned in perfect understanding
Of the unified whole

A connection of intersecting lines,
A formation of perceptive cycles
Winding spiral fashion around a central point

This:
We are born from water into air
Live in a fire of creation
And are reduced at last to earth

The elements of this elsuive state, mortality
Also the elements by which we define our immortality.

Savage transmission
Forced entrance
Comprehension
Coiled wire throes exposed

This violent schism
Convulsing between parallells
And projected into your cranium
An ultimate revelation

Reality versus desire
Wake up.

Sedated sedition
Turning beyond this instance of discarded ecstasy
Lost in entropy
Ttime without limits
Existance beyond failure
Summarized and secluded
Exhaustion of ideals
Proving prostration of this panicked prelude
Probing into the cavitites of malicious reason
Excite
Exit
Time to stop
Time to start again
Choosing, being, feeling, seeking
Wait another second
Formative collapse
Apprising uprising
This is too soon
Too late
Your waxen wings can't carry you beyond this smog
Your feathers soaked with oil
Burn.

There is no rest to be found
In the arms of disquiet
No rest inside these halls of haunted sleep.
Here in this dimension
Of false hope and faltered will
Empty words and emptier shades,
Their momentum accorded by chaos,
Seek feeble peace
Where no peace lies,
And reign without permanence
In the kingdom of lost dreams.

Above, dark skies heavy with rain
In his mouth cold metal
Bitter on his tongue as the first drops begin to fall
It comes to this
Bitter years, bitter taste
Bittersweet now, in these last moments

With nothing but trees and sky to witness
He lifts his face to the darkened sky
His teeth reject the barrel even as he bites down
Through a clenched jaw he laughs
Or perhaps he cries

It comes to this
Cold metal on his tongue
Cold rain on his face
Eyes closed as the storm breaks.

Ash and elder grew,
Brushing leaves when wind blew
Never more then a fleeting caress
Yet the briefest touch was such
That each would have waited forever if for less.

Ash and elder grew,
Brushing leaves when wind blew
These sweet moments enough for both
Separated by water
Yet happy in their silent troth

Each willing to spend eternity
Longing for what could not be.

Ash and elder grew,
Brushing leaves when wind blew
Autumn came and with it winter's breath
And still the two stood firm
Fearing nothing less than death.

For ten years had they stood
For another hundred if they could.

Ash and elder grew,
Brushing leaves when wind blew
Winter came and passed
Spring with her capricious fancy
Was their betrayer at the last.

Ash and elder grew,
Brushing leaves when wind blew
Dawn found their embrace
Elder, broken, fallen forward
Limbs entwined at last with ash.

A wild wind, a night storm's blow
Has broken all the promises in two

And ash's leaves drop like falling tears
As she must contemplate alone these stolen years.

Perpetual confluence of idea
Existance of an ageless nature
In a vortex spiraled span
Ever permeated with loss and revival
Cyclic and permanent
Contradiction and counter indication
For this, is emotion an art
And art an emotion
By this is the arc of reactivity consumed
In echoes of eternity.

Electric connection
Arcing between us
Pole to pole
Slow burn to flash fire
Taking me under
Taking me over
My consummation
My desire
This moment.

Midnight
Black light
Highway heart attack
Split second collision
Spine cracked
Impact
Hooves on the windshield,
Blind flash of eyes
Yellow-lit in headlight glare.

Inarticulate moments, denying purity of intent
Present broken windows of opportunity,
And an objective pursued beyond resistance
Results in loss.
The cure?
Acceptance of guilt,
Excision of regret,
Convening with those similarly burdened.

And if all else fails, there's always
Pseudo-ritualistic suicide.

Wandering the bitter streets of a midnight city,
Anachronous maze of fog and alleyways
Lonely footsteps, the sigh of distant traffic
Sky bruised by city lights, wet brick reflected
In oil slick water, black into wavering black...
Sodium lights and ashes,
Moths in the descending beams, wings burning.

As I unwrap my tools I contemplate the moment we are about to experiance together
In a few seconds, you will be experiancing the only perfection you will ever attain
I am transforming you
Through me you will become more then you ever could achieve on your own
I try to communicate this to you but instead of thanking me you begin to beg
You don't understand
I guess you can't
But I do derive some satisfaction from our association
Before I brought you here you never believed things like me were real
Now you know I'm the only thing that ever was.

I had a bad day, I guess
You should have paid some attention to that
Before you decided to pick today to point out to me all the ways in which I've failed
I thought I'd just hit you once
Just to show that I was serious
But once I started I couldn't stop
I'm sorry
I tried to put you back together but the pieces wouldn't fit.

Fondle cold flesh
They can't say no
Empty eyes filmed with grey
Stare at nothing
Frozen rictus kiss
Slick with fluid
Decomposed
In this eternal embrace
You long for rigor mortis touch
On your skin

You gave me this

It hurt before it got better
It felt like dying
Quivering pulsations of hope burrowing through my veins

Fuck you!
Take your heartworm and fucking eat it
Squirming deep inside
Festering like lies
Feeding from the inside out until there was nothing left but hate

Take your heartworm and fucking eat it

Heartworm
Disease of desire
Twisted and coiled deep inside
Waiting to explode

Eat your fucking heartworm alive
Swallow it down
Let it grow inside

Heartworm

I love you

Heartworm

I'll kill you

Heartworm

It feels like dying when the worm turns.

Serenity defiles the calm freneticism of breathing
An aching span of distorted magnitude- hours, moments
Interchangeable and discarded between one heartbeat and the next
Pleasure becomes pain in one fervent breath.

Cut deep, expose the nerves and viscera, sweet sensation
Sought
In the untainted depths of consciousness.
You thought you knew
Now you see-
It's all here.

Pain-pleasure spectrum expanding
You can experiance it all in this too-short time, as your vision darkens
Serenity becomes one with fear-
Don't hold back, give it all to the moment
Bloodpainfeardeathecstasy
It consumes you as it transforms you.

Chiaroscuro
Beauty and horror
You can be it all this time.

Absent sound of still water, glass pond reflecting mirror images of geese
Breast to breast below a sky elegiac grey
Clear and pure with the faintest wash of pink, a last breath fading
Abandoning the evening to night.

Silence is broken in sudden movement of water, ripples shatter the mirror
Black on fragmented black amid a soft winnowing of wings
Above, gray sky bleeds to blue like a sigh, a soft expulsion of breath
Washing away the last of the light.

Water becomes still again, sapphire reflection making a path for the moon
Crescents of silver trailing and refracting with the shiver of the wind's touch
Soft whispers in the reeds, they stir and rustle together
Bending and moving invisibly in shadowed ranks

Breeze bidding goodnight.

Storm of sound encroaches from sudden silence
Endless echoes spiraling through blue infinity
Words falling like petals or broken drops of water
Spray-iridescent arc, rainbow hues refracted in an illusionary mist
Expanding and breaking like bubbleskin
Gone

Fractions of seconds to wonder why,
No time to weep
Accept or not,
Future impacts with the present.

Occurance millisecond-
Impulse to vocal chords aborted
Preprogrammed flight response inevitable
Yet ultimately futile.

Synapses fire useless messages
As consciousness extinguishes
In an instant of chaotic regret.

Alone here in the catacombs of my own obsessive vision,
Trying to find something I can't even name,
I chase down fragments of lost memories,

Try to put them together, but they slip through my hands,
Willow-the-wisps,
They vanish down corridors too dark to explore now.

I'm not that desperate yet, although desperation grows,
In hours and minutes, insanity is infinitely patient,
The places I don't want to visit wait.

What happened then, yesterdays ago?
Don't ask.

Don't seek out truth because it will blind you.
Hope?
Hope is void.
Once time moved fast,
Hours vanished in a span of seconds.
Now time stands still, and there is nothing to do but wait.
Chance is lost,
Hope is void.
And we have all the time in the world.

Cycling downward,
Ticking clocks and dripping faucets, the slow grind and wear of memories
Eat away at me a little at a time,
Until there's nothing left at all

But delusions and apparitions.
Are they memories or dreams?
The lines blur-
Past and future collide

Intensity unbearable
Breath ripped from my lungs
Eyes open
Awake

This is what happened,
This is what was and will be,
Truth is a prison
Now I am free.

Falling away from the daylight
Descending into shadows and lost dreams
Journey completed in emptiness, I found truth

Crawling over the broken glass of memories
I discovered that scars never do heal
And voices are not silenced by time

Whispers of forgotten moments, they call to me
Fragmented like broken mirrors, sharp enough to cut
Reflecting images I'd rather not see

And I feel like this could be the end of everything
Or the beginning of nothing.

(When You Open Your Briefcase be Prepared for a
Veritable Supernova
of Cascading Bodyparts)

Violent tension occluding life
Warped, entwined, turbulent with energy
Constrained,
Chained
Victimised by prudence and ire
Fallen from sweet elevation
To be consumed by fire

Versimilitude, tokens of an apparent moment
Shaken, buffeted and torn between a view
Static,
Ecstatic
Captured by evidence and illusion
Whispered beneath hope
Slighted by cursory confusion

Underhanded factions of virulent emotion
Forming, welling, flowing to overwhelm reason
Taken,
Mistaken
Fragmented by advance and retreat
Vanished beyond retaliation
Incongruitous reactions complete

Dissonance between moments-
Accept a change in environment
Words encourage metamorphosis.

Freedom becomes thought,
Arrives at pure intention,
Results in will.

Past perfection evoked once again
In shadowed relief.
Strain for light,
Achieve release.

Crawl out of your self indulgence and ask me why I'm here,
Still waiting, still wondering, still letting you
Do this to me,
Day after day hour after hour,
Never saying I've had enough.
Never standing up, turning away,
Just stay.

Why? I could walk away, I could say
I've taken more than I wanted and
More than I think I should but it's so hard to say no,
When I want to.

So go ahead, take another shot at bringing me down,
I'll still be waiting and wondering and letting you.
So do this to me,
Again and again, time after time,
Never saying enough is enough,
Never letting me fall, wounded but whole,
Just keep on.

Why? You could see I'm breaking
With each word and each action you push on me,
And each one is just a little more then I can handle but I
Still stay here.

Cause I want to see just how much it will take to kill me,
Just how far you will go to make me fall.
So do it to me again,
One more time and we'll see if this is it-
Enough will be enough,
I'll crumble that last little bit and you can watch the pieces scatter,
Small and smaller still,
Each one an evidence of my imperfection,
Each one a monument to your skill.

I long to be taken and transformed,
My transgressions forgiven in each sweet moment
that I am reborn and renewed in you.
Hold me and heal me,
I close my eyes and wait for your touch.
Warm and wake me,
Let it work it's wild wonders here and leave me
Dizzy and breathless.
Let it bring me to life,
Standing amazed and unbound in the sudden sunlight
Shadows banished and demons driven hence,
Confused and naked and grateful.

Half-truths and contradictions
Own the architecture of this misunderstanding-
Bitterness and salted wounds
Become the cornerstones of its foundation.

And now we erect a wall between the words and the emotions,
That stands tall and strong, proof to the winds of feeling and desire,
And inside
On each side, we wait and arm ourselves for battle.

This place, this feeling lost again- awake and armorless
And struggling
Beneath the rage of your denial, I fight to breathe
And ultimately fail.

You breached that wall we built between the two of us,
Its crumbling mortar flakes and falls away and I blink,
Frightened in the sudden light.
I thought I was safe here, but you came in and stripped me bare.

Your words are weapons, I have no defense
I feel my life and worth seeping away with each wound
Cold and colder still,
And I wonder why it always works this way, why the wall becomes a prison
And your words become the instrument of my despair.

Wake up-
Come back-
I can taste it all now.
Snowflakes and icicles and blood and your eyes,
My hands are cold but yours are colder,
Love.

And in this moment I think I ask myself
Why?
What happened?
Angel wings and bird feathers can't save us now.
We've come too far
It's too late.

So look up and tell me you love me one more time,
With those cold eyes and colder lips

And I'll kiss you this once and tell you I hear you
It's not too far.
This distance is growing shorter every hour
And I'm looking for the moment
Inside me.

Put your arms around me love,
And hold on tight.
This trip is coming to an end and I'm just a little scared
Of what the end might be.
Here is that last curve in the road, the one where your brakes fail
And you take it too fast, too hard but it feels good
Too lose control.

Can't stop,

Can't see,

Wait for me.

Opportunistic fool
You act like this was all made for you
But you don't see.
Haven't you noticed
Don't you care?
The way things change with use,
The way they fade with time?
These are concerns,
But never mind.
Go your own way
Take, break, leave
Do what you will
This is your world anyway.
And when it's over with and done
Oh well.
Don't worry about the tracks you leave
The damages you cause
They're someone else's price, not yours.
This is your place
And you will make it your way
Change, rape, move on
It works for you, doesn't it?
It's okay.
Forget the whales
Forget the treefrogs
Forget the protests
They're nothing-
Background noise.
This is your car
This is your money
This is your pollution
This is your world.
Use it til it's gone
Then move on.
Find another space, another place
This one will work, too.
'Rain forest? fragile sea?
It's all the same to me.
Let's make some changes here
Let's build and improve,
And when I'm done you won't believe
How much better it will be.'

Standing on the corner of change
Watching life go by
I could go either way
Think I'll stay here

They say life is a process
One that should move forward not back
Maybe they don't understand
The way this feels

I gave it time to fade
But I'm sorry to say it hasn't
And I've given myself the opportunity to forget
But I declined

I want to hold onto this for a while more
Savor it in each hour I'm alone
Taste the misery
Like touching your tongue to a residue of battery acid
Lemon-sour it hurts just a little
In a way that you can almost like

I hope I haven't become addicted
To this feeling of loss and pain
This ache that I hold inside
Like a treasure to peek at every once in a while

I like to take it out on days like today
Poke it and see if it's still tender
Has something else filled the cavity yet?
No it's still there

I don't know what I'll do with myself when it's gone
I have grown used to it
I kind of think I need it now
I hope not

I want to hold onto this for a little bit longer
If you don't mind, I think I'll keep it here
Close to me
Right here where I can see it every time I close my eyes
Like reliving an accident to slow to stop
You know how it's hard to look away

I think I am happier this way
Is that bad?
I think I like the way this feels
I don't want to stop now

I don't want to move on
Forgive, forget
I want to keep it fresh
Because it's got that pain I need

It feels good inside to hurt this way
It feels like I'm alive
I need this now
It's become a part of me

Damage is a word I know well from you
You taught it to me with every word you said
And every time you looked away

When I swallowed your fishhook, I thought maybe it
would grow inside
Turn into a flower
But you know it didn't
And it's cold

I'm alone here in this graveyard of memories
Looking for the stone with your name on it
I want to sit down beside it because the tide is calling me
But it's pulling the wrong way

And I want to take this fishhook
This glittering piece of nightmare
Take it out
Maybe drain out some of the poison you put in me
But I'm afraid it's part of me now

Damage is a word I learned at your side
You showed me all the meanings, you wiped my eyes and said- Look again
And you know I did
But then you looked away

And I'm here in this awful lonely place begging for some light
A little understanding from the trees maybe
Or the ground
They can welcome me, I have no other place to go
Here is a place I'm comfortable

With this fishhook, this barbed distraction deep inside
I look around and down
I see choices and I turn away from them
Their time is past

If you'll take it out now I'll love you

If you'll put it back now I'll forgive you

If you hold my hand now maybe I'll make it

If you come back I'll say I'm sorry, please

Tell me you love me

Give me hate and I'll take it
Put it behind me.
I'm not looking for a reason anymore
I'm just trying to survive.

I've been down and I've been up
And somewhere in between.
And sometimes I can't tell them apart anymore
And I'm afraid that I'm relieved.

Because I don't want to feel if I can't.
And I don't want to try if I won't.
And I don't want to see what you show me.
And I don't like to pretend there's a choice.

So, give me pain and I'll take it
Put it behind me.
I have before and it didn't kill me.
Maybe it hurts but I'll get over that.

Because I think down is more honest then up,
And in between is a just a step
Why bother to differentiate
When we both know that it's too late?

Because I don't want to know if you can.
And I don't want to try if you won't.
And I don't want to hear what you tell me.
And I won't swallow your lies.

Just give me your disease and I'll take it
Put it here with the others.
We all have the ones we want to trade,
I'll get used to this one too.

Don't worry about bringing me down
I've never really been up anyway.
I couldn't tell the difference-
They both felt the same.

You know, I don't want to feel what you give me.
And I don't want to try not to care.
I don't want to say that you broke me.
If I never really was there.

I've found a way to be numb to this
Desensitized, I'm willing to adjust
Why worry about the little things?
I don't need truth and trust

I don't want to be in this circle.
But I don't want to find a way out.
So I'll take what you give and put it away
And I won't ask you for a change today.

After all, anyone can see that I'm okay.

Coming like the tick tock
Drip drop
of a leaky faucet
These thoughts run through my head
Tormenting me with what if
And might have been
And could still...
God, why do I wander like this?
Circled in darkness and unable to find a way out.

'Cause I asked for mercy and you gave me nothing but ashes.
Why should I even care anymore?
Try and find a reason to be this way,
Try and find a reason to change.
It's all the same in the open when you open
Up to pain.

Breaking like the hard crack
Tear loose
Of a branch in a windstorm
My strength ripped open like a wound
I try to cover up
Shut down
Hold in.
God, why do I bother with this?
Smothered in darkness and so afraid to go on this broken way.

'Cause I asked for kindness and you gave me razors.
Why don't you care anymore?
Try and find a reason you're this way,
Try and find a way to make you change.
I shouldn't have been in the open when I opened
Up to pain.

Dying like the soft gray
Quiet hush
Of an empty Saturday
I try to think of how I got here
And I think of you
Breaking me.
God, why did I let you inside
So you could swallow me and leave me here?

'Caused I asked for some of you and you gave me lies.
Why did I care at all?
Try and find a reason to go on,
Try and find it in me to let go.
I don't want to be in the open anymore since I've opened
Up to pain.
I can't make myself be open anymore since I opened
Up your pain.

Shadows climb the walls and drip like syrup down your face
I watch you move and think of blood
Taste like vinegar and poison.
You're my paper cut
It hurts when you look at me
Don't look away now.

Darkness beats against the window and in both of us
I want to crawl away, but I can't, don't say you're sorry
Tastes like...
Ask me what I want and I'll tell you
Anything but this.

But take me over and give me the sweet rush of your consuming
Taking it easy makes it hard to let go, so don't.
Taste like this
Just push me over the edge and don't look back
And we'll go.

I watch you sleep and I think of this and dying
You cut me open and dip your hands inside and each time
Tastes like...
And you don't even know it hurts
Somewhere.

I watch you walk away and I see my shadow follow you
I'm empty and husked inside
Taste like nothing.
You'll come back to this perfect circle
We can go again.

At the quiet lake
Black water
I look down but I can't find a reflection
Of me
I want to feel this
Black water
The body's reaction is to fight but we can overcome that
Drown me in the loving depths of your
Black water
I want to feel it fill me up and wash me away
Deep enough to swallow everything about me
There's black water
In my mouth and in my soul
Black water
Let it take me away from here
Black water
Le it pull me down now
Black water
I'm not fighting it
Black water
I can taste it
Black water
I am drowning
In black water
I'm free
Black water.

Cycles of seasons,
Minutes of hours
Change my night to day.
Transmutation
Of the inside
Is the only way.

Nothing here has the answer
Do I really care?
If it changed
Somehow, inside,
Would I be aware?

Test the currents of my thought-lines
Seek the riptide deep below
Underneath this apathy
Is there still a flow?

I find the answer in feathers
Sun on leaves, and fur
They help me find my way back
To the way we were.

Wash me clean
Take away this time
Regret is a river
Of what could have been.

I know this, I'm still here
Waiting to watch another broken minute
Turned away by fear.

I ask for answers in the sky
Fall down like rain upon me
Change and change again
They will not satisfy.

Waking into sadness
Look and I will find
Something in the silence
Speaks into my mind.

Times, regrets, river's end
It's broken past repair
Nothing left to touch
Yet still I have to care

I want to drown here with you
Lose myself inside it,
Find it here anew.

Wash us clean
Take for you this time
Regret is a river
We're the might-have-been.

Do you want it?
Hungry
I watch the water drip from my faucet
Running over my hands, warm like tears
Empty inside
Space to fill but nothing to
Fill it with.
Do you understand?
Hungry
I rinse away the bitter taste of might-have-been
Like salt too long on the tongue
It bites
Holds on and leaves
a residue, a stain.
Do you want to know?
Hungry
I can hold on or let go now
Doesn't really matter which
The choice is made
Time slips, the water's red
I'm hungry, are you?

Wolfsong
Against the sky
Howl for the moon
Fishhook-silver, limitless
Did you know
Emptyness burns like the cold on certain days?
Wolfsong
Cry lonely
Across distance
Cut through, find me
In here somewhere
Part of me thaws and tries to answer.

Is it the apple?
Moonshine on sticky branches
Withered flesh
Clinging like an insect to the rotting branch
Watch it hang, set in space
Wait for it to fall
The world ends
Life goes on

Wind blows
Shift the ragged tree tops
Black branches claw the sky
I watch, waiting for something
See the sun die
Maybe today
You can look around but you won't find a way
Answers are hard to find here
Talk is cheap
Ask me again sometime
Maybe I'll care
Wind blows, shifting dead leaves
Skitter-scratch
They move across the tar like ghost ships
Entering empty spaces where the wind can't reach
Filling gutters like husks of life gone by
Did you do this?
Is it you?
I get an answer back in the sound of the wind
Empty and alone like a space where leaves once hung
Winter-cold and I'm here
Dying inside where no one can see
Is it too late?
I think so
Bury me.

Nothing changes
Are we standing still?
Time seems to pass for you
But it passes me by
Falling down
I can't find a way anymore
I'm too tired

I can't see the road
The lights are dim
I tried to make my way here
And now I'm lost
Falling down
I can't do this anymore
I'm too broken

Falling down
I try
Find a way, make a chance
But it's too late now
All my hiding places are gone and I can't run
And still
Nothing changes

You could fall forever and it wouldn't matter
No one looks for you
When you fall