Death told her
           her life should end
and he was her friend

Calmly, she stole my gun
     she walked outside in the sun
pulled the trigger, set the mood
barrel to her head to conclude

I saw her head come undone
,,, Reached down, for my gun
Eyed the chunks in her hair
Now to my head |
                               |I draw a rose there.

To fire and dust, ran my Father’s veins-
His sudden tempers, fast to wain,
Considered judgments, swift but sure;
Against stray pathos, well immured.

Fire and dust, through all his days-
Meanings strict as he would say;
Toward logic, reasoning flowed his mind,
With love, the tension to unwind.

How I miss the fire and dust of him,
And miss the years, now memory’s dim;
As diamonds hide their humbler sides,
Their closed channels, to abide.

The death of a child
Cannot be portrayed into words
But only understood
By the deepest trenches of the heart

The moon hung its head low in the night sky
A perfect circle to personify infinity
Whether it was the message of a spirit
Or a coincidental language of the planets
We will never know

Something tugged on my spine
To turn around, and meet the eyes of a ghost
A mirror, I thought
For it was the ghost that I saw in my eyes
During my personal ice-age

A stranger alone, but
Not as strange as the loneliness
Of the aftermath of death
Do I dare speak?
To harvest hidden emotions of the past?

I spoke meek and astutely
Then stepped out of my skin
To show him my crooked spine
Because rotted bones and knotted arteries
Speak for themselves

He understood that I apprehended
That a grave for one is a grave for two
One for their body, and one for your heart
A weeping embrace in place
Of lost words stolen by mortality

There is a hairs breadth between agony
And serenity. You must dance the fence
Like jumping wildly over a broad flame
And play the line between torment, torrent,
Or truth. There is no room for error here.
You must caress the demon in your mind
And sooth him, and feed him, and care for him
For this is the key to finding freedom

You must bottle your hurt and keep it safe
Affixing a sure gaze on the hour
Watching for changes, studying each bit
Of its black, grey, green, red pulsating form
So that if it breaks loose, you may find it
So that if it attacks, you may retreat
And retreat, you will, to your teary crypt
You must caress the demon in your mind

You must stitch it to your being, intentionally
Pushing the needle each time more deeply
And pull the wailing fabric through the mass.
Your body must convulse, leak; naturally
From time to time returning to this start
It is imperative that you are ready
In your heart as it beats double bass line
So that if it attacks, you may retreat

The line between paradise of your mind
May be found within each of your sorrows.
In what you remember or learn from them
And from the beauty of experience
Worthy, fully, of valuable heartache.
You must accept this, it is inevitable.
Assimilate your minds fictitious factions,
It is imperative that you are ready.

You must caress the demon in your mind
So that if it attacks, you may retreat
It is imperative that you are ready
For this is the key to finding freedom
There is a hairs breadth between agony
And serenity
You must dance the fence

The tv blares
Its empty promises
Of laughter and easy ***.
If I look like her
Will I get laid?
And for a moment,
My 55 year old body
Remembers what it was
To look like that.
The tv goes off and
I go read a book.



copyright/all rights reserved Audrey Howitt 2011

A blurred division
between consciousness and reality,
this is where I dwell.
It is absolutely certain
that I've lost the line.
Someone has to pull me out.
The flames cascade across the floor
and eat me alive.

The day your world bled there was no blood. There were no tears. The clouds gorged themselves on sky but remained white and empty. (There was no rain. There never was any rain.) The earth you lived on faded to the cold grey of old black and white photographs but nobody screamed. Was your voice caged by self-loathing, or pity? It wasn’t ignorance. I still remember the day you said you missed the color red. Where was the violence? Did you bury it with your fear or your innocence? Because there’s nothing as unpoetic as an open wound. It seems that’s how you’re heading to live your whole **** life; open and weeping and dying without color.  (And I?  I saw a ray of hope and decided to give up on you after all.)

I look out into the world
Our world, within a world, within a world
Within a world
But where does it end?
Does it end?
If life ends, but the universe cannot
Then does life really end?
I’d like to think there’s something out there
Some hope that this means more
But I know it don’t mean ****
It’s beyond me
Everything is beyond me
Like, society
Nothing makes sense, there’s no use
Trying to make sense of that
But yet we keep searching for a solution
We will never ever solve
If we could solve it, we’d **** ourselves first
With pollution and ******* and blindness
Because everyone searches for truth
When there is none
It is pointless because
We will never know
There are things beyond our explanation
But nobody will accept it
Yet still I live
To breathe in life
because
I have never seen something more beautiful
Than when I look at our world within a world
How strange it is!
Yet how perfect
And no matter how complicated,
So simple.
And simple, because it is complicated.
I am inspired
By everything around me
But I cannot put into words
My inspiration
It is the wind, the movement through the trees
It is everything I want it to be
And nothing at all
It has no meaning
Yet means everything to me
I just wish people could see through my eyes
And know
And feel
The inexplicable
Maybe for just a moment
They’d feel so trapped that they’d finally be free

I want to grow old with you.
I want to wake you up
     in the middle of the night
     just to make sure you're okay.
I want to sit on the porch
     a glass of lemonade in hand
     and talk about all those old times.
I want to watch as our hair goes grey
     as our faces become lined
     and orthopedic shoes come into our fashion.
But for now we are not so old
     and all we have is now
     with no guarantee of a future.
In this moment under a tree
     we wish that today will turn into tomorrow
     and those days stretch into years.
For I want to grow old with you
     and live out our tomorrows together
     until we run out.