Gentle plutonium flows through
a cloud soaked sky.
The next breath is
somewhere
in the air all around me.
I cannot catch it
I inhale the scent of a city
to exhale the circular lengths
of lost civilizations held together
by faceless, mindless tycoons
and machine-gun fire.

Like the phosphorous spark
of distant fireflies,
words stirring like chemicals
to flash in unison.
So what is this now?
A cerulean tempo limited alone
by the accidental pausing
of an instant?
Stutter of the clock.
or these hidden iron
beats hammering rhythms
into my soiled heart.
Touch of an infinity
blood flow
with a pinch of glassy
thoughts that dwell on stilts over
a sea of miniature gods and
hourglasses and TV sets and
suicide beds.

Streetlights in the
windows talk
but do not offer a final
answer.

Hey, I think about you
nearly every day,*
he says
through the telephone.

And I stutter and falter
to tell him that I
do not think of him
at all.

I was born without
eyes, ears, or
a heart.

He said he liked her style
and her pianist fingers.
She told him that he could paint her
onto canvas, in shades
of cinnamon and ivory.

He laughed at her trembling hands
as she sat there, dressed in naught
but peonies and wild roses.
She scowled at his impudence
and then laughed
at the absurdity of it all.

She sat there and he told her
hold still
with a smile that flashed
across his eyes like quicksilver.

She watched him create poetry
with strokes of umber and chartreuse,
cerulean and scarlet.
He pulled the shadows from her eyes
and placed them into a fixed state of being.

She watched the metamorphosis of scars
into moonlit fault lines and
freckles into blips of smooth paint.

He transformed her pale outline
into a sensuous display of smooth gradients
and colors deep enough to make men weep.
He captured the penumbra of sorrow
and spread it across her painted eyes.

As he anointed the canvas
with delicate finishing touches,
She dressed in a paint-spattered shirt
and marveled at the uncanny likeness.

They sat and watched the paint dry
as he rubbed the knots from her shoulders
and kissed strained tendons and ligament
beneath innocuous flesh,
as she tapped rhythms into his hands.

He is no longer hers to consume.
He belongs now to the kingdom of earthworms
and a darkness that swallows all traces of light.
He took with him the chunk of her
that knew how to love as a human
and left her with shirts devoid of his form
and gradually losing his scent,
fragmented memories that slip
through fingers like sand,
and a room full of paintings
that she cannot bring herself
to uncover.

Color me in.
I lie naked and
wrapped in white linen-
A corpse.
If only my mind could
lie still as my body.

Let them carry me
to the incinerator.
But the pallbearers
have heard my death rattle,
they've found me out.

But I am an island now.
It is quiet here, only
remnants of Chopin

and little gold rings,
ashes,
a story in Braille,
what else have you got?

I'm so tired of being
the Phoenix in this tale.

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?