Shoulder to shoulder,
We walk through the halls that have become our own
Kingdom in a world not our home.

It’s funny how that works,
How we’ve become nearer to what we want of the other
But the same distance has not truly been crossed here in this place
Where we were forced to grow up again.

To say that we are closer to our goals,
To the unfinished wants of those places which exist beyond these stars,
May be a lie, but I’d like to think
That maybe there is a sliver of truth in those dreams
Which we have managed to share in our passing.

They can keep that wine,
Which has festered for shorter than they
Have rotted inside of crystalized skin.
I’ll live without my heartbeat as
I force space travel to meet my dreams
Of breathing a Titan’s methane air
And swimming in Neptune’s seas.

The thrones they have and the jocks’ lives they wear
Do not interest me,
Not when I have breathed in Tin Pan Alley’s air
And watched Kings play golden trumpets
Up to the high Cs.

They can cling to their castles
Where only cobwebs grow.
I’d rather drag along clunky boxes
With black and green light screens
That shrink down to my palm,
While the numbers within dance free.

Frankly, they can shutter themselves away
Amongst dark corridors and coffins.
I’ll take the Worldwide Web
Every single day.
Over their lifeless deaths
I’ll spend eternity my way.

To say that we’re both far from home
Might be a bit of a stretch,
Since simple roads and passable oceans fail
To describe the true distance between worlds
Ripped apart so that only faded myths
Whisper of how once they were one.

We are not quite
Sitting right across from each other
In libraries where books scream secrets
While we glance up with the silent truth of distrust.
We are far from where we should be,
Yet if either of us want to traverse past the stars
And into the worlds that exist in mathematician numbers
And in the dreams we have at night when the other is no longer watching,
We need to do more than simply wait for that moment
Where our eyes meet once in connection rather than separation.

She's known her for only a few weeks,
Maybe a month, it's sort of a blur
That should drip down her cheeks,
But only smears her vision instead
As she blinks away the disappointment that
Must be all she feels.
Because she knows better than
To get attached when
Everyone she meets on the street is sick,
Hacking up their life in little red drops that
Count down the weeks until
It's only her walking the streets because she can't get sick and
Die like everyone else and
Why her alone and not that girl too?

They were both young and gasping so, so clearly
When they ran up the stairs with groceries,
Which had been left to rot with their owner in the backroom.
They were both fit in fancy dresses from empty stores
And laced-up boots that fast-food jobs wouldn't buy but the end of the world could.
She was fine, vintage comic book in hand,
Golden ribbons trailing from her hair as she giggled
And their shoulders shook, bumping against each other
As laughter unfurled in the air.

It isn't fair,
Because she'll be fine,
One of those lucky survivors who'll
Always walk into a quiet apartment on her own.

I
He has hands and feet now.
And eyes that can close off the world to such a limited view.
  Look at the sun and it is bright,
  Even when the sky shifts to his other sight,
  That warps the fabric of space into view.
  Gravity bends around and around the star burning above,
  Trapping his gaze under its twisting fire.
He forces the vision away, blinking
Once and then twice, then thrice while it lingers.

He breathes in and out
Tucks back a strand of hair glowing red even if there wasn’t light.
Humans see the brightness,
The nameless shade slipping through their thoughts
Slithering down their necks, causing the hair to rise.
When it catches his eye,
When he lets it catch his eye
The dying red star, the one he wasn’t finished slurping down,
Glimmers in those strands of hair.

II
Once, a very long time ago yet so recently in his memory,
There was a hole, gaping and black
Not quite as empty as humans like to pretend that they are.
Stars and planets, bits of rock with life clinging to the surface
Sliding down, down, down what was once a mouth.
That’s all, everything he was, only a mouth to devour.
Until—

His hands clench.
His hands, his feet, his eyes
The mouth closed so very tight
Even if past the lips only round little teeth reside and not
A bottomless abyss.
He might be wrong about that, though
Never could quite build the courage to face a mirror and open wide,
To see if that echoless emptiness still waits inside this carbon-construction of a body.  

He breathes in and out, feels the air slip into lungs
And out again unlike those stars and planets from so long ago.
How was it? How did he become like this?
During that time when his appetite was vast,
Yet he couldn’t have been larger than a drop of ink on a page.
How did he grow, yet become so contained
That the light can strike off this form and not fall into him forever like it did then.

III
There once was an item of science and a priest of old—
The light, the light that doesn’t fall in like the other rays slips its fingers
Into the maw, pulling its jaw open to the point that it
Cracks and realizes that
Its eating, that’s what it—he is doing
That’s all he’s doing, and he wants more
Not more to eat, but more to existing.
And the light pulls out the half-eaten star,
Weaving the red and the orange and the yellow
Into strands that settle past shaking shoulders.

The memory of what he once was presses down upon him as
He wraps his arms around
Those shoulders that only shiver now
Under the weight of boundaries
That keeps the people walking by from falling into him.
He looks back up
Searching for the light that molded him into this shape.
The sun is too dim though, the rays brushing too weakly against his face
To be whatever god forced him into human limbs.

December tenth stares from a wall,
At a girl with night-colored hair and
Eyes the shade of a twilight
That blurs purple into the darkness.

The girl looks out
At the blurred edges of this night’s snowflakes,
Falling softly past the windowpane
And down to empty streets below.

It has been more than a month since her birthday,
Her escape from fourteen
That twirled around the clock
A hundred or more times before
Finally stopping.

Maybe not a hundred times,
It was only one month
Repeating again and again
With thirty days of sunshine and one of rain,
Only one of rain.
Madoka always dies on rainy days.

A teacup clatters,
Not quite the clinks of shattering glass,
But startling all the same.
The awakened girl looks into
Kind eyes and golden curls left free to spill over a friend’s shoulder.
Still intentional in all movements,
The golden girl continues setting up the rest of that midnight’s meal.

Tiramisu melts upon tongues as
Two friends sit in silence,
And two survivors let their thoughts soften with the disappearing cake.

The quiet reigns,
Until the twilight girl leaves
With the waking of dawn’s light.
A soft “thank you” drifts with the snow behind her
While unnumbered days rise up ahead,
Forever blocking her sight of what’s to come.

It’s a tall order
Sloping miles above my head in loose handholds
That crumble to gravel at my touch,
Rolling under my feet sliding back
Further than I can crawl forward.
It hurts in scraped palms
And hearts of my own both beating
In and out of my chest.
My knees tremble at the eternity above my head.
But the view,
The sun unhindered by Earthly clouds,
The stars that I had lost sight of
Make this treacherous climb worth all the pain
Of one foolish enough to fall off the mountain the first time.

Snow piles up against the walls, but thin clothes are all they wear
As the boy gardens within the greenhouses behind the school,
Red, bright tomatoes slipping out of his fingers, and popping into his mouth
That grins at the bursts of sweetness.
Inches from him, the man by one month pretends not to glance his way
Instead shifting through the bristling leaves to claim breakfast’s zucchini.

He would complain at the theft if the tomatoes weren’t everywhere
Making bland meals of packaged rice and canned beans a savory impossibility.
It isn’t like little indulgence will take away all of the red little briberies,
The secret keys to a reluctant community spreading its arms wide months after the pair stumbled in.

The man scowls, and the boy glances up
Not hiding his interest like his companion.
The solution to anger is always tomatoes,
So the next slip of fingers is against the man’s lips
As he bites down, the sweetness pops away mild irritation in the flavor of surprise.
Neither gives in to smiles, but their shoulders brush more than once as the tension seeps out with the heat into the snow.

Distracted,
She’s holding the flat popcorn bag in hand,
Giggling into the phone while the boy
Idles time away rereading a well-worn tale.

It expands,
The bag in hand
Blowing up past her fingers
Onto countertops and kitchen floors.
Partially cooked kernels skid away
From giggles rising to shrieks
That shatter the lights around the pair and tears through the house.

The girl hunches in the kitchen,
Sheepish embarrassment erupting in pink blushes across the face,
While the boy slowly lowers the book made helmet.

His hands tremble, but she does not see,
For he shakes his head in exasperation
And goes for the brooms down the hall.

They spend the rest of the evening bathed in candlelight
Curled up on the couch with the taste of salt on their tongues
From the bag of chips shared between them.

She is a star wrapped up in human form,
Unknown to herself
Unseen by those around her.

A cell dividing into itself, pulled her in
Around it,
Then, through it as it divided around her white light.

Growing up, nothing is remembered.
She may run too fast,
Sometimes sing in voices only trees can hear,
But human she is to herself.

What would it be like,
You think?
To be made of starlight,
To reach out hands in mother’s garden
Teasing brown and broken to green,
To walk barefoot on snow
Or searing blacktop and laugh softly.

Somehow, no one sees the angel inside the girl,
The one with hair of autumn leaves
And eyes of river blue.

She is the softness of pillow feathers,
Tickling your nose and your toes as
You both laugh under covers.

She is the glacier snow,
The ice monster,
Burying you alive under the frozen river.

She is the snow,
Delicately complex, yet
Melting at the slightest touch.

Most importantly, most truthfully,
She is everything.
Every color and emotion,
Tucked away in white starlight.

When you run your fingers through his hair,
They burn as hot as the orange strands
That streak through the red of his locks
Which are too warm these fall nights.

You’re not sure when you realized that
He wasn’t like you,
Human and soft enough to be pricked by the knife’s edge
That he playfully dragged across his tongue
While looking at you with eyes that refracted the amber light of his soul.

He’s not sure when he realized that he’d stay,
Far past the summer when you met
On the sandy banks of the lake that swallowed light
Until it was the same deep blue of your eyes,
Binding him to your side long after the sun set
And the rays upon the bed’s sheets had faded
Into a warm glow in the dark.

When he runs his hands over your toes,
Cooled by the coming winter
That wraps you up in wool sweaters
And leaves you huffing as he walks by in only jeans,
He realizes that he dare not leave
You to grow cold these coming nights.

The dead don’t rise, but he does
Like awakening from a dream
And realizing that the only eternal thing
In this decaying universe is himself.

The body looks the same
The ash on his tongue possesses the same flavor as at the time of death,
A goal that will elude him unlike the rest
Who will never be trapped by the fear
Of their actions haunting them forever.

Don’t walk into the shadows, for they are too deep.
You might slip through the floor and into the sea
Where the Golden King now lies,
Watching the end go on by.

As around us spun the star-filled void,
I spoke to a man whose own fate he avoids
By standing outside of the Garden’s gate
And leaving us all to our ill-bound fate.

Together we watched the world that existed below
Slowly turn to the end we all know
That dwells deep within the sun,
An all-consuming fire that no ship can outrun.

Our souls are tied to the light of the moon,
Because the sun swallowed the world too soon,
And left the oceans baked red
And burnt everything green to black and dead.

On top of the sea in that star-filled void,
The King watched as humanity was surely destroyed.
Inch by inch, they fought to not give
To the bubbling sun that ate all of its terrestrial kin.

With a cruel, unholy smile
He turned to me after a long while,
And asked if this death was truly my fate
Or if I wanted his power to tear down God’s Gate.

On top of the world and at the end of it all,
I met a golden King who was the creation of Gods and the heir to their fall.
Neither of us could help it when I took his hand
And, with what was left of the world, made our last stand.

Black is too much light
On a starry night.

He’s the one who lurks
Just on top of the street lamp’s light,
Above gazes that look up at cloudless skies and crescent moons.

Once, black was the comforting underside of a child’s blanket,
The closed-eyed darkness before dreams,
The glorious shadow of the day’s new moon.

Now, he spreads out of his bounds
Pulled out by the sprawl of the eternal lamp light.
And in the place of starlight,
Only darkness rules the night.

He might bite down on it,
The glass between his lips
Swirling red with wine he swallows
While fixing withering glares
At me, who only points out the obvious
As the guests murmur among themselves,
Unaware of our little argument
That cracks the glass in my hand,
Seeping little red rivulets
Stain the white cloth underneath
As I smile, sharp teeth glinting.
He never looks away, a reassurance even when we curse one another.
Regardless of what we do, we won’t shatter.

A maiden lost before her time,
Her dying light casts a shadow upon a man's face
Revealing the monster that has always existed.

A fool reaches forward to grasp an illusion,
A friend who is nothing but the mirror of a mirage
Always avoiding the truth in the reflection.

Welcome back to the island, friends,
For it has been so long since then,
When we wandered these shores in childish wonder
And played these games in the shadows of absent stars.

The Messes We Leave
                                                             The Cats You Dump on My Door

There’s a black plastic bag sleeping in a tree
And an orange cat who treads beneath it,
Flinching at
The jack-o-lantern grins
That the coyotes give
As they prowl about at night.

                                                           Even after we take him inside,
                                                                             He’s often so scared
                                                                     Wide-eyed and meowing
                                        Like these new owners will leave him too.

There’s a whole litter
Gone in scattered bones
Except for one who watches from rooftops and trees.

                                                                  He never meows, that one,
                                             Never accepts the invitation to come in.

There’s a pregnant kitten
Barely more than skin,
And a white calico
Who stares at us with the same cunning eyes
That outwitted the wolves other pale cats did not.

             Those are the handful we tucked away behind these walls,
                                                                        The rest are not so lucky.
                                                     A pair of siblings who lost the third
                                          Two toms who yowl to each other at night,
                       Those are just the handful who survive still out there.
          Together, they are that small number out of countless dozens
                              Who disappeared under car tires and canine teeth.

A fool once said
That “there is power and those too weak to seek it”
As he burned upon the pyre of his own foolishness
Blinded by willful ignorance as motherhood,
The primeval weapon of life,
Descended upon him like the sparrow pair
Drive down the hawk
And the mother car gouges
The human hand that grabs at her kittens.

Love carves open fools with
Its power stretching back
To when life first raged against the death
Daring to take the newborn future of the world.

The serpent represents the form of evil,
Some say, at least, during certain times.

He says it doesn’t.
Apophis,
Destroyer, World-eater,
Embodiment of the end,
Claims it never did.

Imagine, a creature of chaos,
From a time where moments were indivisible.
There are no seconds or minutes, no beginnings nor ends,
Only an eternity within itself.
Is it any wonder that it took the form of a snake,
The one creature that can devour its own tail
And pretend to last forever.

Envision the beginning, that fleeting second of novelty,
A swirling, chaotic mass of all that could be,
Being pulled apart into bright stars
That burned imprints onto the serpent’s eyes.
Now witness the first things that aren’t you
Blasting themselves apart, their remains flung far and wide.

Our sun, our Ra, isn’t the first he’s seen,
But it will be the one he devours,
Holds in his mouth so that its yellow brilliance
Never bubbles to bloated red
And swallows up that sweet blue
That hides within its rays.

Our race, and our ancestors
Who like him swirled out of the chaotic sea,
Are the first to watch the stars and see
The way nothing lasts forever.
Why wouldn’t he want to hold us in his belly?
We could exist forever, never wither, never rip apart,
Never be alone in eternity.

Quote that black bird for me,
Cause I don’t have the time.
I’m too busy deciding
Whether great snowfalls will end it all
Or ***** of fire this time.