I adore you
With your forward brow,
Eyes of nightshade and black treacle.
Your image floats and unfurls in the ****** spaces
Between marks posed in gazette.
You stare back at me knowingly,
Cunningly,
As though watching the course of my life unfold.
You have stretched your hand through time
To let it fall in a cold gust across these pages,
Betwixt the folds of my cerebrum,
Your spectral lips prompting faintly
In the nook behind my ear.
-O goddess, O muse!-
O fellow soul…
You have found me.

I never thought to tell.

I swallowed each heavy feeling
Like a chore
With the hope of making the weight
More convenient
And each gobbet of memory sank and churned
In the pit of my stomach.

These pond stones
Which hiccuped in the gullet
Vanished from sight,
Yet they did not pass.

The weight did not pass.

I want to shed this blanket of skin
That binds this frame.
I wish desperately to slip out
As easily
As I would a sock
Or shirt
Or shoe.

It is *****, it is dusty, it is
Eaten away by moths
In some places,
Stretched and torn like cling wrap
In others.
It reeks of must
And the over-sweet smell
Of cheap perfume.

Heavy, insufferable, and vulnerable,
It subjects me to the whim of Man.
It is smothering me,
Demanding that I keep it up
-The con, the jig, the ruse-
For (it claims) I exist
Only to tend its membranous form.

If I could, I would
Simply strip it all away
To reveal my true, incorporeal self.
It is like nothing you have ever seen.
No, it is hotter than the deepest pits of Hell,
Heavier than every star, collapsed,
More blinding and more absolute
Than the birth of a universe,
Deep inside of this skin.

A large, leaning figure of a man
in tenebrous coattails,
slight and mantis-like,
waits for me
at the end of a long, dark hall.

A phantom,
he does not speak,
yet he allures me
silently,
letting his stillness attest
to his presence.

His featureless shadow of a face
screams silently of hunger,
greed,
a desire for my liveliness--
for my ability to walk freely in the light.