I am cobwebs and smoke.
I am shards of a person who cannot decide
The difference between
Love
And god.
I am razorblades and thin air.
I am ink and shadows.
I am drowning in moonlight-
I am a spun web of starlight and wanting.
I am the wire frame of myself-
See through shape with nothing inside.
I am the wrong port in this storm,
Sending out beams of
Don't-ignore-me,
Blades of light that split the hazy fog of apathy.
You've sewn me with seeds of humanity
And I feel the life beneath my skin
Like it will sprout
Roots
Any day now.
I have a ribcage full of fireflies
That shine through the spaces when I breathe.
I have glimpsed dreamcatchers
In your eyes
And snagged my darkness in their dizzy thrall.

Sometimes a man can't say
What he . . . A wind comes
And his doors don't rattle. Rain
Comes and his hair is dry.

There's a lot to keep inside
And a lot to . . . Sometimes shame
Means we. . . Children are cruel,
He's six and his hands. . .

Even Hamlet kept passing
The king praying
And the king said,
"There was something. . . ."

One day when you're lost
And you do not want to live
Just remember me

'literature has a way of owning you'--
(the author said, after the book-signing;
and taking me behind the shelves, showed me
what possession meant, riptide trough and swell)
---much as the sea lays claim to one adrift,
to drown or hold aloft, then pin to bed,
displacing breath; choke...release...toss free, choke;
lungs drenched: retching silt, pelagic darkness
spotted with the faint transmuted sun.
whether full to glint a myriad in sky,
or blind to evanesce in foam and spray...
an atlantean crush of symbols: lost--
my inner mythic fades to distant waves
revising how i write of self, sunk