Crouching slick faced in the depths of the pines,
Drums are echoing in me like dead men.
The forest always knows how it will end,
The thick autumn painted crimson with blood.
The deer murmurs as I slowly take sight
And ran for miles after his mortal wound.

Through ravines and thorns I carefully wound:
His corpse was still beating among the pines.
Cone-needle bed is his funeral site.
Death has become the tooth-scarce grin of men.
My hands are on the shoulders of my blood:
A burden he must carry through the end.

Not long after this the deer filled the end
Of our truck and the ragged red-brown wound
Pained my eyes, hissing at me as the blood
Fled from it like a warrior who pines
For home. We cut him apart with old men
And the winter made our breath turn to sight.

Two months later my kin’s ribs are the sight
That tell me it is all about to end.
Where once stood muscle now lay paper men
Leaking memories, ready to be wound
In the splint’ring rigidity of pine
And finally make good their debt of blood

We are starving without the nature-blood
And the black smoke pollutes the holy site
Where killing became living in the pines.
Now there are machines living at the end
Of my fence, chewing on the trees, wounding
My mother with the oiled claws of un-men.

I meandered slowly towards the dead men
Now laid enshrouded deep within the blood
Of the forest. I am the living wound
Among the trees. Wooden markers show sights
Of a generation shortly ended.
There is no life among the wretched pines.

Now coming are the haunted men who pine
for the forest of their blood, but the end
has come and earth-wounds are their only sight.

She’s a darting smile in honey sweet sun
a soft speckled nap in the shade

She’s a bright red bird weaving in the trees,
a shimmering root in the reach

She’s the smoke in a starry night skyline
a kiss in warm crying light

She’s an oft turned page under tired brown eyes
a tale of trumpets and song

But most of all she’s a love long sought for
a quiet reminder of strength.

How word conveys thine yonder form
is winter’s ice upon my ear,
No mouth can so describe the warmth
lay hous’d inside my heart endeared.

Despite all speech that one might find,
though vastly far it always spans,
your essence will lay undefined,
far beyond all ink-spotted hands.

But here I stay ever toiling,
grasping my pen yet unprepared,
Cursive paper onward coiling,
My crumpled sheets lay uncompared.

So know my love you’re all to me
beyond that which our words can see.

I bled my words but none landed on the paper.

My smile glistens like cracked glass.
The dancing never stops.

I can still feel that stained carpet on my toes, the one where I used to play tug of war with my dog until he got hit by that Mac truck in February because he’s stupid and thought it was trying to conquer his territory
or something, but now I guess I’m the stupid one, because here I am flying out over the streetlights and sidewalks, just waiting to crack against the pavement like some gigantic Humpty Dumpty, which makes me glad that there’s a precedent for not being able to put people back together, because I’m almost positive that even if they did, there would be at least one or two pieces switched around that would make just the smallest difference and then Humpty Dumpty wouldn’t really be himself anymore, and that’s sad because I’ve always at least been myself, even if a little misguided, and at least I wasn’t one of those soul ****** drones that took the medication and good god this is taking forever I chose this because I thought it would be quick, because I didn’t want to end up like the squirrel Josh ran over on White Oak Road where just about everything in him was smashed except one leg and his head and he just sat there twitching for like thirty seconds or at least until I couldn’t really see him anymore because we were driving away, which is odd because if it had been a dog or a cat we would have stopped, like the mac truck driver did for Jake in February, but since it was a squirrel we just chuckled and kept on driving over to the Dairy Queen, the biggest one in the world actually, and it even has a sign saying so, and I always tapped it as I walked inside the place, which really wasn’t so much a huge place as slightly bigger than the other Dairy Queens of the world, and I would have really liked to travel the world but it was too expensive and the world isn’t really too keen on meeting some country yokel who can’t even pronounce Thucydides correctly, which I really don’t get why we don’t have any cool names in the modern times, because everyone’s roll sheets and grave stones and birth certificates read like a grocery list,
John,
Bob,
Ben,
Joe,
and no one ever has a cool name like Pericles or Hesiod or Ajax,
but I guess that’s because no one can ever really fill out those names either, because it’d be too much like a 6 year old wearing size 17 shoes
or my girlfriend wearing my hoodie but less cute and more pathetic,
as if we had broken up and she just wanted to wear it for nostalgia  and her eyeliner is smeared all over the collar because she wiped her eyes on it and yeah, that’s probably what it’d be like if I

Rain weaves weary paths on the
old Aurelian stone busts
like lilting music in a
deserted ballroom.

Yellow cobblestones echo
underneath black soled shoes and
sickly noses sing.

Across the street, children laugh
like the breaking shaft of a
silverish door key in a
cold iron-clad lock.