He floats, adrift over wine-dark depths,
Veins of denial and luciferin,
Dressed in silk ribbons, deceptive in their innocence,
The discarded robe of a fallen monarch.

He glides, elusive, over nothing, solitary in his rule,
Unmoored and untouchable, even to a hand offering solace,
For fear that this same hand may tether him to an unsavory reality.
Lying to himself, the king of falsity and bioluminescence.

Wakeful and aware of my feet against the floor,
Alive in a vast labyrinth of precious tomes,
their pages soft beneath my fingertips,
Their covers defensively misleading.

How beautiful, really, to be able to read them,
Be it a chapter, a page, or even a few lines.
Reading deep into precious texts
that don’t know they’re being read.

Unaware of the stories, written out in neurons, told through fluttered lashes,
And the twitch of a nose,
Pictures painted by the wide sweeping motions of searching irises,
blind to their own vibrant illustrations.

Each story searches for its conclusion
within the pages of another,
Trying to navigate itself through an index
That is not its own.

Perhaps someday I’ll find such beauty in my own weathered pages,
when my spine has split and my text has faded,
When I am a complete person built of indented paragraphs,
an entire soul typed out in times new roman.

In the dark of a still December evening,
I sit staring out of my window,
At all the other windows,
Staring back at me.

A thousand different lives as seen through a lit window,
Snapshots of alternate universes,
Confined by lace curtains,
And lit with fluorescent suns.

In the dark of a still December evening,
We're all just lights behind a window,
Indifferent to the other worlds,
Coexisting across the way.

There is a house with only one window,
And seventeen locks on the door.
There is a porch with an ivory doorbell,
That doesn’t get rung anymore.

There is a room with cracks in the ceiling,
And cobwebs that carpet the floor,
There is a box made of tarnished old silver,
With a rusted old key and a door.

An old music box that is all out of music,
And dusty with years of denial,
Inside the box is a little glass dancer,
Whose legs haven’t danced in a while.

There is a house with only one window,
And seventeen locks on the door.
There is a coatrack of cedar and pine,
That doesn’t hold coats anymore.

There is a clock that’s forgotten the time,
Whose bells have forgotten to ring,
There is a cage on a spindly old table,
With a bird who forgot how to sing.

An old fireplace that no longer holds fire,
A collector of cobwebs and lint,
Alone with a matchbox that’s all out of matches,
And a steel left without any flint

There is a house with only one window,
And seventeen locks on the door.
Haunted by ghosts of the dreams that once were,
But just don’t make sense anymore.

There is a room where broken things hide,
With no window to let in the light,
Pretending that they’re safe behind seventeen locks,
From things that go bump in the night.

A room where the silence is thick on the air,
But the quiet, no comfort imparts,
To the girl in the corner made of paper and glass,
With seventeen holes in her heart.

There’s a way about the world that makes the winter water freeze,
A sort of rhythm in the chaos, a bit of cadence to the trees.
There’s a way about the world that makes the summer sunshine glow,
That made me wonder as a child, where dandelion wishes go. 

There’s a way about the world that makes the silver moonlight dance,
And chase the sun across the sky in an impossible romance.
There’s a way about the world that causes hurricanes to churn,
That makes sure the wheel of time and change will never cease to turn.

There’s a way about the world that people seek to understand,
They try to number every second, and count every grain of sand,
They make pictures in the speckled sky that greets us every night,
Draw pointless constellations, from unrelated points of light.

There's a way about the world that we could never comprehend,
We'll simply close our eyes and trust that each beginning has an end.
There's a way about the world that we will simply never know,
But that has never stopped me wondering, where dandelion wishes go.

Here I sit at a desk that was once my mother’s,
Now papered with little yellow sticky notes.
Perhaps at one time it was neat and tidy, the way my mother is,
But now it’s a constellation of my wandering thoughts,
And things I must remember to do.

Clinging on to each other with all their might,
Little golden papers inscribed with various shades of ink,
At any moment, one may fall to the ground, like an oak leaf in a September breeze,
Finally letting go of its branch and swimming to the ground with a sigh,
To be swept away and forgotten.

Perhaps that little paper held a word I liked,
Or some mundane task that now I’ll never remember to do,
Perhaps it was a lyric, a fragment of a song I heard and found memorable,
A perfect little collection of words strung together like lace,
Leaving an empty space in the yellow foliage.

Here I sit at a desk that was once my mother’s,
That is now papered with small yellow sticky notes,
Thinking that there’s beauty in the way things are, a sort of cadence to the rhythm of everything,
Searching for the meaning of life in a cluster of yellow sticky notes,
Included in a list of chores, or written between the words of a love song.

A tavern built on misdeeds and insurrection,
House of rascals, whisky and imperfection
A hideaway for rebels and racketeers,
Where drinks are served to outlaws and mutineers,
Where the pianist plays for pirates and privateers,
Where the wicked and the wayward can be served,
And are respected however undeserved.

It’s a rag-tag bunch of outlaws and anarchists,
A cavalcade of rough revolutionists,
So come on in my dear insurrectionist,
Welcome to our lawless little band,
Welcome to the Tavern of the ******.

Come and join our banished battalion,
Join our cause, oh revered rapscallion,
So calling out to nature’s abominations,
We’ve got bourbon, bombshells and indignation,
Come and wait for imminent and sure damnation,
No matter what your deviance may be,
Come and join the drunken reverie.

It’s a monument to lost souls and deviants,
A shrine to every small disobedience,
A riotous, cathartic experience,
Where radicals are safe from reprimand,
Welcome to the Tavern of the ******.

Welcome back, my worshipped renegade,
To the place where freedom’s sweet as lemonade,
Where skanks and outlaws, sing so intoxicated,
The anthem of the unkempt and agitated,
The mantra of the evil and of the hated,
Laughing as they sing their merry tune,
Unified by their impending doom.

It’s a testament to chaos and anarchy,
A haven for the worst of humanity,
A house of lawlessness and profanity,
Welcome to our lawless little band,
Welcome to the Tavern of the ******.