A Young ghost had grown old,
Her memory I ferried for Lethe.
Enervating knees fell in orison
Upon the samphire, married.
There I drank in dizzy stupor;
This is the quiet of my release.

She is the artic of midsummer
Who feeds on the way you burn
For her.

I was to carry the key but my anxiety
Had gnashed my digits down to stumps.
While the little bird grew back her plume.
She finds herself beyond my fragile cage,
The world is avant-garde, bright with bloom.
But she looks back sorrowfully on me.
“I’m sorry. It’s time for me to go now.”
And all I can do is nod quietly.
Swallow the bolder knit in my throat
From the years we have built.
Light as air, she steps into sunlight
And I dissolve into darkness.
So long as she fashions a smile
I will fabricate one all the while.

I would have sculpted you a shelter from my bones.
—Never yours.

Quietly, I slipped into a vale.
Where the ash stands stagnant as my locket memories, and the gravity of those peel reeds back from an ancient spruce I watered long ago.
Though he embowed, wounds rewarded the vehement flesh with bark. I ******* soul’s decay and sip a silent vice to subside the grief, dip a whetted shoot into ruby waters.
On that welkin, I rubricate the evening mist in scarlet poetry  as spindles of bough became lines on a paper sky, sketching and swelling with childlike-visionary.
Until I stood on the brink of a parapet in a dance with death. I realized there weren’t any shapes all along, but only clouds.

I. Phasmophobia
I am the innumerable gloom of dim, long-buried anthems.
In wistful suspension, I shadow over a living loft in silence.
Tethered between lines, my fog bleeds on panes in knocking
Hawking your dimming faces in the lamplight of my genesis.
Torn the tunnels of their astringed throats, a requiem is reaped.
— ”I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous at the edge of your vision.” -Cynthia Huntington

II. Claustrophobia
I am the small match ignited from the depths of your mind.
My walls blanched absent of evacuation, self invite into
Your personal and private violation, invading every fissure
With icy burns, solidifying your chrysalis on hungry bark.
Your frozen God of smothering doom, a willow devours you.
— “But then I remember the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really no where else to go.” -Peter Watts

III. Ommetaphobia
I am the stricken, scarlet cloth coalesced of cruelty and ichor.
These rawboned talons, cloaked thereof, overtake embrace—
In coarse delight— a piety of prisoners’ silver stark sights.
Perceptive cavities leak my garb as my artistic blade sweeps.
Plucked from the dredges of a briny skull, two diamond orbs.
— ”The hearts hushed secret is in the soft, dark eye." -Letitia Elizabeth Landon
.
IV. Monophobia
I was the cherished friend to you, my twine stitched in your grasp.
A golden balloon unaffected by tides of time and distorting gales.
Alas from this intimate atmosphere shot an arrow, poisonous
Where silently I erupt into a missing memory upon the wind.
As your curtains close, you breathe for me, without a hand to hold.
—”And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.” -Edgar Allan Poe

V. Arachnophobia
I am the legion of soundless beholders aloft your dormant dreams.
An itch scattered over the crooked spine, arid for pulsing melodies.
This fruitful sapling beckons each dark, angular limb near your neck.
As my lighting strikes erratically, your foolish impulse slow to clutch
Creeping necrosis bestowed by the guardian who claimed your home.
—”The Spider taketh with her hands and is in king’s palaces.” -Proverbs 30:28.

VI. Agoraphobia
I am the ancestral abductor of this rotting womb you deem a shelter.
As the embryo held within, I contract you into tides and bid ‘swim’.
Directions devoid, beyond bolted doors, you plummet to my depths
Where you wish for comforts’ wind but mislaid the method to breathe.
My otherworld encompasses you, whilst I drink in your suffocating.
— ”Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” -William Thackeray

VII. Ecclesiophobia
I am the black shepherd in martyric masque and a mitre casque.
A discrete imminent sheep cowers, hanging on the hook in my gallery—
My chalice congregates your pure liquor of laments for libertine luxury.
I rise where you fall and smother the lantern of your last mortal minutes
Instilling final grace in the stillness of your veins, my kingdom reigns eternally.
— ”Suffering can be a gift.” - Abbie Bernstein.

A pearl mansion, three stories tall
Soaring on a halcyon hill.
A stretched view to read the world.
A throne with riches to fill.

The comfort of a swain.
But carnality in silence
An everlasting reserve of cake.
A bottomless appetite in defiance.

A quail in a cage, the keys in her hand.
To pluck the plume languidly.
A daffodil to determine fate:
“I love him. I love him not.”

To spoil their fly,
To reap their fall.
Their loyalty hazily sewn
In grounds of her royal hall.

Heels encased in crystals of tears.
To lien their names
And shine her shoes
Perched high on a golden bluff.

To shutter her windows
On cloudy days.
To be a star in the night
Despite the moon’s wane.

Eternal seasons of the self.
To watch feathers move
Without the burden of wind.
The quietude of stillness but to fill the void.

To reign solely as a dreary majesty.
To kiss and then walk astray.
Or perhaps earnest denial
To pacify the pain.

My heart’s elastic distend remains
Serried with shattered glass.
Grant me barrage, for I cannot bear
This despair.

Our palsied, maudlin yarn.
Strewn in memories
She has long foregone
Whilst my soul corrodes there.

I want to respire
But her fire is suffocating.
My infantry boots are sewn,
And father time marches on.

Fissure the seams, let me dream
Of a land where I am not locked
By the shadows of her music-
The light over my sheets.

Blinding, I cannot read the notes.
And this melody that weeps
From my aching fingertips-
Ravenous for velvet unfelt.

Alas, I eternally smolder.
All at once, barren and brimmed .
Let me spill my hate, my love.
Over the canvas of this silent reverie.

Little lamb, lone in the brush
Without a mother’s feed.
Who is to groom the gloss
Of her delicate clothing?

Little lamb, who sings to me,
Unlettered melodies,
Why does she wag forth
These eyes of rust—
In pensive gloat ache
Sipped sinews of her throat?

Little Lamb, bleating to bleed,
Ventures frail, tender limbs
Deep within Tophet’s Vale.
Meek, she slips in buried sheets.

Little Lamb, orchid chewed to root
Bask and bathe the moon
Twixt her thighs.
Splayed upon pastures
Nourished with tears.

Wine spilled into the milk of being.
She drinks the rich grain.

Banished before thon barren plains,
Where treacherous tears abstain
Fare. Fair is the waste,
The impurity of deep, decrepit weeds.
And dage brings fruit then touched
Only by their ravens of rot.
May they paint thine tainted stave
In golden garth and lull the lark;
“Mine, Sweet babe,
Robbed of cradle
Readied for ritual.
Mine, Sweet babe,
Gore masked black
Within the crimson bath.”
Lacen their throats, the gullets that gloat!
Lest langes of thorns, wrap the bairn sworn.
Death breeds glore o’er luid nights
Beldam rise belles in wicked repel.
Round the funeral pyre.

I woke up one night
And I cried:
"Papa, I don't want to die!"

It is so sad when I look
To that child of the past-
Long forgotten and still
He weeps.

I am but a feigned rendition
of the boy inhabiting this soul.

We are so different
As oil upon water.
Yet how can I say
I was never him?

As now nothing
Seems more sweet.

That delicate snowflake
Fell into streams
Long spent, and yet
I sent for him.

Little did he know
His ending was not in death.
But he cannot be found.
Silent is the child's cry.

Souls, once one in the sun,
Now reach for fallen stars.
Ludic, hopeless fingers—
G r a s p i n g
For a sole thread of truth.

Don’t fly too close, little firefly.
For it’s flame shall render
All your desires and dreams
To spurned puddles of wax.

D r i p p i n g

In these wrinkled hands
Formed for puppets
A silhouette on the sphere
As the Earth only knows,
The darkness it adheres.

Descry the glittering sand,
Every coin is vestal, unused.
He cast unto the well,
Uttering a spell
That dwindled on his aching lips.

Amiss, his voice does not graze
Her conscious divination.
A thousand times again,
He strives-
Just for a spare thought.

But the fool, consumed, controlled
Wallows in the walls
She sculpts around him.

He begins to work away the vines
Of her honied tendrils.
Yet, each finger twined of gossamers,
Drenched in delirium.

Nay, she rejects his presence.
But grants her endless visitations
As a specter, with a Faustian kiss.

He drinks of her,
To parch his arid throat.
Remote, he holds the seed
Which festers within.
Forever.

She is to me
Like fire to frostbitten fingertips.
I cherish the silver sliver
Of her sweet, tempered knife
Invading a dull, grey life.
My stone,
Fragmented over planes
I knew naught existed.

All the while, I cannot share
This secret spell
She has mistakenly casted over me.

As I am the cloth close to her heart,
Weepless and waiting-
For her to draw me
Towards the flame of her lips.
I will never tell her this:

I am a thousand pieces.

The breadth of a cliff
Gauged as narrow,
Glossed with ego.

To his chagrin
He could fall in
And strike the final shoal.

Atoll, a toll.
On her cherry lips,
Beckons a cheery lay.

To have failed
Trounces the fool
That thorns his ears
Of her musical display.

Like the first inspire of brisk, waking air.
The climbing Carpathian lantern of day.
I sip on tender herbs and taste the gentle stems
Of sensations gone astray.

I feel an awakening.

Weeping Winter
Deigns his spine
In small whispers of magic.

The fingers of a ghost
He Almost
Mourned the loss of them.

Until he tastes
The fruit of rot.
And felt
Old daggers in the dark.

Like a drop of dew
In Summer heat,
He recedes towards the Sun

To await the Winter Mourn
And scorn
A mother of her forgotten son.

You are a worm.
Yet even famished fowl reap for any other.

What worth are heavy pockets
If they are suffused with stool?

Darling, how pretty pauper you pray
Pity she invocates for a lascivious eventide lantern.

Yet if it were me,
That lantern so sweet,
Would she truly taste hellfire.