Written as a wedding gift for two dear friends, Gregg and Lisa.

This is a love poem.

This is a clashing skylines over mountain tops love poem.

This is a desert wind kicking dust clouds off of the earthen floor like time love poem.

It's a phoenix rising from the ashes again and again, smoothing every rough edge to make them beautiful, burning faults like paper lanterns love poem.
It's giant monument cascading down in a rainstorm of embers as the lone giant tumbles to the earth in a offering of solidarity.

This is a love poem.

It's wind and water and trees bowing limbs in genuflect out of respect for the hearts combined.
It's wild and fierce, like great beasts and flashing storms that match the primal song of the passion of two souls aligning.
It's hanging by a single chord from the tallest of ancient brothers. It's laughter echoing off of canyon walls and echoed back like majesty.

This is a love poem.

This is an urban jungle alive with life and color love poem.
This is a chain link fence and beat pounding to vibrate two heart strings into a single rhythm, striking a beautiful chord love poem.
This poem is spinning lights and a body of hundreds. Legion, moving as one, rich with the scent of joy and effort.
It's late nights and early mornings, adorned in affection and whispers. It's music and dance and holding tight and holding on.

This is a love poem.
This is a timeless love moving at the speed of thought, pushing clocks to keep pace in futility love poem.
This is a hand touching skin, like ink touching paper to record the poems of your past, present, and future, to only be recited with a kiss love poem.
It's a forever has too few letters for how long this love has been destined and how long it will continue on love poem.

This poem is learning the other like morning prayer. It's tasting each goodnight kiss like Eucharist.
This poem is sound and fury and steadfast through every storm and letting the wind of your whirling dance fill the sails of the wooden ship you build together.

This poem is aging. Building monoliths of your past. Tearing them down and using the stones to build the cobbled path of your future. It's a new laugh. An innocent laugh. Fresh eyes glimpsing a future made from the hearts of two that will carry the love forward so that it can remain forever a wave giving back to the shore. Rich. Tidal. Steady.

This is a love poem.

This is a wrinkles and cracks forming like cuneiform. Making the sculpture more beautiful with time love poem. A lines spreading out across the cover of the book, wrinkled to resemble a road map of the winding path of the journey of two, circling one and other like a binary star. Bright and radiant.

It's a patina heart. Showing through with red and blue. Lines lit by fire that warms aching bones on even the coldest nights of our minds.

This is a love poem.
This is a celebration.

This is a gathering of witnesses who checked their wings at the door, that we may stand below and watch the dance above. Quaking parishioners glimpsing the face of God and beauty. Jaws agape eyes shining with tears like morning dew.

This is a love poem trying in vain to describe the beauty of soul mates finding their way back home. For sometimes home is not a destination, but a person.

This is a love poem.
This is a poem about love.

Hot muzzle smell
I will teach you
A brand new spell
It will make you whole again

She tastes like morning dew
Lips a deep red hue
He licks her neck again
Drink from the bottom shelf
Drinking to your health
God twists the knife again

What else can I say?
Et tu, Brute?
Sing songs to the king
Sad in a haze of wine
He walks in the garden
Whispering rhymes
Beneath his breath

Golden seraphim statues
Dance for a sad king
He twists his ring
Wishing

Then there on the roof
A woman bathing
She hums his favorite tune
Beneath the moon

in my father’s car, father driving, my fingers curled as if readying themselves for the wheel.  father small talking, his dark chatter, my hands like jaws left open, horrified before the heads god plans to put them in.  heads not to scale.  heads trial size.  

I worry the heat in my eyes is permanent.  my lids worry as well and retreat.  burn pain is its own person telling me I am long term its most bearable memory.  

the hospital seems a distant campfire lowered by the sleepy laughter of the still beautiful.  my daughter.  who as a girl melted the faces of two action figures with the bulb of a reading lamp not to upset her brothers but so the figures could kiss.  

I begin to make sense all by myself and nod to the dog shaped thing drowsing in the car’s murk just beyond my feet.  politely father asks if he can help and I okay him asking me anything.  he chooses the health of my sons.  one in particular.  I stick to the dog.  to the puppies it ran from no faster

had they been aflame.

I'm going to have to be the one
No one else can save me,
not one human on the earth has the time to constantly be along someone's suffering side
So it'll be me, to do the duty on myself, to get through this never ending battle
& I'll be stronger at the end of it
But it's just so hard to do it alone while feeling so alone,
it even hurts to know that there are not many people who consistently reach out enough to grab  me,
to lift me up and get me going
I'll have to be the one
I'm me, no one else can do it for me,
independency
But when you've spiraled down into such a deep dark place and you try to get out,
every inch doesn't feel that much closer to the light
I fall back in the mud again
Just to fail once more
To be a failure again
To repeat the cycle again
To never get out
To be stuck
Stuck in the mud that I fell in
Thank god it's not quick sand
If it was, I'd never get out
That's how I know there's hope
There's gotta be
Nothing lasts forever
Besides life
Life is infinite
Infinity is what?
People keep on smiling and thats great,
no jealousy,  just envy for their days that keep on  going, their routines and lives that are naturally just flowing, while I space out & sit in silence and wait to disappear in a sphere that's not crystal clear
My bones ache and for gods sake,
I try my hardest to appreciate
That I'm alive today
Even though my days are grey
Getting out of bed never felt so hard
It's like I've lost all my strength &
the power of my body and mind
I'm lost, but no ones there to find me,
I'll be here to find me, there's a little hope inside of me
Reading is such a chore,
since i lose track of everything,
feeling like a bore
No energy to take care of me,
well this is how it'll have to be,
but hopefully.. this is just temporary.

Knees, keep supporting me
You know I believe in you
Stop with all the frailties
And get me where I'm rolling to
Unscrew
All the blues
You sing and keep running in time
Well fed, sleep when you're dead
Or at least aT the end of this rhyme

Pause time, wipe off the grime
Focus on the words I have to say
Ran five hundred score, just a few more
And we can be in a happy place
Don't stop
Don't drop
Reach mountaintop and valley low
Haters degrade the progress made
Saying that we run too fast, too slow

Oh yes, do your best
Until you glimpse that finish line
Past the dream to reality
And see it was you all this time
These knees
Strongly
Wanted to finish just as bad as you
God be blessed, revel in success
We all run, but how you finish is up to you

In the early morning light
I woke up sweating in a fright,
You weren't there, I guess my dream came true.
It hurts, it burns,
In my heart a curse,
It grows in strength like a young boy's tears,
And silently spreads, like how cancer appears.

If I ever fall apart,
You'll love and heal my quiet heart,
And thanks to you, I know no one will touch me.
You protect me from the cold,
you renewed my faith of old,
I'll take these prayers now,
Unfurled like greens in spring,
The gifts the days of light bring,
And pray to God my love returns.

I'll wait for you still, soldier dear,
I'm but a girl, but I'll not a shed a tear,
For nothing sears like a parent's worry.
Deep inside your father's eyes,
A hidden thing, blackened in the ash
Of a legacy inherited, passed,
In times of fire and peace
And you're the one to carry
What your grandpa also has.

There's naught to do,
The climb's not through,
And it's unfortunate that not just I depend
On the hopes that are born
From the loves you're fighting for,
And it's an end
Ceremony at which we'll laugh and cry.
I won't receive a pin,
Except to love the one I'm with
At last, and I've completed
A training of my own.

4:11 am - The nighthawks are starting to resemble pigeons.

Train station is deserted.
An employee checks the bins as the tunnel fills  with the ringing of a distant bell, heralding the arrival of the morning train.
42  minutes till my train.

I can smell the acrid fumes of the Ferny Grove train.
The behemoth pulls away-
empty.

At least I'm not existential anymore.

There is an installation of a coffin made from old bits of railroad,
"Not everyone makes it across the tracks"
This reminder of mortality is strangely fitting in a place of transit.
The true face of memento mori is  shown.
Remember that you too will die, and everything will come to pass.

It's times like this that make me wish 'The Sound of Silence" was never written.
For its perfection in this moment comes as a burst of pure divine bliss.
The kind you wish would never fade away. But inevitably does.
And all we are left with is a memory of that bliss,
everytime we hear the song (after the first time).
As if we are recalling the curves of an old lover from the shadow of yesterdays gone.
Dancing beneath our fingertips, always out of reach.

Memory is never as divine as the moment that burnt it in.

----

4:29 am - It was ephemeral.

The trainyard announcer has a cultured voice.

----

4:41 am - I fear the muse has left me, beauty fled.

DEAR GOD - PLEASE LET THERE BE A CAB AT THE STATION FOR ME.

Selection 11 gave me the water i desired.
11 minutes till the train.
D.O.B. 11/2
Aquarius,  11th  sign of the Zodiac.

Will I see the dawn rise from the train?
There is no light at the end of the tunnel from where I sit.

Inexplicably: I recall the cool river air that bathed us as we lay naked in your apartment,
the smell of cigarettes on our skin, the evening peppered with
scurrying, fighting possums
that danced upon your balcony.
I recall being inside you.

(Then I imagined you being eaten out
by a woman
her lips inside yours,
her curled tongue
inside your hot, bald
golden cunt.)

And I came.
Warm and glorious
my children of pleasure
caught in a latex coffin.
Your heaves of pleasure pushing against my chest
with the rhythm of waves.

----

4:46 am - On the train.

Fluorescent lighting is the devil.
Everything is garish yellow.

We  pull up to the station near where you lived.

Your blue  rose lives in a Chinese vase
and no longer smells
of Marlene Dietrich.

Treasury  Casino - 2:30 am

From my seat in the smokers section
I can see the Brisbane eye,
the river,
and the  performing arts center.
Streetlights  are mans answer  to the cosmos

"Everything you can do,
I can make better."

Once it was said that we were made in God's image.
Now we can safely say that God was  made in our image.

I am in a quiet place of the universe, the night stretches on
visible through the stately
wonderous
walls
carved of old wood  and sandstone.

I am in a suede armchair, winged for pleasure.
The ceiling in this room is twice as high as an ordinary room.
Circular steel balls hang down like a path of bubbles
left  by a leviathan.

My water was poured  with panache.

Let me set  the scene for you:
I'm in the  Treasury Casino, this building was once the QLD state treasury, it never changed really.
Sitting next to  window that overlooks the river, a glass of water sits to my left. The room is the size of a double garage, maybe bigger. The floor and ceilings are made of old wood, the walls are decorated with a transparent gray fabric that remindsme of smoke. An old marble fireplace sits in a wall studded with tiny lights that resemble stars or candles. Above me is a series of hanging circular light fixtures that resemble a trail of bubbles left by a leviathan.

This room was designed for,  and houses opulence.  
The TV plays Eminem.

Peter Garrett dances like a Parkinson's sufferer.
And looks like Disco-Nosferatu.

We have  killed the night
and neon power
and infomercials
rape the romance
once held
by late night solitude.