Every part of you
Has a secret
Language

Everything around me is gray
People phase in and out
Friends just kinda are there
Your family stands in the background
Like an old, grainy, black and white picture
Rain falls in time with your tears
Who can tell you're even there
Like a ghost you flit in and out of life
A spectator to everything
Participant in nothing
Life just seems...kind of bland

Transmogrified
by winter squalls,
the branches of the sycamore
have ossified into a cathedral
of snow.

A red cardinal alights
there—a spot of blood,
a feathered clot of sin.

Hush. Listen to the limbs
where he has perched:

the nascent cracking
of winter’s church.

When the torque of speech is such
that stapled teeth would seem a wiser lot.
When thought is but a hemlocked lash
of passionate disdain..


..then to the water I return...

A sack of cats for Naiads, hatched
about the reedy bridge, I’ll give
my all to them.
To cross their palms with lighter steps
I call to them from oily depths of
worn illumination.


Here, patience sees them come..

In winter cools of briny shift
to press their vagues upon the lips
of tinkers, by the flotsam slum..

..As Canton sirens pilot tension
through the gentian-violet haze,
so distant trains commemorate

  a quiet absolution.

In a caged room surrounded by mourn
faced by the art I drew and painted
skewed in a sullen moody brew*
drowning in the remedy of beauty

On the cliff, clipped of untraced wings
rated by the lifelong abandonment
sent free by the unlived blurred visions
fondling the melodies of the unfounded

Inside a class of the pessimist, frowned at
Summerly scented lavender cases the rain
burnt under the burdening traffic
of smoke, lurk, afflictions, delusions

Outside the forest chasing waterfalls
submerged in the weakening infernos
isolated inside the gust of wintery winds
*sipping tea and seducing mere boredom

there's two ladies talking
about things
they don't dare mention