Love lingers, camps out, loiters,
Displaying its outer banner
And inner banter.

How we finally learn to suffer,
Survive, eat what nature gives us
In a field of forgetfulness

Where the night passes like a fugue,
Beneath skins, our abandoned given names,
Drowned as the last snows melt.

We are thawed in the flood.
What flowed me and led to this pain.
And here I am again

With no more authority
Than an endangered species
On a political trail.

My wearied mind only seems tame.
Inertia wanders as it chokes
Down the drain of a sewer

Where all life must flow to an end.
You say melodramatic while I say melancholic,
Drunk with the inner timber that rots incessantly

As I can no longer burn brightly,
Sitting waterlogged, myself dead wood,
Drinking a mixed drink called Felicity

Washing skin clean, laughing never again,
Shall I be this dirty. Ha, never again,
As I wish you would wipe my ass.

Near the river of shoes where souls flow elsewhere.
The pairs and their ties astonishing
As the virtuous sleepwalk of pity and woe.

Of a life livelier elsewhere, however dead:
Why the clouds break
For friends in old age who never reconcile.

Always one saint kissing the sad memorials of self
As the horrors of life become pleasurable trinkets.
Tragic notes so discourteous, we become Art.

Wish you would bid me, Go Away, today.
Go Away, ever so nicely, no more of me ever.
To which I will (not so nicely) say:

This is our pact: : two perilous devils
As large as tiny gods, each saying
I would have given you up

For a million dollars or a published book,
Though not ever:
This.

So what question, More lovely or temperate,
Braggart of death with the entrail
Of blind obituaries?

Forgive me for I speak with damaged syllables,
Strung together with dental floss,
Worn until the final breaking of lost utterances.

Yours truly, with throat bare naked
For the praises sung stole all
Your near spoken trepidations,

So now you no longer believe
For you are now just another
Living thing,

Manifold in a false paradise,
Meditating until the end of the world
Why you wear a condomn when sleeping with worry,

Why you kiss through that starless glass window
Where you once stared back at a face
Watching in the distance, now living in wind.

Sometimes I hear angels. Hear them
Coming to get me, slain by your eyes
On this lowly ground where abundance once lived.

Pardon my blood, forgive me for spilling it.
When I told you I loved you.
Decay has a way of following me.

Years of zero maintenance,
Eyes dim away as the flesh wastes.
Makeup beautifully hiding any flaw.

The lion rises from her lagoon at 6am.
Work awaits my iron heart,
Facing scattered souls in a ditch.

Someone will take my eyes
For I am an organ donor.
But before that, please let me sleep.

In this picture, sickness always dwells.
I see this. I am the clairvoyant overthrown
By Czars, peasants, & local supermarkets.

Maybe I feigned love. Or maybe I feigned self.
Foodstamps and fainting. Hunger and waking.
I pray for the hour when I am heard.

Truth arrives as a spent light.
Little flicker, no flame, woe washed
From a spot where we once loved.

No face in my head, only a vain weeping
For I am so imperfect, not even
Self can love self. Mirrors wound

Further. Why dark is my friend.
Fluorescent lights, my greatest foe.
Citadel cities, I seek solace. Watch me move.

Seeking shelter from self,
The trouble with liberty
As I walk wantonly

My candy cane sword picking up
Cigarette butts,
Cursing environmental slogans,

Threatening to bomb all polluters,
Just that instant,
Surely I jest, only sometimes

Yet knowing I write another’s garbage
Or long lost treasure, Imagine me blind
So you may read me, see my words

Know that I’ve lost sight on the follies of self.
Preacher ego, unrepealed, gone into a nook,
No dark confessional can save.

Loving this cool place where no sunlight intrudes.
This deadly frost where I’ve travelled forever,
This deep eternal theme of death

For all my dreams are now barren,
My desires flattened, my mortality alive
For my spirit split in half, that hell-hole of a heart,

Moaning alone for the magic hand of Art to save me.
Knowing I’ve been swooned to death,
Conned by that imploring, debt collector of time: God.

This nothingness I give breath and death.
Exchanging love for carelessness.
Viewing the corporation of self as the evil within.

Tumultuous sea where I’ve overflowed before.
First with the curiosity of embarrassment.
My lips flamed red in avoidance of these straits.

How I hid from the runnels within us.
Had I not reached us?
Had I not already swum?

Now my hope lies slain.
God bless it before I bury it.
I walk with god-like indolence.

Watch me ignore the return of spring,
That holy brooding ghost over me
As a vulture, my last pitch of grief.

Where I can cry no more.
Where the bruised bones
Lay wretched for having lost

An arm wrestle with God,
Chess players of the streets,
Domino players of the night.

The darkness is done.
Myself, long tucked in,
Grasping the hem of a coverlet

Mapped with our planetary destinations,
Where stars are embroidered
As our dreams.

And so lie the wasted memories:
The drowned hand, the hanging hair,
The waterlogged skin.

Only the restless hopes of recovery
Where the harshest word is: Death.
Life being that mis-prize,

An echoe of solitude so long ago
I’m mute as I murmur from my shell
Of a hardened heart as this land rolls over me.

I could be your mother, your sister, your brother.
Anyone gone that you loved.
Yet I am no one for I was not

loved…

And so it is that I went: A chaste liar,
Thief, apparatus for mending.
I am the ruin that faces you in a window.

You do not see me, do not record my words.
I am sick with dreaming now
Past these old evil days.

Do not call me back or say goodbye.
For I am that diminished thing in a frame.
Hung up, displayed, passed by.

I am some mousey waif
Twittering softly to herself
Beside the fireside, eager to love

Been washed by rivers of blood
For all the trouble of the sky
Where my fractured bones bled

Kept me in a wheelchair alone,
Drawing the proofs of the many undead
Pythagorean theorems, knowing

Love could be plotted somehow.
And it was a terrible day:
How I proofed no more, drew

Down the blinds, lifting my slim arm, swearing,
Allegiance to myself, all this unspoken,
In a very darkened house.