It's easy to take back words
That someone has yet to read
When you put them down on
Pixelated screens rather than on paper.

Paper keeps the marks, absorbs them
And no matter the eraser kisses
They remain, shadowed, a palimpsest, waiting
Betraying you if anyone really looks.  

The backspace button, though, my friend
Snuffs out incriminating words, murders them,
And I envy such simple magic,
Despairing it cannot delete my mind.

It fails me, the weight remaining
Ill balanced, to sprawl across vertebrae,
In the hollows of my collarbones,
Beneath my tongue, behind my teeth.

All the things I cannot say,
Not in my own gray matter,
Not allowed in voice or print,
That flèche gauche waits, ever hungry.

Every day is enough. Isn't it?

What cruelty it is
for a guardian angel
to be intangible chaperone.

How are they to
reach out and soothe
their wounded lonely charge?

No gentle guiding hand
on nape of neck,
wings to blanket embraces.

What good is a
soul meet soul communion
when I am hollow?

Ever since I was a child,
I have held near and dear
Fairy tales and whispers of More
Not often faithful belief but joy,
Wonder, lessons of morality mental pearls
That I might string, lively, worrybeads,
Which turn, fixed, Princess Periezade's grief,
No healing waters for transformed princes,
For the Magic has gone out.

It is no wonder that Pandora
In that box containing all plagues
Held too Hope, broken-winged, fragile, dull
Worst of all evils, to Nietzsche,
I understand him much better now,
It does truly prolong the torment,
The taunting cruelty that some tomorrow
May be better, but not tonight  
For the Magic has gone out.

The fresh-faced youth, dagger on hip,
is possessed of many secrets.

Spy, chameleon, a wolf in sheep’s clothing,
accustomed to the shadows,
indeed, he is not a ‘he’ at all,
but a woman in service to her dauphin.

The drape of her shirt and breeches
hint at her curves, her muscle,
the delicate arch of her feet
in her red court shoes
long and well suited to
slipping across foreign marble
to do what she must.

She has played the man-at-war,
the page boy and the cupbearer,
the mistress and the catamite,
in the bed of men and women both,
their pillow talk treason carried away
while she still bears their bruises and love bites.  

Servant of the state, the empire,
her lord and her god-
she is Madonna, Joan of Arc,
a thousand women unnamed,
her king’s blade, steel under velvet.

It is a rumble-of-steel sky day
Until a blue shot reminds me
The sun is always rising somewhere