In the dead of night it was like
we were the only souls alive for miles.
Contrasting dark, a flashing spark,
a passing flame igniting smiles,
twilight feigned but bright remained
in colors running wild.
Invading silence, each word soft violence,
a welcome for exiled
lingering upon your lips and staying there awhile.
But fleeting, momentary time
could not be reconciled;
these holy seconds’ sanctitude
decayed to dust, defiled-
each grain of sand from hourglass
swept slowly from the pile;
in morning, born from memory,
nostalgia and daydream’s child.

Weathering the desert storm
pouring forth sand sharp as glass;
skin torn and muscles cut by countless thorns,
each one a mark left keeping score.
A violently dehydrated form
staggering in search of water’s shore
emerges from the static-
dry eyes sore, could have sworn...
but it was just mirage, playing waves of warmth,
dancing heat eating me like a carnivore,
bleaching bones below the sun to their very core
and yet I will walk until I can’t anymore;
searching for what I adore, knowing Ive seen and felt relieved by rain before,
towing my weight, dragging ever onward toward-
though corpse and carrion I am, the pain I must ignore;
each drop of sweat a loss I can’t afford.

How do you prove an immunity to
a recurringly exhumed seclusion
when the noise of static, so intrusive when unmuted, easily confuses
and a skewed view produces only illusion's futile ruses?
Can't hands, seamlessly and when misguided, be abusive
from refusing their own bruises and contusions,
manifest and fuse into a multitude of misconstrued, misled misuses?
Yet I will argue choosing to humor the tune communicating through the intuitive music and movement that amuses-
what is heard echoes clues for harmony and hallowed union's
mutual congruence,
even in the crudest beauty and pursuit of human improvement and what we knew, uprooted.
Doubt, when reducing to delusions, always loses when refuted,
and though humility means fragile ****** included,
elusive truths all allude to an absolution through this-
what diffuses, what we keep, and how we do it the conclusion.

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.