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Slice where you live like pie
--this piece of heaven,
you and your cream-filled sky.

Cappuccino sweet-talk,
every dream includes a bit of sleep-walk,
the taste of last summer
floats belly-up in your cup.
We are fragile figures. Our pillows at the outskirts of paradise. Befriended by dreams, the mind begins to process the day in Kodachrome. Once it starts, there's no turning off the pictures. She lies beside me. She's reached paradoxical sleep. I'm still on the outside looking in.

Take me there. Beyond the eyelids, where the mind wanders each night. To where the seeds of disturbance must be resolved within us. Some are strengthened. Others desolve as mist. This is how we survive. Chemical fires burn, become tides of memory. Pass the torch of preservation. Keeping them warm and remembered.

A miraculous routine. Live together. Dream alone. Desolate. Magnificent. My eyes are at the moment the apparitions are shut away. My mind in this place, a stretched fabric. Yet, it's far from alone. In the cataloging of miles and years, I sense an odd fellowship cresting without limit. I thought I saw her smile in agreement from her side of sleep.
From the 'Checklist Before Commencing on a Dream.'

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4793791/checklist-before-commencing-on-a-dream/
patient, optimistic travelers
gliding soundlessly along
moving walkways while sun falls
across gleaming surfaces
of aluminum, glass and peace
~
The day was orange
The word is yellow
Out like a light switch
Teeth a steady glow

The projectile's
Crisscross trajectory
Is no kindness

In the catacombs of this mine
Watch it leak
Watch it settle

What remains is
Subterranea, urania
Built to last
A moment to inhale
Before fade to black

~
~
Lipstick to void. She is a race against time. The beveled past a disruption in her lines of influence.

Travel is dangerous, and tonight it darkens the highway of blood vessels coursing through her extremities. She wants to be luminous and under the skin.

While Dorothy dreams of tornadoes in Kansas, she dreams of remote climbs in lesser Glasgow, of party drugs in Tokyo. How many lights does she see?

In her hair are sixty circuits. But she waits, religiously inclined on the hotel bed. She drove through ghosts to get here wearing nothing but Las Vegas.

So strange at this hour, in a city full of sleepwalkers for the taking, she now dreams she's a bulldozer, she now dreams she's alone in an empty field.

~
~
Bring your whirlwinds with you;
in the snow angel summer
bring Margot the sun.

In the hour of red glare
a rush to pick slowberries
before getting caught up in the silk.

Prisms, mirrors, lenses!
strategies for combatting visibility:
keep your eyes closed,
face away from the window.

The myriad threads of people in hiding,
they eat their own web each day,
and yet something always shines
in the heart's secret annex.

Men and women are
separated from each other,
the girls are on a train
to the Bergen-Belsen,
"white founts falling
in the courts of the sun."

Margot now cries quietly;
so silently she weeps over
sunshine and hate.

~
"white founts falling in the courts of the sun" is a line from 'Lepanto' by G. K. Chesterton (1911)
•###•

•the•message•is•so•phantom•

•strangled•
•during•the•thir­d•act•

•illuminated•
•letters•are•the•ciphertext•

•and•they•glo­w•
•in•your•eyes•
•Bletchley•Park•

•Turing•
•worked•it•out•with•­
•Delilah•

•they•killed•for•less•
•died•for•even•more•

•###•
~
Sugar wife,
slipping husband,
massaged honeymoon flesh
wrapped in cellophane.

The sound of a water clock
cascading down
her mysterious frontage.

Handprints on
the glass pane
opaque with remnant steam.

Let your eyes
be your guide,
when dressed in
the tiniest temptations,
she catwalks into the room
with a novel idea for two.

~
Driven by red
riding hood,
wheels of eternity run
hot and cold
along the tracks
in her arm.

Around the bend
there are jigsaw
pieces of a puzzle,
scattered as destinations
once towns and villages,
now fodder for
the migrant beginner.

According to fable,
there's a wolf at the door,
home is no longer
a worthwhile rendezvous,
but a trap of origin.

Misery is a train ride,
a stray fantasy,
lingering in the wilderness
of her fractured mind.

She sells her gold bracelets,
for she needs
the dark coal,
she seeks
its deep freeze.

She can then
be many things
along the journey,
just never
a connection,
never a permanent signal.
He loved to teach...

He loved to teach her...

He loved to teach her abject lessons
      in elevators and on stairwells.


She hated to learn...

She hated to learn from him...

She hated to learn from him the inherent
       danger of buildings.
Nearly 1 in 4 women in the United States have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
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