Tethered, fluttering wings shedding feathers,
panicking and fretting but never bettered or unfettered;
talons tremble, tremors tell of pain remembered.
Desire tightens wire’s hold strongest before severed-
clouds and claustrophobia weathered,
sails to shimmer under sun and kissing wind as one, together.

What am I between these driving
delusions of all my anxieties, aside?
When every moment is a revolt against
suicide and my steadying decline
and my internal monologue dissolved
into reminding myself why.
Who am I but ceaselessly unsure
of the lens of my own myopic, miserable mind?
Between the shadows stirring
in the corners of these drying eyes
and the alarming cry for predators nearby,
these countless confines multiplying wildly.
How often I find I am fighting my brain every second, all the time
my own excessive efforts led awry
as my uncertainties undermine.
But now all I know is I am finally
freeing myself from being so spine numbingly paralyzed
now that I've realized I lie
underneath somewhere within
the way of still waking up
from this frozen comatose demise.

Perhaps all I can ask is that
I carve a path back to my apathy
although my atrophy's
divorce detracts from me
as my degrade is happening
and the capacity for happiness everlastingly lacking.
What is belief but misguided and
more patiently practiced blasphemy?
Yet here I am left with hands half grabbing,
for words gasping, I am practically asking.
Abandoned with no hopes left intact,
momentum caught in trappings,
vices snapping, I prolong a pain, adapting
and what sort of self congratulatory act is that, exactly?

Entangled in plastic
and  fishing line
eyes pecked by
crows; a new
America.

Tip of my tongue, numbed;
words, unsung, heavily hung among my breathless lungs.
Trembling, assembling, three syllables still stunned;
through listless lips, slipped, stammering- stung.
Precariously, so perilously I plunge;
on precipice long perched, i freely fall, fast from.
Ephemeral and fleeting, my crumbled fear succumbs;
days ****** to darkness, now dawning sun's undone.

Rain falls; licks, and tastes-
drips and drops from contours, traced.
Lightning's lash, electric laced;
anxieties anticipate
but under clouds bears no escape-
and here I find my fury: fate.
Twisted bouquet of buildings placed;
no windows, stares an eyeless face.
Hollowed husks commiserate,
though storm will wash and dissipate.
These diseased dreams lie dead, disgraced;
tombs for what I desiccate,
and blood upon this dead landscape;
but hurriedly, its here I haste
for fear of losing steady pace.

Diaphragm expanded
like the cigarette burns on the empty wood floor
from when I left the mattress there and didnt care anymore,
started laying down beside the beaten, weathered boards;
these decades in the grains of timber grew towards-
I lie inert, my bones the weeping willow's withered roots now stretched forward
to sunlight creeping in the windows through daybreak's drunken disorder.
Dehydrated, tormented, and long tortured;
regurgitations reemerged, restless, pushed shoreward-
dysphoric dreams; no rest beneath intoxicated border.