Steel grey mars the sky of a dead world

A specter stares at a stained glass rendering of a dead story he read about in a dead book on a dead religion in a dead language.

He sits on a dead tree and kneels on its dead kin.

A revenant sings

Smoke pours from the burning remains of dead plants turned incense - dying

He walks toward the pulpit

Carved and engraved by a dead artist from a dead town named after a dead slave owner

He grabs the pulpit

Dead skin of his fingernails gripping twisted filigree molded from dead vines

He speaks of life

Of Sunday morning soirées dancing in the summer heat laughing through the harsh winter laying under covers hiding from their nightmares board games on the floor of the living room of the new house on a rainy Tuesday afternoon the smell of pancakes every Saturday morning driving thriving twisting writing breathing bleeding beating

Living

And he almost forgets

She is dead

And his stories

Are ghost stories

I walk with grace
Not gracefully
But alive
And therefore with more grace
Than may be deserved

My life
An affront to itself
A poetic type of irony
Which deconstructs the whole
To find each piece
Microcosmic
Our lives

Kaleidoscopic melding of melting crown moulding mounding

On the floor

Where I lay flat
On my stomach
Waiting for it to form
Into something more exciting
Or at least less
Digestible

A child’s pursuit
Of confounding
To turn around
And confound

To be got
To be able to get

What I’m trying to say is one time I ingested psilocybin mushrooms in the forest and climbed to the top of a tree fort. My friend told me to draw what I saw and handed me a pen. I grabbed the pen and it slipped from my hand to the ground. And I knew. I knew in that moment there was nothing to say. I saw two shadowed figures standing on the ground and one of them pointed up to us.

The wheel is turning
Ever and onward
Rushing at speeds
Incomprehensible
To the acute observer

Obtuse the angles
Of the eye which catches
The periphery
And sees moving
Or shifting

The pavement is veiled in zig-zagging patterns superimposed and waiting to split open revealing the universe

And I lay
Tired and wide-eyed
A stone stabbing the back of my head
Staring at the sky
Wondering how infinite
Infinity

A vain pursuit
To place words
Where there are already
Stars and space

What I’m trying to say is, months later I was in the same forest with the same friend who had given me the pen which taught me to speak. We were doing ******* off of the case of a digital scale by a fire pit lined with fallen trees. It was fall and it was windy and we all had to gather around to lay out lines so it wouldn’t blow away. My friend points to the tree fort and asks if I remember the time we sat there tripping. I remember the shadowed figures and I remember there is nothing to say.

Silence a slippery thing
Not like darkness
Gauged in tone
Simply there
Or not

Seemingly never not
Always a ringing
Almost chirping
If you listen close
To the walls

The stories of dead trees whose lives spanned unspoken aeons and whose roots tasted plowed and plagued soil - felt the crisp rain before we turned it to acid.

I hear this rain
I stand out in it
Feel it on my skin
Listen closely to its story

A stalemate
To say things are known
In opposition to that
Which dictates knowing

What I’m trying to say is, I spent a lot of time going back to that place. There were abandoned storage containers we used to smoke **** and drink beer inside of. I would try to phase through the walls on dextromethorphan, always getting stuck about a foot behind where the wall is. You see it’s not the wall you have to worry about, it’s the underlying concept of a barrier that manifests itself in a wall that I could never seem to get past.

Until that time
Asleep in the next room
I walked to the bathroom

Whispering walls foreboding dark fortunes. Blue reflections of artificial light contorting face and shadows.

I saw it

It placed one finger on its lips

The other hand outstretched
Reaching in to darkness

What I’m trying to ask is,
What I need to know is,
“What were you reaching for?”

Heavens!

Whose angelic bodies sing
Eternal in service
To supremacy

Whose chains of light confine
The awful creatures’ existence
To knees

What shallow merit in good
To be condemned to
Servitude perpetual

And yet,
Here we are

This world a frightful Eden
It’s laws unbroken binding
Their exception paradise
For fools

Heironymus!

What say you of our garden
For whose earthly delights
We do tread shallow waters
Longing for release

What say you of these new-built cages
Steel and glass spires rending
Views of heavens for multitudes
Of scuffling creatures

The fertile forest lain flat to mound
Smoldering bile skyward

What say you, Heironymus?

And Marcus!

What say you of the rampant plague
Indifference
Of stoic nature not hard fought
But fostered from the womb

A generation’s tethered dreams
Of vain glory
Seldom pursued

Whose very tools of liberation
Themselves became
Their ties

What say you, Marcus?

And Plato!

What say you of the shadows
We have cast from whose dancing
In the flickering light
We have grown to know
Bemusement

Would you call that virtue
Justice which has stole
Away our vessels

Where would you have
A soul migrate
Which, lost, knows only

I

A vagrant - a lion?
A king - a sheep?
A beggar - a lion?
A soldier - a sheep?
A doctor - a lion?
A priest - a sheep?

What say you, Plato?

We were smoking molly off of tin foil through a plastic straw made from a pen in the public housing complex of a small town. It tasted like black licorice and the kind of bug-spray flavor that I’ve always associated with being poisoned. I was jammed. I couldn’t not be anymore. He took his hit and stared blankly at me. He fell sideways, shaking violently and jumped up as soon as he hit the floor. I almost panicked for a second thinking about walking into the hospital. Pin-***** pupils staring a medical professional in the face, trying to keep my head up from between my knees in the waiting room. He laughed. I laughed. We carried on this way. For some time, actually.

If you bled the way I bled
If you died the way I died
If you were tied how I was tied
To that hospital bed that night

Would you feel the things i feel
Would you see the things I see
Would you know the things I know
About the shadows in the night

The way they dance
The way they writhe
The way they breathe the scared light
How they’re the only holy thing
I’ve ******* found
In this god
******
Life

How many veils must be lifted to see what is true?

Impatience - the curse of the dying
Who wait with bated breath
For it to be taken from them

Expectedly

The promise of eternal life with which to lift these veils itself a curse

Enlightenment

An ancient joke told by those who have seen true darkness

What could be left to ponder in such a context
With no constraints
And time an endless yarn
Not waiting to be cut

What matter the mysteries that might rise from the well
And what sense in waking from passive slumber
To have hand in the inevitable
Which eternal shifts

No,

Fading is the light

And from it’s last dim flicker may expand again

But mourn not the memories lost
The veils placed gently back to shroud things once thought known

For impatience is the curse of the dying
But death the blessing of the eternal

I remember the screams of the children out on the Common that night. I remember the deafening sounds, as sparks flew past my eyes. I remember the canister landing and pouring it’s smoke to the sky. I remember the look in that man’s eyes, with his hands stretched to the night. As he walked toward the chaos and knew he was ready to die for what’s right.

Chanting, “no justice, no peace”
Forced to live up to the promise

“No justice, no peace”
Turning the masses to prophets

There is neither justice nor peace

As they walk from their cells as free men

“No justice, no peace”

And must we live up to this promise?