Isn't ripping a
Soulmate away from your insides,
Too,
A kind of suicide?

Both
Too much,
and too little
Commotion,
Can mute the poet's emotion

In this house,
we mark the passing of
the newly dead
with hard liquor.
Working
shoulder to shoulder
with the Reaper,
I have to
keep a
bottle
in
at all times.

We really didn't need
another study
into the Placebo Effect,
but it
made the researchers
feel better.

Never enough.
Never enough of anything.
It's always running low,
running out.
Money, energy, time.

The fuel gauge
threatens empty.
The bank balance
teeters and tips
into the red.
Almost out of smokes, and there's
one last shot
in the bottle.
The car tax expires
in two days.

You've been
exhausted
since forever.
You can't kid yourself
that you're young any more.
Clocks tick
just to **** with you.
It's dark, but
not as dark
as it gets.

The grapes haven't spoiled yet, but
will now never be tasted.
The cut flowers
still have some perplexing
life in them.
Hanging from a
tree branch, I find a message
written by a dead woman.
There's a bookmark
embedded between the
pages of a hardback, like
Excalibur lodged in
stone, and I
cannot pull it out.
It hurts to walk along
certain corridors,
past certain doors, with
no one behind them
calling to me.  
The radio is tuned to Ghost FM,
and nobody with a pulse
gets airtime.  
Digital photographs of
fading analogue memories.

Yet still small shoots persist
in breaking through this dark, cold dirt, and
inexplicably blossoming.