Go if you must go

Slowly now go

At your heart's pace

With good intentions

Written

Psalms upon your face

Be mindful

Open to listen

Firm with whom you know

You are

If not presently

Then go find yourself then...

If you must

Do so

So do so with love's intention

Then tell me all about it

Even past Tuesday's

I'll be here

I'll be old

But I will still love you enough

To listen.

Part I.  Like Gods Falling

At first—
new trembling
and then she didn’t want
to be—

alone

with guilt

or seen

as **** half-eaten evidence
So she held it out to him
with her half-hearted, “It's OK.”
her crippling distance

“Why doesn’t she just embrace me
as before?”
He thought
that he had never seen her eyes that way—
with no words for their ruin
he loved her fearfully more

Gorged in the aftermath of forbidden
fat and animal fruit
Sick with excuses
Staring at
the core of lust
Rationalizing
Food?  Beauty? Intrigue?

Wisdom!

Searing awful terror
into each other’s minds

Part II.  Love and War

In the years between
the harrowed rows of sprouting corn
they found pleasure without plan
that bound them more than guilt had severed

How curious the textures of a man
in sunlight

her power?
In all the brilliance she had bargained for

How curious this burning for her
in the sodden life of rotting

She was always holding him now
from the scorching day
as the earth sizzled and swam
in seas of senseless—
background drone of locust and revenge
sealed in sweat and clutching labor

She was always holding him back by night
from the icy crackling mad!
his restless hunting hate!
And sometimes, while she pleaded
he would seize her
Make her pay!

For that afternoon

by the well where the boy was washing
A basket of vegetables returned
a bowl of blood

Part III.  Grief

Prepare the darling carcass
Shroud it in her pleas
clawing in the mud beside its silence
consumed beyond all fire by her anguish
“Can this not be enough to make him move?
Yes! He did! I’m sure I saw it!”
Can this not be enough?”
to stop the knowing…
grief from pouring into space?

Not even light escapes
____

Returning from the Mount of Meeting
hollow chores
collecting fatwood
grinding joyless grain

From corner of her eye
she watches the boy
walk toward the forest
spear in hand
She pauses
looking down
at hands on stone
that once had cradled...
Breath catching on jagged sorrow

She continues to grind

bitterly pregnant


Part IV.  Endings

Descended now
Reclining heap
reflects before a sun’s surrender
His face gleams with last light
hair blown back by volleys of wind

Her face
Not visible
as we are behind them
Her head rests in his lap
She is on her side
Soles of her shoes
mute and toward us
His eyes search the sky for a god—any god!
Her God

Exhaustion poses them past
the point of question
When the matter of “Why?”
becomes each other

Close in

the net of twilight
Dulled of hope and pain
at the edge of all that can be done...

...everything is gray going on black—
but we always knew that

They weren’t all cut from the same cloth
vilified tenders of the iron *****
some were lovers
(or lucid dreamers)
stage romantics
hidden behind jackboots
and skull caps
and switchblade seams

Caste members of a forlorn pack
counting their patchwork and deeds
conjuring up demons
around the console
filling their dreams
with radio reds
and dusted quarries
and faded sepia prints

Brass knuckles
and marches of the few
lightening bolt cracks
from a chilling blood moon
death’s dark specter
cold and ominous looms
the cobalt sea swells
near the nestled, and lost
Clubhouse at Kiusta

the tectonic plates
in me
are shifting
     as our continents
approach collide
my ocean is
getting closer
to the mountains
on your landscape
  tallest grasses blowing
         in wild demon dance,
                shaking their
          heads as heated
storm approaches
oven-baked air crackling
    with its own
         electric currents
Nothing can stop it
it's a magnetic force
              one to be
                   reckoned with
               surrendered to
as dust foams
like ocean froth
around our heads
clinging to us in tiny
starlit fragments
and soon will come
        the slick dive into
             wordless waters,
                    just skin on skin
        slippery mouth muscles
like entwined snakes
flick-flicking, shiny
in eye-lit cherry moons
Take my hand.
Just pull me in.
Enfold me,
          without talking
watch as my aura
rushes into you,
first a delicate whisk
             of cool light
to slake the thirst
of coal-licked caverns
then sparks
and bubbling oxidation
turning into liquid brushfire
Hold your palm
to my chest,
as if to keep
    my heart steady,
        my glowing flare of halo
  pressed into your
clavicle, taking in
the embryonic beats
soothing my torrid ache,
infusing minerals
in vitamin-laced libation
It is time to simply bask
in the new
crispness of radical
shake off
           the silt and salt
and rise up
into the spheres
      of memory
      of soulspeak
of collapsed time zones
budded breath
spiraling up
in curls,
       diaphanous
dark mist
ascending
                 into
           light