I am made of infatuation, shame and forever gloom
You could not fall
This is not the chessboard of your dreams
No pawn makes—
No bishop makes
The queen takes, is taken an equal
This is not an aisle of rebirth
Or some sombre remembrance
It halts, it halts
The numbers lessen
I did not abandon, I am still here
Yet, a halt lingers
Like death stuck on the precipice of throat
A life of a single lifetime of a thought
I am energy, a little restless
But restless so out of the nature of self
Like the eye of a rook
On the king through a rook

A stupor unblinking
Like a sharpening of a dream
The knight-slide like an Arabian sword
The king scuttles
Rook takes rook, king takes rook

I fancied myself a manly dream
But it doesn’t work like that, does it—
The game writes, and children play
Now I wait the shameful minutes away
(And I watch you hands, so patient, simple
Say, are you dead or pleased?)
And I watch your hands
I should’ve looked up when I had the chance
Now the brooding leaves
And my eye hardens
Father, you have won
With a dream so well, you played just right
I should have not worshipped the pawns like that

Fear is a fire that eats the soul
Muffles the brain in a cold body’s triumph
Toss the world from hand to hand
Say, praise the petty warrior heart

Why do I do this? This mumbling
How many Discord VCs to lurk through?
Silence becomes; nobody hears the girl talk
Yet she is good with word, think one once did say

Bold with brushstrokes I dream to make
Yet never the warrior I’d one day paint
As mice we scuttle, say, as a mouse I do
She’s so shy, is said, and I seethe - I stutter

Words are we, and the absence as well
Bumbling thunder that tricks a tongue
Fear is a fire that eats the soul
With its carnal hands, it is so so sweet

I yield to mumble, the scuttle of old
This is not the pretty stumble of youth
World bloomed a bud, bright-eyed and blue
Called to me, it calls me still

Called to me, they all do still
Curse the Icarus eyes of song
We couldn’t look through, we couldn’t do

Gold did lure, it glittered too
Stroked the wings - I couldn’t do
                                        Lord, I couldn’t do

I was happy once - when sadness loomed
Over gangly shoulders and looked
With its bare black eyes upon the world
Upon which I looked, I laughed pale-toothed
And gaunt, and startled its wings that clothed
My pretty green arms and made me lean
into the silly embrace

Sweet, ghastly vehicles churned
Before childish eyes, my childish eyes, and
All night long I watched the city chase its tail
Do you understand? There is a gloom
To trap the soul. The laughter but boiled
Oozed out like ants from a bottle of sweet -
Canvas-skinned, like torn milk it was, and
I chased it like a babe before a bee,
Then like a babe I feared its pretty pinpricks
There is a beast in fear that touches
The young

The gape of a cold cold crown that makes
Even the crescent ugly - of rains run stale
Through the ages of dance, of wheat fields’
Jolly feathers and the merrymaking
Of the nights when warm things creeped
Nearer and said things so gentle, they lead
Through paths of grey caress toward
The golden sun

There is a gloom to eat the sky
A joy that mumbles like dry thunder, that wobbles
Like ripe clouds through the winds, swept off
From the heights…

Sweet, the night lifted her head and nodded, and
Sweet, all good things drooped like prayers
before stone - sweet, the crescents,
Of indent and star, where holy terror
Had loved us slow, never felt so small as did
In the leaning - the yielding - us, beautiful:
Bone-eyed and bare, shuffled off from the heights
Of silver youth, as ****** birds, as ****** boys
Through the winds, and we melted
Sifted, out of ourselves and into the honeyed
Embrace of old

We forget the tides as they claw on
Into the purple oceans of old
We forget the shores
Thousands, ten thousands
And then so many more
As ***** mix in with the seagulls
And seashells we lose
Through toiling of wave wave wave
Everything passes

acrid sweetness
collects in the crevices
of our soapy grey clouds

see, this winded winding
bell of a city
and the porcelain blue night
that guards in its curvature
winds that giddy waters
shuffle their feet,
and clouds the lather
that slowly thins away;
there is a pattern here
a Van Gogh swish-slosh
of silver and black
this is the ecstatic dance
that they talk of

a movement that starts a thousand chains
spiralling unspeakably swift—
a mantra of colour and script—
flicking wrists, and ankles turning
(and the crickets: tch-tch…tch-tch…)
and then all meeting
singularly, before the silver sun-washed eye
of the sky

pretty
this ripe peach moon
I wish to bite

these winds mimic the sea
with stalwart droop and a cape of silk threads
the very worms became them: slowly working
a criss-cross play through the night,
through its zenith and sombre blue, a simple silhouette
before the whispers of clouds—
then tiding parabolic back into a smash
of feathery scattering, these winds are the fireworks
that leap upon us
voiceless and stark, slyly soft, softly silver
dandelions themselves as they break
(leaves trembling in their fervent furore)
and this night stands, its feet dipped
in the shallow rippling of the city
it gazes over the horizons
reflecting into itself