Bone-white moon.
Lacrimosa caught
in the mechanisms.
Can you see me?

Of course not.
I blend in
with the sawgrass
and the catacombs.
With beach glass
and stones the color
of rust. I am a

microcosm.
Can you hear me?
My tragedy is in
the way I keep quiet.
Silence like ashes.
I am ethereal now.

This is my requiem.
Send my regards
to Mykonos.
Burn the screaming harp.
I am subterranean now.
Someday it will all turn
to gold.

Like love, these words
are just a means to an end.
Writing cryptic phrases
beneath the guise
of beautiful colors
and sun-stroked flesh.

These words are just
dark matter, from
an empty head.
Senseless chatter
in a poet's bed.

I watch you turn away,
as if you can't remember
how we got here.
I watch your hands
for a sign- there is
nothing but godless regret
and cold fingers
stroking my ego.

These words are not
what I meant to say.
Blue smoke curls and folds
and it is more than me;
More than this winter note,
I wrote for you.
My hands shake
and the walls murmur
with disapproval.

There is love in these words
but they come from a place
that transcends darkness,
where sorrow bleeds crystalline
and fills up every groove and sulcus.
These words are no good,
and my lips tremble
as apologetic syllables
go tumbling across the threshold.

These words are finite,
the end of an era.

When the fog dissipates
and the city skyline
winks into your clever retinas,
will you be satisfied
with what you see?

When those things you had forgotten
are worming their way back
into your bones and blood vessels,
will you still glance at the intractable sun,
awestruck and catatonic,
like a moth to the moon?
Will you still find beauty in
sidewalk weeds and broken glass?

When the fog dissipates,
and humanity presents itself,
brazen and unabashed,
in a flurry of chaos and stale dreams,
will you still fall into the mass
of faces and hands and ******* and eyes?

Or will you falter at the glaring sight
of a society that's run amuck?

You took the words
right out of my mouth
and then shoved them
down my throat.

And to you,  
it's just an afterthought,
a nod into space;
but I'm standing here
breathing oceans of static
in the small space
between us;
trying to fill the void.

You didn't hear the love
spilling out from the spaces
and cracks between my words.
You couldn't hear the apologies
in my silence.
You didn't feel the way
I held your name
on the tip of my tongue,
and really, I don't blame you.

If only to appease you,
I'd crawl back to the shore
and drift back out to sea,
dissolve into a memory.

I just hope that you might
remember me
the way I used to be.

Borne into a frenzy
of sleepless black nights
that coil and surround me,
where chimeras and serpents
glide like paint,
in the sea that separates
the mind and the horizon.

I flail and sputter,
treading naught
but black water.
Just leave me here for awhile.

every word that comes tumbling out
of your superfluous lips
is loaded with wholesome irreverence,
weighing leaded and cruel upon my heart
by the pale recycled light of the moon.

déjà vu lingers before my bleary eyes
again,
as crumbs of flightlessness
slip through my fingers, again.
and I can see you unfolding us,
dissecting us, laying out all of the pieces
in a heart-wrenching vivisection.

and I know you can't really **** something
that's been near death for years,
but when do you give up
on resuscitation?

you played me like a mandolin,
striking notes like broken glass
in the space between your wayward sheets.
your hands were my compass,
your eyes the Adriatic Sea-
and I plunged into the depths
like an albatross,
fawning over wide open spaces
and beautiful colors.

yes, you played me like a symphony,
my body ebbing and flowing
in ghastly syncopation.
notes like honeysuckle and lilac
coursing through my bloodstream-
capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava
and straight on into my heart.

and you'd be ecstatic to know
that I haven't heard such a haunting refrain
since you went away.